All Involved (31 page)

That's how tagbanging became like a new spike on the fork of L.A. graffiti. It mutated into something completely new cuz it's this weird mix between graffiti and the gangster life, where the line between the two just gets fuzzier and fuzzier now. Tagbangers carrying guns to protect themselves or shoot somebody that's disrespecting by crossing them out? Shit, that's real as hell. I got one, a little .22 throwaway that's easy to hide. I just didn't bring it with me cuz the last thing I needed was Big Fate deciding I needed to be searched and then what? Have to explain that? No thanks.

I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach like my life's never gonna be the same. It feels like I swallowed up a bunch of nails and they're just rolling around in me. I mean, you know it's bad, you know it's gotten way out of hand if a fucking nerd like me is packing. And I'm not the only one. It's so far out of control that everybody took notice. There's green lights out on taggers now. Pressure from big dogs way above Big Fate to get these renegade tagbanging crews in line cuz some of them are basically doing gangster shit anyways, shooting people over tagging territory and whatnot.

It's really not so crazy to think about legislating them cuz some tagbanging crews are so big they're gangs in their own rights. I'm talking like four hundred people big. You just can't have that many people running around unchecked. It fucks up business. I'm sure
that's Big Fate's take. Anyways, it's prolly safer for everyone for it to be a little more regulated in the gangster system, and if you're down with that, and some are, okay, but I'm not. Hell no. I'm not about to lose freedom that way. I'm not about to be forced into doing gangster shit just cuz I want to paint.

There's this pause on my headphones as I hear the heads turning with a soft little
whisk-whisk
sound before the theme from
A Fistful of Dollars
rolls in. That's my strolling music right there, man. I can't lie. It's on there cuz it's more trumpet. I'm down with trumpets lately. I don't know why. They just speak to me, just spark something in me. Like puppies nuzzling on my ribs. Warm-good. That's what it feels like when a really clean trumpet hits me.

But that feeling drains right down my body and out of my toes when I look up and see some sort of tank-truck-things coming up the street. Big, armored trucks they look like. Two of them. And, man, are they ever coming fast! I pretty much freeze right then, cuz what the fuck else am I supposed to do? I'm praying they just go right by me, just right on by without even looking at me. But they
don't
.

They fucking stop in the street alongside me!

I swipe my headphones off my head as brakes squeal and some sort of back hatch must open cuz I hear metal bang and then there's four guys out and . . .

Holy shit! Dudes in helmets and serious gear point their guns at me. I never been so scared in my life. I just kinda fall forward onto my knees and put my hands up, you know? All the way up, because you can't expect to run and get away from that. The badger's back and he's going to town on my stomach with his claws so good that my heart freaks out and runs into my throat to get away from him, and it just sits there, right on my Adam's apple, pounding.

“On the ground,” one of them says from behind a whatdoyoucallit? A giant gun I know the name of, but I forget what it is when it's inches from my face. A military gun though. A long gun with a handle on top of it.

And it's so calm and quiet the way he says what he says that it
freaks me out more. I get on the ground, right flat on somebody's lawn. There's a dandelion clump near my face with white fuzzy tops and next to it is an old piece of dog shit so I turn my head the other way so I don't have to see it or smell it.

“Spread-eagle,” the same voice says, and I must not do it fast enough, cuz real quick there's hard cold metal forcing my legs open wider and my arms further apart and that's when it hits me that they're using the barrels of the guns to do it, to move my arms and legs and I want to throw up on the grass right then, cuz what if one of their fingers slips and I get shot?

My throat's dry, but I manage to say, “Please don't shoot me.”

“You got a weapon on you?” the voice wants to know.

I shake my head no. They pat me down anyways.

I say
they
cuz it feels like four hands.

When they don't find anything, the same voice says, “I'm going to need you to stay down until you count two hundred. Begin.”

I nod before I say, “One, two, three, four . . .”

