When I Was Born
As if, when I was born, the doctor gave the blanket I was swaddled in to a police hound to sniff, and while judicial clerks tabulated future statistics for how many policemen would have to be hired, I slept in a dream of lavender folds in my crib, my flesh over my bones like those long floor-to-ceiling curtains in palaces, I dreamed another world beyond me, of horses and women and food, of fields and dancing and songs, unknowing that when I was carried from the hospital in my blanket, a police dog snarled at my passing, a new set of handcuffs was being made, and in the distance a new prison was being built. At an early age a heavy Bible was placed in my hand, You got to get down and work hard, they told me. You can’t be talking back. Whatever you do, watch out not to get in trouble, ’cause they’ll be looking for you, expecting you to get in trouble, they said. Trouble was the furthest thing from my mind when I knelt in a church or climbed the rickety choir-loft stairs to sing, o love was me, o happy was I, young child hypnotized by the stained-glass-window eye of God circled above the altar back wall dawn-effused and made glow with blue robes angels and doves as I sang Latin hymns, opening my mouth as wide and wholesome as a frog on a pond in the full-moon summer night, while shadows of pigeons flurried on the edge of the stained- glass window — Lord, I didn’t see no blood of mine spilling on the dirt, Lord, that others thought I was bad had predestined my fate to fall early, struck later in life from the blind side by one clean sweeping stroke of law I couldn’t foresee because I was too blinded by the blaze of beauty around me, too in love with an old man’s walk and cane to even think he might curse a mean fate on me, too in love with vigorous icy air of dark dawn to think others might be plotting my future at the hands of jailers. But violence followed me. On a cold November dusk, boys’ brown arms cold and numb, noses sniffling, dust in our hair, smudged cheeks, while bats flitted like black gloves from leafless trees, and on the distant freeway semis gutted the air with growls, while all the boys on the playground were blending into the shades of evening, I turned from the sandbox, my nose running mucus, my fingers dark crickets in the sand, I turned and saw a big Indian boy by the fence, from his hand a thick coil of chain slurped onto the ground, whiplike, and across from him a blond boy with blue eyes, in a torn T-shirt in midwinter, both approached warily as tigers on my brother, backing him off into the fence, and then by an elm tree I saw a huge brown stone on the ground, and I dashed for the rock, picked it up, ran at the white boy who had hit my brother and lunged at him with the rock, hitting him on the head, falling back on the ground with him, at five years old, war-blood on my hands, my heart screaming as if it had been bitten and ripped to shreds by bats and since then violence has always followed me — in trees, down sidewalks, crouched in bushes, behind houses, it leaps on me as I stand to confront other bullies beating a thousand other brothers and sisters.
Tire Shop
I went down yesterday to fix a leak in my tire. Off Bridge Street there’s a place, 95 cents flats fixed, smeary black paint on warped wood plank between two bald tires. I go in, an old black man with a Jackie Gleason hat, greasy soft, with a mashed cigar stub in his mouth and another old Chicano man working the other pneumatic hissing tire changer. The walls are black with rubber, soot, blown black dust everywhere and rows of worn tires on gnawed board racks for sale, air hoses snaking and looped over the floor. I greet the two old men, “Yeah, how’s it going!” No response. They look up at me as if I just gave them a week to live. “I got a tire needs a tube.” Rudy, a young Chicano, emerges from the black part of the room ponytailed and plump, walks me out to my truck and looks at the tire. “It’ll cost you five bucks to take off and change.” I nod. He tells the old Chicano, who pulls the roller jack with a long steel handle outside, and I wait in the middle of the grunting oval tire- changing machines while the old guy goes out and returns with my tire. He looks at me like a disgruntled carny handling the Ferris wheel for the millionth time and I’m just another ache in the arm, a spoiled kid. I watch the two old men work the tire machines, step on the foot levers that send the bars around, flipping the tire from the rim, and I wonder what brought these two old men to work here on this gray evening in February — are they ex-cons? Drunks or addicts? He whips the tube out. “Rudy,” he yells, and I see a gaping hole in the tube. “Can’t patch that,” Rudy says, then in Spanish slang says, “No podemos pachiarlo — we got a pile of old tubes over there, we’ll do it for ten dollars.” At first I think he might be taking me but I edge away from that thought and I watch the machines work the spleesh of air the final begrudging phoof! of rubber popped loose then the holy clank of steel bar against steel and gently the old Chicano man, instead of throwing the bar on the floor, takes the iron bar and wipes it clean of rubber bits and oil and slides it gently into his waist belt in such a way I’ve seen a mother wipe her infant’s mouth. And I wonder where they live, these two old guys. I turn and watch M*A*S*H on a TV suspended from the ceiling, six o’clock news comes on, Huntington Beach blackened with oil. Rudy comes up behind me and says, “Fucking shame they do that to our shores.” I suddenly realize how I love these workingmen working in half dark with bald tires like medieval hunchbacks in a dungeon. They eat soup and scrape along in their lives — how can they live, I wonder, on 95 cents a tire change in today’s world? I am pleased to be with them and feel how barrio Chicanos love this too — how some give up nice jobs in foreign places to live by friends working in these places and out of these men revolutions have started. The old Chicano is mumbling at me how cheap I am when he learns my four tires are bald and spare flat, shaking his head as he works the tube into the tire well. I notice his heels are chewed to the nails, his fingernails black, his face a weary room-and-board stairwell of a downtown motel given over to drunks and derelicts, his face hand-worn by drunks leaning their full weight on it, wooden steps grooved by hard-soled men just out of prison, a face condemned by life to live out more days in futility. I bid goodbye to the black man chomping his ancient cigar, the Chicano man with his head down and I feel ashamed, somehow, that I cannot live their lives awhile for them. Grateful they are here, I respect such men who have stories that will never be told, who bring back to me my simple boyish days, when men in oily pants and grubby hands talked in rough tones and worked at simple work, getting three meals a day on the table the hard way. They live in an imperfect world, unlike men with money who have places to put their shame, these men have none — others put their shame on planes or Las Vegas trips, these have no place to put their shame on but their mothers their kids themselves, unlike men who put their shame on new cars condos bank accounts so they never have to face their shame, these men in the tire shop have become more human with shame. And I thought of the time my brother betrayed me, leaving me at fourteen when we’d vowed we’d always be together, he left to live with some rich folks and I was taken to the detention center for kids with no place to live — I became a juvenile filled with anger at my brother who left me alone. These tire-shop men made choices never to leave their brothers, in them I saw shame with no place to go but in a man’s face, hands, work and silence. And as I drove away, nearing my farm, I saw a water sprinkler shooting an arc of water far over the fence and grass it was intended to water — the fountain of water hitting a weedy stickered spot that grew the only single flower anywhere around, in the midst of rubble, brush and stones the water hit and touched a dormant seed that blossomed all by itself into what it was despite the surroundings. And something made sense to me then and I’m not quite sure what — an unconditional love of being and living, taking what comes one’s way with dignity. But that night in my dream I cried for my brother as he was leaving, all the words I used against myself, rotten, no good, shitty, failure, dissolved in my tears, my tears poured out of me in my dream and I wept for my brother and wept when I turned after he left and I reached for my sister and she was having coffee with a friend — I wept in my dream because she was not available for me when I needed her, and all my tears flowed, and how I wept, feeling my pain of abandonment, all my tears became that arc of water and I became the flower, by sheer accident in the middle of nowhere, blossoming. . . .
These poems are reprinted from Healing Earthquakes, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. © 2001 by Jimmy Santiago Baca. They appear here by permission of Grove Press.
