Read an Excerpt
The Concrete River
By Luis J. Rodríguez OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1991 Luis J. Rodríguez
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5909-2
CHAPTER 1
WATTS BLEEDS
Watts bleeds
leaving stained reminders
on dusty sidewalks.
Here where I strut alone
as glass lies broken by my feet
and a blanket of darkness is slung
across the wooden shacks
of nuestra colonia.
Watts bleeds
dripping from carcasses of dreams:
Where despair
is old people
sitting on torn patio sofas
with empty eyes
and children running down alleys
with big sticks.
Watts bleeds
on vacant lots
and burned-out buildings—
temples desolated by a people's rage.
Where fear is a deep river.
Where hate is an overgrown weed.
Watts bleeds
even as we laugh,
recall good times,
drink and welcome daylight
through the broken windshield
of an old Impala.
Here is Watts of my youth,
where teachers threw me
from classroom to classroom,
not knowing where I could fit in.
Where I learned to fight or run,
where I zigzagged down alleys,
jumped over fences,
and raced by graffiti on crumbling
factory walls.
Where we played
between the boxcars,
bleeding from
broken limbs and torn flesh,
and where years later
we shot up carga
in the playground
of our childhood.
Watts bleeds
as the shadow of the damned
engulfs all the chinga of our lives.
In the warmth of a summer night,
gunshots echo their deadly song
through the silence of fear;
prelude to a heartbeat.
Watts bleeds
as I bled
getting laid-off from work,
standing by my baby's crib,
touching his soft cheek
and fingering his small hand
as dreams shatter again,
dreams of fathers
for little men.
Watts bleeds
and the city hemorrhages,
unable to stop the flow
from this swollen and festering sore.
Oh bloom, you trampled flower!
Come alive as once
you tried to do from the ashes.
Watts, bleeding and angry,
you will be free.
THE COLDEST DAY
Shadows moved chairs and plates
from tables, whispering,
because that's what people do
in the dark.
To me, it was the coldest day in the world,
there in sunny LA,
the day the gas and the lights
were shut off because bills
went unpaid.
Candles lit the corner of rooms
and fired-up bricks glowed with warmth
but the iciness broke through
the splintered walls.
I took a bath in frigid waters.
I wanted to jump out and run away,
but Mama kept sticking me in,
rubbing me hard with soap
and saying a shiver of words
to comfort me:
This is the only way, she'd say,
the only way ...
It was the coldest day in the world.
It could not be the only way!
That night we drove around for blocks
to find a place to eat.
We stopped in front of a restaurant.
I looked at the window
and refused to enter.
"What's the matter?" Mama demanded.
I pointed to a sign on the restaurant door.
It read: "Come In, Cold Inside."
DEATHWATCH
1.
There is a room in the old house
where the dead sleep,
not dead like without life,
dead like winter,
breathing the moments in
but decay everywhere.
In spring, blossoms burn with color
but each wrinkle, every new invasion
of gray over black on your head
is only a fraction step
in your lifelong demise.
Living with you, Pop,
was like being on a deathwatch.
A slow dying of day, a candle flickering.
What of the man who taught high school
in Ciudad Juárez, wrote biology books
and stormed the rigid government-
controlled system there—
the one who dared new life?
Where have you been, my father?
You were always escaping,
always a faint memory of fire,
a rumor of ardor;
sentenced to leaving
but never gone.
2.
He will never understand
the silence that drove me to the alley,
that kept me tied
to the gravel of deadly play;
why I wanted to die, just to know him.
One day I got drunk with a work crew
and everyone talked about their
imprisoned dads, their junkie dads, their no-dads
and I said I had a dad, but I never heard him
say love, never heard him say son,
and how I wished he wasn't my dad,
but the others yelled back:
How can you judge?
How do you know what he had to do
to be there! Could I do better?
Could I walk in his shoes
and pretend a presence?
3.
He wasn't always there.
Lisa died as an infant
after accidently eating chicharrones
he sold on cobblestone streets in Mexico.
Seni was abandoned and left with his mom.
A story tells of a young Seni who answered the door
to a stranger, wet from a storm.
She called out, "Mama Piri"—
she always called her grandmother mama—
who rushed into the room and told her,
"Don't worry ... it's only your father."
Alberto and Mario, born of different women,
one of whom died giving birth,
stayed in Mexico when Dad left.
By then he had married Mama. She was 11 years younger
and he was almost 40 and still running.
Three more children were born across the border
to become U.S. citizens.
Then a long drive to Watts
where another daughter came.
These were the children he came home to,
the ones who did not get away.
How can I judge?
4.
An Indian-shawled woman trekked across
mountains and desert on an old burro,
just outside the village of Coahuayutla.
In her arms was a baby in weavings,
whimpering in spurts, as the heat
bore down harder with each step
and snakes dangled close to them
from gnarled trees.
Bandits emerged from out of the cactus groves.
"Give us your money, if your life has any value."
The woman pleaded mercy, saying her husband
was with Pancho Villa
and she had to leave because federales
were going to raid her town.
"We don't care about no revolution,"
a bandit said. "Nobody cares for us,
but us ... give us what you got."
