All Involved (36 page)

MAY 4, 1992

9:00
A
.
M
.

When my alarm goes off, I wake up with the beat of a Specials song in my head, so I kick my sheets off, go find the tape of it, and put it in the deck. I'm pressing play on “A Message to You Rudy” as my dad knocks next to the space where my door would be if I had one. We're redoing the house. Actually,
he's
redoing the house—again.

Where my wall used to be is a wooden skeleton of support studs that I stuffed with books because it looked like an empty bookcase sitting there on its own, but also because it makes it more private, at least a little. Still, I can see him looking at me past the spines of my Richard Allen pulp novels.

My dad is a contractor. He got his degree in drafting from Santa Monica City College, but he doesn't do much with it. Mostly, he sells tile and does installations—bathrooms, kitchens, that kind of thing. His claim to fame is that he did both bathrooms in Raquel Welch's guesthouse in Italian marble. There's a framed, autographed picture of her on the wall of his store, Tile Planet. It's on Western, in this little strip of Palos Verdes that cuts into San Pedro. You can see all of L.A. from up there. You can look down on it. I think that's one of the reasons why my dad likes it. He likes looking down on things, especially people.

“You don't need to knock,” I tell my dad, but I don't press the stop button on my music. “The wall's open.”

He doesn't get the sarcasm. He steps into my room a little and says, “You want breakfast or what?”

I eye him for a moment as the ska bops along between us. My dad hates this music. It gets on his nerves, which obviously makes me love it that much more.

“No?” My dad crosses his arms at me. “I made some, and you don't want any?”

“I'm thinking,” I say.

“Well,” he says, irritation in his voice, “think
faster
.”

When my dad uncrosses his arms, it means I'm taking too long to answer him. Six years ago, this would've meant something bad was about to happen because he didn't get his way, but he just balls his hands into fists. The scar on his left hand tightens and goes purple when he does this. Just seeing it turns my stomach. For the longest time, it meant the worst was coming. Purple meant I'd be bruised soon. He sees me looking at it and unclenches both fists before saying, “I asked you a simple question.”

“Fine,” I say so he'll stop bothering me. “I'll have some.”

I watch him go through the spaces in the beams, over the tops of books and around them. I only see the black wave of his hair slide past Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
and Terkel's
Hard Times
from my Great American Books class. When my dad enters the kitchen on the other side of the house, I lose track of him, but I hear him clinking, moving around, shaking plates and cutlery.

Things have been bad between us for a long time. He's been different the past few days though. He's actually been paying attention. Still, why is he making me breakfast? I figure he wants something.

My dad has always taken being a member of the Beat Generation literally. When I was younger I thought for sure that I was in that generation too, because I got beat all the time. Put it this way, on the days I was lucky, it was a belt strap. On the days I wasn't, it was the buckle. My back is pretty scarred now. A white ex-girlfriend once asked me if I'd ever gotten hit with a grenade. She wasn't entirely
kidding. My dad has always been short-tempered, and I'm the only child, so that was how it went until I turned thirteen and pulled a knife on him when he tried to hit me. That was the day it stopped for good. The weirdest thing was though, instead of yelling at me, he smiled and told me he was proud to see me stand up for myself like that, and then he walked away like maybe I'd finally stopped disappointing him.

That messed with me for a long time because it made me think back to every time he ever hit me and I wondered how much of it was on purpose and not out of anger. It was worse to think of it that way, so now I just try not to. It wasn't the end of him being disappointed though. Since then he's just found other things about me not to be proud of, like how, on the first night of the riots, Kerwin and I did acid and went out and rode our choppers.

He wasn't happy to hear we'd been looking for fires to stare at. There was no way to explain to him that it was worth it, that I saw birds and dragons rising from the flames and flying up into the air, thousands and thousands of them turning black and becoming the night sky. He almost took my bike away after I told him that and I don't blame him. You can't bring an unconscious girl home without explaining every single step about how she got there, not to my dad.

