The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  I tried to pluck one of the bills out of the wallet with my fingertips but missed, knocking the wallet to the floor. I was rusty. In front of me, Javier and the black guy were talking. Something was up because, nine times out of ten, these people don’t want to know you’re alive, let alone have a conversation with you. Fingers were pointed, voices raced. And there on the floor by my feet, an open wallet with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill I’d grabbed at, ripe for the plucking.

  Peeking up over the steering wheel, I could see the black guy towering over Javier, pointing these massive fingers down at him like he was talking to a small child. I gotta hand it to Javi, though. He didn’t back off. He stood there, shoulders forward, looking real dignified, I thought. There was a dignity in the way he stood up to a guy two feet taller than he was. Where does strength like that come from?

  I saw the owner of the Mercedes walking over, his one-hundred-dollar bill stuffed in my hand. I ducked back down to pick up the wallet, and in my panic my big, heavy foot punched the accelerator. The Mercedes plowed into Javier, slamming his head into the support bar of the windshield, sped onto a side street with a forty-five-degree-angle incline, then flipped through the air at a center divider, ramming into an island of streetlights.

  I remember the EMTs’ feet crunching on the glass and pebbled shards of metal. The photos they showed me in the hospital of Javier’s contorted body, the impact throwing him fifty feet, unrecognizable except for his uniform, told me the rest of the story.

  When I got sent to Lancaster, Cristina told me she’d never stop loving me, unlike the asshole that knocked her up, some cabrón named Hector. Of course she’d fuck other men, move ’em in when she got bored, kick ’em out when they bored her, but there was no doubt that she’d leave a spot on her bed for me when I was ready to claim it. Some women you can count on waiting forever. I dreamt about that spot on her bed, and that sweet pert spot on her ass every night I was inside, my body fitting into the curves of her body like the outlines of shadows in an eclipse, one moving across the other, then together as one, blinding everyone who dared steal a glance at us, then pulling apart onto our separate orbits, night turning back into day.

  Beautiful, ain’t it? I wrote Cristina that in a letter. Cons make the best letter writers because inside every man is a poet. You just have to throw him in jail to find it.

  It’s the dark half of morning before dawn when I get off the bus at the Greyhound station on Skid Row. You can hear the hum of traffic from the 101 a couple miles away, gentle and constant like a steady rain. The sky lightens to a cobalt gray, and I imagined I’m one of those great ancient Greek conquering heroes returning to his kingdom to reclaim his throne.

  On the starting tip of Sunset Boulevard (which is now called César Chávez Avenue—when did that happen?) I survey my territory—the new apartment buildings and stores, the fresh coats of paint on the doors and window frames on abandoned shops, new storefront signs in English covering the old sun-bleached Spanish ones (which themselves were molded over the old English signs from the forties and fifties), the odd presence of young bearded white men with coffee, not six-packs, on the street corners. Where are the Chicanos? Or the Chinos? To keep me going, I picture Cristina’s robin’s-egg-blue kitchen and my face buried deep in a big home-cooked breakfast of chorizo con huevos, and a warm pair of loving thighs. Then I call my carnals, who must love all the fresh money walking around here, and by this time tomorrow I’ll be up a hundred? Five hundred? Hell, maybe a thousand dollars, enough to relax on for a couple months.

  Cristina’s house is a flat bungalow atop a hill with a straight staircase pointed down at the street like a gun barrel. My stomach and dick throb in unison at the homecoming I’m expecting, one that’ll be more exciting for Cristina because I didn’t write ahead and tell her when my parole date was. It’s been about four years since we last exchanged letters. (Through a prison “pen pal” newsletter, I’d started dating a forty-seven-year-old woman in Canada who sent me cigarettes, money, and pictures of her standing next to a nickel-plated lake, but why would I freeze my fucking ass off in Alberta?)

  When Cristina and I were living together, I’d go out for days at a time, wouldn’t call or send word where I was, then when I’d drunk and scored and fucked as much as I could handle, I’d creep up the stairs at three or four in the morning, tap on the security gate, and shout out “Hellooooo!” drawing out the o’s into aww s, like a drunken crow. Her daughter, Angie, would open the door, tell me to “die in the gutter,” then slam the gate in my face. Man . . . what a bright kid she was.

