“Stop exaggerating,” Bonnie says, smiling.
“Hey, I’m just trying to let these guys know where they come from. They got the gene. They need to know.”
Dad’s father, who he never really knew very well, owned a used-car lot down on Broadway in Lemon Grove. It was a small corner business with a garage where the boys worked sometimes, fixing up old cars just enough to get them “off the lot.” When they were off the clock, they built engines and put them into cars they raced to Tijuana and back. “Some of those vehicles were lowered so low you could push a pack of cigarettes down the street with the front bumper. That was the style, man.” I try to picture Dad’s curly-’froed head with a spit curl, his broad shoulders in an oversize suit with a wallet chain but it’s something from another world, like a character he played in a movie once that disappeared when the credits rolled.
The house in San Diego is overflowing with people. Pete is tall and thin, handsome with dark tan skin and a slender mustache like one of those actors from black-and-white movies we see on TV where everyone carries a sword. Donny has big muttonchops and a goatee and sleeveless flannel showing off his big arms. He shows up with Rose, his quiet Mexican wife and our cousins Cindy, who is about my age, and David, the baby. Donny looks powerful in his Padres baseball cap, a lazy cigarette hanging on the edge of his lips when he talks. He’s the loudest one in the group. He grabs me by the shoulders when I walk in and says, “Hey, bud. Your dad finally got you down here to hang out with your loco-ass family, eh? Bet you didn’t know you had all this insane shit in your blood?” He pulls from a can of Budweiser, occasionally pouring a little into the mouth of the baby David who he holds in his arms. “The brew is good for the heart. Builds strength.”
Wes is a large man who moves like a gentle bear. He’s soft-spoken, unlike his brothers who wail and laugh and tease each other. Grandma Mary has white hair, deep wrinkles, and a big Italian nose. She practically shakes as she runs up to me to squeeze me. “Look at these boys, oh!” she says. She clasps her hands, smiles and says, “So handsome!” Grandma has a magnet of Saint Peter on her fridge and candles all around the house, each for a different saint who she talks to when she prays. “I know we’re supposed to talk to a priest but I just talk to them anyway. I think they’re listening.” She’s Catholic. Donny says that means we’re Catholic too which is fine by me because all I ever knew was we were Dope Fiends or drunks. Catholic sounds much more respectable.
Great-Grandma Rossi is Grandma Mary’s mom. She sits in a wooden rocking chair next to the sliding glass door which leads to a deck, an ancient, thin woman with sunken cheeks in a black dress and a black hat. She doesn’t speak any English and keeps saying something in Italian that I don’t understand: “Oddio! Mio bellissimo bambinos!” She pinches my cheeks hard and hands me a piece of licorice. Dad says she’s ninety-seven years old and the “toughest old broad you’re ever gonna meet.”
They all love Bonnie. They hug her and say, “You hold on to this one, Jimmy. ’Cause if you don’t, I’m taking her.”
Grandma says, “You being good? This is a nice lady. You better be nice to her, Jimmy.”
Dad laughs. “I’ll keep her around for another week if she behaves.” Bonnie shoots him a smile.
The adults order sandwiches from the Italian deli for lunch and we drink sugar sodas and eat salami and cheese with red sauce on torpedo buns.
“Your dad ever tell you we busted him out of a Mexican prison?” Pete asks me.
“Oh, don’t start with that,” Grandma says. “They don’t need to know about that.”
The men ignore her. “You boys. Always so baaad.”
Pete cocks a thumb at Dad and says, “This smart guy right here was driving a car full of drugs across the border.”
“It was my friend’s car. I didn’t know it had drugs in it.”
“That’s what he told the judge!” Donny yells. “That Mexican judge didn’t even speak English and he knew bullshit when he heard it. Bullshit translates in any language. Bull-a-sheet-o!”
Dad shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, it’s true. I didn’t know.”
“Anyway, they stopped him at the border and found a pound of crank—or was it pills? Anyway a big bag of drugs—in the trunk. Sentenced him to five years. That’s five years in a Mexican prison, which ain’t nuthin’ like these cushy cells they got at Chino or Folsom with people making wine in the sink and movie night every Saturday.”
“You would know!” Donny hollers. “They got a Jollett wing up in Chino with the name carved above the door!”
Pete ignores him. “So that ain’t easy time. The food alone. You can’t eat it. The Mexicans don’t give a shit what happens to you when you’re locked up.”
“It’s true,” Dad says. “There’s a sewer running right down the middle of the cell. They give you a little army kit with a metal fork that’s also a can opener and a small bowl with a chicken head in it. That’s lunch. The rolls are made of flour and sawdust. You can see the black bugs baked right into ’em. But I never bothered with it, because my cell had a window onto the street, so you could give money to a kid and he’d go to the taco stand on the corner and bring you back something to eat. It wasn’t so bad.”
Pete continues, “So I was the karate instructor for the police and I was asking around trying to figure out who we could pay to get Jimmy out, because we knew he wouldn’t last too long in there. We went and saw some abogados—those are lawyers—who told us to get used to it because there was no way they were going to release an American drug dealer caught at the Mexican border. So I told them, he’s no drug dealer. He’s just an idiot.” Everyone laughs, including Dad. He doesn’t care if he’s the butt of the joke or the teller of the joke or the audience for the joke, as long as there’s a joke.
“So one day,” Dad says, “some guy came in and just opened my cell door and walked away. I didn’t know why but after a few minutes I think well fuck it maybe he did it on purpose. When I get to the next door, the guard looks away and opens it. So I walk through that one too. I did this five or six times at five or six doors, not knowing if I’m about to be shot or what. Finally, I walked out to the street like it’s nothing. I walked all the way to the American border. Just standing there in my dirty long green wool sweatshirt and a three-week beard, stinking from that cell. At first they didn’t want to let me cross, until I spoke and they heard I was American. I said, ‘Yeah, I just got out of jail.’ So I borrowed a dime and called Pete and he and the old man came and picked me up.”
“We paid off a Mexican federal judge,” Pete says, his arm around Dad. “It cost twenty-five hundred dollars to bust this numskull out. We put him in a car and drove the hell back to San Diego.”
“I haven’t been back since. I think I’m still wanted.”
Dad’s life seems like a series of near misses. He was almost killed in a motorcycle accident when his bike fell over on its side speeding down the highway. He jumped up on it and skidded right across the U.S./Mexican border. He was almost killed by a collapsing VW van as it smashed into a bridge. When he realized what had happened, he climbed out of the car which had folded up like an accordion, walked home and called the cops to report it as stolen. He had guns put to his head but no one ever pulled the trigger. He was shot at and stabbed. There were endless bar fights. Endless trials and cops and social workers and always, in the background somewhere, one or another doe-eyed woman hoping he’d just do the right thing, for once. He seems like something from one of those old pirate movies we see on cable TV at the apartment in Playa del Rey, swashbuckling, daring, a twinkle in his eye, one step ahead of the blade until he was busted and stood before a judge trying to talk down his sentence.