EL CROW by Stephen D. Gutierrez
For a friend, a humble offering for the life he gave me one summer
It starts with a fight and ends in a dance and in between laughs. Like in all good stories, there’s life in it, ¿qué no?
There’s hope, and shit. There’s sadness, too. Well, where cholos are involved there’s bound to be.
“Caw, caw!” There’s Crow spirit.
El Crow flapped into my life in the winter. I didn’t expect him to or anybody else besides the usual troublemakers, but he perched on my shoulder and cawed. He dug his talons in and left his mark.
But let me back up.
I was playing a game of basketball with my team from Rosewood Park, the pussy park in our city, the one that every other park could trounce in blows if the dudes got mean and serious, the neighboring dudes. We tangled with them in a recreation league year round, playing at playing sports according to our abilities (lame to good) and mostly maintained good relations.
But we knew the truth. “These dudes are badder than us.”
A few guys from our park could hold their own with anybody but they mostly stayed away from the games now and got high and sunk into their own lives of danger and impending misery.
We had no backup but ourselves. We played hard, though, and unafraid.
“Who we playing tonight?”
“Bristow. Let’s go for it.” Our surroundings encouraged us.
Our city had magnificent recreation facilities. We had a great park in the southeast corner of our southeastern L.A. city. It was right by the big bakery-factory-thing with smokestacks and massive walls coming up so gray and solid out of the ground near the freeway. A big sign met you on the I-5, traveling south. LAGENDORF BAKERY. A freckled kid held out a slice of bread. You probably saw it but didn’t think of us in Commerce leading our own modest lives of mini tragedy and triumph.
Mine was fucked up at this time. I was a junior in high school and as miserable as a guy gets in high school short of picking up a firearm and blasting away at pain buried so deep in him, it is the only way out. That answer to pain and self-hate wasn’t in yet, but even if it was, I don’t think I would have chosen it to get away from myself for a frenzied moment and exact revenge on those who persecuted me. I don’t think I would have done something so evil to feel better about myself.
But I would have thought about it, seriously, and laughed. I would have bought a gun and looked at it. I was in no mood to fuck around. I was in real pain.
I was awkward and ugly, two features of adolescence for many teens, but I was really awkward and ugly. I was totally uncomfortable in my body. I hated life.
I had a big nose. I have written about it before and I am embarrassed to say it again. But it is the story of my life in a real way, so I must tell of another incident concerning it. I must grant it a starring role again.
My nose. I was feeling fucked up about myself, fucked up. I couldn’t hold my head up in the world.
I mostly wanted to cry on God’s shoulder and ask him why he was doing this shit to me. “Why?” But as I couldn’t find him anywhere I turned to the usual expedients substituting for the divine, mild drugs and alcohol use and masturbation in the heady name of “love,” and favored one over all others because it was my very own talent to dream that fueled it. I rocked in bed for hours listening to the music I adored then, The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Santana . . . Well, the whole cast of rocking characters you’d expect a hip kid to listen to in 1976.
I wasn’t really that hip because when current bands came up I drew a blank.
“Fuck, who’s Boston? Do I need to know them?” No, it turned out, unless you were a Boston fan and would spit back some lacerating comment about my own retro tastes.
“Thick as a Brick? Jethro Tull?”
“Fuck yes, it’s a symphony.”
I was caught in a time warp dictated by the small album collection in my room, courtesy of my older brother who did show some taste before he quit buying albums and concentrated on his own misery in other ways, another story. But I started to decry my abysmal level of hipness and stand by it proudly instead, unashamed of the guilty verdict in all things Steve: “Uncool as a teenager. Not in step with his time.”
Fuck no. The truth is, anybody who knew what was going on around him in any real way during his formative years, his terrible teenage years, really wasn’t that miserable. The truly alienated hadn’t a clue. “Star what?” I asked a year later, and people looked hard at me as if I was a freak.
I was. When punk blasted on to the scene, I missed it, even though I caught the famous radio show on Sunday night, Rodney on the Roq, sitting up in bed with my decent radio propped up next to me on the night stand. It was hosted by Rodney Bingenheimer, cool Rodney interviewing and talking about all the snarly punkers. He came off as knowledgeable, without being pretentious.
I used to flirt with a kid in sociology class the next morning, discussing the show. He was a handsome French (American) kid attending our all-boys Catholic school in Montebello, and he was into punk to the max.
He loved it. He was passionate about it.
“Did you listen to Rodney last night?”
“Yeah, I did. It was great.” I sensed Rodney’s importance in the vitality he brought to his show, but the music didn’t move me yet as it would later. I’ll stand by the Sex Pistols till the end of time.
Johnny Rotten is pretty damn sweet. Sid Vicious is a pussycat who ought to be in the Heavenly Shelter for Abused Beings managed by a just and beneficent God. But it doesn’t work that way.
