The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  But God’s hands couldn’t stop the bulldozers. Families were first told their homes were being torn down to build them brand-new public housing—townhomes with running water, washing machines, lush green lawns and playgrounds, shopping centers, and a “super” market where you could buy Swanson TV dinners and bring them home to cook them in state-of-the-art “Dyna-Warm” ovens, one in every new apartment. Then men in large machines came flying crisp white banners, conquistadors in hard hats bearing royal standards emblazoned with baseballs soaring over a large red treasure map X. The speed with which dozens of houses and trees with deep, ancient roots were pulped into smooth asphalt was extraordinary, something you’d see a child do in a sandbox, wiping a self-contained world clean with the brisk sweep of his hands (not God’s this time).

  It took more than God’s hands to move Aurora Salazar. Four pairs of hands, to be exact, carried Aurora by her wrists and ankles out of her house in front of news reporters and photographers, down a flight of stairs, and onto a swatch of cracked desert floor. Four Mexican officers from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department with badges and guns to restrain an unarmed, barefoot woman, clad in a sleeveless white blouse and pants with large appliqué butterflies fluttering up and down her legs, from ever entering her own home again. Four men to contain one woman’s fury.

  Here my mother, Felicia, smiles (she is telling me this story, again—thank God she’s not showing me the newspaper clippings) and looks somewhere across a field of flaking lime green sunflowers painted on her kitchen walls, whistling low as if to say, “Ay, that was a woman.” She holds out her hands as she speaks and sculpts the land Aurora walked—and was dragged across—with fierce, swift strokes. Mother believes it was the land, those hills, that made Aurora so passionate, those rich, brown, curvaceous mounds and valleys that she’d tell me, stroking her hips, resembled her own body in her youth.

  I didn’t know those hills; I didn’t know that woman. What I knew were tunneled-out highways that unfurled like streamers tossed off a balcony from atop Dodger Stadium and endless days of riding my bicycle through its saucer-tiered parking lots, flat and featureless, my mother said, like that light-skinned, hair-dyed telenovela güerita

  my father left us for. That was when my mother took back her last name, Esperanza, which means “hope.”

  Put these two names together. You get me.

  My mother owns a house in Echo Park, a neighborhood beneath Dodger Stadium whose boundaries sit on a map of Los Angeles like a busty teenage girl with scoliosis and a hooked nose. Echo Park was once a secluded enclave for Hollywood’s silent-film-era movie stars. (Charlie Chaplin lived in a large Victorian mansion that overlooked Echo Park Lake; Tom Mix built the first movie studio in Los Angeles where a public storage facility and a Jack in the Box now sit.) The whites moved away after one war; Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees from another war took their place. Then an influx of young white Westsiders who knew nothing of war trickled in looking for cheap property. By the time I turned thirty and returned to Los Angeles after a failed engagement to a white college grad named Gerald, and a series of uninspiring rent- and food-paying jobs, they’d realigned Echo Park’s nose and straightened her posture with coffee shops, “funky” boutiques that sold just purses or just cell phone holsters, cafés with outdoor seating and Internet access, and bars that were written up in lifestyle magazines and served imported beer on tap. I was thrilled at first when they ushered those dilapidated tiendas, lavanderías, and taquerías out of the neighborhood. Without my mother to barter for things we needed with her currency of shared history, overzealous laughter, and hot chisme, I was shortchanged and ignored. Now that these gringo hipster stores are everywhere, I’m not sure this is my old neighborhood anymore. I drive in, visit my mother, then drive out. I haven’t explored around here for years for a reason; Echo Park has a hard time letting you go.

  My mother watched with guarded cynicism the real estate boom that brought the whites to our front door. For over thirty years she’s worked as a cleaning lady, many of those years for white B-list movie stars and studio executives in the Hollywood Hills. When I was younger, I’d beg to go on her cleaning trips, but she’d never let me. You’re cleaning their filth while they devour your health, she’d say, and send me back to my schoolbooks.

