Erik used to get all trucha when we’d spend thirty minutes waiting for Teófimo to finish dealing dime bags to strawberry pickers down at the campos. Would get all butt hurt when we wouldn’t start our game until Marcus had made it back from helping his dad plant palm trees in one of those new construction yards by the harbor. The barrio foos, we understood it. Playing soccer together at Colonia Park to feel alive. Smoking chronic afterwards to get our heart rates down until we were fucking numb. Erik wasn’t a white boy, but he was close to it. As kids, we didn’t understand him rolling up all hustle, no chill. We figured it was because he was pocho. Little did we know he was our gente, just different. And that he’d decided he was going pro.
Back in the day, Juanito held it down as one of the goalies, and everyone punted the ball at his nuts instead of actually trying to shoot a goal. These days, he’s a fishmonger and has got two baby mamas. Spends most of his free time on his side hustle, cleaning barnacles off pontoon boats for old rich white dudes part of the yacht club. Juanito never complains. He loves his six kids. And to be honest, his little ones, well they ain’t so bad too. Little Ricky didn’t even like soccer, so we made him a defender. The pinche mocoso would pick his mocos out by the beer cans we used to mark the sidelines, and he’d cry when we’d cap on him. That shit sucked dick for his older bro, Chorizo. He had to bring Little Ricky with him everywhere he went since their moms got mugged while selling roses on the side of the highway. Wasn’t until years later we actually found out what had happened. From the outside, we thought there was a much simpler reason for always having to bring the little shit. In present times, Chorizo is locked up. Foo got into gangbanging in high school and actually killed a guy. Little Ricky just keeps it moving. Dude has his bad days, sure. But hit him up at the local McDonald’s and all you’ll see is just his big ol’ cheeser. He loves it when the homies slide through. That foo hooks it up with the extra Big Macs and nuggies. He’s just a manager, but everybody regards him as the McDonald’s jefe. And he’s all proud of that shit too. Diego Jaimes was a paisa and had two first names. But nobody cared because the motherfucker could do bicycle kicks, and scissors, and stop-and-gos, so we put him as forward and thought, ay güey, maybe this mariachi could really go pro! But then at fifteen, his mama and papa got deported. And then, he didn’t have no money anymore, no family, no nothing, and he stopped showing up at school. After he dropped off the face of the earth, some of the foos heard he knocked up some nice Filipina chick who worked in the fields after he’d fucked her while wearing a Glad bag wrapped around his dick. They were just rumors, but what the hell did we know? Odds were the wetback’s luck ran out and he got scooped up by La Migra, just like Arturo, and Kenny (who was actually really named Miguel Ángel), and a couple of the other random kids from around the barrio who came to play soccer with us too.
And then there was Erik. Erik who showed up in the fifth grade. Erik who didn’t take his pito out when we measured to see who had the biggest chile. Erik who didn’t play bloody knuckles or quarters during lunch. Erik who booked it the other way when we played chicken and sprinted across the highway. Nobody actually knew where the fucker was running off to. Whether or not he lived in the barrio. We jumped to the worst conclusions. In the beginning, we figured he was hiding his parents from us because maybe his moms was white. That maybe, she was one of those self-hating Karens, those ones who marry into Mexican families and turn hundreds of years of finely crafted pan dulce into nothing but a loaf of Wonderbread.
The homie Jaime Bravo’s stepmom had been like that. His pops was a straight up bean, but not like in the Diego Rivera way—eyes bulged out all sappo, teeth so tiny you could stick a quarter between them like he was a baby. Nah, he was a modern day Pedro Infante. And a player too. He used to show up with a different sancha every weekend when he rolled up with Jaime to our block’s carne asadas at the park. Everybody knew those chicks were just ornaments. Mexican firecrackers dressed up in red dresses with the high heels that’d just sink in the mud, forty-four double e’s pouring out everywhere. Real dime pieces. And he gave that all up as soon as he got a sniff of some crazy snow bunny ass. Once one finally let him. The word was that they hooked up after he serviced her punch buggy at the local Jiffy Lube. She asked him if he wanted a tip. He for damn sure was ready to oblige. That dude stopped showing up to our carne asadas after that. Stopped getting his groceries at Tresierras with all the gente. Multiple accounts from several vatos confirmed that they’d seen him with his Infante mustache shaved off. That he’d been in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, loading a shit ton of fizzy water into the back of his pickup with that gabacha glued to his side. The horror, the horror.
