Zero Saints (5 page)

6

La frontera redux

The blood of innocents – La migra

Pinche gringo pendejo

Skeletons

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you leave a place to enter a void. You vacate a known reality and change it for something that you have to force yourself to believe, to accept, to understand.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you shed un pedazo grande of your identity and become a different thing, something that’s part apparition, part useless flesh, and part broken memories. You abandon familia, amigos, lenguaje, and the streets you know for a place where you have no rights and are not even considered a citizen, a country in which you will live like a stowaway rat, always afraid of being discovered. So you change. You morph. Te vuelves otra cosa. You start speaking English fast in hopes that your brown skin will be ignored if you at least communicate well. You dress yourself with the comics you read and the books you hated in school and the movies you’ve watched since you were a kid and that thing becomes el nuevo tu. You cover your tatuajes and learn that people on the streets will remember you only if you speak Spanish in their presence. You do everything in your power to become a gringo, to fit in, to become as unnoticeable as the cracks in the sidewalks. Then you start walking with less confidence because everything is mysterious and new and scary and you never feel bienvenido.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that la frontera keeps a piece of you, cuts you inside, hasta el hueso, where you can’t heal yourself. It slashes you in places no blade or bullet can reach and cripples you in ways you don’t understand.

Cruzar la frontera fucks you over en formas que no sabías que podías ser jodido.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that your body becomes a magnet for the bad stuff that has piled up all along that awful dividing line.

Muerte.

Destrucción.

Desesperación.

Olvido.

La nada infinita.

La noche eterna full of screams.

Crossing la frontera is like crossing a swamp because you end up covered in unpleasant shit no matter what you do. La frontera is a place of crying espíritus. It’s a place of almas perdidas y en pena, all of them looking for a way back, for a way to undo what happened, for a path back to their loved ones and their known places and a time before they made their awful decision.

La frontera is a place where miedo seeps into your bones and the silence you’re forced to keep allows the cries of dead children to enter your soul and break you in half like a dry twig. La frontera is a place where los huesos de los muertos are never buried deep enough and the pain of broken familias and la sangre de los inocentes has mixed with the plants and the air and the soil. All that darkness is what gives el río its peculiar smell and green color. Some things have a bottom but they are bottomless. The infinite darkness that hides in that flowing jade vein is what makes white men with guns pull the trigger even when the figure moving under the crosshairs is a woman or a child.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you shatter, you stop being you and turn into a new person that belongs nowhere, that has no home, no roots. Going back is impossible and moving forward is like jumping into a ravine and hoping that it’s not too deep, that the rocks don’t mangle you too much, and that el monstruo that waits for you en la oscuridad is not too hungry.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you have to do whatever it takes to survive, and that’s what pushes you into a life of crime. You need money to survive and washing dishes or mowing lawns are easy gigs to get but they don’t pay enough. In this country, fairness is a concept and nothing more. Los pinches gringos will send dinero to Africa and will pay thousands of dollars to chop their cat’s huevos off and remove their nails, but they won’t pay you a fair amount for painting their fucking mansiones and, if you complain, te llaman a la migra. Pinches hijueputas. Why the fuck should you do stuff in this country that you would never have done back home? Why should you smell like the shit you have to clean when you used to roll around with chingos de lana in your pocket? Thinking about that either makes you look for something different or breaks you again.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you want to clean up, find a good job somewhere, meet a beautiful, sweet girl. You want the American Dream. But fuck all that. The American Dream is as false as the meat in your one-dollar burger and the canned laughter you hear on television. And it’s even worse for you. You have no skills and no diploma and no friends and no nada. You’re a problem. Un ilegal más. A beaner. A television joke. A wetback. You’re nothing but an issue brainless white politicians discuss from the safety of their offices. That’s when any offer becomes salvation, any desperate move a solution, every bad idea something that gives you a bit of hope. That’s when you realize that you will always live in a silent war and that anyone who’s not from your patria can be your enemy at any moment. That’s why you easily fall into selling rich white kids drugs while you pretend to work security at a bar.

