The Madonnas of Echo Park (25 page)

“I have my friends, my hobbies. I have a very busy day. And my dog,” Mother says and glances over at Blackjack's empty bed. “Where is he?”

“Maybe his schedule's packed, too,” I say, but my mother's stare stops me cold. “What?”

“Did you lock the door behind you?” she asks.

My eyelids blink twice, a fleshy, audible
pop!
both of us hear. Her expression bubbles and solidifies like metamorphic rock, a harshness pinching the edges of her lips and eyes, making her neck wrinkles oscillate. This is a look that's neither contemptuous nor sympathetic. It's a look I've seen a mere handful of times in my life, taking me back to a time in my childhood when closets and spaces under the bed were scary places. It's a look that says, I'm not in control of this situation.

“He's too small to push open the front gate by himself,” I say, knowing this is some desperate stab to shift the burden away from me.

“He can tear apart a cable-knit sweater and chew through a mesh leash,” my mother shouts, racing to the living room. “He can push open an unlocked door!”

Outside the kitchen window, the smog lifts on a lustrous morning sky polished smooth like a stone. That vision is almost impossible to reconcile with what I see when I walk out into the living room: a wide-open front door and security gate, jacaranda blossoms fluttering into the house and waltzing across the tile floor, and a sharp breeze snapping up the hill, puckering the air around us. It's like the scene of a crime where the oxygen's been sucked up into a vacuum, making it difficult to breathe, your light-headedness stopping you from coming to any sort of rational conclusion about your next move.

That's what I'm feeling. If this is my state, how will my mother react? In a fit of grotesque panic, flailing down the hill, screaming his name up and down the street?

No. She was on the porch gripping an iron railing with both hands, staring at the expanse of hill below us. In the damp morning breeze, away from the dust and balmy scent of ammonia, her thoughts and her breath came easy. Her mind was made up:

“Adéntrense en este mar que forcejearon con sus jóvenes brazadas y traigan la sabiduría de la corriente con ustedes.”

In Spanish, she knew how to say beautiful things, as if she were quoting poetry. She could turn her anger into song. In English, she was brutal. If she had tried to say what she was feeling in English, it would have come out as, Go away and don't ever come back.

“Wade into this ocean you floundered in with youthful strokes,” she said, “and bring your wisdom of the currents with you.”

I grabbed my purse, nodded my head. “Thanks, Momma. It sounds much nicer in Spanish.”

It was a cold and windy morning for July, a brisk (for L.A.) sixty-one degrees, and I didn't object to my mother asking me to take a midnight blue, fake-fur-collar, and chenille-lined coat she'd stored in my old closet and I hadn't worn since college. It was an expensive coat I'd begged my mother to buy. I was going to have someone sew a huge picture of Morrissey onto the back, with his name written underneath in gang-style calligraphy, but the estimates I got were in the hundreds of dollars and I didn't know anyone who could do it cheap. The coat didn't make sense without the Morrissey picture, so I tossed it into the closet and never wore it again.

My mother had calmed down enough to dig through my old Tupperware containers of clothes and find it. For being shelved in plastic over a decade, the coat was a great fit. Hoping to thaw out the
tension over Blackjack, I teased her about how she was softening in years; I couldn't remember a time, ever, when my mother asked me to take a coat.

“Afraid of me catching a chill?” I laughed. “There are no ‘chills' in East L.A.”

“You're not going to joke your way out of trouble with me,” she said. “Quit acting like a man.”

She agreed to accompany me as far as Vince's place on Sutherland, a dead-end street one block over with many backyards that connected with ours. Vince Hernandez used to stop by in episodic bursts, making several visits one week, then vanishing for months. Now he enjoys taking Blackjack for long walks, culminating in an overnight pass at his place that sometimes includes my mother. He's in his thirty-something forties, runs an underground auto repair shop out of his garage, has most of his hair, and has never married, though he came closest with Mother (which is how she tells it). When she is in the mood to tell me more, she dangles a tantalizing story about how Vince is my real father, which aside from one “fact”—they're about the same age—has never been corroborated by anything else other than wistful glances between the two and an easy familiarity coupled with a savage bickering that comes natural to any man and woman who've been intimate over a period of many years. On summer evenings at Vince's place, I watched him fight his way through my mother's bizarre sense of “long-term girlfriend” entitlements (she honored no commitments yet insisted on the benefits of a wife), then carry those fights into his dreams. He slept in prizefighter's poses, body coiled, fists clenched, his chest puffed out and bubbled like an unwatched omelet, attacking the inert mattress and pillows until their concave indentations sagged into permanence.

