God in the Barrio

When I was seven, my father called a family meeting in the den of our house on Howard Drive. He had just gotten back from a two-month trip to San Jose to bury his father. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while, and despite the brill cream he always wore, his hair was sticking out somehow. He was seated at the head of our formal dining table. My mother hung back, letting him speak. She had given us a baby brother a month earlier, and had dark circles under her eyes.

“We’re moving,” he announced. It was the middle of my third grade school year. I did the calcs quickly in my head and said, “At the end of the year?” He pretended to consider my position, paused, and said, “No. Now.”

I was bewildered. This must have something to do with Death, whose giant claw had reached down and scooped him from us, the old him, the regular, almost unnoticeable him, and returned to us a disjointed likeness of him, eyes too bright, lacking in all the customary comings and goings, listening to an inner melody at once more dissonant, more tempting, and more dangerous than the tidy humming of our domestic world.

On moving day, he drove us to a house that would have fit inside our living room on Howard Drive. I suspect this was the first my mother saw of it. They set up their queen-sized bed in the front room, and put all three kids in the bedroom. Most of our stuff didn’t make it into the house. I’m sure the idea was to put it somewhere else for a while, but I never saw much of it again: my Japanese dolls, my mother’s china, the yard tools.

My mother withdrew into the baby as much as I’m sure she could. We felt odd walking down the new street, as a dozen predatory eyes appraised us from every porch. On Saturday night, the barrio rioted. Music with a pounding bass, trumpets, and accordions poured from houses and bars. Men screamed, trilled, and laughed. Gunshots sounded. Sunday mornings the detritus of Saturday night muggings littered the ditches.

My father converted the front porch into two rooms, and in one he set up a business like his father’s: income tax, immigration, notary public. During the day he met customers, mostly men who looked hard at me for reasons I didn’t really understand but didn’t like. At sundown, after the evening meal, the shopkeepers in the barrio would close the doors, bolt the iron cages, and pull the goods out of the windows. Children would be called inside. Women would retreat into the hintermost parts of the houses. At this point, my father would get up from the dinner table, take out his car keys, and leave with a slam of the door. He would stop on the front steps, clear his throat, and spit. He was surveying the street, perhaps even smelling it. He was wondering what to do, what to have. Maybe he was never consciously aware of what he was doing. Maybe it was always a perfect surprise to him that he ended up at Merino’s Bar every single night. That other world, the night world, with its population of drunks, prostitutes, dealers, cons, and men with wives back home, that became his principal world, his topsy-turvy home, and our world was a place he visited when the stupid sun was up.

I’d never had a particular interest in God when we lived on Howard Drive. I liked the look of the kids in Sunday School the time or two we’d been taken to the church down the street, but it was a social instinct. I had wanted to join in the churchy games.

Now, however, when I lay in bed at night after our crazy days, a prayer took shape on my lips. I didn’t know what a proper prayer was shaped like, but here goes: “God, I know you exist. Send help.” I said it every night, through the whippings at school, playground taunting, playmates who didn’t speak English, my mother’s post-partum depression, fistfights, head lice, near escape from gang rape, shootings on the street, missionaries who declared they loved our little brown bodies but didn’t, and just plain living through the seventies in Chicanoland.