animurbis: beneath the cod-i-go-go

(For my sisters, whom I left behind.)


“Constructing the new urban order—and standing apart from rural stereotypes—necessitated the removal of live urban meat markets and in-town slaughterhouses, such as Smithfield in London, that forced civilized city-dwellers to witness sexual intercourse among animals on their way to market, exposing their delicate senses to the violence of auction and slaughterhouse, and risking their moral decay by forcing them to mingle with drovers perceived by bourgeois reformers as inclined to drink and sexual excess. As a result, meat markets and slaughterhouses were excised from the city, reinforcing urban identities defined in opposition to a countryside populated by beastly people and animals.” (Wolch 727)


a.
: it’s on Reseda Boulevard, just north of Tarzana, there’s this park there on the northeast corner that butts up against the L.A. River, there’s a block of apartment complexes across the street, there’s me bicycling south on my way to Ventura Boulevard to catch the Rapid or the 240 or the 150 or whatever comes, no Orange Line for me, just pass it on by cuz damn bike racks always full;

and it’s night time already, after 8 and dark, when I see them, two fat white ducks waddling across the street from the apartments towards the park, they cross in front of me, they start out into the southbound lanes and I go, oh shit, and look back behind me, no cars coming, they’re okay, I slow down, I watch them, be—behind me now, and then I look—I look forward and there’s this, like, thick stream of fast traffic coming northbound gunning it on the green green light just as the ducks head into the northbound Reseda lanes, and leading the pack is a fast-moving silver Mercedes a bullet a slick blur and I wave my arm and yell out, but, it’s dark already and the tinted windows rolled up and anyways I’m in the bike lane, who ever notices the bike lane, right, and then there’s—

there’s this sick, dull thud, the ear knows already even before I turn around, and the Mercedes screeching silver in the night, and I look back and see bright red brake lights lighting up a fat white duck body mid-flight flop slow motion, up into the air rolled off the rear passenger side tire up into the air and then back down onto black pavement, something absolutely graceful and grotesque at the same time in this movement and these lines and this life and death;

while the other one continues its waddle onto the other sidewalk;

makes it over.

And at first I’m feeling bummed, real bummed, you know, animals in ur—you know, urban, ah, space, flying—but not that kind of flying, right? all of us, ch—choking and sputtering around, knocked around by—in our big, steel isolation…booths, knocked around with constricted lungs and capillaries, instinct all choked up, averted eyes, deodorized, the languages of urban space interfering with every impulse, desire—

poor ducks, I’m thinking, poor fuckin ducks.

But then, you know, I keep bi—keep biking on? and I remember the—the single dime…in my pock—I mean, you know, not only do I—I’m all hungry, right? And literally I, not only do I mean one, single, thin dime, and nothing else in my pocket, but, like, the only reason it’s there is cuz I found it in the MTA station earlier that day? when I was buying my day-pass, on the ground, with my last three bucks? —and suddenly I’m all, like, “Mmmm…you know, duck is actually pretty good—a little rich, but…good…” Never mind that I’m a (mostly) vegetarian. Never mind that I just tried to save the ducks, that I felt horrified only a few seconds ago watching/hearing this poor duck smack pavement. No, suddenly, I’m actually thinking about how exactly I could have the duck plucked and prepared...bike back, stick it in my bike bag, where could I take it (Chinatown, maybe, on my way to Little Tokyo?)—

—dead smashed duck, broken neck, broken body, squashed internal organs and shattered bones and sticky feathers on the street—

get into ma belly, little duck!

….and then, past Victory, I’m over the silly fantasy, chastising myself, monkey back in cage, and I’m avoiding a car pulling out of the Mobil gas station, not looking, swerve to miss front fender, and I’m thinking about the other one, where’d the other one go, right? Did s/he look back at any point? Do you look back when another doesn’t make it, or when you see the collision coming, when you see that there’s nothing you can do anymore, nothing you can say to save them? Do you just keep on waddling on, you know? like, shit, man, too bad for you but I gotta get the fuck outta here, homes, bullets flying, poor, sorry bastard caught one, but not me, uh-uh, I’m gonna make it, gonna get my feathery white ass down to the river, and I ain’t lookin back, I ain’t lookin back.


