by Luis Urrea
They made a little shrine for the doll in their house. Negra kept it up on a shelf, where she could look at it. She never took it out of the box. She didn’t want the dust and ash of the dump to wreck her baby, so when she played with it, she’d have it in the box, still wrapped in plastic.
Negra had another problem: to go to school, she needed shoes.
All students in Mexican schools must wear uniforms. The idea behind this is noble: if everyone dresses exactly alike, then the middle-class kids will be no “better” than the poor kids. Everyone will be equal and have an equal chance.
In theory it works beautifully. Of course, the richer kids can wear new uniforms, new shirts and shoes. They can wear a new uniform every day of the week if they please. The poor kids must wear one uniform every day until it falls off; often they go home and wash their pants and shirts every night. And if they’re really poor, they can’t afford shoes. In Mexico, the bare foot is not a symbol of comfort—it is often a symbol of shame.
Negra had missed the opening of school, and she wanted to learn how to read and write. Her mother came to me arid told me about it. She was surreptitious, because Negra was proud.
I invited Negra to come with me to downtown Tijuana. She piled into the van eagerly. We drove into town and shopped in the shoe stores along Avenida Revolución. It was an incongruous sight—little ash-gray Negra, barefoot in the shiny glass-and-chrome shoe store, watched over by yuppie Mexican women in Jordache jeans and duty-free Parisian perfumes. The saleswoman was gracious in the extreme, taking the measure of Negra’s feet and brushing the ashes off gently when she brought out the shoes. We bought Negra black shoes, and with some money to buy a uniform, she was able to attend school.
One day, on her way back home from classes, a gang of barrio kids caught her, beat her up, and stole the shoes.
She had to wait two weeks until she saw me again. I immediately bought her a new pair, but when she got back to school, they told her she had failed and been expelled. She had missed too many classes.
It was a warm day in spring: we had pulled in with a huge load of clothing and food. My mother and I had collected 150 half-gallon plastic jugs, and we’d been up at dawn in her backyard, filling them with the garden hose. I hadn’t seen Negra for two weeks. I wanted to get a box of food to her family before the crush started. I took cans of corn, string beans, fruit; a sack of pinto beans; a kilo of rice; several jugs of water; bags of doughnuts, bread, bananas, oranges, onions, avocados, and plums.
There were men gathered around Negra’s shack, grinning at me, then looking at their feet. I glanced in the door; an undulating shadow revealed itself to be a couple having sex in the dirt. Negra’s shack had become a whorehouse. Negra was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
Los Cementeros
His name was Andrés. He awakened with the sun. He lay in bed as long as he felt like it, picking the crust of glue off his upper lip. It was white and vague as milk, but hard; it pulled out his whiskers, which were few and thin, black against his dark brown skin. Bed was a mat of folded cardboard on the broken roof of what used to be a small house on a forgotten hill above downtown Tijuana.
A few years ago, the house burned and the city’s services were cut off from the hilltop. The steep alley that led there was left to wash out and be broken up by weeds and grasses and small trees. You could pass the alley’s mouth a hundred times and never know there was anything up there. All you’d see from the street was a carpet of shattered glass and clumps of trash. Besides, this was not near the main tourist routes of Tijuana. This was west of the main city, an area of tawdry used car-part shops and sidewalk clothing vendors.
If you paused at the alley’s mouth at night, and if you looked up, you would see the far end of the slope backlit by streetlights beyond the summit. And in that glare, you would see indistinct movements: legs, and bodies nervously shifting. And if you were white, and they saw you, they would come swarming down on you in a pack—feral and hungry. And they would feed.
They were the cementeros, the glue addicts and paint-thinner sniffers who lived on that hill with Andrés. Cementero derives from the word for “glue,” which is the same as the word for “cement”: cemento. Literally, cementero could be said to mean something like “cementer,” though it has a stronger connotation that is almost religious. Cementeros are “followers of the glue.” (Aptly, and somewhat eerily, cementero is almost the same as the word for “cemetery”—cementerio.)
Their numbers were (and are) fluid. These homeless boys were thrown out or had run away. They had wandered into downtown Tijuana from violent homes or the shattered homes of downtown’s hookers. They were the sons of the women who copulated with animals in the downstairs bars in the lower depths off Reforma and Revolución. Some of them were orphans, some of them had parents in jail.
They found each other. They formed small groups like street kids everywhere, and they thought they would engage in the Utopian dream of cast-off children: they would look out for each other, form their own street version of the families they lost. But this was Tijuana. And the hustle of these streets left no time for utopìas.
Daily life revolved around prostitution and drugs. Soon the boys realized that the thousands of gringos who came down to party on the weekends made easy targets—especially once they’d had enough to drink. The boys lured the tourists away from the disco lights. All it took was a promise: girls—muchachas bonitas. They were sly enough to know that we still believed the racist myth of fock my seester, and they said it. And the gringos followed.
Or they offered dope, cheap. Or themselves. Or watches. The point was to get the victim alone. Then the one boy magically became three, four. Eight arms, eight legs lashed out of the dark and pummeled, with fists, shoes, rocks, pipes.
