The Misfits by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Author:Jimmy Santiago Baca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

On the drive home, I couldn’t get that little boy of out of my mind, that steeple, the guitar, the room. I was a little scared, because next week was my turn, and it’s easy to sit and listen, but when Gerald starts in on my work, it’ll be like dancing on fire. I might get burned, but it sure would make living interesting and life full of mystery and writing the greatest passion of all things in life.

SANTA LUZ HUSTLES & LA MEMORIES

“It’s reflected in No. 45 in the Oval Office. That’s why we’ve got so many more kids picking up guns: they see him, a creature with no scruples, no ethics, destroying everything it touches.”

That was pretty much the discussion we had at Orley’s place last night, and on my walk to the bus station I knew it was time to leave LA. Like so many other screenwriters, I too had arrived here with dreams of making a score. One movie with my name on the screen as screenwriter and I could have enough money to do what I really came to LA to do: write the novel about my pops, who I never got along with. Or rather, he really didn’t like me. Or it seemed so because he never hung out with me, no baseball at parks, no swing set in the backyard, no sitting around watching a movie, no talk, nothing. Crazy as it sounds, he was a stranger even after my living with him all those years. So, I wanted to explore that, and that was why I made the move, went to LA. But I ended up being the same loser as all the other losers in this town, wanting to do something my heart commanded and ignoring those commands daily because I never had enough courage.

The reason I hadn’t started the novel, I rationalized, was I hadn’t gotten a contract to write a movie. It was a head game I enjoyed playing with myself, seeing myself fail every day and saying not to worry, telling myself this was how the game was played: keep submitting my screenplay. . . . I was the guy you see smiling in all those photos, all of us in some way connected to the movie industry. I was the guy who went to bed with a different chick every night—they were everywhere: recent arrivals, old lionesses getting beat down every day by a director or producer and tolerating the abuse because they dreamed one day of having some kind of shot as a showrunner, or maybe, after years of getting shouted at and bawled out, curses raining down on their graying heads, they held on because they believed that they could nail down a job one day at the directors guild or writers guild. But only if, only if they put up with all the shit. Others had, why not them?

And so, we all held on, the gays trying to be writers really getting into their

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