Because I wanted a horse.
Because I’ve always talked back.
Because my mom was a proud Mexicana and when anyone but me talked shit about her, I’d go to blows.
Because of so many racists.
Because I knew I lived in L.A., but I didn’t know where I was.
Because Mexicans and Blacks were in my daily life, and I saw that all the power was with the white guys.
Because I loved sports, had to stop, but I still wanted to play and win.
Because I was left alone too much and mad too much because my mom was a mess who drank too much.
Because my mom’s mom was la amante of the owner of the industrial laundry next to where they lived, and he owned the casita.
Because at 13 I stabbed a kid with a switchblade and I panicked for a week.
Here I suggest reading my novel The Flowers. The main character is not me, but I was like him in certain ways and others not. Still, I grew up close to him and in the same time frame.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
I knew not one adult who’d gone to college, and none advised me toward it. Not one friend or friend of a friend mentioned it as a future destination unless it was for sports. Into and while in high school, I came in and out of wage jobs. Before 16, I’d bought a stock ’36 Ford with a chrome dashboard and then a ’57 Chevy I painted navy blue with specks of glitter in it. I liked girls and girlfriends and drank some, but I smoked mota much more. I ditched school often and got low Cs and Ds (lots of swats, suspensions, and this-is-it threats).
Maybe easier if you are one, but you don’t have to be a perfect student to be a writer. Not all writers have to come from perfect homes or perfect parents.
I was prime rib for Vietnam. I was strongly opposed to that war. Instead, I wanted a workers’ revolution. I went to junior college, got a 2-S deferment, and worked with antiwar vets. I was shocked by how much I liked the courses I took. I knew nothing from any subject named. I discovered that there were books. My class-and-race anger was rerouted into philosophy, religion, myths. I read as many wisdom books as I could learn of, and, as my years mounted, they all condensed into literature, storytelling in many forms. Tales from and voices of many who are forgotten or unseen, unheard or destroyed, or who fought back. The nobodies. Dostoyevsky, Rulfo, and Camus became figures like Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, Pancho Villa, and Cuauhtémoc. I read no American lit. Except the Beats. The voice of Kerouac, to me, was more his buddy Dean Moriarty’s, from the West, where very few writers lived. And his, I thought, was the life of a writer. Out there, where lightning strikes. To live, to go off, to hit the road. Writing was about an outdoors life. It was the huge trees and fierce river of Kesey’s Stampers. It was Luis Valdez’s teatro for campesinos.
I started writing fiction because, naïve, dumb as shit, I thought it would be a good way to make coin. I thought I had salable material, even.
I write of and for the people where I have come from, wanting them to be heard (that is, not just the rich masters). The goal is for their voices to be remembered in the archive of the 500 billion galaxies, plus or minus, that ocean us. I myself see writing not as research in a library or other institution, but as it lives on the soil, in the sky above, in the smell and dust of, say, a cattle drive, in the wild of a high-rise construction job. As it is heard in people’s stories. Like an adventure journalist, I write to record, as best I can, what it is to live in this mystery.•
