Meantime cuz’s channel surfing just like she’s been doing it all her life. Youth catches on fast. Maybe it’s the surfing. Faster she checks out, faster the lenguas check in. TV’s gone crazy.
Suddenly he makes her stop. It’s in Spanish this time. Lucha Libre. Gonna be The Ultimate Wrestling Championship. Some dude named El Gran Mojado. Unbeatable. To the death. Hey. Pacific Rim Auditorium. Noon. Sunday. June 28th. Tomorrow! Call Ticketmaster. Or check out the closest Blockbuster, Robinson-May, Music Plus. But hurry, tickets going fast. Gonna be sold out. Who’s the sponsor? Drink called Passion. Drink Passion. That’s it.
Bobby sets the cuz up with some frozen microwave, Famous Amos, and a glass of milk. Tells the cuz to sit tight. He’s got some business to take care of. She’s got the Barbie doll, her village dirt, and the remote. By the time he gets back, she’s gonna be glued good. Now hit the road. Find the boy.
Pacific Rim Auditorium’s not far. Something tells him he better go on foot. And he better leave now to make it by tomorrow. Not gonna move no machine, no Camaro, through these streets. Used to go everywhere on foot. Knows the alleys and the little streets. Been a while since he maneuvered the barrio. Been a while since any vato called him the Chino Loco. True, some things’d changed big-time, but he knew that. And some things never gonna change. Órale, it’s still about moving the body with the flow. Still about keeping tuned to a sixth sense. Everything in control. Just pushing the air aside to pass. Don’t disturb too much. Keep the memory of everything he passes. Like 360-degree vision. Surround sound. Don’t miss a thing.
So pretty soon, Bobby’s on a roll. Something taking him through some curves. If the cuz is back home channel surfing, this must be barrio surfing. Next minute he’s in the woods: Holly, Brent, Ingle, and West woods. Then it’s the beaches: Manhattan, Redondo, Huntington, Hermosa, Topanga, Seal, and Long. Then it’s the parks: Echo, Leimert, Griffith, Elysian, Monterey, and MacArthur. Then the hills: Beverly and Rolling. The saints: Monica, Bernardino, Ana, Gabriel, Pedro, Marino and Fernando. The Las: Crescenta, Canada, Habra, Mirada, and Puente. And the Els: Segundo and Monte. And finally, the big Los.
It’s getting dark. Big Los twinkling like a shimmering sequined dress at a quinceañera. Clouds of smoke and haze getting those orange and purple stripes of sunset. Looking like a gigantic mural. Órale.
CHAPTER 41:
Prime TimeLast Stop
Buzzworm climbed up the back ladder of the NewsNow van and peered over the top at Emi in a bikini and Ray-Bans stretched out on a beach towel. “Someone said this was the last stop before the sun goes down, but they forgot about Hawaii,” she muttered to her intruder.
“It’s not Hawaii neither,” Buzzworm noted.
“Same person said you could rot here without feeling it. So-called paradise, see. Smoking, drugging, and sex are absolutely necessary to make you feel anything in paradise.”
“If this is paradise, we’re in trouble.” He looked out from his perch, currently a tanning pad, and surveyed day five of the Harbor Freeway crisis in which every homeless person had for the moment found shelter. Funny how it looked like home. He looked over at a book squashed open on its belly. “What’s to read?”
“Book I grabbed off Gabe.”
“Easy Rawlins?”
“He likes this private dick stuff. Dark and dirty. Goes with wearing shades whilst taking in the rays.” Emi rolled over on her stomach and propped her chin up on the triangle made between her forearms and the van’s roof. “It’s moving toward midsummer, and I do have a California look to maintain. You know, glowing health, tight muscles, New Age tan.”
“I wouldn’t know about no New Age tan. Got me an Old Age one myself.”
