Knights and Death

Dusk. Friday. Late spring, a normal Friday. Phone rings, "Can we come down?"

"Sure, of course."

"See you in a few."

I go out onto the front porch to wait. The air has that bright end of sunset red tinge. Standing in the middle of my street and looking southwest, you can see a strip of ocean and the lights of Tijuana, on a clear days you can see the bull ring. My old neighbor, Letha, and I sometimes watched fireworks on Coronado and in Imperial Beach on the Fourth of July from that very vantage point sharing a glass of wine. Thinking of that, I get up from my porch and walk out into the street and look toward the ocean. Fog is fast gathering down there and the bright sunset is swallowed, dusk no longer tinged with gold. I hear a gunshot behind me, and not far. I turn toward the sound and take a few steps up the street. My heart goes cold when I see the boys coming on their bikes. Where’s the shooter? They stop at the corner. I began walking as fast as I can toward them. I hear Jimmy, "Don't let her see, Jason! Stop her!"

I’m scared for the boys. There’s someone with a gun up there. Jimmy, Mikey and Marc stay where they are while Jason rides quickly toward me. I wish they would just come here. We could go inside. The news tells daily of drive-bys. I don’t want them lost to that random killing.

"You wanna see me do a can-can, Martha?" he asks and launches into this complicated trick.

"What happened?" I ask.

"How about a Bunny Hop? Do you wanna' see me do a bunny hop?"

"Jason, what happened?" I now hear sirens in the distance, coming from the fire department a mile up the street.

His response is, "Don't go up there, Martha."

"Is it a body, Jason?"

"Yeah. Some guy was shot."

By then I'm at the corner. The boys try to stand in front of me, shielding me from the sight of a middle-aged Mexican lying face down in the dirt beside a neighbor's driveway.

"Is he dead?" I ask the boys.

No one has ventured any closer than the corner where we stand roughly 30 feet from the body.
We hear screaming and running coming from the alley down which this man had run. A woman's voice, a man's voice. If they're saying anything, I can't understand it. It might not even be words, just crying and screaming; fear, rage and anguish seeking expression.

He's just a man. He's wearing navy blue work pants and a white shirt; the kind of sensible, serious black steel-toed shoes a delivery guy wears to protect his feet. That this simple person would be involved in some deathly drama seems absurd. I stare without really getting what I'm seeing. The boys are worried. I should not see things like this. Their Martha should never see anything so ugly.

I realize this and think that it's my job, as an adult, to shelter the boys, but here they are sheltering me. I decide to let them, and I turn toward home.

"Let's go home," I say. "The cops will be here and it's their business, not ours."

"I wonder what happened?" asks Mikey.

No one answers. Not long before, maybe only a year, someone had broken into Ryan's house and cut up his mother. We learned of this the morning after, when Jimmy went down to get Ryan to go to the jumps. The house was cordoned off with Do Not Enter Crime Scene tape. He came back up the street to get me, to go down there, to get me to go look. It was horrifying, chilling. There was blood on the concrete sidewalk by the front door on the stucco walls and on the door itself. Someone had been hurt badly. Neighbors said that the fire department had taken Ryan's mom away on a gurney. Ryan had stayed with the neighbor for an hour or so until his dad came and got him. We never saw Ryan again.

Our neighborhood is constantly in competition with two others for having the most violent crimes. It's the result of the clashes of cultures and drug gangs (Asian vs. Mexican vs. Black vs. White meth farmers and dealers). It’s the result of people working three jobs to hold a life together, exhausted, frustrated, poor people who want more than they'll ever have -- their desires fed by the outrageous entertainment centers for which they’ve hocked their lives. It's the result of passion and love and cheating and child-stealing and coyote depositing and INS deporting and all the rough unjust moving around of people for one reason or the other. It's the result of despair.

Larry McMurtry wrote about California in the introduction to his book of essays about Texas, In a Narrow Grave.

"...present-day Texas is a very rich subject, particularly for the novelist. Present-day California might be even richer, but California, whether as a subject or a place to live, is almost too taxing. There the confusion is greater, the rivalries of manners more intense: the question is whether anyone can live in California and comprehend it clearly now..."

It's a very good question. My gang of white adolescent boys and I stand on the edges of this violent, multi-ethnic neighborhood some distant sentimental liberal has named the “Urban Village,” and watch it shoot itself, knife itself, beat itself up mostly in relation to race, custom, language, territory, drugs.

"For the Mexicans," says my neighbor Chayo, "it's about territory, not drugs. For the Blacks and Asians it's about territory and drugs." For the Whites? No one knows. Few hang around, only people like me who can’t move; finances hold us here. Where would I get another house in San Diego for $800/month? The white neighbors across the street have lived here since the ‘60’s when it was a beautiful neighborhood. Most of the older Mexicans have lived here that long, too, and attended Hoover High when it was one of the best high schools in San Diego. Old photos of the hood show fancy cars, immaculate lawns and gardens, men in white shirts and fedoras, women in pretty shirt-dresses with aprons. But this Mexican is face down next to the light pole, dead. None of us knows why.

