Monarca
by Rey ArmenterosI’m waiting for Max to finish with his commitment on the other side of town. Looking at the apartment complex across from the Monarca Cafe, I’m remembering what Frank had said once. When I woke up this morning, I had no idea where this was going to take me or that I would end up here again. I thought it meant something, and I thought about her. But when I sent her a message about the old place and the window that looked at Mariachi Plaza, she didn’t give me a word of reminiscence — she just asked what I was doing there, that she thought I was meeting Max. I told her he’s busy and that I’m waiting for him.
I’m looking at the apartments and wondering if they represent anything. They were just a place of convenience for most of the medical professionals that lived there with their families. I was viewing it from a good vantage point. This intersection was the heart of Boyle Heights. On one corner, you’ve got Monarca. If you cross First Street, you hit the apartment complex. If you then cross Boyle Avenue, you reach a corner that is an empty lot — basically, nothing more than a fenced patch of bad grass with no prospects for anything. If you go back across First Street, you are at Mariachi Plaza, and one more crossing would complete the circle and back at Monarca.
Is this the center of Boyle Heights? I wouldn’t know. It’s not like we ventured much out of the hospital when we lived here for those four years.
But this intersection seems to represent the possibilities. Mariachi Plaza with its subway station and troupes of mariachis holds the traditions of the neighborhood. Monarca is a local business, and by Frank’s standards, one of the good guys. The apartment complex is an outside developer, and so one of the bad guys. The empty lot is potential long diffused.
What would Frank say about it? We don’t talk anymore, and I don’t recall how he would put it, but that outside money would have its way with making things gentrified. The area didn’t need that. Frank grew up around here, saw Boyle Heights go through changes. He left, but he came back when his wife got a job at the hospital, in the same department as my wife.
I was driving back from work one day, waiting at the light on First Street when Frank appeared with his guitar in hand. He was crossing the street, looking in my direction, but he didn’t see me. I was going to wave at him but he was already on the other side. It was so funny to me that I would bump into him like that and that he would have a guitar in hand as if he were just playing for money on the street.
Frank was a real estate agent. He was tall and easy-going. He was a go-getter — not about money — about ideals. I felt that made him a solid guy. He was growing his hair longer and playing that guitar on evenings wherever he could secure a small, solo gig. He sat at the Boyle Heights council meetings to hear about the newest challenges, and he would tell me about his discoveries in casual conversation, maybe eating a taco from a truck while we were walking around the neighborhood. It was about connections, he was telling me. I don’t think he ever used the word, network. I think that type of business-normal attitude was beyond him. But he believed in reaching to the smaller businesses, leaving his card after spending some long moments chatting with the owner of the establishment, asking about his family, maybe asking for opportunities to play his guitar.
My wife and I lived with our daughter on the hospital grounds. But for these exceptions with Frank, I never strolled around the area. It used to be a sketchy part of town, but though the gang element had been put on a leash, the elements were still there. One Sunday morning, just two blocks from us, a truck pulled up alongside another truck and open fired. The other truck screeched out of there, losing control and plunging into a house. It actually fractured the foundation of the house. It sounded like not just the car was a total loss. The passengers were dead. Who knew what happened to the people inside the house? It was another reminder that we had to get out of this situation. The apartment was cheap and convenient. But I did not care for reminders of where we were living. I had already gone through that in my youth in Miami.
I learned a few things about the place from my strolls with Frank. There were a lot of old houses here. Though many were run down, they were desirable to an upper middle class clientele that wanted to buy cheap and later sell high. Those were the antagonists to Frank’s little world, and his perspective made sense to me.
Even with what I knew about the neighborhood, during our last year there, I started taking morning walks around that part of the city. There were nothing but old buildings there, exposing some small portion of Los Angeles architectural history. Those old buildings were pulling me in, having me daydream about the unique spaces they cut, and also about what had gone on in that region during a different era. Some of them had been used to death, dilapidated beyond belief, but a few were isolated from human activity. I wondered about what made that happen, why the difference — sometimes from door to door?
I would walk up to the old Sears building. It was supposed to be one of the most important spots in the region. I enjoyed that walk, even with the homeless tents you had to cross under the freeway and the careless drivers in the area. You really had to be careful when you crossed the street. It wasn’t as bad as Miami, but people were not really looking for pedestrians, and I guess that was because there were not that many there. When their cars were bearing down on you, even though you had the right of way with the crosswalk light, and you hollered at them, they looked at you as if you were the madman. Eventually, I stopped these excursions. I had gotten enough material in my notepads, walking and jotting at the same time. I knew what was up, now that I had covered so much mileage, all in the name of exercise.
As it turned out, Frank became our real estate agent. He was there for us, showing places down south in La Mirada and Fullerton — far enough away from the center of Los Angeles to put me somewhat at ease, even if the prices were far from comforting when you thought about how we were going to be able to sustain this. The market was bad, sellers asking for more and more money, locking us out of the game. One day, we told him we were going to stop looking. It was obviously hopeless.
Though we were all converging on the hospital grounds, we didn’t hang out anymore. I would see Frank or his wife at the daycare we had our kid in, just a one-minute walk across the parking lot, but we were now just friends to say hi to, it felt like, and there were no obvious reasons for that. I already knew about the tensions at work — stuff I don’t really want to get into here. But that had nothing to do with Frank and me.
And yet I guess it did. The next time we tried looking for a place, it was one year later, and we didn’t ask Frank to help us out this time. My wife didn’t feel he was really listening to our needs anyway. We finally got a place and bade Boyle Heights goodbye. A few months after that, my wife left the hospital for something closer to our new situation.
Though there were no hard feelings, I always felt we had lost our connection to them after that. I felt bad about not using him the second time, but it didn’t work out the first time with him, and we were desperate for an escape. It was a dilemma. How do you get out of a dilemma without making a decision? Decisions sometimes cost more when you focus on certain priorities.
I always wanted to hang out with him again, but outside of social media, I never saw Frank again. And I was spending this moment, recreating facts and words in this place that raised so many other moments, waiting for my old friend Max to get ahold of me already. I was supposed to pick him up in Hollywood where he was auditioning. I looked at the phone, but still nothing, and I was tempted to tell him to hurry the hell up already.
