Bread and Bread

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...

1. adventures in public transportation I got on the Purple Line at the Normandie Station. Linda and I had just spent an hour and a half drinking soju and nibbling on an immense potato pancake at a Koreatown bar called Toe Bang. (The other place we were considering was called School Food Blooming Roll. You gotta love K-Town.)  Toe Bang: best potato pancake east of Fairfax. The Purple Line was always quiet and relatively empty at this time of night. Those sharing my car included a guy muttering to himself and smoking a cigarette, and a very tall, very thin man with a pencil mustache, slouch boots, and a feminine V-neck sweater. He (she?) seemed like a proud character from a novel about the marginal lives of aging disco queens. For some reason, the Purple Line wasn’t running all the way to Union Station, and it took me lot of minutes and some backtracking to realize this. When I transferred at the MacArthur Park Station, a white-haired man shuffled up to me and mumble...