Santana and Saúl

Throughout the barrios from San Gabriel in the west to Corona and Norco in the east, things were changing. The Pachuco influence was fading. The older vatos (one of the guys) who still wore the full dress looked a little silly. I still wore the pants and shoes and, sometimes, the hat and always the suspenders, but I usually wore suits and ties if I was really dressed up, and my topcoat. Nobody dressed exactly like I did. Nobody was exactly like I was.

Heroin was also spreading like wildfire through the barrios. There were always tecatos, drug addicts, older men that we all knew. They were peaceful and nobody bothered them. A certain brotherhood between them existed throughout all the barrios. If one was sick and didn’t have any carga (heroin), he could call on another addict to help him out, even give him drugs if he couldn’t pay for them on the spot. If a tecato went from Cucamonga to Pomona to score some carga, nobody bothered him, nobody hurt him. Everybody believed that they were no threat to the community.

At the same time the spread of heroin was going on and spreading mellowness, the gangs that were forming in all the barrios became more violent. Tecatos were still given a free pass in all the barrios, but no one else.

Like all kids, I didn’t think about the future. I just wanted to be important in the . barrios. If I had lived in another place maybe I’d want to be an athlete or a doctor or a businessman. From the time I was a peewee I could see that the men around me who were admired were men who lived by a code. They were men who took care of their own. The best of these men weren’t cruel to the weak and they never forgot an insult or an injury if it took a lifetime to repay it. They were loyal to those close to them. They were outlaws. They went where they wanted, but always loyal to their barrio. They had what they wanted when they wanted it, whether it was money, alcohol, drugs or women. The price they paid for that life was sometimes an early death or almost always prison. They were looked up to by all but the citizens and some of them secretly admired the outlaw, especially if they took it out on gabachos. My goal was to be the best of them, the most respected, the most admired, the most feared and I was well along on my way before I was seventeen.

Don Pancho died. I didn’t exactly grieve but I didn’t have any bad feelings for his memory either even though he treated me badly when I was a kid. I was grown up enough by now to understand his hard life and feel sympathy for him. He had been my mother’s husband for about fifteen years and she mourned him. I felt sorry for my mother. At the same time he was better off dead, his suffering over. My mother now had only four children at home. She looked old because of her hard life. Still in her forties, she looked sixty. With Don Pancho gone she had no income. There was no life insurance. My three older sisters were now married and between them and my brother, Toribio, we provided the money she needed to live and take care of my step-brothers and sisters. Toribio was in the Air Force. I was the oldest son near my family and, whether I liked it or not, I had a responsibility.

One night, in the alley near the corner, a couple of tecatos were shooting up. I watched with disgust and fascination as they cooked up the heroin in a bent spoon, and with hungry looks on their faces, their veins bulging with the rubber tied around their arms, nervously waited until they could fill their hypodermic and receive the carga. While they waited for the bubbling liquid to calm down so they could load the needle one of them looked over at me and said, “Want a taste, Santana?”

“Are you crazy? I said, screwing up my face. “Why would I want to do that?”

“It’s better than anything. Better than yesca, better than pisto (drinking).”

The truth was that the thought of sticking a needle in my arm scared me. Why should I want to hurt myself like that? Beside that my fear was that if I did what they did I would become less than human, Dracula, a monster, killing people for no reason. I watched them closely as they injected themselves. The needle slipped in without a twitch from them and as soon as they released the rubber around their arm, they sighed with appreciation, like a man who has taken a bite out of a cold, ripe peach on a hot day. Quickly, they were much calmer. The one holding the needle tipped it toward the sky. “Santanilla, there’s a taste left. Ready to try?”

I was ready to go into a strange barrio and fight my way out. I was ready to steal, to fight, to stab, to shoot. I could work all day in the fields and drink all night and go to work the next morning. There was no danger I wasn’t ready to face. I held my arm out. He held it, and like a doctor, searched for the vein by tapping my forearm, and then punctured the vein with the point of the needle. In too short a time to measure, in a millionth of a second, a short sentence went through my brain…”This is me.” I knew in that moment, for good or evil, the real Santana had been born. Nothing that had ever happened to me in my life was as powerful or had a greater effect on me than that tiny quantity of the drug going into my body. I could not escape the thought, an echo of the past, that a devil wind was blowing through me.