The Madonnas of Echo Park

by Brando Skyhorse

  Lorenzo’s Furniture Store staggers between two renovated storefronts, a hobo being helped to his feet by two well-dressed businessmen. Its fifteen-foot, street-to-roof windows are coated in that same healthy layer of dust I remember, displaying what could be the same exact eighties-style recliners and dinette sets that were for sale when I was in grade school. Inside, the light is from a late winter afternoon, settling its shadows on plastic sofa cushions and a maze of dressers, shelves, and entertainment centers. When I was in elementary school and my mother worked late nights cleaning offices in Universal City, I came here and played house.

  Lorenzo set up my own model “room” near the back of the store, including a four-poster bed whose upper canopy panel he covered with rolls of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. “It’s just like the stars outside,” he said, “but you can’t see them cause the lights here are too bright. Maybe one day you’ll go somewhere where you can see them for real. Remember this star,” he said, pointing to Sirius, the Dog Star. “It’s the brightest in the sky. So even when you’re in the dark you can find your way home. Just follow the dog,” he said, and we howled like mutts until one of his workers caught us and he shouted at them to get back to work.

  Mother put the bed on layaway, but there was a dispute over the price, and Lorenzo was excommunicated from her circle of friends. Both items were sold (a worn-out mattress and a used dresser covered with stickers—on discount—are an excellent deal to a family stretching its money), and I went back to waiting for my mother at home eating Hot Pockets on my flimsy twin bed. When it came time to buy my own furniture, instead of offering Lorenzo an olive branch, I bought cheap particleboard bookcases that required an unwieldy Allen wrench and an instruction sheet in Swedish for assembly.

  There’s raucous laughter coming from a side doorway. Four men are sitting around a mirrored dining table playing poker. Lorenzo’s black, curly hair is now a greasy dishwater white, his broad shoulders pinched together like a clothespin. He peers over a set of thick bifocals when he sees me.

  “We’re closed, miss. Come back in an hour.”

  “Vince asked me to drop off some car keys.”

  “Oh, you see Vince?” Lorenzo asks. The other guys perk up, speaking Spanish in quick, poking thrusts as their eyes drift from their tightly clutched spreads of cards to my breasts and hips. Vince’s name on the lips of a woman is some sort of seal of approval for these men, and I can’t decide what appalls me more, the fact these men are leering at my body in front of a man who was a kind of paternal figure, or Vince’s name being synonymous with attractive women who may or may not include my mother. I fold my arms across my breasts, ready to drop Lorenzo’s keys in the middle of their pot of cigarettes and dollar bills and leave.

  “I don’t see him,” I say. At school, I used to introduce Vince as my father, then my stepfather, then my mother’s boyfriend, each downgrading based on my evolving feelings. “We’re friends,” I say.

  Lorenzo stands up from the table. “How do you know him?”

  “He hangs out with my mother sometimes,” I say, surprised how vapid and adolescent that sounds, and hand Lorenzo the keys. The tips of my lacquered black nails graze his palm’s love line, and I see that flicker of recognition, followed by a fervent expression of disbelief on his face reserved for courtrooms or church. He knows me, and while there is a part of me that wants him to cut across these many years with a simple gesture, a sweet, graceful movement, perhaps brushing a stray hair from my face, or clenching my hand, he lacks the faith to act on these feelings and will instead ask another question to confirm his suspicions, keep his distance, and refrain from slipping back into a late afternoon years ago when he was a man who believed that finding joy and beauty in life were as simple as watching a child jumping on a bed.

  “He must trust you. He never lets anyone handle his keys,” Lorenzo says. He sets his cards faceup on the table. “Se acabó el juego!” he shouts. “Dejad de mirar y empezad a trabajar.” The three men strap hernia belts around their waists, hitch the connected suspenders up over their shoulders, and move the table and chairs back out on the showroom floor.

  “Vince needs someone he can count on,” and this comes out as a dig at my mother, though it’s not meant to.

  “I’m glad you said that. That means I can give you the chair.”

  “The chair?” I ask.