Worst part of it all was what happened to Jaime. A month before him, his pops, and his new moms moved to Palmdale to live closer to her family, he told us that we had to start calling him James. That he couldn’t speak Spanish anymore. That after he moved, he wouldn’t even have to. We’d been toking up when he brought it all up, still steaming, all drenched with sweat. We’d just finished one of our after school Colonia Park games.
“What the fuck kind of shit is that?” Teófimo said. Diego Jaimes offered him the Granny Smith we’d been using to blaze out of, but he declined. “Let me guess. Your new moms told you all this nonsense, huh?”
Jaime looked pretty pissed off. “My dad says I gotta listen to her. So I am.”
“Bullshit,” Chorizo said. He’d been lying on his back, staring up at the flickering flood lights towering over the field. The outskirts of the park were completely engulfed in darkness. “Ay, you keep listening to her, she’s gonna turn you white, dawg. You and your pops.”
Jaime shook his head. He tore a chunk of soil out from the field and threw the clod at Chorizo’s face. “She just wants what’s best for us. Don’t talk like you know her.”
The foos waited for Chorizo to get up and go kick Jaime’s ass after he did that. Instead, Chorizo just sat up and swept off the flecks of dirt covered all over his cata. He let the silence hang for a moment. And then he said, “She’s a gabacha, bro. I know everything about her.”
Jaime stormed off after Chorizo said that. But before he did, he got up, and told Chorizo that he was jealous. Jealous that he wouldn’t have to live in some bullshit neighborhood anymore. Jealous that he wouldn’t have to go to some bullshit school. Jealous that he wouldn’t have to hang out with a bunch of wetbacks anymore.
“Diego Jaimes is the only wetback here!” Chorizo shouted out as Jaime marched away. “And he’s fine with that too!”
Diego Jaimes gave a thumbs up that Jaime would never see. Jaime avoided us at school for the next four weeks. Didn’t tell anybody the day he was going to move. The last we really saw of him was his fat ass disappearing into the darkness that night.
It wasn’t too long after Jaime dipped that Erik showed up. Jesus, we were so fucked up to him in the beginning. Maybe it was because of how it went down with Jaime and his moms. Maybe we’d been traumtized by all that white shit, maybe we were just fucking paranoid. We for sure were still all up in our feelings. But dammit, when Erik showed up to school, he made it so easy to hate him. Dude was this skinny ass pocho. Didn’t know no Spanish. Was the kind of vato who raised both his soft hands above his blockhead like some try-hard gabacho anytime the teacher asked a question. “Don’t talk to that puto,” Chorizo used to tell us after we got our eyes on him for a couple days. “He’s a pussy.”
Not talking to him? That was easy. We could shoot boogers out of our nose at him if he asked if he could borrow a pencil before class started. But not watching him? That was a whole nother story. The pocho was captivating to say the least. Was like a goddamn unicorn. Dude was one of those Canelo Álvarez Mexicans. And that Irish seed fucking showed. He had curly red hair. Was all güero with freckles and green eyes. God, and that was just how he looked.
Erik used to show up to school with a soccer ball between his feet every single damn day. He’d be juggling the thing while we walked in line back to our homeroom from the computer lab. Would be practicing his scissors and helicopters if he managed to sneak the thing out after he asked our teacher Ms. Martin if he could go to the bathroom. Girls started following him around during recess once they caught wind of the whole act. Them and some of the white boys. They referred to him as the golden boy as they watched him practice his headers out on the handball court. Acted like all that shit was high entertainment, yet we’d been doing all that since kindergarten. As we played our soccer games from across campus, we laughed and made fun of all those fucks. Little did they know all they were watching was a cheap sideshow.
Of course, if we would’ve been honest with ourselves back then, we would’ve told you we were offended. Jealous. Soccer was our thing. Not for some ginger ass pocho and his new entourage of white cheerleaders. See, us foos had a long established history of controlling the ball boxes in almost every classroom. Maybe it was because the teachers knew it was all we had. Getting picked to be the pinche ball boy. Ay, we took it in stride. The guys in our outfit flattened every football the school ever got their hands on when the teachers weren’t looking. We made for damn sure the white boys were. We liked to think that was our own little form of deterrence. In all honesty, we just didn’t want no white boys playing touch butt next to us during recess—all those Skyler’s, Tyler’s, Sean’s, and Timmy’s. Híjole. Erik was getting real cozy with those dopes. So we forged a blood pact to hate him.
