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Los Angeles: The Color Of Blood
Copyright 2016 Christina M. Guerrero
DEDICATION
This is for the boy. RIP.
STORY BEHIND THE STORY
A sunny day.
ABOUT THE DRAFTS
At the moment, not much about the draft,
but I will say that I still see this boy on the ground
and it has been almost fifty years since that day.
The sight of this violence was terrible.
Even if nothing else disturbing had ever happened, that incident alone would have caused lifelong, mild to moderate, PTSD symptoms.
‘That incident’ being the boy in the doorway.
I saw him when I was five years old, long before anyone else did.
I was sitting on the left rear seat of an automobile in northeast Los Angeles, as we moved along a busy street.
I was looking at the stunning variety of visual input, listening to the honks and motors and occasional sirens and voices, smelling gas and oil and tacos and tamales and spicy chinese food frying, watching rich people and poor people ...
When I saw the boy.
He was lying in a doorway, on his back, his arms outstretched.
His head was toward the street; his waist was on the threshold; his legs and feet were inside a small store.
He was intact.
Except for whatever was allowing his blood to make a huge deep dark unsettling pearly midnight-bluish-maroon-reddish puddle around his small shaved African-American head.
People were moving around him. Almost as if being bloody in a doorway was something totally normal.
There were no cameras, no boom operators, no crowd of actors or extras, or things like that.
I saw only people going about their business. A large man, who might have been a detective, moved past the boy and gave him a serious look.
I stared, breathless with outrage over the dichotomy of the moment: the sun was setting beautifully in the west; Los Angeles continued to exist; people walked about and moved in and out of stores; cars moved along--
“Don’t look over there,” said a low, serious voice from the front seat.
Too late, I thought. I did, and I am going to remember this the rest of my life.
The cars were moving slowly enough that I was able to observe for quite a while.
The boy remained in the same position the entire time.
I watched, thinking and feeling many things.
A part of me wanted to go and be with him so he would not be alone. I felt a serious, sad feeling over him dying in that position with no one to hold his hand or caress his face.
Common sense spoke up: someone will be there to help him.
Another part of me was strangely thrilled to be alive and moving along in the car toward a place to live and food to eat and people to hang out with. Even at the age of five I knew that death comes for us all, and that so far, death had passed me over, and that I was alive and should continue the business of surviving until death caught up with me.
This survivors guilt made me feel excited yet very guilty. Did we just miss the violence that led to this situation? Would I have been injured or killed had we passed by earlier? Would it have hurt?
And a question that had been there almost from the moment I saw the boy: Why him and not me? Why was I in the car, going about my business, and why was he on the ground, dying or dead? Did someone want to kill him? Or was it an accident?
And suddenly, a bunch of realizations: he will never grow up, he will not go to junior high, he will not go to college, he will not get married, he will not have children, he will not have grandchildren, he will not have a job, he will not be a part of this world anymore except for his body, which might go into the ground or get burned up, and then only his ashes will be here.
I felt overwhelmed by the loss of his life, and by the stillness of his body, and particularly unsettled by the color of his blood. Movies never get it right. Human blood has a shine to it, and a slickness, and when it is moving out of a dying body, it is a dark pearly blue until oxgen infiltrates it, and then it turns bright deep red.
Human beings moving around is the “norm.” Human beings lying on the ground, dying or dead, “should” happen when they are ancient and frail, not when they are young and fresh and barely experiencing life.
I felt overwhelmed by all of these things, and suddenly my only thought was: I want him to be alive, not there, on the ground, with the blood around his head. I want him to be alive. Why can’t he be alive? I felt great distress and a deep serious sadness that I would find out -- many years later -- was the beginning of not only grief, but post traumatic stress disorder. Many years later I would also find out that I had started “acting up” for a while during this time in my life. This was part of the reason why.
As the car moved on, I felt a part of myself stay behind.
A part of me will always be there.
If things had been different, I would have gotten out of the car, and gone to the boy, and held one of his hands until they had to take his body away.
In my version of heaven, I believe I will see him again.
And we will greet one another with a hug, and I will tell him I thought of him almost every day of my life since I saw him.
R.I.P.
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