—MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
As a tyke I disliked playing outside, running around, kicking balls back and forth, or scrambling in dirt and grass—unlike my older brother José, who used to rumble with neighborhood boys in dirt-clod fights. Armed only with plywood or trashcan covers, the boys, divided into teams, would throw dirt clods—often rocks covered in dirt—at each other. José had a scar from one childhood encounter when a projectile struck him square in the forehead. There was blood everywhere.
I preferred playing with toy trucks and army men, being in my head, making up dialogue and adventures. I was awkward, clumsy, behind the eight ball.
Once, at eight years old, when I was visiting my nieces in El Monte (they were only two and three years younger than me), José coaxed me into a homemade go-kart with a lawn-mower engine, painstakingly put together by an Argentine kid mechanical genius who lived next door to my nieces. I didn’t want to get in the damned thing, but José’s taunting got the better of me. I pressed my foot on some kind of accelerator. The go-kart took off. I soon found myself barreling toward a six-foot-high wood- stake fence. I didn’t know what to do—turn, brake, or jump off. I just closed my eyes and crashed into the fence, wood splinters and engine parts flying up in the air along with me. I survived—maybe I was going ten miles per hour or so. But the go-kart was done, the Argentine kid in tears. I hardly lived that down.
Then, at nine, I was stretched out on the front porch playing with plastic toys and wooden cars when my next-door neighbor, a girl about my age, asked if I wanted to play dolls. I didn’t think twice about this. I’d played dolls with my younger sisters from time to time. So then there I was on her porch, my Ken to her Barbie. As things would have it, a couple of local toughs happened to walk by—bullies. They snickered and kept on walking.
I caught hell in school. Students called me everything from “sissy” to “faggot” (and, in Spanish, even more unbearable terms). I didn’t even know what “faggot” meant. I only knew I was being targeted for being “like a girl.” Was that such a terrible thing?
One day, the two bullies saw me and started talking smack about José, who at the time was a school athlete and running star. I turned around and defended him—despite his abuse in the past, he was still my brother. That’s all the excuse the bullies needed. One punch and I was on the ground. Somebody yelled, “Stay down!” I was disgraced, demeaned. I didn’t get up, and the bullies laughed. Others joined in. One shook his head.
I told myself I’d never let anyone do this to me ever again.
Unfortunately, that punch fractured a section of my jaw, which I never took care of. I had a bruise over that part of my face for a long time. A growth developed in the bone. In time I exhibited a jutting mandible that brought more degradations. I was a skinny kid with a big chin. Kids made fun of me. I was the brunt of jokes. A girl called me “monkey.”
Two years later I joined a gang. Not only did this give me status and a fighting chance, but also the homies embraced my most damaged feature. My gang moniker became “Chin.” This was how I identified from then on. Even when my parents, who never had money, offered to pay to get my jaw fixed, I refused. This is something I regret now, more than fifty years later, as I only have three places where my teeth meet, a decades-long problem of not chewing well.
Once in a gang I was no longer bully fodder. I fought all the time. I took on all takers. I shot and stabbed people. I sat in jails and juvenile hall for mostly violent acts. I turned “crazy,” a stone-cold purveyor of la vida loca—tattooed, needles in veins, feeling up chola girls in the shadows, with a façade of toughness to keep everyone away. The message: don’t get close. I turned against parents, teachers, police, rival gang members, and even José, who once tried to reason with me. I was gone—into the street’s steely snare.
Never again would anyone humiliate me.
I’ve come a long way in the decades since then. I’ve learned to overcome the limiting don’t-fuck-with-me persona I fostered in my adolescence. The persona made me stop crying, stop feeling, hurt others before they hurt me—it made me the kind of man my society, my culture, my neighborhood demanded I be. We were all prisoners of patriarchy, which damaged women and children but also our masculinity, our humanity.
Unfortunately, these kinds of men tend to replicate themselves for newer generations, molding their sons—and daughters—to accept unequal relations and abuse. In time these men can be blocked by good reasoning, societal pressures, systematized responses, even laws. But to hold and sustain such changes requires a profound change at the level of society’s base—the whole patriarchy has to be upturned.
