Danny's Guardian Angel

by Ralph F. Lopez-Urbina, a.k.a. Rafas. c/s

[Chapter 1

"Ai-yai-yai-yai-yaiiiiiiiii!" I screamed the day Dopey and Bogo and Creeper . . .---and Rotas and I tore out for Naud Junction to throw chingasos with some batos from Alpine. They were snotnosed pendejos the same as us. Tu sabes, peewees, nine, ten, eleven and twelve year old batos locos with our brains in our balls.

It was April 12, 1945. Clouds had gathered overhead like mourners at a velorio. On radios, the calm bi-lingual romance of Bing Crosby and Pedro Infante love songs floating across the barrio was suddenly interrupted by a special news bulletin. It was sad news. Men and women poured out of their chantes and gathered in small clusters up and down the sidewalks of Naud Street. They spoke words of a great loss, then wept and embraced and consoled one another. President Frankin Delano Roosevelt was dead.

The children of poorly educated, politically disenfranchised parents, we dreamed only of adventure and felt nothing about politics or about our place in the scheme of American society. We were much too young to fathom the significance of the president's death. We had no inkling about how bad off we were. We were happy just cooling it in our hideout, the cellar of don Vittorio's apartment house.

"You remember, don't you Josie, the original French Hospital on Naud Street? The gray, green-trimmed, two story apartment house where the old dagos lived. . . don Alberto . . . Chapito?"

"How could I ever forget it!" she replied, bringing her hand to her heart, visualizing an old horror she had witnessed some thirty years ago. "Old man Caporelli smoked some poor fool who welshed on a gambling debt right in front of the place. Shot him three or four times in the back. The sight of the man slumped face down in a pool of his own blood still haunts my dreams.

"Yeah, it was the first murder victim I ever saw. I think I was more amazed than scared though. I was just a kid then, too naive to link death with my own destiny.

Anyway, we were cooling it in our hideout, getting stupid on mota when Bogo ducked into the cellar and squatted down in our circle. "Hmmm," he sighed, stroking the five or so hairs sprouting from his chin, "that yesca smells real good, ese."

"Las tres," Dopey offered, his throat muffling his voice as he struggled to hold back the euphoric smoke in his lungs, while handing Bogo the leño.

Bogo nodded thanks, took three hits, then passed the joint to Creeper.

El Bogo de Dog Town . . . Man, that bato was so cool. You could never tell by looking at him if there was anything serious floating around in that mind of his--until that weird eye of his went into its circus act. The bato had a great talent for putting people on. Hell, he'd have you sprouting chicken feathers and choking on pigeon feed before it finally dawned on you that you'd been the butt of one of his ruses. Even his three hits on the leño failed to pull that cockeye of his from its bizarre orbit. Bogo fascinated me. I could read that cockeye of his better than my Confirmation catechism. Just then it was flashing SOS all the way.

"What's up," I asked, studying the wayward eye?

"You batos ready to kick some culo," he asked rhetorically, his voice brash with affected bravado?

We stiffened, our eyes glued on Bogo's cockeye. "Sirol que si!" Dopey snapped back, crouching forward.

"¡A toda madre!" Bogo approved, his cockeye cheerfully poised on a sneer. "I was out by the tracks on Spring Street. Spotted some Alpine batos messing around in our barrio, ese."

"¡Ai-yai-yai-yai-yaiiiiiiii! ¡Chingasos, ese! Let's bang with the ¡putos!" I yelled, at the top of my voice, yet failing to shout down the cold slashing at my back, torquing my asshole.

"Viva Dog Town!" Dopey yelled, pumping us with barrio pride as we scrambled from our hideout and tore out running for the tracks at Naud Junction.

"Viva Dog Town . . . Epic stuff, huh Josie . . . For God and country---the Alamo; Appomattox; the Battles of Dominguez, Cahuenga Pass, Harry Love at Panoche Pass; and now Dog Town . . . The Battle of Naud Junction. Turf. A romantic flight. A piece of the pie. War! ¡Pedo! God, no wonder we make such excellent cannon fodder."

Bogo was right. The Alpine peewees were poking around the boxcars at Naud Junction, just east of Spring Street, behind the PMT docks, definitely our territory.

