Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  In the early seventies PCP skulked back onto the drug scene. Certain scumbag dealers peddled it as "organic" mescaline or psilocybin. Even today there is a 90 percent chance that that stuff you thought was THC or cannabinol was actually PCP.

  By 1972 people never much interested in psychedelics were getting into PCP and, indeed, accepting it as the drug of choice. The government was cracking down on reds (Seconals), but people who wanted to achieve that truly helpless, irresponsible, wall-banging euphoria—people who wanted to get all fucked up— could take a couple of tokes on a KJ and get there in about five minutes and stay kristalized, ozoned, for four to six hours.

  There are times, in the ozone, when movement is difficult without sustained, even heroic concentration. "Let's see, lean forward, move the right leg . . . bend the knee and, uh, right, lift the toes so the foot doesn't drag. . . . This is taking forever. . . . Holy Christ, stiffen the knee or we all go down. . . ." In East San Jose this mode of stoned locomotion is known as the moonwalk.

  The problem is that the line between moonwalking and serious trouble is very thin. You can get off on three milligrams of PCP; ten can make your stomach feel like it's full of dirty socks, and you may end up doing pull-ups on the toilet bowl; 200 milligrams is a suicide attempt. By sprinkling the drug on parsley and smoking it (rather than eating, snorting, or shooting it) you can more easily control your intake. This is why your chronic user is almost always a smoker.

  Investigators have found that PCP aggravates preexisting psychosis. It also mimics the primary symptoms of schizophrenia, and it does this much more accurately than mescaline or LSD. By late '76 you could read about these effects in the paper—a guy broke a big chunk of glass off his shower door and ate it. Cut his insides up pretty good. Another fellow was using PCP pretty heavy, and one night, swimming around in the ozone, it occurred to him that since his wife was exactly nine months pregnant, it

  245 A OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

  would be a good idea to use a big butcher knife and "hatch" the kid. Luckily, his wife talked him out of it. She had to tell him about it the next day. Amnesia is a frequent side effect.

  In Los Angeles an unemployed actor who wasn't the Hillside Strangler told police that he was. Another man found himself in a jail cell and put his eyes out with his own hands. (This is a hard one not to have nightmares about. Scientists believe PCP disrupts or distorts the way the brain receives stimuli from within the body. This is what frightens people and freezes them into catatonia. "It just seems," one chronic user told me, "like your brain cells can't hack it.") Treatment for a PCP bummer involves removing as much external stimuli as possible. No excitement.

  There are other horror stories: One man murdered his parents; another stabbed a tiny baby to death. Users themselves die, not only from massive overdoses, but from what is called "behavioral toxicity." People fall from great heights, burn to death, drive their cars into large stationary objects, or drown in a few inches of water because they didn't recognize the danger, or couldn't cope with it, or simply because they were too fried to do anything about it, even move.

  People of all ages, races, and social station are using PCP, but experts give San Jose, California, the nod as the epicenter of the epidemic. And in San Jose the focus of public use and sale was the parking lot at Story and King Road.

  There were, at a guess, some seven hundred cars in the lot, and, aside from the lights of a club called Disco East on one side and those of Story and King Liquors on the other, it was very dark. At least four thousand people were standing around in the lot. Young men in groups of four or five leaned up against cars. Young women roamed the lot in groups of two or three, stopping now and again to talk with guys, have a beer, or share a joint, or just comment on the music blasting out of the car stereo. There were more people by the liquor store, more in the club, and cars were coming and going at all times. Most everyone was Chicano. It was, in fact, rather like being in Mexico, where every town has a plaza where people gather on weekends and feast days. In

  America the tradition has taken wheels, and the plaza has become a parking lot.

  People were there to enjoy themselves, and they refused to lurch, sweat, drool, vomit, curse, murder, die, or flop around in convulsions on the pavement. Socially, the place was like a huge stand-up cocktail party. I'd introduce myself to a group, exchange pleasantries, and stroll on. No one—not even those who thought I was the world's most inept Anglo nark—had a nasty word. I saw some people smoking KJ—it has a distinct, fishlike chemical odor—but they mostly did it in their cars in a secret, masturbatory fashion.