“A New Age tan’s like this: You arrive from some midwestern armpit, see. You’ve been raised on steak and potatoes. To you, veggie is like canned beans. Vegan is, well, it’s a Trekkie term for aliens from Star Vega. Somebody on Venice Beach reads your astrological forecast. Someone else reads your aura. You find out you’re a star-crossed Aquarian with a future as a bisexual. You get a tattoo on your right ankle and pierce your navel. You join a gym, start up on the Nautilus, and get regular bodywork. You take up yoga, do a thorough detox, and go macrobiotic: miso, tofu, and brown rice. You become religiously organic. You join an animal rights support group to heal your inner animal. You try to write a screenplay and get an agent. You go to bed under a pyramid with your therapist/healer. Your folks come out to see you, Disneyland, Universal Studios, and Marilyn Monroe’s grave. They say, ‘California seems to be doing you some good. Got some color in your face for a change.’ Voilà! A New Age tan!”
Buzzworm looked blankly at Emi and shook his dreads. “Well, I’ll be. And I thought having skin color was just so as to define what’s white.”
“It’s total bullshit. I just needed to get away.”
“I read you.”
The hum of propellers was a constant, but the sound suddenly lunged in with the copter’s shadow. “Damn. I told them to stay away!” She propped herself up and made a rude gesture at the flying machine.
“How did Balboa ever get involved with you?”
“Go figure. Behind that noir pose, Gabe’s basically a romantic sort of guy. I’m the opposite. You want cuddly romance, you’re better off with a Siamese cat. So maybe that’s what it is. I keep the romance at bay.”
Emi rolled over on her back again, pillowing her head on her arms. She looked over her toes at Manzanar on the overpass. She still had not had the courage to march up there to meet the man.
“That’s why you won’t go up there, isn’t it?” Buzzworm nodded at the conductor. “That man’s the ultimate romantic. You can hear his music can’t you? Admit it, baby sister. Everyone can. It’s painful stuff. Gets you right here. Times there’s people down there rocking in the cars, weeping.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“He’s calling you, baby sister. He’s got your melody.”
“I’m thirsty. I could use a drink.” She leaned over the side of van and yelled, “Kerry, what’s left in the cooler? Got a Coke? Or better yet, got Passion?” She took the dark glasses off and looked at Buzzworm. “Wanna hear a secret?”
Buzzworm’s lips curled up in a wry smile.
“This is for real,” she looked hurt and turned away.
“Baby sister,” he nudged her with a soft voice. “Secrets are my business.”
Emi nodded. “He was my grandfather.”
“He is your grandfather,” Buzzworm corrected.
She drew a sigh. “I can’t believe it’s him. I remember we were always singing songs together. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I mean about that conducting or whatever it is. He liked to sing. I remember that. And then, he just disappeared. I knew he didn’t die . . . no one said anything as if he did. I was nine or ten. I don’t know why I should have even recognized him.”
“But you did.”
“And if I go up there, he couldn’t possibly recognize me.”
“No problem. I’ll introduce you.”
“What is he to me anyway?”
“Yeah, baby sister, the connection begs to be understood. I can’t say I knew my grandma too well either, but when she died, she left me everything she had. It was just her house, but it was everything. You’d be surprised what comes with a house. Old letters, memories, ghosts, the meaning of ever having it in the first place. Maybe you,” he pointed at her, “get lucky. Get the baton and the overpass to boot.”
Buzzworm looked at his watches. “I give you an hour to get ready.”
“What’s the point?”
“Between these TV microwaves and the ultraviolet, you gonna catch you some cancer out here. Time to put some clothes on and meet another human being. I’m gonna save your life yet.”
“Is that so?”
Buzzworm stepped down the ladder and met Kerry at the bottom with a cold can of Coke. “Her Majesty will see you now,” he smirked. As he turned away, the dull crack of a small but sha
rp thunder rumbled above his head. This sound was all too familiar, and it was not the pop of a flip-top jerked off an aluminum soda can. The rumble came again. Buzzworm jerked Kerry off the ladder and to the ground. “Get down!” he commanded and scrambled to the top of the van. He reached over, clawing at the beach towel, and dragged Emi toward him.