This on a good night, when the boys were feeling kind. Every one of them carried a knife, or a sharpened screwdriver, or a jagged strip of metal. Andrés kept his tucked in the back of his pants. Sometimes one of the boys was just cranky, just feeling grouchy. So he sliced the drunk gringo for good measure.
Sooner or later, some of these boys found their way up the hill. Of course, it seemed a haven. It was like a fortress. They felt safe from other, meaner street toughs, the cholos and surfos (ersatz surfers, whose gang colors featured the bare footprints of Hang-Ten logos that were sometimes drawn on their baggy shorts with pens). And, as always, the police.
However, the hill had its own harsh rules. Every boy looked out for himself, and alliances were often more dangerous than loneliness. Everybody was distrusted.
On the night I first met Andrés, I was led up the alley by an ever fearless Von. All the other boys had heard us coming and vanished down the other side of the hill like rodents. They were soundless and invisible and gone before we were halfway up the hill.
Andrés stayed behind. I could see him, stark and stick-thin against the lights. He stayed behind because he had to—Andrés had two deformed knees that turned his feet perpetually sideways. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even walk. He balanced on two aluminum crutches, and he moved slowly when he moved, his feet dragging and banging along the ground.
“Nobody looks out for nobody,” he told me.
We were looking out at the city lights.
“Fucking lights,” he said. “Beautiful, ¿qué no?”
“How do you eat?”
He smiled. “Stealing.” He acted out delivering a blow with his fist. He ducked his head like a little boy. “You know,” he said.
Andrés was barely five feet tall. He had long hair, long graceful hands that looked delicate—painter’s hands.
His clothing was old and dirty: baggy cords and three shirts, a grimy watch cap on his head. He wore battered Converse high-top basketball shoes on his tangled feet. The jaunty shoes made his feet seem small. Everything about him was evocative of a child. It was disconcerting, because he was saying, “We gang up on them and beat them up and steal all their stuff.”
He had the featu
res of a Mayan carving—slightly sloping forehead, large nose, turned-down mouth. His eyes were bright as obsidian chips.
“It’s hard for me,” he said. “I can’t run. So I try to join in when they’ve got the guy down.”
“Do you use your crutches?”
He laughed, covered his mouth with his hand.
“Sometimes,” he said.
All over the hill, there were little burrows where the boys buried jars filled with money or watches. No one dared disturb another boy’s jar, and when one was tampered with, the revenge was swift and final. They killed each other with stones or knives.
The violence attracted the infrequent attentions of the Tijuana police. The cops raided the hill sometimes and delivered their version of social service to the boys: sound beatings. “Torture,” Andrés called it. To avoid the cops, or anybody else, the boys dug elaborate tunnels under the house. At the least hint of approaching feet, they dove into their rat mazes, where they hid, only their eyes peeking out from under the slab foundation. They slept under there, too, jammed in on top of each other in the cold. They had sex there, sometimes undulating against each other underground.
And, at all times, there was the glue.
They were reduced to shambling zombies by it, their brain cells melting inside their skulls to give them their escape. There were nights when the tunnels were jammed with mindless, drooling bodies; the boys shrieked in hallucinogenic terror under there, came charging out like enraged pit bulls, swinging their knives at ghosts. Then they passed out, arms flung open to the sky, which must have seemed a baffling wonder to them before they slipped away.
This was the best hour for murder. When a hoy had a vendetta against another, he would choose this time of coma in which to strike. The most recent murder had involved two lovers. One of these two fell in love with a third. The new couple plotted to kill the old lover and take his jar. On the night of his last high, they waited until he’d fallen over, then they crushed his head with cement blocks.
“That’s why I sleep on the roof,” Andrés told us. “Nobody looks up there. They’re always looking in the dirt.”
We’d gathered at a street-side taco stand. We were buying him supper. It took Andrés about ten minutes to get down from the hill. I walked with him, while Von went ahead.
“What’s wrong with your knees?” I’d asked him.
“I need surgery.”
“Could you walk after it was done?”
“That’s what they say,” he said.
“How much does it cost?”
He blew air out through slack lips. “Oh. Forget it. Too much.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, shaking his head at the immensity of it.
We bought him a paper plate of tacos.
“I like gum,” he said. “Do you have any bubble gum?”
I did.
He smiled.
As we left him, he reached out and took my hand. His fingers were soft and limp. His hand was cold.
“Be careful,” he said.
The last I saw of him, he was balanced on his twin sticks, smiling a little over his plate of tacos and staring at us. He was smaller than everybody around him. And they repeatedly bumped into him as they passed, rocking him until it looked as though he were going to fall.
CHAPTER FOUR
Happy Birthday,
Laura Patricia
Laura Patricia lived in San Antonio, a small village inland from the port city of Ensenada. The town was nothing much: two small stores that sold beer, mostly, and a scattering of whitewashed houses nestled in a bend in the road among small vineyards. We stopped there every two weeks on what was known as “the Long Run”—a three-hundred-mile haul that took us down the coast, then back northwest, across vast landscapes of mountains, high desert, and prairie.
