This week on TYTT, my storytelling page, Laurie Trautman writes the story of her encounter with thieves in Nicaragua.
Check out Dos Camarones (Two Shrimp). Story’s great, nicely told.
Let me know what you think. Better yet, write your own tale and send it in. Your inner writer calls.
Filed under Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale
For several years now, writer and bohemian-about-town Conrad Romo has been hosting Tongue and Groove, a monthly get together of writers, poets, musicians and spoken-word folks of all ilks.
The next one is this Sunday.
Gig starts at 6pm at Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga. Check it out. Well worth the trip.
Filed under Los Angeles
This story culminates a sad case that I wrote about when it took place: Pico Rivera grandmother Maria Hicks shot and killed by some gang members tagging a wall.
The house where they lived was tagged top to bottom. Angel Rojas, 21, was said to be mentally handicapped to some degree.
I remember having a long, quite enjoyable chat with Hicks’ brother, Ruben Quintero, in the backyard of the family’s house, planted with fruit trees by their father years before.
Quintero is a literature professor at Cal State LA and had written about parody in English literature.
He’d also played football for one of SoCal’s legendary coaches, Ernie Johnson, at El Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, in the mid-1960s. I think the 1967 team was one of the best to ever come out of the region. Ruben told me they used to all do jumping jacks before the fourth quarter to psyche out the other team and would never accept a drink of water on the field.
As Ruben smoked a cigar by a lemon tree, we had a long talk about Aristotle, Vietnam, football and Ernie Johnson, neighborhoods, and murder.
Among the highlights:
– ON HIS FATHER: “My father [a fruitpicker] cherished the book. He hadn’t reead a lot. But he understood that education was an important tool and he kept affirming that. he admired people like J Robert Oppenheimer.
-ON WHY HE WENT TO VIETNAM:”I wanted to become a physicist. I went to Harvey Mudd [in Claremont] for two years. Played football for Claremont Mudd. I was always among the top in math and science in school. There everybody’s bright. They have the advantage of having fathers who were chemists. Like a fool, I left and, joined the Army for two years. I was a combat veteran. Recon unit. Nobody tells you that your mind is going to get a little bit scrambled. I came back from Vietnam, went to USC. But at USC from Vietnam, I couldn’t connect. I took a thousand showers. It took a while. I became a flattened emotional creature.”
-ON WHY HIS SISTER INTERVENED: “We have lived here since 1953. That’s part of the neighborhood; that’s part of where we live. It’s not necessarily any bourgeous social sensibility that’s been cultivated. It was just very much apart of her character. My mother and father just instilled this thing where we just don’t take crap. Something is wrong, you say it’s wrong. Be honest, direct and not be afraid to stand up for things. This is a quality of life that I want to live. I want to be able to drive from my sister’s house and drive home without seeing these [jerks] putting marks on the wall. They have no right to do that: they should know not to do that. She wanted them to understand that nobody wants them to do that. So she did that. When you realize this is your house in a sense, or your home, you’re not going to allow somebody to come over and do a metaphorical urination on a wall over here.”
An interesting conversation for a reporter in search of a murder story.
Filed under Gangs, Southern California, Streets, Uncategorized
Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records
Here’s my story on Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records, and the last of the great independents in what’s become now the old music industry.
He marketed music via boomboxes and car stereos and championed a host of young kids, rappers from Long Beach streets, some of whom, like Snoop Dogg, went on to change the music.
So punk rock!
Now Anderson is downsizing his store and says he’ll probably only stay in business a year.
You can read the story at the link above, and listen to a podcast interview I did with Anderson regarding the early days of the store and gangster rap and how a music that took over started from a small little drum machine.
Filed under Southern California
Santiago "Shagi" Mata, tuba player, Maywood, CA
The LA band craze continues to claim high school tubas right and left.
Here’s a link to a story about the latest: Bell High School had two stolen over the weekend, valued at $6,000 apiece. Several other schools have had tubas stolen in recent months.
It’s all about the emergence of the tuba as the emblematic instrument for Southern California in this era, just as the electric guitar was for the 1970s.
