We were seven scrubs that summer, six brown- eyed barrio boys and me. Los Locos, they called us. The Crazies. Crazy out of our marijuana minds. Twelve-years-old, we prowled like cats past pale apartments, mewing for las chicas, messing with the big kids when the big kids got too bossy. No one ever messed with us. We were too tough. We were too cool. We had sworn an allegiance, all to each other, reciting an oath over knife-slit skin, our dark blood blended in a seven-grip salute. We were Los Locos. The Crazies. The baddest puto madres on the chingamadre block.
It was hot that summer, oven hot. The heat hung over our yellow street like Christ hung on the cross: heavy, hungry, heaving for breath. We dreamed of silver swimming pools, cool and clear, the color of ice. We prayed for the taste of chlorine. Never ones to rob or steal or spray paint walls with graffiti, our crime of choice was the trespass: the unlawful invasion of another man's land. And no place, nowhere, deserved our trespass more than the prim and proper iron-rod perimeter of the Plaza Palm Apartments.
We worked as a team to scale that gate, that iron-rod remote-controlled flimsy piece of caca. Five of us helped the first two up, our cupped hands boosting sneakered feet. They hooked their legs up over the top, dragged themselves over, then dropped to the ground. Two more followed, then another two. Then I climbed up -- my cholos on the other side reaching through the iron rods, boosting me up over the top. Once I dropped among them, we hollered like lobos and sprinted up the driveway, eager to claim our rightful reward.
In the center of the Plaza Palm Apartment complex was a huge blue swimming pool, surrounded by palms and white-padded lounge chairs, by rich fat white guys and their bony blonde wives. Back by the alley was another swimming pool -- the kiddy pool, we called it -- no palms, no padded lounge chairs, just a few rusted tables with matching chairs and a rusted umbrella. The pool itself was free of swimmers. But sitting at a table, a backgammon board between them, a middle-aged oil-slicked couple glistened in the sweaty sun.
As we raced up the steps, the couple eyed us suspiciously, squinting behind their mirrored lenses, wondering who the hell we were -- one white skinny kid with six desperados. We paid no attention to those sizzling chorizos. We ignored them as if they were flies. Lucky for them they didn't tell us to leave. They kept their mouths shut, kept their rules and opinions behind buttoned lips. They watched without expression as we peeled off our shirts, kicked off our shoes, and dove off the edge of the concrete deck, slicing lines into the pool.
The water was cool, crisp and clear, a brilliant blue embrace. Beneath the yellow smog-sun sky, we laughed and splashed, howled and screamed, disrupting the couple with the backgammon board. They shot us dirty glances, shaking their faces with snotty disdain. As if we cared! We were Los Locos. The Crazies. What could possibly happen? A Plaza Palm security guard might come and kick us out, threaten to call our parents. Big deal! Like we were scared of our parents. Nothing scared us. Nada! We were seven warriors celebrating victory. This was our trophy, this was our prize: cool compensation for our courage and camaraderie.
Carlito stepped up on the diving board, his cut-off chinos sopping wet. He waved his arms, called for attention, and dared us all to top his dive. Then sprinting across the diving board, he leapt up into the air, flipped over forward like a shiny copper coin, then landed feet first in the pool. Saúl jumped up and did his famous jackknife. Then someone did a double flip. Someone else, a two-and-a-half. Sancho, leaping off the end of the board, spread his arms like a great white gull, floated like a feather on a warm yellow wind, then smoothly dove into the pool, his toes disappearing through a small white splash.
I went last. I stood on the board with my back to the pool, my toes on the edge, arms out straight. I was bouncing a bit to give the board some spring. I breathed in deep, imagined my fingers crossing myself, the thumbprint of God on my forehead. I bent my knees, pushed my feet: The board sprung me upward. My arms spread out, my heels kicked back, my chin tucked close to my chest. Everything felt perfect for an inverse swan -- everything, of course, but the corner of the board cracking my head like a hammer.
Everything got cool, cool and dark, slow as falling snow. Angels started singing. I heard them humming softly in my ear, their white-linen voices soft as sacred psalms. I was safe, protected -- alone in a womb away from the world where I floated forever in chocolate milk. Then everything turned icy blue. My feet kicked beneath me, my arms reaching up to claw for the sky. Breaking the surface, I sucked in a breath and swam for the concrete edge of the pool. All around -- in the water, on the deck -- my six com- padres stared at me, their mouths hung open, eyes the size of mice.
Someone shouted: "Sangre!"
Others started shouting, too.
I reached to touch the top of my head and thought I felt an egg. I looked at my hand, saw blood on my fingers, and felt my stomach retch.
"Vámanos!" Los Locos shouted.
Scampering for their shirts and shoes, they scattered like a pack of rats, deserting me on the concrete deck. The middle-aged couple, squinting up from their backgammon board, watched as my friends raced back down the steps.
"Blood," I said and staggered toward the couple.
They looked at my fingers and winced.
"You shouldn't be swimming here," the lady said.
"You shouldn't play where you don't belong."
They said they were sorry, but said they couldn't help, that since I didn't live in the Plaza Palm Apartments, there was nothing they could do. Then they turned their mirrored lenses back to their backgammon board. I turned to find my shirt and shoes as a Plaza Palm security guard came rushing up the steps, yelling at me to get the hell out. When I showed him my hand and the blood on my fingers, he groaned and said: "Goddam spics!" Grabbing my stuff with one hand, he snatched my neck with the other, then dragged me off to the Plaza Palm security office.
My mother came and got me. All the way to the hospital, she told me what a fool I was for hanging with those hoodlums. How many times had she told me? "Stay away from those hooligans!" Hooligans, she called them. Hoodlums! The doctor at the hospital burned my head with alcohol, poked his fingers around my scalp. As he stitched up the gash, I felt the tug of each new suture. I felt the presence of my mother beside me, fists on her hips, eyeballs smacking the back of my head.
