Bread and Bread

Working at Homeboy Industries comes with a certain cachet. Most liberal-to-moderate people love the story of the radical priest who rode his bicycle into the middle of gang fights and refused to see gang members as evil incarnate. Today even law enforcement gets the basic axiom that “hurt people hurt people.” In grant applications, I boast about working with the “least likely to succeed.” Tour groups pull up to our headquarters by the busload, partly because people with tattooed faces are still something of a sideshow attraction, but partly because they’re moved by the idea that all these tatted-up gangsters have changed their lives for the better. Sometimes tourists sit for hours in our postage stamp of a garden, listening to stories of pain, confusion, relapse and redemption from literal killers. So it’s hard to remember what things were like back in the day. In 1988, when Homeboy was a tiny jobs program at Dolores Mission Church, gang members were the subject of fear-mongering ...

Today I sat in on the creative writing class at Homeboy (yeah, the one I used to teach; another teacher took over while I was on maternity leave and ended up staying, and I try not to have an ego about it), and the topic was: Write about a place. I've already written about all the L.A. neighborhoods I've lived in and about the South Bay, where I grew up, so I decided to write about dorm life.  I just realized that living in a triple at UCLA is not unlike living in a two-bedroom with minimal storage space and a baby. We were stacked three to a room in ten-story residence halls, concrete walls as thick as our freshman skulls. The carpet hid stains. Our mini fridges were stocked with diet soda and apples growing soft, as we filled up on waffle fries, Froot Loops and build-your-own omelets. We'd fled the suburbs to be here--Manhattan Beach, La Jolla, El Cajon, Walnut Grove. We circled the city, curious about its secrets but still removed. A guy down the hall from me sa...

1. brave hearts Earlier this week, Homeboy Industries hosted its second annual Global Homeboy Network , a gathering of like-minded organizations and Fr. Greg’s answer to those who say “Homeboy is amazing! Will you start one in our city?” (“We’re not the McDonalds of social justice organizations,” he always replies.) I.e., it would be presumptuous (not to mention financially unfeasible) to think that what works in L.A.—and, honestly, largely in East L.A.—would work everywhere. During our Morning Meetings, whenever the schedule is announced, Marvin from Tattoo Removal says that the machines will be going “all damn day.” Everyone choruses: “All damn day!” Except last year one of our machines broke and we had to cut back on hours, so sometimes Marvin would say “nine to one.” A muddled chorus of “nine to one!” and “half damn day” followed. Can you imagine an employee handbook for Homeboy Chicago (or wherever) explaining when and how to reply “all damn day”? (I im...

Friday morning I was pulling into CVS to buy baby sunscreen in anticipation of the Homeboy Family Picnic. A basic errand, but compare it to the day of last year’s Homeboy Family Picnic , when I was trying to finish four grants and text with a potential birthmom who ended up dumping me later that day, all before getting on a plane to New Zealand. I mean, the New Zealand part was good, but I was appreciating this year’s hard-won simplicity. My coworker Sierra with two-year-old Marla. Sierra claims to hate kids. Clearly. I turned on NPR just in time to hear Barack Obama say, “…and then there are days when justice comes like a thunderbolt.” As he continued to talk, and I sat in the same CVS parking lot where I’d once called AAA for a dead battery, I soon found myself in tears, the kind that come when a weight you didn’t even know you were carrying is finally lifted. People say this about finalizing an adoption: Sure, you’re out of the danger zone as soon as your child’s bi...

1. the body he lives in There’s a trainee at Homeboy named Rudy. Recently he gave the Thought of the Day and shared a poem he wrote, about introducing himself for the first time in his memory as “Rudy,” instead of giving his gang nickname. It was a sweet and powerful poem that captured the intensity of rediscovering your own identity—the not-so-simple act of declaring I’m not who they say I am. Rudy, shown smaller than actual size. The first thing everyone notices about Rudy is that he’s close to seven feet tall. He has the girth to match and a deep voice. If he signed on with a casting agency, he would regularly get cast in fairy tale films. But in this world of modern fairy tales, he was cast in the role of tough guy very early in life. When I think about how long it took me—an average-sized white female whose parents never told me not to cry— to truly own my vulnerability, I can only imagine how machismo and other cultural forces must have tamped down the hurt little b...

I just realized that my last four Facebook posts were about the rain. I’m a predictable SoCal native—like my cat OC (also a native), I am surprised and a little unnerved when water starts falling out of the sky. I’m one of those freaked-out drivers you hate. I stay home and ruin the economy, although I did clean the house. Eventually. When you put up barriers, you miss out on the love, Grumpy Cat. First I went back to bed and read Sharp Objects — another creepy-good Gillian Flynn novel—until noon, and felt guilty about it, naturally, because people with more important lives don’t do this, right? I might have a mild case of SAD, or I might be mildly under-caffeinated. I griped at AK for having an overbooked day. I thought about how I would be more confident if I lost six pounds. It’s March 1, which is a great day to be ambitious about such things, except today feels like gloom, not rebirth. I listened to This American Life, an old one from 2002, where they spent the da...

The other day a Facebook friend of mine posted that she was excited for the lunar new year because she needed a do-over on her resolutions. I’m always angling for the same. I’ve been doing okay with my resolutions (although how can it be time to wash my car again ALREADY?), but January left me ragged and exhausted. With my brain attending to two different jobs—and certainly not my writing—I had newfound sympathy for AK, who’s been dividing her time between her paying gig and her therapist hours for almost two years now. I experienced that constant shifting of worlds when I was a working grad student, and it’s a bit of what I was getting at with The Commuters, but back then I had more energy and lived off jalapeño poppers from Jack in the Box.   I think jalapeño poppers might be some kind of official rock bottom in the self-care department. Official handing-off of P&W office keys to new assistant Brandi. Jamie put together a lovely sendoff for me on Wednesday, with ...

I’ve worked at Poets & Writers (usually referred to on this blog as “my org”) for eleven years. Setting aside the continuously mind-boggling fact of how old I actually am, this also means that I’ve only had one job since grad school. It’s only my second professional job (if you can call writing about TV for a startup that has a video game station in the office “professional”). Sometimes I think about the story my mom told me once, about how my Aunt Vanessa once raised ducklings in a cardboard box, and by the time they were grown, their tail feathers veered to one side because the box was so small. Duck in a box. Having one job for nearly a third of your life feels a little bit like that, except imagine that the cardboard box was cozy and home to other kind, understanding ducks and often visited by famous and fascinating ducks, and that there were only three other cardboard boxes in your whole field, and you’d heard that two of them were totally dysfunctional. All of w...