He’s dead. Ducharme, the kid sitting next to me in sociology class, was a very shy, square-jawed kid in need of a light shave to take care of his stubble, a faintly blonde or light brown mask over his white skin. He was extremely intelligent and kind, headed to U.C.L.A. after graduation to study art and indulge in the punk scene nearby, the West L.A. world. He later died during the AIDS crisis in the 80’s and I heard his family repudiated him so terribly they still won’t speak of him honestly now.
So just a shout out to Bill then: “You were a cool dude in class. I enjoyed talking to you.”
“You flirted with me.”
“I know, I know.” I explain to him that I wasn’t a tease because I wasn’t really gay, and he knew it and accepted it. But the question of sexual identity is open then, more open than ever, and I fantasized about some homosexual activity. “You figure in some great moments we could have had. But I was really a raging hetero, unfulfilled. I just latched onto affection where I could find it.”
“Like me. I loved you.”
“You flatter me.”
“I had a crush on you.”
“Yeah, I could kind of see that. I had a crush on you.”
One time we reached across the aisle and squeezed hands. We smiled at each other awkwardly.
It happened suddenly before class started as the teacher cleared his throat and cast an admonitory look in our direction from the podium, as if to say we better shut up and start listening.
“Gentlemen, I don’t like to raise my voice.” He was a black stud who had played defensive back for the University of Utah and now coached the varsity team successfully. You didn’t want to make him mad.
“Do I have your attention then?”
He held it for a moment.
“I think I do.” Mr. Washington seemed to be staring at us without staring at us, looking past us out the window, over our heads.
“Oh, shit.” We never spoke of it again.
“We better be good.”
We looked at each other shyly. He was a sweet guy.
He dug the punks. He loved them.
I loved many things about him.
“Was I really that ugly?” I just got to ask him that.
“I liked you.” That’s enough for me.
I was a homosexual in a heterosexual culture, but that isn’t true. I’ve explained it.
I was an adolescent. The gates are open.
I just wanted to feel and touch and know, but couldn’t. I felt trapped and locked within my own body. Within the confines of my ugliness I couldn’t exist properly, or improperly.
“Caw, caw!” Here comes the Crow into this story, a raging cholo from the worst part of our city, the Bristow Park area. It really was hardcore.
“Those Bristow dudes are fucked up, ha?”
“Yup.” We told ourselves. “Mean.”
They formed a gang that vied with the worst locos in L.A., and if you know L.A., well, I probably don’t need to say more. They held the ancient posture of deadly fatalism in their lurking shadows.
On the basketball court we held our own that night. We beat them.
Rosewood Park came out on top, Bristow Park on the bottom. The electronic sign flashed the score, and heads dropped on our way out of the gym. Not ours, the Rosewood boys, buoyant and cheerful.
It was just a game after all. “But we won!”
It was a great gym to relish our victory in, too, a beautiful indoor court summing up our city’s commitment to its youth, its cherished sports program.
“Beat them at Veteran’s Memorial even!” We couldn’t get enough of ourselves. Within our stellar system of recreational facilities in Commerce, this park ranked high for its newness and modernity. It had been built in honor of a disgraced mayor, Mayor Quigley, who had commissioned it at the height of his terrible power. He had a tyrannical streak that later brought him down, but in his life he accomplished much and I do salute him with vigor and respect.[1]
Quigley Park changed to Veterans Memorial Park when he got caught embezzling or whatever he got caught doing that sent him to federal prison, Club Fed. When he got out he roamed the streets of Commerce tragically, a broken man with a bottle sticking out of his coat pocket.
That isn’t exactly right, as the circumference of his pain didn’t extend to all quarters of our city. But I did see him walking from the local dairy to his house across the street once, and it remains one of the most awful things I have seen in my life. I said a prayer for him that night in church even though I didn’t believe in that shit anymore. I went to mass to see one of the Romero girls sitting lovely in the pew and showering me with a smile if I was lucky. But I owed it to him.
“God bless Mayor Quigley. Damn, you’ve ruined him for no reason.” In an old gray suit he once wore proudly, unshaven and gaunt, he made his way across the street, step by step, painfully, with that bottle of cheap wine sticking out of his pocket.
“Our Father who art in . . . Give this man some mercy, Father. Give this man some love.” Later I would see him within the context of Greek literature, and it was just as bad, but more understandable. Pride brought him down.
It sent him to hell. But he lives on for what he did for our city, everything.
And the park that once bore his name attracted many Southern Californians. A sharp baseball diamond could be seen from the freeway, a nice stadium hosting some pretty swank teams, USC, a minor league club or two coming by. In the corner of the park rose the recreation center we all could be proud of as Commerce-ites, but envy as residents of other sections of the city.
Bounded by a beautiful manicured lawn with choice flowers popping up along the edges of the walk that took you on a little hike to nowhere, just a dead end picnic area at the back that the stoners rolled joints at before the games, the front promised eternal life upon entry. Doing anything in a place like this was bound to be good.