With the arrival of Mexican immigrants, and their tradition of house parties, the tuba has become all the rage in SoCal. Great tubists in banda music, like Santiago Mata (pictured here), are paid more than other musicians.
Also, the Sierreno trio — tuba, guitar and accordion — has grown in popularity at these parties.
Hence, tubas, the most expensive of marching band instruments, are in high demand. Most of the thefts have taken place in predominantly Mexican immigrant areas — southeast of LA especially — where banda is hugely popular.
I’ve written a story about this phenomenon and one about the thefts of tubas that many instructors believe is the result.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants
This week on my storytelling website, TELL YOUR TRUE TALE, check out the very cool story by Jeffrey Scott Hunter, on how he
came to commit his first bank robbery.
That led to others and they in turn led to Mr. Hunter’s incarceration for 29 years.
I love the chaotic feel to the story, the details, and even the language he uses. I always think that’s crucial to a story — the language and details often just exude a sense of what the story is about.
Let me know what you think after reading the piece:
I’ll be linking to more stories from TYTT. I happily consider all submissions, though please keep in mind that I can’t pay anything and this is a site for true storytelling — not memoir, fiction, or op-ed. I do edit, though, so feel free to send along that story you’ve always meant to write. No time like the present to get it done and get it up for people to read.
Filed under Uncategorized
Troy Erik
I’m doing a story now about a young fellow, Nathan Vickers, who was a drag queen or a transgender woman, and was shot to death on a street known as a prostitute hangout in Hollywood in November.
Part of the story is exactly who Nathan Vickers – or “Chase,” or “Cassidy,” or “Chastity” – was, or intended to be. He’d come from the Bay Area and seemed to seeking a transformation of one kind or another.
Helping me figure out Nathan’s world is Troy Erik, a former queen and current activist. A woman named Amber, he told me, knew Nathan well in the days leading up to his death. We went looking for her, as we’d heard she was just out of jail.
We looked at Donut Time (Santa Monica and Highland) and at the adult bookstore (no name) behind it, and in front of the $1 Chinese Express, whose prices didn’t keep it from going out of business.
We never did find Amber. But Andre, a sociable street fellow, said he’d known Chase or Cassidy. “She always dressed as a woman when I knew her,” he said.
We also happened upon “Grace” – a queen who enjoyed enormous renown in the 1980s because she looked, in drag, exactly like pop diva Grace Jones, and is now homeless. That’s next post.
Filed under Los Angeles, Streets
Out on the story about Nathan Vickers, the transgender woman shot and killed in Hollywood in November, we came across Grace.
Grace says he’s from Ogden, Utah — where growing up black and gay in the 1960s must have been … a real story. He told me he had the pleasure that few in California have had of ice skating on a real frozen pond in Utah.
She was once legendary on the streets of Hollywood as a drag queen who looked remarkably like pop diva Grace Jones. Then it was parties, and a wild life, and nightclub shows where she was the center of attention.
“She was the queen of them all,” said my guide, Troy Erik. Then? “Well, drugs,” said Troy.
Now Grace lives in the back of a Hollywood Park, with a man he calls his husband, and a shopping cart full of stuff and can talk non-stop, like free-form jazz, of the stories of when she was beautiful and everyone wanted her.
Filed under Streets
A story today in the Daily Bulletin in the Inland Empire is interesting for what it dredges up about an episode in the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.
Members of the tribe, each of which earns a ton of money from their casino, feel in with San Bernardino gang members and through them with the Mexican Mafia members in that area. Now it’s become a campaign issue, according to the story.
The Mexican Mafia prison gang remains the most fascinating criminal enterprise in California. It’s able to force street gang members to exact taxes from local drug dealers. When MM members began this system in the early 1990s, it amounted, and still does, to the first region-wide organized crime in the history of Southern California, which had been spared the Italian mafia and others.
Local gang members were ordered to do the bidding of the MM — also known as “Eme”, which is Spanish for the letter M — whose influence in the prison system is vast. Gang members hopped to it, for the most part. The revenue is shared among taxers, shotcallers and the mafioso from each areas of SoCal.
