Reaching Out

by Francisco Jiménez

  "I am not either," my mother said apologetically. "I'll stay with Rorra and your father while you and the boys unload your stuff."

  I didn't argue with them; I knew how they felt. While my family waited in the car, I went looking for Kenna Hall to check in. I followed other students and their families who seemed to be headed in the right direction, though a few of them seemed as lost and confused as I was. I spotted a short line of people waiting outside the entrance to an old, gray three-story dormitory, which turned out to be Kenna Hall. The line moved quickly. When it was my turn to check in, the attendant, who was sitting behind a small table, smiled and asked politely: "What's your name?"

  "Frank Jiménez." Ar home I preferred being called Panchito. But my first grade teacher, Miss Scalapino, had called me Frank because she said it was easier to pronounce. The name Frank stayed with me throughout elementary school. In junior high and high school I was called Frankie, which I favored over Frank because it was closer to the English translation of the name Panchito.

  "You're not on our list," he said, running his index finger on a long list of names beginning with the letter H.

  "It's under the J's," I said, spelling it out for him. He gave me a puzzled look as he checked off my name with his red pencil.

  "It's a five-dollar deposit for the key; sign here, next to your name," he said.

  I handed him a five-dollar bill and signed. He inspected my signature, shook his head, and handed mc the key in a small white envelope. I rushed back to the car, keeping my head down and not looking at anyone.

  Trampita and I unloaded the boxes out of the trunk and placed them on the sidewalk in front of the DeSoto. I glanced over and noticed the bulge underneath his striped blue shirt. When he was an infant, Trampita had gotten a hernia. We were living in a migrant labor camp in Santa Rosa that winter. Our parents worked at night in an apple cannery and left Roberto to take care of Trampita and me while they were gone. One cold night, after Roberto and I had fallen asleep, Trampita rolled oft the mattress that was on the dirt floor and landed outside the tent and cried so much that he had ruptured his navel.

  "Why can't I go with them?" Rorra whined.

  "I want to go with them, too," said Rubén.

  "Ya, pues!" my father said impatiently. Enough. "Do you understand?"

  My sister stomped her feet, turned around, away from my father, and made a bad face. Adjusting his soiled cap, my father said, "Torito, you take Rubén with you and help Panchito and Trampita with the boxes."

  "I'll take care of Rubén," Torito said proudly.

  "Better behave, mijo," my mother said, gently warning Rubén as be jumped out of the car. Trampita, Torito, and I headed to Kenna Hall, each one of us carrying a box. Rubén skipped along to keep up.

  We walked up a narrow stairway to the second floor of Kenna, following other students carrying suitcases, stereos, and boxes. They squeezed past others who were coming down the stairs empty-handed and on their way to get more of their belongings. The dimly lit hallway with dark brown vinyl floors looked like a long tunnel. Loud banging noises echoed in the corridor as students slammed room doors shut. A quarter of the way down the hall we found my room, 218. I buttressed the box on my knee and balanced it with my left hand while I unlocked the door. A ray of light coming from the room's window pierced through and burst into the hallway. Trampita and Torito, who were huffing and puffing, dropped the boxes on one of the two empty beds. I set down my box on the other empty one. The rectangular room had identical worn furniture on both sides: a tall, narrow closet by the entrance, a twin bed with a blue and white striped mattress, and a light brown wooden desk and chair to match and an adjustable desk lamp. "This looks like the one-room cabins we used to live in when we picked cotton in Corcoran," Trampita said, "only it's a little smaller." Noticing my sadness, he quickly added, "But at least it doesn't have holes on the walls!"

  "Okay, let's get going. Our parents are waiting for us." I pushed them lightly out of the room. We headed back to the car.

  "Ya era tiempo," said my father, irritated. It's about time. "What took you so long?"

  "I am sorry," I responded. "It was very crowded." I hugged Trampita, Torito, and Rubén and said goodbye to them. I opened the back car door and kissed Rorra and my mother.