Big doors at the top of a wide set of stairs reflected the world blackly. Inside, it was state of the art from top to bottom. It was multi-level with a rifle range on the bottom floor, and that beautiful basketball court on the second floor, a hardwood beauty. A fully stocked gym filled another corner of the building, and there on the first floor could be found the recreation hall for the local kids, the people the place was built for after all. Pool tables and carom boards and ping-pong tables sat with plenty of room between them, and a jukebox kept up a good sound. Kids roamed and laughed.
It was plush with real carpet leading up to the Aerobics Center on the third floor and the big room where the Karate Club practiced. It was stonily enduring when you approached it from outside, and airy and magnificent inside.
I was having a drink of water in the lobby after helping beat these guys, Bristow Park.
“Fuck Rosewood. Bunch of punks.” A basketball slammed into my back and I hit my mouth on the faucet, not hard enough to bust a tooth but hard enough to piss me off.
I whirled around without thinking. I saw a lean, pale-skinned guy, a white Chicano, sneering at me. Un huero, anyway.
Before I could stop myself, it came out of me, a putdown of their park, not their gang, thank God. But it came out of me fiercely. “Fuck Bristow. We kicked your ass.”
“Orale, who is this punk?” A cholo dude stepped forward from the loose team ready to go, but another dude stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Let him answer,” he said, nodding to the guy who had thrown the basketball at me.
“He’s a big boy.” I knew this dude to be Crow from Bristow, from the gang that made its name in L.A. with unrivalled locura. I knew him to be El Crow himself, he who splashed his name on walls under the railroad overpass and everywhere else and once knifed a dude in El Monte, I heard.
He could fight and liked to caw like a fucking Crow sometimes, when he said something funny.
“Oh, yeah.” Right now he had a little expression on his face that was hard to read. Merriment danced in his eyes.
He kept everyone back with his arms spread out at his sides, down below.
The vato from his hood looked scared. The huero dude sized me up in the lobby without his friends around him, and ceased being a bad dude without their backing. “Fuck Bristow,” I said it again. I said it taking a step forward, staring straight at him.
He just stood there.
“You gonna go outside with me or what? Let’s settle it.”
I started walking down the steps into the brisk night. Everybody followed me, a sweaty knot of teenagers. Half of it were the homeboys from Bristow, ragged in their long, baggy khakis cut off at the knees with their gray sweat shirts or oversized tee shirts worn over their black jerseys, gray sweat shirts or big tee shirts marked with their names. EL BOSCO. EL OSO.
And the other half were the dudes from my park, mellower guys in gym trunks and our red Rosewood Park jerseys shining brightly, sporting windbreakers over them, longhairs with grins on their faces, a little scared for me, for themselves probably, if things got out of hand. I looked over at them.
“Watch this. I’m gonna kick his ass.” I just stepped up to him and plastered him in the face.
He was standing there waiting with his hands semi-up, trying to hide the fear in his eyes, and I let him have it. His face twisted, and I jumped on him so fiercely there was a gasp from the crowd. “Oh.”
I was standing above him waling on him righteously when I got swooped up with an arm around my waist, powerfully, and carried to a safe spot.
It was another one of our recreation leaders, clean-cut guys with athletic cred and good heads on their shoulders, usually students at Cal State L.A. or Long Beach or one of the community colleges, Cerritos or East L.A. It was one of these guys doing what he was paid to do.
He loomed over me with a finger in my face. “Stop it, fuckhead. No fighting here on my shift. What the fuck you doing anyway? You’re not so stupid.” He recognized me from around.
“This fucker threw a basketball at me and called me a pussy, our park. He can talk big. Let’s see if he can back it. I was finding out, dude.”
The dude was already up wiping his face. It was bloody at the lip.
“Oh, shit. Over that?”
“Yeah, over that.”
“All right. I want you to shake hands.”
“Fuck no! Crawl up to me on your knees, ese, and tell the world who’s a punk!”
“Oh! Rosewood is fucking bad.” Crow stepped aside and clapped.
He was standing next to the huero dude, who still didn’t know what to say. He wiped his mouth and looked around and landed on his homeboys to the side.
“No, man, look at him.” Crow instructed him. “Rosewood says crawl to him. Crawl.” He kicked him in the ass, hard.
The dude lurched forward and everybody started cracking up.
“Hey, everybody get in the bus!” Things were settling down now.
The recreation leader was monitoring our movement into the bus at the curb.
“Oh, fuck.” I wiped my own mouth and walked towards him. “You threw a basketball at me, man. Don’t do that shit.” I extended my hand coming at him, but he turned away and scowled.
“Fuck you.”
I heard him say it. “What?”
But Crow didn’t let anything happen. “Naw, it’s cool, man. You got him, Rosewood. You’re the winner tonight, you’re the champ!”
