Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “Losing isn’t so bad.”

  “Sure would be nice to win, Dad.” I flicked my cigarette out on the front yard. “We already know what it’s like to lose.”

  I woke up nervous. You know the feeling. Your stomach is churning. You want to go back to bed. Only if you did, you wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. Your stomach feels like you swallowed a pigeon, and it was slamming against your insides, trying to get out. Panic city. I tried to pretend it was a normal day. I fixed breakfast for Elena. Scrambled eggs. “Come back to me, Sammy,” she said.

  “I haven’t gone anywhere, mamacita,” I said. She liked when I called her mamacita.

  “Yes, you have, Sammy. You’re away.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re doing something for Gigi. It makes you go away.” That meant I hadn’t read to her for two weeks.

  I nodded. “I’m coming back. I promise.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Tonight I’m coming back.”

  “You’ll read to me?’

  “Seguro, mamacita.” She smiled. She had my dad’s smile. My mom’s eyes. A killer combination. I felt better. I walked to school.

  The assembly was for seniors only. Since it was a special election, there were special rules. The runner-up would automatically be the vice president. Our classes marched in. There were about six hundred of us in our class—give or take. I won’t lie. I was nervous as hell. My palms were sweating. The twelve—we all sat together. We listened to the speeches, dull stuff. I promise to represent the students I promise that our dances will be really far out and the bands will be far out and I promise that I’ll do everything to make our senior year the grooviest year of your life are you fat are you short I want your vote I’m just like you so vote for me that way you’re voting for you.

  Every one had their partisans. They made a big deal, like their candidate had really said something. Then it was Gigi’s turn. Stick to the plan, Gigi. Just stick to the plan. The dress was nice. Serious. Too much makeup. Again. But that was Gigi. Relax. Relax. She didn’t look nervous. Maybe all the practicing had paid off. She smiled at everyone. She raised the pages of her speech in the air. “This is my speech,” she said. “Mr. Fitz approved it. He approved all our speeches. That’s the system.” She paused—just like we’d practiced. She waved the pages of her speech in the air—then took it in her hands, and ripped it right in half. She tossed the ripped pages asíde. Everyone watched as the pages floated to the floor. She might as well have ripped the pages out of the Bible. You could hear people breathe—that’s how quiet it was. Everyone had stopped. Everyone was listening. “My name is Gigi Carmona and I want to be your president. You know why? Because nobody owns me. Nobody owns Gigi Carmona.” She’d changed the speech. Shit! She’d changed everything. I could hear my heart. Okay, Gigi, okay.

  “You know,” she said—just like she was having a conversation, “you know, I don’t care about school dances. Maybe I’d care more if someone actually asked me out.” Everyone laughed. She had them. God. She had them. “I know. I know. I wear too much makeup.” She smiled. “I like it, baby ¿y qué?” Attitude. She was giving them attitude. They roared. They roared for Gigi. She waited for them to stop laughing and clapping—and then she started again. “I don’t care about football games. Maybe I’d care more if the guys who played that game walked around the school with a little more respect in their walk. The school doesn’t belong to football players—it belongs to us. To everybody. I care about what happens in this school. I think we need to change the way we do things around here. I do. You know what I’m gonna do once you elect me president of the senior class? I’m going to lead the charge to change the dress code. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a nun. And I don’t want to dress like one. You think if I’d said that in the speech I turned into the principal, that he’d have let me say it? No way!” God, she was going for all the marbles. This was her chance to say something—and damnit she was gonna make the most of it. Gigi Carmona had never stood in front of a microphone. And she was making it count. She pointed at the principal who was sitting next to all the candidates. “He would not have let me say what I wanted to say.” She stopped. She looked at all of us. “This is America. I believe in free speech, baby. Do you? If you don’t, I want to know why not?” She paused again. “My name is Gigi Carmona and I say it’s time we opened our mouths and raised some hell.” As those words came out of her, the senior class exploded. The whole world was yelling her name. The whole world was stomping their feet. Our teachers had lost control. We didn’t belong to them. We belonged to ourselves.

