The Madonnas of Echo Park (19 page)

“Freddy. Yeah, you lived with Cristina. Why are you here?” she asks.

“I'm back. I was away and now I'm back.”

“Oh. How long's it been?” she asks.

“A few years. Not long, really. I've got catching up to do, though. How're your kids?”

“Got kids of their own,” she says. “A lot's changed. Most of the old neighbors sold their homes and cashed out. Made a lot of money.”

“Cristina hit it rich!” I say, slapping my thigh. “She's gonna be in so much trouble when I see her. Where'd she move to?”

Julianne sits down on the opposite end of the sofa, arms and legs crossed. “Cristina's dead,” she says.

I'm used to death sneaking up on me, disappearing homeboys in puffs of smoke or for life sentences behind bars. I never knew how it felt to lose a woman, forever, until today. Women were doors left a little bit ajar at the ends of darkened hallways—always open, but you
had to find your way to them first. Dead women were grandmothers in their seventies and eighties, not women I'd made love to, held close, slept beside.

“I saw them taking her body down those stairs,” Julianne says and lights a cigarette. She offers me one, and I take it. “Worked every day of her life. Crazy.”

“But she was so . . . young.”

“Cristina gained a lot of weight, stopped leaving the house. Then one day they're taking her down the stairs on a covered gurney. A For Sale sign goes up on the front lawn 'cause her daughter, Angie, didn't want to live there anymore. Then some dykes buy the place. It's been that way up and down this street.”

“You know where Angie is?” I ask.

“Such a nice girl,” Julianne says.

“I was her dad for a while.”

“Were you as good a dad as you were a husband?” Julianne cackles, puffing out a cloud of smoke in front of her like a veil. “You ever tell Cristina that you cheated on her with me? Or the five other women on this block?”

“That was years ago,” I say. “You were cheating, too.”

“I was being cheated on. I had to cheat back. How else do you get anything around here? And I came clean. Did you ever come clean with—”

“No, god no. I'm glad I didn't. That kind of thing would've killed her.”

“Someone beat you to it.”

Why do men cheat? Hell, why do women own more than one pair of shoes? It doesn't matter that I cheated on Cristina with another cheater. It doesn't matter that I came home to her most nights, paid the bills when I had money I didn't piss away, and when I told her I loved her more than anyone it was usually true. It doesn't even matter that it wasn't Julianne I cheated on, it was Cristina I was cheating on . . . 
with her.
Well, that may have mattered a little bit. Point is,
there's no expiration date on cheating. Women treat cheating men the way society treats child molesters. Never forgiven, never forgotten, and no amount of rehabilitation is enough for you to earn back your status as a human being.

But that doesn't mean you can't get lucky.

“Where are you gonna go?” she asks.

“I got lots of friends here,” I say. “Bound to be something I can cook up.”

Julianne moves next to me on the sofa. “You can't stay,” she says. “Pete will be back at three.”

“What happened to the guy you was married to? What was his name?”

“I told you a lot of things changed,” she says and leans in, sticking her tongue in my mouth. She rubs her hands on my thighs, and I wait for the bulge in my pants to rise, that bulge that's been waiting twelve years to be inside a woman. She's not any of the women I'd dreamed of and fantasized about and jerked off to, but she's a warm body, jagged around the edges but soft in the middle. Fresh-out-of-jail pussy's much better than fresh-out-of-jail sunshine, but I still have to concentrate to get hard, grunting and wincing in pain as Julianne's mouth slides up and down on a semiflaccid piece of flesh. There's a hissing, farty sound when I enter her pussy, a hiccup of cum, a few dribbles, like what spits out of the bottom of a shampoo bottle, then I'm crumpled over in a quiet U shape for a minute or two.

I sit back up, buckle my pants. “I've gotta go,” I say. “Can you lend me fifty bucks?”

Julianne slides back on her sweatshirt. “Don't got any money until the first.”

“I need to piss,” I say. She motions to her bedroom. Next to her bed is a purse. I steal nine dollars and a pack of Kools; in the bathroom, I take two bars of Ivory soap, then hop out an open window, back to Sunset Boulevard.

