Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love. Van Halen. 1978. Warner Bros.

 Back in 1978, when Van Halen released its debut record, I learned that though fights can often be avoided, the brutality implicit in violence is a pet of circumstance, and roams unleashed. For the three years that I attended middle school, students from the Worth Heights barrio where I grew up, together with neighboring Hubbard Heights and Carter Park students, were antagonists in yearly school wide clashes with students from differing social demographics. I forget the chronology but the respective clashes involved Mexican nationals one year, blacks the next and, finally, whites—known then as “ropers.” These racist engagements were intensely short-lived, usually beginning around the start of the school year with insults exchanged in the hallways between classes or an isolated fist fight at the outdoor, all-asphalt tether ball courts. By the end of the week tensions had grown unbearably disruptive, often with skirmishes erupting randomly, spontaneously, throughout the Friday morning and afternoon. For those of us not participating in the week-long melee the school air was action-charged with gossip, disinformation, rumor, and anxious anticipation. Based on scuttlebutt and previous years’ experiences we knew the annual strife would climax in an after school free for all that took place at various points along the many routes home. To get back to Worth Heights from Rosemont, you crossed busy Seminary Drive on the school’s northern side, then walked across Rosemont Park heading due north. At Bolt Street you took a right and began walking east. It was roughly a seven mile trip. After crossing the park—where you’d see two or three fights or maybe one mass brawl surrounded by a throng of entranced, bewildered teenagers—but before the heavy traffic north-south thoroughfare of Hemphill Street, came the idyllic, residential lane called Bolt Street, lit by an afternoon sun whose light shone through overhead branches up and down the tree lined street. Midway between Sixth and Hemphill Streets stood a small bodega that I can’t remember ever having patronized, and that still operates today. 7-11, with its fluorescent, brightly lit one-room layout and cold familiarity, was only blocks away. That’s where my friends and I would empty our pockets on Marvel comics, cigarettes, and Coke flavored Slurpees in white plastic, multi-ounce collectors cups. I was quickly becoming an avid consumer, weirdly comfortable in retail spaces more than I was outdoors, where my new group of friends assured me they belonged, biking and playing Little League baseball or competitive miniature golf in the Junior Putters Association. This difference in our relationship made me suspect to them, though we were united by a passion for Putt-Putt, video arcade games and Kiss. We were trading opinions on the new Gene Simmons-endorsed band from LA with the blistering Kinks cover getting airplay on the Dallas market’s two album-rock radio stations when we came upon a small group of curious onlookers gathered on the bodega’s unlined gravel parking lot for one of those outbreaks of violence that all too casually marked an end to the week’s informal observance of irrational teen aggression. Two girls were the stragglers’ focal point, one of whom I recognized as Doris Barela, kid sister to my classmate Francis, a tough girl I was glad to know because of her consistent amiability. I remember making Francis smile once, then watching with pleasure as she gave herself over to the moment, the look on her face an expression of undiluted pre-teen joy. I didn’t know Doris the saw way I knew her sister but I did know they shared a reputation not for looking for fights, but for never walking away from someone who was. That afternoon Doris was spewing invective at a female Mexican national. It was like watching a pair of cats in one of those preliminary battles where they’re seated opposite one another, the first cat with its head thrown slightly back and its small face drawn in a wince as it taps with its forepaw repeatedly at the second cat’s face, that cat seated low on its hind quarters, its face drawn in a wince too and its tiny ears flattened in aggravated annoyance. Suddenly both girls lunged at one another, thereby inaugurating the fight’s second phase, the awkward grappling for control and dominance of your opponent’s body. That is when my brain did what it does to release whatever flow of chemicals is necessary to cement in memory an image of Doris flinging her opponent’s body to the ground and, then, by some inspired improvised choreography, catching that body by a fistful of its hair before it hit the ground, and, with her free hand, start smashing her fist into the girl’s vulnerable, unprotected face with the kind of savagery you’re supposed to see only in prison. Over the years the chemical composition of this memory has failed the indelibility test. I can still see the vicious attack play out, only now the memory has been isolated from its origin and has taken for its setting the archetypal backdrop of the salmon colored brick facade of the Barela family home on Main Street. Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love captures the working class tensions of that Hispanic neighborhood caught between New World conservatism and modern, progressive social paradigms, as well as the internalized conflicts that raged inside of its children. Eighth grade was the final time I spoke with any of those boys. Richard, who I knew since first grade, successfully initiated a power struggle for control of the friendships and bullied me out of the group, while Rick and Fernando, like most of us, moved on to join the ever widening ranks of the unremarkable. Rodney, the youngest, was killed in a motorcycle accident only a few years later and was buried by his parents.

August 23 021