Sweet Thursday

2 The Troubled Life of Joseph and Mary

Mack came back with a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and he poured some in Doc’s glass and some in his own.

Doc said, “What kind of a fellow is the new owner over there—Mexican, isn’t he?”

“Nice fellow,” said Mack. “Classy dresser. Name of Joseph and Mary Rivas. Smart as a whip, but kind of unfortunate, Doc—unfortunate and funny. You know how it is, when a pimp falls in love it don’t make any difference how much he suffers—it’s funny. And Joseph and Mary’s kind of like that.”

“Tell me about him,” said Doc.

“I been studying him,” said Mack. “He told me some stuff and I put two and two together. He’s smart. You know, Doc, there’s a kind of smartness that cuts its own throat. Haven’t you knew people that was so busy being smart they never had time to do nothing else? Well, Joseph and Mary is kind of like that.”

“Tell me,” said Doc.

“I guess you couldn’t find no two people oppositer than what you and him is,” Mack began. “You’re nice, Doc, nice and egg-heady,[17] but a guy would have to be nuts to think you was smart. Everybody takes care of you because you’re wide open. Anybody is like to throw a sneak-punch at Joseph and Mary just because he’s in there dancing and feinting all the time. And he’s nice too, in a way.”

“Where’d he come from?” Doc asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mack.

Mack was right. Doc and Joseph and Mary were about as opposite as you can get, but delicately opposite. Their differences balanced like figures of a mobile in a light breeze. Doc was a man whose whole direction and impulse was legal and legitimate. Left to his own devices, he would have obeyed every law, down to pausing at boulevard stop signs. The fact that Doc was constantly jockeyed into illicit practices was the fault of his friends, not of himself—the fault of Wide Ida, whom the liquor laws cramped like a tight girdle, and of the Bear Flag, whose business, while accepted and recognized, was certainly mentioned disparagingly in every conceivable statute book.

Mack and the boys had lived so long in the shadow of the vagrancy laws that they considered them a shield and an umbrella. Their association with larceny, fraud, loitering, illegal congregation, and conspiracy on all levels was not only accepted, but to a certain extent had become a matter of pride to the inhabitants of Cannery Row. But they were lamblike children of probity and virtue compared to Joseph and Mary. Everything he did naturally turned out to be against the law. This had been true from his earliest childhood. In Los Angeles, where he had been born, he led a gang of pachucos[18] while he was still a child. The charge that he lagged with loaded pennies,[19] if not provable, at least seems reasonable. He rejected the theory of private ownership of removable property almost from birth. At the age of eight he was a pool hustler of such success that Navy officers had been known to put him off limits. When the gang wars started in the Mexican district of Los Angeles, Joseph and Mary rose above pachucos. He set up an ambulatory store, well stocked with switch knives, snap guns, brass knuckles, and, for the very poor, socks loaded with sand, cheap and very effective. At twelve he matriculated at reform school, and two years later emerged with honors. He had learned nearly every criminal technique in existence. This fourteen-year-old handsome boy with sad and innocent eyes could operate the tumblers of a safe with either fingers or stethoscope. He could make second stories as though he had suction cups on his feet. But no sooner had he mastered these arts than he abandoned them, reasoning that the odds were too great. He was always a smart boy. Joseph and Mary was looking for a profession wherein the victim was the partner of the predator. The badger game, the swinging panel, and the Spanish treasure[20] were nearer to his ideal. But even they fell short. He had never made a police blotter and he wanted to keep it that way. Somewhere he felt there was a profession illegal enough to satisfy him morally and yet safe enough not to outrage his instinctive knowledge of the law of averages. You might have said he was well launched on his career when, suddenly, puberty smote him, and for a number of years his activities took a different direction.

In the fields of larceny and fraud Joseph and Mary vegetated for a number of years. He was a man when the fog cleared from before his eyes and he could see again. Then just when he was set to go, the Army got him and kept him as long as it could in good conscience. It is said that his final dishonorable discharge is a masterpiece of understatement.

J and M never could get set. He started again on his career and took a wrong turning, for he fell under the influence of a young and understanding priest, who drew him into the warm bosom of Mother Church, into which Joseph and Mary had been born anyway. Now Joseph and Mary Rivas approved of confession and forgiveness, and he felt, as perhaps François Villon[21] had, that under the protection of the cloth he might find some outlet for his talent. Father Murphy taught him the theory of honest labor, and when Joseph and Mary had got over the shock of the principle he decided to give it a try. He was still malleable, and he succeeded, where Villon had failed, in keeping his hands off church property. With the help of Father Murphy, who had influence in the city government, Joseph and Mary found himself the possessor of a city job, a position of dignity, with a monthly check to be cashed without fear of fingerprinting.

The Plaza in Los Angeles is a pretty square, ornamented with small gardens, palms in great pots, and many, many flowers. It is a landmark, a tourist center, a city pride, for it preserves a Mexican-ness unknown in Mexico. Joseph and Mary, then, was in charge of watering and cultivating the plants in the Plaza—a job that was not only easy and pleasant but kept him in direct touch with those tourists who might be interested in small packets of art studies. Although Joseph and Mary realized he could never get rich in this job, he took a certain pleasure in being partly legal. It gave him the satisfaction most people find in sin.

