We moved to West Covina to be closer to our family. For the first time ever, I was excited by a move because West Covina meant that I could be near Choli again. He and I picked up right where we’d left off. We were thick as thieves. But growing up on the West Covina–La Puente border, Choli and I were surrounded by a lot of gang activity. We never joined any gangs—our moms kept too close an eye on us to do such a thing. But Choli and I needed to be tough around our neighborhood. Teenagers suffering from toxic masculinity and economic inequality can always smell fear, so my cousin and I had to be fearless.
Fun fact, Choli and I fought each other only once in our lives. It was the Great Tom Hanks–Will Smith War of ’91.The battle was over what TV show to watch in his house. I should have known how passionate I would become about episodic storytelling as an adult because Choli wanted to watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and I was ready to get into a fistfight to watch reruns of Bosom Buddies. Can you imagine? A fat Hispanic kid fighting for the honor of Tom Hanks in drag! We first fought over the remote control. Then fists started flying. Screams were let out. In the end, Choli pinned me to the ground, which meant he was the victor. Except that he was crying and I was not, so in our tough little neighborhood that meant it was a tie.
On one of the first weekends I moved in, Choli and I walked over to Nogales High School. We were both about to start Rincon Intermediate, which was a feeder school to Nogales High that had a reputation of being full of gang activity at the time. Choli and I simply wanted to play handball, and Nogales High was the only place that had handball courts. Handball was a very democratic sport. You did not need any of the expensive equipment and lush fields that baseball and football required. All you needed was one little blue handball. There’s a reason so many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals play the sport to this day. And if you do not think handball is a sport, then neither is golf!
Choli and I got in less than one round of handball before a white male, who looked approximately thirty years of age, approached us with a gun in his hand. Immediately frightened, my cousin and I dropped the handball on the floor. We did not know what was happening. Was this one of the gangsters we were warned about at Nogales? The man identified himself as an undercover cop and accused us of being there to rob the school. Perplexed, Choli and I disagreed. We were simply there to play handball. The undercover officer did not believe us. Lying or not, we were only thirteen years old.
The officer locked Choli and me in a dark storage room adjacent to the handball courts while he looked around the premises for the accomplices he insisted we had. We were frightened. We had no idea why he did not believe us. We were certain that once he saw the blue handball, he would let us go. After what felt like an eternity in the darkness, we were finally let out of the tiny room, only to be placed in the back of a squad car. Two additional white police officers had shown up at this point, and the three men looked around the school in search of our imaginary accomplices while we were locked up in the backseat. Mortified, I started to feel like we had done something wrong. I mean, why else spend this much energy on two kids unless they had committed some kind of crime? A police car, an undercover cop, two officers on patrol, and three loaded firearms ready to scream—all there to stop two kids from playing handball. We were let go after they could not prove their theory. No apology. They simply opened the squad car door and told us not to come back during nonschool hours.
Choli and I started eighth grade at Rincon. The kids there were tougher than any I had ever encountered. A lot of them were gangbangers or affiliated with gangs. Choli and I didn’t belong to any crews, but we were accepted at school simply for being tough, keeping to ourselves, always being respectful, and never ever ratting anyone out. The little gangsters felt safe around Choli and me. So much so that one of them, Richard, the most intimidating cholo at school, crept up to me one morning and asked: “Do you wanna buy a shotgun?” Richard was not kidding. The guys from his crew had an extra one and he needed to sell it quickly. I thought about buying it for a split second. For as tough as I acted, I always feared I was one confrontation away from serious harm. Maybe I would be safer with a shotgun. Maybe the shotgun would earn me more respect. But then I thought, Does a thirteen-year-old really need a shotgun? I also remembered that I didn’t have money to buy a shotgun, and had nowhere to hide said shotgun from my parents if I was stupid enough to do so. I told Richard that I was cool, he shrugged, and he continued his discounted sales pitch with another student.
At Rincon Intermediate, we were being forced to grow up faster than more affluent kids our age do. Despite it all, there were a lot of laughs, flirting, and hanging out at the school. My first slow dance was at Rincon, so was my first quinceañera court, for my Salvadorian American friend Nelda. Rincon was not miserable by any stretch of the imagination. But we were always on edge.