  When I got older and discovered tabloids and Entertainment Tonight on television, I’d ask her for secrets, little black books with addresses and phone numbers of other movie stars (with the way these stars dated, I thought they enjoyed only each other’s company—one big, happy, rich, and famous family), descriptions of drug caches, sex tapes, something we could profit from. She thought this way of thinking was crass, something that was endemic among people my age. When she arrived to clean in the mornings, she said, anything exciting that had been happening had happened and moved on. And if anything did happen, she’s liable to tell a complete stranger more about it than her own daughter.

  My mother’s house is halfway up a block of prewar residences, most of which have changed owners in the past few years. Perched atop a tilting hill like an old cat that can do nothing but sleep all day in a sunny window ledge, it was built in the 1920s and has survived five major earthquakes. Out front, a large jacaranda tree with cracked bark spreads its heavy blossoms across the jagged, pitched staircase that leads to the security gates that protect the doorway and the front windows, relics from when the neighborhood used to be rough. For years I tried to convince my mother to move away because it was dangerous. Now I try to convince her to move away to cash in on the gentrification march. Either way, she won’t budge.

  I come here each month to help my mother, who lives alone, clean her house. I knock on the security gate because I don’t have my own set of keys. Through the open front door I hear a transistor radio playing loud ranchera music in the kitchen over the sound of church bells up in the hills tolling the start of Sunday service.

  “You’re just in time to help,” my mother says from the kitchen, something she tells me no matter what time I show up. “The gate’s open. Lock it behind you so I can let Blackjack out. The towels are next to the storage room.”

  The storage room used to be my old bedroom, though my mother hasn’t called it my bedroom since the day I left for college. I set my purse—a large, unfashionable taupe sack with worn straps—down in the living room on a ratty couch with reversible pleather/corduroy cushions that one of her bosses handed down to her years ago and start to clean.

  The sticky-sweet smell of fresh varnish and lemon ammonia is overpowering. I unlatch a series of French-door-style windows that open onto the front porch to breathe in the smoggy air outdoors. It’s early, and the sky’s coated with a wispy molasses glaze. Strong puffs of wind swirl dust devils around my feet. Cleaning the mantel above the fake fireplace, I find a row of family pictures of me, my mother, and bits and pieces of my father, Hector. She cut and excised most of him away in these photos, leaving behind a stray hand on my cradle or a phantom arm caught midwave. In Hector’s place are portraits and magazine clippings of Morrissey, an English rock star from the eighties.

  That jagged space where my father used to be never looked right. When I was in high school, I overlaid Morrissey’s image from glossy magazines into shots where my mother was holding on to a headless neck or kissing a crisp rip in front of a tree that had been sliced in half. I pasted in Morrissey’s picture because he was the kind of man who would never leave my mother, or abandon a child. His songs contain stories of endless devotion and his incapability of being loved by anyone. Why not give him, then, to someone who no longer had anyone to give her love to? Judging from these photos, Morrissey was a better father than my own was.

  If second-generation Mexicans could canonize a living saint in Los Angeles, it’d be Morrissey. Like most of the Mexican girls and gay boys I knew, I went through a vicious, life-consuming Morrissey phase in high school, one that for a period of time made me hate the queen of England and Margaret Thatcher more than I hated the Los An
geles Police Department. White girls who could tell what kind of music I listened to by the way I dressed would come up to me and say, “You like Morrissey, too? Why? He’s not Mexican.” I’d say, Then why do you love Prince? Or hip-hop? I never understood why when a white person likes a musician who’s not white, they’re cool, but if a person who isn’t white likes a musician who is, they’re a freak or, worse, a sellout.

  I couldn’t explain to you why Morrissey meant so much to me, or still means so much to me that one of my life’s ambitions remains seeing him in person. Not at a concert but in an actual Los Angeles place—eating dinner at Astro’s Coffee Shop or shopping for organic tofu at Trader Joe’s. While it sounds far-fetched, he does live in L.A., somewhere in Beverly Hills I’ve read, driving himself around in a silver mist Porsche that has on occasion been spotted on my side of town. It’s a fanciful yet unrealistic possibility; I’ve calculated the odds and thought about ways to improve my chances of an “accidental” encounter, but I place no faith in an actual meeting. Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular, and I will be the first to point out the irony of a woman whose last name means “hope” placing no stock in faith. Hope is my mother’s name, and faith my mother’s cause, not mine.

