General Relief

I had my second cup of coffee before I stepped out, as I was slowly enjoying it I thought to myself, “remember this moment and how at peace you are with yourself, remember this moment when you realize that your day is going by slow or in case you feel a headache coming on” so I sat in silence and enjoyed that coffee like I was facing execution right after it. I’d submitted an application online the day before but was referred to an office that was extremely out of the way. There was an Exposition Park branch of the DPSS (Department of Public Social Services) by my mom’s house and decided to go to that branch as soon as my coffee was done, it was just after eight a.m. Turns out that branch only services parents and children and was told to go to the downtown offices on the corner of Adams and Grand. I thought to myself, “no problem, I got this” I took a liberated trip in the new expo line and got off at the Adams stop by LATTC a.k.a. “Trade Tech” as I made my way to the office I wondered if that would be my only trip or if I was in for a long day. I was in for a long day. The gentleman at the service counter told me that since I’d submitted my application to the South East division there was nothing I could do because they could not access my file until I personally checked in with those offices. He gave me my case and file number and politely asked that I go to the office in South East LA and take care of my paperwork there. Being that I had no choice but to go to that office I took my first deep sigh and realized that yes, it was going to be a long day, I would have to take at least four buses and I did'nt have a dollar on me. I walked over to Broadway and as I did so I prepared my wrap for the bus drivers I would encounter on my trek to Gage and Holmes, a courtesy ride is nothing new to me, I used to take them all the time in high school when I wanted to save a few bucks, but this time it was different because I legitimately did not have a dollar to my name. “ Hey brother/sister the county fucked up my paper work and I have to go down to Gage to fix the issue but I don’t have any money” it was between that and the regular, “Bus driver, may I please get a courtesy ride?” and say no more. The first bus came the 45, I chose to go with the first story just to warm up in case I should encounter a hostile bus driver down the line. He said, “sure man, get in” I exited Gage and began walking east, it took me a while to realize I had the address and could make a more or less accurate assesment of how long the walk would take me. I quickly realized that it would take me more than ten industrial blocks in the hot sun before I hit the street where the third building was located. I walked to the closest bus stop and by the mercy of the good lord found a stop that was under the shade of a tree. Again, I worked on my wrap for this next bus driver, I told myself I would stick to the first story, luckily by the time I got on the bus I realized that the machine where you insert your bus fare was jammed and the driver was therefore letting everyone get in for free.
I arrived at the third building or the “District 17” building, just outside the entrance were two ladies in colorful scrubs offering medical services to the people who were coming out and had just been approved for Medi-cal. I walked to the customer service counter and told them my story, I was referred to a window and was helped by two workers who found my case and assigned me a personal worker. I sat in the waiting area and waited for about a half hour, during that half hour I noticed the others who were waiting for social services, young mothers, elderly women with their grandchildren, young men and I was called up. The worker said that he was glad to see me because he was about to give me a call and notify me that those offices too were designed specifically for parents, also he stated that I what I need to ask for was Adult GR (general relief) and that I had filled out the online application incorrectly which is why the automated online application was sent to that particular office. He quickly cancelled my application and said that I had to re-apply but at one of the centers that specifically handles Adult GR, and of course he told me I had to go back to the office that I’d just come from but I had to wait a 24 hour period. He did his best and was as helpful as he could be given the fact that I was going to be forgotten within the next hour due to his work load. By this time the sun was at its peak and it was already one o’clock. But I was still determined. I would not go home, I had already found my rhythm and was not giving up that easily. I told the Gage route bus driver, “I need to get to Broadway to handle some county paper work in downtown” with no hesitation he said, “come on” it should be noted that there is a certain sense of slight embarrassment when asking for a courtesy ride because the stigma of the L.A. commuter is that you’re at the bottom of the social ladder and asking for a courtesy ride is letting your fellow commuters know that you don’t have enough money for even a bus ride and therefore have resorted to asking for a free ride. I felt no shame, yet it was odd because I didn’t feel this stigma when I would ask for courtesy rides as a teenager. Never the less I was under the hot sun and now on the corner of Gage and Broadway on my way up to downtown. By then I had already developed lower class commuter swag, as in when the bus came I just told the driver, “Yo man, I’m going up to the county building on Adams, can I get a ride?” again with no hesitation the driver let me in and I was off.
When I finally arrived back to the Downtown building helicopters were swarming and black and whites were all over Grand. Turns out some guy was in a police pursuit but abandoned the car he was in right in front of the building and blended in with everyone that was in and around the building, when the cops came asking, everyone said they didn’t see where the suspect had gone, but once the police were gone everyone was talking about what direction the guy had gone and what he looked like. There was a long line but it was moving relatively fast, people were selling loose cigarettes, Medi-cal scams, job hunting scams and various other black market services for all of those that were recently approved for whatever service they had gone in to the building for. Finally I was given a number and was asked to take a seat, it was just after 2p.m.