At about this time the Los Angeles Police Department had a puzzle on its hands. Marijuana was being distributed in fairly large quantities and at a greatly reduced price. The narcotics squad conducted raid after raid without finding the source. Every vacant lot was searched from San Pedro to Eagle Rock. And then the countryside was laid out on graphing paper and the search for the pointed leaves of the marijuana went on in ever-widening circles: north past Santa Barbara; east to the Colorado River; south as far as the border. The border was sealed, and it is well known that muggles[22] does not grow in the Pacific Ocean. Six months of intensive search, with the cooperation of all local officials and the state police, got absolutely nowhere. The supply continued unabated, and the narcotics squad was convinced that the pushers did not know the source.

Heaven knows how long the situation might have continued if it had not been for Mildred Bugle, thirteen, head of her class in Beginning Botany, Los Angeles High School. One Saturday afternoon she crossed the Plaza, picked some interesting leaves growing around a potted palm, and positively identified them as Cannabis Americana.

Joseph and Mary Rivas might have been in trouble but for the fact that the Los Angeles Police Department was in worse trouble. They could not bring him to book. How would it look if the newspapers got hold of the story that the Plaza was the source of supply? that the product had been planted and nurtured by a city employee, freshened with city water, and fed with city manure?

Joseph and Mary was given a floater so strongly worded that it singed his eyelashes. The police even bought him a bus ticket as far as San Luis Obispo.

Doc chuckled. “You know, Mack,” he said, “you’re almost building a case for honesty.”

“I always put in a good word for it,” said Mack.

“How did he get in the wetback[23] business?” Doc asked.

“Well, he was casing the field for a career,” said Mack, “and wetbacks looked like a gold-brick cinch. Joseph and Mary figured the angles and the percentage. You look at it and you see it couldn’t flop.” He put up his fingers to count facts, then took a quick drink to tide him over the period when his hands would be tied up.

Mack touched the little finger of his left hand with his right forefinger. “Number one,” he said. “J and M talks Mexican because his old man and his old lady was Mexican before they come to L.A.” He touched his third finger. “Number two, the wetbacks come in by theirself. Nobody makes them come. There’s a steady supply. Number three, they can’t talk English and they don’t know a cop from a bucket. They need somebody like Joseph and Mary to take care of them and get them jobs and take their pay. If one of them gets mean, all J and M got to do is call the federal men, and they deport him without no trouble to J and M. That’s what he was always looking for—a racket with the percentage stacked for the house. He figures he’s got three or four crews working in fruit and vegetables and he can kind of lay back and rest, the way he always wanted. That’s why he bought out Lee Chong. He figured to make the grocery a kind of labor center, where he could rest up his men and sell them stuff at the same time. And what he’s doing ain’t very much against the law.”

Doc said, “I can tell, from your tone, it didn’t work. What happened?”

“Music,” said Mack.

Now it is true that Joseph and Mary did know all the angles, averages, and percentages. His systems couldn’t lose, but they did. The odds are against making your point with the dice, and that law holds until magic intervenes and someone makes a run.

There were literally millions of wetbacks in the country—quiet, hard-working, ignorant men, content to bend their backs over the demanding earth. It was a setup; it couldn’t lose. How did it happen, then, that in Joseph and Mary’s crew there should be one tenor and one guitar player? Under his horrified eyes an orchestra took shape—two guitars, a guitarón, rhythm and maraca men, a tenor, and two baritones. He would have had the whole lot deported if his nephew, Cacahuete, had not joined them with his hot trumpet.

Joseph and Mary’s wetbacks abandoned the carrot and cauliflower fields for the dance floors of the little towns in California. They called themselves the Espaldas Mojadas.[24] They played “Ven a Mi, Mi Chica Dolorosa” and “Mujer de San Luis” and “El Nubito Blanco que Llora.”[25]

The Espaldas Mojadas dressed in tight charro[26] costumes, wore huge Mexican hats, and played for dances in the Spreckel Fireman’s Hall, the Soledad I. O. O. F.,[27] the Elks of King City, the Greenfield Garage, the San Ardo Municipal Auditorium. Joseph and Mary stopped fighting them and started booking them. Business was so good he screened new wetbacks for talent. It was Joseph and Mary’s first entrance into show business, and its native dishonesty reassured him that his course was well chosen.

“So, you see,” said Mack, “it was music done it. You can’t trust nothing no more. You take Fauna now—the Bear Flag ain’t like any hookshop on land or sea. She makes them girls take table-manner lessons and posture lessons, and she reads the stars. You never seen nothing like it. Everything’s changed, Doc, everything.”

Doc looked around his moldy laboratory, and he shivered. “Maybe I’m changed too,” he said.

“Hell, Doc, you can’t change. Why, what could we depend on! Doc, if you change a lot of people are going to cash in their chips. Why, we was all just waiting around for you to get back so we could go on being normal.”

“I don’t feel the same, Mack. I’m restless.”

“Now you get yourself a girl,” said Mack. “You play some of the churchy music to her on your phonograph. And then I’ll come in and hustle you for a couple of bucks. Make a try, Doc. You owe it to your friends.”

“I’ll try,” said Doc, “but I have no confidence in it. I’m afraid I’ve changed.”