HILLSIDES AND FLATLANDS

Héctor Tobar

MY SON WAS STILL sleeping in a crib. We set him down each night, my wife and I, in his cushioned cocoon, lined with bumpers festooned with dinosaurs in primary colors. When he woke up in the middle of the night, I’d pick him up and feed him, sway and coo, and sing him back to sleep, with “Hush little baby don’t say a word . . .” followed by a series of improvised verses, “And if that wine don’t make you dance, Papa’s going to buy you a pair of pants . . .” Then I’d watch him sleep, brown skin and full lips, puffing infant breaths on a cottony rectangle, protected, my son.

I was a father for the first time. I’d given up on my dreams to be a novelist, and taken a job at a newspaper for the health insurance, because that’s what fathers do. My home was filled with the baked-bread smell of regurgitated mother’s milk, and I’d learned how to change diapers. In the mornings, I’d give my baby boy a kiss good-bye and leave for the newsroom, where my editors scanned their green-glowing computer screens for dispatches of overnight violence. They would then send me into the big, asphalted, graffitied, subdivided coastal plain of working Los Angeles, where the palm trees were as old as great-grandfathers. I believed it was my calling to bear witness, to speak for the voiceless, but an entry-level job those days required months and maybe years on the cop beat. So I traveled into the harried and sooty grid inhabited by people of African and Latin American descent. These were the early days of the Automatic Weapons Era, and there were bodies to be counted, witnesses and survivors and families to interview after the firefights of the night and the weekend before.

I was born and raised in a Los Angeles that did, and did not, resemble these battlefields. My Guatemalan parents and I were not well off, in our East Hollywood neighborhood; but the phrase “drive-by shooting” was unknown to me. Our neighborhood was gang-free and racially integrated. At least one murderer lived nearby, in an apartment that was less than a block from my family’s—James Earl Ray, who went on to kill Martin Luther King Jr. But I remember no gunplay growing up. We lived on a humble grid of side streets squeezed between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, among assorted working people, artists, immigrants, and drifters. In our corner of East Hollywood, Jews and Armenians and white Southerners lived alongside Mexicans and Eastern European exiles. My best friends were from Arkansas, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Czechoslovakia. We played baseball on the tarry blacktop of our elementary school for hours on end, and walked home along streets lined with brick apartments built in the 1930s, and wide Craftsman homes, and birds of paradise and jade plants covered with dust.

My long Angeleno coming-of-age coincided with the city’s long, steady postindustrial decline. Oil embargoes and plant closings, and a hippie apocalypse of bad drugs and cultish radicalism, from Free Love to the Symbionese Liberation Army to crack cocaine, and the tax revolt and the fiscal strangulation of the public schools. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s. Unhappy decades for Los Angeles. When I started my own family, in 1996, we sought out a nook of urban peace away from the grid and the flatlands. We scanned elevated patches of real estate in search of a street with curved lines that hugged the topography of a mound or hillside, or the meandering routes of ancient watersheds. My wife and I bought our first home in a community called Mount Washington, at an elevation of approximately 725 feet above sea level, and about 300 feet above the Latino barrio below us. In Los Angeles, this small difference in altitude meant we lived in a mellower socioeconomic milieu, closer to nature and the looping flight patterns of red-tailed hawks and the scavenging routes of scrawny coyotes. Mount Washington was also one of the city’s oldest bohemian getaways; at various moments in its history, our 800-square-foot two-bedroom home had belonged to a minor starlet of the silent-screen era, and to a sound engineer who’d won an Academy Award on a 1990s Hollywood blockbuster.

At night, while the coyotes feasted on our street’s possums and feral cats, we’d hear the air-snapping reports of the occasional volley of gunshots coming from the barrio below us, the slinging of lead by the teenage armies of disorder and self-destruction; the sirens and helicopters of the Los Angeles Police Department usually followed. Nevertheless, I rarely felt any sense of danger driving through these adjacent barrios. Nor on my midday journeys southward into the districts where people were being killed in greater numbers. Lennox. Athens. South-Central. Nonlocals who first glimpse these districts are often puzzled. “This is a ghetto? But it looks sorta nice.” There are avocado trees, and houses with lawns and cactus plants and rosebushes. Only the housing projects seem to fit the role. I wandered these neighborhoods at will and without fear—before sunset. Altogether, the poor southern districts of the metropolis spread out over close to one hundred square miles of flatlands and grids. A cruel, de facto segregation held sway. Only blacks and Latinos lived there.

One Thursday morning I was dispatched to the Florence district, an unincorporated community adjacent to South-Central Los Angeles, and specifically to East Sixty-First Street and Central Avenue. A nine-year-old boy had died the night before, three days after being shot in his family’s 1976 Ford Granada. On Sunday night, a group of young men had taken an AK-47 and opened fire on the vehicle with brass-and-lead cartridge, penetrating the steel and glass skin of the Ford, where the boy had been sitting in the backseat with his brother and sister (ages three and six) and mother and father. According to the sheriff’s department, the killers were members of a gang whose name I put into print then, but which I will now refuse to write out of respect for the dead. I turned off the freeway and entered the neighborhood, and noted the absence of bright colors, the earth-toned pallet of the southern districts of Los Angeles. A stucco, patched-over aesthetic reigned, one low-slung building after another wearing several layers of taupe and cement-gray paint. This was L.A.’s Rust Belt: the Goodyear Tire & Rubber factory, closed in the late 1970s, was located six blocks away from the scene of the shooting. In 1983, the actor playing the lead in the film Bless Their Little Hearts (an unheralded classic of African American cinema) drove a car through this neighborhood, and past the crumbling brick Acropolis of the half-demolished Goodyear plant.

