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at 1352 Hope Street with mamá, tía Mari, tío Leo, and my brother Milagro we live here, the five of us packed together in a box where there's no hot water windows don't work plumbing don't work heater don't work nothing here works. But this is where I live in this lopsided brown building that sags like an old face. Tía Mari says it's gonna fold into itself one day and come down on us, a giant toothless wrinkled mouth swallowing us whole. Says she'll be glad when it happens too cuz she's waiting for the Big One, the 8 point earthquake that'll crack sidewalks open and crumble freeways, turn skyscrapers into chalk dust, she's waiting for the earth to move beneath her feet. But my mamá, she's living on bent knees, cleaning rich people's houses, wiping clean white tile floors and toilet bowls. Walking on bent knees, making pilgrimage, holding sacred holy apparitions on street corners, underground metros, churches, trees, tortillas. Mamá is waiting for Jesus to come back from the dead, for La Virgen de Guadalupe to send her a sign, for her cemetery of candles and saints to rise up like riot flames among the living. She's waiting for salvation on Hope Street. Tío Leo laughs, says God in the USA is TV and money, is a rich White slum lord living in Beverely Hills, is the Border Patrol asking for papeles, is the police officer who shot Turo from down the street and got away with it. Says the bullet whole in Turo's back es la huella de Dios. Somos cucarachas, he shouts y el zapato o la mano que cae del cielo a darte el madrazo es tu Dios. Scares us when Tío Leo starts saying stuff like that, Mamá shakes her head and asks: ¿Qué, no crees en nada? He says he believes in numbers. In 2 roaches + 2 roaches = 4 roaches. In 3 days sin chamba + 6 days sin chamba = 9 días de desesperación. In 8 hours worked + 4 hours work = overtime. In numbers typed in at the right hand side of his paycheck = never enough. He's waiting to win the lottery, for God to @#* up and accidentally call his numbers: as soft as my brother's name to come raining down on me. I'm waiting for for a miracle cuz we're 5-to-a-room here cuz there's a muerta on the 1st floor and a deaf woman who eats mice on the 3rd. I wait for miracles cuz here roaches have wings and fall from ceilngs into bowls of soup and cereal. Here, we can't get rid of them, even with daily sprays, those roach motels, that Chinese chalk, and the manager won't fumigate says we got roaches cuz we're dirty. All 126 tenants have roaches cuz all 126 of us are dirty and lazy and poor and well everybody knows that roaches come with poverty and poverty with roaches. And the other day when I told the manager we needed mouse traps he told me, aquí no hay ratones and he said we should leave him alone because after all he wasn't God and he couldn't solve all of our problems and anyways we were all crazy, seeing things all 126 of us who live here, seeing things cuz I live smack in the middle of this city's aneurysm, where drunk disenfranchised men pee against cracked walls and shoot heroine up swollen veins, where the unwanted leave their dreams lying around like syringes on sidewalks. I pray for miracles cuz I'm only 17 and I live among all these roaches these mice these men. |
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