In the ground floor there are two lobbies and you can go back and forth for hours depending on how many of the available services you’re asking for. I asked for GR, Cal-Fresh and Cal-Works, I was given a number and from the start all I heard were names. It was loud, and the lobby was packed with more people standing by the walls waiting for their name or number to be called, in front of me was a couple with a child, the child was crying and the man was showing his son tough love, I heard him tell his son, “why you crying? You’re gonna hit yo' head 20 times a day, and I know you aint gonna cry every time you hit yo’self” he was reprimanding his partner for holding him, he told her, “you gotta toughen him up, all that baby-ing your doing is gone make him soft…” he was interrupted only by the fact that he like I, like the couple next to me realized that we might be in the wrong lobby because they weren’t calling out any numbers, the young lady next to me was telling her boyfriend, “ay babe, just go ask, we’ve been waiting for like an hour and they haven’t called us” to which he replied, “just wait, the lady said we’re in the right place and they’ll call our number” just as he got up to comply with his girlfriend’s wish one more time, a worker in one of the windows began calling out numbers, I was A107, we stood in line and received thick packages that contained the forms for all of the services we were requesting. We were told to go to the adjacent lobby and wait for our name to be called by our worker.
Now the adjacent lobby was a whole other trip. There was a kind of solidarity that they don’t teach you in college. If there was one commonality it’s that we were/are broke and we are all on that level and no one person in there requesting those services is above anyone else, that and for the most part we were all inpatient and highly irritable because some had been in there for well over seven hours and still had not been fully helped. There was a young cat going up and down the isles talking to everyone as if he knew them all, he was no older than 21 slender and letting everyone know that he had dope readily available, “aight my dude, hit me up you know I got that “X” that weed, whatever you need my dude” there were some that were playing music through their cell phone speakers like they were ghetto blasters. Because of its location most people were of color, mostly black and brown, most were young, homeless, some elderly folks, at one point a group of people began mocking a transgender person yelling, “you know you’re a boy right??” a shouting match ensued and the sheriff came in, everyone quieted down. Someone in the background said, “Damn they got us up in here like it’s county jail or some shit!” and everyone minded their business again. And sure enough the sheriff’s presence could be felt as two officers, two heavy set women scanned the room, everyone avoiding eye contact, myself included. Everyone seemed to have an angle as to how to fill out a given application, what to say, how to answer, what to ask for and everyone gladly exchanged details black and brown, in that sense uncle Sam had a way of unifying the working poor, regardless of gang affiliation of perceived economic status.
It was at that moment that a much deeper sense of critical thought kicked in. frustration was beginning to set in, I closed my eyes took a deep breath and recalled what I’d told myself just that morning before heading out the door. It was my nirvana, recalling that inner peace, that inner tranquility that I felt as I sipped on that coffee looking out of my mom’s kitchen window. When I opened my eyes I saw a completely different scene that I knew from the start but didn’t quite get. Someone next to me just blurted out, “God damn this shit is taking forever, I just wanna get my shit and be out!” and various county workers kept coming out of doors, yelling out names and numbers, everyone hoping that it would be their name called and when it was all you heard were sighs of relief and “God Lord Jesus thank you!” and that’s when it hit me. This is privilege, undeniable privilege. I told myself, if it weren’t for the fact that I have “proper documentation” I would be extremely fucked. I think I’m at the bottom but I’m really not. This option has always existed for me, I just didn’t want to take this route. My mom never needed it, my grandparents never needed it, and I therefore thought I would never need it, but my reality is different. I need it. And I have to thank my lucky stars that I have the capability of applying, if I was "undocumented" I would be shit out of luck. How many people aren’t in the predicament I’m in, but without the access to these services? How many people are really worse off than me but can’t get this help?
At about close to five p.m. my worker finally called my name, “Daniel Morales” I walked to the door and she presented herself, “Hi Daniel, my name is Miss Rodriguez I’ll be your worker follow me." I followed her, filled out my applications and I qualified, I didn’t make it out till well after five. The office was relatively empty in comparison to how it was just an hour before, I was in the last line with the last of the people applying, and everyone was in a more cheerful mood because our process was pretty much done. The only thing remaining was to receive our Cal-Fresh cards and our bag of free bus tokens, I walked out and made my way to my sixth free metro ride that day, as I walked to the station down Adams I did something I rarely do, I said a prayer, I stopped at a red light, looked to the sky and thanked the lord for every humbling yet eye opening experience that I lived that day and quietly made my way back to my mom’s house.