Crow lifted my hand up in the manner of a victory in the ring. “Hey, everybody, this is Rosewood! He beat our man tonight. So what? Give him some respect or something. Leave him alone. If anybody fucks with him on the bus, I’m here for him. I’m backing this dude up, ey! I like his style!” Then he started shadowboxing in front of me, crouched low.
“Wanna go at it, Rosewood? Think you can take on the Crow? I bet you can.” He started cackling like cholos do, and came up to me and put his hand on my neck, and squeezed.
“Good show, ey. That dude’s a punk. He called you out. You came out. You came out like a tiger out of the bushes at Rosewood!” He crouched low again and clawed at the air, laughed.
“You dropped him on his ass. You’re pretty good, ey. Wanna join our gang?” He said it, smilingly.
“Naw, man, I can’t do that.”
“Why? Where you from?”
“Nowhere, man. Rosewood.”
He formed a megaphone around his mouth with his hands and turned to the straggling vatos getting into the bus, pushing themselves past the Rosewood dudes standing meekly in line.
“This dude is from Rosewood! He is Rosewood!”
I followed him up the steps and sat with my friends in the front. The heavily set Mexican bus driver, who had probably watched the whole thing from his seat, huffed and swung his leg around in the seat proper.
He started the bus. The motor roared.
I sat in the front very nervously. I looked back when I could and saw a bunch of fuckups standing up and pressing their faces to the windows and gesturing to people on the freeway.
The huero dude sat sullenly with his leg in the aisle. My friends held their heads down and talked quietly to each other. When we got off at my park, rushing out with all the sudden energy available to sixteen-year-olds sweated up and nervous, I breathed out heavily and stretched in the aisle and tried to be nonchalant.
“We’re gonna get you, ey!” rung out from the back of the bus.
“We don’t forget!”
“Yes, we do!” Crow said. “We forget everything stupid like you!” I caught enough of the scene to see him head-locking a guy and rubbing his head playfully, with his tongue out.
“Go home, Rosewood! Everything’s cool!”
Thus began my association with Crow. Thus began my love affair with the man who would save me.
I didn’t love him in the way you’re thinking and not even consciously while we were friends, but I love him in retrospect for the deep sympathy he brought to my life and the great dignity he bestowed on me the next summer. It was completely unplanned, I’m sure, as he was an unpremeditated guy, a crazy fucking cholo.
Era El Crow. I started writing this piece using a little cholo lilt, teasingly, a Caló key, but changed my tune suddenly when I realized it was off, wrong, for depicting me and capturing my experience with him. I had to be me on the page to get it down right, the beauty of it.
I was not Crow. I was not Bristow. I was not barrio boy Gutierrez. But I was hurting something fierce, and that immeasurable pain guided me in the world. Where one finds succor, one goes.
I started hanging out with Crow whenever he showed up at our park. Our park might rightly be called the greatest of them all in Commerce, even without the grandeur of the recreation center that Veterans Park boasted. It was the oldest and the best overall, home to the world-class swim-training facility, the Aquatorium, that had sent a young woman to the Olympics and back with a medal early on in our city’s history, a member of our vaunted swim team that hosted important Southern California meets in my youth. Then the swim team morphed into a water polo club that produced another Olympic medalist years later, Brenda Villa. She went to Stanford and threw the ball into the net with great force, splashing water up and breaking all kinds of records, and brought home a gold medal at the end of her career, captain of the U.S. Women’s Water Polo team. Way to go, Brenda, homegirl from Rosewood.
Rosewood Park. Commerce. Los Angeles. California. We even had the palm trees shooting up into the orange sky. But I’m getting away from our essence.
Our park attracted a bunch of kids from East L.A. and a busload from Watts every summer because it was safe and clean and nice and close enough on the bus. You could get the famous Commerce bus at Kmart on Whittier Boulevard and travel there for free (!) and get home by 9:00 on a summer night exhausted from using the pool for only a dime and unbothered by urban troubles, really. The kids from Watts rode in on a chartered bus during the daytime and swam for a couple of weeks, a kind of day camp in Commerce. Everybody ate cheaply at the snack bar.
Buses roared up all day and night is what I’m saying. Dudes from Bristow took advantage of their own direct line, and came with confidence to their city’s premier park, stepping off with attitude. “Here we are, people! Bristow! Better hide!”
“Shut up! Act right!” A vato punched another in the arm and they all blended into the scene.
We hid from them. We cowered.
Crow came off the bus one day, and announced himself. “Well I’m just full of love!” He wore his little cholo shades, but flipped them up and peered around him at the curb.
“Rosewood! ¡Aquí está su hermano!”
“Who’s that, man?”
“Crow. Who else?” Everybody knew Crow.
“Stay away from that dude, man. He’s trouble.”
“Naw, he’s all right. He’s cool.”
