Answer

I WAS HERE BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE. I DIDN’T HATE SCHOOL, I especially didn’t hate learning. The main thing they taught me, yelling into my face, was that I was wasting their time and money. It did take me a few incidents, and growing years, to allow the words of these wise teachers to work for me: Wasting their time and money? So I got done with their troubles and their finger-pointing at me. At the part-time job I already had—my uncle Jorge (pronounced in easy Anglo, George) ran an industrial laundry he called the plant—and I asked him if I could go full-time. He didn’t have a question, didn’t blink. He said he’d started working before they’d invented school. To him and lots of people I came up around, I was grown, young only en este lado, on their side.

Forty-eight hours a week, 7 to 3:30, and I was making coin. I bought me a nothing-special, four-door Ford—no more bus! I was shifted into the clean area, the unpressed washed sheets and unfolded towels, and that was better too. I loved getting morning café with lots of sugar from Rosa, who’d been working here over 30 years, the same as my uncle, who knew my mom. She gave some to me every day if I got there before 6:50, because at 6:51 she put her thermos away. Herminio, an older man who was from a Mixtec village with a name I could never pronounce, had extra tacos warmed (rolled like burritos) for me at the first whistle break—frijoles with onion and tomate, con chilecito. Life was good like this, and I got paid. The guys I worked with, Juanito and Gerónimo, they were older, sharper, and I liked being around them and learning work and all else. Juanito, who would say he was from El Paso, but really Juárez, though really really San Luis Potosí, was the oldest of us, the longest at the job, which was almost five years. He was either 24 or 27, depending on the day you asked. Gerónimo was 21 and had spent time in prison. He said he was a Mexican Indian from Arizona. Since he didn’t speak English or seem to know any Native language either, I didn’t believe he was telling the whole truth, but I didn’t question him. His face was more wood carving from Olvera Street of an Aztec than skin, so harsh and rough it could’ve been gouged by a machete. The two of them told me lots. Me, I was born at the Texas–New Mexico border but raised in L.A., and I was hungry to learn so much I didn’t know in the real world. Even though I had my most life in this big noisy city, I was more del campo, like an innocent country boy. They told me dicho-like truths about cabrones and pendejos, and they especially liked to be expert about people who worked in the plant.

“Her,” Juanito whispered when Faby walked by, his eyes down as if in prayer. She was pretty and swayed. “She’d be good for 10 babies.”

We laughed. He meant she was a chichona, big in the boobies area.

“Brother,” Gerónimo told him like he was talking to an alcoholic, “you forgot the four legal ones? You want a little illegal one