The Madonnas of Echo Park Read online

  When Ms. O’Neill asked Aurora where her record was, she pulled from a torn grocery store bag a rainbow-sequined vinyl record case. A velvet sash strung around a plastic rose clasped the top of the box, which flipped open to reveal an alphabetized selection of 45 singles. Ms. O’Neill unsheathed each record from its wax paper sleeve with delicate fingertips, the girls ooohhhing and aaahhhing over the case’s delicate satin lining and the number of singles the case contained. Ms. O’Neill counted over fifty, plenty for an afternoon dance party. She asked the class to give Aurora a round of applause for sharing with us something so important to her. Girls both Mexican and Vietnamese burst into squealing chant-cheers, something you’d hear on the playground before a fight, while the boys smacked their hands together like we were trying to smother fires in our palms.

  “Aurora,” Ms. O’Neill said, “why don’t you pick the first song?”

  She walked across the room in an outfit that matched her record case—a tight red fringe blouse with poet’s sleeves and a tie-string bow across her budding chest along with tapered black jeans that hugged her curved thighs (up to that point, girls had been stick figures, straight lines wrapped in corduroy) and matching black platform sandals. Her face had a thin dusting of powdered-donut-white foundation to cover her chicken pox scars; her eyelashes were etched into her face like fiery black sunsets. I was attracted to her, though I didn’t know what attraction was yet, and because I could think of nothing we shared in common—not one friend on the playground, not a single family acquaintance who shopped or did laundry with an acquaintance of her family’s—I hated this feeling.

  When she approached the record player, the boys fire-drill sprang out of their chairs. The girls, sensing some sort of new, significant moment, skirted the edges of the classroom and formed a rigid semicircle, cutting off any chance of escape. My two coconspirators had sandwiched themselves with about ten other boys into a far corner, leaving nowhere for me to stand but right in front of a firing squad of giggling twelve-year-old girls.

  Aurora slid a 45 out of her case and in one graceful motion popped a plastic yellow “spider” in the center of the record and threaded it onto the turntable’s spindle. When you play a record, there’s that brief anxious moment of silence when the needle crackles but the music hasn’t started. This was the kind of silence you could tear apart by making an obscene noise, setting off a laughing seizure so uproarious that Ms. O’Neill would lose control of the class, or by doing something catastrophic like wetting your pants, but that meant you’d risk being the object of a ritualized humiliation so vicious, moving to the next grade level wouldn’t stop it. The boys waited in anticipation of who would be brave enough to make that fart noise or trickle “fear piss” down his legs.

  Madonna’s “Borderline” began to play. This was a new song, Aurora bragged, which, along with her opulent record case, meant that her parents must have been as “rich” as my parents. (There was a real low bar for “rich” in Echo Park.) I recognized the song from MTV. Part of the video for the song had been filmed in the neighborhood, and because of its story line (Mexican break-dancers, Latin boyfriend, Madonna’s girlfriends dressed in retro chola girl outfits complete with drape coats, baggy pants, and hairnet caps), I believed Madonna was a Mexican.

  The girls swayed their hips to the soft, synthesized tinkle that opens the song, then nodded their heads an inch to the left, an inch to the right (the way the Muppets dance on TV) to the syncopated beat, before singing along with the chorus. The circle on the girls’ side tightened in anticipation of the first dance. Ms. O’Neill leaned down to Aurora, and after a quick consultation both nodded their heads in agreement. Aurora strode across the circle and placed her hand on my shoulder.

  “This is Madonna,” she said. “Come and dance with me, Brando.”

  There was an audible gasp as her fingers traced a line down my shirtsleeve and clasped my hand. Was it too late for me to make an obscene noise or wet my pants? The girls leered with confidence; Aurora’s boldness had made them aware for the first time how powerful a girl their own age could be. So much change was possible in so short a time. I looked to the boys for some sort of help, an intervention, one good idea to get me out of this. They stared back hypnotized in defeat, the way men look when they have played their last, failed excuse. I could sense the walls of the room sliding together, two sides of a V closing shut, our bodies interlocking, our differences now irrelevant. It was simple as following Aurora’s lead.

  I shrugged her hands off me.

  “I can’t dance with you,” I said. “You’re a Mexican.” It was a moment I’d rehearsed with my mother, but the word Mexican caught on the roof of my mouth like a stutter. It was the hard x—the same consonant that degrades the word sex.

  “What do you mean?” She laughed, her shy smile saying, You cannot be serious.

  “You are a Mexican,” I said, loud enough for the entire class this time. “I can’t dance with you.”

  Aurora kept smiling, but her eyes focused on the chalkboard, evaporating me in a glance.

  Madonna continued to play. Ms. O’Neill lunged at Aurora and pulled her into the circle. While they danced, the crowd relaxed and bunched into the segregated clusters we knew so well. My two useless cohorts emerged from the corner and patted me on the back. A couple of Vietnamese girls came with them, their satisfied smiles making me blush. They couldn’t tell for sure whether Aurora, with her excellent command of English and British band names etched in ballpoint onto the cover of her denim blue three-ring binder, was a “real” Mexican (real as in a chola), but they were sure that Aurora’s best friend, named Duchess, was. While we talked, a group of Mexican boys teased me in a singsong mock-Chinese. The boldest of the bunch asked Aurora to dance with him, which she did. I watched them in silent fury, like a lost man watches the horizon.