I've got a Vespa bike, P-125 model. We call them choppers because we chop them down. If I ever wreck one, it's easier to chop it than get a new one. I kitted the engine on mine. I chopped down the cowlings, extended the forks. That took it from a 45-mile-per-hour max to over 90. You can hear its whine for miles. It's practically a
Road Warrior
bike.

That's what I was riding when coming home from Kerwin's the next morning and right as I was going up our street, I saw this twitchy guy chuck a flaming Molotov cocktail right through Momo's front doorway. I couldn't believe it. There's this kid, younger than
me probably, dressed all in black, but he's got this white square of napkin on his hairline, held there by dried blood. Next to him was this van parked on the lawn. I cut my engine and coasted in when I saw him because I didn't know what he was going to do. For the longest time he just stood there, with the bottle burning in his hand.

I thought for sure it was going to explode on him. It looked like he was talking to himself, whispering, all the while not noticing how serious the situation was, and it must have gotten to the point where it burned his hand because he screamed and threw it as hard as he could through the front door. Right after, he turned to the van, and looked at me like he wanted to do something about me sitting there on my chopper, but he took off instead.

I went to the door after that because I wanted to see if there was anything of Momo's that could be salvaged quickly, but the second I looked in, I saw a girl lying facedown on the living room floor and any thought I had before that just evaporated.

Next to her, a giant rippling triangle of orange fire climbed the wall, like in the movies, except louder, and so hot. Just getting a few feet from it made all the hair on my right arm shrink down to little black nubs and all I could think to do was grab the girl's ankles and drag her out the door. Doing that, I scraped her chin and cheek pretty bad on the porch concrete before I got her onto the lawn and flipped over. She was bleeding and unconscious as I panicked and searched for a heartbeat.

In my room, I hit stop on the Specials. It's a good thing I think showers are overrated, because our water is off again—something to do with the plumbing being worked on. I don't even question it anymore. I swipe some deodorant on, grab a blue Fred Perry, do the collar up, and put on some red bracers. After that, it's just bleach-stained jeans with a rollup high enough that you can see every inch of my black Docs. My dad sees me this way every morning and rolls his eyes. He's had it explained to him so many times, but he still doesn't know what a mod is, or why his Mexican American son would ever want to be one.

He doesn't get that culture is different for my generation, that we get to choose. It's not about whatever it was when he was my age. It's about
cholo
stuff now. Gang stuff. It's selfish. He doesn't get that music saved me. The ska, Two-Tone stuff, Trojan records, it keeps me out of that world. Sometimes I think my old man would be happier if I was out banging, though, because maybe that's closer to how he grew up, even though he never talks about it—even though he's got other scars that can't be from learning construction work even though he says they are.

My mom gets me though. She's happy I'm not involved. In fact, she's the reason I'm still living at home, even though I've been graduated from high school for a year. She's already at work by now. She got a call last night that the accounting office she works at would be opening back up today after being closed last week for the riots, so she left early, before I woke up because she was afraid of the reports she'd been seeing about snipers on the news. When she's gone, it's tougher for my dad and me to talk to each other without it sounding like we're fighting.

My dad's sitting at the kitchen table when I get there, dousing his omelet in ketchup because he's the only Mexican on earth who doesn't eat it with salsa. He says he can eat it however he wants because he pays for it.

As soon as I sit down across from him, I say, “What do you need, Dad?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do I need?' ” He waves his fork at me. “I need to eat.”

“Yeah, but why'd you make some for me, too? What's your motive?”

He scoffs and forks a bite into his mouth. “‘Motive'? You watch too much TV,
mijo,
using words like that.”

He's only being defensive because he knows I caught him. He
does need something from me. All I have to do is wait it out. I look out the kitchen window at the half-tiled fountain in the backyard that my dad hasn't finished yet.