As he pulled her closer, she gasped, “I actually saw them out there aiming for the dish. It’s such a dick in the air, you . . . wouldn’t . . . think . . . they’d . . . miss.”
CHAPTER 42:
Drive-ByVirtually Everywhere
There was a time when the V-6 and the double-overhead cam did not reign. In those days, there were the railroads and the harbors and the aqueduct. These were the first infrastructures built by migrant and immigrant labor that created the initial grid on which everything else began to fill in. Steam locomotives cut a cloud of black smoke through the heart of the West. Yankee pirates arrived with cotton linens, left with smuggled cowhides and tallow. And the water was eventually carved away from the north, trickled, then flooded, into this desert valley. And after that nothing could stop the growing congregation of humanity in this corner of the world, and a new grid spread itself with particular domination. As someone said, now the freeways crashed into each other with flower beds.
Spread across these infrastructures was yet another of Manzanar’s grids: his map of labor. It was those delicate vulnerable creatures within those machines that made this happen: a thing called work. Every day, he saw them scatter across the city this way and that, divvying themselves up into the garment district, the entertainment industry, the tourist business, the military machine, the service sector, the automotive industry, the education industry, federal, county, and city employees, union workers, domestics, and day labor. It was work that defined each person in the city, despite the fact that almost everyone wanted to be defined by their leisure. Every day Manzanar had watched the daily hires hugging their knees on the backs of pickup trucks, looking backwards into traffic, eyes fixed, challenging the pretensions of other workers inside cars that they imagined defined their existence. Now, for a scant moment in history, the poor looked out those same cars.
Little by little, Manzanar began to sense a new kind of grid, this one defined not by inanimate structures or other living things but by himself and others like him. He found himself at the heart of an expanding symphony of which he was not the only conductor. On a distant overpass, he could make out the odd mirror of his figure, waving a baton. And beyond that, another homeless person had also taken up the baton. And across the city, on overpasses and street corners, from balconies and park benches, people held branches and pencils, toothbrushes and carrot sticks, and conducted. Strange and wonderful elements had been added as well. Among them: lutes and lyres, harmonicas, accordions, sitars, hand organs, nose flutes, gamelons, congas, berimbaus, and cuícas. Manzanar nodded to himself. Not bad.
And of course the movement of traffic had almost altogether stopped, not only in the freeway valley below but virtually everywhere. The tenor of this music was a very different sort, at times a kind of choral babel. In its initial movements, a soft angelic quality with the repetitive chorus of the homeless encampment wafted gently above the smoking cinders of quenched fires. As the members of this choir grew exponentially, the thing began to have grandiose proportions only Manzanar could appreciate. The entire City of Angels seemed to have opened its singular voice to herald a naked old man and little boy with an orange followed by a motley parade approaching from the south. Once again, the grid was changing.
Manzanar charged into his music, frantically looking for help. The valley was no longer only ten lanes across or one mile long; it was becoming the entire city and bigger than a tiny island or a puny country the size of San Bernardino. And the approaching parade was dragging in the entire midriff (and maybe even the swaying hips, burning thighs, and sultry genitals) of the hemisphere. The rational forces of the North looked south at the naughty old man who waved his penis around and shook their big collective head. This was a gesture of war, was it not?
Despite the celebratory nature of Manzanar’s great laboring choir, the terror of gunfire ripped across that valley of cars. Manzanar knew it had started with a single shot—the one that had penetrated the soft body of a young woman sunning herself on that news van. That was all it took. The sound of the shot penetrated Manzanar’s very being with a vengeance he did not understand. The moment repeated itself again and again; he clothed it in desperation each time with pain and more pain. Great shuddering sobs welled from within.
