THE BARRIO OF BEVERLY HILLS, Scott Sonders [reading strategies book .txt] 📗

the seat was cracked and sunken in the middle from use.

Carlos sat across from me, drumming his spoon on the matching red tablecloth, in time to the music. I watched him for awhile and said, “By the way, I don’t want to burst your bubble or anything, but I should probably tell you that I’m well-acquainted with that little tool you used to open my car door. You’re right about it being illegal for us commoners to own one of those babies. But don’t worry,” I said with a knowing smile, “being one of your best customers and all, I won’t turn you in.”

Carlos looked puzzled. “Hey, you’re not bullshitting with me, are you? What does a college guy with no calluses on his hands know about using a Slim Jim lock jimmy?”

“Don’t let these baby-soft hands and my wire-rimmed glasses fool you. Like that blonde over there, I’ve been around the block a few times. “

“Yeah? Around what block, or, if that blonde is your type, I should say around who or what?”

“Well,” I said, “She’s probably more your type. But...”
“Carlos wisecracked, “I’d guess she’s probably a whole football team’s type.”

“Pah-dum-dump,” I said, rolling a rimshot off the tabletop with my forefingers. “But as I was about to explain, before you started with your Don Rickles one-liner — actually, I was always poor. Even though I grew up in foster homes, I still got really good grades in high school. But scholarship money was pretty tight. I needed some serious moolah to go to college, and...”

Carlos interrupted, “You’re not the Lone Ranger. I bet you wouldn’t have guessed but I go to college, too. At night. The car-park is my subsidy.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “why wouldn’t I have guessed?”

His cheeks reddened slightly. Carlos hesitated, “Well, okay, I’m being a little paranoid, but you know what I mean...”

Now it was my turn, “No, I don’t know what you mean. I don’t even have a clue.”

Carlos said, “Well okay, it’s just that, well,” his cheeks grew more red, “most people who park their cars at my lot figure I’m just some minimum wage Spick. You know, not the kind of person with the capacity for college.”

“First of all,” I said, “if we’re gonna be friends, then you better start finding out some things about me before making assumptions. Second, I don’t buy into that kind of bigot shit. Third, I think you’re right about being a little paranoid because there’s no way you even look Mexican.”

“There! I gotcha! You just contradicted yourself. First you said you’re not a bigot and then you go off with a typical stereotype about looking Mexican. My father happens to be a tall, blue-eyed blonde guy from somewhere in the Midwest. A bona fide WASP. And besides, there are people of Swedish decent that have been living and dying in Mexico City for maybe three or four generations. They’re more Mexican than me. At least I was born here, well, in Texas, anyway.

“No, you’re right. I admit it. I’m not perfect. But that still doesn’t make me a bigot. Sometimes I can’t help it; I was raised in what the real estate brokers call “Beverly Hills Adjacent,” which is a smaltzy way of saying wannabe rich but probably broke dick. But really, the first five years of my life were in a Jewish orphanage in Mar Vista – that’s kinda near Beverly Hills. And I guess that makes me a Jew – the orphanage part, not the living near Beverly Hills part. At least, that’s what I’ve always figured. And I can tell you that I’ve been on the butt end of some pretty nasty stereotypes my whole life. Just like I said you don’t look Mexican, I’ve heard about a hundred times that I don’t look Jewish. And since you brought up the history thing, Jews look like whoever had been raping their grandmothers for a couple hundred years.”

“Okay, man,” Carlos said, “I guess we’re even. A Spick and a Hymie.” He tapped his spoon against the table. “Who’d have guessed?”

“No,” I said, “We’re not even because I’m a Spick, too.”

“Oh, right, man. And just exactly what kind of Spick are you?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “the real truth is that my parents were from Iceland and I was born in Puerto Rico. That makes me an icepick!”

Carlos groaned, “Oh man, I should have seen that coming. An icepick! I don’t believe you actually said that. Two thirds of a pun, P.U.”

“So why are you smiling?” I said.

“Because, in spite of your lousy jokes, I think you’re an okay guy.”

* * * * * * * * *
It was then that I first heard about his sister. He mentioned her during our subsequent tossing back of not one but about six beers each. He told me that she was "really nice" and insisted that I should meet her. This insistence, within the space of a first meeting, would have usually seemed odd to me, but after a more than modest intake of alcohol it seemed perfectly normal. I am, however, wary of the word "nice" used in the context of someone trying to set me up on a blind date. Mothers use the word "nice" when what they really mean is that their daughter is too dumpy for anyone else's taste. Though Carlos had an irresistible manner, I still didn't get to meet his sister for several weeks.