We sit on the curb under the palm tree in my front yard, watching the street. Night falls soft and starlit somewhere, but here the sky is a wild red and blue disco show of police cars and fire engines. No one asks questions, looks for witnesses or talks to neighbors. It seems they simply examine the body, check his I.D. and haul him away. Chances are good he has no I.D., another "Illegal" come up to earn a living where he might actually have that chance. Most of our stories have no better or more meaningful ending than that.

Je suis l'anarchie

Here's a small piece of a big story I've held in a long time from the pain and the beauty of it. Boys on Bikes. My car radio confirmed the realization that I was ready to write it as I was driving back from town Saturday afternoon. I hit the radio button and there was Bad Religion... Zoom!

Jimmy slides into the passenger seat -- his seat because I am "his" Martha. The others can sit where they can in the back of the 1988 Red Ford Ranger under the canopy of the sistine camper, but he's the man of this outfit just as he is the man of his family, a little brother, a little sister and twins -- and a mom, strong, stringy, trashed-out, beautiful-hearted beloved recovering addict mother. These kids are poor; as poor as you can be and still cling to the underbelly of white middle class America in California. His mother's kitchen is wallpapered with German cockroaches and the little kids suffer constant ear infections, but there is nothing she can do; she doesn't rent it. She's basically squatting in a tiny condemned house with a sliding foundation facing an alley a block from me. Her brother was evicted when the place was condemned; she holds her tentative ground until the arrival of the wrecking ball.

Music is critical and my truck rocks loudly down our street. For a while it has been "The Unforgiven" and "Wherever I May Roam" (our anthem and we sing it loudly). We agree that Metallica is way better than "Scummy Posers" or "Megabreath." I feel a kind of triumph driving a bunch of young metal heads through our rap and banda infested neighborhood. We're all going where we love to go to do what we love to do. It can't be better than that. As soon as I start the truck, Jimmy holds up a tape, one of the home-recorded often erased and mangled tapes he uses to copy albums from his uncle or a friend or "Uncle Lisa" his lesbian aunt. He pushes the eject button and our recent soundtrack, Metallica Metallica lands in his waiting hand. He rolls down the window of the truck, ready to eject the tape even further, but changes his mind and tosses it onto the floor. "Do you know punk, Martha?"

"I know a little bit about it." I smile. Ahhhhh.

"Well, punk is better than metal."

"Why is that, Jimmy?"

"Just listen." There really IS no better answer, so I just laugh my agreement and for a few weeks we go to the BMX jumps at Mission Trails Regional Park with a Bad Religion soundtrack.

They had been riding their BMX bikes the ten miles from our street to the jumps maybe once a week. Jimmy never tells his mom how far it is, and when they realize that where I hike is where they dream of riding, they are in my truck almost every day. The weekends are best because Jimmy's friends come up from Imperial Beach to spend two nights. I wait Friday nights to hear the call, "Martha! Come out! Watch me do a can-can! I really got it now!"

They build and rebuild their bikes in my garage from random parts they pick up wherever they find them. One flat, hot August day, we "borrow" a surfboard from an open garage in Imperial Beach, and I am pretty sure they similarly "find" some bike parts. A great day is when one of them brings home a good Haro fork or an uncracked Mongoose frame. At the jumps the bikes break constantly; rims crumple and forks shatter landing from a flight 8 feet in the air over "The Doubles." Over and over they pick themselves up (thank god) bleeding and dusty and throw their bikes on the dirt yelling, "You fucking shit bike!" before picking it up again, cradling it in their arms like a beloved, wounded child, carrying to the scrap of shade in that blistering chaparral dust and fixing it. They have no choice. No one they know can buy them a new one. Until locals see what skillful, disciplined and fearless riders they are, they take a lot of shit because they don't have the fancy expensive bicycles or gear those kids have. They have what can't be bought; sheer guts.

Most times Molly, Kelly, Truffle (dogs) and I hike while the boys ride. We range the sharp hills and valleys, following the beauty. We usually cover six to eight miles, running with the same wild-Indian rage and rapture the boys ride their bikes. The boys have hiked with me and know this, and we are ecstatic happy whenever we are together. I am the right kind of wild adult for them; I don't think what they do is reckless, dangerous or crazy, but rather spellbinding and beautiful. I buy a video camera and begin to film their passionate, daring, impoverished, gallant boyhood. I'm new to the camera and my one habitual mistake yields the name of our production company, "Lens Cap Productions." Form matters; incredible discipline goes into what they do, these boys who flunk most of their classes and for whom high school graduation comes as a miracle. "Jimmy needs to learn to apply himself," said Jimmy's ninth grade report card. Right.

So when the moment comes in the trajectory toward their maturity to make the move from Metallica to punk, it doesn't surprise me; but it does make me proud. Sure it means fewer trips to Freedom Guitar to listen to the way Jason is able to pull a riff from Master of Puppets (for the hundredth time). We listen to Bad Religion, to Offspring, to Black Flag, to the Ramones, Beastie Boys... Then, one day...

"Have you heard of these guys, Martha? They're from your day."

"What's this? My NIGHT?" I laugh.

"You know what I mean. I got this from my uncle." He shoves a tape into the deck, throwing Offspring out the truck window. Jimmy has found the heart of it and the song that comes up is the hymn uniting this very particular 41 year old woman with this 15 year old boy. We don't want to be anarchy; we can't help it.