b.
—neath the cod-i-go-go (redux—who do you see when you look in the mirror?):
“you think you’re out, you think you got out of the jaula, don’t you, you think you’r—paradoxically you think you’re like out but you think you’re still the same, too, you have not been altered by it, you trash the old gang, just like you trashed the old(er) gang when we first met cuz back then you had also just moved on to bigger&betteretceteras and now once again you have moved on beyond you have grown and evolved, sound familiar, you do not hear it in your voice but I hear it, familia—familiar, I hear the languages rolling off your dry, white tongue, and I lower my eyes and and head and mi—I prostra—I minimize myself to you, watch you from the corner of my eye, humilde, you know, stumble my speech, broken rhythm dissonant tonality fake tone-deafness, this is a new trick that I have learned, right, or maybe just refined, honed, this is a new tool that maybe you knew once too but maybe you have forgotten because apparently it works, pretty soon you are showing yourself to me, you are operating from above me, you think that you are in control and by contrast my own life is such a mess such a disappointment so uncertain and lacking in con…confiden—unconfident, you know, disorganized, puro desorden, and I listen carefully to each and every syllable that comes out of your mouth in between bites and also the silences between them too of course and I see that actually you are right, you have not changed, you have h—you have not changed at all, one bit, one bite, you still carry the same odor and taste, bouncing around your monkey cage, still sound the same, monotone drone, you are surrounded now, but you are still all alone.”


c.
“Using zoning and other planning tools, local officials worked to sanitize the city, attract the more affluent classes and change the city’s sense of place. This process of spatial reordering served to privilege animals as part of middle-class lifestyles of consumption—in this case, promoting animals as household pets—rather than working-class relations with animals focused on production (for cash as well as direct sustenance). In so doing, local managers generated conflict and inflicted a loss of identity for many of the city’s working-class residents by changing the character of their neighborhoods.” (Wolch 730)

My sister tells me how all the gentrifying yuppies harass her because of her pitbull pup, Frankie. One man in a PBS t-shirt begins to scream at her for not carrying a plastic bag—never mind that the dogpark bags are a few yards away, if she should need one; never mind that Frankie already did his business someplace else. “It’s irresponsible people like you who let their dogs shit all over my neighborhood! You don’t live here! You shouldn’t be here!” My sister says, calmly, “Wow, man, did you just go through a divorce or something? Why are you so angry, mister? Why are you being so ugly?” and the guy says, “You’re ugly—you’re fat and ugly!” and my sister goes, “No, man—I mean on the inside—what’s so wrong in your life that you’re so ugly on the inside? You must be going through some really hard times.” The one-sided shouting match continues, the guy gets all worked up, threatens to call the cops, while my sister maintains this cool, calm, Zen demeanor, while Frankie wags his tail, while San José like every other city continues to squeeze out the poor, the beautiful, the cultural, the life, to make room for more death, vapidity, nihilism, despair.

And then there are the dog-owners who scoop their pets up when Frankie starts to play with them, when he even comes near. There are the dirty looks, the wide berths on the sidewalk, the nervous giggles, the alienated postures and stares.

“You know the only people who are nice to Frankie?” my sister says. “The poor people who still live around here, the Mexicans, the Black people. Of course. They love him, man, they go right up to him and play with him, they compliment how beautiful he is. Everybody else, forget about it.”

(Exhibit/Shared Memory A:
The father with their new pitbull puppy, Rambo, in the driveway, high, the father high, and Rambo tied to a piece of rope, or maybe it’s just a piece of alambre, and neck muscle raw and tight inside this ring, Rambo in the air, dangling, screaming, the father jerking him up, tiny body twisting around, black and brown tiger stripes, choking, gagging, screaming, in East San José, the father taking it upon himself to toughen you up, make you fluent in the language of urban displacement, teach you how hard the world is, how coarse and violent, brutal, unrelenting, get ready, grow yourself some skin, grow some hide, grow some muscle, and hide, grow some tiger stripes, stop your screaming, grow some teeth, you don’t wanna hang you better bite your way through this rope, bite your way to the pavement, to freedom, bite your way to run away and don’t look back, learn the languages that cut, slice through all the red tape with red tongue and bloody fangs and paws, dangling you learn the vocabulary of slash and burn, cut and run, tiger stripes, red eyes, you eye the concrete driveway below your desperate, kicking feet, you eye the black pavement in the distance from the corner of your eye, you eye the street, you will run, you will run, you will cut this shit and run, you will not look back at the rest you cannot save, you will cut and bleed and cut and run.)


d.
When I was in the fourth grade, my school, which was kind of a rougher school in a more economically depressed area of East San José, moved me to an ESL class. I was not an ESL learner—English was my first language, but I also knew Spanish from working with my dad and from my parents talking around the house while I was growing up. Part of how the ESL class worked at my school, though, was to identify high-performing fully or partially bilingual students, and pair them up with ESL students in the ESL class, in order to help the ESL students.

At first, I just went to the class and didn’t think anything of it. Neither did my mom. After a while, though, I complained that I was bored in the class, that compared to my previous classes, it was moving kind of slow. My mom went to my school to investigate, and when she talked to my teacher and found out that they had moved me to the ESL class so that I could help the other students, without notifying or asking her, she flipped out. She made the school test me for the district GATE program (“Gifted and Talented Education”), and when I passed, she enrolled me in the program, and I was transferred to another school—nearby, but in a nicer neighborhood, with more resources, and with a whiter—and of course, richer—student population.