We spotted them some fifty yards away. Called out the little fools. Stuck out our middle fingers and hollered "¡Tenga!" at them. We called them putos and cussed out their mamas. The feisty hijos de la chingada didn't back off one inch. They not only cussed back at us, screaming safos, the same to you, but the locos attacked us first. And in our ¡barrio!

"Can you believe that shit? I swear Josie; those little matones had huevos."

"Scrambled eggs, if you ask me!" Josie fired back disgustedly. "They didn't have the balls to think of the heartaches they were causing, the mountain of grief they were piling on their poor mothers--sus pobres jefitas. . . .

"¡Viva! la Alpine!" some loco yelled from the gang of charging intruders. "Alpine Sucks!" Dopey screamed back, as the late afternoon sun slashed open the gloom and highlighted the ferocity of his scowling face.

"Fuck you ¡puto!" the short, scowling chichimeca with the dark ugly face snarled back. He looked like their leader, their main chingón, what with his immaculate white T-shirt, starched, neatly pressed khaki pants, and cordovan-dyed, spit-shined Price's shoes. Scary little bastard.

I wonder who his role model was? Christ, Josie, I hope I don't make you puke. The story won't get any prettier, you know."

"Aw, get off it, Danny!" Josie whined in disbelief. "Hell, I was already eighteen when you were a snot-nosed punk running the streets with Dopey and the rest of the clowns you hung around with. I saw lots of punks like you and your camaradas get thrown into the bote or can on account of that stupid gang thing."

"Well, I thought maybe . . .--I mean, people do change, Josie. Get a little schooling. Luck out on a job. Start earning decent money. You know the old saying, more pay more play. Folks can get real uppity when they can jingle a little feria or change in their pockets. All of a sudden putting on airs, acting like their ashamed of themselves just cause they grew up poor in dilapidated barrios. Hell, you've seen how foolish raza behaves when they run from their impoverished lives in the barrio, radically altering their lifestyles and behaving as though their farts no longer stink. I've yet to figure out why they do this. They seem driven by a desire to start their lives all over again, to reinvent themselves and their pasts. Apparently they've come to view their glory days as pachucos or pachucas as a symbol for being ignorant, piss-poor Mexicans. *I guess memories of the vida loca or wild and crazy life spoil their freshly cooked illusions of themselves; the fantasy lives they act out while attempting to please those who've despised them all their lives and only tolerate them now."

"Whew! What are you . . . some kind of shrink?" Josie kidded, shaking her head. Sounds like a lot of mierda to me. Mira Danny, you know damn well that no one's as uptight as a reconstructed cholo. Wow. Talk about overcompensating. Those batos try so hard to clean up their acts that they end up turning into Nazis. They go from one extreme to the other. I tell you Danny, they can change their addresses, change their dress styles, and come up with squeaky-clean vocabularies … they can play all kinds of phony social games, but it's all a morality play with a schizophrenic moral. You know damned well that as long as these fools do this because they're ashamed of themselves or because they're embarrassed about who and what they once were and where they came from, they become nothing but tapados; ignorant and dangerous phantasms that mask their true identities with a heartless and ill-informed nationalist propaganda. Hollow people whose commitment to an historical, racial, and cultural amnesia has cost them their identity and the gateway to ultimate self understanding. Now Please! Get on with your story, will you."

"Easy girl. Slow down. Not so fast. I hope you're not telling me that these piss-poor Chicanos--these made over pachucos, as you choose to call them--are ashamed of themselves for the wrong reasons?"

"That's exactly what I'm telling you! Those fools aren't just turning their backs on a legacy of shame. ¡Dios mio! If only it were that simple," Josie complained, her face a mirror of the incredulity. "Their vergüenza--their shameful rejection of the past doesn't merely rid them of their poverty and humiliation. It wipes out their entire history, the rich Hispanic and Native American legacy that courses through their veins and embeds itself in every cell of their bodies. Such an insane rejection wipes out an intimate, valuable, and defining chunk of their lives, including their mothers and fathers; their uncles and aunts; their cousins; friends; neighbors; their race; their struggles; the bigotry they've suffered; the social and political exclusion that's weakened and isolated them; the poverty and the sickness they've endured; their patriotism; their heroism; their tragedies; their joy; their laughter; their songs; their stories; their nurturing love; the sheer humanity of it all! No, Danny, they're not just turning their backs on their shameful and meaningless lives. A Chicano's past is a hell of a lot more viable than that! It is the womb of our humanity. To cut off the umbilical cord before our nurturing is complete is to give birth to a stillborn raza. Now, get on with your story!"