  The school bell ended the party. Ms. O’Neill called me over to her desk and asked Aurora to stay after class. She was on the other side of the room, shoulders hunched, putting her records away as fast as she could.

  “You did a terrible, terrible thing today, Brando,” Ms. O’Neill said. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Well, I think you owe Aurora an apology.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We turned to see a door slamming the way it does in a vacuum. Ms. O’Neill raced out of the classroom, shouting “Aurora! Aurora!” until her voice cracked.

  When Ms. O’Neill returned, she said, “You’ll apologize first thing after break.”

  I spent vacation in my hot, airless bedroom in self-imposed exile, not leaving my house for fear of seeing Aurora at the bus stop or on my way to the supermarket or, worse, running into Duchess, who I believed was on the lookout to beat me to a bloody pulp (this being, at the time, the worst thing I thought a gang member could do to you). Playing on an endless loop on my bedroom television was MTV. I saw the “Borderline” video several times a day for a week. At some point in the video, there was a close-up of Madonna’s face that would melt, time-lapsed, into Aurora’s face, staring at me with that same hollow look I saw when I rejected her, betraying an emotion beyond disgust or contempt—it was a look that said I didn’t exist. I’d recognize this look more and more as I grew older, in places both private and public, for reasons both explicit and unspoken, and once you’ve been seen through in this way—once you have been made transparent—

  no amount of physical pain matches the weight of invisibility.

  When we returned from break, I told Ms. O’Neill that I hadn’t forgotten about what I’d done at the dance and was ready to apologize to Aurora, even if I had to in front of the class. She said that wasn’t necessary but was proud of how determined I seemed. The bell rang, and we took our seats in the castes we had arranged for ourselves and felt comfortable with. Aurora’s chair was empty. Ms. O’Neill asked if anyone had seen her during the break. No one had.

  A week later, her name was no long
er called in roll. I asked Ms. O’Neill what had happened to her.

  “Aurora won’t be coming back,” she said.

  “Then how am I going to apologize?”

  “You’ll have to find another way to do it.”

  Twenty-five years later, I think I have found my way, in the book you’re reading now. This is the story of Aurora Esperanza and why she disappeared, told through the people of Echo Park who ultimately led me back to her. And while I’ve changed some details to protect those who drifted in and through this project over the duration of its writing, these are their real voices. I want to add that everyone in this book insisted he or she was a proud American first, an American who happened to be Mexican, not the other way around. No one emphasized this more than Aurora. I am a Mexican, she said when I caught up with her, but a Mexican is not all that I am. To my surprise there were no hard feelings, and as we joked about that day (“I shouldn’t have picked a Madonna song!”), she was gracious enough to ask about my mother’s attempts to raise me as someone other than a Mexican in a curious rather than an accusatory way.

  “I don’t blame her,” she said. “I must confess—and I guess this is a confession—why would anyone want to be a Mexican in this country at a time like this?” I understood what she meant. When writing this book, originally called Amexicans, there was such a vitriolic fever against illegal immigration (translation: Mexicans) that it made me grateful I had an Indian last name, and ashamed that I felt grateful.

  Aurora, if you are reading this (it wasn’t clear during our talk that you would), I have a confession of my own: I’m ready to dance with you. I’m ready to lace my still too-small-for-a-man fingers around your waist, ready to smell cotton-candy-scented shampoo in your long, black, curly hair as we sway our close but not touching hips to the beat of a song decades out of time. I won’t offer an apology, because you didn’t want one then, and I’m sure you have no need for one now.

  I’m ready to dance with you, Aurora. I hope you understand why I need to say that to you here, in this way: because a work of fiction is an excellent place for a confession.

  —B.S.

  1

  Bienvenidos

  We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours. Those who’d never been here before could at last see the Promised Land in the darkness; those who’d been deported and come back, only a shadow of that promise. Before the sun rises on this famished desert, stretching from the fiercest undertow in the Pacific to the steepest flint-tipped crest in the San Gabriel Mountains, the temperature drops to an icy chill, the border disappears, and in a finger snap of a blink of an eye, we are running,

  carried on the breath of a morning frost into hot kitchens to cook your food, waltzing across miles of tile floor to clean your houses, settling like dew on shaggy front lawns to cut your grass. We run into this American dream with a determination to shed everything we know and love that weighs us down if we have any hope of survival. This is how we learn to navigate the terrain.

  I measure the land not by what I have but by what I have lost, because the more you lose, the more American you can become. In the rolling jade valleys of Elysian Park, my family lost their home in Chavez Ravine to the cheers of gringos rooting for a baseball team they stole from another town. Down the hill in Echo Park, I lost my wife—and the woman I left her for—when I ran out of excuses and they ran out of forgiveness. Across town, in Hollywood, I lost my job of eighteen years when a restaurant that catered to fashion and fame found its last customers were those who had neither. And my daughters, they are both lost to me, somewhere in the blinding California sunshine.