  Not that she’s given up on converting me. Her idea of faith has nothing to do with God, at least not anymore. She was a religious young woman who could quote Bible passages, but with the passing of her years and the aging of her muscles, she’s come to equate faith with hard work and hard work with having a successful, happy life. Forget faith is a word, she’d say. Pretend it’s a color. What color is your faith, m’hija? Faith has colors, she says; otherwise those stained-glass windows in cathedrals would be as see-through as a horny man’s promises. Was my faith a red-hot incandescence, fizzy as neon light that burned as bright but half as long? Or was it an ice cool ocean sunset blue, determined, immovable, but indifferent to compassion or suffering? I told her I couldn’t see what she was talking about, so I guess my faith has no color. It’s see-through, like glass.

  What else can I tell you about Morrissey? He was born in Davyhulme, England, but raised in Hulme, Manchester, is a strict vegan who fires any of his roadies if they eat meat, and sings his “love never lost ’cause it was never found” lyrics as if his words were speeding along a treacherous mountain pass, curving and undulating his syllables into trills and yodels until they sound almost Spanish. When the albums I listened to came from England, and Manchester meant more to me than East Los Angeles, the images his words conjured up in my head were, and are, Californian. His dreary, wet Manchester sky above pelted my red-tiled and tar paper L.A. rooftops below, falling on a girl with a jet-black, slicked-back bob haircut, black eyeliner, pushup bra, denim jean shorts, fishnet tights, and ass-kicking Doc Martens. You can’t help who, or what, you love.

  There’s a small, wet chill on my knee. Blackjack nuzzles this spot again with his nose, and I reach down to rub him behind his ears, careful not to leave my hand too close to his mouth. He looks appreciative and happy, but he is also my mother’s dog, which means that he can be feisty and cruel, snapping at you when you are at your most comfortable and relaxed. This may be due to his breed, a border collie mix, born with the impulse to chase, bite, and corral sheep. A better explanation is my mother walking him on an irregular timetable that can span several weeks, leaving a four-year-old dog with an enormous amount of pent-up energy that has nowhere to go. Whenever she walks him, he rockets out the front door, strains at his leash, pulls my mother down the sidewalk, lunges at other dogs, bounds into the street at passing cars, and nips at kids who try to pet him because they find his distinctive Oreo-and-cream markings irresistible. This leads to fewer walks, which leads to more bad behavior. I offer to walk Blackjack whenever I stop by, but my mother says the dog and I don’t understand each other, which some days feels truer than others.

  I rub his neck and walk him back into the kitchen, where my mother is cleaning the floor. Her hunched back bobs and weaves like a boxer, her arms gliding a square-head mop in taut N-shaped strokes across the floor before dipping the worn head in a yellow pail of soapy black water. She motions with a quick wave for me to lead the dog to the opposite side of the kitchen, where a knee-high white plastic doggy fence is installed in the doorway to the laundry room. Blackjack walks across the wet floor and, catching the scent on his paws, stops moving. I nudge him by his collar and then give him a few taps on his backside. He won’t budge.

  “Lead him,” she says. “Don’t let him lead you.”

  “You can’t see what I’m doing,” I say, realizing that’s a feeble comeback. My mother is the world’s leading expert on knowing what I’m doing at any moment without being able to see me. “The dog does what he wants.”

  “He’s never going to follow you if he doesn’t believe you know where you’re going,” she says, dipping the mop head in the bucket.

  “I don’t need him to follow me,” I say, pulling at his collar. Blackjack whimpers while I try to slide him across a floor my mother will have to wax again. “He’s your dog. He should do what you want him to do.”

  “You’re my daughter,” she says. “Do you do what I want you to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You never told me what that was.”

  My mother stands the mop handle next to the refrigerator and walks over to the doggy gate. She motions with a firm gesture that says “come,” and a jab of her right hand. Blackjack trots over in an obedient path, his paws not leaving a single track on the waxed floor, and hops the fence onto his bed in one fluid movement. Mother picks up the mop and cleans over the streaked areas I’d dragged him across.

