The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  “Hey, asshole! You pushed me!”

  “No cursing on the bus!” I shouted.

  There aren’t any specific regulations about passengers using profanity, but one curse word between two races is enough to start a fight. In the same way, I thought a shout from me would be enough to calm the ruckus. Most confrontations flicker out and die on their own, or a passenger takes the initiative and resolves the dispute himself. I can’t drive and referee. Not in the job description either.

  “I’m fuckin’ talking to you, maricón!” the mojado shouted. The kid had no idea someone was shouting at him—I think he had one of those earpiece cell phones—when the mojado punched him in the back of his head.

  He stumbled out of his unlaced high-top sneakers and fell back on a row of bucket seats, spilling the candy pouches. My eyes were on the road—that’s my job—but in my memory I can hear every Skittle pack hit the rubber floor. The kid popped up off the seats, smacked the mojado to the floor, and then started throwing punches. The mojado punched back in the kid’s ribs.

  The passengers were shouting and screaming, and that’s when somebody must have started recording with his camera phone. With a police call and the police reports, I was going to be put behind schedule, and lose time off the clock I wasn’t going to get paid for. Who needed this aggravation? Why not toss both of them off and let them duke it out in the street?

  I pulled over at the next bus stop and turned on my flashers. At this point, I’m sure I radioed for police dispatch per regulations, but why no record of my call exists, I can’t explain.

  I grabbed the black kid’s jersey and pried him off the mojado.“You’re off my bus,” I remember saying.

  “Why you kicking me off?” the kid shouted. “He started it!”

  You’re wondering the same thing. Why him? There were eighteen Mexicans onboard, a late-night zombie army of classroom cleaners headed to USC, and about two or three blacks. Easy choice.

  “Off,” I said and shoved him to the door. “Off the fucking bus!”

  “Fuck you! You wetbacks are all the same!”

  Try, if you can, to pretend you haven’t seen the video. I won’t deny being called a wetback infuriated me, but the “kick” off the stairs and onto the street wasn’t a kick. The kid used most of his strength to fling himself off the bus. I popped the doors closed and shouted something at the mojado. The video says I said, “Vuelva a donde usted vino, pinche mojado!” but I don’t remember saying that. What I wanted was to get out of there.

  The kid ran alongside the bus, slamming and kicking it as I drove away. He was right in my blind spot when I drove for an intersection. There’s no footage of this, but I had the green light. I had the right of way. That truck, whose description I’ve given a hundred times and will give again here—late-model GMC pickup truck, mushroom brown, white guy driving and a Mexican seated next to him in the cab—ran straight through a red light, cutting me off. I had two seconds to decide whether to plow into the truck, risking my and my passengers’ lives, or swerve to the right to miss it.

  There was a loud thump, followed by the dull, thudding sound of what could have been a heavy sack dropping from a roof.

  Leaning out the front door, I could see the kid had smacked into the bus’s sideboards and was propelled forward about thirty feet, cracking his neck against the curb. I’ve seen enough bodies spread out on the pavement to know he was dead.

  What was I feeling? Nothing. I wanted to deal with the situation in a quick and professional manner, the way I’d been trained. I turned on the hazards, alternating light on, then off, then on, over his crumpled body. It was dark by then. Nights here are sudden, like an accident.

  I’m confident I radioed for help when I reboarded the bus. I have no explanation why the call came in eleven minutes after those first 911 calls came from my passengers. Standard procedure is to keep everyone onboard until the police arrive to prevent witnesses fleeing the scene. Following regulations for hitting a pedestrian, I asked if anyone onboard was hurt, but there was too much noise and screaming for me to hear their answers.

  Under the baseboard in a storage box was a thick sheet of canvas. I exited the bus and covered the body. A group of blacks from an apartment complex across the street pooled out in front, watching the scene.

  I lit several flares while the crowd across the street whooped and hollered and drank beer. Then they shouted and pointed before they bolted over. A small crowd grew into a large one, forming a rowdy semicircle around the body. That’s when one of the blacks on the bus pushed open the front door and shouted, “He killed him! The Mexican threw the brother off the bus and killed him! I got it on video!”

