A winter industrial sky over the south east corners of freeways and no palm trees. The good things all happened the day before, when it was time for recess and the lunch lady with the V in her first name was absent from her post, allowing students to sneak tater tots onto the playground. All over the City Commerce, children in their homes lie on their bellies by the blue of the television observing romance from Lucia Mendez, listening to their parents fighting about viejas, car insurance, and mother-in-laws. Cars wait to be turned on at four in the morning, warmed up, revved up and taken into San Gabriel Valley factory parking lots where their owners sharpen metal and avoid flying sparks at work during the day.
There is the whole street of short white houses around Rosewood Park and its flat pool, where there are only hushed radios, usually tuned to the A.M. radio station playing rancheras until you’re homesick, and you don’t know for what. There is one song you can hear, and Homero, the owner of the CD player sits close to it, looking at The Smiths poster curling from the window where he taped it.
It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind, he sings and repeats the words popping from the ink on the poster, the band emerging from a blue street in Manchester, the East LA of England. Homero has felt this way many times before. Jenny tells him some fucked up reason why he’s not good enough for her and she’ll wait a couple of days for his hurt to stop wailing, for him to stop crying (because he does this, on the phone with her and in notes he writes in scribbled capital letters, smeared in places by salt and beating his head against the paper). And who can blame him? He’s a man, he has feelings, but this Jenny only wants him to have feelings for her, not about her. On Monday they had talked.
He said, “I love you, Jenny.”
She said, “You’re too young to be in love.”
He said, ——.
She said, “Why? Is it because you make me tapes?”
He said, ——.
She said, “You like me, but you’re not in love. Don’t be so immature.”
He said, “Well, I am, even if you don’t believe me.”
To read the complete story go to Ana Castillo’s, La Tolteca E-zine:
http://tolteca.anacastillo.com/content/
