Cheech Marin - 75 Pools

 

Bam, bam, bam. I was only eight years old, but I knew exactly what that sound was. I think that every eight-year-old in South Central LA knew exactly what that sound was. There were gunshots, and they were being fired three feet outside my bedroom window. Bam, bam. Another two shots, and I just slid out of the bed and crawled as fast as I could into the living room where my mom and dad slept in a Murphy bed that pulled out of the wall. 

 

“Mom. Mom, they're shooting back there.” “I know, mijo. Stay down.” She grabbed me and threw herself on top of me. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my feet, man. She stayed on me for a long time, and then finally she got up, went to the window, pulled back the shade, and then red and blue swirling police lights filled the whole room. “Mom, where's dad?” “He's out there.” “What's happening?” There was a burglary. And indeed there was a burglary happening in the barbershop next door. 

 

And over the years, I asked my dad what happened that night. And this is what he told me, “About 3 o’clock in the morning, he heard this faint tinkle of a low rent burglar alarm going off.” Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. He said it sounded just low rent. At this time, he was an eight-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. So, he got up, pulled back the shade, and he looked over there, and there was a guy in the barbershop walking around with a little flashlight. Without thinking, he got on his khaki pants, put on his white T-shirt, and got his gun. He told my mother, “Call the police, give them the address, tell them I'm LAPD and I'm going out to investigate. And be sure to tell him I'm wearing a white T-shirt.” 

 

So, he went down the alley, got to the place where the door had been jimmied open, saw the guy in there, shone his flashlight and his gun at him and said, “I'm a LAPD. Come out with your hands up.” And the guy complied, and he walked out of the place. He stood there in the alley while my dad turned him around, put his hands up against the wall and started frisking him. In one pocket, he pulled out three straight razors. In the other pocket was a very long screwdriver, which I guess he used to jimmy open the door, and he held him there. The guy said, “What are you going to do with me?” My dad said, “I'm just going to hold you here until the cops come. They're on their way.” 

 

It had been raining that night. He laid his umbrella up against the wall, and all of a sudden, you could hear a siren coming down the street. He looked at my dad and said, “I'm not going back to prison.” He made a lunge for his gun and knocked it out of his hand. The gun was on the ground, on the wet ground. They both went for it. And whoever got there first was going to live. He wrestled with a guy, and he was trying to keep him away from the gun as much as he could, and he was trying to get a hold of him. The guy broke free, grabbed the umbrella that was lying there and started to whack him over the head with it. 

 

Just at that same time, the cops came out of their car at the head of the alley. My mom opened the window. “My husband's a policeman. He's the one in the white T-shirt. The white T-shirt. He's the cop.” By this time, my dad had found the gun on the wet ground, turned on his back and fired. He hit the guy in the shoulder. At the same time, the other cops let go, bam, bam, bam, bam. The guy staggered, almost made it to the end of the alley, and then collapsed. He was dead. 

 

In every police involved shooting, there's an inquest. Everybody that's participated or had something to do with it gives testimony. All the cops, my dad, even my mother. The man's parents who lived in the area, they came and they testified that they had tried their best to do it, to raise their son, but he had a significant criminal record and had just spent four years in the state penitentiary for armed robbery. But they concluded that it was a justifiable homicide and the act of an armed robbery case closed. 

 

Everything went back to normal, but it never went back to normal for me. I had nightmares every single night. Anything woke me up, and I was out in the window looking around, and my heart was always beating, and I was on the juvenile track to a fast heart attack. [chuckles] 

 

So about six months go by, and my dad announces, one day “We're going to go take a trip out to the San Fernando Valley to see my police buddy Ernie.” “Okay.” Well, I'd never been to the San Fernando Valley. Sounded like an exciting adventure. I'd never been to the country, what country there was. So, we all piled in the Plymouth and headed out for Granada Hills. 

 

I remember getting on the freeway-- The freeway in those days stopped at Van Nuys, and we had to go through five or six towns before we got to Granada Hills and all the orange groves. It was in the middle of orange grove. It was boring. It was a long ride, and I started looking out the window. What I noticed, that shocked me. People had swimming pools in their backyards. Their own private swimming pools. How could--? Wow. And so, I started counting them as we got along. I searched for them. I looked through fences and behind stuff, and where I could see a flash of blue, there was a swimming pool. How can there be so many? 

 

By the time we got to the Dickens house, that was the name of the family were going to visit, I had gotten up to 50. Wow. So, we got to the Dickens house. Ernie, Virginia, and their son Mike. They were very nice, and they made us lunch. My dad and Ernie fell into this easy camaraderie that all cops have, and then they announced, “Ernie and I are going for a ride and we'll be right back.” Okay. So, we continued to chat with Virginia and Mike and tell stories, and they became our lifelong friends. After a couple hours, my dad and Ernie came back and chatted a little more, then my dad announced, “Well, we're going home now.” “Okay, see you later.” We all climbed back into the Plymouth and headed back for South Central. 

 

My dad was very silent on the way back home. He didn't say a word till we were almost home and then he said, “I bought a house today.” My mother's jaw dropped, “What?” “Yeah, I just made a down payment on the house a block over from Ernie's. We're going to move in a week.” My mother at the time was eight and a half months pregnant with my twin sisters. She started breathing really heavy. [audience laughter] I thought she was going to deliver right there. 

 

So, a week later, I find myself in the cab of a moving truck with my dad on the way to our new home in Granada Hills. I was scared. I was excited, but I was scared. I wasn't scared about leaving South Central. That was a scary place for me. I had seen two homicides by the time I was seven. I was missing a couple friends, but not much. But I would miss my extended family who lived all over the South Central, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandmother, my grandfather, but we were going to this new place, Granada Hills. 