Desperation leads to the gig at the door and the gig at the door leads to some money and the bills in your pocket leads to a sense of accomplishment. You talk to Guillermo and he talks to a white college student who drives a shiny new BMW and asks you for $400 cash and leases a one-bedroom apartment under his name and hands you the key. “You pull any stunts, I’ll have my friends find you. You don’t want that to happen, amigo,” he says. You smile, nod. Pinche gringo pendejo playing tough guy. You want to tell him
No mames, güey
while you grab him by the throat and slam his head against the pavement until his brain comes out his nose. You want to fill his stupid mouth with dirt so he can feel what many others feel as they try to cross la frontera and end up with their faces in the dirt as the sun devours the flesh of their backs. But you don’t. You stay put and put all your strength on ignoring your desires. Instead of teaching the huevón a lesson, you take the keys he’s holding out to you and enter your new casa for the first time ever. Then you put a mattress on the floor and a small television next to it. You put some food in the fridge and build your altar and start trying to convince yourself that it isn’t so bad. Then you settle in somewhat and stay away from the leasing office, never check your mail, and get the fuck out of there for the entire day whenever they leave a note on the door saying someone will be entering the apartment to kill some cucarachas or check the batteries en los detectores de humo. You don’t know it yet, but this vida de mentira, this hiding around, it starts turning you into a ghost, a transparency on two legs, a shadow that’s not attached to anything solid. Then, when you notice, you also realize that being almost invisible is helpful and that your indistinctness is the only reason no one really notices you working the door at the bar and selling all sorts of overpriced pharmaceuticals to kids who think they’re really cool.

You’re in the corazón of a large city, completely exposed for hours to thousands of faces that come to 6
^th
Street to drink and dance and try to fuck someone, but no one pays attention to you. You’re a darker spot moving within a charco de sombra, just another brown face in a town where brown faces look out at you from every drive thru window and brown hands clean every car and a woman from a country south of the border cleans every mansion and every landscaping crew is full of guys who look just like you and every precious toddler at the park knows a bit of Spanish because his nanny only speaks Spanish when mommy and daddy aren’t around.

What happens when you cross la frontera is that you don’t know what’s going to happen to you and you hustle harder than you ever hustled before and you pray to la Santa Muerte and ask for protección and do bad things that you convince yourself are not that bad because la frontera crossed your abuelos first and no one is really pinche ilegal because people can’t be ilegal and we’re all atrapados en este puto mundo. Then you try to forget about everything that came before, you try to pretend like the familia and the women and the amigos and the laughter and the fear and the bodies and the money and the years are just not there and you focus on making money, staying alive, and being invisible. And the easiest way to be invisible is to be in front of a lot of eyes that don’t give a shit.

Working at the club is the best way to make money and hide in plain sight. Most Mexicans come to this country and end up doing backbreaking work for fucking centavos because they’re afraid of la migra and think being out in the open and having a visible job will lead to deportation. Al carajo eso. You do what you have to do and even learn to enjoy it a little because you can pay your bills and have plenty of pills at home and own a car and a gun and an iPod full of buena música and even have more than enough lana at home to replace the iPod some pinches mareros stole from you.

What sometimes happens when you cross la frontera is that you go to work the night after some assholes kidnapped you and chopped someone’s head off right in front of you. Being there is weird and your butt clenches every time you think about walking to your car alone after all the rich white drunks have gone back to their homes and dorms, but it also makes you feel like life is already doing its thing and moving on. Because the thing about life is that time gets between facts and memories and as memories turn into what they are, facts start sliding back, moving into a space full of images from películas and skeletons from bad dreams and imagined monstruos and stuff that someone told you. That makes the fear lessen. Then you start thinking about the Russian cruising around in a car like a hungry predator looking for prey. You think about his gun spitting out justice and someone’s head hitting the pavement with a loud thud and blood running down into the gutter. Between that thought and the knowledge that la Santísima Muerte is watching your back, you give folks their drugs, stuff the money they hand over into your pocket before transferring it to the little box behind the bar, pop a few oxies, and walk to your car without looking back every two seconds while you wish for the call that will let you know que la muerte ha hecho su trabajo.

7

The End of Days

Heroin – weed – blow

The last working horse of the Blues

Never let them see you scared

Yeah, that night I went to work. I was scared. I had no gun. I wanted to stay home, locked away and safe, but that’s not the way to do things. You can’t let them see you scared. Bad people are like dogs. They can smell your fear. That’s when they pounce on you y te obligan a repartir chingazos o morir como una rata.