On my neck I hear the song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” from the
Real Genius
sound track starting up. I can tell from the guitar and synthesizers. And that's all I can hear. This low little rhythm in the grass. For just a sec, I'm blown away by the fucking crazy strange timing of it, but then I'm focused on something else.

I don't even look up, but I hear boots run away from me, and then I hear the two truck-things in the street rolling again. They pass into my vision as I see them head up the street. The first one, oh fuck, the first one turns up into the driveway I just walked out of. They're hitting Big Fate! Oh, Jesus fuck. That's bad. That's really, really bad.

“Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . .”

The other truck-thing stops in the street, and four more guys with machine guns roll out and rush the house. Two put their shoulders into the front door and it gives with this awful groan and a loud-ass crash before they go in with their guns raised.

“Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.”

I stop counting there. I look around and see nobody near me. No
army dudes, nothing. My cuff's in the dog shit though.
Ugh
. I get up slow and easy, and nobody says anything, so I run cuz nobody's stopping me.

Fuck, man. My headphones are up and bouncing around my neck as I get hold of them and jam them down on my ears as I book it down the block cuz I'm in the shit now. I'm
actually
in the shit.

I'm getting it on all sides, man! Everybody's fucking with me. I got my aunt telling me every two minutes how I'm gonna end up dead like Ernie if I don't stop tagging and she won't listen when I say Ernie wasn't painting, he never did tagging or nothing. But that's not something she gets or will ever get.

And on the other hand, I got Big Fate hassling me about joining up and time ticking down on that. And now, on the other-other hand, there's this? Soldiers jumping out on me, throwing me on the ground? Soldiers rolling up on Big Fate and giving a perfect advertisement for why the fuck not to be a gangster, cuz there's always somebody bigger and badder around the corner, somebody who can fuck you up quicker than you ever thought?

Shit. I feel more than
ever
like I got to get the fuck outta L.A.

You don't really think what a nice day it is until you think you're gonna die. But now I look up after several smoky days and find that I can see the sky again through partial clouds and it's blue. Well, it's like a gray blue. But it's warm. Over 70 degrees prolly. And under that sky on Atlantic and Rosecrans, on the roof of the building where the Tacos El Unico stand is in a little strip mall, is a guy with sunglasses on, an automatic rifle, and a bulletproof vest.

That's Rudy. He's Guatemalan. But he's cool. He does security for us. I never seen him with that kinda gear before though, and I don't know where he got it. It's a little unnerving if you want to know the truth. I wave at him and he doesn't wave back. He nods. I wonder how long he's been up there. I mean, El Unico's always
open, even through curfew it's been like that. He must be switching with somebody, I think.

Before I get to the door, I say hey to James-the-Homeless-Dude cuz he's standing in the parking lot, leaning on his cane. James is crazy, but he's mellow. He comes by a lot. Ernesto always used to feed him, no questions asked. You know that shit came out of his check too, and I always told Ernie, I said, you know that makes it harder to save up when you're trying to scrape money together, right? He always told me not to worry about it. A taco here or there wasn't going to stop his dream, and it helped people, so that was always worth it. Just remembering him saying that, I shake my head.

“Hey,” James says to me, “do you know where Ernesto's at?”

He tunes out when I say I don't know. I feel bad not telling him what happened to Ernesto and all, but I don't want to make this little homeless dude feel bad. He liked Ernesto plenty and I can tell his life's been rough and I don't want to add to that or take on the responsibility of feeding him the way Ernesto did when I'm already planning on being out. I say bye to James and he says bye as I head for the front door.

Inside, there's some National Guards sitting and eating. They say what's up to me, and at first I think what'd I do? But they're saying hey to everybody who comes in. I keep talking to them though. Not everybody does. They say they got hooked up with free food and it's
so good
. Best tacos and burritos they've had, they say, and that makes sense cuz they're mostly white and black and I-don't-know-what, but I can tell they don't have anyone cooking Mexican food for them at home.