Today, years after its formation, the Eme taxation system is often as ingenius as the member in that area, which is to say sometimes enormously so, sometimes not at all.
In Huntington Park, the Eme member, doing life in Pelican Bay State Prison, ordered gang members to tax popsicle vendors and street drag-queen prostitutes, as well as drug dealers. One transgender told me recently they had to pay taxes to even live in the area, as the considered their presence a besmirching of the barrio’s rep.
Out in SB County, according to fed documents, the local Eme figured out that some members of the San Manuel Band were juicy sources of cash. In 2008, Sal “Toro” Hernandez, the Eme member from San Bernardino, was implicated in the whole thing. A DEA document, according to newspaper reports, said the Eme was extorting money from tribe members, who each reportedly earn $100,000 a month in revenue from their casino.
“Toro” Hernandez pleaded guilty as did his brother, Alfred. (Here’s a reprint of a Press Enterprise article on the case.)
Will be interesting to see how the campaign, and this issue within it, plays out.
Filed under Drugs, Gangs, Southern California
Mennonite one-room school house near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua
Time Magazine has published a set of photos of an Old Colony Mennonite community in Durango, Mexico, titling it The Flower Girls. Check them out. Tell me what you think. I find the photos are sweet, delicate, beautiful, and only hint at the disaster that has befallen most of these Mennonite communities, which have tried mightily to separate themselves from the world.
The Mennonite communities in Chihuahua are replete with severe problems of inbreeding, domestic violence, benighted education, alcoholism, and, in the last 20 years, drug trafficking, particularly in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, four hours south of Ciudad Juarez.
Mennonites came to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s, invited by the government that wanted to colonize the north to avoid further US depredations. Those who came to escape the world were masterful farmers and cheesemakers. But in time they suffered from the same problems as other Mexican farmers: drought, lack of credit, etc. Many in the Chihuahua colonies turned to drug smuggling — some full time and some to pay an urgent debt. I ran into these folks in 2003 and included a chapter on the harrowing result — the scariest moment of my reporting life — in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.
I like the Time photos immensely, but from them you’d not guess much of the reality of Old Colony Mennonite life in Mexico.
For many of these world-rejecting Mennonites, it always seemed to me that their very attempt to isolate themselves made them vulnerable to the worst the modern world has to offer. Many I spoke with described their people as lambs, unprepared for what they would encounter outside their community. Some likened it to Indians’ lack of exposure to small pox before the Europeans came.
I’ve included a photo above of a one-room schoolhouse, taught by a man with barely a bad sixth-grade education, which is how Mennonite kids are still schooled in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. Would love your comments on the Time photos.
Don Cornelius, host of Soul Train
Don Cornelius, the great host of Soul Train in the 1970s and 1980s, was found dead today in his Sherman Oaks home, apparently a suicide.
I loved Don Cornelius and watched him often. He had that cool style.
Above all, he was my introduction to one of the greatest periods of American pop music: soul music in the 1970s. I think Soul Train introduced black pop culture to a lot of folks that way.
I remember seeing Billy Paul, O’Jays, Chi-Lites, Delfonics, Kool and the Gang, Roberta Flack, Barry White, and the best of them all, the Spinners with the late Phillipe Soul Wynne — all on Soul Train.
A great dude…..Sorry to see him go.
Filed under Uncategorized
Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach
I’ve been spending time lately with Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach, a ferociously independent record store.
Anderson’s store is a landmark, one of the places where rap began in Southern California, and a store that hung on long beyond others because it mastered the art of customer service, knowing what people wanted, and got them in touch with emerging artists who didn’t get any radio play.
But he’s downsizing now, moving from the space he occupied for 33 years and this will probably be his last year, the last independent record store around. “You can’t compete with free,” he told me.
Anderson was there at the beginning of one of the three great DIY musical forces to come out of LA. In Hollywood, it was punk in the late 1970s. In the late 1980s, from Paramount came Chalino Sanchez and Mexican drug ballads, narcocorridos.