“All right, man. It’s up to you.”
“It sure is.”
It was springtime and the vatos from Bristow hung out at my park, and Crow recognized me hanging out in the bleachers with my friends, and pulled me away from them for some good laughs in the corner where the cholos hung out, cackling and smoking and telling cholo stories that formed my art as much as anything. He gave me some righteous material.
El Crow. Fucking crazy motherfucker deserves some Caló, though. Pero I can’t do it no more because I just don’t feel up to it, but what the fuck.
The Crow. Came from Bristow with a lot of brio. Wore cholo clothes down to his holey socks sticking out the back of his scuffed black shoes, always gray khakis, never beige, and had a laugh that rang across the whole fucking park.
He liked to dance by himself under a tree and regale me with stories.
“Hey, Rosewood. Did I ever tell you about the time . . .”
“Too many times,” his homeboy said.
“Shut up, I’m not talking to you.” He was just a bundle of laughter and danger leading the show by the marked-up picnic table with a joint in one hand and a beer in the other and a big, fucking smile lighting up his totally black face. He looked like a crow.
He was blue-black like you’ll see some African Americans still, I mean most blacks in our country got white in them, but Crow shone. He shone like a blue-black crow, nothing less.[2]
He had sharp, bright teeth, not Dracula sharp but a little chipped on top where he had gotten into it at a party deep in enemy territory and come out alive, the scars on his stomach proof of the crazy life. “Check it out, Rosewood,” he said one night, and pulled up his tee shirt and there rose the ugly protuberant scar courtesy of another knife fight, a stab wound near his belly button.
“Homeboy stuck me. I stuck him back.” He pretended to stick an enemy, daintily almost, a beer in one hand that was raised high behind him, leaning forward as if fencing. “Poof. We both bleed for each other. Must be love, ¿que no?”
“Fucking Crow.” A homeboy piped up, close-chesting a Bud.
I held mine to my chest, cholo-style, in a colored tee shirt with a pocket, not cholo style.
I wore Levis and tennis shoes. They wore the standard attire, two or three dudes standing around Crow on a beautiful spring night, leaning back, smoking, burping.
“Rosewood?”
“What?”
“You live around here then?”
“Yup.”
“You all fancy at home? You got like manners.”
“Nope. I smoke dope with my jefita.”
“Ah! Fucking Rosewood! Go steal that broad’s bike away and we’ll go riding around town all Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, ¿que no? ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head!’” He paused to remember the rest, then kicked up his heels again, doing a little dance, lifting his beer. “Crow will make your bed!”
“Qué vato,” came out of one of his homeboys.
“I can’t do that.”
“I know, man. I wouldn’t ask you to do that for reals. You keep it cool for us here in Rosewood. You ever hear us whistling, dude, don’t come. Duck. I don’t want you in our trouble.”
“All right.”
“Let him come, ey,” another homeboy said. “He’ll be all right with us. We can show him the life.”
“It ain’t no life for him. He’s Rosewood. He does enough already.”
“What?”
“Don’t you know, stupid? He makes it so we don’t have to fucking whistle. Rosewood makes it smell good, the air.” He put a hand on my shoulder again. He was always doing that.
“You’re a beautiful man, ey. You know that?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You don’t judge me. Everybody thinks the Crow is bad. They don’t know that the Crow is just doing the best he can. He’s a bird in the sky with an eye for the pie. Caw, caw!” He flapped his wings for the first time.
“Gonna settle for a big fat worm. Share it with my homeboys!” He yelled out his gang’s name. “¡Rifamos! Que no, homeboys?”
“Simon.” They nodded.
“But we better catch the bus, ey.”
“Naw, I’m gonna steal that broad’s bike and ride it home.” A girl had left her old-fashioned bike with the big basket leaning against the snack bar wall as she went and talked to some friends standing under a tree not far away.
She looked over at us once in a while.
“Hey, baby, I love you!”
“Oh, fucking Crow.”
“What, dude? She loves me, too, I can already tell.” But he was so red-eyed you wonder how he saw anything, leaning back and checking out the scene.
Then he broke into a big grin, made a sputtering noise with his lips, and squashed a roach under his shoe in the mud.
“I gotta go, Crow, I gotta split.”
“All right, man. Easy, man. Cuidate.” He gave me a hug, a real cholo hug.
“Beware of the boogie man. That motherfucker will get you.” He made scary fingers and came at me wobblingly as I backed off, laughing.
“Fucking Crow.”
“Fucking Rosewood. You know what, ey? Naw, I’ll tell you later. Go home. Go smoke a leño con su jefita. Let’s go, dudes. Let’s split.” He turned to his partners. They were eager to go, standing around pulling at their waistbands under their tee shirts, as if they might draw cuetes for the fuck of it and shoot a round into the night.
They were grinning at me when I split. “Later.”
“Later.”
It went like that for a while. But it was in the summer when things really turned around for me.
