by Ron Arias
The tattoo leaned closer to the visitor. “What’s your hurry, man? Sit down.”
“I’m looking for ...” Chávez opened his notebook. “Tomás López. You know where he lives?”
“What you want him for?” the fat man said. “You don’t look like no cop.”
“I’m taking a survey and I want to talk to him.”
“Talk to us. A ver, ask me a question. I’ve got all the answers.”
“Leave him alone, Pete. He don’t want to talk to no winos. Mira, he’s all nervous.”
“Hey, you think we’re winos?” Pete raised himself slowly.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you think we’re winos, no?” He held up the bottle, then heaved it into the weeds. “Winos, huh?” For a moment his puffy eyelids closed.
Chávez waited, speechless, afraid of what the man’s next move would be.
“Well, that’s what we are. ¿Qué no, Jess? Two goddamn winos trying to get the feria for a little juice.” Pete scrutinized the newcomer. “Hey, man, we ain’t gonna hurt you. Sit down.”
Chávez steadied his voice. “Yeah, okay,” he said and dropped heavily onto the mattress. The fat man remained standing.
“How about a little wine, man? You lend us something to buy a pint?”
Chávez removed his wallet from his pants pocket, slipped out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to Pete. “Get me a beer.”
Jess reached for a shirt hanging from a low limb. “Oye, buey,” he said, throwing it to Pete. “They won’t let you in the store without a shirt.”
Pete stretched the T-shirt over his wet belly and walked away through the weeds and down the hill.
Through the haze beyond the freeway, Chávez could see the outline of the Music Center buildings. He tried clearing his throat but the phlegm wouldn’t rise. Closing his eyes, he felt the dark pit begin to close in. He began to walk in a circle and when he fell, the velvet lid or whatever was above him descended softly around his ears. Darkness was heavy, then it spoke: “Hey, man, you sick?”
Chávez opened his eyes. Clammy hands held his face and the thick smell of alcoholic sweat pricked his nostrils.
“What’s the matter with you?” Jess asked.
“Huh?” Chávez rubbed his sweaty forehead with his free hand. His other arm still clutched the notebook. “I guess it’s the sun, too much sun. I’ll be all right.”
Jess looked at him closely. “You go to school, don’t you? That’s why you can’t take a little pinche sun. Man, you’re in poor shape. That’s what happens to you school guys. Shit, I used to pull twelve hours in the sun and all I got was a better sun tan.”
Chávez sat up, notebook on his lap. Macho, brags, likes sun.
“You got that clean look. But you don’t look too sharp now.”
“Listen, how about if I interview you instead of Tomás López?”
Chávez opened the notebook. One warm body is as good as the next. To hell with Tomás López. What do they expect for eight dollars an interview? He stared down at the blank form. Once filled out, it would join hundreds of other forms to be classified, coded, scanned into computers, results studied and neatly presented to the public as a precise, up-to-date portrait of the Latino population in Los Angeles. So big deal if Macho Jess here subbed for Tomás López. Big frigging deal.
Jess gestured to the notebook. “What do you want to know?”
Chávez pushed down the top of his ballpoint pen. “Well, like your age.”
“No! Don’t write nothing down.”
“But that’s not how you do an interview. I ask you questions and then write down your answers.”
“How do I know what you’re writing?” Jess grabbed the binder and closed the cover. “Don’t write nothing down.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t even know your name.”
“How do I know you don’t? Come on, man, everybody knows me.”
Chávez shrugged. “Okay, but I’m going to write it down anyway, later on. Now give me back the notebook.”
“I’ll give it back when I’m done talking. You just listen. I ain’t as dumb as you think. Now what do you want me to say?”
“Everything . . . what you do, where you’re from.”
“Hm . . . well, like I was in the Navy, man.”
Navy veteran
“I ain’t always been here. No way José. I got in the Navy when I was sixteen. No, really, I did. They sent me to Oakland. And you know what I did? I painted those big ships. Yeah, me.”
Occupation: painter
“I had some good times, man. Got to travel, see the world, got me this tattoo.”
Decorated
“But they kicked me out after I beat some cabrón over the head with a spray gun. I sprayed him good. He called me a little wetback. I can’t take that from no one. So I sprayed him real good.”
Honorable discharge
“When I got back to El Paso I got married. And, man, that was the wrong thing to do. My old lady wanted everything. Like she wanted a new car. Man, I couldn’t buy no new car.”
Low income
“So my compa and me went out and stole one. Yeah, jacked it right off the lot. Black Chevy. Wasn’t really new but it smelled like the real deal. I knew she was gonna like it. So I dropped my compa off at his place, then drove over to show my wife. I tell her, but you know what she did? She called the cops. Now what kind of wife is that? I was just doing what she wanted.”
Adjusts well to environment
“I got two years in prison just for tryin’ to make her happy.”
Thoughtful
“But guess what? After six months in the bote, they let me out. Said early parole for good behavior. Ha! All because I stayed outta fights.”