  Lorenzo leads me back through the maze of bookshelves and dressers to a waist-high oak chair with intricate grapevine spirals etched into its legs and arms, a green cashmere seat cushion with a sunrise stitched into it, and an inlaid brass back spread with a pair of golden lions encircling a silver E. It is the sort of chair you’d expect to find in the smoking room of a movie palace, and there is something beautiful, almost haunting, about this kind of attention to detail.

  “Vince did some work on a classic car for Father Alemencio. He caught up with Father checking in with this crazy old woman who lives up in the Heights,” Lorenzo says, “and while Vince was there she asked him to drop off this chair to be refurbished. Vince can never say no to a lady.”

  “He’s capable,” I say.

  “I’ve fixed up the chair,” Lorenzo continues, “and Father paid for the bill, but she’s never come to collect. Vince said he’d drop it off, but he never got around to it. He told me when he dropped off these keys, he’d take the chair. You dropped them off; now you can take it.”

  “No, I can’t. Not today.”

  “Why not?” Lorenzo asks. “You said you were Vince’s friend, right? You said he could count on you, right?”

  “I don’t have time for this. I’ve lost my mother’s dog and I have to find it. And my car’s parked, like, four blocks away from here.” I can’t believe how spoiled that sounds.

  “It’s not far if you know your way around here,” Lorenzo says. “Go past the lake, up a couple blocks, then straight ahead until you hit Kensington, where the old Victorian houses are.”

  “No, no, no,” I stammer. “I have to be out of here by noon. I have things to do. I have my day planned out,” I lie.

  “You could call Vince,” Lorenzo says, and the thought of interrupting him and my mother having sex makes me shudder.

  “No, I can’t do that, either,” I say.

  “Or you can take it yourself,” he says. “If it doesn’t get done today, I have to charge him for keeping this here.”

  “Why did Vince offer to deliver this chair?” I ask. “Why don’t you deliver it?”

  “Because the Coat Queen’s crazy.”

  “The Coat Queen?” I ask. The mere idea of learning there’s someone who lives around here called the Coat Queen, and knowing that I’m being sent on an errand to meet her while looking for my mother’s dog, explodes that pristine image I had earlier of an unspoiled, unhurried day. How did such a simple day get so complicated so fast?

  “You should know this in advance,” Lorenzo says, tearing a sheet of protective plastic from a large roll to wrap the chair in. “Lady’s always got these old coats on, and always wears more than one. Hot, cold, don’t matter. She has thousands of ’em.”

  “And an old woman who’s always cold scares you,” I say, then mutter, “Hope your wife never turns fifty.”

  Lorenzo ties down the plastic with twine. He stands back, checks that the fit is snug. “I don’t like confrontations,” he says.

  Was this the reason he and my mother never reconciled? Was this his way of making me do penance for my mother’s grudge? I am afraid to ask, but more afraid to refuse.

  “Give me the address,” I sigh.

  Lorenzo disappears in the back and returns with a crude line map. Then he offers his hand and we shake. He’s waiting for me to offer my name, which I don’t. He knows who I am. Why say anything? Isn’t it better this way? That wonderful feeling of seeing someone after a long time has for me always been replaced by a sinking, uncomfortable dread, a silence that says there isn’t one way to reestablish that connection we once shared and will never shar
e again.

  “I wish I had cash on hand to pay you for helping out,” he says. “Why don’t you take these?”

  He pulls a crusty roll of star stickers from his pocket. “They don’t stick too well. You could tape ’em up, though.” The stickers are moist in his hand. One peels off the roll and sticks to my palm.

  “Okay, well, thanks,” I say, more dismissive than I need to be. I mean, really—stickers? Didn’t time move at all in this neighborhood? The chair is an awkward weight, so before long I set it down to re-adjust my grip. The sticker is still affixed to my hand.

  It was Sirius, the Dog Star. In a rush I’m misty-eyed. How many nights did I fall asleep in that cheap four-poster bed staring up at and trying to reach my brilliant glow-in-the-dark sky, dreaming of a life that was elsewhere, then woke up in my old, darkened bedroom? How many times had I left Echo Park only to end up back here? What was I searching for? My hope? My faith? The light to find my way home?

  A blast of air from a passing bus, carrying one man sitting in the back, lifts the star off my hand. Follow me, the star seems to say, as it corkscrew whips in the air, fluttering like a phosphorescent butterfly down the street until it plops into the waters of Echo Park Lake.