  Then Cristina would storm out onto the porch in one of those skimpy white nightgowns with a slit up the front that didn’t—hell, couldn’t—cover her breasts, yank me into the house, and unleash a shouting tirade that’d go for thirty minutes. She’d tire herself out, which is when I’d moisten her up with a few promises and a neck massage. By morning I was between her legs and good in her eyes for another two weeks. She liked it better when I didn’t make excuses about where I was or who I was with anyway. Stay here or stay away, she’d say. God, what a woman. I hope she hasn’t gained too much weight.

  It’s an easier climb up the stairs than I remember. The gaping cracks in the hillside foundation that ran up and down the uneven staircase like varicose veins have been filled in, the threads from my old patch-up caulking jobs paved over with a smooth frosting of flat, even concrete. Potted plants arranged in neat rows line either side of the staircase, and there’s a wicker sitting bench on the porch, both new additions. The security gate’s been removed and replaced with a separate front door with a stained-glass inlay. On the brass mailbox next to the door is a different last name than Cristina’s, which I assume is her new husband, a man I’ve never met and almost feel sorry for. Whoever he is, he’ll never be in my league. He’ll have to accept his demotion; I was here first.

  I knock and see a rustling of blinds before the door opens. A white woman with short black hair and a tight T-shirt that somehow makes her look like a man answers. I speak first, because when you’re on the locked side of a door you’re trying to open, you always speak first.

  “Morning. I’m looking for my wife, Cristina. Are you a friend of hers?”

  “There’s no Cristina here,” the woman says.

  “Is she out?” I say. It’s time to apply a little grease to the situation. “If she’s shopping, I’d love to come inside and cook up a warm meal that’s waiting for her when she gets back.”

  “Nobody named Cristina lives here,” she says.

  “Did Cristina tell you not to let me in? Cristina’s a forgiving woman, and if she told you otherwise, she was saying what comes natural to a woman that hasn’t seen her man in a while. What’s your name?”

  “There’s no Cristina here,” the woman says and, through the crack in the door, looks me over. “I need you to leave.”

  “Miss, there’s no cause for that. I’m scruffy because I’ve been on a bus all night. Been visiting my sick brother in Bakersfield. He and Cristina are real close. She’ll want to know how he’s doing.”

  “Please leave,” the woman says. She closes and double-bolts the door. I knock again, harder this time. She’s not gonna get rid of me this easy.

  The door flies open, like in the old days. Cristina’s going to let me have it. That old fire’s still burning in her!

  The woman reappears with a phone in her hand. “If you don’t leave,” she says, “I’m calling the police.”

  “Miss, let Cristina speak to me for five minutes.”

  “I’m dialing,” she says.

  “Lady, you’re making a big mistake.” I laugh, backing away and staring over my shoulder, wondering how far this will go. I could force my way in, but trouble with the cops on my first day out of the joint is the last thing I need. And I’m a gentleman about certain things; I don’t like getting rough with a woman I’ve just met.

  I’m down the stairs and on the sidewalk before she closes the door. Cristina must b
e angrier than I thought. Looking up and down the block for another staircase I can sit down and think on, I see Julianne’s old bungalow, tucked at the rear of a driveway adjoining a house that’s being renovated by some Mexican day laborers. Julianne was one of the last white women who lived here, a holdover from when her mother bought a place here in the 1950s. We used to smoke out, get drunk, and fuck at her place when our spouses were working. She had two kids back then and was proud—get a load of this—of never having lived more than five hundred feet away from her mother. That kind of shit almost sounds like it makes sense when you’re high every day.

  That thick, caked-on skunk stench hits me through a punctured screen door. She comes out in a sweatshirt and ripped, pissed-on cutoff shorts. Her stringy hair’s a ball of earthworms, and there’s thirty pounds more of her; she leans out of the doorframe heavy, like a tottering pole that’s been bent in a hurricane.

  “Helloooo!” I bellow. “Julianne, it’s me. I’m back.”