To his credit, Vince did his best to act as a father figure when he was around. When he was away, I conjured him into a famous explorer who would sail around the uncharted regions of the world for months
and years at a time, reappearing with gold, spices, silks, and exotic tales of mermaids and sea monsters. Someone who'd disappear for long periods of time not for his benefit but for mine, returning with riches that would make his time away worthwhile. Age wore the spell off—his absences grew so lengthy, and what he returned with became so worthless, I declared him lost at sea and would tell any guy who asked me where my real father was to fuck off.

Vince's house is nestled next to a support post for one of those big billboards that you find up and down the Strip but that are a rarity on this stretch of Sunset. The access ladder could be reached by standing on someone's shoulders, making the billboard a favorite forty-ounce-drinking, weed-smoking, outdoor fucking spot for teenagers. Vince joked about how hard it was to see the stars at night under sudden downpours of Olde English or used condoms. The steady stream of billboard crashers became such a nuisance that he removed the access ladder and constructed a new series of interlocking ladders that, with the insertion of a special key he made himself from a bottle opener, could access the trellis and the accompanying advertisement for a cocky local weatherman named Sergeant Sunshine. He hasn't been on TV for several years—he was removed for making a racist on-air comment—but his fluorescent blue eyes remain on Sunset, peeking out over a pair of gigantic Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses with silvery metallic lenses that “reflect” a painted-on Hollywood sign and a cluster of palm trees with five-point, gold-star-shaped fronds.

Those blue eyes fed my teenage dreams. Sometimes, when the weather or the shouting drove me out of Vince's house, I'd climb up eighty feet to the billboard catwalk with my sleeping bag and feel the city lights pulsate under my body as I gazed into a Hollywood caricature that promised spotlighted red carpet premieres, rides in the backs of limousines, and the kind of glamour and riches that to a teenage girl seemed inevitable, if not my birthright. Later, when I realized I wasn't going to be a movie star, or even live like one, the billboard became that one recognizable landmark you see after a long
trip that smacks you in the face and says, Welcome home, nothing's changed.

The same sign could be affixed to Vince's front door. An unprimed car with black plumber's tape trim juts out of Vince's open garage door. An old transistor radio blares music in the sharp morning air from what must be the last surviving English oldies radio station in Los Angeles. Vince stands next to the car in an Army green T-shirt, baggy cargo pants, and his trademark steel-toe boots, shaking his head in frustrated disbelief.

“Lady,” he says and kisses me on the cheek.
“Cómo está mi pequeña estrella?”

“She left the front door open,” Mother says, “and Blackjack ran out. Thought he might have come here. Have you seen him?”

“Dogs run away,” he says, not answering and grabbing an open Heineken. “Then they come back. Hey, lady, you want something to eat? You're white-girl thin.”

“I want to know how the car's coming,” I say, and Vince lights up with equal doses of pleasure and dissatisfaction.

“I can't believe the people around here buy cars and know nothing about them,” he says. “I'm rebuilding this one from scratch. It'll be a classic when I'm done.”

“You're an Einstein with cars,” I tease.

“Yeah, I
may
be a genius,” Vince says.

“You want to see the genius of men in action?” Mother says to me. “See how fast he puts on his pants after sex.”

“Listen to your mom,” Vince says, taking a healthy swig of beer. “So what are you going to do today, lady? How about we go to the Lotus Festival tonight at the lake? I haven't taken you since you were singing
Fraggle Rock
songs.”

“She's going to look for my dog,” Mother says.

Vince cocks an eyebrow, takes another gulp, and finishes the bottle. He yanks out a brand-new bottle opener (he goes through bottle openers the way the Devil goes through souls) and opens a new beer. “Why?”