  A small group clustered around the light of his cell phone, their pinched, illuminated faces carved out from the night behind them. It was a short clip, maybe fifteen seconds, but I could see the light flickering in an endless loop, hear my voice repeating itself, the crowd’s conviction and anger rising with each replay.

  “You killed him, motherfucker!” a man shouted, followed by a chorus of yeah s!

  “He ran alongside the bus in the street,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “Fuck accident!” another man shouted. “You ain’t even from here!”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “Oh, you didn’t see him!” a third voice shouted. “’Cause it’s night and he’s black you didn’t see him?”

  “No, no,” I stammered. “That’s not what I meant. He was in my blind spot.”

  “The fucker who started it’s on the bus!” the black with the camera phone said. “He grabbed the brother! Get him, too!”

  The crowd had heard enough. A group of them—shirtless, tatted thugs—stormed up the open front doors and onto the bus.

  “We got him!” somebody screamed from inside. “We got the motherfucker!”

  A Mexican guy—not the one who started the fight—was thrown off the bus and corralled into the semicircle with me and the dead body.

  “What you got to say for yourself?” a voice shouted.

  I didn’t answer. The Mexican was trembling. He whispered “No sé” under his breath.

  “Fucking cholos go hunt for black people! You wetbacks been trying to kill us up and down these streets!”

  “Say something!” one of the crowd shouted.

  A large hand smacked him in the face before he could. Then a solid punch, and he went down. He screamed for help in Spanish, which made the crowd rabid. Someone lunged at me, and I scrambled up the stairwell, kicking back at the hands trying to grab my legs. I slapped a hydraulic button to lock the doors. The mob threw the Mexican up against them.

  “Habre la puerta!” he screamed. “Dios mío, habre la puerta!”

  The man pounded his fists against the glass doors. His face was bloodied and bruised. There was a short moment where the crowd outside sounded worn out. Inside the bus was screaming, shouts of “Sácanos de aqui!”

  I started up the bus, hoping the roar of the engine would scare the crowd outside into thinking I might barrel into them and back off. Instead, they threw the Mexican back into the doors, his face a bruised sunset, then down onto the sidewalk with an audible crack.

  It’s a violation of Metro policy to leave the scene of an accident. But I had the safety of my passengers to consider. Nobody mentions that, by driving away, I saved those other Mexicans’ lives. In the rearview, the silhouettes chasing us receded, swallowed into the dark. I switched the lighted marquee to OUT OF SERVICE—HAVE A NICE DAY! and sped down Hoover, missing all the stops. On the corner of Hoover and Jefferson, I pulled over at a Denny’s, radioed dispatch my new location, and opened the passenger doors.

  Everything I did up to this point, I think you’d agree, a reasonable man would have done the same way. The Mexican who started the fight ran off. A few others followed him. I told everyone to wait either inside the restaurant or across the street on the USC campus.

  I was shaken and wanted to clear my head, grab a bite to eat,
some coffee maybe, something to settle me down. With no police car in sight, I drove east, then north, up Figueroa back to my division yard, off Mission Road, in Boyle Heights, behind the 5/10 interchange. At the corner of Figueroa and the point where César Chávez turns into Sunset Boulevard (the one spot in Los Angeles where a Mexican name changes into an American one), instead of turning right down Chávez to the yard, I turned left on Sunset and kept driving.

  Why? I don’t know. There are specific rules that cover off-route trips, but I couldn’t recall what they were. I’d never seen the streets that deserted before. The city lights shimmered like a pinwheel on a child’s grave, hard, gray beams cut up and spun in a dozen fingered directions. In front of me was this long straight line of blue-green diamond streetlights stretching out in a fluid purple blackness, like blood in an artery. And a silence to rival any national park, any mountainous abyss, a silence you’d think impossible in a city of millions.

