The Madonnas of Echo Park (3 page)

I shrugged her hands off me.

“I can't dance with you,” I said. “You're a Mexican.” It was a moment I'd rehearsed with my mother, but the word
Mexican
caught on the roof of my mouth like a stutter. It was the hard
x
—the same consonant that degrades the word
sex.

“What do you mean?” She laughed, her shy smile saying,
You cannot be serious.

“You are
a Mexican,
” I said, loud enough for the entire class this time. “I can't dance with you.”

Aurora kept smiling, but her eyes focused on the chalkboard, evaporating me in a glance.

Madonna continued to play. Ms. O'Neill lunged at Aurora and pulled her into the circle. While they danced, the crowd relaxed and bunched into the segregated clusters we knew so well. My two useless cohorts emerged from the corner and patted me on the back. A couple of Vietnamese girls came with them, their satisfied smiles making me blush. They couldn't tell for sure whether Aurora, with her excellent command of English and British band names etched
in ballpoint onto the cover of her denim blue three-ring binder, was a “real” Mexican (real as in a
chola
), but they
were
sure that Aurora's best friend, named Duchess, was. While we talked, a group of Mexican boys teased me in a singsong mock-Chinese. The boldest of the bunch asked Aurora to dance with him, which she did. I watched them in silent fury, like a lost man watches the horizon.

The school bell ended the party. Ms. O'Neill called me over to her desk and asked Aurora to stay after class. She was on the other side of the room, shoulders hunched, putting her records away as fast as she could.

“You did a terrible, terrible thing today, Brando,” Ms. O'Neill said. “Why would you say something like that?”

“I don't know,” I lied.

“Well, I think you owe Aurora an apology.”

“Okay,” I said.

We turned to see a door slamming the way it does in a vacuum. Ms. O'Neill raced out of the classroom, shouting “Aurora! Aurora!” until her voice cracked.

When Ms. O'Neill returned, she said, “You'll apologize first thing after break.”

I spent vacation in my hot, airless bedroom in self-imposed exile, not leaving my house for fear of seeing Aurora at the bus stop or on my way to the supermarket or, worse, running into Duchess, who I believed was on the lookout to beat me to a bloody pulp (this being, at the time, the worst thing I thought a gang member could do to you). Playing on an endless loop on my bedroom television was MTV. I saw the “Borderline” video several times a day for a week. At some point in the video, there was a close-up of Madonna's face that would melt, time-lapsed, into Aurora's face, staring at me with that same hollow look I saw when I rejected her, betraying an emotion beyond disgust or contempt—it was a look that said I didn't exist. I'd recognize this look more and more as I grew older, in places both private and public, for reasons both explicit and unspoken, and once you've been
seen through
in this way—once you have been made
transparent
—
no amount of physical pain matches the weight of invisibility.

When we returned from break, I told Ms. O'Neill that I hadn't forgotten about what I'd done at the dance and was ready to apologize to Aurora, even if I had to in front of the class. She said that wasn't necessary but was proud of how determined I seemed. The bell rang, and we took our seats in the castes we had arranged for ourselves and felt comfortable with. Aurora's chair was empty. Ms. O'Neill asked if anyone had seen her during the break. No one had.

A week later, her name was no longer called in roll. I asked Ms. O'Neill what had happened to her.

“Aurora won't be coming back,” she said.

“Then how am I going to apologize?”

“You'll have to find another way to do it.”

Twenty-five years later, I think I have found my way, in the book you're reading now. This is the story of Aurora Esperanza and why she disappeared, told through the people of Echo Park who ultimately led me back to her. And while I've changed some details to protect those who drifted in and through this project over the duration of its writing, these are their real voices. I want to add that everyone in this book insisted he or she was a proud American
first,
an American who happened to be Mexican, not the other way around. No one emphasized this more than Aurora. I
am
a Mexican, she said when I caught up with her, but
a Mexican
is not
all that I am.
To my surprise there were no hard feelings, and as we joked about that day (“I shouldn't have picked a Madonna song!”), she was gracious enough to ask about my mother's attempts to raise me as someone other than a Mexican in a curious rather than an accusatory way.

“I don't blame her,” she said. “I must confess—and I guess this
is
a confession—why would anyone want to be a Mexican in
this
country at a time like this?” I understood what she meant. When writing
this book, originally called
Amexicans
, there was such a vitriolic fever against illegal immigration (translation: Mexicans) that it made me grateful I had an Indian last name, and ashamed that I felt grateful.

Aurora, if you are reading this (it wasn't clear during our talk that you would), I have a confession of my own: I'm ready to dance with you. I'm ready to lace my still too-small-for-a-man fingers around your waist, ready to smell cotton-candy-scented shampoo in your long, black, curly hair as we sway our close but not touching hips to the beat of a song decades out of time. I won't offer an apology, because you didn't want one then, and I'm sure you have no need for one now.

I'm ready to dance with you, Aurora. I hope you understand why I need to say that to you here, in this way: because a work of fiction is an excellent place for a confession.

—B.S.

W
e slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours. Those who'd never been here before could at last see the Promised Land in the darkness; those who'd been deported and come back, only a shadow of that promise. Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running,
carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass. We run into this American dream with a determination to shed everything we know and love that weighs us down if we have any hope of survival. This is how we learn to navigate the terrain.

I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become. In the rolling jade valleys of Elysian Park, my family lost their home in Chavez Ravine to the cheers of
gringos
rooting for a baseball team
they stole from another town. Down the hill in Echo Park, I lost my wife—and the woman I left her for—when I ran out of excuses and they ran out of forgiveness. Across town, in Hollywood, I lost my job of eighteen years when a restaurant that catered to fashion and fame found its last customers were those who had neither. And my daughters, they are both lost to me, somewhere in the blinding California sunshine.