  I stopped to talk to one group primarily because one of them was just finishing up a KJ roach. The fellow wore sharply creased black slacks, a patterned Qiana shirt, and stacked heels. I never did get his name—he may not have known it—and so I will call him Party Boy. No one really talked to Party Boy. He just moon-walked around for a time, and his eyes seemed to roll around in his head without regard to focus.

  Just as I finished my second beer, Party Boy noticed me for the first time. It was as if some hideous extraterrestrial had materialized before his flaming eyes. "What?" he asked and grabbed my arm urgently, nodding for me to complete the sentence. I must have looked blank.

  "What religion?" He was clearly annoyed at having to elaborate.

  "Raised Catholic," I said, and nodded for him so he would understand that this was a good thing. Party Boy threw back his head and screamed, "I want to be free." He glared at me. His face was fierce. "Me too," I offered lamely. He grabbed the beer can from my hand—I had been using it as an ashtray—and downed the dregs, ashes and all. "You want to be free," I reminded him in the hope that this would take his mind off the ashes.

  Party Boy pondered the familiarity of the phrase for some time, then asked me what religion I was. "Raised Catholic," I said.

  "Uh . . . good." He tried to show me a swirling red-and-black tattoo on his chest that apparently had religious signifi-

  cance, but his shirt was in the way. It took him a long time to get it off, and he fought with it, as if the shirt were a sentient thing.

  Bernardo, a tall fellow with a goatee, pulled me behind some cars, out of Party Boy's sight. "The vato's [The word "vato" corresponds pretty much to the word "dude." It is good to be a vato loco, a crazy dude. It is not so good to be "a vato who's all fucked up."] all fucked up," Bernardo said. We watched Party Boy lurching around, trying to get his shirt back on. It took him most of ten minutes, primarily because one arm was inside out, and whichever way he put the damn thing on, there was always something wrong with it.

  It was about this time, 2:00 a.m., that the fights started. There was one every half hour or so, but Bernardo didn't want me to watch. Instead he told me about the cars: hours of information about cars. "A lowrider," Bernardo said, "buys his car stock. Never customized. An artist doesn't display someone else's work." A hundred feet away I could catch the action in strobo-scopic bursts: arms whipping like hummingbirds' wings, thumps, whumps, smacks, and groans, fists thudding into flesh with the sound of a tenderizing hammer pounding into a two-inch beefsteak.

  "The first thing you want to do," Bernardo said, "is mold the make and model name off your car." Your ride, he explained, is your pride, and to have a big chrome advertisement for Buick Riviera on it is tantamount to having Buick Riviera tattooed on your chest.

  Party Boy, his shirt buttoned in an exceedingly strange fashion, wandered over and tried to say something, but there was no sense in him. "Man," Bernardo said in exasperation, "tomorrow I'll wake up with a hangover, but you're going to wake up as a tomato, man, a vegetable."

  "Fuck . . . vegetables," Party Boy said, and Bernardo was off again about the cars. You want true spoke wheels ($600), and little tiny, thin tires with about half an inch of whitewall on them, the 560s or 520s ($150). And you'll need to get rid of your twenty-inch stock steering wheel and replace it with an eight-inch chain, welded into a circle and chromed ($20). Then there's your


  stereo and tapes ($200) and when you have $1,000 together, you'll want your ride painted to your design. A diamond-tuck crushed-velvet interior job goes for about $500 in town, half that in Tijuana. Of course, you'll lower your car, but that causes problems on sloping driveways and over speed bumps, so when you have about $800, you can put in hydraulics—lifts, juice— and make your car do push-ups.

  Engines are not modified for speed. That's for the Anglo kids who run the other side of town in cars that say Trans-Am on the side with the back end all jacked up. "Roadsniffers," Bernardo called them.

  "Lowriders," he said solemnly, "are slow riders."

  Bernardo saw the scene in the parking lot as a gigantic party for mechanical artists, a place where lowriders could display their work. The key word, he said, was unity, Chicano unity.

  "Unity," I said, "Jesus, what about that?"