"Oh! Yes. Hmm …

Where was I? Cold! I recall my guts knotting up . . . an icy feeling cascading down my spine. Shit, I was scared--todo escamado. I could feel my scrotum tightening around my balls. But it was too late to back out. You know how it is with raza when our balls are on the line. What had started as a rock fight soon exploded into a full scale melee as we banged head-on, kicking, punching, biting, scratching, or otherwise busting each other up with anything we could grab a hold of. I recall sucker-punching the indio chaparro with the ugly mug, mashing my army surplus combat boot on the bato's spit-shined shoe, then squaring off to throw chingasos with him. Man, I was bad! I was an angry, scowling, cussing, punching and kicking mini-matón with no mercy in his heart. Shit, I never got a punch off. Some bato blindsided me. Whacked me across the backside of my right thigh with a two-by-four. I whirled around to confront my enemy but my leg buckled beneath me and I crumpled helplessly on the rock-strewn track bed, instinctively balling myself into a fetal position, as a sharp, searing pain shot through my right leg.

My camaradas went berserk when they saw me go down. Pinchi Creeper freaked out he was so pissed off. Throwing out his chest like he was King Kong. Hollering "Orale pues, you fucken putos . . .---wanna throw ¡¿chingasos?! Well, come on! ¡Venganse! We'll kick all your motherfucking ¡culos!

"¡Chale!" Dopey snarled, his white face crimson with anger, his tongue flicking out like the hot wick of a bomb about to explode, "We'll all kick ¡culo! Get those fucken punks! Dog town ¡rifa!

And we did! We kicked the shit out of those little bastards. ¡Rifamos a toda madre! I can imagine the fairy tales those little matones laid on their homies to camouflage the beating we gave them when they straggled back to the Alpine barrio with their faces bloodied and their clothes in shreds . . . poor, miserable fools.

"Run! ¡Corranle putos! Run to your mamas, you fucken sissies!" Dopey screamed after them, pouring insult on their humiliation. "We know what your assholes look like! Next time bring your balls!"

"¡Aiiiiiiiii-yai-yai-yai-yaiiiiiiiii! Dog town ¡rifa!" Creeper screamed, grabbing his balls, the Alpine peewees ducking out of sight under a row of Southern Pacific Railroad boxcars stationed next to the PMT docks.

"You okay, Danny?" Dopey asked, offering me his hand, his ferocity amazingly softening to a brow of concern.

"¡Mi pinchi pierna!" I blurted, wincing. I can't move my fucken leg, ese.

"Easy li'l brother . . . calmate carnalito. We'll take care of you. Don't worry, we'll get you home, ese. We'll get you home."

The violence I encountered that fateful day would bring fantastic changes in my life in the weeks, months, and years awaiting me in the future.

"Dopey . . ." I mused aloud, my eyes going blank as I gazed inward at a series of disconnected images, jerking back to the present as I confronted the horror of the last one, his violent death.

"Yeah," Josie ventured, intuiting my drift of thought, "we didn't call him Dopey just cause he had big ears.

"Hell no," I agreed with a laugh. "I was a measly brat--a chavalo travieso--next to that bad-ass pachuco.

Dopey was a prime candidate for the loony bin--de a tiro maniaco el bato. He was a rabid son of a bitch. Died like a mad dog, he did. Pobre Dopey. We were such great camaradas. The crazy fool wound up topping the L. A. P. D.'s hit list. They hated his "Mexican" ass. Chief Parker's chotas shot so many holes in him that what was left of him looked like a bloody sponge.

"You're damned lucky you survived all that violence, Danny," Josie sympathized, shaking her head. Tanta muerte . . . tantas lagrimas."

"Yeah," I agreed, realizing my good fortune, "those were bullets I'm glad I dodged. I might not have been as nuts as Dopey was, but I was snapping at his heels. We did a lot of crazy things together. Burglaries, gangbanging, all kinds crazy shit. You know, Josie, flashing back on those wild-assed days, I'm really amazed about how much that gang thing meant to me back then. I mean the way it defined who I was . . .

Continued to Part 2