Goldilocks and the Three Beers

Genuine saints are quite rare in Los Angeles, California, but I used to know one and Hector Martinez was his name. He worked for the S.P. railroad and lived all alone in a tumble-down shack behind Gutierrez house with no woman of his own or anybody else's, either, happily sharing his pay checks with friends and needy neighbors. And on our street, where scandal was king, its long dirty fingernails never once scratched Hector. If there was any (continued on page 142)Goldilocks(continued from page 103) little vanity in his life, it was the watch he bought when he first came to the U.S.A. It was solid gold like Hector himself and would run for a week.

When Hector died at 69 years of age, everybody went to the wake. There were more flowers than you cared to smell and more rosaries than you cared to hear. Finally, just before they screwed down the lid on Hector's coffin, his brother Salvador held up Hector's watch for all to see, wound it tight and slipped it into Hector's pocket to tick away down there in the grave and keep him company. All of us were very taken with the idea, but, as usual, there had to be one critic.

"Better Sal gave me that watch," Casimiro whispered. "Who's going to wind it up down there? While I myself could keep it running forever in Hector's memory."

"Yes," I said, "and you'd run right along with it, all the way to the nearest pawnshop."

"You used to be a nice polite boy," he said. "Up to the age of seven years, you were among the very best."

Casimiro Ortega was Hector's exact opposite in all but age. His main claim to fame was his bald head, which was proof, according to him, that there was no Indian in his pure Spanish blood. His face was the color of the muscatel he mostly drank. His tiny pink eyes peeked out of their holes as sneaky as mice, and I next saw him at the graveyard. The last rites were finished. Hector's coffin perched on its rollers over the grave. The people were headed for home, but Casimiro sat alone under a giant cross of gardenias with his face in his hands like he was crying his eyes out.

"Oh-oh," I thought and patted him down till I found a screwdriver stuck into his left shoe.

"To pick my teeth with," Casimiro explained.

"What teeth?" I asked and took it away from him.

"And besides," he said, "what if Hector wakes up and starts banging on the lid and nobody's here to let him out?"

"Nothing like a faithful friend," I said.

"You and your so-called saints," Casimiro grumbled. "To hear everybody talk, you'd think Hector never once slipped his halo, but I remember the time when he threw it in the gutter. So go buy beer someplace and I'll open your eyes for you."

Curiosity is no doubt my strongest weakness. With the screwdriver safe in my pocket, I made a quick round trip to the nearest liquor store, handed Casimiro a beer and sat down on the grass beside him, careful to keep the rest of the sixpack out of his reach, but his eyes made love to it.

"Fix your attention on 1927," he began. "Brotherhood Week hadn't been invented yet, so people were a lot franker about their feelings. There were no Mexican-Americans back then. You were one thing or the other."

"Already you're stretching it out," I complained.

"This will be a three-bottle story at the very least," he said. "And besides, how would a snot-nose like yourself understand those fine old days unless I painted their picture? Life was honey then or else pure vinegar. It was breezy mountaintops or stinking gullies and not all flat and swampy like today."

"Speak for yourself," I told him.

"Then, with your permission," he said, "we'll pay a little visit to East Fifth Street just below Main, which was a very bad street for saints then, as it is now, and especially at night. It's two o'clock in the morning. The iron screens are locked across the pawnshop windows. Even the all-night missions are closed. Everything was dark and dead except the Acropolis café. It was all white tile inside and glared out at you like your grandmother's last tooth. Dinners were forty cents, the daily blue plate was twenty-five and a bowl of chili, a dime. They gave you a lot to eat there, but to tell the truth, it wasn't very tasty."

"Is this a restaurant guide," I asked, "or what? Where's Hector in all this embroidery? Home asleep?"

"Better for him if he had been," Casimiro said. "But no, your good friend Saint Hector Martinez is standing right outside and he's been there four hours, staring in like a hungry wolf. Because inside is the woman. She was counting her tips now, a very small handful of nickels and dimes and one giant fifty-cent piece. Her stockings were rolled down, which was the style back then, and her naked knees twinkled dimply little smiles at you. But don't think it was her knees Hector was staring at. No, it was her hair, which was as gold as the watch in his pocket. Now the woman comes out the door. She walks up the hill toward Main and Hector quietly follows her. The woman doesn't turn her head, but, like any cow lost from the herd, she knows something's sniffing her tracks. Nobody's in sight. Ahead there's an alley. The man or whatever will be sure to nail her there and drag her off into the dark for who knows what? She makes herself stop and turn around. And there's Hector, wearing the same blue suit they buried him in. There's his dumb ox eyes staring out of his adobe face and his big solemn mouth doing its best to smile politely. Compared with the woman, he stood as tall as a telephone pole, but his big hands hung at his sides like a scolded schoolboy's and that took the scare out of the woman.

