And the list ends here. Thinking about it now, a chronological explanation seems deceptive, but were I to draw a timeline the list would end during the summer after my first year of middle school. I can place an exact moment, in fact—a hot July evening during the summer of 1991.
That was the night I discovered a cheerful rap group from Los Angeles. My teacher in rap, as my teacher in so many things that summer, was a girl named Indiana. We were constant companions. Our friendship was based on our shared inability to join any acceptable clique at school. Indiana was wiry and nervous and possessed of a schizophrenic beauty. It was the nervousness, and the fact that she was flaca at a time when most Chicanas were developing curves, that kept her locked out of the group she desired to join. She was also unacceptable—though I didn’t realize this at first—because she was not really Chicana, but some inexplicable white ethnic mix that failed to make the cut. I was withdrawn into myself even then, socially awkward, and far too developed for anyone’s good. We made an interesting pair that summer, cruising the mall, begging our mothers to leave us unchaperoned at the amusement park, stealing candy and cigarettes from the pharmacy.
One Friday night, an uncle or cousin or one of Indiana’s mother’s boyfriends—there were always men at Indiana’s house, men who were gruff and burly, men whose clothes shone with permanent grease stains—announced his intention to drive through east San Jose in order to pick up a spare part for his car. Indiana wheedled him into taking us along. The wait for the spare part would be long and stifling and he would threaten to abandon us before it was all over, but we knew that before we drove off and we knew, too, that it was worth it. He had to drive down Santa Clara Street.
During the week, Santa Clara Street was a six-lane road connecting a mercantile stretch of east San Jose (panaderias, pool halls, tattoo parlors) with one in downtown San Jose (flagship investment banks, skyrise hotels) and the Rose Garden district of San Jose (historical-society homes, attorney-at-law offices, parking regulations). Then it passed the 87 freeway and became The Alameda. The Alameda ran into the nether world of Santa Clara (Santa Clara University, artisan coffee shops, weekend farmers’ markets). So the street attracted all types of people. But many of those people stayed far away from the east San Jose side on weekend nights.