They're from Company C, they say, stationed in Inglewood. Third Battalion, 160th Infantry, they say. They've been here almost the whole time and gesture across the street. I look to the 7-Eleven convenience store there and see some sandbags and stuff on the corner where there are four more of them, and I can't tell from this distance but, even in uniforms, they look like
cholos
to me. It's just the way they stand. At that point, guards in the restaurant can't really
keep quiet about it any longer and they tell me I smell pretty ripe and at first I don't know what that means, but then I remember the dog shit and I apologize and duck behind the counter.

I nod at the chef working and start washing the cuff of my flannel good with soap and water so hot it burns me a little. I get my hands good too cuz being here reminds me so much of Ernie, of how he used to call me out and everything.

We didn't work much here, we mostly worked the truck, but every so often we'd be in the stand together and he'd give me endless shit about not washing my hands. Turns out spray paint gets on your hands pretty bad. I'd always wash them after, and the color would come off the skin, but it'd stay stuck to my nails. I'd try and try to get it off, but eventually, I'd give up and come in and chop for him. Tomatoes. Meat. Lettuce. Whatever. But the first thing he'd do was always look at my hands and bust me fast.

Ernie'd say, “What the hell are you doing? Why didn't you wash your hands?”

“I
did
wash my hands,” I'd say. “They're clean.”

“How come your nails are still blue then? How about that?”

“They're
clean,
” I'd say.

“Listen, someone hands you a plate and they got paint on their hands, would you want to eat that? It's gross, man. Don't do that. It's not professional.”

And then I'd be like, “What do you know about professional?”

“Listen,” he'd say, and his tone would be different, calmer, “I'm not your dad. I'm not telling you what to do with your life. You wanna paint on your off-time, okay. Go crazy. Have your fun. But once you're eighteen or nineteen, maybe you need to think about knocking that graffiti shit off, because that's the kind of thing you do county time for, and they don't like that stuff in there.”

Ernie was always my voice of reason, always hitting me with constant reality checks. I didn't really want to hear it, you know? With him gone, I guess I need to take that on myself from now on, which is tough, cuz I kinda don't want to. It's hard.

I get to drying my hands with the paper towels before rolling one up in my cuff so it looks like one sleeve is white on the end. I stare at the sink for a few seconds before going to the back and asking to sit down with my boss.

He's got a tiny desk in a little supply closet. He's pretty much
paisa,
so he loves sitting down behind the desk and holding court. I don't know where that word comes from. Maybe we stole it from the Italian
paisano
and turned it into a Spanish word or something. To us, though, it means something like
fresh off the boat
means to Orientals, I think. Somebody from the old country that still acts like it, somebody not American yet, or maybe they never will be.

My boss, he's a good dude. Sometimes you just have to remind him to be one is all. Behind his back we call him Listo-Listo cuz he always asks if we're ready before shift in a real annoying way every day, like, “
¿Listo, listo?
”

He repeats himself like that all the time. So much that you get to feeling he doesn't actually think you're ready, so he's always reminding you to be. I dunno. Sitting across from him, I smile. He likes when you call him
jefe,
so I start that way.

“
Jefe,
” I say, “I worked the week before last and then Monday and Tuesday last week, and on Wednesday you sent me and Ernesto home from the truck, so—”

In Spanish, he tells me he was real sorry to hear about Ernesto but that's not really his business, and speaking of, things are tight right now with the banks not being open. Maybe tomorrow he can pay me, he says.

I can see he's lying to me though. I've worked here long enough to know we do most of our business in cash and that's how it goes when you sling a lot of food to people who may or may not be documented, so flow's definitely not our problem. If anything, we got too much sitting around in the safe cuz the banks have been closed and he's nervous about it. That would help explain Rudy with the gun on the roof anyways.

As cool as I can, I ask about his wife and he says she's good,
so when he says that, I make sure to ask about his girlfriend and he freezes up cuz he knows who I'm talking about. One night two months ago, I was out dropping trash in the Dumpster and I saw something going on in his car and I thought for sure someone was trying to steal it, so I crept up and ended up seeing something I didn't need to see, but I'm glad I did. I mean, how was I to know that he'd be fucking some girl from behind in his backseat?