It was at this point in our lives, with my dad desperate to find more work, that he received something unexpected in the mail. It was an official letter from an unknown American gentleman who must have had a premonition that my dad was going through a hard time. This stranger’s name sounded very rich. It was Ed McMahon, and he had just notified my dad that he may have just won one million dollars. My dad was beside himself. He could not believe his good fortune. It was as if God was giving him a break for once in his life. One million dollars. There was so much my dad could do with one million dollars. Pay off all the debt he owed. Buy his two cars outright. My dad did not know what to do with all of his excitement. He did not tell my mom or me anything. He hid that official communication from Ed McMahon under his mattress. On the weekend, my uncle Javier came to visit. That’s when my dad took him upstairs to his room and shut the door behind them. He told my uncle that he was going to tell him something he had not shared with a single soul. My dad pulled out the letter from under his mattress and said, “I may just have won one million dollars.”
My uncle Javier took a second to compose himself, trying to hold it together, but then he erupted into laughter. “You didn’t win shit,” said my uncle. “That’s marketing to get you to buy useless electronics.” My dad felt so ashamed that he did not mention the microwave he had already ordered to be eligible for the one million dollars.
I was just as naive as my dad at the time. Walking home from Rincon one day, I noticed that my neighbor Edgar, who was ten years older than me, was playing mariachi on his front patio. I had only heard mariachi music at the Ecuadorian parties that my grandfather used to throw, so up to that point, I had assumed mariachis were from Ecuador. I locked eyes with Edgar and naively asked, “Oh, you listen to Ecuadorian mariachis, too?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” replied Edgar. “Mariachis are from Mexico!”
I did not know.
Despite that rocky start, Edgar and I became fast friends. My parents did not say anything about the fact that I was thirteen hanging out with a twenty-three-year-old. They were just happy I had a new friend after moving me out of my old neighborhood. Edgar was a brawny Mexican American who loved to talk about his past high school football glory. He was essentially a younger, shorter, and browner version of Al Bundy. Edgar was a quintessential guy from the ’hood: tough on the outside, but really a kindhearted kid on the inside. Edgar and I bonded over our love for Vicente Fernandez and comic books. Comics, by the way, were not something I could ever talk about at Rincon, or my cholo friends would clown on me. I knew of the classic DC superhero characters like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman from my childhood in Ecuador, but Edgar introduced me to the more “sciency” characters of Marvel. The Hulk and his gamma rays. The radioactive Spider-Man. The tight-knit family of scientists known as the Fantastic Four. And the most important of all to me, the children of the atom: the X-Men. Patterned after Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Charles Xavier and Magneto were the perfect models for helping non-Black kids understand the Civil Rights Movement. Anybody who felt different or rejected by society could easily relate to being a mutant. I sure as hell did. I fell in love with the character of Wolverine, a short superhero with a hairy chest, a huge ego, and an attitude problem. Without a doubt, Wolverine was the most Latino superhero I had ever read about! Wolverine also had a drinking problem. Something I started developing at the time, as Choli and I insisted on drinking alcohol at every family function together.
My everyday uniform was a black bomber jacket and a black White Sox baseball hat. Dr. Dre had dropped The Chronic a year earlier and only a pioneer of gangsta rap could get me to turn my back on the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was from Compton, after all, and Compton was now full of immigrants. Dr. Dre knew what was up. I made friends with all the local gangs at school and I even had a girlfriend, or at least I had a girl who said she was my girlfriend and I went along with it. Her name was Jenny. She was sweet and bubbly. A Latina cheerleader in a school where boys were too cool to play sports. We never saw each other outside of class. Her parents were too strict. Jenny and I talked on the phone from time to time. One day after school, Jenny guided me behind the English building and kissed me. But this was no innocent elementary school peck on the lips. This was the French way of showing affection. It was exciting. Jenny’s kiss teleported me all the way back to the court of Louis XIV. After that kiss, I was ready for cigarettes, baguettes, and red wine. Jenny and I broke up shortly after that, but that kiss was the most memorable moment of my entire middle school experience. In the immortal words of Snoop Dogg: It was “realer than Real Deal Holyfield.”