  Gigi was happy. God, she was. And we were happy, too. Because we’d seen somebody—and the somebody she was had given us something. It was as if we were the last piece of America that was waking up. And Gigi was the one who was nudging us out of our slumber. It was good. God. Yeah, Gigi! I wondered what Eddie Montague was thinking now. I wanted to find him. I wanted to see the look on his face. I wanted to ask him if Gigi had said anything enlightening. But it wasn’t fair of me to think those things. It was mean. It was small. I knew that. And he hadn’t been the only one to sell her short. I had, too. Me. Sammy Santos. I’d sold her short. I didn’t think she had it in her. I’d mistaken her for the makeup she wore. And even as I watched her standing in front of us glowing like she was on fire with the same kind of grace that a candle has when it burns in a church—even as she stood there—I was ashamed. For not believing. Gigi had told the truth. I hadn’t enlisted. I’d been drafted. I started yelling, “Gigi! Gigi! Gigi!” Maybe by yelling her name, I could wash away my guilt. And then, like magic, everybody was shouting, “Gigi! Gigi! Gigi!” and she stood there in front all of us, and I knew that the bird she had inside her was free. She had found a way to set it free. She tossed us all a kiss and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  Politics is never easy. This was our first lesson. There would be more lessons. All of them would hurt. We may have won the battle—but we lost the war. Nobody doubted that Gigi had gotten the votes. Even one of her opponents confessed to voting for her. It didn’t matter. Our votes didn’t count. Democracy wasn’t always a simple thing. She’d broken the rules. This was a coloring book, and Gigi had colored outside the lines. They disqualified her. “You’re lucky we’re not suspending you.” They always say that. How undeserving and lucky you were. How generous and virtuous and forgiving they were. You’re lucky. That’s what they told her. They appointed a new president and a new vice president. But everybody knew the truth—Gigi Carmona from Hollywood had beaten them. She’d stood up there and spit at them. They’d forgotten to remind us of that particular rule on the first day of school: no spitting. No spitting in public.

  Gigi came over that evening. Sat on my front porch and cried. “They stole it from me, Sammy.”

  It was my fault. I was the one who’d given her the advice to switch the speeches. My big idea. But it was Gigi who was paying the price. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d have won. I was supposed to help you, Gigi. I screwed you over.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s true. I shoved you out on a busy street—and a car was coming. I screwed you over.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not right. You know what Fitz said? You brought this on yourself. That’s what he said. Don’t believe them, Sammy. If you believe them, then we lose.”

  We did lose. That’s what I wanted to say. I put my arm around her.

  “I was great. Don’t you think so, Sammy?” She broke down. Right there. Right there on my porch.

  “God, Gigi, you were the most beautiful thing on the earth.”

  I don’t know if she heard me or not.

  Her tears had become a river. We both took a dive and swam there. Nothing else to do but swim.

  Right after we’d finished Gigi’s campaign, my father began a campaign of his own. He and Frances Sánchez’ father were working t
he precinct for Hubert Humphrey. They walked the neighborhood, and not just ours. They handed out pamphlets put out by the Democratic National Committee. Meetings, meetings, meetings. Meetings with the local unions. Meetings with the Knights of Columbus. Meetings with the precinct chairs. Democrats loved meetings. My father was always gone. He’d come home late every night. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework. I’d warm up dinner for him. He’d talk politics. I’d listen. I loved his voice.

  When Halloween came along, I had to take Elena trick-or-treating. We had fun, me and Elena. I let her stay up and count her stash. She counted it over and over. But we missed our father. “He’s gone,” Elena said, “just like you when you were helping Gigi.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’ll be back. Be patient. He’ll be back.”

  On election day, we joined my father in front of my sister’s school, Hollywood Heights. Not the real name of the school—but that’s what we called it. That’s where the people of Hollywood voted. Our polling place. My father held his Humphrey sign like he was related to him. He greeted everyone as they walked in to vote. He knew everyone by name. All the men shook my father’s hand. He was acting just like Father Fallon—that’s what he did when people were coming out of Mass, shook everyone’s hands.