  “Oh, hello, hello. Come on in and sit down,” she says and offers her sofa, its plastic slipcovers dotted with cigarette burns.

  “So which one of Pete’s friends are you?” she says.

  “Julianne, it’s me. Freddy. I lived across the street a few years ago.”

  “You did?” she asks. It’s no wonder her memories of this period of her life are vague; the bitch got high so many times you can’t find Acapulco gold anymore because she smoked most of it herself. Then her creased face unravels into something soft, feminine, and it hits her, who I am, the moments we shared lost for these many years. Those times come flooding back, and she’s not happy that the dam couldn’t hold back that much water.

  “Freddy. Yeah, you lived with Cristina. Why are you here?” she asks.

  “I’m back. I was away and now I’m back.”

  “Oh. How long’s it been?” she asks.

  “A few years. Not long, really. I’ve got catching up to do, though. How’re your kids?”

  “Got kids of their own,” she says. “A lot’s changed. Most of the old neighbors sold their homes and cashed out. Made a lot of money.”

  “Cristina hit it rich!” I say, slapping my thigh. “She’s gonna be in so much trouble when I see her. Where’d she move to?”

  Julianne sits down on the opposite end of the sofa, arms and legs crossed. “Cristina’s dead,” she says.

  I’m used to death sneaking up on me, disappearing homeboys in puffs of smoke or for life sentences behind bars. I never knew how it felt to lose a woman, forever, until today. Women were doors left a little bit ajar at the ends of darkened hallways—always open, but you had to find your way to them first. Dead women were grandmothers in their seventies and eighties, not women I’d made love to, held close, slept beside.

  “I saw them taking her body down those stairs,” Julianne says and lights a cigarette. She offers me one, and I take it. “Worked every day of her life. Crazy.”

  “But she was so . . . young.”

  “Cristina gained a lot of weight, stopped leaving the house. Then one day they’re taking her down the stairs on a covered gurney. A For Sale sign goes up on the front lawn ’cause her daughter, Angie, didn’t want to live there anymore. Then some dykes buy the place. It’s been that way up and down this street.”

  “You know where Angie is?” I ask.

  “Such a nice girl,” Julianne says.

  “I was her dad for a while.”

  “Were you as good a dad as you were a husband?” Julianne cackles, puffing out a cloud of smoke in front of her like a veil. “You ever tell Cristina that you cheated on her with me? Or the five other women on this block?”

  “That was years ago,” I say. “You were cheating, too.”

  “I was being cheated on. I had to cheat back. How else do you get anything around here? And I came clean. Did you ever come clean with—”

  “No, god no. I’m glad I didn’t. That kind of thing would’ve killed her.”

  “Someone beat you to it.”

  Why do men cheat? Hell, why do women own more than one pair of shoes? It doesn’t matter that I cheated on Cristina with another cheater. It doesn’t matter that I came home to her most nights, paid the bills when I had money I didn’t piss away, and when I told her I loved her more than anyone it was usually true. It doesn’t even matter that it wasn’t Julianne I cheated on, it was Cristina I was cheating on . . . with her. Well, that may have mattered a little bit. Point is, there’s no expiration date on cheating. Women treat cheating men the way society treats child molesters. Never forgiven, never forgotten, and no amount of rehabilitation is enough for you to earn back your status as a human being.

  But that doesn’t mean you can’t get lucky.

  “Where are you gonna go?” she asks.

  “I got lots of friends here,” I say. “Bound to be something I can cook up.”

  Julianne moves next to me on the sofa. “You can’t stay,” she says. “Pete will be back at three.”

  “What happened to the guy you was married to? What was his name?”

  “I told you a lot of things changed,” she says and leans in, sticking her tongue in my mouth. She rubs her hands on my thighs, and I wait for the bulge in my pants to rise, that bulge that’s been waiting twelve years to be inside a woman. She’s not any of the women I’d dreamed of and fantasized about and jerked off to, but she’s a warm body, jagged around the edges but soft in the middle. Fresh-out-of-jail pussy’s much better than fresh-out-of-jail sunshine, but I still have to concentrate to get hard, grunting and wincing in pain as Julianne’s mouth slides up and down on a semiflaccid piece of flesh. There’s a hissing, farty sound when I enter her pussy, a hiccup of cum, a few dribbles, like what spits out of the bottom of a shampoo bottle, then I’m crumpled over in a quiet U shape for a minute or two.

