Always Running

One morning, while Luis is a teenager, he wakes up in the garage to the sound of his sister’s yells. He gets up from the pile of blankets where he sleeps and bickers with her. The previous night, unbeknownst to anyone, Luis had tried to commit suicide. That night, Luis comes home drunk and high. Depressed, he tries to cut his wrist with a razor blade. But as he holds the blade in his hand he realizes, “I couldn’t do it.”

For months, Luis has been “exiled to the garage.” María has grown exasperated with pulling him out of jail cells and hearing about his gang exploits. For a time, Luis stays with Yuk Yuk’s family and later with other friends. Eventually, he starts sleeping by the railroad tracks or in abandoned cars. Frustrated, he comes home and works out a deal with his mother, whereby he’s allowed to stay in the garage but forbidden to enter the house without her permission.

Luis attends high school, but he’s “loco” all the time. He notices that white students tend to take the hardest classes, play on sports teams, and join clubs. Latino students take the “stupid classes” and are often on the verge of dropping out. By this time, Luis has become a quiet, sullen kid. He knows everybody assumes he’s a “thug,” and so he dresses like one, reasoning that he might as well be proud of his thug identity.

Luis spends much of his time in the garage, listening to jazz and Motown records. He learns how to play the saxophone, and sometimes plays gigs. After gigs, he drinks heavily, gradually becoming an alcoholic. Many other gang members are musical—for instance, Joaquín Lopez plays the harmonica in shows.

One afternoon, when Luis is fourteen, Joe accuses him of stealing his records. Luis tells Joe, “Fuck you,” and Joe attacks Luis and then destroys Luis’s saxophone. Still furious, Joe leaves the house and doesn’t return for three days. All Luis can think about is the “lost melodies.”

It’s Fiesta Day in San Gabriel—the day when Latino residents celebrate their heritage. That night, Luis and his friends wander past the neighborhood parade. While Luis is hanging out with his friends, he crosses paths with a beautiful young woman named Viviana.  The two flirt and agree to ride a Ferris wheel together.

As the night goes on, families start to leaving the carnival area—the only people left are cops and rival gang members. Viviana confesses to Luis that she hates Los Angeles gang culture. Noticing that some of the rival gang members are glaring at him, Luis realizes that Viviana is from the Sangra part of the county, and she’s here with two of the lead Sangra cholas (female gang members), Cokie and Dina. He suggests that they go somewhere else. Luis wants to be “with Viviana, away from the war cries, the bloodshed.”

Viviana and Luis walk toward a school building and climb onto the roof together. Suddenly, Luis notices a group of gang members, some of them Sangra, some of them Tribe, fighting. Luis tells Viviana he has to join the fight, but Viviana begs him to stay. Luis hesitates, then decides to stay. He kisses Viviana, feeling like a traitor to his gang.

Every year, there’s a football game between Luis’s largely Latino high school and the mostly white neighboring school. At the game, Luis and his friends delight in yelling at rival students. Luis notices that when white students are in the neighborhood, there are always lots of police officers stopping the Latino students, often without reason.

During Luis’s sophomore year of high school, cops stop Luis’s friend Carlito after the football game and, when Carlito asks an officer, “Why are we being harassed?” they beat him with a baton and choke him. Carlito passes out, and the others are afraid the cops have killed him. Paramedics arrive and take Carlos away (after being delayed by the police), and soon a fight breaks out, with Luis and his fellow gang members leading the attack on the police. They also attack white bystanders. Luis’s friends attack a group of Asians who attend the rival high school simply because one of them accuses Luis’s friends of hurting innocent people. Luis knows what he’s doing is unjust—whites harass Asians almost as much as they harass Latinos—but he doesn’t care: he just wants to fight.

Luis attacks more white bystanders outside the football game. As the night goes on, the fight spreads, and gangs burn cars and break windows. Though Luis eventually goes home, the fights continue next Monday at school. Latino students attack white students at their high school. White students fight, too, bringing baseball bats to school with them. Toward the end of the day, a white student attacks Luis’s friend Santos with a bat, and Chicharrón hits him with a tire iron. The police come to break up the fight, arresting only Latinos, including Luis and his friends. Luis is brought down to the station and later expelled. He doesn’t care.

At the age of fifteen, Luis buses tables in a restaurant in San Gabriel. Many of the clientele are middle-class whites who treat him offensively. Luis retaliates by spitting in customers’ food and “accidentally” spilling water on them. The Latina waitresses at the restaurant are harassed, both by the staff and the customers. Every so often, cops come to the restaurant and arrest undocumented employees. Luis gets used to carrying his birth certificate with him wherever he goes.

Luis and his friends get high every day, often by inhaling gasoline, clear plastic, or paint. One evening, Luis gets so high on clear plastic that he begins to feel like “water.” He tries to move toward a bright light in the distance. Even as he loses consciousness, he keeps on inhaling more clear plastic. Then, suddenly, he feels his friends shaking him awake. As he regains consciousness, Luis tries to get even higher, but his friend Wilo sternly tells him, “Give me the bag.” Luis learns that he stopped breathing for a moment—and, in a way, he died. Luis thinks, “I wished I did die.”

Wilo’s sister, Payasa, has a crush on Luis, and they begin dating. Luis notices that Payasa gets high all the time, and becomes reckless whenever she does. He breaks up with her when he starts to realize that she can only be intimate with him when she’s high. She later goes to a rehabilitation clinic.

Luis returns to the scene he described at the beginning of the chapter. He holds a razor blade in his hand, trying to muster the courage to cut himself. But as he does so, he begins to remember “a sense of being, of worth,” and decides that he’s alive for a good reason, even if he doesn’t know what this reason is. He throws the blade away and goes to sleep.

The next morning, Luis enters the house, breaking his agreement with María. María ignores him. But when he asks if he can eat breakfast in the house that morning, she turns around, smiles, and replies, ‘Of course … When you’re ready to visit, with respect to our house, you can come to eat.” Luis kisses his mother and then goes to the table to eat.