Nevertheless, for years I’ve been working on breaking those molds inside me. Today I freely exhibit sensitive, creative, and feminine qualities. I cry when I need to. I laugh much more. I can also show anger, but it is mostly contained within the boundaries of dignity and integrality; I try not to “lose it.” This is not easy—especially since my sobriety forces me to regularly address the pressing pain beneath all the fury, instead of drowning it in drugs or alcohol.
I’ve acted out the tough-guy role most of my life. Now the feminine is unleashed in my writing, learning interests, community activism, and many other pursuits. Mind you, I also have strong masculine energy in attention to details, getting things organized, in moving projects. I protect my community, my family, and myself. I can stand up to most dangers. Together these energies, if properly activated, can make for a visionary and productive person.
What about being “tough”? It’s better to be solid and aimed true. This also requires appropriate flexibility: as the saying goes, only trees with sturdy, profound roots withstand the strongest winds.
Being sturdy but flexible is even more important when one claims the mantle of healer and revolutionary. I’m now free to be the poet and imaginative person my inner drives always demanded of me. Far too many males remain constrained by their father’s blows, mother’s yells, peers’ reprimands, social mores.
“Man up!” is the cry. But this is not only about aguante—the will to withstand whatever comes at you. We need to expand what our idea of “man” is and what withstanding consists of, to include the powers, emotional and otherwise, that anyone can retrieve.
Of course, one should have backbone, to endure the pressures and fires of life. This goes for men and women alike. These fires either forge you or melt you. When the latter happens it can lead to distortion, even to the grotesque, at the level of soul. When the former occurs it can temper the steel of your character, to help focus your vision and action.
As a maintenance mechanic I used acetylene/oxygen cutting torches, among other tools. Imagine acetylene gas as masculine and oxygen as feminine: in proper ratio to each other, you get the most precise cutting flame. On the job, the right mix was when the emission coming out of the torch had a blue plume at its core. When there was too much or little acetylene in relation to oxygen, you either just blackened the metal you were trying to cut, or you melted it. The blue plume at the center meant you could make good, clean cuts.
Feminine and masculine energies are in nature, in our psyches, and in how we stand in the world. But we must remember: the feminine is constant, the masculine variable. Men need to adequately access both for a full emotional life—to show strength and stamina but also feel hurt, confusion, and doubt, and embrace whatever ordeals may come. Ordeals are what make a life.
It’s especially important to have men’s tears. I’m not talking about men who “cry” about so-called unfair situations, who complain (and “mansplain”), exhibiting an infantile outlook toward serious things. The tears I’m talking about are different from the tears of a child. These mature tears allow one to be present with healthy and authentic feelings. Unfortunately, rage is one emotion that frequently emanates from fractured and emotionally strapped men. Outrage and rage create explosive and dangerous situations at home, at work, and in public spaces.. Anger, on the other hand, is natural and necessary. Anger has eyes. Anger has source and direction, putting resolution within one’s grasp. Rage, on the other hand, is blind.
With art, song, poetry, music, clear writing, anger can be effectively expressed. This is also true in personal arguments; one is generally in a good space of anger if they are able to maintain language, including biting wit and focused ideas. Anger loses its grip over us when fully addressed. As Emily Dickinson wrote: “Anger as soon as fed is dead— ’Tis starving makes it fat.”
Arnulfo Timoteo Garcia was serving a twenty-five-to-life sentence in San Quentin Prison when I met him, more than ten years ago. He was editor of the San Quentin News and a leader in Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP). From East San Jose, drug addiction had brought him to crime and prison. Close friends called him Pachuco, for the cool way he carried himself.
I once read poetry on San Quentin’s maximum-security yard (at the time, overcrowding was so bad that all rooms were used for prisoner housing). With me were a saxophone player, a conga drummer, and the stories and words of Michael Meade, as well as the renowned American Buddhist Jack Kornfield, founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center nearby. Arnulfo was our friend inside who helped host us.
I took part in another talk at the San Quentin chapel. A few years later I spoke during a public event with about three hundred outside visitors for a GRIP graduation. Arnulfo stood there in cap and gown, surrounded by other graduating prisoners. Everyone respected Arnulfo—Sureño and Norteño Mexicans, black and white, correctional officers and prisoners. He broke through walls with genuine heart and mind.
