The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Author:Brando Skyhorse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

6

The Hustler

The best sunrise you’ll ever see is your first as a free man. That big gassy light that creaks out of God’s cellar, wrestling the night away from a sky holding on to it with every star and streetlight, shining on a man who can rise when he wants, not when a 120-decibel buzzer tells him to— that is a sunrise. I should know. I’ve seen that sunrise over a dozen times, each one a promise that this will be the one that changes my life, this dawn will be witness to a new set of priorities, a new sense of hope. Of course I end up right back in the joint on a technicality (the technicality being that I get caught), and it’s another stretch before I see that sunrise again.

You don’t think about things like sunrises until you’ve gone without them, those unappreciated everyday moments you leave behind on the outside. You’d be amazed at the things people leave behind: being able to see your woman’s hairy muff rise like dough when she comes out of the shower in the morning; your mother’s huevos rancheros; the chance to give your son his first taste of beer on a summer’s night. Hell, I know one guy who misses Kentucky Fried Chicken as much as some guys miss pucha. And then there are all the things out there changing, things you don’t know about that you’d miss if you did. All you’ve got is faith that things change slow enough out there for you to catch up to them when you get out of here.

For me, this time out is different. I’ve changed. This sunrise here, the pale gray promise of one I can see hovering behind that line of palm trees on a faraway hill, is different. It’s a sunrise that says: Welcome home.

I’m Freddy Blas, forty-two years old. Born in Mexico, raised in East L.A., and 100 percent American. I spent nineteen of those forty-two years locked up—juvie, youth camps, youth authority, Solano, Tracy, Soledad, Tehachapi, Chino—including my last stint up at Lancaster for aggravated battery (I had some trouble parking a car and got sent away for almost twelve years; can you believe that shit?).

I grew up over in Boyle Heights, where we caught the Night Stalker on East Hubbard Street, near Whittier Boulevard. I say “we” because I was in that mob that ran down and captured that loco serial killer during the summer of 1985. You wouldn’t know this unless I told you, but I was the reason they caught that fucker, the first chingón (I need Spanish here because, for many of the best cusswords, there’s no English equivalent) to start punching the shit out of him. Before I started throwing chingasos, people were flailing at him and missing, trying to catch a goldfish on hot sand. Everybody was afraid to touch him, intimidated by the indestructible bogeyman with supernatural powers they’d heard about on TV for months. They didn’t see that thrashing

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