  Daybreak was washing the night away off the sides of the horizon. I parked in front of a gas station, shut down the bus, and rested my head on the wheel. I don’t know how long I was out for, but the sound of someone pounding to get inside woke me up. The man kept knocking and didn’t seem to care about the blood smeared on the doors.

  When I opened them, he climbed the steps and emptied his pockets into the fare box before I got a word out.

  “I’m out of service,” I said. I could see why he didn’t notice the doors. He was bruised and bloodied himself, had been in one hell of a fight.

  “I am too,” he said. “But here we are.”

  “No, this bus is out of service.”

  “Okay,” he said. “When you going to be ready to roll?”

  “No, mister, the bus, totally out of service.” I wasn’t sure he understood English, and I was too exhausted to stand by my principles. “¿Comprendes? Tienes que coger otro autobús.”

  “I understood you the first time,” he said.

  “Then why are you still here?” I asked.

  “I have somewhere to go and no other way to get there.”

  “Why is that my problem?”

  “Because that’s your job, right?”

  He held himself with a swagger but had this faraway stare in his eyes, that look you get when you’ve had enough pain for one day and aren’t sure whether you’ll be able to take on any more tomorrow. And he was right; it was my job. It didn’t take me long to decide what to do.

  “You’re right,” I said and glanced at the fare box. “You put in too much.”

  “That’s okay, man,” he said. “It’s a first for me.”

  Yes, I know many of the facts as I’ve remembered them don’t match the numerous eyewitness reports on file, and yes, they never located the truck that caused me to swerve into that kid. And nobody’s been able to find this guy, this “Freddy” I picked up, the last passenger of the night, and maybe of my career, but I’m telling you this did happen.

  “How do we get to where you’re going?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “How will you know when we’ve arrived?”

  “I’ll know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will get you there.”

  He took a seat about halfway back in the empty bus, picked something off the floor I couldn’t see, and rested his head against a window. It was several long blocks on Sunset before we hit our first red light, one of those lights that take forever to change, but I could wait. I would get him where he needed to go no matter how long it took me. I would learn a new set of rules. I would find another way home.

  5

  Yo Soy el Army

  We used to own these streets. From Echo Park Lake, up Echo Park Avenue, and into the green hills and avocado trees of Elysian Park, home to the Los Angeles Police Academy, up to Dodger Stadium (built in the 1950s on top of the ’hood that used to be Chavez Ravine), down to the whites’ six-lane escape route to the San Fernando Valley, Glendale Boulevard, under and through the freeway interchanges downtown, across the big Victorian mansions of Angelino Heights, then back to Sunset Boulevard—this whole part of Rampart belonged to the Echo Park Locos. I’d been a Loco since I was fourteen; my father, Manny Mendoza, Sr., before me a legendary Loco who’d taken on nine members from 18th Street who dared cross out of their territory on a Friday night. Or was it eight members from 13th Street on a Saturday night? I never could be sure how true those stories my father told me were.

  Most of the gangs around here didn’t take the Locos seriously before my old man. My abuelita was a Zooter in White Fence, and even she didn’t respect the Locos. “Why don’t you join a gang con huevos?” she asked and laughed at my dad. We were considered teeny-boppers before he did shit that made us legit in the eyes of bigger and harder gangs. He was the most respected veterano the Locos had; even during his final bedridden year, when he had to wear a diaper, homeboys from as far as Temple Street held their noses and came to “el maestro” for counsel. In a respectful voice he never used with me or my pussy brother Efren, who ran off because he loved his faggot books more than his own sangre, Dad broke it down for the younger vatos. How you use rubbers, the right way to “jump” someone into the gang (never kick the head or the balls—you don’t want to be stuck with a brain-damaged maricón), and the trick to taking apart a Chevy Impala carburetor. Manny called it “cholo school.” (This was back when cholos still cared what us OGs had to pass down.) There were lessons on how to handle fights with junkies and drunkards, when to fuck or be fucked in the joint, the best place on your body to hide shanks, where to go after you’ve shot someone (not your mama’s or your bitch’s house, pendejo), and what to do if some puta negra gave you what my old man died from

  at forty-seven, “permanent pneumonia” (AIDS)—these were the perils of our streets.