They turned bad at first, and then got better. And it was all because of Crow, mi homeboy, mi carnal de Commerce.
It was one little incident that brightened my life, really, and it’s gonna be a disappointment for you. The peak of this story is weak, I’m sorry to say. It lacks oomph. But it worked for me, this seminal moment in my tortured teenage life.
The climax of my relationship with Crow came on a summer night. Spring had passed and now it was the mad season in Commerce, at Rosewood Park. Things got busier than ever. The recreation hall throbbed with life, and busloads of kids poured into the Aquatorium every day, a long line extending down the side of the building for the night session. It was exciting being there, with life in the air and no danger evident, except the danger of being alive. I refer to the basic dilemma of having been born on this earth and become subject to its terrible exigencies.
That is danger enough. Life.
I hated it. I didn’t really deserve to be alive.
I hated myself so thoroughly I really could have hung myself if I could have managed the knot on a fine piece of rope or knew of a place to do it without bothering anybody. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. My mother still loved me, I knew, and my sister and my brother, and my sick old man, shunted off to the side in this story because it can only bear so much pain, loved me. They all loved me in their own undemonstrative way, as I loved them back.
But nobody felt love in that house, lived it. Everybody just survived.
It was a regular old house on Senta Avenue in Commerce, one block from the park, Rosewood Park, the neighborhood described in the historical literature as “the Beverly Hills of Commerce.” What it was could be said of so many surrounding cities in Southeastern L.A., Bell and Cudahy and Southgate, for instance. It was a bunch of small, well-kept stucco homes built during the War and sold to local Angelenos working in the factories and warehouses a short drive away as well as to emigrant Americans arriving from the Midwest to work in the defense industry and otherwise partake of the booming economy in Southern California. It was neat and safe.
I lived there without purpose and meaning. I really had no reason to get up in the morning and do anything “fun,” as I couldn’t participate in life fully, feeling so horrible about myself. Life was a trial to pass through until I got a nose job, eons away, and began to live. Ha!
Well, one long summer night I’m walking to the parking feeling as low as can be.
I’m so down on myself I want to die.
I really don’t want to live. I cross the street to the big parking lot filled with cars bringing in the nightly visitors from the other cities, neighborhoods of L.A., and I see a baseball game going on under the watery lights. I keep walking.
I walk around the park, which I never do, usually going straight to my basic hangout spot with my friends or some appointed rendezvous with a stoner for some cheap weed. I don’t circle the park regularly on the sidewalk, and it is strange doing something so common to many, with plenty of older people walking outside for their exercise, and so known to me, having surveyed the park from every angle, but untried as of yet. It is breaking routine simply but grandly.
I see things differently, but am still miserable. I’m thinking of going across the street to my old elementary school, Rosewood Park Elementary, and just sitting in the back by myself, smoking a sad joint I have in my pocket, looking around from an old bench near the cafeteria and listening to the cars pass on the freeway. I am drenched in shame. I don’t want to be seen but I can’t stay at home either.
Things are turbulent there, with my old man in bed crying out in Alzheimer’s agony, victim of the early-onset beast that prowls the family tree every generation and eats of it viciously, leaping up on a branch and stalking along cannily until it sees what it wants, a bright, ripe, piece of brain encased in a fruity shell it can lick its chops at and admire before tearing the motherfucker to pieces with ravenous appetite. There’s that, which presents another problem of unbearable magnitude if I let it, that beast a-comin’ and so what or oh god anything but that, the stench and smell of decay in my nostrils all day, sickness and unbearable suffering at home, and a 50% chance I’ll get it at his age, oh fuck.
I know this even though my mother tries to hide it.
She tries to hide a lot of things, like her Valium use. She’s an anxious, fraught woman with immeasurable strength in her, and the sensitivity of a true neurotic, someone for whom life is difficult under the best of circumstances but whose deep pride will not permit a breakdown. Against the natural tendency to dissolution, she fights. She’s a mess, a heroic mess.
“Stephen, Albert, Norma,” she calls out to her kids.
“Where are you?” She floats among the rooms, pretending to be in charge with more vigilance than she possesses. There’s all this at home. But mostly I’m afraid of the mirror. I can’t stand myself so badly I’m driven to it to see if I’m wrong. But it never lies.
I am ugly. I am a piece of shit.
I round the bend to another section of the park. It’s at the far end, where our small, modest recreation hall sits, home to ping pong tables and the rest. Nearby, across from the new playground shining brightly in the sand before the dark veil cloaks it, a second baseball diamond waits for a game tomorrow, prepped expertly by our grounds crew, white chalk lines undisturbed. Mellow light fills the air yet. It’s dusk.
Dusk in Commerce at Rosewood Park. Dusk in L.A.
