On his way south, he hopped off on Sports Arena, but Tower Records was gone. What? He pulled a U and tried again, as if he’d somehow missed the store. Gone? How could it be gone? Screw that—he sped to Washington and went up to Hillcrest and looked for Off the Record. He was in the mood for some import CDs. Keep his veneer of sanity. It was gone too. Junior sat there in the parking lot where the Hillcrest Bowl used to be. He could not believe it—all culture had vanished from San Diego. His phone said, “You let me penetrate you.” Chango. Junior didn’t answer.
He’d only come to check it out. It was a crazy adventure, he told himself. Good for a laugh. Chango had picked up a magazine in a dentist’s office. New dentures: our tax dollars at work. He thought it was a Nat Geo, but he wasn’t sure. Some gabacho had written an article about abandoned homes along the I-15 corridor. Repos. Something like six out of ten, maybe seven out of fifteen or something like that. Point was, they were just sitting there, like haunted houses, like the whole highway was a long ghost town, and the writer had broken in to look around and found all kinds of stuff just laying around. Sure, sad shit like kids’ homework on the kitchen table. But it’s on a kitchen table, you catch my drift, Chango demanded. There’s whole houses full of furniture and mink coats and plasma TVs and freakin’ Bose stereos. La-Z-Boys! Hells yeah! Some have cars in the garages. And it’s all foreclosed and owned by some bank. But the kicker—the kicker, Yuniorr—is that the banks can’t afford to resell this stuff, so they send trucks to the houses to haul it to the dump. Friggin’ illegals driving trucks just drag it all out and go toss it. A million bucks worth of primo swag.
“You tell me, how many freakin’ apartments gots big-screen TVs that them boys just hauled home? You been to the swap meet?” And Chango had noted, in his profound research (he stole the magazine from the dentist’s) that the meltdown had banks backed up. Some of these houses wouldn’t be purged for a year or more.
“Ain’t even stealin’, peewee. Nobody wants it anyway. Worst case is breaking-and-entering. So I got this plan and I’m gonna make us a million dollars in a couple of months. But I need you to help.”
“Why me?”
“You know how to talk white. Shit! Why’d you think?”
Junior motored down I-5 and dropped out at National City. He was loving the tired face of America’s Finest City—San Diego was a’ight, but National was still the bomb. The Bay Theater, where he used to see Elvis revivals and Mexican triple-features. He’d kissed a few locas up there in the back rows. He smiled. He checked the old Mile of Cars—they used to call it the Mile of Scars, because sometimes Shelltown or Del Sol dudes would catch them out there at night and fists would fly between the car lots. That was before everybody got all gatted up and brought the 9s along. Junior shook his head; he would have never imagined that fistfights and fear would come to seem nostalgic.
He drove into the old hood, heading for West 20th and Chango’s odd crib over the hump and hiding behind the barrio on the little slope to the old slaughterhouse estuaries. He wanted to see his old church, maybe light a candle. He didn’t mean to go bad in his life. He didn’t mean to go so far away and not come back, either. Or maybe he did. St. Anthony’s. America’s prettiest little Catholic church. He smiled. They’d sneak out of catechism and go down behind the elementary school and play baseball on the edge of the swamp. There was a flat cat carcass they used for home plate.
He turned the corner and beheld an empty lot surrounded by a low chain-link fence. He slammed on the brakes. It was gone, like Tower Records. Things seemed to be vanishing as if all of San Diego County were being abducted by aliens.
He jumped out of his car and beheld a man watering his lawn, surrounded by a platoon of pug dogs.
“Where’s the church?” he called.
“Church? Burned down! Where you been?”
“What! When?”
“Long time, long time. Say, ain’t you that Garcia boy?”
“Not me,” said Junior, getting back in the car.
He drove past his old house. Man, it sure was tiny. Looked like all his old man’s gardens were dead. He didn’t want to look at it. It had a faded For Sale sign stuck in the black iron fence.
The barrio had a Burger King in it, and a Tijuana Trolley stop. Damn. All kinds of Mexican nationals sat around on the cement benches savoring their Quata Poundas among squiggles of graffiti. Junior shook his head.
He dropped into the ancient little underpass and popped out on the west side of I-5 and hung a left and went to the end of the earth and hung another left and dropped down the small slope toward the black water and there it was. Chango’s house. His dad’s old, forgotten Esso station. Out of business since 1964. Chango lived in the triangular office. He’d pasted butcher paper over the glass and had put an Obama poster on the front, with some Sharpie redesigns so that it now said: CHANGO YOU CAN BELIEVE IN.
He’d given the prez a droopy pachuco mustache and some tiny, irritating homeboy sunglasses—Junior knew that Chango, ever the classicisist, would still call the glasses gafas. He knocked on the glass until Chango woke up from his nap.
“Car’s for shit,” Chango noted as Junior drove.
“Where we going?” Junior said.
“You remember the Elbow Room? That’s where we’re goin’. Down behind there. Hey, the radio sucks, ese. What’s this? You should be listening to oldies.”
Junior punched the OFF button.
“Damn,” Chango muttered. “Shit.” He looked like a greasy old crow. All wizened and craggy, all gray and lonesome. His big new teeth were white and looked like they were made out of slivers of oven-safe bake wear. His fingers were yellow from decades of Mexican cigarettes. “For reals,” he was saying. It was apparently a long-standing conversation he had with himself. His various jail tattoos were purple and blurry and could have been dice rolling snake eyes and maybe a skeleton with a sombrero and on the other forearm an out-of-focus obscenity. He had that trustworthy little vato loco cross tattooed in the meat between his thumb and forefinger. “Tha’s right, you know it,” he added.
He’d shown Junior the article. It was by Charles Bowden, and did, indeed, confess to uninvited recon sorties into the creepy abandoned homes. One found these places by looking for overgrown yellow lawns and a sepulchral silence.
“This guy’s a great writer,” Junior said. “I can’t believe you read him.”
“Who?” Chango replied.
“This guy—the writer.”
“I was mostly lookin’ at the pictures, homie. That’s what caught my eye.”
They pulled around the old block where everybody used to go to drink at the Elbow Room, except for Junior who was too young to get in. They rattled around into a dirt alley and Chango directed him to stop at the double-door of a garage. They could hear Thee Midnighters blasting out.
“That’s some real music, boy,” Chango said, and creaked out of his seat, though he managed to sway pretty good once he got erect, swaggering like an arthritic pimp.
Inside, a Mongol associate of Chango’s had dolled up a stolen U-Haul panel truck. He wore his vest and scared Junior to death, though lots of vatos liked the Mongols because they were the only Chicano bikers around.