Good citizen
“Then I find out my wife’s been seeing another guy. I blew up, smacked her, got my things and left. We got divorced and I never seen her since. That’s how I got here. Never been back to El Paso. And I got another lady. See that house over there? The blue one? That’s mine. I painted it myself. I got four kids. No, five. All of them boys. But they ain’t like me. They’re going to stay in school and be something, like you maybe.
Five children
Pushes education
“See, and you thought I was a bum, puro wino nomás, just sitting on my ass all day. Well, I got a family and a job and this is my day off. What do you say about that?”
Chávez noticed Pete shuffling toward them at the edge of the empty lot.
“You got more questions, Mister College?”
“A few more but I can skip it. Here comes my beer.”
“No, go on. Ask me another question.”
“Okay, what’s your religion?”
“Católico romano, man.”
Catholic
“Like I was gonna be a priest. Yeah, I was real close. But I joined the Navy instead.”
Jess saw Pete coming along the path and he stood, turning his back to Chávez. A colorful Virgin of Guadalupe spread herself across his shoulder blades and ribs down to his waist.
Devout
“I had enough for a quart,” Pete said excitedly.
“What about my beer?” Chávez asked.
“What’s he saying, Jess?”
“He thinks you forgot his beer.”
“Hey, that’s right. I did forget. Sorry about that. But hey, don’t worry. We’ll give you some of our wine.”
“No, thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank us. We didn’t give you nothing.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Under qué?”
“Never mind.”
“Oye, Jess,” Pete said. “Let’s go. The old lady says she’s going to call the cops if we don’t go.”
“Who’s that?” Chávez said, looking confused.
“Oh, the vieja in that old house,” Pete said, motioning to the blue one.
Just then the curtains in a window moved.
“Metichi viej
a, always after us.”
“Isn’t that where Jess lives?”
Pete smiled. “What’s he been telling you? Shit, he ain’t got no old lady.”
Chávez looked at Jess. “But you said . . . ”
“I said nothing.”
“And the Navy and . . . ”
“Sure, and my great-grandfather was Pancho Villa.”
The two men started to walk away when Jess turned his head. “Hey, Mister College, Tomás López died two years ago.”
Chávez wiped the sweat from around his eyes, picked up the notebook and hobbled out of the shade. “Wait,” he yelled, trotting after the two laughing figures. “Let me have some of that wine!”
Lupe
In the early morning, Tiburcio’s wife Isabel gave birth to a nine-pound, eight-ounce hermaphrodite. Isabel immediately asked to see the yowling baby. She pushed up on both elbows, smiling, eyes alert. It had been her easiest birth, so easy that Cuca the midwife hardly did more than hold Isabel’s hand.
Her pregnancy had almost gone unnoticed. To her other children she appeared the same, perhaps rounder, her eyes more affectionate. She had told them that one day soon their new brother or sister would arrive from her womb, clean and innocent—not “bought” at some mysterious store, as some of her neighbors liked to say.
Cuca hesitated, then held up the naked infant, its combination of boy and girl protruding before the mother’s happy inspection. Isabel counted the fingers and toes.
“Any birthmarks?” she asked.
“No,” the old woman said, raising a wrinkled brow.
“He looks like his father, wouldn’t you say?”
“He, Isabel? It’s just as much a he as a she.”
“Then she looks like her father.”
Isabel blinked and lay back on the pillow. Before she dozed off, she asked that Tiburcio and the children be allowed to see the baby. They had been waiting in the kitchen for more than an hour, and the pot of Quaker Oats that Isabel had been cooking was still on the burner, lumpy, cold and hardly mixed. The contractions had come so fast that calling the hospital was out of the question. Even Cuca—two blocks away—almost missed the event.
Tiburcio entered the sunlit room first. He patted the small, bald head, smiled and nodded to his wife. The eldest son Robert moved close and said all newborn babies look alike. Eventually the other children touched the tiny hands, made faces and wondered if the birth meant they didn’t have to go to school that day.
“Go to school,” Isabel whispered, closing her eyes.
Isabel was soon flooded with sympathy. Some called the baby a “he,” others maintained it was a girl because of one very long strand of hair above the left ear. Other neighbors switched back and forth, sometimes saying the baby was very pretty, muy chulo, sometimes very pretty, muy chula.
“What about a name?” Tiburcio asked. “We just can’t keep calling our new baby it.”
Her husband was right, Isabel thought. “Any suggestions?”
No one spoke. Tiburcio nervously opened a telephone directory, his fingers flipping pages, eyes scanning up and down.
“Tiburcio,” Isabel said, “go ask the priest. He should know.”
Tiburcio jogged two blocks toward the river to the church and around the back to the sacristy. He found Father James and quickly explained the predicament. After a brief meditation on the matter, the young, Spanish priest shook his head, shrugged and advised him to pick a name before the baptism.
Cuca was more positive. There was only one solution: an operation. Afterward, naming the baby would not be a problem.
“Absolutely not!” Isabel cried. “No one’s going to touch my baby.”
In the afternoon, Fausto and his niece Carmela, neighbors from across the street, stopped by to congratulate Tiburcio and Isabel. The baby was asleep in its crib. Isabel was propped up with pillows, and Tiburcio, who was scribbling names on a pad and just as quickly crossing them out, explained the situation. Fausto, an old timer from Chihuahua, studied the baby, circling the crib and stroking the hairless crown of his own head.