"'You're the pancakes and the big tip,' she said.

"Hector nodded.

"'OK,' she said, 'so I already gave you a big smile and what more do you expect for your fifty cents?'

"Hector stupidly introduced himself in the Mexican style and explained just what he wanted.

"She said, 'Huh?'

"He searched the sidewalk for splinters of English somebody might possibly have spilled there.

"'Mucho late,' he finally said. 'Many bad mans. Jees Christ, they touchy you, I kill 'um.'

"He smashed his right fist into his left palm for demonstration.

"'OK, Pancakes,' she sighed, 'you can be my watchdog if you insist, only my feet are killing me, got any money?'

"Hector pulled out a fat roll of bills. The woman's eyes flip-flopped.

"'Honey Bunch,' she said, 'a single's all we need. For take-um taxicab.'"

Right away I smelled the badger and said so. We argued over who was telling this story. Casimiro won.

"The cab carried them past Pershing Square and up Hope Street onto Bunker Hill. It stopped in front of a three-story house with a tower. Possibly a queen once lived there, but now it had gone democratic. There were seventeen separate mailboxes in front and as they walked down the hall, the smells of all nations came creeping out from under the doors. The woman unlocked the last one and went in waving her hands around in the dark till she found the string that turned the light bulb on. The room was very tall, with two tall windows. It was painted park-bench green, except the ceiling was dark white with brown spots. There was a big iron bed, a washstand and a stuffed armchair, which was full of surprises when Hector sat on it. The woman poured water into a bowl and sat on the bed, soaking her puffy red feet. And they talked, the woman about her boss with his filthy Greek habits and about various smart remarks her girlfriend Ethel had made, but mostly about her feet. She talked in English, of course, and Hector talked in the tongue of his fathers.

"'Do you know the golden sun of Mexico when it rises from the black pocket of the night?' he said. 'And the tassels of the corn, which give life to the bellies of men, how they sparkle in the rays of that same sun and turn pure gold, which is the same gold as the gold of the hair of thy head--'"

"Quit talking like those Mexicans of John Steinbeck." I interrupted.

"Who's John Steinbeck?" Casimiro asked.

"He was a very rich writer," I said.

(continued on page 146) Goldilocks(continued from page 142)

"And you, too, will be a very rich writer," said Casimiro, "if you set down this story just like I tell it. And what do I get for all my trouble? One miserable bottle of beer."

He turned his bottle upside down. Not a drop fell out.

"What comes next is very romantic," he said in a teasy voice.

I knew I was throwing good beer after bad, but I handed him another bottle.

"By now," Casimiro went on, "the woman's feet were nicely soaked, so her corn plaster peeled off very easily and she held her foot in her hand and inspected the corn quite closely."

"That's very romantic," I said, disgusted, "and quite sexy, too."

"Wait! The woman looks up. What does she see? A giant adobe man is coming at her with a knife. No use to scream. A scream brings no one in that house. It is the usual tone of voice there. The woman waits with scared eyes. Now Hector kneels down before her, knife in hand. He dries her foot on his necktie. Then he shaves off the corn. His knife is so sharp she feels nothing. He snaps the knife shut and gets to his feet.

" 'Me coming domingo, Sunday,' he said. 'Twelve o'clock.'

"He touched the woman's hair, running his fingers through it like a rake through water. Then he put on his hat and left. The woman stared after him with her mouth open and one foot in the bowl of water."

"You bore me!" I shouted. "You and your two A.M. and your wolf looks and your beds and knives, and then nothing happens at all, nothing. And besides, it's all lies, because you weren't even there to see it."

"How do you know I wasn't pissing just outside the window?" Casimiro asked me.

I had to admit that was an old habit of his. He never used plumbing when he could help it.

"OK for this once," I told him, "but you might at least tell me what that woman looked like."

