Que sera, sera...

Up to a year ago, Eddie was working in a slaughterhouse that skins and dresses carcasses before they’re cut up for local markets. He could do everything except the kill itself, and if he’d had a choice, he would have done something different, but by sheer coincidence, that’s what he did in Mexico before he came here.

Eddie though, was born in Cathedral City, California, and the dates that he gave ring familiarly, evoking places that form a string of which it is one bead: Brawley, Indio, Palm Springs, Riverside, Berdoo, Barstow, Needles─those byways where bands of misfits from mostly the central western states and the upper Southwest, and the Mid-West, too─once wandered through running from parental oppression, societal exclusion, lovelessness, cruel winters, and sometimes the law, seeking sanctuary often from plain obligation, but also from capitalism and that sort of indentureship─and gravitas, distancing themselves in the process from an aura of arbitrary mortality where the cinch girdling the underbelly of the baby boom was starting to chafe the flesh from the weight of McNamara’s heel against the stirrup.

Eddie’s father, Mundo, was a Chicano from El Paso who thumbed his way west as far as Palm Springs where hunger put up a barrier as impenetrable as a brick wall and forced him to plead for food at a pancake house where they put him to work washing dishes and where clarity overtook him two weeks later in the same clothes in front of the same dishwashing machine talking to a skinny little Mexican girl with crooked teeth who drove in from Cat City every day to wait tables at the same business and who offered to rent him an outbuilding (that belonged to her mother) so that he wouldn’t have to sleep in the bougainvillea bushes around the back of the store.

The girl, Minnie, was close to thirty years old to Mundo’s twenty, and the one thing that never should have led to another (what she had hoped might), didn’t, because once the trail grime washed away and he got his bearings again, Mundo developed an interest in a red-haired girl who was part of a coterie of new-agers among whom could be verified talents for street magic and musicianship─and gifts for decocting LSD, and for nurturing an awesome sinsemílla somewhere in the surrounding outland.

The bunch liked Mundo well enough, but Eddie, when he came, was an entirely different story, even if he was the spitting image of his father. One day, Mundo and Minnie came home from work and found Minnie’s mother, Celia, feeding him from a brand new bottle, singing him to sleep with a wistful version of Cielíto Líndo. As far as Mundo knew, neither Celia nor Minnie had ever seen Eddie before that day.

The red-haired girl and her outfit left town in front of men with warrants, and they might have saved themselves, but in an effort to salvage some of their hard-earned product, they left a sizeable amount of it hidden (at the redhead’s suggestion) underneath the floorboards of the shed where Mundo slept, and where Eddie in all probability had been conceived. The penalties for possession in those days were steep, but Mundo went before a more progressive judge who gave him maybe the only real choice he was ever to receive in life: 5 years in the military, or 10 years behind bars.

Celia and Minnie had been in the U.S. 20 years, but they’d never gotten around to legalizing it. And caught with the same chain that dragged Mundo off, while he was gone, they were deported. Eddie went along.

When Mundo, world-weary and torn, returned five years later to Cat City, who did he have the luck to find first (and only) but his redheaded girl. This was nothing less than a sign. He determined that he was going to piece his family back together no matter what the cost. The girl with red hair was a dutiful partner for a year, but the lure of the streets was too much for her. Mundo by now, quite by accident had discovered where Minnie was through a chance encounter with an old neighbor of Celia’s who had managed to keep in touch. But the search for his son would have to wait until he tracked his one and only, and brought her back home again. He found her a year later in the LA morgue─killed by person or persons unknown in front of Doris Day’s star on Hollywood Boulevard with a single bullet to the back of the head─the next to last casualty of his private years of war.

Mundo never made it back to Cathedral City. There was a gate through Palm Springs that wouldn't open for him. He wandered around the desert for years─a brooding, haunted presence in jump boots and field jacket that would appear on the road out of the shimmer of some lost dimension and disappear at night into a nameless hollow of that same eternity. People who recognized him from Cathedral City would stop and talk to him, but they never could persuade him to go home. He was found dead one day (of natural causes, they say) seated against the bole of a tree by The Salton Sea.

Celia died of TB 10 years into her second life in Mexico. Minnie died 10 years after of the same disease, but not before she told Eddie the whole truth as she knew it.

Alone now, Eddie decided to follow his own star, and crossed every desert between El Paso and the Coachella Valley sardined along with twelve others in the tank of an oil truck. He said once that he felt the man next to him die, as had three others in the group. He tracked himself backwards all the way to Cathedral City. He moved around in the desert for years afterwards, doing odd jobs, washing dishes for food, getting a feel for the kind of choices that a man who has no choices makes. One day, he was waiting in line for a day job on a street in LA when a man picked him and two others up and bought them food and coats and transported them east to the (ironically) Mid-West where they were put up in a disreputable trailer park and given work at even more disreputable jobs.

The next day, Eddie woke up to a world covered in a twelve inch blanket of snow. He thought he was in heaven. In about three months he would be there. He was picked up one day by the local gendarmerie for throwing a cigarette on the street─and for looking like a wetback; and held without bail for over two months (despite his contention in very poor English that he was an American citizen) until the day that he was found hanging by a twisted strip of bed clothing in the lavatory of the communal county jail cell.

Some would be tempted to say, “Such is life,” where another would retort, “By whose standards?” but the best that can be said is, “Nice try, Eddie.”

As hard as it is sometimes to find somebody to blame, it is most often the hardest to find somebody to forgive.

Noe.