 

So, as soon as we got off the freeway, I started counting swimming pools again. And by the time we got to our new house, I was up to 75. So, there we were in front of our brand-new house, glistening in the middle of this dirt lot. I looked up and down the block and there were similar houses. Brand new house, dirt lot. I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” We got out of the car and walked in. I walked up to the house and opened the door, and that smell, that smell of a brand-new house, if you could take the smell of a new car and multiply it by 100,000 times, that's what that smell was. That fresh paint and that parquet floor that never been stepped on. We were the first people to ever live in this house, and it was like were in dreamland. 

 

So, we walked in and looked around, and it was four bedrooms where we had been living in this tiny, tiny duplex in South Central. It was four bedrooms, two baths, and a huge lot. I would learn all my basic gardening skills in that lot. [audience chuckles] And that night, we went to sleep. We only had two pieces of furniture in the whole house. Two beds. The one I slept in and the one the parents slept in. I went to sleep. And in the middle of the night, I woke up. I heard a sound. It's happening again. I looked out the window. We didn't have any shades on the windows at this time. We had just moved in. 

 

Looked out the window and could see nothing but it sounded like our house was getting electrocuted. The sound got louder. I opened the window the whole way, and it's really loud now. It took me a minute to figure out what exactly that sound was. It was crickets. [audience laughter] A million crickets. A million crickets had replaced screaming sirens, which I heard 10 times a day in South Central. 

 

The next day, my dad had to get up and go to work all the way in downtown LA. He took the only car. We were there at the house. My poor mother would just wander around trying to find some shady spot, sit there and pant like a German shepherd. [audience laughter] She was going to deliver any day, so I would walk her around. I got up and I would walk, she would waddle, and we would go into every room and just sit there in the room, and feel the ambiance of the room. There was no furniture. We sit on the floor. Even at that age, it was hard to pick her up after we had to get out of there.

 

I picked up my room, “Okay, that's going to be. That's great. Look at parquet floor. It's just like at the Boston Gardens. This is amazing.” And then, we picked out the room that my twin sisters, Margie and Monica, would occupy. We would look out the window of every room, and then we would go and sit in the living room and look out those windows and imagine a big lawn in front and gardens in back. We didn't have a swimming pool, and we would never have a swimming pool. And it was okay. I didn't really care. It was just a status symbol. Besides, I didn't even know how to swim at that point. [audience chuckles] 

 

So, summer went on, and it was always hot. It was just 100 degrees every day. My grandmother came out to help with the care of the twins. They were born Margie and Monica. We’re having a great time settling into our new house. I remember the first day, my mother walked in the kitchen, turned on the taps, and mud came out. That's how new that house was. So, summer was over, and I was ready to start my new school, Granada Hills Elementary. 

 

So, my grandmother had come, and she was watching over my twin sisters. And my mother walked me through the orange grove till we arrived at Granada Hills Elementary. We got up to the playground, and there was kids yelling and screaming. It looked just like South Central, only everybody was a little more polite, but it was loud. We walked in and found my classroom. Teacher was very nice. She greeted me, showed me to a desk, and I was trying to be on my best behavior. I was actually trying not to wrinkle my clothes. I walked like a starched robot, and I sat down. 

 

I don't even remember what she said. She was just going on about, “This is here, this is there, and these are the rules,” and blah, blah, blah. Recess bell rang. All the kids headed out the door. So, I got out there and looked around at the playground, and I noticed that everybody was white. Not all. There was a few Mexicans, but no Asians and certainly no Blacks. I said, “Well, this is weird, but okay.” One day, everybody in my neighborhood is black, and then the next day everybody was white. It was like going from Nigeria to Knott's Berry Farm, you know? [audience laughter] “What is going on here?” 

 

So, I looked around for something familiar, something I could relate to. And in the distance, I saw a tetherball, and kids were playing tetherball. “Hey, they had tetherball in my old school. I'll go try that.” I walked over and sat down on the bench to be the next one to play. They were playing tetherball just like they played tetherball in South Central. “Okay, I know these rules.” And in the near distance, I saw these two kids walking towards me, and they were laughing to each other, and they were pointing at me. And then, they would laugh again and then point again. And finally, they got up to the bench where I was sitting, and the bigger of the ones shoved me right off the bench, and he said, “Hey, get to the end, blackie.” 

 

I didn't know the procedure here in Granada Hills. I only knew what I knew from South Central. So, I swung as hard as I could and hit this guy right in the mouth. [audience laughter] I guess that was the first time his sense of entitlement ever got challenged, [audience laughter] because he lit up like a thermometer and he didn't stop crying for a half hour. Nearby teacher heard little Johnny crying. He came, got the both of us, and marched us off to the principal's office. And on the way there, I thought of the beating that I was absolutely going to get from my father for misbehaving, but it paled in the comparison to the thought of at least one little A-hole was never going to bother me again. [audience laughter] 

 

Nice first day. So, I was thinking, South Central was undeniably a violent place. Sirens every day. But the violence was general. It was all around. It was happening to other people. This is the first time it was personal. This is the first time I had ever been in a fight. I didn't fight with my friends. They weren’t my friends. And so, I wondered, I was the same kid in this situation. So, what was different about that world and the new world? What was that dividing line? What was that boundary that separated those two worlds? And I came to the conclusion that it was a line of 75 swimming pools. Thank you.