Any regular person would’ve been content with all the shine he was getting. But Erik had to push it. Way too far. During his third week at our school, this foo watched us from across the quad during every single recess. Behind a trash can. Straight up. Erik hid behind this thing like his life depended on it, and when the other kids came up to ask him why he wasn’t juggling his soccer ball and putting on his show, he shooed them away, as if they were blowing his cover. “Ay, maybe he wants to play with us or something?” Marcus said after Erik’s third consecutive day of recon. We just kept ignoring him.
Wasn’t until a week later that Erik finally worked up the guts to roll up to our game and ask us if he could play. Of course, we all said no. Not in like a mean way or anything. Just a no, a simple no. Boy, he started crying after that! And not even like a little cry neither—nah, like fucking full on howling. Shoot, we could hear him still even after he ran back to his trash can. Little Ricky was actually crying too, going on about how we’d been a bunch of mean jerks. We reminded him of the blood pact, but he kept on crying, and then Chorizo smacked him upside the head.
All things considered, we were convinced that was going to be the last of Erik. But then literally the next day, word started going around about how he was the star midfielder on one of those club soccer teams from out of town. Those ones with only rich white boys on them. The ones that only let beaners try out if it was a lock they were the second coming of Pelé. We couldn’t accept that. We screamed, “Fuck that!” the second one of our little birdies came to us and spilled the beans that Erik was going around telling all his followers that the real reason we banned him from our games was because we were afraid he was better than us!
Everybody but Little Ricky participated in the anti-Erik efforts for the rest of that week. Spent four consecutive days tripping Erik in the lunch line, chucking erasers at the bitch as he was reading to Ms. Martin’s Q Bear during free time. During recess on the Thursday of that week, Chorizo’s diabolical ass fucking pissed on Erik’s Chucks when the two of them were standing side-by-side at the urinal. Erik cracked Chorizo in the jaw after he did that. Sent our homeboy back to the quad with a black eye and a written message too. Weasel had chicken-scratched it on a piece of crumpled up toilet paper. It read:
TOMORROW. RECESS. QUAD. BE THERE.
Wasn’t like we had anywhere else to go. That next day, Erik showed up to school rocking a US men’s national soccer team jersey, which read Dempsey on the back. The little huevon knew exactly what he was doing. That shit got Chorizo so hot, that when he saw Erik wearing it during nutrition with all his gabachos around him, he threatened to tear it off him and shove it down his throat. We only just managed to calm his ass down before nutrition ended. Even still, he gave Erik the fucking stank eye the entire time we were sitting in class.
All eyes were on us once recess came back around again, and Erik made the long walk across the basketball courts over to our game. He sauntered over to us with the kind of swag of a big swinging dick. His whole peanut gallery had assembled, along with some of the school’s resident paisas, who we referred to as Little Tijuana.
“You got two choices, gentleman,” Erik said once he was standing before us. He was nose-to-nose with Juanito, who was holding our soccer ball in his hands. “The first choice is that you let me play with you. If I don’t score one goal for the rest of recess today, I’ll never ask to play soccer with you guys again.”
A few of the white girls gasped. Some of the paisas demanded that the couple of them that knew English translate what the hell Erik had even been saying.
Erik took a deep breath and went on. “The second choice is one that I personally don’t want to deal with, but will, if that’s what this all comes too.” He put his hand over his heart then and looked up towards the clouds. Then he said, “The second choice is that you all say no again. And that I end every single one of you.”
Juanito immediately burst out laughing. Chorizo’s fists were trembling, and Diego Jaimes crossed his arms and kept saying to just let Erik play since there was no way he was better than him. We formed a circle after Chorizo got Diego Jaimes to shut up. We flipped off the white boys watching and put the Erik situation to a vote.
“Alright eses,” Marcus said, “how many foos are actually in favor of letting this vato play with us? Raise your hands.”
Eyes darted around the circle. Only Diego Jaimes and Little Ricky held their hands above their heads.
“Well, that settles that then,” Marcus said. “Get ready for any funny business, aight? This Erik guy seems pretty nu—”
“YOU GO GET THEM, ERIK!!!”
Dude was on us like flies on shit. Totally blindsided us when we weren’t looking. It was like getting sucker punched the way he slapped the ball out of Juanito’s hands and spartan-kicked Diego Jaimes, who barrelled over into Little Ricky and Chorizo like a bowling ball.