  "Que Dios te bendiga, mijo," my mother said, giving me a blessing. I felt my throat tighten and I tried to hold back my tears. My father put out his cigarette and patted me on the back. He reached into his wallet and took out a card with a faded picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe and handed it to me.

  "Cuídate, mijo," he said. Take care of yourself, son. His lower lip quivered. "Remember ... be respectful. If you respect others, they will respect you."

  "Sí, Papá," I said, kissing lightly his scarred and leathery hands, Trampita slid into the driver's seat, fastened the door with the rope, starred the motor, and slowly backed out of the parking space. The car sputtered as they drove away, leaving a trail of gray smoke behind. I stood alone on the sidewalk and waved goodbye, following the DeSoto with my eyes until it turned right onto El Camino Real and disappeared.

  Moving In

  When I got back to my room, I closed the door and locked it. The image of my family driving away kept flashing in my mind. I sat on the bed, staring at the empty wall and fighting back the urge to cry. I have to be tough, I thought. This is the opportunity I worked so hard for. When my father hurt his back and could no longer work, my family stopped following seasonal crops. To help support our family, Roberto and I got janitorial jobs, each one of us working thirty-five hours a week while going to school. My brother worked for the Santa Maria Unified School District, and I was employed by the Santa Maria Window Cleaners, cleaning commercial offices. All during high school, I worked in the mornings before school, in the evenings, and on weekends, sweeping and dusting offices, cleaning windows and toilets, and washing and waxing floors. And although my father taught me that all work was noble, I did not want to pick crops or labor as a janitor all of my life. I studied every night, after work, seven days a week. My efforts paid off. I made the California Scholarship Federation every semester for four years, which earned me several scholarships and a federal loan for one thousand dollars to pay for my first year of college. With the help of Mr. Penney, my high school counselor, I was admitted at the University of Santa Clara.

  I picked up the three boxes from the beds and placed them on the floor, near the closet. A wave of sadness came over me as I began unpacking the new clothes my mother had bought for me as a surprise gift for college: two pairs of pants, one navy blue, one black; a couple of short-sleeved shirts; three pairs of white underwear. She saved from her grocery money every week to buy them at a back-to-school sale at JC Penney, as well as my pointed black boots. I smiled to myself as I recalled Trampita's telling me that I could kill cockroaches in corners with them. I taped the card from my father of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the wall above my desk and placed my worn-out pocket dictionary and thesaurus on the top shelf and pencils and pen in the desk drawer.

  I finally had a desk I could call my own. All during high school, I had done my homework at the public library and at the gas company after I finished cleaning it in the late evening. As I was sitting at my desk trying to get a feel for it, I heard someone unlocking the door. I jumped up, wiped my eyes, and opened it. Before me stood a tall, athletic, blue-eyed student with a crewcut. Behind him were two women. "Hi, I am Smokey Murphy," he said, looking down at me with a broad, friendly smile and shaking my hand.

  People call me Frank or Frankie," I said. "My last name is Jiménez."

  "I guess we're roommates. Hey, I want you to meet my mother, Lois, and Kathy Griffith, my girlfriend."

  "Glad to meet you," I said, admiring Kathy's pretty round face and pageboy hairstyle. His mother was short and thin and had a raspy voice.

  "I see you have already staked your claim," Smokey said, rolling up his shirt sleeves and checking out the stuff I had brought.

  "I hop
e you don't mind."

  "Don't be silly—of course I don't mind." He plopped himself on his bed, which was on the right side of the room, against the wall. "Hey, these beds are pretty good." He lay down on it and stretched. His big feet hung a couple of inches over the foot of the bed. "I wish they were a bit longer, though."

  "I don't have that problem."

  "Yeah, I guess you don't," he said, turning over and scanning my size. I measured five feet seven inches. We both laughed.

  "Kathy and I will go get your stuff, Smokey, while you rest," his mother said in a friendly but sarcastic tone.

  Smokey leaped out of bed and put his arm around her. "Now, Mom, no need to get riled. We'll bring our stuff up in no time at all."

  "I'll give you a hand," I said, following them out the door.