She grounded me to a week in my room, feeding me aspirin and antibiotics. When the week was up, she loaded me into the beat-up Bug with a sleeping bag and a pillowcase of clothes; then she drove me up to Griffith Park and dropped me off at the all-boy camp. I got dumped in a cabin with ten other kids, all of them poor, all of them white. Geeks with glasses and asthma. I felt like I'd been sent to jail, sentenced to boredom in some adolescent gulag. I refused to speak to anyone, not even our counselor -- some acne-faced moron twice my age who insisted I call him "Big Daddy-D."
In one of the cabins was a pea-brained bully. Davey Boy, they called him. Tall and blonde with jack rabbit teeth, he pranced through camp with a gang of goons, his big hands smacking all the smaller guys. I was a smaller guy, too. One morning, as everyone waited for the breakfast bell, Davey and his entourage crept up behind me. Then whack! Davey smacked me square on the scalp. I felt the stitches give. Spinning around, I stared up at his chin, his face a full head higher. "Watch it!" I warned him, pointing my finger like a knife at his throat. Davey chuckled, clucked his tongue, then started off through crowd, saying:
"See ya later, Shorty."
In the lodge after lunch, as I scraped my leftovers into the trash, Davey quietly snuck up behind me and smacked me again on the stitches. Two hours later, he did it again, this time up at the archery range. As he pranced off laughing, I slowly drew back a steel-tipped arrow, aiming for the back of his sun burnt neck. I could've killed him. I could've shot that arrow straight through his skull, out through his face, splitting his two buckteeth.
But I let the tragaleche go.
That evening, as we all lined up for the camp-wide barbecue, Davey and his gang came prancing up to me and the other kids from my cabin, demanding that we let them cut in front. "Go screw yourselves," I told him. "And quit smacking my head. I got stitches last week, and it hurts like a bastard every time you bop me one." For a moment, Davey seemed to understand. His lips loosened over his long front teeth. He tipped his forehead slightly, looked at me with soft, narrow eyes. Then his hand flew up and smacked me on the scalp.
"See ya later, Shorty!"
Back at my cabin, as the others got washed and ready for bed, I sat on my bunk with my face twisted up, my teeth grinding into my gums. Big Daddy-D, from across the cabin, slunk on over and knelt down beside me. "Something wrong?" he sniffed. I explained about Davey's smack-handed manner, his habit of making my stitches bleed. I'd asked him to stop. I told him to quit. What more could I possibly do?
"Well," Big Daddy sighed, thoughtfully scratching the back of his head. "If he smacks you again -- smack him back."
Those, as they say, were the magic frijoles.
After Big Daddy-D took off for the can, I grabbed my jacket from the end of my bunk and slipped unnoticed out of the cabin. I marched up along a narrow dirt path, past several wooden cabins, each with a yellow bulb burning by the door. Reaching the cabin at the top of the path, I went up the steps and knocked on the door, knocking so hard my knuckles went numb. The door swung open and a counselor appeared, his nose wrinkling up under black-rimmed glasses.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"Davey here?"
"Why? Who wants to know?"
I thought for a moment. Then said:
"Shorty."
"Hey, Davey Boy!" the counselor shouted over his shoulder. "Someone's here to see you." He shot me another curious glance, pushing his glasses up on his nose. Davey appeared behind him.
"Yeah, Shorty? Wutch you want?"
"Care to step outside?" I asked.
"Sure," Davey said, grinning like a great white shark.
Pushing past his counselor, he glanced down for a moment at the concrete steps. That was a big mistake. That was the chance of a lifetime, an instant of singular opportunity, the window through which I might pass into manhood. I took my best shot. I threw back my elbow, tightened my fist, then pasted that stupid six-foot clown, knocking the cleft right out of his chin. He went down easy, like a puta for diez dolares. His face fell flat on the concrete slab, and the sharp metallic snap of his chipping front teeth rang like laughter in my ears.
They hauled us both down to meet the camp director. Like an army drill instructor, he got in our faces with his beef jerky breath and chewed us both a new culo. He swore he'd send us back to our homes, back to the filth of our ghettoes. I briefly thought of Los Locos, thought of us smoking a big fat jay, kicking it back on the corner, flipping the bird as the badges drove by. Then I thought, To hell with them! And to hell with my mother, too! She was last one I wanted to see -- dumping me here in this toilet bowl, this bacterial heap of white rubbish.
"Fine," I said finally and swore to be good.
Then Davey and I were forced to shake hands.
Davey's hand was cold and wet, slimy as a fish.
Heading back to our cabin, Big Daddy-D put his arm around my shoulder, thanked me for keeping his name hush-hush in my chat with the camp director. That, he said, was very grown up. By the time we reached the cabin, the kids had already heard what happened. The following morning, the whole camp knew. Waiting for the breakfast bell, kids kept coming up to me, slapping their hands across my back, praising me for cold-cocking Davey. They elevated me to celebrity status. They mythicized the moment when my tightly folded fist flattened Davey's chin.
We were seven scrubs that summer, six brown- eyed barrio boys and me. Los Locos, they called us. The Crazies. Crazy out of our marijuana minds. Twelve-years-old, we prowled like cats past pale apartments, mewing for las chicas, messing with the big kids when the big kids got too bossy. No one ever messed with us. We were too tough. We were too cool. We had sworn an allegiance, all to each other, reciting an oath over knife-slit skin, our dark blood blended in a seven-grip salute. We were Los Locos. The Crazies. The baddest puto madres on the chinga madre block. 