Cryptopolis and other st.., p.21
Cryptopolis and Other Stories, page 21
He and his brother had shared the same room for years. Alex often kicked him out to have sex with his girlfriends. For the past five years he’d been doing this, and sometimes Ernesto would sit out in the hall and listen to his brother have sex, the grunting and the moaning and the whispers and the screams, and afterwards his brother would shame him, make him feel like half a man because Ernesto hadn’t convinced his chick to let him slip his dick inside her cunt yet, and sometimes that got Ernesto real fuckin’ mad and he’d take it out on Margarita, and that was bad, and he knew that, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. His girlfriend said she didn’t like it when a guy begged, it was so pathetic, but he couldn’t help it, and hell it finally worked, didn’t it?
And now it was morning, and he was feeling pretty good about himself. The sun was just rising. He liked getting up this early. Always had. Alex was still sleeping. He’d be sleeping till noon.
Ernesto grabbed his backpack and got out of the house before anyone was even up. His mom had been out of work for months, so she didn’t get up till noon either. He walked down to the bus stop and waited for the first bus of the day, the one that would take him all the way to the pier in Redondo Beach. He liked to explore the South Bay on his own. He’d been doing it since he was twelve or thirteen. He didn’t understand why the other kids in his neighborhood were so scared to leave their block. The rest of L.A. was accessible by bus for only a couple of dollars. His friends seemed intimidated by the white neighborhoods, but Ernesto was fascinated by them. They had no right to keep him out. If he could afford the ninety-cent bus fare to get him there, he had as much a right to be there as anyone else.
He liked to prowl around the streets of Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa, Venice, Santa Monica, even the hills of Palos Verdes. Sometimes the cops hassled him, but he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He just stood his ground. He refused to feel guilty for no reason at all.
The Torrance #3, its dirty red and white paint peeling off the side, pulled up to the bus stop. Ernesto dropped his change into the glass and metal machine at the front, then went and took his usual seat in the far-right corner, way in the back. There were a lot of people on the bus, even this early. Everyone was always so quiet. Everybody was middle aged, going to work at 5:00 in the morning, dead stares in their eyes, not reading books or newspapers or anything. Just watching the ugly scenery go by.
Ernesto never realized how ugly the scenery was until he started visiting all the other cities that surrounded him. From his birth to the age of twelve he had very rarely left the city of Wilmington, much less his block. A couple of times his parents had saved up the money to take the family on a vacation to Disneyland. But they had to take the bus there. Through downtown L.A. And he remembered feeling scared of the people milling around the dirty city. It was even dirtier and scarier than Wilmington. Disneyland was a dream, but he didn’t get to go there often. Just too expensive. And ever since his dad took off, there was no extra money for anything, not even for food, not really…
According to Ernesto’s driver’s license, he weighed 140 pounds and was 6’1. He ate what he could when it came his way. Most of the time he ate dinner over at Margarita’s house. He was ashamed of that. Ashamed of his clothes. Ashamed of the way he looked. Ashamed of the disapproving stares in the eyes of Margarita’s parents. Her parents had been married for years, over twenty. That was so strange. Ernesto didn’t know anyone else on the planet who had been married that long. They were very Catholic, very protective of their daughter. Ernesto wore a cross around his neck, but he didn’t really believe in God. He just wore it ’cause he knew Margarita’s parents would respect him a little more.
It seemed to him, and he could be wrong, but it seemed to him that nobody on this entire bus got any respect. And it was grinding them down. Every day, they woke up at 4:00 in the morning, got dressed, made a little sack lunch for themselves maybe, put on their make-up, their freshly ironed slacks, went outside to wait for a bus in the cold, and all for what? So they could report to a cash register, a little cubicle somewhere? Often, he’d see middle-aged men in suits and ties riding the bus. That always confused him. What was the point? To have all the responsibilities of a rich man, but none of the rewards? He always wondered what their stories were. Recently divorced? Was it a new job, and they were just now climbing out of the hole? Or did they make so little money at their important suit-and-tie job that they couldn’t afford a car? Were they angry as they sat there on the bus? Did they think it was unfair, to have to sit there side by side with dirty Wilmington scum like Ernesto? It was impossible to tell, because these people rarely had any expression on their face except for a kind of dull, numb acceptance of the day that lay ahead. Ernesto hoped he would never have that kind of look on his face.
