Luis J. Rodríguez

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 nuetsra 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 the 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 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 check 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.

When Heavy tells a story the millwright shanty under the electric furnaces chokes with quiet, amid the roar, as Heavy pauses, adjusts his mountainous weight over a creaky grease-stained metal chair and looks up at the whirling ceiling fan next to fluorescent lights hanging by wires. His fingers lace like so many sausages across the canvas of blue workshirt on his chest. Heavy tells his story and the voice of reason quickens the demise of foulness from red-faced millwrights just back from a repair job and sitting around for the five air whistles that again call them to combat on the furnace floor. All laughter stops, all nonsense sayings and cuts of wisdom cease their echo when Heavy tells a story. Heavy talks about the Mexican melter who once had an affair with the Pit Boss’s wife. The heart of the problem–and the fact from which the story’s plot revolves– was that the melter lived across the street from the Pit Boss. One night just before the graveyard shift, the melter left his home, kissed his wife’s round face and proceeded to walk to the bus stop. But a bullet pierced through his hardhat and he fell, like an overturned stack of fire bricks, onto the pavement. The moral of this story: Never have an affair with someone whose old man lives within shooting distance. Heavy tells a story about a furnace foreman who always yelled at the laborers for failing to clean the bag house of the built-up filth from hours of cooking scrap iron and ore. The men told him it was too dangerous to walk on the tin-roofed panels; their weight could cause them to fall some 30 feet into the gaping mouth of a flaming furnace below. “Nonsense,” the foreman yelled, “you’re all just lazy Polacks.” (he called everyone Polacks). The foreman then proceeded to walk across the roof as the men stood nearby, with mouths open, near the safety of side beams. “You see,” he said standing in the middle as hydraulics moved shutters up and down to capture the sulphur dust. Then the foreman moved forward and before anyone could shout, he crashed through the roof, screaming into a reddened pot of molten metal; the oxygen in his body making popping sounds as it entered. The furnace operates continued to pour ladles of scrap iron and to melt the steel. They skimmed the slag off the top and when it was ready, they poured the molten mass into ingot molds. There was nothing they could do for the foreman, they said. Production had to keep going. Heavy looks into the eyes of his listeners and says: Somewhere there’s a skyscraper in downtown LA with steel beams made from the ingot with the foreman’s body in it. Somewhere there’s a bridge or underground pipe with the man’s remains chemically bound within the molecular structure. Heavy tells a story. . . and the men lay down their tools, and coffee is poured into heavy ceramic cups, the shanty stills beneath the rumbling, and even foremen stop by to pay a listen when Heavy tells a story.

All night vigil. My two-and-a-half-year-old boy and his 10-month-old sister lay on the same bed, facing opposite ends; their feet touching. They looked soft, peaceful, bundled there in strands of blankets. I brushed away roaches that meandered across their faces, but not even that could wake them. Outside, the dark cover of night tore as daybreak bloomed like a rose on a stem of thorns. I sat down on the backsteps, gazing across the yellowed yard. A 1954 Chevy Bel-Air stared back. It was my favorite possession. I hated it just then. It didn’t start when I tried to get it going earlier that night. It had a bad solenoid. I held a 12-gauge shotgun across my lap. I expected trouble from the Paragons gang of the west Lynwood barrio. Somebody said I dove the car that dudes from Colonia Watts used to shoot up the Paragons’ neighborhood. But I got more than trouble that night. My wife had left around 10 p.m. to take a friend of mine home. She didn’t come back. I wanted to kill somebody. At moments, it had nothing to do with the Paragons. It had to do with a woman I loved. But who to kill? Not her– sweet allure wrapped in a black skirt. I’d kill myself first. Kill me first? But she was the one who quit! Kill her? No, think man! I was hurt, angry. . . but to kill her? To kill a Paragon? To kill anybody? I went into the house and put the gun away. Later that morning, my wife came for her things: some clothes, the babies. . . their toys. A radio, broken TV, and some dishes remained. I didn’t stop her. There was nothing to say that my face didn’t explain already. Nothing to do. . . but run. So I drove the long haul to Downey and parked near an enclosed area alongside the Los Angeles River. I got out of the car, climbed over the fence and stumbled down the slopes. A small line of water rippled in the middle. On rainy days this place flooded and flowed, but most of the time it was dry with dumped garbage and dismembered furniture. Since a child, the river and its veins of canals were places for me to think. Places to heal. Once on the river’s bed, I began to cleanse. I ran. I ran into the mist of morning, carrying the heat of emotion through the sun’s rays; I ran past the factories that lay smack in the middle of somebody’s backyard. I ran past alleys with overturned trashcans and mounds of tires. Debris lay underfoot. Overgrown weeds scraped my legs as I streamed past; recalling the song of bullets that whirred in the wind. I ran across bridges, beneath overhead passes, and then back alongside the infested walls of the concrete river; splashing rainwater as I threaded, my heels colliding against the pavement. So much energy propelled my legs and, just like the river, it went on for miles. When all was gone, the concrete river was always there and me, always running.