The Madonnas of Echo Park Read Online Free Page B

harder and pay them cheaper. When the jobs dried up, though, my demeanor and reliability became assets.
    The sun disappears behind a swath of clouds, darkening the street, when Diego arrives wearing a black Dodgers cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a cup of coffee. He’s many gray hairs away from forty, but we’ve been drawn together because he likes to talk and there’s nothing else to do while waiting for a job except brag or listen. He drifted here from Mobile after a spree of murders targeting Mexicans in trailer parks. The murderers used baseball bats and, in some cases, machetes. Police blamed Colombians, though Diego insisted it was a meth-dealing white supremacist gang, and for that insistence he had to leave town fast. He sent his wife and four kids money working his way west, but by Albuquerque there was nothing left to send home. His expenses include smokes, whiskey, and underground taxi dancing bars where you can dance with women in lingerie or bikinis for ten bucks, grind on them against a wall for twenty, get a hand job for fifty, or take them home for three hundred (the term
women
is misleading; the girls at the bars we frequent in East L.A. are either teenagers with developing chests and acne dotting their cheekbones or haggard
abuelitas
with rubber tread marks around their flaccid bellies and breasts).
    I never question the holes in Diego’s story because he’s honest company. He doesn’t wolf-whistle, grope, or lunge at the Catholic schoolgirls when they walk by, doesn’t brown-bag forties for breakfast, doesn’t sell his drugs in front of me, and most important, he doesn’t push, shove, or jostle to get chosen for a job. There’s a civilized, dignified air in his approach to being
un trabajador,
and while he mentions no plans to change his day-to-day life, this is a condition he says—most of us say—is temporary. Ask any man why he’s here, and you’ll get the same answer:
What else can I do?
    An SUV with tinted windows creeps into the parking lot. Its stop-start approach marks them as first-timers. Nobody wants to take a job from a new boss. All the young men—those who have a choice—know it’s not worthwhile. The pay’s miserable (six or seven dollars an hour instead of the usual ten), and they think they’ve rented a slave instead of hired a housepainter. During the day, they’re the ones ordered around. Out here, they get a taste of being in charge and get drunk on it. If you’re not careful, a simple driveway paving job can turn into a landscaping job, a garbage collection job, a disposing of paint cans job, or a “suck my dick,
maricón
” job, and you’d better do it for the same fee you negotiated for one job because, really, who are you going to complain to? That’s why you need to be smart about whose truck you get into. Get into the wrong one and you’re broke, deported, or dead.
    If you don’t have a choice, like these men out here in their sixties who still wear cowboy-style straw hats with brims instead of baseball caps and long, dark dress slacks coupled with funeral dress shoes instead of jeans and sneakers, you risk what’s left of your body. You know it’s not worth much to a white man who needs a roofer, but it may be worth something to a Chinese lady who needs her lawn weeded. Slow and feeble,
“los hombres del país viejo”
can’t be picky.
    â€œTenant pick up his first crew?” Diego asks.
    â€œAbout a half hour ago.”
    â€œFirst sunny day we’ve had in a while.”
    â€œHe said he’d be back.”
    â€œMan of his word,” Diego says. “Bad trait in a
gringo.
”
    â€œI don’t mind a man who’s honest.”
    â€œHate honest bosses. Honest men are bullies.” He motions to the old men hunched around the SUV with his coffee. “Look at that,” he says. “Why do they still come out