  There was another fight in progress not forty yards away. "Hey," Bernardo said, "if a vato gets bad with you, you don't want to turn away with your tail between your legs." A couple of police materialized out of nowhere—they were bareheaded, no provocative riot gear—and the fight disintegrated. Party Boy was stumbling around in the vicinity, and I wondered if he had enough sense not to ask them if they were Catholic.

  Okay, Bernardo said, I was here on a bad night. Sometimes there are no fights at all. But even when there are, they are one-on-one, no organized shit like East L.A. where the car clubs are sometimes more like war clubs. Their operations are planned with maps and CBs and walkie-talkies—the whole enchilada. The object is to take a tire iron to some car belonging to a rival club and make off with the plaque in the back window. Then you fly the plaque with the vanquished club's name on it in your back window. Upside down. Then someone burns down the president's house. Then the guns come out. It's West Side Story on wheels.

  In San Jose car clubs have gotten big again in the last few years, and there is a central council designed to keep them at peace. On weekend nights there may be thirty-some clubs repre-

  sented in this parking lot, perhaps the world's largest regular gathering of lowriders.

  "And you want to write about KJ," Bernardo snorted. "Okay, some vatos deal to get money to cherry out their ride. But how many dealers can there be? Most lowriders I know have jobs. A lot are married, with kids. And they're not going to go getting all kristalized, man. One KJ costs twenty-five dollars. You do four a week, that's a hundred dollars you can be putting into your ride.

  "Mira, I'm no hypocrite. I smoked KJ, everybody has. It's a good high. But everybody knows that it burns your brain cells. I don't like to be around people who smoke KJ, man. One vato poked me in the back with a knife behind KJ, man, I went to the hospital. And you know what else? People who smoke KJ all the time are ashamed, man. You talk to them when they're straight, they're ashamed. They don't want anyone to know that they're burning up their brains."

  The two cops came by again, hurrying a guy in handcuffs toward the squad cars parked on the periphery of the lot. The guy was dressed like Party Boy, but you couldn't tell from the distance.

  Bernardo said that what I ought to do is find someone who had his ride together—anyone, my choice—and cruise around with him for a day. "See if he talks about KJ or cars. Give the lowriders a chance."

  "Yeah," I said, "maybe I'll do that."

  "Make me a promise," Bernardo said, and he kept at me until I finally did.

  I was cruising on Saturday afternoon with Huero when he decided to show me some placas, those walls of stylized graffiti you see around Tropicana. Huero's personal favorite was several feet high, written in spray paint on the back of the McDonald's near Welch Park, a prime cruising spot. The script had that peculiar Aztec-style Chicano graffiti artists strive for, and it read "Huero of Sa Jo." For good measure he had added a "14," which means northern California, as opposed to southern California, which is "13."

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 250

  Huero got arrested because of that particular placa. The police took him off to court. They argued that Huero was something of a flamboyant and well-known character in the barrio, that everyone knew him as Huero, and that he had even modified the grill-work of his extremely noticeable car to read ''Huero."

  Huero, for his part, said that many people in the barrio share his street name, which refers to lightly complected Chicanos or Mexicans. Literally, the name means white man, and for all Huero knew, maybe some white guy came down to the McDonald's near Welch Park and wrote "Huero" on the wall in Aztec script.

  Perhaps the judge agreed. Maybe he took note of Huero's wounds. He had been hit fifteen times in Vietnam. One of his legs and one of his arms don't work so well, and just at the outside corner of one eye there is a bullet-sized groove that runs back to an ear pretty much chewed away. Huero earned a Congressional Medal of Honor in 1969, and the judge might have taken this into account before deciding whether he was going to put a thirty-one-year-old man in the slammer for writing on some wall with spray paint.

  Then again, Huero's luck may have had something to do with the rifa. It is sometimes written, sometimes it appears like this: = r=. The word means quarrel, and a rifa on a placa means "Don't mess with this, because anything you write on my placa reflects back on you." The rifa is a spell, a little bit of magic, and as much as anything, it might have been the rifa that brought Huero through his big graffiti bust.