At the time, I had been getting into trouble, incubating this nascent little cholo identity with Dickie’s and big white t-shirts, tagging, getting into fights almost every day. Always in the principal’s office. But then I was in GATE, at the richie nerd school in the nice neighborhood—with my passing-white skin, with my talent for words, with my desire to escape—and everything changed.

There is a direct line that stretches from my mom’s intervention in that ESL class to my ability to write these words here. From then on, I was a straight-A student, I won scholarships, I attended a prestigious, private Jesuit college preparatory, I went to university on a full academic-merit ride. But from mini-tagger to author, above all, I learned to write. I learned the language of the pen. I learned the language of rhetoric and composition. I succeeded in the English language. I wrote stories, essays, poems, letters, books, critiques. I wrote my reality, my world, my existence; I wrote myself.

But of course, this was the Richard Rodriguez path to success, and as an adult, it wasn’t long before I reached a point of crisis. I recognized that along with all that I had gained, there was an immeasurable loss. Yes, my mother had “saved” me, but at the price of connection—to my culture, my people, my history, my community—all that stuff of assimilation that Rodriguez talks about as necessary for “success” in dominant American society. But where he embraces this process, I found myself rejecting the either/or proposition that made alienation and disconnection prerequisites for “getting out,” for succeeding. I saw the intervention as a traumatic event, one that gave me some helpful tools, sure, but that also stripped me of others vital to my happiness, well-being, and very survival—other social skills, tactics, technologies, community connections, and most of all, languages.

The languages of the barrio, the languages of the street. “La escuela de la calle,” my dad called it. This was where he learned, one foot on either side of the border, body and being sliced brutally in half by barbed wire, a travieso, mañoso, abused little orphan running the mean streets of Nogales, Sonora/Arizona. This was what he tried to teach me—sometimes with cariño; most of the time, a huevo—and this is what I ran away from. The languages of backyard barbecues, chismes, bromas, quinceañeras, parking lots, cruising, cussing, coqueteando. The languages of lived, everyday experience, of violence, of family, of experientially based intellectual discourse exchanged on the porch, over the frontyard fence, sitting around a Sunday morning table of menudo, standing around a cement mixer in dirty boots and splattered jeans. Intertwining reality and dreams. The languages of a deep history rooted in the earth beneath our feet, of the metaphysical, the slyly cynical, the flirtatious, the tactically intelligent, naïve maneuver—the well-timed, meticulously planned, yet spontaneous, movida.

The advance; the retreat.

All of these I would have to come back to, find my way back to again, reconnect with and relearn later—con cariño y a huevo.


e.
It is a trauma, it is a rupture, it is a knife—a blade of perfect grammar and proper punctuation that flays your skin, slices your veins, leaves you dripping graffiti blood on streets you can no longer claim. You must cauterize the wounds, you must follow the trail of blood back, no matter where it leads, and then you must re-open them again, re-member, carve new glyphs into your skin, pre–Guadalupe Hidalgo, pre-Columbus, pre-Mohammad, pre-Christ, pre-Azteca, pre-Maya, you must reach back, all the way back, Xipe-Totec, dig into the pagan earth, and below, Miktlan, Xibalba-be, my mother, my father, Coatlicue, gather it all up along the way, all the ancestors, all the pain, all the life and all the death, you must transcribe your memories with new languages, you must extend your wrists to those left behind, you must share the skills that you have learned so that they can share the ones that you abandoned, you must teach each other the vocabularies that you have mastered, forgotten, invented, erased, press mouth to mouth and wrist to wrist, earth and flesh, allow the blood and breath to run and mix, allow the words to flow, allow the grammar to intertwine—you must commit to never again leave another behind.




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References


Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (2000). Dir. Michael Haneke.

Sesshu Foster. Atomik Aztex. City Lights Books, 2005.

Killer of Sheep (1977). Dir. Charles Burnett.

Lewis McAdams. The River: Books One & Two. Blue Press, 2005.

“Pets.” Porno for Pyros. Porno for Pyros. Warner Bros., 1993.

J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown & Co., 1951.

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection: The Cocoanuts / Animal Crackers / Monkey Business / Horse Feathers / Duck Soup (1930). Dirs. Victor Heerman, Robert Florey, Joseph Santley. DVD. Universal Studios, 2004.

Kurt Vonnegut (r.i.p., 1922–2007). Cat’s Cradle. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963.

David Watson. Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies. Autonomedia, 1998.

Jennifer Wolch. “Anima urbis.” Progress in Human Geography 26.6 (2002) pp. 721–742. Originally delivered as the Progress in Human Geography lecture at the AAG Annual Conference, Los Angeles, California, 2001.