I see the homeboys sitting in their corner of the park, the homeboys from Bristow. I recognize them by stance already, appropriately nicknamed vatos with small goatees and solemn faces sometimes breaking out into laughter when Crow says something especially funny. They accept me as one of Crow’s friends who is all right.
I pose no threat to them. I’m just a guy from Rosewood.
I walk up to them. I hear the whistle famous for gathering them in times of distress.
“Hey, dudes.” They are standing around the picnic table.
I enjoy a familiarity with them now, even though it’s not the same as the easiness I feel with my real friends from Rosewood Park, those fuckheads.
“Ringo!” Crow calls out.
“What? What the fuck is this dude talking about?” I tell myself. “Is he mistaking me for somebody else?”
I almost turn around and go home. But he brings me forward with a hand on my shoulder.
“This dude is Ringo, ey,” he says to his friends, as if introducing me for the first time.
“He’s got a big, beautiful nose like Ringo’s! I think he looks cool, like the coolest dude in Commerce!”
I hang my head down and grin. I have been called everything in the world but nothing nice, nothing complimentary. Nobody has taken the time to transform what I consider ugly (and probably is) into something great. Nobody possesses the imagination to do anything but be mean, or remain silent, which is kindness in itself that I appreciate.
But too many people have spoken up loudly. Names have been thrown at me.
Names. I can’t even think of these names without breaking out into laughter again, the laughter of hysteria, of painful dismissal of myself that still lives in me awfully. So I won’t repeat them for you.
But it was awful. It was horrifying, this period in my life that God granted me to strengthen my fiber for the greater trials coming up. Ha, ha, ha!
God, that fuckhead, was jacking off in the corner after doing charitable work on skid row, proud of himself for his great compassion and loving heart that never turned away from suffering. Never.
“Oh, bullshit. Nothing in the Gospels remotely approaches my situation. Your miracles are dead examples of love, every single one of them, including your death on the cross. Especially your death on the cross. Your resurrection leaves me cold because you come back in the same body. Easter is the most depressing time of the year for me. I can’t feel hope in it. I probably never will.” I won’t.
I go to that Catholic school run by Irish Christian Brothers and pronounce judgments that remain into my adult years. I am not a stupid teenager unable to comprehend a greater reality that will be clear in time. It is all pretty clear to me now. I know a lot: It does not all turn out better in the end.
The life to come is filled with suffering and unease. I stand with the ones whom Jesus could never touch because we revolted him. We’re in the Fifth Gospel, the one according to Stephen.
“Jesus, man, don’t feel bad, just because you can’t help us.” But he turned away in disgust because his own powers fell short of healing.
“I curse you,” he said. Bad sport. “I endow you with guilt.”
But there is hope, oh, there is hope in the world, and please don’t call him Jesus in disguise or a manifestation of the godhead.
Call him Crow. “Look at this dude, man.” He made me grin.
“You look great, Ringo. Don’t hold your head down around the Crow. Hold your head up high, ey. Not too many dudes can claim a look like that, and you know that Crow don’t lie! Pop open a beer for my homeboy, ese! Let’s get high!” Crow passes me a beer.
A big, fat joint gets pulled out of a pocket and lit. Passed around. Smoked.
Cholo Steve gets high in the park con los vatos, pero Steve ain’t no cholo, and that’s the truth. He’s college bound. But for the first time in a long time he feels good about himself.
“Crow.”
“What?”
“This is some good shit.”
“Only the best for Ringo.”
“Oh, shit. I ain’t no Beatle.” But I laugh with him pleasantly.
I can’t say I’m cured of my loathsomeness because I never really will feel whole. For the rest of my life, I will be broken. But Crow gives me enough to hang on and endure. He allows me to escape my worst feelings of worthlessness.
“Ringo is the man,” he raises a beer to the heavens, the sparkly dewy heavens that the pot has brought out, “that we could depend on in Rosewood. When these vatos come after us,” he ducks and pretends to be dodging cholos, “we’ll just call out to him, ‘Ringo, save us!’ And this vato will show up with some drumsticks or something, beat their asses away!” He grins at me fondly, saluting me with that damn beer in his hand, the cholo aphrodisiac, Budweiser.
This all takes place on a darkening night at Rosewood Park in Commerce. I salute my little fucking city, I do. But this is all more important, what I’m talking about. My life. Crow’s life. Your life. Si quieres, jump in. Throw all your misfortune in there and find a way out, somehow.
“Caw, caw!” El Crow flapped into my life in the winter and spread his wings mightily in the spring. He enfolded me in the summer and showed me the color of his heart, red.
“Puro cora, El Crow.” Chicano dude from East Los. I’m singing him.
I don’t give a fuck if he’s out of fashion. I don’t give a fuck if you don’t want to hear about him.
I’m telling you about him. He was beautiful.
That’s why I’m bothering. Whenever I saw him from then on, “Ringo” came out of his mouth and I felt warm inside.
It’s not too many people who can make me feel warm inside. I split.