But what if Margarita wanted to marry him? Have kids with him? Wouldn’t he need to get a job just to keep her around? Was she worth it? Was anything worth that look on your face at 5:00 in the morning?
Anyway, he didn’t have to deal with it right now. He didn’t have to think about it. He was free. Free to do whatever the fuck he wanted. This was his celebration.
He rode the bus from Wilmington, into Carson, then Torrance, then Redondo Beach. It always amazed him how much the scenery could change in only thirty minutes. Ernesto’s apartment in Wilmington was right next to a chemical factory that spewed dirt-like particles into the air day after day. On the bus, when he was going from Wilmington to Long Beach, he would try to do his homework, but as he passed by the plant tiny black particles would appear on his pure white notebook paper. And he’d have to brush it away with his palm. He always wondered, Am I breathin’ that shit in?
Huge pyramid-shaped piles of sulfur, fluorescent piss-yellow, three stories high, had been dumped in the middle of the plant. It was so high, you could see it from the street. He always wondered what happened to that shit when it rained. Did it just stay there, or did some of it ever blow away? They never covered it up with nothin’. It always just sat there like a giant alien creature, watching everything that went on around it…
Immense billboards in Spanish littered every corner, almost all of them advertising alcohol. Porno shops with pink stucco walls and no windows. Iron bars on every first-floor window. Bars on the screen doors. Trash carpeting the sidewalks like makeshift rugs. White men in police cars occasionally busting a homeboy on the street corner, just outside Wilmington High. That’s where the kids liked to gather, right by the homemade paper banner for The Colts, the home team, and sometimes things got rowdy, and the apartment buildings next door would complain, and the cops would come. That’s the only time he ever saw the cops in his neighborhood, except when somebody was murdered. The cops never prevented crime. They always just showed up afterwards to clean up the mess and identify the remains and take a lot of notes. They were like janitors, but not as friendly.
That was Ernesto’s neighborhood. For the first decade of his life, he had known nothing else. Then, one day, he hopped on a bus. And was amazed. Revelation. The cities surrounding him were not so far away, easily accessible, and yet they were like different worlds. Alternate dimensions living side by side. Carson wasn’t too different from Wilmington. Maybe a little bit better… just a little bit. Not as many iron bars on the windows. Not as much trash in the street. The first time he saw Carson Ernesto thought, I wish I could live here. Then he saw Torrance. Parts of it looked like Carson. Then, rapidly, things changed. Suddenly, he was in the suburbs with nice houses and pretty lawns and white children playing on the sidewalk and no trash anywhere and cops all over the place, watching. And then he was in Redondo Beach and Ernesto couldn’t believe it. Why was the sky so much different here? How could that be? The sky here was bright blue. The air was clean. There were some days when Ernesto honestly thought Wilmington was on another planet. He’d go from one city to the other, and the sky would shift from gray to blue, just like that. From black particles clinging to your notebook to the pure salty ocean breeze.
And then came the other cities: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, Venice, Santa Monica. Each of them a welcome refuge from the continual chaos brewing at home. Ever since Dad took off, things hadn’t been so good. Fuck, it hadn’t been so good when Dad was around, but at least he was bringing food home. And his mom was always on him to get a job and help out. Why? Why should I? Why isn’t Dad doing that? Where is he?
His mom never had an answer to that.
So instead, he’d spend his days studying all the people in the white neighborhoods, wishing he was one of them. Sometimes he’d bring his best friend Julio with him, and that’s when they’d mug the little old ladies and the older dudes who looked like they had money. And in this way Ernesto began to contribute. His mom never asked where he got the money from. He never bothered to tell her.
But he only mugged people with Julio. Never alone.
He and Julio… they were brothers. Not by flesh, but by blood. Julio was always watching action movies, all kinds of action movies. Even black and white ones. He showed Ernesto one where these two guys became brothers by cutting each other’s palms with a knife and mingling their blood together. So, Julio insisted he and Ernesto do this late one night, out in an old baseball field grown over with weeds. It hurt like a bitch, but afterwards Julio said, “We’re brothers now. Now we need to swear to die for each other.” And they did.