“Blackjack's a small dog. He could get hit by a car or a bus,” Mother says.

“Dog's too fast to be hit. Or be caught. Let him come back on his own. He wants to go out and see the world, maybe change it for the better, get a bitch pregnant.”

“Every man wants to change the world,” Mother says. “How come so few of them do?”

Vince examines the car's body. “Lady, if you wait until lunchtime, I'll give you a ride. You won't have to walk in circles.”

“She won't catch him driving in a car,” Mother insists. “She has to be on foot.”

“Lady has better things to do today. And she doesn't know the neighborhood anymore. She needs a few places to start,” Vince says. He finishes his second beer and opens a third. “Check with the Catholic boys. They're training for some intercity competition and running throughout Echo Park. Bound to run into them, and you can tell them to keep an eye out. Oh, and you should ask the Lord.”

“The Lord?” I laugh. “C'mon, I'm not gonna fall for that one anymore.” The Lord was an Echo Park urban myth, a clairvoyant oracle who, depending on whom you believed, would answer any single question you asked him, grant your one deepest wish, and if this wasn't enough, change one person's opinion of you so you could start a new, positive relationship with them (keeping up the relationship was on you). This sounded very sixties-ish to me, and the catch, of course, was that nobody I trusted had seen the Lord; some drunks outside the local bars, kids who'd claimed they'd hiked up the tinder-dry hill of weeds he lived on and saw him feeding on dog carcasses, and, of course, Vince. After a poker game where he'd lost his life savings, Vince claims the three things the Lord gave him were granted in one moment—he met my mother the next day.

“I'm telling you, he's called the Lord for a reason,” Vince insists. “He's a wise old man. He knows everything that goes on around here. These people buying houses for too much money? He predicted this
years ago. I never believed in a god—but I always believed in the Lord.”

“Vince, stop teasing her,” my mother says.

Over the sound of a passing police helicopter and a doo-wop group on Vince's tinny radio speakers come the chiming of bells from what used to be the Ukrainian Orthodox church up the street. The first of three Spanish-language Sunday services has concluded. Whenever she hears the bells, Mother has bitter comments about her disbelieving churchgoing neighbors strung like arrows from a quiver, but she's also superstitious, and I can see she is restraining herself today, afraid that some obnoxious remark about how fraudulent most Mexican Catholics' faiths are might boomerang on her and end up flattening Blackjack on Sunset Boulevard.

“I think this Lord's telling me to get going,” I say. “There's a lot of ground I need to cover.”

“He'll hate you for chasing him,” Vince says. “Men always do.”

“He can't hate me more than he does now,” I say. “At least he'll know I'm not afraid of him.”

“He's a dog, sweetheart, not a wild bear,” Vince says and digs into his pants pocket. He pulls out a set of gold keys attached to a paper clip key ring. “Lady, if you're walking down Sunset, do me a favor and drop these off at Lorenzo's. I've been meaning to give these to him, but I'm going to be stuck under this car today.”

“Lorenzo? I haven't spoken to him in years.”

“It'll be fine,” Vince says. “I've kept him up-to-date on you.”

“She shouldn't get sidetracked,” Mother says. “She's anxious to get home.”

“It's not a problem,” I say and take the keys. “It's one stop. I can find Blackjack and be on the road before noon. Mom, let me walk you home.”

“I'm fine. You should get going.”

“Okay. I'll drop by here later this afternoon,” I say.

“I won't be here later.”

“Then I'll meet you back at the house.”

“I won't be there, either,” Mother says.

“Where do you think you're going to be?”

“I don't know.”

“Then how am I supposed to return your dog when I find him?” I can hear the edge in my voice popping my words up and out of my throat, as if I were holding a blade against my own neck.

My mother lingers outside the garage. Vince stares at the ground. I realize they are planning to sleep together, which I find kind of charming this early in the morning, but I'm amazed at their inability to acknowledge lust. It's funny—the older and less impressionable I got, the more they tried to protect me from whatever truths they shared and were ashamed of. The time for this kind of discretion was when I was a young girl, who believed that every night we stayed over at Vince's would be the last night I'd have to unpack my Strawberry Shortcake travel bag. Now, this secrecy feels ridiculous.