It's shaped like a circular, three-tiered wedding cake with a moat around the base, and it looks like a place where broken rainbows go to die because the tile on it is green and red, blue and yellow, purple and white, all mixed together. My dad does his work-order jobs with the good stuff, but at home, he's cheap, so he tiles with the mashed ends of things from the shop. Orphans, my dad calls them, and then says he has to find a home for them, it's his penance. Even though I've asked, he never has explained that.

My dad stares at me like I'm an asshole for a good thirty seconds before he finally says, “I need you to come with me to Compton and check on the Victorian. Bring one of your friends. There's no telling how safe it is out there.”

I think I can call Kerwin, and that he's probably awake by now, but I also think if I do this, my dad can do something for me too.

“Okay,” I say, “but I want to go by the hospital and check on Cecilia, too.”

My dad sighs. “She's bad news, that girl. You need to stay away from her.”

“I just want to make sure she's okay,” I say.

I never planned on lying to Momo about Cecilia. It just happened.

One moment I was in the house watching television about all that's been going on, and the next, Momo was on my lawn with a car full of
cholos
behind him. I didn't expect that, so I panicked and went outside. Next thing I know I'm lying when he asks about her. I lied because it sounded like he meant to kill her if I told him where she was.

The truth is, she never ran away. She'd inhaled smoke, but there was something else too. She was seriously glazed over. It wasn't pretty how coughing fits would break her moments of almost deathly stillness. I put her in the back of my mom's Honda and drove us to St. Francis Medical Center on MLK and Imperial. I filled the forms
out as best I could for her, but all I really had was a first name from when I met her months ago and Momo's address. When she went beyond the admittance doors, I told her I'd check up on her, and I meant it.

Right now, though, my dad is looking at me like I'm stupid enough to make a move on a drug dealer's girl. A girl I wouldn't make a move on even if I was attracted to her—which I'm not—because I told Momo she was okay and gone, not still here in Lynwood and hooked up to a respirator. I'm in enough trouble as it is.

“Fine,” my dad finally says.

We're definitely related. He says it the exact same way I agreed to eating breakfast with him, like it isn't fine, but he'll do it. He'll drive me to the hospital.

We have a deal.

At noon, we head to the hospital, but while we're on MLK, my dad asks if I want lunch, and when I tell him I'm not that hungry, he ignores me and pulls into Tom's Burgers and parks anyway. This is more like my dad, I think, not much of a listener, always doing what he wants regardless. Tom's is right across from the hospital. I think he's doing it to prove a point. He didn't really want to come, so he's going to string it out.

Inside is busy. We pass by the little arcade and up to the front to order. A little black kid is playing an old Centipede machine as two friends cheer him on. The other two video games stand unplayed. Tom's is a neighborhood place, known to be 'hood good—which means cheap, filling, and occasionally tasty—and seeing it full of families sitting down to a meal, or couples sharing fries, makes it seem like life is returning to normal, at least a little bit. There aren't any smiles passing back and forth between strangers, but I get the sense others feel the same way. Eyes aren't darting. People aren't hunched over food. They're all just trying to get on with their lives.

We wait through a line that's eight deep, and it's smoky as hell from everybody and their cigarettes. The whole time we're standing there I'm just wishing we were at Tam's on Long Beach instead. They have the best chili cheese fries. I know, Tam's and Tom's, it can get confusing, but not if you're from Lynwood. Everybody I've ever met prefers Tam's, but it's not close to the hospital, and this one is.

“Make sure you know what you want,” my dad says. “When we get up there, I'm ordering.”

“Fine,” I say, and another of the Rivera fines makes an appearance.

My dad always knows what he wants, and when I don't, on anything, it drives him crazy. Sometimes, I use this to my advantage, but on a day like today, when I'm not all that hungry and don't really want to be here anyway, I'm willing to oblige him as I scan the menu on the wall behind the register. I figure just a cheeseburger. That's safe. No thousand island, no onions.
Jalapeños
though. I can put the ketchup on myself. They always sit that out at the condiment station.