“Well, what do you think?” Tiburcio said a bit nervously. “We need a name.”
“Lower your voice,” Isabel said. “You’ll wake the baby.”
“Well, Fausto? You’re the man with all the books.”
Carmela reminded them that her uncle wasn’t a magician.
“Lupe,” Fausto said. “Guadalupe. Either way it fits.”
Tiburcio raised his heavy body and looked at his wife.
“What do you think?”
“Fine,” Isabel said and sighed.
She looked around the room at the smiles, then at the creature in her arms and suddenly realized the baby seemed to be smiling too.
“Tío,” Carmela said, “I think we’d better go. You need your nap and Isabel has to rest.”
“Sure. Now that Lupe has a name, a siesta sounds perfect to me.”
Carmela kissed Isabel on the cheek. “You take care,” she said and led her uncle out the door and through the living room.
The unopened presents were still piled on a table in one corner; the baby shower had been planned for today but Lupe had arrived two weeks early.
“Poor woman,” Carmela said when they reached the sidewalk. “All those kids and one more to take care of. God, I’d hate to be in her place. She says her mother can’t even help her.”
“And why not?”
“She lives in Texas, and there’s no money to bring her here.”
“She’ll survive. Isabel’s a strong woman.”
“Has to be. You see Tiburcio? He’s like a walrus. She must spend all day cooking for him.”
“He’s nervous. Some people eat when they’re nervous.”
“All the time?”
Carmela steadied her uncle’s arm as they crossed the street. “I’d be nervous too. Six kids, lousy job.”
“That’s why he’s nervous. He lost his job.”
The two entered Fausto’s house. The old man sat down next to a bookcase jammed with paperbacks, magazines and hardcover discards from the county library.
“Carmela, that man is desperate. A strange baby’s one thing, but giving it up to some circus?”
“You’re kidding!”
“That’s what he told me. What could I say? It’s his kid.”
Two days later, Tiburcio, with fear in his eyes, stumbled up the front porch stairs and banged on Fausto’s door.
“¿Qué pasa?” Fausto said, flipping up the screen door latch.
“My kids, they won’t eat.”
“So? It happens.”
“No, I mean a whole day and a half now. Nothing. All except for Lupe. He doesn’t stop eating, nursing all the time.”
The two men stepped into the kitchen. Fausto sat down at the table and turned on the antique radio. The cracked dial knob was loosely held together with a Band-Aid and kept slipping off the metal rod in the center.
“What’ll I do?” Tiburcio said with a hapless expression.
Fausto finally stopped the dial on the station he wanted. The announcer was giving the day’s astrology reading.
“Maybe,” Fausto said, “your food is bad. Is that it?”
“I tried everything, even capirotada. They never turn that down.”
Fausto leaned forward and listened for Sagittarius. After a moment, he looked up and told his sallow-faced friend not to worry. “You know children. They probably planned this weeks ago. On the other hand, it might be the weather. It does funny things. Or maybe they’re like me. Sometimes I get tired of eating, can’t stand anything—todo me da asco. You ever feel that way?”
Tiburcio slapped his paunch. “That’s another thing. I haven’t eaten all afternoon. It doesn’t even bother me. Just not hungry.”
“See what I mean?”
“What’s crazy is I don’t miss food.”
“Tiburcio, go home, and I’ll read up on this. Maybe I’ll find an answer.”
For two more days
the children of Elysian Valley fasted. Then one by one the adults were afflicted by the same indifference to all forms of food. School was closed and some parents straggled to work for a few days. By Sunday only the strongest and most faithful of the St. Ann congregation were able to listen to the dark, weary figure seated on a stool behind the pulpit. By the fourth day, most of the children lay in bed with vague, limp expressions, their parents not much better. Even Fausto, searching his books, could barely stand any reference to food.
As for Lupe, the baby had quickly sucked his mother dry. Isabel was forced to fill the hungry little mouth with bottles of formula milk, watered-down coconut water and weak chicken broth. Hour after hour, Isabel trudged between the kitchen and the crib, stepping around her reduced husband, who was sprawled on a living room sofa chair. Occasionally, she stopped to rouse an eyelid of one of her other children, all lined up on a single bed like sardines.
It wasn’t long before Lupe and his emaciated neighbors captured national attention. Reporters wandered freely through the homes, describing the scene of full cupboards and refrigerators, untouched freezers, blank faces and the usual skinny forms buried under bed sheets. Television crews marched in with their portable units, focused on pale cheeks, trying in vain to provoke a few intelligible words for their viewers. Nothing worked; they were left with silence or the continuous sucking and slurping sounds of one voracious, healthy infant.
“Fate,” the Los Angeles mayor announced, “rests in the hands of medical intervention.” The teams of doctors and nurses moved in with their machines, monitors, medicines and advice.
Most of the tests were run on baby Lupe. A hermaphrodite was unusual but, of course, not impossible. What was most strange was the baby’s unceasing appetite. Medical professionals and other observers, now in white hazmat suits, could only admire such phenomenal digestive development.