  I sit back up, buckle my pants. “I’ve gotta go,” I say. “Can you lend me fifty bucks?”

  Julianne slides back on her sweatshirt. “Don’t got any money until the first.”

  “I need to piss,” I say. She motions to her bedroom. Next to her bed is a purse. I steal nine dollars and a pack of Kools; in the bathroom, I take two bars of Ivory soap, then hop out an open window, back to Sunset Boulevard.

  * * *

  Not counting Cristina and Angie, I learn throughout the day there’s eight families I know who sold their houses and moved away, five guys who “disappeared,” two guys in jail, and a handful of nobodies who’d never heard of me. “Shit, granddad,” one asshole said, “you ain’t even got a cell phone!” Where did all these people on telephones come from anyway? Big phones, small phones, video phones, phones that stick out of their ears like mechanical worms trying to burrow out of their heads because they can’t stand all the noise inside those skulls. And the things these cabrónes talk about! Putos screaming into their phones like they’re fucking them, walking down the street like square-dancing zombies—punch some buttons and stagger to the left! Punch more buttons and shuffle to the right!—trying to conduct business shit from a phone on the street. Send this memo, write that letter, and of course, call somebody to tell them what you told somebody else thirty seconds ago. Listen, if you ain’t a hustler, the street ain’t your motherfuckin’ office.

  The liquor store where I used to pick up scores and run lottery ticket hustles is now owned by a pair of “you buy, you fly” Arab pricks who chased me away when I’d hung around the lotto results posters (always a prime location for meeting other hustlers) too long. And shit got expensive while I was in the joint! How can shit cost so much when a black man’s running the country? Farther up Sunset, the hardware parking lot has men looking for honest, pathetic, backbreaking work, and since that sure as hell ain’t me, I walk over to a sunny coffee shop, where I order a “latte” and a bran muffin and get caught not paying for them by a skinny, tattooed white bitch with pink hair and a cluster of spike piercings around her neck.

  Down to my last three dollars, I walk into the Little Joy Jr. bar, determ
ined to hustle up enough money for a motel room downtown on Skid Row and a chance to find Angie tomorrow. There’s a weird ammonia smell in the bar I can’t place and graffiti in English—who writes fucking graffiti in English in Echo Park?—covers the walls of what was once a low-key jota bar. The bathroom used to be as reliable as an ATM—always money there if you didn’t mind sucking dick (“straight” Mexican guys do it, and get it done to them, all the time). A stereo blasts something loud that isn’t oldies or Motown. I order the cheapest beer they have, a PBR, and search for my mark. Over by the pool table with a young white girl who’d be gorgeous if not for her tattoos and shaved head is a white guy in his thirties with thick Buddy Holly–style glasses, a short-sleeve shirt that changes color depending on what angle I look at it from, baggy black pants with a chain dangling from his right pocket, and spotless black “work” shoes.

  “You up for a game?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. I offer to shake hands, which for me isn’t a pleasantry but a calculated business move. I have an almost supernatural ability to gauge a person’s character by his handshake. I’ve figured this guy out in seconds. If this man were currency, he’d be the loose change you find in your couch. I’m gonna make it rain money in here.

  “Ten bucks a rack?” I ask, starting out small. My game here is to appear that I have no game, and after an hour, I’m up eighty bucks. The guy plays along, aware he’s being hustled by the third game, but too drunk or too proud to pull himself out of it. By midnight, he’s made three trips to the ATM and I’m up to two fifty. That’s when I offer him double or nothing that I can’t make cigarette ashes go right through the palm of his hand. He’s drunk now, loud and defiant, but agrees to the bet.

  I light one of Julianne’s Kools and search for an ashtray. What I do is lick both my thumb and index finger and rub them together. Then I swab both fingers in the ashtray and place my thumb on top of his hand and my index finger in his palm. Boom, ashes through your hands. That’s five hundred dollars, pendejo.