Anderson helped mid-wife gangster rap, which emerged in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, from the garages of Compton then Long Beach came West Coast gangster rap — first with NWA, then with Snoop Dogg and his 213 crew. 213’s first demo was recorded on a drum machine in VIP’s backroom.
Anderson’s advertisement was getting new cassettes in the hands of those with big car stereos and ghetto blasters — “street promotion.” (Gangster rap was so punk rock.)
Yet I wonder whether these kinds of geographic movements of intense garage band creativity are as possible nowadays, even as technology has allowed everyone to be a DIYer, all from a laptop computer, and avoid entirely the control of major record labels. “It’s people’s attention span,” Anderson told me.
Hope to have a podcast of an interview with him (a first for me!) that’ll go with the story on VIP’s downsizing, which I hope will run in a few days.
Filed under Business, Los Angeles
I had lunch the other day with an old friend, Zeus Garcia.
In his day, Zeus was like the Michael Jordan of Oaxacan Indian basketball – this in the mid-1970s. He and his brothers and cousins formed a basketball team from their village outside the City of Oaxaca and won tournaments for miles around for years. In the 1980s, they all migrated to LA., part of a large Zapotec Indian migration to the area that really heated up during those years. Almost all of them moved to either Pico-Union or Mar Vista or Venice. (More on why not East LA in a later post.)
Zeus, when I first met him in the late 1990s, was a bus boy and intent on bringing a purer form of basketball to the United States, which he felt had corrupted the sport he loved. He coached a team of Oaxacan all stars, which he called Raza Unida.
Oaxacan Indians are basketball-obsessed folks and the sport plays an enormous role in their lives here in Southern California. Tournaments take place almost every weekend somewhere in the LA area. Zeus was kind of the guru of Oaxacan Indian basketball here. I wrote about him in my first book, True Tales from Another Mexico. I later went to the Copa Benito Juarez in Guelatao, Oaxaca, and watched 7000 people take in the tournament at a small outdoor court in the birthplace of the legendary Mexican president, who was Zapotec.
Zeus is now a truck driver delivering for a fruit and vegetable wholesaler near downtown L.A. He told me his brother, Isaias, himself a great basketball player in his day, last year returned to their village to take on a servicio – a public job that is unpaid and that each member of an Indian village must do if he wants to remain in good standing. Some who’ve refused have had their lands taken. Zeus was full of stories of how folks back home seemed from another world to Isaias, mired in gossip and unwilling to try new things or work hard.
This is the story of many Mexican villages, seems to me. The ones with the drive and gumption leave. Those left behind depend on the dollars sent down from El Norte, and the result is a kind of welfare dependency that drives a lot of returning immigrants nuts.
I may do that story. Keep you apprised as it goes along.
Photos: Zeus Garcia then and in 1999, and two shots of village teams from the Copa Benito Juarez.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants
Xochilt Market at Broadwway & 42nd Street
Another in my campaign to shoot every Virgin of Guadalupe in LA. This one protects the last pay phone in town.
Filed under Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants, Streets, Virgin
I’ve spending time with Wan Joon Kim and his son Kirk. Mr. Kim was a gangster rap empresario in Compton, selling records, then cassettes, of the rap pioneers from that town when no one else would, and operating it all out of a stand at an indoor swap meet.
The story began as a piece about indoor swap meets and how in Los Angeles they’ve become an avenue that thousands of Korean immigrants have used to work their way into America, selling whatever anyone would buy. They pioneered the indoor swap meet and most vendors in indoor swap meets are still Korean, though new immigrants find their way into many other businesses nowadays.
Mr. Kim just happened to sign a lease in Compton at a time when it was a hive of DIY rap artists and promoters who had nowhere else to sell their stuff. He didn’t care what he sold so long as it was different and moved. He became “Pops” to an entire generation of young Compton rappers, and had 20 years of great sales, until computer downloads began the decline of the record store. Great story, I think. Very happy I happened on it. Here he is with his son and wife….
Filed under Migrants, Uncategorized