After serving sixteen years during his last stretch, Arnulfo was approved for early release—many people gave him glowing recommendations. We talked on the phone about the work we were going to do together—for urban peace, for justice, for personal and social transformations in our poor, diminished, and traumatized communities. I was always encouraged whenever we talked. He was one person who could make mountains move against any obstruction.
After Arnulfo’s release, I got to see him as a free man during the fortieth anniversary of Barrios Unidos in Santa Cruz, California, on September 9, 2017. Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez, founder and director of Barrios Unidos, who has brought me to juvenile lockups and Soledad prison over the years, also knew and worked with Arnulfo. Barrios Unidos acknowledged Arnulfo and other men who had served many years in prison—including one who did close to forty years—and were now in community as leaders, mentors, fathers, grandfathers.
Arnulfo strolled about with a huge smile all night. He introduced me to his family. I brought my son Ramiro to meet this hero of mine. I also introduced Arnulfo to my friend and fellow peace warrior, Alex Sanchez, once a leader in the Normandy Locos set of Mara Salvatrucha and now founder and director of Homies Unidos, a peace and gang-interventionist organization working with Central American youth. Alex and I were once members of Sureño gangs. I told Alex that Arnulfo was from a Norteño neighborhood, and without hesitation, Arnulfo grabbed us both and gave us a loving hug. I was so moved by this gesture—for all the death, suffering, and destruction the wars between Sureños and Norteños have caused over six decades. And there we were, so-called enemies, in a powerful embrace.
It was a moment I will never forget.
Two months after Arnulfo became free in the world, he was in a car with his sister Yolanda Herrera, on the way to meet with community leaders, when a vehicle smashed into them from behind, forcing the car into the path of a semi-truck.
Arnulfo and Yolanda were killed instantly.
I’ve cried many man tears in the past decade or so.
My best friend in Los Angeles, Tony Hernandez, a Chicanoized Guatemalan cholo known as Crow, first contacted me from prison after reading Always Running. We became close after his release, when I learned he’d endured twenty years of drug abuse and seventeen years in juvenile lockups and prison, and had been shot. He was my biggest fan and always sat in the front row at my readings. Tony had been suicidal as long as I could remember. He lasted around a decade after being freed. I, and others, stopped him from dying many times. He had extreme intelligence; he loved books and spiritual matters (he was a practicing Buddhist). He became part of the Mosaic men’s conferences in Mendocino, California. I paid to get Tony to Peru with Trini and me along with two other members of our sweat lodge circle. The Quechua recognized the Mayan in him and loved his likeable personality.
Tony seemed happy the last two weeks of his life. He built an interior wall for Tia Chucha’s and helped us move from one space to another. He came by the house to share food and thoughts. Even though Tony and his longtime girlfriend had broken up, and he was in between jobs, he acted like he was okay. One day Tony asked me when I was leaving town again. He had asked this many times before. On this occasion I was leaving for Boston within days; I answered without thinking much about it. The night I arrived in Boston, I received a phone call: Tony had called a mutual friend to say he was ending it all with pills and beer in an undisclosed location. On the phone he said something like, “Tell Louie I love him and that I’m at peace.”
Two weeks later a security guard making his rounds found Tony’s body inside a pickup truck, parked in the wide lot of a warehouse complex.
A few years later, I received news that James Lilly, another one of my biggest supporters, from the Chicago area, was gone. The call came from our friend Izumi Tanaka, a photographer and filmmaker, who created a 2007 documentary on James’s life called “Pushin’ Forward: The James Lilly Story.” James was a Mexican kid from the Little Village barrio, a former Latin King known as “Shyster,” who had been paralyzed since being shot at fifteen. James eventually found his way, got married, had children, and even became a world-class wheelchair racer, one year winning the grueling Sadler’s Ultra Challenge 267-mile run from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska. James also attended more than a few of my talks, and I went to see him speak to kids as well. In his early forties, despondent and drinking, James killed himself in the garage of his home.