  Dad and Mr. Sánchez were proud. Their people had come out to vote. They’d done their job. When the polls closed, my father bought us hamburgers at LotaBurger. We went home, hamburgers in hand, to watch the results on television.

  Humphrey won by a landslide—in my dad’s precinct. Humphrey had taken Hollywood by storm. The nation went a different way. Like Gigi Carmona, Hubert Humphrey would never be president. We were always out of step. Out of line, some people would say. Way out of line.

  That night, my father and I went to our version of the wailing wall—the front porch. He had a beer. I smoked a cigarette. “No me gusta perder,” my dad said.

  I nodded. “I hate losing, too, Dad.”

  Then all of a sudden, he broke out laughing. At first I thought he might be crying. But he wasn’t. “Maybe we shouldn’t hate losing so much, you know that, Sammy? I mean—it’s the only thing we’re good at.” He laughed and laughed. God, his laugh made me smile. But that’s when I understood that there wasn’t much of a difference between Gigi’s tears and my father’s laughter.

  “Sammy, how come everybody wants to be in love?”

  “Because everybody’s crazy, that’s why.”

  “Were Mom and Dad crazy when they were in love?”

  “Probably, Elena. That’s the way it is.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I was fearless when I was a boy. Not afraid of anything. Didn’t have bad dreams. Wasn’t afraid of the devil. Pifas Espinosa, he had dreams. Bad ones. He used to tell me all about them at recess, how the devil would come, how he wore disguises. How the devil always dressed like someone he knew, his father, his mother, one of his brothers, a teacher, the guy behind the counter at Rexall drugs. And then he’d move in for the kill. “He takes me with him.” He was afraid. I felt bad for Pifas. Even though I hadn’t liked him back then. Me, I never had dreams like that. I had a guardian angel. And, as insurance, my Mom hung a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in my room. His heart burned like his eyes. For me. His heart.

  I didn’t have to be afraid.

  And I wasn’t afraid of school. Lots of kids in Hollywood were afraid of school. There were rumors about what went on in there. “They make you hate your mom and dad. They turn you into a gringo.” I heard a kid say that at the Pic Quick. I knew it wasn’t true. If you weren’t born a gringo, you couldn’t become one. I knew that. I wasn’t afraid of school, even though my English wasn’t so great. Not at first. My parents spoke it, but they liked Spanish more. I liked Spanish more, too. School, well, school was an all-English thing. But that didn’t scare me. English. Spanish. They were languages. What was scary about that? Uno, dos, tres, cuatro. One, two, three, four. Was that scary?

  Even scary teachers didn’t scare me. I think that’s why so many of my teachers didn’t like me. They looked at me, saw the lack of fear in my eyes. That’s what they saw. I think they mistook that fearless look of mine for a lack of respect.

  No, I wasn’t afraid of bad dreams or devils or English or school or teachers. And I wasn’t afraid of the neighborhood I lived in. When I was in sixth grade, I overheard a man at the Safeway say he wouldn’t walk through the streets of Hollywood at night. “Not in that neighborhood.” Even Mrs. Apodaca was afraid of our barrio. Said it wasn’t decent. Anything could happen. Like what? I’d been walking through the streets of Hollywood my whole life. Walked and walked. Found things. Saw stuff. Talked to people. Asked them questions. What was there to be afraid of?

  My mom was always chasing me down. Always trying to escape. Streets, alleys, the aisles of Surplus City. Every chance I got, I made good my escape. Mama always found me. She was crazy about me. My dad, too. Always hugging me and kissing me and holding me. For the longest time, I was an only child. I was an entire world for my mom and dad. I was heaven. I was Eden.

  And they were gods.

  I was eight when Elena was born. Old enough to be jealous, I guess. But I never was. Jealousy wasn’t ever my thing. I loved the idea of having a sister. When my mom was pregnant, I told her that’s what I wanted. A sister. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I got. I thought my mom was giving me a present. I thought Elena was for me. When my mom went into the hospital, René asked me if I was afraid. “Why?” I said.

  “What if she doesn’t come back?”