"Literaloco​s y literatont​os"

Image courtesy of Rafael Cardenas (www.eastsiderWriter.com)

"Literaloco​s y literatont​os"
By Abel Salas


It’s me and Chapulín. This kid calls me maestro, and there no more humbling an attribution. We’re at a neighborhood bar working on our second or third beer after walking through the Mobile Mural Lab which has been stationed strategically at the regular Friday afternoon Boyle Heights Farmer’s Market. It’s getting cool, and until just moments before taking a seat on these stools, our pockets were empty. For poets, this is not a surprise. Penniless poet is a redundancy.

“No problem,” I had uttered an hour or two earlier. We see a client and a B & B contributing writer, a successful attorney who supports the arts and advertises here regularly. He doesn’t have a problem with an advance payment on the next issue. Chapulín is a poet, and, of course, poets never think about the weather or whether they’re dressed appropriately. He’s in a t-shirt, shorts and the inevitable Chuck Taylors. As the sun goes down, I can see he’s having a tough time with the drop in temperature.

“We have to start your East side poe-tour and cantina crawl with a stop at the Proyecto Pastoral segunda to get you a long sleeve flannel, homie,” I tell the young vato sporting a goatee and Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses. Bronze and maybe just a bit on the chonchito side like me, he is covered in a grip of tattoos. Daniel Morales León, AKA ElChapulín, is the resident poet at La Mina Collective, over in City Terrace. Relocated from South Central to LA’s Eastside, he is part of a circle that also includes the charming and magnetic boys in a lively cumbia band called La Chamba, young dudes who also happen to take political organizing with a zeal and a seriousness that provokes and inspires. They are LA’s first and foremost exponents of cumbia chicha, a Peruvian variation of working class cumbia where the accordion has been supplanted by the electric guitar. Daniel’s jefitos are from Oaxaca, and they don’t necessarily always understand, he says, that he is a “poeta necio,” a handle I’ve managed to get friendlier with myself over the years.

“They have a hard time understanding just exactly what it is I do,” says Chapulín, who has also begun extending his East side residency with regular gigs as the host of the Corazón del Pueblo bi-monthly open mic series, Flowers of Fire.

“You know why we named it Flowers of Fire, right? Flores de Fuego,” I say. “Not really, but I can pretty much guess,” comes the reply from a sage and wise young bard who I’ve watched the sun come up with more than once already.

“When we first came together as the original Corazón del Pueblo collective board, we were thinking of the floricanto,you know, ‘in xochitl in cuicatl,’ which is nahuatl for ‘flower-song,’” I explain. We weave back and forth on a hundred subjects but mostly we get back to the poetry and what it means and why we have to write. And then there are references to Neruda and Roque Dalton. I’m trying to tell him about the argentina Alejandra Pizarnik and her “ extracción de la piedra de la locura,” that stone of madness we both have lodged in our brains.

“She committed suicide,” I say. “Say what?” says Chapulín. “Yeah, she OD’d on seconal on purpose,” I say. Later, we sit in my car and I extract a manuscript to share some more of that madness,the kinds of craziness that keeps Chapulín awake at all hours when he has to write, when he has to let the ink dribble in spades from his finger tips, allowing it to pour forth onto a page before it hemorrhages in his veins.