  After we hauled Smokey's things into the room, his mom and girlfriend said goodbye and drove away. I was surprised to see how calm and happy Smokey appeared to be as we walked back to our room. The first thing he did as he began unpacking was to put a framed picture of Kathy on his desk.

  "Where is she going to college?" I asked.

  "Oh, she's not going to college yet. She's a senior at Woodland High School; that's where we met. She's a year behind me."

  "Where's Woodland?"

  "Near Sacramento; that's where I grew up. Where's your hometown?"

  "Santa Maria."

  "Never heard of it."

  "It's a small agricultural town about two hundred miles south of here."

  "Woodland is a small town too," he said, unpacking a football and a tennis racquet. He swung the tennis racquet as if it were a large flyswatter, tossed it in his closet, and picked up the football. "Do you play sports?"

  "Not really. I'm not good at them," I said. "How about you?"

  "I love playing sports." He lobbed the football back and forth between his hands and tossed it into the air and caught it. "I played football and basketball, ran track, and played tennis in high school. I'm going to try out for the football team here. What do you like to do for fun?"

  "Dancing and listening to music." I was good at dancing. Roberto called me Resortes, "Rubber Legs."

  "Me too," he said, catching me off-guard and throwing the football to me. I tried to catch it but fumbled and dropped it.

  "I told you..." I had no interest in sports. We never followed sports at home and had little or no time to participate in them at school because I had to work.

  I saw that he had a portable typewriter. I could definitely use one of those, I thought. I had left my old, broken typewriter at home. I had bought it for five dollars from Robert Twitchel, an attorney whose office I cleaned when I was a freshman in high school.

  The hall became increasingly noisy and congested as more and more students lugged their belongings to their rooms and became acquainted with each other. I was not used to so much noise. At home we honored silence most of the time because noise irritated my father, who suffered from frequent headaches. I wanted to be alone, but Smokey insisted on meeting our next-door neighbors and making new friends. We met Tony Lizza from Needles, California, and Jim Brodlow from Milwaukee, Pat Hall from San Luis Obispo, Mario Farana from San Francisco, and Tom Maulhardt from Oxnard, California. Smokey's energetic personality attracted students to our room like a magnet. One by one they came, introducing themselves. Within minutes it seemed as if we had met everyone on our floor and a few from the third floor who dropped by to see what all the commotion was about. Pat Hall squeezed through several bodies to get to Smokey's radio. He changed the station to a baseball game and turned up the volume so loud that it grabbed everyone's attention. But only for a few seconds, because immediately they began arguing about what baseball team was the best. Like teletypes, they rattled off statistics on every player and team and had strong opinions on each. How can they know so much about baseball? wondered.

  Once we had settled in, we assembled in the hallway as our prefect, Gary, and Father Edward Warren, a tall and thin Jesuit priest who wore a black cassock and Roman collar, welcomed us. Slightly hunched over, with hands clasped, Father Warren informed us that his room was at the east end of our floor and that his door would be open every day from seven to eleven p.m. in case we needed help personally or spiritually. "I am an English instructor, so some of you may end up in my classes," he said, smiling and glancing at all of us. He excused himself and gave the floor to Gary, who proceeded to explain to us that his role as prefect was to enforce dorm rules. He went over a long list of dorm regulations that applied to all freshmen.

  "It's important that you guys keep it quiet at all times, but particularly during study period, which is from seven until eleven p.m., Monday through Thursday. I don't want to see or hear boisterous behavior, slamming of doors, or loud playing of radios or stereos. You must have the lights off by eleven p.m. On Fridays and Saturdays, you can stay out until one a.m. I will be checking rooms periodically to make sure you follow these rules." The moans increased with each rule the prefect explained. I did not mind the regulations, because my father was much more demanding. He allowed Roberto and me to go out only once a week and we had to be home by midnight. It was advantageous for us to date girls whose parents were also strict because we avoided the embarrassment of having to be home before our dates.

  "If you want to leave campus on weekends, you must sign a form, which I will give to you. And if you leave, you must be back by ten-thirty p.m. on Sunday. There is one telephone on each floor. You may nor use it after eleven p.m. Also, you may not have any type of alcoholic beverages in your rooms, nor women visitors, ever!"