I stood at my spot at the door of The Jackalope and actually wished a few caras palidas with popped collars would start some shit just so I could throw them out.

A white kid wearing a ball cap and sunglasses came up to me and asked me for for a quarter in a nervous voice. I had some Blue Dream, a few dime bags of White Rhino, and a few old bags of a shitty shipment of Death Star that apparently was as strong as oregano. Only idiots wear sunglasses and caps at night, so I told the kid forty for two quarters and handed him the Death Star. No tenia ni idea de lo que estaba comprando.

Folks came in and out like any other night, but I was paying special attaention to every face. I was on the lookout for inked features.

My second client of the night was a regular. Horse was a black man who played the blues at The Rollins Bar. He came over, gave me a quick hug/handshake and got his stuff. Then, like always, he leaned against the wall next to me and started talking about everything and nothing all at once.

“Man, they have some rigid mufuckas in there tonight,” he said, pointing down the sidewalk at The Rollins Bar. “Why the fuck you gonna go to a blues bar if you’re more worried about talking on your phone than listening to some tunes? People stupid. People always been stupid, but this shit is getting ridiculous. Don’t know how much longer I’m gonna be able to do my thing, man, you know what I mean? I’m old, man. You can’t keep the last working horse of the blues going in these mufucking conditions. I done played with Lightnin’ Hopkins back in the day. I played harp with SRV for a few gigs before he hit it big, man. These ain’t no conditions for a living legend, you know what I mean? Fucking playing for rigid ass mufuckas.”

Horse shook his head, thanked me, and left. I’m no blues historian, but he regularly told stories of playing with blues legends in San Antonio back in the 30s and 40s. O es un vampiro negro o un hijueputa mentiroso.

About an hour after Horse disappeared back into the night, I spotted Pilar making her way down 6
^th
Street toward me. No one knew her last name, age or country of origin. All we knew about her was that she did a lot of heroin and constantly spoke about the final judgement in a bizarre, diluted accent that could be from Puerto Rico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. Rumors, por otro lado, were abundant. Some said she had a PhD in something and worked as a professor for many years before losing a baby and turning to smack for comfort. Others said she was a ghost trapped on 6
^th
Street, un espíritu con algún propósito aún por cumplir.

A block away, her words were reaching my ears above the usual escándalo of the street.

“The Almighty is giving you a chance to stop sinning right now,” she was saying. “I am His voice, here to warn you of the coming judgement. You who obey the needs of the flesh now will soon be cast into the flaming pits of eternal damnation!”

Someone yelled at her to shut up from inside a bar. It stopped her in her tracks. She looked around, her eyes wide and her hands out wide.

“Have fun now, you son of a whore, for you will be the first to cry when the seas blacken, the mountains turn to dust, and the Almighty starts striking down the sinners! You will see your mother eating your father and everything you love will be covered first in hungry locusts and then in the darkness and stench of decay!”

She finally reached me and came in for the transaction. I had her bag of peace ready to go because her smell was hard to put up with, so I always tried to get her taken care of and back on her way as quickly as possible. This time, however, she stopped a few feet away. I look at her wild hair and ojos locos and went back to paying attention to the door. You can’t worry too much about the things junkies do.

“Your time is closer than theirs,” said Pilar. I looked back at her. Her eyes were locked into mine, wide open and bloodshot.

“You will be gone before the streets of this town are covered in the bodies of men and beasts. The Fallen Angel is reaching out for you, his filthy talons craving the feel of your ripping flesh.”

Her words sent a shiver down my spine.

“Get away from my door, Pilar. I can’t have you here spitting nonsense at the customers.”

“Repent now. Your time is almost at hand. When you start coughing up blood and hear the hoofs of the Beast on your roof, remember my wor…”

“Get out of here, Pilar. I don’t want to have to remove you.”

She looked at me. She turned around and walked down the sidewalk in silence.

Pilar’s words wouldn’t have worried me, but the fact that she left without her smack and cut out her crazy talk made me feel very uncomfortable. The feeling grew inside me and morphed into something cold that stuck to my ribs.

After the doors closed, I pretended to be feeling very tired and asked Jenny, a waitress whose boyfriend always picked her up at the end of the night, to give me a ride to my car.