She held close the tied wrappings filled with infant.
Another bandit saw the baby and said:
"This is your child, mother?"
"And of a revolutionary," she replied.
"Then go ... your mother-love
has won you a life."
My grandmother continued on her way;
Dad had crossed his first frontera.
5.
Trust was a tree that never stayed rooted;
never to trust a hope of family
never to nurture the branches of a child
awake with ripening fruit.
He trusted less the love we gave
as he mistrusted doctors.
He seldom went to doctors.
One time doctors put him in a hospital
for tests. He had a cough that wouldn't
go away. They had him splayed and tied with tubes
to monitors and plastic bottles.
After a few days, he called my brother and me
to take his car and wait in front of the hospital
steps. When we got there my dad
ran from the front door and into the car.
He had removed all the attachments,
put on his clothes,
sneaked past the nurses station,
and waited by a phone booth for our arrival.
He claimed the hospital was holding
him hostage for the insurance money.
Doctors called and demanded
his return. Dad said never.
He had his own remedies.
6.
He was the one who braved the world's
most heavily-guarded border,
the one who sold pots, pans, and insurance,
and worked construction sites,
the one who endured
the degradations of school administrators,
who refused his credentials,
forced to be a janitor—
what they called a "laboratory technician"—
cleaning up animal cages and classrooms;
the closest he would get to a profession.
Every so often, Dad hauled home
hamsters, tarantulas, king snakes,
and fossiled rocks.
My father, the "biologist," named
all the trees and plants
in our yard gave them stickers
with unpronounceable syllables.
He even renamed us:
I was Grillo—cricket;
my brother became Rano, the frog;
Ana was La Pata, the duck;
And Gloria, he transformed into La Cucaracha:
Cockroach.
By renaming things, he reclaimed them.
7.
All around the room are mounds of papers:
Junk mail, coupons, envelopes (unopened & empty),
much of this sticking out of drawers,
on floor piles—in a shapeless heap
in the corner. On the wooden end
of a bed is a ball made up of thousands
of rubber bands. Cereal boxes
are thrown about everywhere,
some half full. There are writing
tablets piled on one side, filled
with numbers, numbers without pattern,
that you write over and over:
obsessed.
For years your silence
was greeting and departure,
a vocal disengagement.
I see you now walking around in rags,
your eyes glued to Spanish-language novelas,
keen to every nuance of voice and movement,
what you rarely gave to me.
This silence is now comfort.
We almost made it, eh Pop?
From the times when you came home late
and gathered up children in both arms
as wide as a gentle wind
to this old guy, visited by police and social workers,
talking to air, accused of lunacy.
I never knew you.
Losing you was all there was.
TIA CHUCHA
Every few years
Tía Chucha would visit the family
in a tornado of song
and open us up
as if we were an overripe avocado.
She was a dumpy, black-haired
creature of upheaval,
who often came unannounced
with a bag of presents
including home-made perfumes and colognes
that smelled something like
rotting fish
on a hot day at the tuna cannery.
They said she was crazy.
Oh sure, she once ran out naked
to catch the postman
with a letter that didn't belong to us.
I mean, she had this annoying habit
of boarding city buses
and singing at the top of her voice
(one bus driver even refused to go on
until she got off).
But crazy?
To me, she was the wisp
of the wind's freedom,
a music-maker
who once tried to teach me guitar
but ended up singing
and singing,
me listening,
and her singing
until I put the instrument down
and watched the clock
click the lesson time away.
I didn't learn guitar,
but I learned something
about her craving
for the new, the unbroken
... so she could break it.
Periodically she banished
herself from the family
and was the better for it.
I secretly admired Tía Chucha.
She was always quick with a story,
another "Pepito" joke,
or a hand-written lyric
that she would produce
regardless of the occasion.
She was a despot
of desire;
uncontainable
as a splash of water
on a varnished table.
I wanted to remove
the layers
of unnatural seeing
the way Tía Chucha beheld
the world, with first eyes,
like an infant
who can discern
the elixir
within milk.
I wanted to be
one of the prizes
she stuffed into
her rumpled bag.
SPEAKING WITH HANDS
There were no markets in Watts.
There were these small corner stores
we called marketas
who charged more money
for cheaper goods than what existed
in other parts of town.
The owners were often thieves in white coats
who talked to you like animals,
who knew you had no options;
who knew Watts was the preferred landfill
of the city.
One time, Mama started an argument
at the cash register.
In her broken English,
speaking with her hands,
she had us children stand around her
as she fought with the grocer
on prices & quality & dignity.
Mama became a woman swept
by a sobering madness;
she must have been what Moses saw
in the burning bush,
a pillar of fire,
consuming the still air
that reeked of overripe fruit
and bad meat from the frozen food
section.
She refused to leave
until the owner called the police.
The police came and argued too,
but Mama wouldn't stop.
They pulled her into the parking lot,
called her crazy ...
and then Mama showed them crazy!
They didn't know what to do
but let her go, and Mama took us children
back toward home, tired of being tired.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Concrete River by Luis J. Rodríguez. Copyright © 1991 Luis J. Rodríguez. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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