  Cruising with Huero on a warm afternoon is a little like being handed the key to the barrio. First of all, he has sunk over six thousand dollars into his '75 Chevy Monte Carlo, jacking it up to the really florid heights of the baroque lowrider style. From the chrome grillwork, reading "Huero," back, the car is all color and splash. The basic color is star-burst bronze, and brown and amber tendrils snake through the long, off-white side panels. These tendrils are interspersed with vertical blue and light blue flames that look a bit like desert plants in some lights. Indeed, the trunk sports a representational desert scene with cacti and an otherwise naked girl wearing a sombrero. Under that scene are the words

  "Mi Vida Loca," —my crazy life. On both rear fender wells are the words "Lowrider's Dream," and on both opera windows, painted in white, is the suggestion "Let's fall in love."

  We were cruising through Tropicana—down Havana and around Florida and through Sumatra—and people on their lawns would shout, "Hey, Huero, man," and Huero would pull over. People stepped to the car, alert for any new changes.

  "Hey, Huero, man, when did you throw crush into your ride?"

  Just last week as a matter of fact. The light blue diamond-tuck crushed-velvet interior covers the doors, the rear seat bench, and extends into the rear window well. The front buckets have been replaced with padded swivel seats, and they are covered in shiny bright blue vinyl with silver metal flake, and that same material covers the ceiling. The little glass sunroof Huero installed is tinted a gentle purple, and the sun streaming through on the crush and the metal flake, on the silver brocade scarf hanging from the rearview mirror, gives the interior the stained-glass atmosphere of a Mexican church. The hood ornament is a very substantial swooping silver eagle.

  Still, the most important thing about Huero's ride is his wife, Babe. She rides to his right, and on the dash, just in front of her, are four golden letters reading babe. She is a good deal darker than Huero, and they laugh about this a lot. They laugh about everything. They are so much in love it is simultaneously delightful and embarrassing: always stealing quick kisses, always tickling and touching one another.

  Babe works as a counselor in the high schools. She reads Margaret Mead and uses words like "ethnocentricity," words that send poor Huero into paroxysms of laughter.

  For Huero, everything and everyone is wonderful. I was wonderful because I was in San Jose spending my own money to find out about lowriders. Well, not exactly. I explained that I was getting expenses and being paid on top of it. No matter, Huero was happy to have me with him.

  And it is at this point that many a lowrider might fire up
a joint of Columbo and just cruise at fifteen, twenty miles an hour with the purple streaming through the roof onto the silver brocade

  scarf and the willow trees swaying in the breeze outside—watch it here, the intersection, you have to take them at a diagonal so you don't bottom out—and El Chicano or Malo blasting out of the stereo, all horns and drums, or maybe that all-time lowrider slow dance classic, Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk," and here comes another lowrider, fifteen, twenty miles an hour, taking the intersection on the diagonal and you should shift into neutral and blast the pipes in greeting and maybe, while the road ahead is clear, give Babe a kiss.

  On any given Saturday afternoon about half the car clubs will be meeting. Members drive to the president's house, and if a car is dirty, or dented, or riding on a spare wheel, fines will be given out. I was not really sure of Huero's position. He said that he was a member of the National Lowriders, but he'd dropped out. Now, for photos of his ride, he'd like to be flying a plaque. We stopped at the president's house. He was a bright young guy named Jesse, and I overheard him tell Huero that "you got a dent man, I can't let you fly our plaque." Time passed, and more cars arrived, but we didn't seem to be invited to the meeting.

  We cruised over to Disco East where some of the Street Escorts were hanging out. The Escorts have thirty-six cars, while the National Lowriders have fourteen. They seemed to be a better disciplined, more organized club. A few of them commented favorably on Huero's ride, and somewhere along the line there was a misunderstanding. We got the impression that just for today we might be able to fly the Escort's plaque in Huero's ride. Following the Escorts to their president's house, Huero commented on what a bunch of good vatos they all were. We socialized on the front lawn for a time, and someone asked Huero to please move his ride. It was parked in the middle of a long line of Escort cars, and it stood out like a giant ink stain on the flag. The Escorts favor solid-color paint jobs—they like 1963 Chevy Impalas with skirts. Their interiors are stark, dark leather. No Escort would even think of installing a hood ornament.