The chase was on then. All we heard was the high-pitched screams of the snow bunnies, the “RUN, ERIK! RUN!”s and the “DON’T LET EM GET YOU!”s. And shit, that’s just what Erik did. Except he wasn’t running from us with the ball in his arms. No, that’d be way too easy. Erik had that motherfucker between his feet. That foo was dribbling. And he was still faster than all of us. The entire school cheered as the gap between him and us grew bigger and bigger. One or two of the white girls must’ve fainted when Erik stopped in place and turned around to take a look at the horde trying to keep up with him. The paisas were shouting out, “Trucha! Ay, is he really gonna do it?” And the white boys, well they were the white boys, and had probably pissed their pants because they’d never seen anything so legendary.
“Foos, he coming at us?” Juanito said when he saw Erik dribbling back in our direction. “Foos. He can’t do that. Can he? Can he?”
Was like staring down Iron Mike on the other side of a boxing ring from where we stood. Was some years later, during one of the few times Erik was home from being all college boy out at an Ivy League on the east coast, that the few of us who weren’t working spent the night reminiscing with the guy about the whole thing, as we hotboxed the shit out of his closet in his childhood bedroom.
“And ay, Erik, Erik,” Teófimo coughed out as he passed one of the two bongs we had going around over to Marcus, who then passed it to Juanito. At that time, Teófimo and Marcus were banging out cheesy breads and pizzas at CPK during the day, and holding it down as security guards shooing away hobos from the Greyhound station overnight. Juanito was driving big rigs.
“What’s up, Teó?” Erik whispered. That foo was full on zombified at that point in the night, eyes red as all hell, mouth instinctively chewing so he could swallow his Taco Bell bean and cheese burrito. He’d been blitzed since his second hit.
“Ay, you member how you balled up DJ after you dribbled the ball back to us?” Teófimo said. “Bro, I thought the feds were gonna have to put an APB on your ass the way you broke his ankles. No gas, dawg. No gas. Blew our brains out that you were coming at us like some bat outta hell. You were all crazy, man. Damn, I think I shit my pants when you did that too.”
“That’s disgusting, man,” Erik laughed feebly. Marcus passed him the bong and he immediately slumped over after clearing the rest of the bud.
“Look at him. He’s all gone,” Juanito said. “If his pops sees him like this tomorrow morning, he’s going to kill him.” He picked up the bong, loaded it once more, and took a fat hit. “Fuck,” he said coughing, “probably us too.”
“Bro, that shit was insane,” Teófimo went on, not even paying attention to Juanito. Erik was lying on the carpet with his eyes closed. He’d pulled the blanket he’d been all snuggled up in up to his chin. “None of us could even touch you, Erik. Couldn’t even get in a lil squirrel tap or nothing. Ay, Erik? You wanna know what was the craziest thing you did that day? Foo, it was when you juked past all of us. It was how that shit wasn’t enough for you. How you kept going. That’s when I knew you were a different kind of cat, dawg. You never stopped, just kept on dribbling, all the way to the other goal.”
Teófimo was staring somewhere far off ahead of him where nobody could see. Erik had ko’d long before he’d finished his soliloquy. Once he’d started snoring, we carried him to his bed and tucked him under his blankets. And then, we went back into his closet, closed the door, and kept on smoking. We knew he’d be pissed at us for not waking him up. For letting him waste all that product, all those hours he could’ve been catching up with us. Dude was flying back to NYC the very next afternoon. Unlike him though, we understood the flipside of it all. Saw it as clear as the back of our hands as we passed that bong back and forth amongst all his old high school soccer cleats, club soccer team trophies, and laminated neon binders his moms had put together, jam-packed with honor roll certificates and science project awards.
These days, old heads in the hood try to make it seem like we should feel special or something, since we grew up with the kid. Most times, we shoot that shit down. Hell, we laugh and make fun of Erik. Whip out our phones and show them pictures of the motherfucker crying after missing a PK, the fucking one that would’ve won him and his white boy teammates a state championship for their high school.
There’s the other ten percent of the time though. That ten percent when a couple of young cats get the guts to come up to us when we got enough of the foos together to get a game going down at Colonia park, the same day Erik is playing on TV. Most times, we make those vatos play for any information about the guy. We tell them they gotta knock us on our asses if they wanna know where Erik’s favorite place is to get tacos in town, or how big his dick was. It fucking blows their minds everytime once our game’s over, and we’re all sprawled out underneath the flood lights of the field, sun down, and everybody’s steaming with sweat, covered in grass stains and mosquito bites from head to toe. We play it off once we got Erik on FaceTime. Play it off when he’s cheesin, and they’re cheesin at the sight of their hero smiling through the cracked screen of a cell phone—him standing in his pro team’s locker room. Truth be told, that shit never gets old. Fuck, we’re right there with them.