*   *   *

Not counting Cristina and Angie, I learn throughout the day there's eight families I know who sold their houses and moved away, five guys who “disappeared,” two guys in jail, and a handful of nobodies who'd never heard of me. “Shit, granddad,” one asshole said, “you ain't even got a cell phone!” Where did all these people on telephones come from anyway? Big phones, small phones, video phones, phones that stick out of their ears like mechanical worms trying to burrow out of their heads because they can't stand all the noise inside those skulls. And the things these
cabrónes
talk about!
Putos
screaming into their phones like they're fucking them, walking down the street like square-dancing zombies—punch some buttons and stagger to the left! Punch more buttons and shuffle to the right!—trying to conduct business shit from a phone on the street. Send this memo, write that letter, and of course, call somebody to tell them what you told somebody else thirty seconds ago. Listen, if you ain't a hustler, the street
ain't your motherfuckin' office.

The liquor store where I used to pick up scores and run lottery ticket hustles is now owned by a pair of “you buy, you fly” Arab pricks who chased me away when I'd hung around the lotto results posters (always a prime location for meeting other hustlers) too long. And shit got
expensive
while I was in the joint! How can shit cost so much when a black man's running the country? Farther up Sunset, the hardware parking lot has men looking for honest, pathetic, backbreaking work, and since that sure as hell ain't me, I walk over to a sunny coffee shop, where I order a “latte” and a bran muffin and get caught not paying for them by a skinny, tattooed white bitch with pink hair and a cluster of spike piercings around her neck.

Down to my last three dollars, I walk into the Little Joy Jr. bar, determined to hustle up enough money for a motel room downtown on Skid Row and a chance to find Angie tomorrow. There's a weird ammonia smell in the bar I can't place and graffiti in English—who writes fucking graffiti in English in
Echo Park
?—covers the walls of what was once a low-key
jota
bar. The bathroom used to be as reliable
as an ATM—always money there if you didn't mind sucking dick (“straight” Mexican guys do it, and get it done to them, all the time). A stereo blasts something loud that isn't oldies or Motown. I order the cheapest beer they have, a PBR, and search for my mark. Over by the pool table with a young white girl who'd be gorgeous if not for her tattoos and shaved head is a white guy in his thirties with thick Buddy Holly–style glasses, a short-sleeve shirt that changes color depending on what angle I look at it from, baggy black pants with a chain dangling from his right pocket, and spotless black “work” shoes.

“You up for a game?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. I offer to shake hands, which for me isn't a pleasantry but a calculated business move. I have an almost supernatural ability to gauge a person's character by his handshake. I've figured this guy out in seconds. If this man were currency, he'd be the loose change you find in your couch. I'm gonna make it rain money in here.

“Ten bucks a rack?” I ask, starting out small. My game here is to appear that I have no game, and after an hour, I'm up eighty bucks. The guy plays along, aware he's being hustled by the third game, but too drunk or too proud to pull himself out of it. By midnight, he's made three trips to the ATM and I'm up to two fifty. That's when I offer him double or nothing that I can't make cigarette ashes go right through the palm of his hand. He's drunk now, loud and defiant, but agrees to the bet.

I light one of Julianne's Kools and search for an ashtray. What I do is lick both my thumb and index finger and rub them together. Then I swab both fingers in the ashtray and place my thumb on top of his hand and my index finger in his palm. Boom, ashes through your hands. That's five hundred dollars,
pendejo.

Except there's a problem. I can't find an ashtray.

“Outside,” the guy says. “We gotta do this outside.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Can't smoke in here.”

“Since when?” And that's when I realize what the weird smell in the bar is. It's “no smoke,” the smell of no one smoking in the bar. I can smell the moistness of spilled alcohol and fresh piss from the bathrooms. Turns my stomach.

“Since years ago. Man, where have
you
been?”

Out on the street, I have to take a long drag and almost burn my fingertips to get enough ashes for the bet. I grab his hand like a pincer, and he snatches it away, brushing ashes from his palm.