I felt guilty about these deaths. I felt I should have done more—the same way I felt about the two dozen homies and friends I lost in my youth. I carried this guilt, even when others explained to me I hadn’t done anything wrong and probably couldn’t have done anything to stop them. I understand. Just the same, I’ve ruminated over and over about how I could have been more sharply responsive to these brothers.
One of the heartbreaking losses of the past few years was Greg Kimura, a Japanese American poet who I’d known for close to twenty years from the Mosaic gatherings. He called himself the “Bad Poet” and he’d get up to read “bad” poems, but they were always insightful, with humor and depth:
Write bad poetry—make it rhyme.
Invent weird rhythm that slips way, way, way out of time.
Use trees, leaves and sieves as cheap metaphors.
Steal 2nd-hand images like girlfriend-slammed doors.
Be abstract, obscure, completely obtuse.
Use ludicrous words like hypotenuse.
And nasty words like shoot, heck, and dang.
And wiener and spit and boom shangalang.
Make darkness fall, make dawn arise.
Make the girl at the counter have cornflower eyes.
And don’t worry about rhythm, ’cause this isn’t rap.
Snoop Dogg don’t write this kind of crap.
Make your pain sharp as needles.
Make your mother play kazoo.
(And use historical references
like Napoleon’s Waterloo.)
Don’t get hung up on rhyme.
Most call what I write poetry crime.
Just slip your hands in the deepest black muck
Slide your straw in and take a big suck
And most of all . . . write bad poetry.
Greg passed away in 2017 from a brain-stem tumor. But he smiled and held on to loved ones and friends, till the end. One story I’ve heard about Greg’s influence was of a seventy-year-old woman who owned a home on South Pender Island, British Columbia. An American, she visited there often over thirty years. One day her thirty-six-year-old daughter saw a bottle floating near the island. She retrieved it and brought it to her mother. In the bottle, still dry, was a copy of Greg’s poem “Cargo.” The woman took “Cargo” to her friends, who all loved it. She then searched on the Internet for information about Greg and found out he had passed a few months before. Deeply saddened, she felt the synchronicity of coming across that poem when she did. It was an otherworldly gift from Greg to her and her family and friends—one, she said, she’d cherish.
All these men were decent and honorable, as were many others who’ve died who I can’t name here. They were my friends despite whatever dogged them from their pasts, whatever personal demons they carried or whatever fate claimed them. I should point out that many more men and women I’ve helped or interacted with over the years who were tangled up with gangs, prisons, or suicide roads, or in recovery, are doing well. Most are enjoying stable lives. Nonetheless, these men are missed. Now they are ancestors—I call on them in times of need, being among the legislators of the dead whom I appeal to.
Here’s Rumi:
On the day I die, when I’m being carried
toward the grave, don’t weep. Don’t say,
he’s gone, he’s gone. Death has nothing
to do with going away. The sun sets and
the moon sets, but they’re not gone.
Death is a coming together. The tomb
looks like a prison, but it’s really
release into union. The human seed goes
down in the ground like a bucket into
the well where Joseph is. It grows and
comes up full of some unimagined beauty.
Your mouth closes here and immediately
opens with a shout of joy over there.
Men should cry more, connect more, feel more—and men and women should outcry more against men’s abuse, power, control, addictions, and rage.
Cry and outcry.
At the same time, tears aren’t always about deaths or other losses. There are also tears of joy; of comprehension; of the realization of wise outcomes, even when least expected; of reaching plateaus in life, without safety net or equipment, but moving forward anyway; of seeing how mentors, elders, friends, strong teachings, a great love, family, have lit the murky trails.
We’ve also cried too much—trillions of tears, so much pain, so much damage—and seen things remain the same. We’ve yelled and screamed, oh so often, with great intensity, railing and railing against injustices small and large, and still we feel invalidated and unheard. At some point the screams and cries, and the unfathomable numbness that can overtake us, are not enough. It’s good that we can have an array of feelings, but in one’s life, as in the life of a people, these have to turn into positive and formidable options. We all need a relationship with options—the more the better. These will help transform the hurt and rage beyond our fists, our bodies, our throats, and our silences into what’s generative and healing and loving.
Collective hungers and angers should become artfully extracted into a culture of paying attention and acting accordingly, acknowledging the worth of every pain, every joy, all the tears, all the screams.