I started getting together with Carlos every Friday after work. We'd kick back a few beers and talk about where we'd been and where each of us wanted to go. One of the things I first noticed about him was the exactness with which he chose his coif and clothing. It was his custom to flaunt a large gold crucifix around his neck, choker style, in some contrast to the faded Levi 501's that, like me, he also wore as part of his customary outfit. Those jeans were marketed as "shrink-to-fit." Carlos took advantage of the concept by buying his denims the right size so when they did shrink, they'd fit and fit tight.

Later, I discovered something from Carlos that I would have never directly experienced with my own awkward appearances. It was rare that anyone didn't notice his charm and Valentino good looks. This made some want to be in his company. It invariably benefited their own social success. But others despised his elegance, allowing themselves one more cause for envy and one more reason to hope for his downfall.

The neighboring Catholic mothers viewed his chiseled cheeks and wavy shocks of burnt sienna hair as something more to add to their already extant worries about the chastity of their own daughters. Some would hurriedly but unhesitantly make the sign of the Cross when Carlos sauntered into the proximity of their female offspring. They believed that no girl past puberty would be able to resist his glorious union of Paul Newman blue eyes and perfect olive skin, quite captivating in a neighborhood where everyone, like Carlos, was of Mexican heritage. They admired him because they were acculturated to perceive his Anglicized aggregate as better than their own, as mas mejor. Though in this way, they also regarded him with suspicion.

But Carlos was different from the other homeboys. He thought himself "respectable," and drove a late-model BMW. This was a sore spot those who obsessed over gray-primered Chevies with diamond tuck upholstery and black-tinted windows. Indeed, Carlos scorned every notion of cholo. By the time I'd become his friend, he was already avoiding former his former “associates” who wore baggy chinos to make you wonder if they had a weapon in their pocket, to make you wonder if they were dangerous.

Certain topics made Carlos stammer, become embarrassed, grow quiet. He'd done some hard-time. He'd been involved in an apparently intense situation, but would rarely discuss it. I heard the story piece by piece, sometimes during my Fridays with Carlos, and sometimes, though later, from Ramona, the older of his two covergirl-pretty sisters.

It seems there'd been another brother. But he'd been caught between rival bullets in one of those "little squabbles" that have great big consequences. Questions over whose turf was whose. Questions and death, but no answers. Boyle Heights. Monterey Park. City Terrace. It didn't matter what part of East Los Angeles you came from. It was your territory, your turf. And more "turf" always came with more graves to weed.

When Carlos was serving his time, he'd enrolled in a state sponsored "education and rehabilitation" program. Everyone in his family was what Carlos called an "autodidact." But he kept his intellectual side in the closet. Parading any serious education could get your ass kicked by some of the barrio boys. Still, after his time with the Youth Authority, Carlos got out with an Associate of Arts degree, while not yet nineteen.

"Things were never simple or easy," Carlos once told me during one of our Friday meetings. "The Fates were not merely content with the death of my brother. It was as if they demanded another sacrifice, as if they wanted Ramona to get raped. It was as if it was necessary, just like in those plays by Euripides. It was necessary to compound the conflict of my story."

He told me that he'd learned that phrase in a literature class, and early on I figured that Carlos enjoyed his masks: speaking sometimes like a professor, at others like a barrio homeboy, and yet again like Joe Surfer. He seemed obsessed with the notion that he was a reincarnated character from an ancient Greek tragedy, that his life's "fuck-ups" were simply more links in the chain, the chain of the "little squabble" which had sent his kid brother to a permanent otherworld and his twin sister to a temporary netherworld. "There were no winners," he would say, "Victory was temporary." Carlos told me that he'd tried but couldn't contain his rage. After the death of his brother and rape of his sister, he felt that existence was mocking him. He'd taken his Beemer and his best friend on a reckless ride. Born To Be Wild roared from the 8-track stereo as his sister's sobbing grew ever more faint. He had told me, "Night was day. Day was night. They were undifferentiated. Equal. An emotional equinox."

Nobody had known where Carlos had gotten the shotgun when it blasted through the swelter of a late September night. He'd "taken out that sonofabitch from right off the sidewalk." He'd taken him out "the only way that others would understand." So close that the victim's blood splattered back on the shooter's face. He'd kept those bloodstained clothes "as a reminder." He told me that he knew "he was obligated by an unwritten but long understood code to be cop, judge, jury. It was the blood that mattered. It was the blood that showed a score had been settled. It was the blood that returned honor."

Carlos would sometimes make speeches instead of just talk. He said everyone in his family was "poetic" like that. That "it was genetic." In one of his speeches he told me the end of his "murder story." He said, "So I did it. In the open for everyone to know and for everyone to see. I did it right in front of that pendejo's home, and right in front of that pendejo's friends and his whole family. I'm telling you, I blew that sonofabitch away while he was drinking from a can