  “I’m finished in the living room,” I say.

  “Kitchen’s done,” she says, cocking the mop handle in a corner. “Rest of the house, too.”

  “You cleaned the house by yourself?” I ask.

  “Yeah, wouldn’t be the first time. And I couldn’t sleep again. I had the nightmares.”

  “You could talk to someone about them.”

  “Why? I talk about it to the dog, and he says, get up and feed me, or get up and walk me. I feed him, walk him, and I’m fine.”

  “Not sleeping’s unhealthy. You’d have to have been up since five to clean everything.”

  “Four-thirty,” she says. My mother doesn’t enjoy when I get things right, even if it’s by accident. If five is the exact time she woke up (and I think it is), she’d still have said “four-thirty.”

  “I don’t mind rising early. I get the moon all to myself,” she says. Picking up the water bucket, she empties it out in the kitchen sink, the sludgy water trickling down a rusty drain.

  “So everything’s done,” I say, trying not to conceal my excitement.

  “Yeah, everything’s finished,” she says, and my day opens before me like a blossoming African flower or a clear stretch of Highway 1: beautiful, precious, uncomplicated, a million miles away from here. And in this early morning moment of utter simplicity, with no blame or regret exchanged between us, through a window over my mother’s shoulder I see a pure, aurulent glow, a light that fills me with such a sense of peace, love, and acceptance that I could forswear sex, alcohol, and music if I had the slightest faith this feeling would return. But how could it? This was a moment that bends like palm trees in a strong Santa Ana, an elastic piece of time that, without warning, breaks and snaps back out the window, leaving me again in my mother’s old kitchen, her words piercing the soft yellow glow.

  “Blackjack needs a walk,” she says.

  “Mom, the dog doesn’t like me.”

  “Mi luz,” my mother says, granting me this term of endearment half the time when she wants something, then taking it back the other half, when I disappoint her, “I’ve been up since before dawn. My feet are blistered. It’s so hard for me to get down the stairs. One quick walk around the block and y
ou’re done.”

  “The blocks are long here,” I say. “That could take half an hour.”

  “You don’t have half an hour for your mother?”

  “For you, yes. That dog, no way. He doesn’t stay when I tell him to stay. If he slipped out of his leash, he could run into traffic and be killed. Or get me killed. It’s embarrassing,” I drawl, my subdued Mexican accent lapping on my tongue, those last two syllables, ass and ing, hanging in the air like lazy curlicues of marijuana smoke.

  Mother catches it. “You talking like you live here,” she says, tugging on her own words like stale toffee. Once, this would have been an admonishment for turning my back on mi barrio, mi casita. But this ’hood, where my mother’s derived her credibility for toughness and hard living, has become too expensive for me to buy a home in. You can walk by apartment buildings in Echo Park now and actually hear through the open windows the sound of forks and spoons scraping leftovers from china plates and bowls into plastic-bag-lined trash cans. The dogs never had it so good around here.

  “Too rich for me, Mom. Your old clients bought their summer homes here so they don’t have to fly to Acapulco.”

  She laughs, unaccustomed to me teasing her, and takes out a can of premium dog food, the kind she used to take two buses to buy but is now sold in a pet boutique around the corner. Popping the tab, she shakes the wet slabs of dog food into a monogrammed silver supper dish behind Blackjack’s doggy gate. He gives it a round of suspicious sniffs.

  “You always have a room here,” my mother says. This is a comment that I call a “let,” as in “let it lie there, let it go.” I don’t really have a room here, but why raise a fuss? I’ve had a great morning with my mother. Chores have been handled, and I’ve experienced some sort of vision that’s left a blissful, unexplained feeling coursing through my body, the result no doubt of looking outside and seeing that one of those glorious, breathtaking Los Angeles days is waiting for me!—as soon as I walk the dog. I watch Blackjack ignore his pricey dog food, feel that flush of anger at how much attention my mother lavishes on him, and hear the words tripping out of my mouth so fast, there’s no time to catch them before they fall.