  If Chavez Ravine is where God’s hands touched the ground, Echo Park Lake is where God stood while doing so. It’s an enormous half-mile-long footprint in the center of Echo Park, sandwiched between Sunset Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway, those twin arteries of Los Angeles’s bloodstream. The lake itself has evaded progress for over one hundred years as the land around it metamorphosed from rolling dirt trails into interlocking sections of houses, apartment buildings, and condos. It’s survived an oil spill in which it was set ablaze, been dragged hundreds of times for missing children or heartbroken lovers, fished in for city-water catfish, dredged to its floor and converted for a short time into an unofficial neighborhood garbage pit, been home to numerous movie and video shoots (my favorites are Jack Nicholson floating on a boat as he spies on a couple having a secret tryst in Chinatown, and the Bangles dancing around the lake in a video for “Manic Monday”), been skimmed across by a multitude of paddleboat rentals, played host to frequent ghost sighting, including the Lady of the Lake, a woman in a blue dress who has appeared hundreds of times walking across the water and whom my mother tried to convince me for years was my great-grandmother, and is home this weekend to the Lotus Festival, which happens every July.

  Its name comes from the hundreds of cucumber green lotus pads that sprout large, starry pink and white fronds this time of year. A cornucopia of food stands selling barbecued meats prepared in methods and styles from around the world are set up around the lake, along with arts and crafts booths, palm-reading tables, inflatable bounce houses, collapsible carnival rides, a miniature Ferris wheel. Later there will be dragon boat races across the lake’s murky toilet green water and a large fireworks display at the end of the night, launched from a platform attached to three large permanent fountains that shoot continuous jets of water fifty feet into the air throughout the year.

  And here I am, amid the sounds of locking metal pins, grilling meat, and hammering nails, sitting next to a palm tree carved up with English graffiti on an ornate movie palace throne. Crescents of fountain mist drizzle over me while I watch families of ducks waddle into the lake, their feet creating delicate ripples of water that swirl together into dizzying, hypnotic patterns. This is the first chance I’ve had to sit down this morning and think, think about whether there’s any way out of delivering this chair, or finding my mother’s dog. There’s a sense of deflated tranquillity and acceptance, the calm that comes right before tackling an impossible problem you know has one painful solution.

  Across the lake, what appears to be a trail of floating white dots, the bouncy kind you see on kids’ shows that follow in time the words of a song, drift along the water’s edge. The glare’s too strong through the fountain mist to see what the dots are, but there’s a musicality to their movement, a slapping of the pavement in time to their own percussive beat. They’re runners, a graceful, fluid caravan of young boys, jogging around the lake, stretching their legs back and forth in place, bodies standing still on a long conveyor belt, yet moving closer. They’re shouting a call-and-response chant between themselves and an older voice that’s leading the way, set to the tune of a popular rap song, whose tune itself was borrowed from another song:

  Tally ho! Tally ho!

  Shit!

  Tally, tally ho!

  Bullshit!

  Approaching the boathouse, the boys slow down in unison, like a train edging to a stop at a platform. Their crisp white-collared, short-sleeve shirts have a red-stitched insignia that says ST. GOTTESCHALK’S. The leader, a rangy man with a military crew cut and gray stubble poking through his four o’clock shadow, yanks off a pair of aviator sunglasses and makes a whirring motion with his hand.

  “Take five, boys,” he says and lights up a cigarette.

  The boys yell and shout while they bend, flex, and stretch in tight clusters. They ignore me; a woman sitting next to the lake in a gilded throne chair doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to them.

  The older man walks over and stares at me in the chair.

  “Hope?” he asks.

  Mr. Charles MacArthur, or Crazy Mac, the track coach at Downtown High, where I was on the varsity squad, is now the coach at St. Gotteschalk’s, an old Catholic school built over a razed convent and located next to the expanded freeway off-ramp and a strip of renovated luxury condominiums. Crazy Mac had an incandescent reputation in school. His jogging songs were littered with obscenities, he drank and smoked on campus, drove an expensive sports car no teacher could afford on their salary, and because of his long, unexplained absences, was rumored to be a government spook.