But in the year to come, my senior year, I returned to that moment again and again. I was so god-awful lost then I don’t know what I would have done without the compass of his love, which was evident in his eyes when he looked at me, and even in his stance when he beamed at the world, as fucked up as he was.
El Crow. Puro cora. All heart. No mystery in him but the puzzle of goodness twisted out of shape by circumstance.
El Crow. No apologies para el vato. None whatsoever.
Crow de más bad gang in L.A. don’t need none. When he killed somebody a few years later, well, that’s what happened. He felt bad about him and mourned him and still claimed his goodness with a tear-streaked face, last time I saw him.
Still told me he wasn’t a bad guy. “I’m not, inside.” Thumped his chest and scowled, with pain.
“Don’t turn your back on the Crow now, Ringo. He needs your love. Just tell him hi when you see him in the hood, trying to be cool at Rosewood, sitting on a bench trying to get away from that bullshit at my park.”
“I will, Crow.”
“I know you will, Ringo. You’re good people. I shot him and I ran out to help him and my homeboys pulled me back in the car. ‘Are you crazy, ey? Let’s go!’ Right there on Lorena Street where those dudes hang out. You know who I’m talking about.”
“Kind of.”
“That’s right. You’re not into this shit. Good. I shot him. I killed him. It ain’t nothing to be proud of. El Crow don’t flap over death, ese. He flies high with life.”
“Orale, Crow.”
“Orale, Ringo.”
I heard about his death. I heard how he fell off a big ladder at work. Standing atop one of those huge industrial ladders in a cavernous warehouse, he flapped his wings and either slipped or jumped, depending on the story, the few eyewitnesses who provided accounts.
“Caw, caw,” one even said he heard.
“He fell like a motherfucker and lay there with a little grin on his face on the floor, all bloody.”
“He jumped,” another said. “Fuck it. Ya estuvo.”
He did both, I think, with one important fact left out. When he felt himself slipping, he jumped. But bolstered by all the good he had done in his life, he flew around the warehouse a couple of times while the dudes below him stood transfixed, as stoned as him – they had all smoked at lunch – watching him but remembering none of what matters, his ability to transform.
“The Crow! Caw, caw!” He looked down with his big crow face and smiled, his black arms flapping.
Then he fell or jumped from the top rung where he landed for a second try and decided to reenact the original movement, the first scene that got everybody’s attention.
“Crow’s up on the ladder!”
“Get down from there, Crow! You’re too fucked up! We don’t even have to work today! The boss is out!”
“Caw, caw! El Crow ain’t no punk!” He flew.
Jumped or slipped. In a flash, Crow lay dead on the cement floor.
But I’d rather remember the good times.
“Hey, Ringo! Let’s score some beer and drink a tall one before you hit your books tonight.”
“It’s Friday, man. I ain’t hitting no books.”
“Want to hang with us?”
“Naw, I don’t think so.”
“Caw, caw! The Crow is too much for you!” He was.
But I honored him by being true to his spirit, staying alive instead of letting myself die inside.
“Knife pokes be damned,” I told myself. “At least he digs for blood honestly.”
El Crow. Ya nomas got one more thing to say in this little history.
He initiated me into his larger gang that night, the gang of beloved freaks that I would always belong to. Struggling to love ourselves, we managed to get by with a little help from each other.
“So, Ringo, easy, ha?”
“Easy.” I went home going the long way around the park again. I gazed up at the moon and the few stars twinkling in the night sky, L.A. blue, nearly black with a column of smoke coming up from one of the factories. I marveled at it, life.
I even sung a little song for him. “What would you say if I sang out of tune/Would you stand up and walk out on me?”
I developed my routine for him at home. I memorized the lyrics of Ringo’s signature tune and crooned them for him exclusively, occupying my little dusty corner in my bedroom when my brother was out of the house, leaning forward Joe Cocker style, confusing the great English bluesman with Ringo for a second, but really just borrowing his staggering posture to sing Ringo’s song: “Oh I get by with a little help from my friends/Mm I get high with a little help from my friends.” I sat on the bed and wept a few times, thankful for Crow’s understanding.
“Thank you, Crow,” I said openly. “You’re Bristow and I’m Rosewood. But we’re both Commerce, L.A., the city of the angels, eh?” I sniffled.
“At least one of us is, and I know it ain’t me.”
[1] He created the damn city out of nothing. He had the zest and vision for it. But he was doomed.
[2] But he was Mexican, pure Mexican, whatever that means in this day of de-racialized national identity. He flew out of a tribe that bore blue-black skin, flew away from ancient Mexico and its indigenous culture. He had a sloping forehead and nose that enhanced the crow effect. He looked like a fucking crow.
Stephen Gutierrez’s nonfiction has appeared in Third Coast, Fourth Genre, ZYZZYVA, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, and Los Angeles Times Sunday.