  "These dorm rules are bad for your health," someone yelled from the back of the crowd. There was thunderous applause, followed by laughter.

  "Okay, guys, settle down," Gary continued. "Dinner tonight will be held in the Mission Gardens. The regular dining hall is located in Nobili; it's a dormitory for freshmen girls. Be back by seven p.m." As we were about to disperse, the prefect tired another rule. "No T-shirts, cutoffs, or sandals at any time in the dining hall."

  We went back to our rooms, got dressed appropriately, and headed for the Mission Gardens for a special dinner sponsored by the sophomore class. I was struck by the beauty of the gardens, with the palm and olive trees, a wisteria arbor, and hundreds of rosebushes. For dinner we had chicken with vegetables and salad, which we never had at home because my father thought that salad was food for rabbits. I would have preferred my mother's tastier homemade flour tortillas and came con chile. The food was plentiful, and, as a habit, I ate everything we were served—and was shocked to see so much food left on students' plates and then thrown away. At home we never wasted food. During rainy winters in Corcoran, when my parents went days without field work, we had to look for food in the trash behind grocery stores. We picked up partly spoiled fruits and vegetables that had been discarded. My mother sliced off the rotten parts and made soup with the good vegetable pieces and with beef bones she bought at a butcher shop.

  That evening Smokey and I made sure we were in our room by seven. A few minutes later, after our prefect dropped by to check on us, we listened to rock 'n' roll music on the radio while we finished unpacking and rearranging our room, I placed my desk against the left wall, next to the window. Smokey placed his on the other side of the window too. We went to bed early because we wanted to be rested for the placement tests in English and math we had to take the next morning and for registration in the afternoon. As we lay in bed, we talked for a few minutes. "I notice you have a thick accent," Smokey said, pulling the covers over his broad shoulders.

  "I'm Mexican. But I was born in Colton, California," I quickly added. It was an automatic response. As a child, my father often warned me against telling the truth about where we were born because we had crossed the U.S.-Mexican border illegally. I had lived in constant fear of being caught by the immigration authorities. And even though I now had my green card and felt bad and uncomfortable about not telling the truth, lying about my birthplace had
become ingrained in me. "My lather doesn't speak English, so we speak only Spanish at home."

  "So you'll be able to help me with my Spanish. I am planning to take Spanish for the language requirement."

  "Sure, but only if you help me with my English."

  "Unfortunately, I didn't inherit the Irish writing talent, but I think I can help you." He paused. "What does your father do?" There was a moment of silence.

  "My father used to work in the fields ... but ever since he hurt his back a few years ago, he hasn't been able to work," I did net want to tell Smokey that my father had fallen into a deep depression ever since he tried to sharecrop strawberries and failed—by no fault of his own. I was in the eighth grade, attending El Camino Junior High School in Santa Maria, at the time. Even though my father was suffering from back problems, he held on to his regular job of picking strawberries for Ito, a Japanese sharecropper, while trying to take care of three acres of strawberries that had been parceled out to him by the owner of the land. My father would work for Ito from seven in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon, come home, have a quick supper, and head out to the three acres, where he worked until dusk. After a few weeks, the plants became infested with blight, so the land owner had a chemical company fumigate them. The company used chemicals that were too strong; they killed the plants. From that day on, my father's spirit began to die too. And when he could no longer work in the fields because of his back, he became worse. "We must be cursed," he often said.

  "I am so sorry." Smokey must have sensed my uneasiness, because he did not ask me any more questions about my father. "My dad is a policeman," he said, breaking the silence. "He's had lots of jobs. He was a security consultant, but also a rancher and farmer until the Depression. Then he worked as a butcher and mortuary assistant until becoming a policeman. He's seventy-one years old."

  Smokey's openness made me feel comfortable, so I told him about my mother, who also worked in the fields and cooked for twenty farm workers during the time we lived in Tent City, a migrant labor camp in Santa Maria.