  Turns out we didn’t own these streets at all. One by one, the houses on my block of Laveta Terrace sprouted For Sale signs on their front lawns like tombstones, each one taking away a friend or an enemy, but neighbors all, cashing out homes that had been in their families for decades for hundreds of thousands of dollars, taking with them veteranos and future veteranos alike. There’s a handful of OGs left in the neighborhood. You can spot ’em by their tattoos, etched black letters spelling LOCOS across their knuckles and crosses in the soft spots on their hands where their pointer fingers and thumbs meet, not these bullshit white-boy rock-star tattoos of make-believe tribal bracelets on their forearms or random Chino characters on their lower backs. Our tattoos weren’t fashion statements. They were marks of fidelity, to our streets, our homeboys, and our allegiance to hate those born on the other side of town. Now they were bitter reminders of a war neither won nor lost but redeclared, with new opponents who carried not knives, guns, and family grudges but hammers, contracts, and measuring tape. There is no elegy for those who have been dispossessed of their anger—what remains is a future carved out of banality instead of blood.

  “Do you want bean sprouts, sir?”

  A girl with dyed cotton-candy pink hair and metal spikes decorating her collarbone jabbed an impatient finger at my paper plate. “Bean sprouts or kettle chips?” she asked.

  “Bean sprouts,” I croaked, ashamed I’d reached a point in my life where I had to make decisions like choosing between bean sprouts or potato chips (and then going with fucking bean sprouts!). They were a side dish for my lunch, a grilled cheese and soy bacon sandwich, made on seven-grain bread with organic, grass-fed, raw-milk cheddar and, at my request, heart-healthy mayonnaise.

  Somewhere I thought I smelled, wafting into Membo’s Coffee Shop on Sunset Boulevard, an outdoor hibachi cooking thick steaks and ribs slathered with honeysweet barbecue sauce. I paid for my sandwich with a ten-dollar bill and received a handful of nickels and pennies. My son Juan, holding a miniature coffee cup and saucer, claimed two chairs under a canvas umbrella amid a cluster of street-side outdoor dining tables.


  “We were lucky to get these,” Juan said.

  “It’s hot out here,” I said, sinking down into a cushioned patio chair made for pampered jotas. “Don’t understand why everyone wants to sit outside. Tables are right next to the street. Eat a mouthful of dust and exhaust when the lights change and a bus roars by.”

  “What’d you get?” Juan asked.

  “The one thing they had with fake meat,” I said.

  “You have to watch that because of your . . . ,” Juan said, pointing to my chest.

  “I asked for the good mayo.”

  “Good,” Juan said. “And stay away from these, too,” he said, raising his cup. “These espressos are addictive.”

  I took a small bite from my sandwich, leaned back in the chair, and wiped my mouth with a coarse brown napkin made from recycled paper.

  “I don’t know why we keep coming here,” I said.

  “It’s in the neighborhood,” Juan said.

  “I don’t know anybody here,” I said. “Nobody who works here, nobody who sits and eats here.”

  “They don’t know you either, Dad,” Juan said. “Give it time.”

  “I should have gotten a beer.”

  “It’s not a restaurant anymore,” Juan said, sipping from his cup. “I keep reminding you they don’t serve beer here.”

  “Won’t be a problem where you’re going,” I said, biting into my sandwich. Juan nodded, sipped from his cup. “How much more you need to get done?”

  Juan set down his cup on the saucer. “Got my clothes, gym bag, towels, toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, shower shoes—everything at Target. I need to make copies of my birth certificate and papers.”

  “You got a mailing address yet?” I asked.

  “No, Dad, not until I’ve been processed.”

  “So you’re not official yet?”

  “Dad, we’ve been through this.”

  “Have you signed anything?”

  “Dad . . .”