Ernesto felt so close to Julio, he didn’t even drop him as a friend when he walked in on him making moves on Margarita at this party. He watched Julio put his hand on her left breast, watched him trying to kiss her. Margarita even seemed to be getting into it. Who knows how far it would’ve gone if he hadn’t walked in on them right then and there? They were both drunk, so Ernesto forgave them. He was mad at first, but he got over it. Ernesto saw how Julio looked at Margarita all the time, but he knew Julio would never cross that line again. Julio had apologized. They were partners in crime. Brothers to the end. Just like in the movies…
Ernesto was too scared to mug people alone. That wasn’t even the main reason he visited these neighborhoods, little paradises like Redondo Beach. He came because he just wanted to get away from his life for a little while and pretend he was someone else.
Sometimes the bus was too slow for him. That’s when he started hitchhiking. His mother said she and Dad used to hitchhike all the time back in the late 60s. Wearing nothing but a bikini and sandals, or shorts and sandals, she and her friends would stick their thumb out on Pacific Coast Highway and get rides all the way to the beach and back again. Nobody ever harmed them or were scared of them. Everything changed in Southern California when the Manson murders happened. You couldn’t trust anybody these days, she said. Ernesto barely knew who Manson was and really didn’t care. He just wanted to turn the clock back and recapture that kind of freedom.
So, he started hitchhiking. Out of necessity. The Torrance buses only ran so long, until about nine o’clock at night. If you wanted to stay out later, you either had to call a cab or hitch a ride. Well, he sure as hell couldn’t afford a cab. So that’s when he started hitching. Sometimes people looked at him funny, and sped past him, but the people who did stop were always nice. A few of them were even white. He hadn’t had any problems, not at all. He thought his mom was just being paranoid. So, he never told her about it. It was his secret, something he usually did only when he was alone.
The #3 reached the Redondo Beach pier just before seven. It was bitter, freezing cold here. He was glad he brought his black jacket with him; he zipped it all the way up to his chin and went down to the shore. He watched the early morning sun spread out across the lightening sky, tossed rocks into the ocean, then bought a $1.50 churro from an Asian girl in a booth—part of his earnings from the last time he and Julio had gone out “shopping” in this neighborhood. He spent a couple of hours strolling up and down the empty beach, then decided he wanted to check out the scene in Venice.
The Venice Boardwalk was always cool. There were always insane white people there, crazed old hippies standing on wooden benches, giving speeches about bullshit. About the war in Iraq. About the CIA doing this and that. How they were behind the illegal drug trade and other paranoid crap. Jesus, if so, at least they were doing something right. Drugs had always been good to Ernesto. Sometimes he’d buy a twenty bag from his brother and sell it for a profit in Venice. You could always make good money on that shit on the Boardwalk, no doubt about it, way more than he could in Wilmington. If his mother knew what he was up to she’d freak, but so what? It’s not like he was doing it all the time. Not as much as the CIA, right? Right.
Ernesto sat on the soft sand, watching a couple of white teenagers, only a few years older than him, making out on the sand not far from where the waves were coming in. Sometimes he brought Margarita out here with him, but not often. This was his own private paradise. Not even Julio came with him to the beach. He liked to just sit here and think. About his dad. About his mom. School. Just nonsense. Maybe next time, though, he’d bring her out here with him. Maybe this is where he’d propose to her.
Aw, fuck, man, what the hell’re you thinking? You saw what Dad did to Mom. You want to end up like that? That’s crazy talk. Get your ass out of here and go to Venice and make some money.
He had a twenty bag in his jacket. He could unload it on some old hippie and make this a business trip. Why not? He got up from the sand and wandered back to the bus stop. He glanced over his shoulder at the couple on the beach. They looked so damn happy. But they were white. Probably lived somewhere nearby, in a real house, with a real family. They could afford this. All of it.
He hopped on the #3, got off on Crenshaw, caught the #5, and headed for PCH. Within ten minutes he was standing on the corner of PCH and Crenshaw with his thumb in the air, walking northwest, his back to the rising sun.
