Alice Bag - Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story

VIOLENCE

GIRL

Copyright 2011 by Alice Bag

All rights reserved.

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way

Suite 124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

feralhouse.com

Book design by Gregg Einhorn

ISBN 978-1936239122

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my husband and daughters.

One two three four! My band rips into our opening song. The music is loud, tight, fast and intense.

A wave of bodies surges at the front of the stage as the audience explodes into frenetic dancing. The music blaring at my back, Im going to ride this wave. I grab the microphone from the stand and belt out the words.

Shes taken too much of the domesticated world, shes tearing it to pieces shes a violence girl!

Im bouncing on stilettos like a fighter in the ring, I charge out onto the edge of the stage, full of adrenaline and fire. I sing into the faces in the front rows. They are my current, my source of energy. I urge them to engage. I know theres something in them, some inner carbonation lying still, waiting to be shaken. Its fizzing in them as I shake them up. Shake, motherfucker, shake! I want you to explode with me.

Im stomping, jogging and dancing all over the stage, teetering precariously on my high heels. I spot an area of spectators in front of Patricia, my bassist. Fuck that! No spectators, were all participants here! I get up in their faces as I continue to spew out the words. Now theyre dancing, thats right, keep it going.

Shes a violence girl, she thrives on pain, shes a violence girl, you cant restrain!

I am in my element, en mi mero mole. There is so much energy coursing through my body that surely I am dangerous to touch.

Then I see him. A gnat on my windshield, a tiny insect in wire-rimmed glasses has moved toward the front of the stage. He stands facing Craig, my rhythm guitarist, flipping him off. I make my way over and the insect turns my way, sticking his insolent middle finger up in the air in defiance. Some people in the audience slam their bodies into him attempting to swat the bug, but he resists. I reach out toward him while still singing. Ill swat him myself. I reach to smack him but he backs away.

The gnat is emboldened now. I try to keep singing, the crowd is still with me but he is hovering in my peripheral vision. He has moved closer, middle finger still in the air. I dance over, lean over the front row and swing at his face. He is squished in and cant move more than a few inches back. I miss his face but as hes backing away I catch his glasses between my fingers. He looks at me, suddenly helpless. I smile at the gnat and hold his glasses up high as I bend and twist them into a wire sculpture. Gnat has been swallowed by the audience, his finger has submerged under the sea of punks. We are all dancing in unison. With great flourish I place the wire sculpture under my lovely high heels and smash the glasses to bits.

How did I come to unleash the wrath of Kali upon the world of punk? The answer to that question lies way back in my childhood and perhaps even before that, because the seeds of Violence Girl were sown way before I was even born.

My father, Manuel Armendariz, was a self-employed carpenter, which meant that sometimes he worked a lot and other times he didnt work at all. He grew up in Mexico and always considered himself a Mexican; not a Mexican-American, not Chicano. Even on the rare occasions when he wore a suit, he looked like a laborer: bulky and strong, with a solid frame. His face was all up front, with a strong jawline that locked into place, like a pit bull. He had a disposition to match: alternately cuddly and ferocious. Manuel met my mother, Candelaria, on a bus in Mexico. She was shapely yet angular, like a cubist version of a woman with an hourglass figure.

My father as a young man.

My father was coming home from work, sweaty and covered with dust and dirt from a day of construction, when he sat down next to this very fashionably dressed lady. Instead of being put off, she started a conversation, and eventually my father said, Id ask you out to the movies, if I wasnt so dirty.

A smile would creep across my fathers face as he recalled the memory, mimicking my mothers high pitched voice: You dont look so dirty to me. My father always laughed when he told this story; since he actually was filthy, he immediately knew that my mother liked him. I imagine him dressed in his grimy khakis and T-shirt, bushy black hair turned prematurely gray by sawdust, holding hands with my stylish, soon-to-be mother in the dark cine, watching the screen as Pedro Infante woos his leading lady.

My mom, a cubist version of a shapely woman.

Candelaria was also born in Mexico, the youngest of 15 children. Her family moved to the United States when she was still a small child. This was during the height of the Great Depression, and the experience marked her profoundly. She and her siblings grew up near a shoe factory in L.A. They would rummage through the nearby city dump, looking for a matching pair of castoff shoes they might wear but which they never found. If they were lucky enough to find a left and a right shoe of the same style, they were invariably different sizes. If one was only a bit larger, the problem could be solved by wadding up a piece of paper and stuffing it into the toe box. Candelaria was a dyed-in-the-wool pack rat who never threw away anything that could be repurposed or recycled. I like to think of her as being the original DIY-er.

Mom and Dad, early courtship.

Unlike my father, my mother considered herself American, or at least Mexican-American. Over time, she even came to prefer the American nickname of Candy over the nickname used by our Mexican relatives: Lala. This was a pattern of Anglo-remonikering that some of her children would repeat, including me: Alicia, who would become Alice. It might seem strange today, but the desire to assimilate was stronger in those days, when public swimming pools in East Los Angeles still had white days and Mexican days. By the time Candy met Manuel, she was already a widow with five children from her first marriage, one of whom had died in infancy. She was married with her first kid before she turned 16 and thus spent practically her whole life being a mother. When I was older, I accidentally found my parents marriage certificate, and, after doing the math, I realized that my mother had been eight months pregnant when they finally made it legal. It was obvious that my dad had waited until the very last minute to marry my mother. I confronted him with it, joking, You didnt want me.

He replied, I always wanted you. I just didnt want to get married.

My familys home on Ditman Avenue was tiny, even by the standards of a poor barrio in East L.A., and it was completely infested with brown German cockroaches. My mother waged a never-ending battle against these intruders, stockpiling every insecticide carried by the local five-and-dime, all to no avail. The cockroaches had long since won the war, and they humored my mothers futile attempts to eradicate them so long as she occasionally allowed some wayward queso or a bit of burnt tortilla to fall behind the stove.

My earliest memory is of being at Hollenbeck Park with my father. We are sitting under a tree. I am very young, but Im not too young to pick up on the forced smile, the fake show of happiness that my dad tries to put on for my sake. Theres a melancholy, pathetic cloud casting a shadow on our sunny day. Despite my childs understanding of the world, I can sense the emptiness that has wandered in to fill the vacancy left by my mother. Shes missing from the scene because shes in the hospital and hasnt been home in days.