  “Like a queen on her throne. Glad to see nothing’s changed, Hope,” he says, calling me by my nickname. “Bet you still remember how orgasmic a smoke is after running. Want one?”

  “I don’t smoke anymore.”

  “Ah, so you don’t run anymore,” he says.

  I flinch because he’s right. It was the one thing that brought me joy in high school.

  “How’s life at St. G’s?” I ask.

  “Less bullshit than the public schools, at least until they get shut down and turned into condos. I’ve brushed up on my Bible. ‘In our hearts, we seek compassion. In our souls, we look for grace,’” MacArthur says.

  “That’s pretty,” I say.

  “It’s a load of shit,” he says. “But God keeps the alimony payments on time.”

  “Another divorce?”

  “When it comes to relationships, women are chess players,” he says. “They see several moves ahead. Men are playing checkers—jump, jump, jump, king me.” He motions to the chair. “So this is what happens when you quit running. You become so lazy you need to carry your own chair around.”

  “It’s not mine.” I laugh. “It’s for someone called the ‘Coat Queen.’”

  “Have fun,” MacArthur says. “She soaks us with a garden hose whenever we jog by her house. Two minutes, guys!” he screams over his shoulder, and the boys dissolve back into a pair of straight, ordered lines.

  “We gotta move, Esperanza. In training for the fall invitational. You’re welcome to join us. You could show these plebes what a runner looks like.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’m looking for my mother’s dog. Have you seen him? Small, fast border collie? Jesus, he’s not even my dog.”

  “Can’t help you. And knock off the blasphemy,” MacArthur says, “or you’ll have to answer to the Lord.”

  “You’re crazy, Mac.” (This is what anyone would say to MacArthur after talking to him, hence his nickname.)

  “Not about this. The Lord’s for real,” he says, and I can’t tell if we’re talking about the Lord from Echo Park or the Good Lord Above. “But it’s a good thing you’re looking for a dog,” Mac says and stubs out his cigarette. “Dog’s a symbol for envy, one of
the seven deadly sins. Okay, boys, mount up!”

  The boys walk up a sloping path, waiting for Mac to take the lead. They break into a synchronized jog, floating dots once again, singing a brand-new song:

  In heaven, they don’t serve beer up there!

  That’s why we’re fuckin’ drinkin’ here!

  When I’m sure Crazy Mac’s out of sight, I do a short jog carrying the chair. Twenty steps later, I’m winded. I follow the ducks’ example and waddle up the hill to Kensington Road.

  On a street that borders Angelino Heights lies the Coat Queen’s magnificent three-story emerald green and candy-cane red Victorian mansion, one in a row of over two dozen magnificent Victorian mansions lined up next to one another like a storybook lane. Her house sits on a corner that intersects with a street that dead-ends in an open field enclosed with a chain-link fence where trabajadores are working and dotted with surveyors’ flags and colorful banners announcing the construction of a new housing development.

  The sky above her home, punctured by an intricate weather vane, is as blue as the waters off a Caribbean island. A wrought-iron fence guards a razor-sharp front lawn and a wall of immaculately trimmed twenty-foot hedges. Chrysanthemum, bluebell, and lily flower beds, with birds of paradise peeking out from underneath an overgrowth of trumpet vines, grow alongside a cobblestone walkway. On the front porch is an antique bench swing, swinging in the breeze over elaborate marble tile arranged in a Spanish-style mosaic. It is difficult to imagine this house looking any different at the turn of the twentieth century. Could this be the home of an antisocial lunatic?

  I knock on the door and set the chair on the porch next to a row of potted strawberry plants. Their scent makes me think of Gerald. He was sweet to me in ways that I appreciated—like taking me on picnics and bringing me baskets of fresh strawberries because he knew they were my favorite—but that also left me feeling vulnerable, dependent, and conceited, like making me mix tapes with “love” songs from bands that made him want to drink all day (the Replacements, the Clash, and Bob Marley & the Wailers). When he proposed to me, with a mix tape of course (U2’s “All I Want Is You”), he said he wanted children. Lots of children. And for a moment I saw them—a beautiful but ragtag band of mixed children, struggling to find an identity between Mexican and American. I was trying to find a way to do it, and not feeling very successful. If their mother couldn’t find a way to do it, what hope was there for them?