These are the musings and sharp reveries that have pulled him here, to a barrio not unlike the South Central hood where he was raised, a community that drew me 12 years ago after a decade of nomadic gypsy wanderings in Mexico City, Chiapas, Barcelona, New York, Matamoros, El Paso and Houston after a childhood in Austin marked by movimiento politics, Brown Beret marches against police brutality and the tutelage under an ex-pinto poet named Raúl Salinas, or raúlrsalinas, as he himself signed his named.“Tapón,” the placazo Raúl was given during his own childhood, had authored the now renowned “Un Trip Through the Mind Jail Y Otras Excursions,” and I’m trying to tell Chapulín that lineage and an appreciation for the literary opportunities we have been handed from elders who made it a point to step outside of their traditional homes to embrace brotherhood with distant relatives from all of the tribes is important. I’m telling him that I wouldn’t be publishing this paper in the barrio I recognize as ground zero for Chicano culture worldwide if it weren’t for them.

Chapulin, like many of the young brothers who share spoken word, did not grow up surrounded by nurturing poet swho arrived with an arm load of books and told them, “you should read this and come back later so we can talk about it.” No, Daniel and many of his peers brought themselves up, literally. They did not have guides or XicanIndio mentors who led them through sweat lodge ceremonies. They looked for and found their poetic voices on the street and in the immigrant stories of the irindigena parents.

“I’ve been spittin’ for about a minute,” says Chapulín. And I know he’s the one. He’s the one who can only sit still long enough to let the poem live through him, pound itself out of him until it sees the light of day. I see a grittier, angrier yet somehow still less tortured version of myself in him. So we chill, we make the rounds. We break bread and follow the moon, howling into the wind and pretending we don’t care. That life is only loaned to us and that we’re on borrowed time. Of course, I tell him that in an effort to let my own street-wise profe know how much his influence and love had meant to me, I coined a word. How I sat in a South Austin restaurant called Little Mexico over a plate of tacos de carne guisada (steak picado to folks here in Califaztlan) and a cold Corona with the legendary barrio bard, a traveler who had been invited to Cuba and Nicaragua and Libya and Palestine to share revolutionary poetry. How he was at the same time a die-hard radical AIM(American Indian Movement) activist and a co-founder of the national Leonard Peltier Support Committee. How I looked at him with reverence and said I would forever be proud of having been inducted into the great hall of the“literalocos y literatontos” he had adopted and raised.

I tell Chapulin how Raúl used to humbly refer to himself as the cockroach poet because he never took it so seriously that he had to act like a diva and demand green M & Ms backstage at readings where he shared the stage with truly great writers such as Ernesto Cardenal and Fernando Alegria and Mikey Piñero. These days, it seems like so many of the young poets are trying too hard to be rock stars who worry about pecking order or whether or not they’re going to be on the radio instead of just trying to be the guys that don’t mind taking out the trash and cleaning the refrigerator and loading sound equipment even though they don’t have to.Chapulin is one of those dudes. He gets down and dirty, but he can also slang words and spit fire with the best of them. There is also something simultaneously charismatic and travieso about him. Much later, after I’ve published his gut-wrenching poem about Mexico, I watch him dance around a room holding the printed pages in his arms and waving them about with a contagious glee. And again, I know he is the one. I can choose no one better to help me uphold the literaloco-literatonto banner. And more than any of the other youngsters on the scene right now, he really is mexicano. “Yes, I’m Chicano, but I was born in Mexico,” he says proudly. While still heir to a powerful Chicano literary tradition, he is unique among all the other serious young wordsmiths mixing it up on the Eastside right now with poetry rooted in rap and hip-hop. He holds up his mexicanidad for all to see and still skips easily back and forth between two languages like a wizard of wordplay, straddling all kinds of borders… a lad after me own heart, neta.

“Literaloco-literatonto, huh?” says Chapulín. “I like it.”

*Abel Salas is the publisher of "Brooklyn & Boyle"
This article can be read on the June edition.