"Didn't I say she was a blondie?" Casimiro asked. "So, naturally, she had to be beautiful. But if you want the details, she had a piggy little nose and very little chin, if any. Also, she had the habit of keeping her mouth half-open, so you could see a jungle of teeth inside sprouting out in various directions. Maybe her face sagged a little, too, and in fact her whole shape, but she had pretty green eyes, except when you looked into them, you could see a long parade of men robbing her of her pay, leaving her for another woman or kicking her in the belly when she was eight months' pregnant. Because, you see, she came from one of those farmer states back East where blondies are the same small change as dark ones with us. So anyway," Casimiro went on, "there was Hector knocking on her door that next Sunday.

" 'We going beach,' he said.

"They took the big red car that said Venice in front. They got off where the tracks ended and there was blue ocean as far as the woman could see and white waves breaking on the sand. She had possibly seen rivers back home and maybe even a lake, but though she'd lived three years in L.A., she'd never seen the ocean before.

" 'It's the cat's pajamas!' she yelled."

"The which?" I asked.

"That's what people said in 1927," Casimiro explained. "And a lot of those cool and groovy words you use now will sound very funny and out of date when you get as old as I am. Anyway, the woman swung on Hector's arm while they walked across the beach. There were very few people present, since it was in the month of March, only some kids running in and out of the water and dragging long snakes of kelp behind them. The woman took off her shoes and waded in the water and giggled and screamed when the waves sucked the sand from under her feet. Hector ran in to keep her from falling. The water licked up over his high shoes and wetted his trouser bottoms, but he stood holding the woman's hand while she splashed her feet around and laughed up into his face."

"I'm getting very tired of all those feet," I told Casimiro. "You promised a three-beer story and there they are in Venice and all Hector does is get his pants wet."

"How do you know he isn't going to drown her out there," Casimiro asked, "and maybe rape her, too?"

So, of course, I had to hand him another beer.

"Well," he said, "when the woman got tired of the water, they came out and sat on the warm sand."

"And started counting the grains," I said bitterly, " 'one, two, three, four.' I can see this story will go on forever."

"Only to the end of this bottle," Casimiro promised. "So finally they walked back to the arcades, where they bought hot dogs from a little cart. Hector ate one and the woman ate four and they caught the big red car back to town. It was dark now. The woman fell asleep. Hector put his arm around her to keep her little nose from bumping the window. People threw them some very angry looks, the woman with her golden hair nestled against the adobe-face man in the black hat. You didn't see much of that kind of thing back then, but nobody dared to meet Hector's eyes, which prowled through that streetcar like police dogs.

"At the woman's door, Hector held out his hand to say good night, but the woman took it and moved it across various places on her body, then she touched that giant Mexican flagpole of his and squeezed it in a friendly way. Hector sucked in his breath like a steam whistle and she locked the door behind him.

" 'We gets married,' Hector told her.

" 'Someday,' she said.

"The woman was surprised how slowly and respectfully Hector unbuttoned all her buttons and took off her clothes. It was noon next day before she woke up. Hector was long gone and someone was pounding on the door. The woman grabbed a towel to cover herself and opened up and there was her girlfriend Ethel.

" 'I seen you and him come in,' Ethel said, 'and I heard you at it all night long.'

"The woman pulled the towel tighter. She felt very naked.

" 'I'm ashamed for you,' Ethel said. 'Don't you know what he is?'

" 'He's a foreign gentleman,' the woman said, 'and he wants to marry me.'

" 'He's no foreign gentleman, you dimwit!' Ethel yelled. 'He's a Mexican and that's the next worst thing to a big black nigger.'

"The woman looked around and the first thing she saw was a curling iron, so she threw it at her friend Ethel. And the next thing she saw was the coffeepot, so she threw that, too, but it only hit the door, because Ethel was already gone."

"Just while it so happened you had to piss," I suggested, "and I hope you spent a nice day in Venice, too, all buried in the sand with only one eye showing."

"Naturally," said Casimiro, "but on Tuesday, I was present in full view, because after work, Hector asked me to speak to the woman for him on account of my superior English, but he made me get a shoeshine first. It was around six o'clock when we walked into the Acropolis cafe, and very bustling, but the woman left her trays and ran straight to Hector, and her eyes stared up into his big face like little spaniels'."

"Everybody's got dog eyes in this story," I complained.

"I told her," Casimiro said, "how my friend was a sincere and honorable man desiring her hand in marriage, so how could we reach her father to ask his consent? But it seems her father was dead, her mother had disappeared and where any uncles or brothers might be, the woman didn't know, but speaking for herself, the answer was yes. So with all the customers shouting for their blue plates and the Greek jumping up and down, the woman threw her apron on the floor and we left the Acropolis behind us.

