The Madonnas of Echo Park (13 page)

Bus operators are not paid to be heroes, nor are we paid to absorb your abuse. We are paid to get you from point A to point B. That's my job. We have procedures that cover every kind of accident or incident you can imagine. There's no screen or enclosure protecting me from aggressive or out-of-control passengers; if there's a situation, I stop the bus and wait for the police to arrive. I've done this dozens of
times with everyone from frothing smackheads to rabid crackheads and until the night of the twelfth never had a problem.

That's because the quality of my passengers' ride is as important as following the rules. This means a well-maintained bus that's on time and clean. No butts, no beverages, no trash left behind. There are drivers who feel it's not their responsibility to take pride in their work space. They wait for the custodial staff at the division yard to hose the buses down with pressurized hot water; the problem is that “situations” are often missed by the cleaning crews (on purpose, if you ask me). I don't need to enumerate those human functions that can leave a residue or footprint behind on a bus, but this doesn't bother me; cleaning up shit is part of any job.

My father, Manny Sr., was in the street gang Echo Park Locos and got my spoiled older brother, Manny Jr., to drop out of sixth grade to join. I was never into gangs. Running around the streets at night didn't interest me. I liked books and school, learning English, being educated. I knew more at twelve than Manny Sr. did at forty. When I turned fourteen, Manny Jr. tried to “jump” me into the gang by pretending he had Dodgers tickets then beating the shit out of me in a blind alley. “You're one of us now,
cabrón,
” he said. Manny Sr. took Junior's side, so I left home and moved into an abandoned house (Echo Park had plenty back then). I'm glad I ran off when I did. Living on my own taught me my sense of responsibility. I found work at a burrito stand in Lincoln Heights where I hauled bags of garbage, emptied the grease traps, and cleaned out the toilets. You know any fourteen-year-olds today who'd clean toilets at a burrito stand?

“Man, these sixteen-hour days are tough on a kid,” I'd say to any customer who would listen. I wanted someone,
anyone,
to sympathize.

“Gotta start somewhere,” they'd say back, because who'd sympathize with a fourteen-year-old know-nothing? To our customers, sixteen-hour workdays were the rule, not the exception. My boss, overhearing, would rap me on the head with his knuckles and finish the customer's thought: “Somewhere's better than nowhere.”

Today, I work fewer hours than I did then, and make a take-home salary of $53,000 a year. That's generous money for a man who didn't go to college. I live in a clean one-bedroom apartment in Boyle Heights not too far from the house I grew up in, no kids,
relatives (that I acknowledge), or wife/ex-wife. Most of the other operators are men who have lots of mouths to feed. I don't say “men” to be sexist; four out of five bus operators are men, and if you aren't a single mother or divorced, there's no reason to take such a physically demanding job. By the end of my shift, my arms throb, the film on my eyeballs peels like an onion, my ass feels stuffed with novocaine, and my lower back is in such excruciating pain, I have no energy for anything in my bed except sleep. Sex is the last thing on my mind.

That said, when a single female bus operator appears, she gets snapped up quick. I dated a bus operator named Carol—nice white girl, stocky build; large, healthy bottom; divorced with two children
—until I discovered she brought her children along with her on her route. This was dangerous, but more important, it was against the rules. Perverts and pedophiles ride the buses (some days it seems nothing but) looking for children to grab or molest. There's a Mexican guy on my route, a regular, who wears these pants with a hole cut out in his crotch. He exposes himself to little girls and Oriental women. One time, he tried it on this little Chinese girl who screamed until he fled the bus at the next stop. The passengers gave her a round of applause, and I congratulated her. “He does that every night,” I said. “Good for you.” For some reason, she became hysterical. “Why don't
you
do something?” she screamed. “Why do you let him on?”

Discriminating against specific riders whom I haven't witnessed committing an actual crime firsthand (I have to see something happen right in front of me), along with direct confrontation of an assumed criminal, is a violation of Metro policy. I
can't
get involved. The same applied for Carol bringing her children on her route. I'd have forgotten the incident if it had been once or twice, but she admitted she was “sticking” Metro—to say nothing of the safety of
both her children and her passengers—several days a week. Why not, she said, when Metro wasted millions of dollars on their new headquarters Downtown (the
L.A. Times
called it the “Taj Mahal”), and her child-care benefits were shit? Besides, she said with a hint of pride at her resourcefulness, it was easier and cheaper than finding a regular babysitter.

