The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (6 page)

I saw it almost happen one time just after we got to Tijuana, right outside of church. The machete hit the ground when one guy missed chopping another guy’s leg off. Sparks flew off the street when the blade hit it. You don’t forget stuff like that—the sound or the sparks. It was scary. Next thing, the police came over and started shooting in the air to break up the fight before the men did some damage. I realized that this was not a movie. This was real life, man. I also learned that very seldom was the fight about money; it was almost always about a woman.

I don’t remember being hassled at all in Autlán. We kids had to fight more in Tijuana. The good thing was that it was more about bullies than gangs. The gangs would come later, after I left. Bullies used to pick on me, and looking back on it I see that it wasn’t personal. It was just that ignorance is ignorance, and the hood was nasty. I had to be able to know when to walk away and know when to hold my ground so they didn’t keep piling up on me. I learned that if they thought I was crazier than they were, they would rather go around me. A few times I had to do that—fight and act crazy. It got to the point where I would find a rock that was the size and shape of an egg, and if things got weird I would put it in between my fingers and get ready to punch.

At the time I looked a lot different from the way I look now. I had fair hair and was light-skinned, and my mom dressed me like I was a little sailor kid. I mean, come on—of course I was going to get into fights. One time I got to school—Escuela Miguel F. Martinez—just after my mom had spanked me for some reason, and I had a lot of anger in me. Sure enough, some guy said something like, “Look at this guy! You can tell his mama dresses him.” I
had the rock in my hand, and I nailed him hard! Everybody was standing around, waiting to see what he was going to do. I was looking at him like, “I hope you try to do something, because I’m ready to die.” There’s two kinds of desperation: one is born of fear and one is born of anger, and in the one born of anger you just don’t want to take it anymore. I forget his name, and I didn’t realize then that he was one of the street bullies. He never bothered me again.

The thing is, he was right—my mom was dressing me. I used to tell her, “I’m getting beat up in school; you got me in short blue pants and stuff. This is like saying, ‘Come and get me.’ ”

“Oh, you look so nice,” she’d say.

“Nice? You’re dressing me like a choirboy. Mom, you don’t understand.”

“Shut up!”

Once my mother wanted me to wear some pants I didn’t like. She got angry and said, “You’re like a crab. You’re trying to straighten everybody else out, but you’re the one who always walks crooked.” That stayed with me. I said to myself, “I’m no crab, and now there’s no way I am going to wear those pants.”

It took a while to convince my mom, and I talked to my dad to help me out. Slowly they came around. They were so involved in trying to make it to the next day, so concerned with food and getting the washing done—it wasn’t like we sat down to break bread and talk about these things. All of us kids had stuff like that to deal with, and we just had to get through it.

It was toughest on Tony. He was a teenager and new to town. And he was dark-skinned, but I was fair-skinned and had light hair back then. When we would go out together, they really picked on him a lot. “Hey, Tony, how much do they pay you?” He didn’t know yet to ignore them. He’d say, “Who pays me for what?”

“Aren’t you babysitting that kid?”

“No. He’s my brother.”

“No, he ain’t—look at you. He doesn’t look like he’s part of
you!” They’d start laughing, and he had to answer them somehow, and the fists would start flying.

The worst that happened was a few years after that, when Tony got hit in the head with a hammer in some street brawl. He told us that he could have avoided it, but his friend wanted to come home the same way they had gone into town, back on the same street where they had gotten into an argument with some guys. He survived, but that was what it was like. Welcome to Tijuana.

I’m glad I’m not the oldest in my family. The ground was tested by Tony, Laura, and Irma before I came along, and whatever was going on with Mom and Dad, Toño—that’s what we called him—got the brunt of it. He got the main bruises because my mom and dad didn’t know yet how best to deal with kids. He was like my buffer and second father and has always been in my corner—my first defender and my first hero. I’ll always be so proud of him.

I love my family, man. They’re all so different, each one of my sisters and brothers. Laura, she was in charge when my mom and Tony weren’t around, since she was the oldest girl. She was like the scout and would be the first to check things out when we moved into a new place—very curious and mischievous. She was an instigator, too, like, “Let’s cut school and go get some jicamas!” Or “Let’s go pull some carrots out of the ground and eat them!” Like I needed convincing. “Sure, okay—sounds good to me.”

