The Madonnas of Echo Park (14 page)

I repeat: for a bus line that services different ethnic groups that don't enjoy each other's company, I've never had a major problem—that is, one that I couldn't handle on my own—until the one on the
thirteenth. Or was it the twelfth? It's the twelfth or the thirteenth; you have the fucking report in front of you. Bus routes are not drawn up with any particular attention paid to where the different races live. It's impossible for a bus operator in Los Angeles to drive a route that doesn't cross at least two, if not more, ethnic parts of the city. Thus, it is up to the operators to keep their passengers aware of their surroundings. I've prevented dozens of fights, and maybe saved a few lives, by advising Mexicans and blacks about which stops are safe for them to get off. Judging from the coverage you've seen on TV about the “incident” aboard my bus, you'd never know this. Sure, there have been occasions (how many is impossible to say) where I've been honked at on the road in standstill traffic, by black drivers in those fucking pimped-out bitch wagons with the cannon-loud bass. I honk right back, to remind them
I'm
driving the two-ton bus. Or the balding white assholes in fucking convertible BMWs, slicing across two or three lanes of traffic to race onto a freeway entrance. What, you get to be in a hurry because you're rich, white, and on cocaine? What gives you the fucking right to cut me fucking off? Fuck
you,
you fucking
FUCKS
!

Not that I say anything. I'm a professional, and I take my job seriously.

I've seen what's been reported in the news. There's been protests, church convocations, and neighborhood meetings with Latino speakers and black leaders, with everyone from the NAACP to Al Sharpton (and what the fuck does Al Sharpton know about Los Angeles?). They're not debating what took place but discussing “community awareness issues” and “racial sensitivity” and “appealing for calm” and a dozen other bullshit things that have nothing to do with the actual facts of that night. I hate it when people get their facts wrong and act as if you have the problem when you try to correct them. For instance, it was a mistake on my birth certificate that wound up listing me in the police report as being three years older than my real age, which is
right there
on my Class C license. I didn't lie about my age. I don't lie, period. I
follow the rules.
And I never meant to leave that kid facedown, in his own blood, at that bus stop.

You want to hear what happened.

It was dusk. I can't recall the exact time, but the time line isn't as essential to my story as the news would lead you to believe. What's important is that dusk is the most dangerous time to drive. Any operator will tell you this. The sun drops out of the sky in Los Angeles like someone who's been standing next to you talking your ear off and then,
poof
, gone, and then the sky's on fire and the glare from that fire blinds you and you're alone.

For a long time, Washington Boulevard's been the official Mexican/black border. Everything north above Washington is Mexican; everything south below it is black. A sixteen-year-old kid got on at Washington. He was in uniform: Kobe basketball jersey that went to his knees, denim shorts sagging down his ass, and bright toothpaste-white high-tops. The black kid flashed his bus pass and shoved his way past a
mojado
in his uniform: baggy, untucked T-shirt, blue jeans, and a baseball cap. He was better put together than the average wetback, though. Gold chains dangled from his neck and wrist, and I remember how callused his tattooed knuckles were as he counted his change into the fare box. The black kid pulled a box of Skittles packs out of his backpack and tried to sell them.

There's a strict no solicitation policy on MTA buses and trains, one I enforce no matter what color or age the salesman is. On this route, it's black kids selling candy bars with a rehearsed speech in rapid-fire nonghetto English. They never look at you, though. On other routes, though, it could be Mexican kids selling plastic key chains with an intense stare. They shove their plastic Chinese-made trinkets in front of you but don't say a word. And God help you—literally—if you get one of those Korean Christians raising money for a pilgrimage of mercy to the Middle East; they stand there like some lost retards, with
cards in the palms of their hands that ask you to give them a dollar in the name of Christ until you shoo them away or drop some change in their cups.

This black kid was so loud selling these Skittle packs I didn't hear the
mojado
at first. No one's ever been stupid enough to start anything with a black past Washington.