This history was unknown to most of the locals. The neighborhood was by then 80 percent Latino, and Spanish and English were spoken in equal measures. In a series of sidewalk interviews in those two languages I was able to piece together the sequence of events of that violent Sunday night.

The Martinez family had moved out of their East Sixty-First Street apartment several years earlier. David Martinez was a mechanic, and he’d taken his family more than twenty miles away, to the Orange County suburb of Buena Park, home to another barrio and to the onetime boysenberry patch and now amusement park known as Knott’s Berry Farm. Distance from the flat center of Los Angeles had brought the Martinezes a measure of safety and peace. But they still had friends in Florence and on a visit to see them their car had broken down in front of the apartment building on East Sixty-First Street where they used to live. Mr. Martinez returned with his family to Florence to see if he could fix and retrieve the car. When he parked and stepped onto the street, another car pulled up and several young men opened fire: they’d seen the Martinezes’ car, and the silhouettes of the five people packed inside, and assumed they were rival gang members.

“They were blasting,” one member of the local gang told me about the gunmen. “They were trying to get us,” said another. They pantomimed their reactions and the actions of the gunmen with a lightheartedness that itself was deeply disturbing. Hector had been struck in the skull and back, and stumbled from the car holding his head in his hands. One of the gang members counted the votive candles at the sidewalk memorial to the dead boy: twenty-two. Another spray-painted the victim’s name on the concrete: R.I.P. Hector. Other witnesses recounted how it had been a very warm, late summer night, with as many as thirty people gathered outside the apartment building, including families with children. As I scribbled into my notebook, I heard no statements of outrage. No one railed against the murderous demons who had perpetrated the crime, or against the neighborhood’s poverty, and the grimness and hopelessness from which one murder, and hundreds of murders, had been born. (Years later, the apartment building was demolished. The Diego Rivera Learning Complex, a public high school, now rises from the site where Hector Martinez was killed.)

Next I drove to the Martinez home in Buena Park and found a carpeted living room, filled with mourning and suffering. Alejandra Murillo, Hector’s mother, had herself been wounded. She still wore the bracelet from the hospital and the bandages on her wrist from an IV drip. There were two other journalists present, and as we sat and stood in the small space the dead boy looked at us from a studio portrait on a shelf near the television: Alejandra’s mothering there to be seen in the straight part of his wet hair, the bright smile. A brown-skinned boy. His mother herself so young: twenty-five. Someone asked Alejandra about her own wounds, so she lifted up the corner of her blouse to show us the bruise and razorlike cut left by the bullet that had struck her on her side, just above her waist. Her six-year-old son, Christian, his knee still bandaged from a gunshot wound, sat on the floor, playing a video game. “They took my son from me,” she said in Spanish, through the haze of a sedated numbness. “Era mi adoración.” I whispered my question, the only question I could truly ask her: Tell me something about Hector. So that I can tell people who he really was.

“Tocaba el acordeón,” she said, and she broke into tears and doubled over in pain at the memory of her beautiful son playing that big, boxy instrument, a symbol of his Mexican heritage, each mastered note and melody a testament to his intelligence and joy and promise. She cried and cried, until one of the television reporters finally said one of the most narcissistic things I’ve ever heard: “Señora, por favor. Get ahold of yourself. Think of us. We have a job to do and this isn’t easy for us either.”

I offered Alejandra and the members of her family my deepest condolences and drove back to Los Angeles. The story I would tell was in my head and in my notebook. Now I just had to write it, which I would do, in green, watery letters on the pulsing screen of my computer terminal, in the three or four hours left before my deadline. I thought of Alejandra doubled over in pain, sitting on a big chair, and for a moment I thought of her loss and her sorrow as a kind of contagion that might take my own son from me. No, no, no. Please no. Please, God, protect my son. From bullets and car crashes and randomness. Protect him. I turned on the radio in search of a distraction, and thankfully the local public radio station offered stories from lands near and far that did not involve death. As I got closer to downtown, I listened to the story of a precocious, bright boy, a solver of impossible problems, recounting feats of mathematical prowess. His voice stayed with me as I reached the newspaper’s garage, and when I pulled into a parking space the story ended, and I turned off the car, and stayed inside.

I thought of three boys: Hector Martinez and his accordion, alive in that portrait; this bright boy on the radio; and my own son, small and vulnerable in his crib. Three boys. Their beating hearts, their lungs, hungry for new breaths. Fragile and brilliant. One alive and balancing equations to show the world what smart boys can do; one soon to be buried at age nine, to be mourned by his mother for the rest of her life. And my son, my beautiful boy, the infant I held in my arms, asleep on a hillside. I am a father. I am powerless. And I am afraid. I began to sob, to weep uncontrollably. Cribs and sidewalk shooting grounds, mother’s milk and flowers on a grave. After a few minutes, I wiped the tears from my cheeks, and walked into the newsroom.