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South Central
Strike your heel three times, Dorothy —
“Go home.
Go home.
Go home.
Leave! This is not your home…”
Maybe the voices will vanish,
maybe the glass will stop shaking.
The chants bleed through the television,
vibrating the screen like a cheap coiled bed spring,
a warning siren rattling the room.
Donald Trump pointing his finger through the static,
breaking the screen like glass —
a dagger aimed at the nameless.
The aimless immigrants — painted as thieves, rapists, animals.
Lighting this match.
This cigarette — this one’s for you, America.
The paper crackles, the drag hits,
and the exhale slips out in a soft hiss, curling toward the ceiling.
Let me get a drag from this fag —
the soft hiss of smoke curls in the lungs and whispers:
The thunder of the past can echo in a man’s life — forever.
This story… it’s the story of a man who remembers the crossing —
from hot-ass Tijuana to good old San Diego in the late 1970s.
Crossing the border has swallowed men who never came out the other side.
But he made it through — with nothing but hunger in his gut
and a prayer to never be what he was in Mexico.
“¿Adónde vas, pinche cojo?” — Where you going, you cripple?
He remembers his grandma’s voice, sharp as a whip.
Kids laughing, pointing,
him dragging his leg through the dirt as a boy.
Polio had marked him.
He had treatment in Mexico City, covered by his father’s job insurance.
The doctor told them: “If he continues, he should walk fine.”
But his parents chose the comfort of the pueblo over the promise of the city.
Why? Who knows… Were they evil? Ignorant? Afraid?
He remembers his older brother — ten years old, already working,
shouldering the load beside their father
because the mother was always dying…
always chasing a cure in bottles and witchcraft.
It was at that job the men gave his brother his first drink.
His initiation…
They laughed, clapped him on the back,
pushed the bottle into his hand with their words:
“Here, take a drink — you are now a man.”
The liquor burned down a boy’s throat,
and in that moment, alcohol took root in the family —
not as comfort, not as cure,
but as medicine for pain, heartache, and manhood.
His father — dead from bone cancer.
His older brother — dead from cirrhosis,
a complicated love, a complicated hate.
His mother — still dying,
still claiming “evil people want to kill her,”
still searching for a metaphysical cure that never comes.
These days, his phone never shuts up — ICE raids, checkpoints, deportations.
He listens while he eats, while he drives, while he works.
A delivery driver — plastic bags stacked in the mini warehouse out back.
Every morning he loads the van, click-clack of his cane echoing in the yard,
hauling weight onto a Costco dolly like he’s still twenty-five.
A man with a green card, still looking over his shoulder
like the past could reach out and drag him back.
Fifteen years since a DUI he fixed,
but in his mind it’s still stamped on his forehead.
You’d think he was a failure…
Forgot to mention: he too fought through alcoholism.
Once in L.A., he drank to kill anxiety —
but the cure left him with nothing.
And yet he is a father, a husband, a son.
He owns his own business, trafficking through South Central and across Los Angeles,
delivering to liquor stores, street vendors, and mini markets.
Still surviving.
This cigarette is done.
His demons walk with him,
but he’s still moving the dolly,
still providing,
still alive.
🥷 You don’t have to believe. You can ignore it. But if you knew… would you believe it happens?
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