“Hey, you,” he said. “You, buddy, with the candies. You pushed into me.” Out of my peripheral vision, I could see his muscles tense. The
mojado
followed the black kid to the back of the bus. A glance in my cabin rearview—and remember I'm driving—put the kid about halfway between the front and the rear exit doors.

“Hey, asshole! You pushed me!”

“No cursing on the bus!” I shouted.

There aren't any specific regulations about passengers using profanity, but one curse word between two races is enough to start a fight. In the same way, I thought a shout from me would be enough to calm the ruckus. Most confrontations flicker out and die on their own, or a passenger takes the initiative and resolves the dispute himself. I can't drive and referee. Not in the job description either.

“I'm fuckin' talking to you,
maricón
!” the
mojado
shouted. The kid had no idea someone was shouting at him—I think he had one of those earpiece cell phones—when the
mojado
punched him in the back of his head.

He stumbled out of his unlaced high-top sneakers and fell back on a row of bucket seats, spilling the candy pouches. My eyes were on the road—that's my job—but in my memory I can hear every Skittle pack hit the rubber floor. The kid popped up off the seats, smacked the
mojado
to the floor, and then started throwing punches. The
mojado
punched back in the kid's ribs.

The passengers were shouting and screaming, and that's when somebody must have started recording with his camera phone. With a police call and the police reports, I was going to be put behind schedule, and lose time off the clock I wasn't going to get paid for.
Who needed this aggravation? Why not toss both of them off and let them duke it out in the street?

I pulled over at the next bus stop and turned on my flashers. At this point, I'm sure I radioed for police dispatch per regulations, but why no record of my call exists, I can't explain.

I grabbed the black kid's jersey and pried him off the
mojado.
“You're off my bus,” I remember saying.

“Why you kicking me off?” the kid shouted. “He started it!”

You're wondering the same thing. Why him? There were eighteen Mexicans onboard, a late-night zombie army of classroom cleaners headed to USC, and about two or three blacks. Easy choice.

“Off,” I said and shoved him to the door. “Off the fucking bus!”

“Fuck you! You wetbacks are all the same!”

Try, if you can, to pretend you haven't seen the video. I won't deny being called a wetback infuriated me, but the “kick” off the stairs and onto the street wasn't a kick. The kid used most of his strength to fling himself off the bus. I popped the doors closed and shouted something at the
mojado.
The video says I said,
“Vuelva a donde usted vino, pinche mojado!”
but I don't remember saying that. What I wanted was to get out of there.

The kid ran alongside the bus, slamming and kicking it as I drove away. He was right in my blind spot when I drove for an intersection. There's no footage of this, but I had the green light. I had the right of way. That truck, whose description I've given a hundred times and will give again here—late-model GMC pickup truck, mushroom brown, white guy driving and a Mexican seated next to him in the cab—ran straight through a red light, cutting me off. I had two seconds to decide whether to plow into the truck, risking my and my passengers' lives, or swerve to the right to miss it.

There was a loud thump, followed by the dull, thudding sound of what could have been a heavy sack dropping from a roof.

Leaning out the front door, I could see the kid had smacked into the bus's sideboards and was propelled forward about thirty feet,
cracking his neck against the curb. I've seen enough bodies spread out on the pavement to know he was dead.

What was I feeling? Nothing. I wanted to deal with the situation in a quick and professional manner, the way I'd been trained. I turned on the hazards, alternating light on, then off, then on, over his crumpled body. It was dark by then. Nights here are sudden, like an accident.

I'm confident I radioed for help when I reboarded the bus. I have no explanation why the call came in eleven minutes after those first 911 calls came from my passengers. Standard procedure is to keep everyone onboard until the police arrive to prevent witnesses fleeing the scene. Following regulations for hitting a pedestrian, I asked if anyone onboard was hurt, but there was too much noise and screaming for me to hear their answers.

Under the baseboard in a storage box was a thick sheet of canvas. I exited the bus and covered the body. A group of blacks from an apartment complex across the street pooled out in front, watching the scene.