“There it is,” I say. “They went right through your hand.”

“That was a trick,” he says.

“A bet's a bet. That's five hundred dollars.”

“I'm not paying you shit,” he says louder. “That's a stupid fucking magic trick.”

“Don't get mad because you didn't see it coming,” I say. “Stick around, you'll get a chance to win some of it back.”

“Fuck you,” he says and shoves me against a wall.

I don't want to fight. I want the money. You gotta talk angry guys down to get their cash, then string them along until their money's gone. It's time to start talking.

The hustle is on the tip of my tongue. The old pat routine I used to run, the words that poured a soothing balm over any man who was pissed because he had a shitty job, was stuck with a whale or a tramp for a wife, or was down to his last couple bucks of drinking money, the pitch I gave to befriend and defraud—those magic words are there for the taking, if I can summon the barroom gods to help me this one time until I have my sea legs back. But where are they? Where are the gods and the words they brought with them, those precious words that had gotten me into a thousand wallets and out of a thousand brawls?

“Fuck you,” he says and shoves me again.

“I don't want to hurt you,” I warn. “I just got out of the baddest joint in the state.”

He sucker punches me in the gut. I fold shut around his fist. He
kicks me in the balls and smacks my head against the curb. I cover my head with my arms, crawling away on my hands and knees. He kicks me in the gut again, and I land facedown out in the street.

“Don't come back,” he says.

“Are you kidding?” I laugh, coughing up what I hope is spit. “It's yours!” I say and point down the block. “This street, this shitty neighborhood! It's all yours!” Scuffing my elbows and knees on the pavement, I crawl to a parking lot and collapse on a stack of pallets, dreaming of Cristina wrapped in a sweat-drenched bedsheet walking to a window and letting in the cool air, the breeze dancing around her body and a warm sun turning her dark silhouette into light.

I hear the street noise first. The ear-bludgeoning din of a garbage truck picking up what must be a large metal box of boulders. Then the metronomic clicking of traffic lights. A bus's hydraulics exhales in front of a gas station on Sunset Boulevard I slept behind last night. My back's in such pain it's radiating a high-pitched sound on a frequency only I can hear. It's the cold gray of morning again, not yet light but past being dark. There's a sun coming up in the sky, the second sunrise I've seen in a row as a free man.

Using their air and water dispenser, I wash the blood and vomit from my chest, then take out of a Dumpster pieces of a cracked pallet and washboard my shirt on it with the soap from Julianne's house.

My eyes adjust to the grayness. Parked on the curb is a city bus. If the driver's gone for a coffee, I can sneak in and crash in the back for a couple hours. Or I could ride the bus to wherever it's going and get the hell out of here. Forget about finding Angie. The beating I took last night hasn't given me a chance to think too far ahead.

The bus's back doors won't pry open. Up front, I can see through the doors the driver asleep behind the steering wheel. I fish through my pockets and come up with forty-seven cents, not enough for a fare, but maybe all the coins will fool him. I kick on the doors, but
the heels of my shoes keep slipping on something greasy and slick that's smeared on the glass. When the doors open, I drop my change in the fare box, knowing he won't throw me off as long as I keep talking. To my surprise, he talks first.

“I'm out of service,” he says. I've spent enough nights out on the street—including last night—to know he'd slept in this bus. If he'd stolen it, he didn't seem too worried.

“I am too,” I say. “But here we are.”

“No, this bus is out of service,” he says, cutting me off.

“Okay,” I say. “When you going to be ready to roll?”

“No, mister, the bus, totally out of service.
¿Comprendes? Tienes que coger otro autobús.
”

“I understood you the first time,” I say. Can't he tell I'm not some
pinche mojado
fresh from the desert?

“Then why are you still here?” he asks.

“I have somewhere to go and no other way to get there,” I say. Isn't this obvious? I've never had to encourage a bus driver to
drive
before.

“Why is that my problem?”

“Because that's your job, right?” What's wrong with this guy? Either kick me off or get going. There's a lot I can do today and I don't want to waste my time here in Echo Park.