  What I thought I could not lose was my place in this country. How can you lose something that never belonged to you?

  “Bienvenidos! You are all welcome here,” announces David Tenant from the flatbed of his mushroom brown GMC pickup truck in the parking lot of the Do-It-Yourself Hardware store on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. He says this to the regulars, and to those who won’t be back because the work is too hard or the pay too small or they will have been deported or they will have moved on, to Salinas, San Diego, Phoenix. There are hundreds of parking lots in Los Angeles like this one, and thousands of men like me standing in them, waiting for a good day’s wages. That day doesn’t come around too often now because construction jobs are in short supply, but today, the first dry, chilly morning to break through a week of rain, Tenant’s looking for men, and if I’m lucky, I could make a hundred dollars for a ten-hour day.

  A restless crowd of thirty to forty men undulate around Tenant’s truck, our hunger for work an octupus’s tentacles swallowing the vehicle into our mass of bodies. The younger men, punching buttons on their ancient cell phones, swarm the front, while the grandfathers are hunched over in devotion or exhaustion in the rear. Tenant leaps up on a set of crates, raises his arms as a conductor readies his orchestra to begin a symphony, and cocks a boot atop the tailgate.

  “Who’s here to work?” he shouts.

  We raise our hands and yell, “Me, señor!”

  He scythes the air with his palms, casting a line in the direction he wants men from and pulling them from the crowd into the flatbed. The chosen men stride past us, hoisting themselves into the pickup in ascension. Any man who fakes being picked is tossed back into the sea; any man who refuses to leave the flatbed has to deal with Tenant’s son Adam, a squat, muscular former security guard and current aspiring actor who sits in the cab shouting into his cell phone until he’s needed. He’s been an extra in a number of horror films with Roman numerals in their titles and comes to help his father after the late-night shoots wired on meth and coming down on coffee, his thick biceps coated with what he says is real Hollywood movie blood.

  Men materialize in the parking lot as fast as they disappear into the back of Tenant’s truck. They come from a nearby alley, where they smoke weed and piss against the wall, or from the liquor store, fresh from checking their lottery numbers, or with forty-ouncers. Preachers have been here before to save us, but most of these men want the sermon that comes out of a bottle.

  Tenant waves his arms in front of himself with a magician’s swipe, his quota satisfied. “No más!” he shouts. “But we’ll be back.” The pickup jerks the dozen laughing and singing men in the back like bobble-head dolls as it speeds out of the parking lot and turns onto Sunset Boulevard.

  We are left with our bodies coiled, smoldering, cursing our luck, waiting for the next pickup truck to approach, which could be anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. It’s an erratic schedule better suited to a younger man, but when a boss like Tenant, who is in the business of supplying trabajadores to job sites throughout the city, says he’s coming back, it’s worth it to wait.

  When I started as un trabajador, the bosses could tell I’d never done any outdoor work. And knowing English on top of that? I was lucky to last a day. They liked men fresh from the border, not a forty-plus-year-old man who’d worked most of his life in a restaurant but whose opportunities for a living wage had vanished, undercut by busboys pooled from the very men I now jostled alongside. They could mold these young mojados, push them harder and pay them cheaper. When the jobs dried up, though, my demeanor and reliability became assets.

  The sun disappears behind a swath of clouds, darkening the street, when Diego arrives wearing a black Dodgers cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a cup of coffee. He’s many gray hairs away from forty, but we’ve been drawn together because he likes to talk and there’s nothing else to do while waiting for a job except brag or listen. He drifted here from Mobile after a spree of murders targeting Mexicans in trailer parks. The murderers used baseball bats and, in some cases, machetes. Police blamed Colombians, though Diego insisted it was a meth-dealing white supremacist gang, and for that insistence he had to leave town fast. He sent his wife and four kids money working his way west, but by Albuquerque there was nothing left to send home. His expenses include smokes, whiskey, and underground taxi dancing b
ars where you can dance with women in lingerie or bikinis for ten bucks, grind on them against a wall for twenty, get a hand job for fifty, or take them home for three hundred (the term women is misleading; the girls at the bars we frequent in East L.A. are either teenagers with developing chests and acne dotting their cheekbones or haggard abuelitas with rubber tread marks around their flaccid bellies and breasts).

  I never question the holes in Diego’s story because he’s honest company. He doesn’t wolf-whistle, grope, or lunge at the Catholic schoolgirls when they walk by, doesn’t brown-bag forties for breakfast, doesn’t sell his drugs in front of me, and most important, he doesn’t push, shove, or jostle to get chosen for a job. There’s a civilized, dignified air in his approach to being un trabajador, and while he mentions no plans to change his day-to-day life, this is a condition he says—most of us say—is temporary. Ask any man why he’s here, and you’ll get the same answer: What else can I do?