  I wasn’t afraid. Maybe I should have been. But I wasn’t. Fear was something in my future. Something I was bound to learn sooner or later. We learned to read, to write, to think, to sin, to love—and to be afraid. That’s what we learned in living. For me, fear was something I learned in the confessional booth of Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. If I was heaven to my parents, I was hell to Father Fallon. Sammy Santos wasn’t Eden. No, not to Fallon. Everybody’s garden was different.

  I don’t know why. I took an instant dislike to that priest in catechism classes when I was seven. He was big and white. Not fat really. But not skinny. Thick. Like the trunk of a tree. He came to our class and spoke about sin. His topic was as serious as his voice. Gravel, like gravel in a cement mixer. He smoked a lot. I could smell it. Maybe that’s why he always talked like he needed to clear his throat. Like he was about to spit.

  Sin and repentance. That was his topic. He told us how holy God was and how not-holy we were. I took notes. That’s what I always did. Took notes. God wants to redeem me that’s what I wrote. That’s what he said. That’s what I wrote. And then I wrote. Heaven is something you have to want. That’s what he said. That’s what I wrote. I wondered how badly I wanted heaven. I wondered if I had to love Father Fallon in order to get there. Probably I did. I was in trouble. Serious. I don’t know why, but I told Larry Torres that I didn’t like Father Fallon. “No one likes him,” Larry said. “He’s just an F.B.I. anyway.” I didn’t ask him what that meant. I didn’t want Larry to think he knew more than me. Later I asked Pifas what that meant. “Foreign Born Irish,” he said. “Oh,” I said. I guess I’d known that. I mean, everybody knew Father Fallon was from Ireland. It was supposed to be a good thing. It was better to be from Ireland than to be from Mexico. I knew that.

  I studied hard to make my first communion. I had reached the age of reason. That’s what they told me. It sounded important. I learned my Baltimore Catechism. I didn’t know where Baltimore was. Didn’t know why they’d named a catechism after a city. No one ever explained that to me. I guess if it was important, they would have told me. I sometimes got distracted by side issues. I still do that. But the main thing—the main thing was that I learned about God. Learned about the seven sacraments. Learned to pray the rosary. Learned the Apostle’s Creed and the Act of Contrition. Sister Joseph taught me the prayers in English. My mom taught me the prayers in Spanish. Two women. Two teachers. Two languages.
Two of everything. I was lucky. That’s what I thought.

  For the longest time I was confused about the theology of sin. But this is what I was told: there were mortal sins and there were venial sins. That sounded simple enough. Mortal sins were big sins. Serious. Things like missing mass, using God’s name in vain, stealing, coveting your neighbor’s wife—whatever that meant—and killing. I knew what killing meant. I never understood exactly why missing mass was as serious as killing someone. I guess I figured it was a good way of getting people to go to mass every Sunday, of keeping order. Order was important. Couldn’t have a church that was in chaos. No. Mrs. Apodaca wouldn’t have stood for it. Mass. Every Sunday. Serious business. Mortal.

  Then there were venial sins. They were smaller—things like getting mad and yelling and not obeying your parents and cussing. I figured most of my sins fell under this category. Maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe there were mortal sins I didn’t even know about. And maybe I’d committed them. All of them. Without even knowing it.

  Larry Torres informed me that sex was a mortal sin. I didn’t know anything about that. “If you’re married,” he said, “then it’s okay.” I took his word for it. Larry Torres seemed to know a lot of things. “Getting a hard-on, that’s a mortal sin, too.” I didn’t know what that was. But he had two older brothers. They must’ve told him these things. How else would he know? I nodded. Hard-ons, I thought. Serious. Mortal.

  My first confession was pretty uneventful. There was about eighty of us who were waiting in line. We sat in the pews, kneeling, preparing ourselves. To make our hearts contrite. That’s how Sister Joseph put it. I remember kneeling in my pew listening to Larry Torres and Reyes Espinoza endlessly discussing what they were going to tell the priest. “I’m going to tell him I killed someone,” Reyes Espinoza whispered. Even as a kid he was a liar and a jerk. Even back then.

  “And did you kill anyone?” Larry whispered back.