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

of cold beer. He died between swallows." Carlos had paused for a breath, to think about what came next. He continued, "It's strange, I don't even believe in killing. Not by anybody. But I don't regret it. He didn't regret doing my sister. He did my sister, then he bragged about it. Maybe if he hadn't bragged. Maybe if he would've shown some kind of contrition, things could've been different."

He stopped, pulled his wallet from his hip pocket where he kept it attached to his belt by a brass loop and chain. He extracted a ragged bit of paper, unfolded it and smoothed it across the tablecloth where we were sitting, carefully avoiding the mustard and ketchup stains. Looking up he said, "You want to hear something that I wrote just a little after it happened?"

I nodded.

He began, "Death and Brutality never stop to ask anyone's name. In their grasp we are all nameless and equal. Death and Brutality already have their own names. Many synonyms. Many metaphors and noms de guerre. They have so many names that they never ask for ours. They don't discriminate. Culpable and culprit are derivatives of the same root word. Victim and perpetrator become interchangeable. Many words, only one meaning. They are paper boats rushing to the same destination in a great river of meaning. And in that river I heard the whispering of many voices saying, 'You know Carlos? He was the one. He was El abogado. He was the prosecuting attorney. The straightest of straight arrow guys.'"

Brutality and Death. The universal constants. The unified field theory that Einstein had hoped he'd never find. The great equalizers and, perhaps, the only true democracy. It was these dangerous things, abstractions mutating into tangibles, that Carlos told me his mother had wished to avoid "when she had crossed a different kind of river nineteen years before." And it was just such things that Carla Batista had wondered about daily when her baby boy's legs had gone brittle with polio. Carlos told me, "The good doctors at Los Angeles County General prescribed injections and braces, and told my mother to wait, as I would most likely grow out of the disease."

On one of our Friday evenings when we were both hungry and devouring two entire roast chickens at one of the Grand Central Market concessions, Carlos explained that, once before, his mother's prayers had been answered. So she didn't wait for the doctors. Instead, she had pleaded every day with the Virgin on her son's behalf. Despite the priest from her village just a few years before, she had remained devout. On Easter Sunday before his third birthday, Carla Maria had crawled, with open hands and bare knees, up long stone steps to the church door, leaving behind a sacrificial smear of skin and blood. In four months her own wounds healed, and little Carlos started walking.

The Blessed Virgin was thereafter commemorated for interceding on behalf of the innocent child, and the doctors stopped the injections.

* * * * * * * *

But most of this story occurred prior to my friendship with Carlos. He'd served thirty-six months with the California Youth Authority, or C.Y.A. as the inmates called it. He'd been tried as a minor for second-degree murder. He'd become a model prisoner, and for his birthday was awarded release from the Nelles Detention Center. It seems the Parole Board felt that Carlos, given the chance to cool, had demonstrated a corrigible and forgiving nature. His education, they felt, made him "a viable candidate for early release."

There were few things Carlos truly hated. Imprisonment was one. Gangsters and cops were another. "They're two sides of the same coin," Carlos would later and often allege, although cautiously and never in public. And so he returned and once again took up his role as owner and manager of the asphalt lot that stretched under a flashing fluorescent fixture, announcing the entrance to PARKER'S SELF-PARK. This was his reprieve, and his inheritance from an almost forgotten father.

It was odd, Carlos with his cool BMW and cool Levi's, sitting next to an uncool parking shed that was too hot in the summer and overheated in the winter. But he loved that place. It was redemption. The claustrophobia that hunted and haunted him during his incarceration had grown unbearable. I'd more than once heard him confess to a sister, a friend, or even an enemy that he was trying to intimidate, "If I hadn't gotten out when I did, it would've been fuckin' bedlam. I was stir crazy, man, I was ready to go totally insane and pull a Charlie Manson."

Carlos said that even with notoriety, he still had enemies. He said, "Enemies watch for the soft underbelly. Enemies are predators. They attack what they perceive as weak, who they perceive as vulnerable." Carlos liked his image of being dangerous. He said, it kept the predators at bay. But he never acted dangerous around me. I guess he somehow figured that I wasn't a predator, but I can't make a claim one way or the other.

I'd also heard another local legend about Carlos from one of his employees at the self-park. He told me a story about how Carlos had come to shotgun the guy who raped Ramona. It seems that the guy had pleaded for mercy, that the guy had cried in front of his mother and friends, "Por favor, Carlito, yo soy tu compadre — please, Carlos, I'm your homeboy — show me some sympathy."

But Carlos only growled in response, "If you want sympathy you rotten motherfucker, run away and look in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, because, man, that's the only place you’re going to find sympathy."

* * * * * * * *

It seemed to me that things were different for Carlos when he got back to his parking lot. With the parking lot, sometimes, Carlos still had to act tough. There would be an occasional disgruntled customer, bums looking for handouts, junkies casing the place for a simple B & E, and twenty dollar hookers hustling for a quick scam or a blowjob, whichever delivered the easiest money.

But with his parking lot, at least, Carlos was on the outside looking in. This was his reprieve. This wasn't jail. Now it was Carlos locking the door to keep the others out. With the parking lot he could be on the street he loved. With the parking lot he was free to watch life sweat and bleed. If he wanted to, he could be part of it. Que vida loca

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Text: Story & photos copyrighted by Scott Sonders
Publication Date: 02-11-2010

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