In the early spring, the rains would be beginning to taper off. The floods of 1978 and ’79 had devastated parts of the region. Bridges were cracked in half, and the town of Guadalupe had actually washed away, with nothing left but outskirts surrounding a wide mud flat. San Antonio itself was hit repeatedly by the creek that ran between it and the orphanage we visited on the run. During the worst rains, the creek swelled to a mad river for a night, rising over its banks and screaming through house after house, blowing out the windows in brown torrents.
Our job was to bathe kids, wash heads, deliver food, and attend to any minor medical crises we discovered at the orphanage. Laura Patricia lived in a small house behind the corner market and across the creek. When I met her, she was about ten—a pretty girl with copper hair. Neighborhood kids were allowed to go over to bathe and get shampoos after the orphans had finished.
Each child was awarded a treat bag for bathing—he or she got two doughnuts (day-olds donated by Winchell’s), two or three pieces of fruit, and a carton of chocolate milk. We had reservations about the chocolate, but learned that the kids wouldn’t drink plain milk. They’d often give it to the dogs.
Colored poker chips, won in competitions, “bought” sundries at a small “store” set up in the back of one of the vans. Orphanage boys always helped put together the treat bags—for a fee. They were terrors, but the prospect of being paid in chocolate doughnuts for their tireless efforts turned them into little Jimmy Swaggarts. They pontificated from the fruit table, strutting and exhorting the other kids to be as holy as they. We’d stuff over a hundred bags, and they’d eat at least as many chunks of doughnut.
In the background was Laura, watching.
Later, when I’d go out to work on heads and hair, she’d follow me. Finally, one day, I asked her if she’d like to help me wash. She immediately took over the rinse-and-brush brigade. I’d be raising a ruckus with the children: “Brace yourself, I’m going to pour hot soup on your head! Watch out—here comes a cup of hot coffee!” She would shake her head at me like a wife. Whenever I sat in a chair, she’d come into the house and sit near, not looking at me, as though it had been the sheerest happenstance that we were there at the same time. On rare occasions, she would sit on the arm of the chair and put her hand on my back.
Laura did not bathe with the other kids.
Her mother had breast cancer, and we often paid for her bus trips to Los Angeles, where she got her treatments. The chemicals made her bloat until she was unrecognizable, and they ultimately did little good. Her right breast was removed before we met.
Five years after her mother’s first mastectomy, Laura turned eleven. She transformed from a quiet, moody little girl to being a tall, beautiful young woman. Her hair went long and wavy of its own accord, and her walk became graceful. Her body began to curve and lengthen. She remained quiet, though. Her thoughts and feelings were almost always a mystery.
Sometimes, when her mother had bad spells, Laura wrote to ask me for help in getting her to the hospital. One day, I got a letter telling me that she had to begin kidney dialysis; Laura was terrified. She asked me to get everyone to pray so she wouldn’t die. Then she told me that the next time I saw her it would be her twelfth birthday. Her mother was going to give her a little party, and she wanted me to be the guest of honor.
A friend of mine gave me five dollars to give to Laura. I put it in her birthday card, along with twenty dollars from me.
Another Chicano friend of mine named Rico had been going down on the run with me. Rico was in the MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) organization at the college where I was working, and he had helped get some clothes collected for Tijuana. He had become somewhat of a cause célèbre with the Mexico Crew—he drove a chopped and severely modified low-rider VW bug. It had roses etched in its tiny windows, and “suicide doors”—they opened in the opposite direction from regular car doors. It also had a Porsche engine that made a violent racket. His license plates said QUE MALO. (How Bad.)
Rico was endearingly obscene. He’d be in the midst of a pack of Baptist Bible students, and when something startled him, he’d cry, “Jesus Chri
st!” or “Holy shit!”
Incredibly, his great charm seemed to make them deaf to his sins. The church folk swarmed to him. I often wondered if the Baptist sisters didn’t dream they could tame the beast, make of him an upright Bible-believing missionary.
Rico’s cry could always be heard in the distance: “Holy fuckin’ shit!”
———
Rico piled into a van with me. When we got to San Antonio, it was drizzling. Laura was standing out in the dirt road, watching for us, alone. When she saw us coming, she ran inside.
There were actually two orphanages near Laura’s house. The crew would pull into the first and begin the bathing. A small group moved on to the second, to begin preparing the food bags and washing heads. Rico, a woman named Diana, and I left the first crew and walked through San Antonio. When we got to Laura’s house, she ran outside and took my hand. I slipped her the card and told her I was hoping she would buy her own gift, since I didn’t know what to get her.
Von had given me a digital wristwatch for her, too, but I wanted to spring that on her later.
“You’ve got to come to the party!” she insisted.
“I will,” I said.
“Bring your friends.”
“All right,” I said. I told her we were walking to the orphanage.
She walked along beside me, as quiet as always.
Between the village and the second orphanage, the stream had erased the road that once cut through its bed, so the government erected a stone bridge over it. This bridge took an age to build, and they didn’t grade the ramps leading up to it. Within a couple of years, the soil had washed away from either end, leaving a nice stone sculpture of a bridge in the air.