I remember one time Laura decided to get some candy on credit from a store, and she shared it with all of us. When my mother found out about it, there was hell to pay—for all of us. I wasn’t even there when all this went down, but when I got home there was another beating waiting for me. That was what Laura was like—a troublemaker and fearless! Irma was more introverted than Tony and Laura, more on her own planet, and she also was the first of us kids to get into music. She told me that she used to peek into the room where our dad would be practicing his violin until he said,
“Venga”
—come here. He started teaching her songs and some piano, how to read music. She was a natural.

In Tijuana, the rest of my sisters and brothers were all small and growing up—Leticia, Jorge, and Maria. I didn’t get as much of a chance to babysit or take care of them, as Tony and Laura had done for me. I feel especially bad for Jorge that I wasn’t as much a big brother for him as Tony was for me. He would have to figure out a lot of things on his own. After we left Autlán, I was either out on the streets or hanging with Dad.

From the moment we got to Tijuana, we started to learn to survive another way, too—it was time for all of us to go to work, to start supporting the family. All hands on deck, you know? I give the credit to my mom and my dad for all that. They implanted in us some really no-nonsense, hard-core values and morals. You never borrow or beg. What doesn’t belong to you, you don’t take. What’s yours, you fight to the death for it.

One day when my father woke us up, he had with him a couple of boxes of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and a shoe-shine box. He gave half the gum to Tony and half to me, and he gave the shoe-shine box to Tony. “Go down to Avenida Revolución, and don’t come back till you sell all of it,” he said.

Avenida Revolución was our Broadway, the center of downtown Tijuana, where the bars and nightclubs were and where all the tourists went—American and Mexican. Tony and I would go up to them, selling gum and shining shoes. That was really the beginning of my introduction to American culture. It was the first time I saw a black man—a really tall dude with big feet. I just stared at the size of his shoes while polishing them. I began to learn a few words in English, and I learned to count. “Candy, mister?” “Ten cents.” “A quarter.” Fifty cents, if I was lucky.

We would get just enough money to take the bus, so we had to make enough money to pay for our inventory and supplies plus enough to ride home and get there the next day. Sometimes we ended up walking because we had no bus fare—like the time Tony got a huge fifty-cent tip on a shoeshine and we decided to take the rest of the day off. We were rich for an afternoon, watching a movie and eating candy, but we forgot to save something for the ride
home. The next day, it was back to the same schedule—wake up early, help out at home, go to school, take the bus downtown, and sell, sell, sell—help Mom and Dad with the rent.

I think I did miss out on a certain part of my childhood, as many kids do. In the first ten years I was with my first wife, Deborah, I would sneak into toy stores and buy little figurines, action figures. Thing is, a few years after that, in 1986, I was hanging out with Miles’s drummer, Tony Williams. He started his career as a teenager, and I saw that his house was full of toys that he got from Japan—the first Transformers and all that. He saw me looking at them, and I said, “It’s okay; I do the same thing.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. What’s this one do?” Suddenly it was not the same guy who played at Slug’s with Larry Young and John McLaughlin or who drove Miles’s band in the ’60s. It was, “Oh, man, look at this!”

I’ll tell you, that was a revelation to me. I think Michael Jackson was like that also. There was part of us that missed out on being a kid, and we didn’t wean it out of our systems till much later. After a while, you grow up and put the toys away, but for a while that child needed to be expressed. I’m sure Deborah must have thought I was a peculiar dude.

What I went through was what all we Santanas went through. Everybody worked. After we were old enough to take care of ourselves, Chepa left (plus we couldn’t afford her anymore), and Mom needed help to run the house, clean, and cook. So Laura and Irma helped Mom at home. All of us did whatever we needed to do to make the rent and get the food on the table. That part of my childhood I’m really proud of—nobody ever complained or asked, “Why do I have to do this?” or anything like that. It was just understood.