What I thought I could not lose was my place in this country. How can you lose something that never belonged to you?

“Bienvenidos!
You are all welcome here,” announces David Tenant from the flatbed of his mushroom brown GMC pickup truck in the parking lot of the Do-It-Yourself Hardware store on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. He says this to the regulars, and to those who won't be back because the work is too hard or the pay too small or they will have been deported or they will have moved on, to Salinas, San Diego, Phoenix. There are hundreds of parking lots in Los Angeles like this one, and thousands of men like me standing in them, waiting for a good day's wages. That day doesn't come around too often now because construction jobs are in short supply, but today, the first dry, chilly morning to break through a week of rain, Tenant's looking for men, and if I'm lucky, I could make a hundred dollars for a ten-hour day.

A restless crowd of thirty to forty men undulate around Tenant's truck, our hunger for work an octupus's tentacles swallowing the vehicle into our mass of bodies. The younger men, punching buttons on their ancient cell phones, swarm the front, while the grandfathers are hunched over in devotion or exhaustion in the rear. Tenant leaps up on a set of crates, raises his arms as a conductor readies his orchestra to begin a symphony, and cocks a boot atop the tailgate.

“Who's here to work?” he shouts.

We raise our hands and yell, “Me,
señor
!”

He scythes the air with his palms, casting a line in the direction he wants men from and pulling them from the crowd into the flatbed. The chosen men stride past us, hoisting themselves into the pickup in ascension. Any man who fakes being picked is tossed back into the sea; any man who refuses to leave the flatbed has to deal with Tenant's son Adam, a squat, muscular former security guard and current aspiring actor who sits in the cab shouting into his cell phone until he's needed. He's been an extra in a number of horror films with Roman numerals in their titles and comes to help his father after the late-night shoots wired on meth and coming down on coffee, his thick biceps coated with what he says is real Hollywood movie blood.

Men materialize in the parking lot as fast as they disappear into the back of Tenant's truck. They come from a nearby alley, where they smoke weed and piss against the wall, or from the liquor store, fresh from checking their lottery numbers, or with forty-ouncers. Preachers have been here before to save us, but most of these men want the sermon that comes out of a bottle.

Tenant waves his arms in front of himself with a magician's swipe, his quota satisfied.
“No más!”
he shouts. “But we'll be back.” The pickup jerks the dozen laughing and singing men in the back like bobble-head dolls as it speeds out of the parking lot and turns onto Sunset Boulevard.

We are left with our bodies coiled, smoldering, cursing our luck, waiting for the next pickup truck to approach, which could be anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. It's an erratic schedule better suited to a younger man, but when a boss like Tenant, who is in the business of supplying
trabajadores
to job sites throughout the city, says he's coming back, it's worth it to wait.

When I started as
un trabajador,
the bosses could tell I'd never done any outdoor work. And knowing English on top of that? I was lucky to last a day. They liked men fresh from the border, not a forty-plus-year-old man who'd worked most of his life in a restaurant but whose opportunities for a living wage had vanished, undercut by
busboys pooled from the very men I now jostled alongside. They could mold these young
mojados,
push them harder and pay them cheaper. When the jobs dried up, though, my demeanor and reliability became assets.

The sun disappears behind a swath of clouds, darkening the street, when Diego arrives wearing a black Dodgers cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a cup of coffee. He's many gray hairs away from forty, but we've been drawn together because he likes to talk and there's nothing else to do while waiting for a job except brag or listen. He drifted here from Mobile after a spree of murders targeting Mexicans in trailer parks. The murderers used baseball bats and, in some cases, machetes. Police blamed Colombians, though Diego insisted it was a meth-dealing white supremacist gang, and for that insistence he had to leave town fast. He sent his wife and four kids money working his way west, but by Albuquerque there was nothing left to send home. His expenses include smokes, whiskey, and underground taxi dancing bars where you can dance with women in lingerie or bikinis for ten bucks, grind on them against a wall for twenty, get a hand job for fifty, or take them home for three hundred (the term
women
is misleading; the girls at the bars we frequent in East L.A. are either teenagers with developing chests and acne dotting their cheekbones or haggard
abuelitas
with rubber tread marks around their flaccid bellies and breasts).

I never question the holes in Diego's story because he's honest company. He doesn't wolf-whistle, grope, or lunge at the Catholic schoolgirls when they walk by, doesn't brown-bag forties for breakfast, doesn't sell his drugs in front of me, and most important, he doesn't push, shove, or jostle to get chosen for a job. There's a civilized, dignified air in his approach to being
un trabajador,
and while he mentions no plans to change his day-to-day life, this is a condition he says—most of us say—is temporary. Ask any man why he's here, and you'll get the same answer:
What else can I do?

An SUV with tinted windows creeps into the parking lot. Its stop-
start approach marks them as first-timers. Nobody wants to take a job from a new boss. All the young men—those who have a choice—know it's not worthwhile. The pay's miserable (six or seven dollars an hour instead of the usual ten), and they think they've rented a slave instead of hired a housepainter. During the day, they're the ones ordered around. Out here, they get a taste of being in charge and get drunk on it. If you're not careful, a simple driveway paving job can turn into a landscaping job, a garbage collection job, a disposing of paint cans job, or a “suck my dick,
maricón
” job, and you'd better do it for the same fee you negotiated for one job because, really, who are you going to complain to? That's why you need to be smart about whose truck you get into. Get into the wrong one and you're broke, deported, or dead.