The assemblage of military might pointed at one’s own people was horrific, as was the amassing of weapons and munitions by the people themselves. If half of the homeless were veterans of war, then half of the current occupants of the valley suddenly returned to familiar scenes of fear and bloodshed, jumping into the foliage, cowering behind jeeps, lugging knives and rifles, carefully surveying the fray from that big ditch. A single shot heralded the ugly possibility of war. On cue, the thunder of a hundred helicopters announced their appearance on the downtown horizon, strafing the freeway along its dotted lines, bombing the valley with tear gas and smoke. The coordinated might of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the Coast and National Guards, federal, state, and local police forces of the most militaristic of nations looked down as it had in the past on tiny islands and puny countries the size of San Bernardino and descended in a single storm.
Manzanar recomposed with difficulty what the generals surveyed on their infrared monitors; a rainbow of putrid green gas and red, white, and blue smoke hid the fray from discerning eyes, muffled the shrieking and wailing. Lines of cars along the slow lanes south and north exploded into flames, golden clouds of boiling petroleum rising in two great walls, further obscuring the deed.
The motley community of homeless and helpless and well intentioned ran in terror, surrendered, vomited, cradled the dying. Manzanar recorded every scream and cry and shudder with dumb incomprehension. And the rising tide of that migration from the South—not foreign to the ravages of war—never stopped, clamored forward, joined the war with both wooden and real weapons, capital, and plunder.
And so the percussion of war cracked and thundered. Horns trumpeted attack. Strings bled a foul massacre. Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air?
SUNDAY:
Pacific Rim
CHAPTER 43:
DeadlineOver the Net
First thing, I shot a bunch of faxes out: the feature story on the El Zócalo demonstration, insider interview with a revolutionary, plus the flyer to Bobby—hoping he’d know what the hell to do with it. Hoping he was going to find his kid. If I could get the rest of my stories pieced together, maybe I’d make it myself to the Ultimate Wrestling event.
Next off, I got back to LAX in time to meet Mexicana flight 900 for a second time to look for the woman with the baby and yellow bag. She turned out to be a no-show. I should have known. Rafaela had diverted the merchandise. I called the travel agency in México City. “I was expecting my cousin. Her last name is Juárez, traveling with her baby boy. She never arrived. I’m very worried,” I lied.
“Why don’t you just call her at home?”
“I don’t have her number. Just this copy of her itinerary. It’s very confusing. Perhaps you could provide a number for her?”
“Juárez? What is her first name?”
I fumbled for some common name with C. “Carmen,” I tried. “No Carmen. Only a Corazón.”
“Yes! How stupid of me. She goes by Corazón now.”
“The ticket was picked up and paid for in cash. There’s really no record. I wouldn’t worry. She’ll contact you, I’m sure.”
Another dead end. As for contacts, I needed to renew speaking contact with Emi and Buzz, but Emi’s cellphone still drew a blank, and I’d paged Buzz three times already. No answer. I needed Emi to help me fill in the blanks on my homeless conductor angl
e on the freeway crisis, and I never did get an answer about my package. If I could get the word, pin down the contents: kidney, heart, liver, whatever. As it was, it was somewhere out there playing limbo. If I got lucky, it might just limbo under my next deadline.
It was still daylight, and I still had to check out a lead on the poison oranges. The customs slips I’d taken from Doña Maria’s indicated an address in El Segundo. I took a couple of freeway offs over to a legitimate brokerage, but no records could be produced to track the product. “Oranges from Brazil via Honduras. Is that the normal route?” I queried.
“Well, say Brazil’s quota for oranges is exhausted, then Brazil exports to Honduras. Honduras to Guatemala, Guatemala to México, and México to the United States. Then it’s cool even though everyone knows the orange harvest is dead in México in June. Keeps everyone in business.”
So even the legal papers would have been bogus. As it was, I had a bunch of bureaucratic papers to make transactions look legal, to make the connections fuzzy. Anyone could fill them out. And no one had ever heard of the broker who signed the documents. The invisibility of those who fingered the threads mocked my every move. I said I’d be back with more information. It was going to take more time. I wasn’t going to get this story right away, but I’d get it eventually. After all, it was my story.
I called Doña Maria’s number and got Lupe on the phone. “How is Rafaela?” I asked.
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