Tijuana Gringo
17 08 00 -- Hustler
A kid stopped to hustle me yesterday as I sat reading in the park. It was a few minutes before sunset, the time when the park begins to change from family zone to gay pickup spot. He sat down on my bench. Jingled coins in his hand.
-- Hey, you got money for my taxi?
-- No, no traigo monedas. ("I carry no coins.")
-- You from here? ("Eres de agui?")
-- Yes, no. From San Diego, but I live here now.
-- Well, at least you speak Spanish, not like most gabachos.
-- Well, thank you. I have a lot to learn, but that is why I live here now.
-- Where? I haven't seen you around here before.
-- Alli en frente ("there across the street"). But I don't come to the park at night.
-- Oh.
-- Where are you from?
-- Guadalajara.
-- Ah, tapatio?
-- Si.
-- How old are you, fifteen, sixteen?
-- Sixteen.
-- You don't go to secundaria ("high school")?
-- No. I never started ("entered").
-- Ay, muchacho, you should go to school. Go to school! You don't want to spend the rest of your life working in the streets!
-- Mmmm....
-- Go to school.
-- Well....
-- I sound like your father, no? But you should still go to school.
-- Well, I'm leaving now. Nice meeting you.
-- Wait, what's your name?
-- Jose.
-- Miguel.
I saw him again today on the street. He was walking with a middleaged man who appeared to be Mexican. When the man wasn't looking, Jose nodded at me, and I remembered something a nun friend of Agustin said to me last week. She had come looking for a donation to her school, and while my landlord went in to look for his checkbook, I told her what I've learned about the park. "Sounds like there's a place here for a ministry," she smiled, a little sadly. At that very moment, with a clanging of metal, the Franciscan church bell, far across the park, began to ring and ring and ring.
And I thought this was only cultural anthropology?
Copyright 2000 Danchar Thomas
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