"Around the corner was a jewelry store where Spanish was spoken--very badly, I might add. The Jew was already putting up his shutters for the night, but he seemed quite happy to see us. The first thing that hit the woman's eye was a tray full of diamond rings, very large and sparkly and marked down to nineteen ninety-seven.

" 'Ooooo!' she screamed, in heaven.

" 'Falsos!' Hector shouted and shoved them aside. 'Fake lies! Plated garbage!'

"He told the Jew to show us nothing but twenty-four-karat-gold wedding bands. To check the color, he held each one up to his watch and then to the woman's golden hair. Finally, he found a very wide heavy band that satisfied him. The Jew offered easy credit, but Hector paid forty dollars cash, which was real money in those days, and gave the woman twenty more to buy her wedding out-fit with.

"We walked the woman home up Hope Street. No need of a taxi this time; she trotted along between us like a deer on her clickety little feet, which had suddenly quit bothering her. And when you looked into her eyes, you could no longer see that big parade of men kicking her belly back there in the past. She was as fresh and new as an eight-year-old on the way to her first Communion. At her door, she begged Hector to come in and spend the night, but he said no. The wedding was set for Friday afternoon and till then, they mustn't even see each other for fear of committing a sin without a license. The woman couldn't stand to wait. She started spilling tears, so to cheer her up, Hector left her his gold watch for company.

"That was a Tuesday, as you remember. By Thursday night, Hector was as impatient as the woman. He had to see her one more time to prove she was more than just some crazy golden dream inside his head. And he dragged me along to keep him from sin. There used to be a little toy cable car on Bunker Hill that was the quickest way up from our side of town. Angels' Flight, they called it, so we paid our pennies and up we went. The city lights dropped away from under us. When we got out at the top, the stars were all around us and heaven seemed very close. Hector was dancing around with excitement. He ran me down the street to the big house with the tower. We went in and knocked on the woman's door, but there was no answer."

"Oh-oh," I said. "I knew it. She pawned Hector's watch and ran off."

Casimiro showed me a gummy grin that shut me up.

"I wish she had," he said. "Anyway, we knocked again. Louder.

" 'Go 'way,' the woman yelled from inside, but when she heard Hector's voice, she came running to throw open the door with a big happy smile on her face and a towel around her neck. In one hand she held a toothbrush and in the other a bowl full of nasty white paste. There were patches of paste on her golden head, too, and where it was parted you could see hair the color of mattress stuffing. Hector stared at it like it was a nest of rattlesnakes.

" 'What's wrong, Sugar Pie?' the woman asked.

" 'False gold!' Hector shouted, just like at the jeweler's. 'Fake lies! Plated garbage!'

" 'Honey Bunch,' the woman howled, 'I'll never let it slip again. I'll gold it every day of my life for you.'

"But Hector was deaf to her.

"The toothbrush fell onto the floor, and so did the bowl. The woman's face sagged into what it had been before, and so did her shape, and that same ugly old parade came marching back into her eyes. Hector picked up his gold watch. It was on her pillow. Probably she'd been sleeping with it. But as you know, Hector was always quite generous, so he left her the wedding ring for a souvenir, and then we closed the door on the woman and went on home."

"Just because she dyed her hair?" I yelled. "Hector Martinez? You're lying. There had to be another man in there. Or something!"

"Idiot!" Casimiro yelled back. "Snotnose! What do you know about life? Do the Mexicans got to be saints every time? And the blondies always devils?"

"You're only jealous," I shouted, "because nobody's gonna bring flowers to your funeral, let alone gold watches, when your spongy old liver finally drinks itself to death! That's why you're dragging Hector down. And even if that stupid story could be part-way true," I yelled, "it wasn't Hector's fault! He got poisoned by that color line and it was the blondies drew that line, not us!"

We were still hollering at each other when the gravediggers came.

"Show a little respect for the dead," they ordered.

There were four of them, so we took their suggestion and quietly watched while they lowered Hector's coffin into the hole and filled it in with dirt and stomped it down.

"Give me my screwdriver back," Casimiro said.

I handed it over.

"Why not borrow one of their shovels?" I asked.

Casimiro walked on down the hill. I stuffed the six-pack under a nearby spray of chrysanthemums and drove the old man home to his house. As far as I know, he never went back for the watch, so no doubt it kept on ticking away steady as a heartbeat till the next Thursday, and after that, everything was quiet in Hector Martinez' grave out there at the Calvary Cemetery.