At around ten a.m. (he wasn’t exactly sure about the time since he didn’t own a watch) a VW van that looked like it had just slipped out of the 1970s slowed down and pulled up to the curb between a McDonald’s and some New Age hole-in-the-wall called The Psychic Eye. Ernesto was surprised to see an older white man with graying hair sitting behind the wheel. Older men usually never stopped for Ernesto. They were too afraid of having their wallet ripped off or somethin’. Sure, Ernesto was a mugger, but he’d never rip off somebody who was doing him a favor. That’d just be wrong. Most white dudes were scared of Ernesto. It took him a long time to figure that out. At first, he was offended. Then he tried to use it to his advantage. After all, if they’re gonna be scared of you, you might as well give ‘em good reason to be.
But this dude was different. He was slowin’ down, and Ernesto was fuckin’ glad about that. He’d walked an impossibly long stretch of PCH plenty of times before, and he wasn’t in the mood to repeat that experience.
The dude was big and flabby. As if he’d played football many years ago, but now all that muscle had turned to mush. He wore a wine-red corduroy jacket over a black t-shirt, dark blue jeans, and flip-flop sandals. He had a wide, boyish smile that made him look much younger than he probably was. A full head of silver hair. He had to be in his fifties, at least. An old man.
An old man who stuck his arm out the window and said, “Say, kid, where’re you going?”
“I’m headin’ toward Venice Beach. Gotta meet someone there. You goin’ in that direction?”
The man laughed. “Yeah, that general direction. I can probably drop you off pretty close. Hop in if you want. I might talk your ear off, though.”
“Shit, I don’t mind.” Ernesto walked around the side of the van and climbed into the passenger seat.
“We can’t go anywhere until you’ve got your seatbelt on,” the man said.
Ernesto strapped in. “I hate these things.”
“So do I,” the man said, putting his foot on the gas. They eased back into traffic. “I hate seatbelts. I hate having to put my cigarette out in restaurants and bars. I hate paying taxes. I hate wearing a helmet when I ride a motorcycle. I hate getting a ticket for parking my car over eighteen inches from the curb. And I hate jay-walking tickets. But what the fuck’re you gonna do? We live in America, don’t we? It’s hard to do what you want without offending somebody.”
Ernesto laughed. “I know what you mean.”
“My name’s Harold,” the man said. “What’s yours?”
“Ernesto.”
“You supposed to be in school right now?”
Ernesto waved his hand in the air. He leaned his head back against the vinyl seat and watched the scenery whiz by. Ernesto dreamed of the day he could have his own car, maybe even a van like this, and just go and not look back; he wanted to drive the entire length of PCH and see what was waiting for him on the other end of it. “Oh, I don’t like school that much. I leave when I want to. I felt like goin’ to the beach today. It’s that kind of day. Who could sit in a classroom on a morning like this?”
He stuck his hand out the window, felt the wind blowing against his skin. The sky was bright blue, the sun so warm and bright.
Harold laughed—a bellowing, hearty kind of laugh. “Jesus, you could be me when I was a kid. I never liked to be indoors. And I never liked to be told what to do.”
“Yeah?” Ernesto took a second look at the man. The jacket fit him real well, almost as if it was tailored for his lumpy body. He looked like an eccentric college professor. If Ernesto had seen him walking down the street, he’s the kind of guy he and Julio would’ve mugged. He looked like money. Easy money.
“What do you do?” Ernesto said. “You know, for a living?”
“Nothing that would interest you. Real estate. Boring stuff. I’m semi-retired at this point. Sometimes I think I’d like to cut out entirely and go back to my hitchhiking days.”
“You used to hitchhike?”
“When I was your age? Hell, I used to live on the road during the summers. I didn’t have a car when I was fifteen, sixteen, so that’s how me and my friends got around. In the summer of ‘68 I hitchhiked from Santa Cruz all the way to D.C and back again. It wasn’t a problem until the seventies when those slasher movies started comin’ out. Then everybody got paranoid and afraid. It’s too bad. I think something’s lost in America when you can’t get around by just stickin’ your thumb in the air. Kids are too scared these days. Not adventurous at all. Take my kid. Tim’s real serious, all the time. He moved out when he was eighteen. Got a job as a manager at Robinson’s. Nice kid. Handsome, not like me at all.” Harold laughed. “He’s twenty and he’s already married and has a kid. Little boy.”