How ungrateful can you get? She had a good job, with good benefits that at her age and skill set she'd never be able to find elsewhere. I could never get involved with, let alone marry, someone that reckless and irresponsible. When I dumped her, I made sure to tip off her supervisor, which led to her dismissal. Look, I'm not a
pinche jota
. A woman can be a beautiful thing at arm's length, but get too close and you find they are distractions, there to manipulate men who have succumbed to accepting mediocrity and need someone to share it with.

Passengers aren't any better. The women I've tried to court had a different idea of what their men should be—loud, drunk, jailhouse tats, deliberate facial hair. Working day in, day out for a living isn't as glamorous as dealing drugs or “smokin' homies”; you can't see the results right away. How can a guy who drives a bus for a living compete with a baller who rolls around in a jet-black Cadillac with wine velour upholstery? The girls hop in and take a ride, then get taken for a ride, right back to the bus stop, boarding with their hands covering their puffy black eyes, ashamed to be seen on the “Ghetto Express” (though not ashamed, of course, that a hardworking American has to drive them around; to them I'm no better than a chauffeur). Then, a few months later, they waddle up the stairs onto the bus, hands cradling their large bellies, their eyes imploring me for sympathy. Those same hands will soon be dragging a chain of screaming children, yanking them along like a tangle of broken kites. If they look at me, which they do not, they'd say,
“What else can I do?”
I say, they made their choices, and there's no reason to feel sympathy for someone who wants nothing out of her life and gets what she aims for.

Now on occasion, in the past, I've been fooled by women who I believed were ambitious and uninterested in blaming whites for all their problems. I courted this cleaning lady when I started driving; I wasn't breaking the rules because
she
made the effort to befriend
me
. This was back when I spoke Spanish to the passengers (I refuse to speak it to them now), and I could tell my speaking Spanish made her feel more comfortable. She initiated the small talk, inquired about my day, gave me a warm good-bye at her stop on Vermont and Los Feliz. These were clear signals that she was interested in me, so I didn't mind waiting an extra minute or two at her stop in Echo Park if she was running late. When she told me the house she cleaned was on Avalon Street, about three long L.A. blocks (a twenty-minute walk) from her stop on Vermont, I didn't mind stopping at Avalon every Thursday, since it crossed Los Feliz Boulevard anyway. And when she told me about her ex-husband, this was a very clear signal that she wanted me to ask her out.

When she boarded with a group of kids she was taking to a pool party and had the nerve to ask for a discount, I figured that was as good a time as any to set up a date. She said no, and she wasn't nice about it either. That's when I realized she'd been using me to get special treatment, her own bus stop and extra time in the mornings. Not only did I refuse a discount but I didn't tell her that a couple of children in the group, the younger brothers and sisters dragged along by their reluctant older siblings, could have ridden for free because they were with a paying adult. I don't like to be cheated, and cheating her let me get something back that had been stolen from me. From then on, whatever satisfaction I got from this job would be earned through a series of small, trivial victories. I'm damn proud to say I have won more of these battles than I've lost.

I've made sacrifices in my own life to keep this job as long as I have, but overall it's provided me with a better standard of living than I would've had if I'd stayed with my father. When people on my bus
say they're “trapped in the ghetto,” trapped in their lives—and they say this a lot; my passengers
love
to shout into their expensive fucking cell phones—I'm the proof that escape is possible. The American Dream is there for the taking if you aren't lazy and have no qualms about the kind of work you do.