We moved a lot during those first two years—it felt like almost every three months we moved to another place in Colonia Libertad. Then we moved across the Tijuana River, which runs right through the middle of the ghetto and into the United States, to a small place
on Calle Coahuila, in Zona Norte, a neighborhood that was a little better. Two years after we came to Tijuana, we moved to Calle H. These were bungalows, almost like a trailer park. I was ten years old, and I noticed people around us had little black-and-white TVs. We kids used to sneak around to the neighbors’ houses and stand on our tippy-toes, peeking in their windows until—
snap!
—they closed the curtains. That’s how I discovered boxing. It was funny—I remember every few months there was a matchup between Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Graziano—on TV, in the headlines. And there was my first
hero
hero: Gaspar “El Indio” Ortega.

Ortega was a welterweight and was the first boxer to come out of Mexico and go all the way up. His hometown was Tijuana, so as you can imagine the whole place talked about him and supported him. We followed every one of his fights, especially the one in ’61, when he fought Emile Griffith and lost. It didn’t matter—he was
our
hero.

Ortega was one of the first boxers to be very evasive in his fighting. He knew how to bob and weave. Years later I got my chance to meet him—he was living in Connecticut then and had to be in his eighties. He was proud of his fights, but he was proudest of one thing. “You know what, Carlos?” he told me. “I still got all my teeth. They never knocked them out.”

I can still remember those fights, watching them and getting down on my knees and praying for Ortega and for Sugar Ray. “Don’t let them beat him,” I would say and squeeze my eyes shut. That’s when I really learned to pray from the gut—when I first began to realize that God might be listening.

If it had been up to my mom I would have been doing my praying in a different place. As usual, my mom was diligent and relentless—“You’re going to do this and you’re going to do that.” One time she decided I had to go to church and learn to be a
monaguillo,
an altar boy. It’s all about ritual and regalia, learning where to be at the right time, grabbing the book when you’re supposed to. The very first time I was in a mass, there was this other boy who was training me—he had done it, like, five or six times—and I remember he was a jokester.

At one point this guy started cracking up. Then I started cracking up, and the more we got to laughing the angrier the priest got. Then the next thing I know, all the people in the church started laughing, too. I didn’t know what was so funny—I was just trying to keep it together. Then the priest picked up the chalice, and I tried to pass him the book at the same time—“Okay, here it is; now read it.” The boy didn’t tell me exactly what I needed to do—I didn’t know you’re not supposed to give it directly to him. You’re supposed to put it in a certain place, and he’ll pick it up.

After the mass, the priest gave me a smack in the head. Of course that put a damper on my wanting to go to church ever again. I was thinking, “If you’re going to be with God, aren’t you supposed to be merciful and nice?” That priest single-handedly separated me from the church right there and then. I mean, what’s wrong with smiling and laughing in church? Are these not the things that God wants us to be doing—enjoying ourselves? I remember the Bible stories—the Flood; God asking someone to sacrifice his son. “Your God is an angry God; he’s a jealous God,” things like that. Come on, that’s not God—that’s Godzilla. I think God has a sense of humor. He has to.

I learned a few things in church—just the other day I made the gesture of a blessing onstage, like the one a priest would make over his sacred chalice, before I took a sip of wine. We were in Italy, so I figured everyone there would get what I was doing—the sign of the cross, hands like they’re praying, look up to heaven before raising the glass, which these days is usually Silver Oak Cabernet. I didn’t think it was sacrilege. I think any kind of spiritual path should have some humor.

Still, my mom persisted and persisted—two years after I got smacked in the head for laughing in church she was still trying to get me to go back there. She dragged me to confession at five in the afternoon. “We’re going there, and you’re going to tell the priest your sins.” I was twelve at that point. “What sins, Mom?”

“You know what I’m talking about!” She wouldn’t let go of me, and she had a strong grip. I’m young and I’m pissed, and I’m
feeling guilty because you’re not supposed to be angry at your mother—that’s enough sins right there!

So we went to the church, and the little door opened, and I went in. I heard this voice on the other side of the wall say, “Go ahead, tell me your sins… go ahead…
go ahead!
” I didn’t know what to say, so I finally thought, “The hell with this,” and I ran out. My mom was so pissed. I told her the story of being smacked as a choirboy and reminded her that she didn’t want to hear about that. I told her that if God can hear me, I’ll talk with him directly, and that’s it. “You can make me do a lot of things, but you can’t make me do this, because I won’t do it.”