I lit several flares while the crowd across the street whooped and hollered and drank beer. Then they shouted and pointed before they bolted over. A small crowd grew into a large one, forming a rowdy semicircle around the body. That's when one of the blacks on the bus pushed open the front door and shouted, “He killed him! The Mexican threw the brother off the bus and killed him! I got it on video!”

A small group clustered around the light of his cell phone, their pinched, illuminated faces carved out from the night behind them. It was a short clip, maybe fifteen seconds, but I could see the light flickering in an endless loop, hear my voice repeating itself, the crowd's conviction and anger rising with each replay.

“You killed him, motherfucker!” a man shouted, followed by a chorus of
yeah
s!

“He ran alongside the bus in the street,” I said. “It was an accident.”

“Fuck accident!” another man shouted. “You ain't even from here!”

“I didn't see him.”

“Oh, you didn't see him!” a third voice shouted. “'Cause it's night and he's black you didn't see him?”

“No, no,” I stammered. “That's not what I meant. He was in my blind spot.”

“The fucker who started it's on the bus!” the black with the camera phone said. “He grabbed the brother! Get him, too!”

The crowd had heard enough. A group of them—shirtless, tatted thugs—stormed up the open front doors and onto the bus.

“We got him!” somebody screamed from inside. “We got the motherfucker!”

A Mexican guy—not the one who started the fight—was thrown off the bus and corralled into the semicircle with me and the dead body.

“What you got to say for yourself?” a voice shouted.

I didn't answer. The Mexican was trembling. He whispered
“No sé”
under his breath.

“Fucking
cholos
go hunt for black people! You wetbacks been trying to kill us up and down these streets!”

“Say something!” one of the crowd shouted.

A large hand smacked him in the face before he could. Then a solid punch, and he went down. He screamed for help in Spanish, which made the crowd rabid. Someone lunged at me, and I scrambled up the stairwell, kicking back at the hands trying to grab my legs. I slapped a hydraulic button to lock the doors. The mob threw the Mexican up against them.

“Habre la puerta!”
he screamed.
“Dios mío, habre la puerta!”

The man pounded his fists against the glass doors. His face was bloodied and bruised. There was a short moment where the crowd outside sounded worn out. Inside the bus was screaming, shouts of
“Sácanos de aqui!”

I started up the bus, hoping the roar of the engine would scare the crowd outside into thinking I might barrel into them and back off. Instead, they threw the Mexican back into the doors, his face a bruised sunset, then down onto the sidewalk with an audible
crack.

It's a violation of Metro policy to leave the scene of an accident. But I had the safety of my passengers to consider. Nobody mentions that, by driving away, I saved those other Mexicans' lives. In the rearview, the silhouettes chasing us receded, swallowed into the dark. I switched the lighted marquee to
OUT OF SERVICE
—
HAVE A NICE DAY
! and sped down Hoover, missing all the stops. On the corner of Hoover and Jefferson, I pulled over at a Denny's, radioed dispatch my new location, and opened the passenger doors.

Everything I did up to this point, I think you'd agree, a reasonable man would have done the same way. The Mexican who started the fight ran off. A few others followed him. I told everyone to wait either inside the restaurant or across the street on the USC campus.

I was shaken and wanted to clear my head, grab a bite to eat, some coffee maybe, something to settle me down. With no police car in sight, I drove east, then north, up Figueroa back to my division yard, off Mission Road, in Boyle Heights, behind the 5/10 interchange. At the corner of Figueroa and the point where César Chávez turns into Sunset Boulevard (the one spot in Los Angeles where a Mexican name changes into an American one), instead of turning right down Chávez to the yard, I turned left on Sunset and kept driving.

Why? I don't know. There are specific rules that cover off-route trips, but I couldn't recall what they were. I'd never seen the streets that deserted before. The city lights shimmered like a pinwheel on a child's grave, hard, gray beams cut up and spun in a dozen fingered directions. In front of me was this long straight line of blue-green diamond streetlights stretching out in a fluid purple blackness, like blood in an artery. And a silence to rival any national park, any mountainous abyss, a silence you'd think impossible in a city of millions.