These new wetbacks don't see it that way. They're picky about what jobs they'll do and how much money they'll accept for the “privilege” to come and do half-assed work at your house. A lot of my riders are
mojados
going to MacArthur Park to buy fake IDs, passports, and birth certificates with forged birth dates. Papers in hand, they assemble in fixed meeting areas around the park—in front of the police, who won't touch them—to be picked out for odd jobs and day labor across the city. These aren't Mexicans who've lived in this country for years, looking to legitimize a life they've worked hard to build here. They aren't even Mexicans who, from what I've learned about the Mendoza name in libraries, became Americans when the border flipped on us, vanishing years of Mexican heritage with a quill stroke, turning rich landowners into migrant settlers in a new and hostile country. No, these are country hicks,
mojados
who've made no effort to assimilate, learn English, and do the hard work to become a part of American society the way I did. If I had time off from work, I'd be right out there with those Minutemen on the border, bullhorn in hand, screaming at the top of my lungs. These men looking to take our jobs, and their women who pop off babies for free health care, want schooling for their bastards and welfare from my taxes—they're freeloaders who focus unwanted attention on us legitimate Mexicans, who had to learn the rules and suffer the stings of becoming Americans. Get Mexico to take care of fucking Mexicans for a change.

You don't need to go to MacArthur Park to find
mojados
. These men are everywhere—loud, boisterous, and macho when they're in packs hanging on corners. But here on my bus? They sit near the front (away from the blacks who ironically like sitting in back), meek
little church mice punching numbers or text messages into their cell phones.

General conversation is not permitted between me and my passengers; however, if I see a wetback staying on past MacArthur Park, I have been known to ask him—in English—if he knows he's heading into the black part of town. If a wetback doesn't
habla inglés,
I punch my hand and fist together and point straight ahead.
Mojados
caught past Washington Boulevard are taking a big chance, whether it's day or night, but they go where the work takes them. When I speak English to them, they look disappointed and offended. Can you imagine that? They're angry at
me
that I don't speak Spanish in
my
country? They've played the fucking
habla español
card from fucking Jalisco to here—that's
how
they get here so easy—and when they meet a Mexican who won't play that game with them, they have the nerve to challenge me on
my
fucking Mexican-ness!

Of course, I don't spend a lot of time getting worked up over this. That's how things are and I accept it.

See, even if conversation were permitted, this isn't the kind of route where I have regular passengers I could strike up conversations with. I had them on other routes, but here my riders don't set their schedules to mine; their work isn't regular, it drifts from region to region. They're itinerant, hostile (or both), and speak either no English or that Ebonics shit, which is worse than Spanish. I try to warn these
mojados
what they're in for because a large part of my job is communicating where the bus stops are so people will get off in the neighborhood they belong in and not wander into the wrong part of the city. Spend a few minutes driving down here and you'll see the blacks are angrier at these Mexicans than I am. You can hear it in the voices of the old men who lived through the Watts riots. “Every block,” they say, “you'd point to the houses and go, ‘That's where the Johnsons live,' ‘That's where the Franklins live.' Now it's ‘That's where the Gonzaleses live,' and ‘That's where the Sanchezes live.'” Blacks kill each other up and down these streets I drive every
day, but they cannot stand the thought of being threatened by fucking
wetbacks.

Moving down Alvarado to Hoover Street, the streets get residential again; unlike in Los Feliz, here are long, straight lines of single-tract houses that must have been charming in the forties and fifties but have iron bars on the windows and front doors; Armenian and Arab-owned liquor stores; and Popeyes, KFCs, and Chicken-to-Go stands. The riders are loud black teenagers who want an
air-conditioned trip down to the USC area to hang out (there's no way these thugs are college students). They wear white ghost-sheet shirts down to their knees, sagging denim shorts that fall to their ankles, diamond studs in their ears, and are outfitted with the latest technological gadgets—iPhones, iPods, iDicks—things they hook into their ears to make them oblivious to what's going on around them. They can't hear a thing and explode in profane rages if you disturb them from the bubble they've created to ask them for a bus pass that hasn't expired or to remind them—
no
free transfers to or from other buses. These teens carry a couple thousand dollars' worth of toys on them, money I never could have earned from working a straight job at their age, and they want a free transfer! Why do these kids' mothers (their fathers can't do much from prison) let their
children walk around with expensive things that'll provoke a confrontation ending in a robbery or a homicide? How many times have I run behind schedule because of a shooting along this stretch of boulevard? They close down one lane of traffic for emergency vehicles, and as we slow to a bumper-to-bumper crawl, these black kids run up to the bus windows with their cell phone cameras to see if they can take pictures of the dead body, the three-hundred-dollar sneakers poking out from under the sheet a giveaway of how old these corpses are.