AN ECHO PARK BESO: LOVE DEFERRED ECHOING ALWAYS c/s

 

By Isaac Lomelí

When I was young, I knew Echo Park only through chase scenes on "CHiPs" and from stories my family shared with me. Parks are, in general, good places for making mischief, Chicanos being no different than others when it comes to mischievous behavior in them. This was true at Echo Park during the '70s and up until recently.

My tio once told me that his first stabbing happened at Echo Park. Whether he was the one doing the stabbing or involved otherwise, I didn't want to know. And there were other Echo Park stories based on precarious situations members of my family had found themselves in. Some of the tall tales placed me in the middle of them as a toddler they'd taken along, although I have no clear memories from that far back.

Kind of makes me wonder if my parents were a tiny bit negligent. What does Echo Park mean to the Chicano? From my accounts, it was just a place you could go to be yourself. To speak Spanish, Spanglish, or whatever. To walk with your hyna, to be a vato loco, cruise through in your ranfla, a space where the cops and güeros let you be. Yeah, you were in America, but you could still be Mexican in and around Echo Park. This feeling, this longing to be back in Mexico, or at lease away from here, likely explains why nostalgia is a strong part of the Chicano psyche. We grew up listening to stories of Mexico from parents, abuelitos, and borrachos, all with beautiful things to say about the homes they left behind.

You see, nobody ever left Mexico because they wanted to: it was because they had to. The land and the culture are beautiful, but the life and the living is hard. So they come to Los Estados for the money, but always have a longing to go back. So, we Chicanos grow up with a longing too. We are not from there, and we are not wanted here. We long for a place to call our own, and a place like Echo Park used to provide a taste of that.

Nostalgia defined as an echo. Just as an echo is something we hear from the past—albeit a very near past—-nostalgia is about the past coming back to us in an exquisite way. Chicanos have always been associated with a love for the past. In my 20s I dated a black woman whose her mother told her, "They've always liked old things. They've always liked that (old] music, even when I was young."

Perhaps our sense of nostalgia has to do with holding on to any tradition that we can call truly ours in this country, in this new era, a land where many of us have roots that predate the relatively recent (by comparison) modern metropolis we conjure when we think of Los Angeles. In spite of the fact that in L.A., the city’s most significant geographical and geological features, and many of its streets all bear Spanish names, more than a few of us also sometimes feel like we are still discovering ourselves here. All we can hear are echoes we hope to one day trace to their origin, the site where the imprint was made.

Now, let's fast forward to the present. I had managed to recapture and become reacquainted with an echo from the past that had been suspiciously ignored. It was a violent, painful and ugly place I dared not visit again. Yet, here I was, with Patty in a place I hadn't expected to be and in a manner I'd never imagined I could.

Officer Poncherello didn't come crashing through on his bike chasing a burglar; no cars plunged into the lake; and my heart didn't fight the love being nurtured.

A few years back, I'd picked up a rideshare in Echo Park. My first thought had been, "man ... l hope it's not as rough as it used to be." Once there, I was pleasantly surprised by the atmosphere, the sense of culture and comfort, and equally important, safety. The graffiti had morphed into art and the homeless had perhaps found shelter. Enough rain had fallen on L.A., for the lake to be reopened, and it was so safe, even Nuestra Reina de Los Angeles had come back. Glancing out over my old neighborhood park, I said to myself, "This would be a great place for a date."

Twenty-five years before, I'd lain in bed looking up at the moon through a window with the curtains drawn open and prayed, "Please, God, just let me kiss her once." She was the girl my friends and I called "Patty Fine" because she was the standard of beauty against which we measured all other girls. Meanwhile, my friends ribbed me, calling me "Isaac Ugly," cleverly wringing humor out of the ironic inversion, cruelly insinuating that she was out of my league and any effort to woo her would just be a tragic waste.

More than two decades after that prayer was sent echoing Heavenward, my request was granted. Patty Fine and I would be going out on a date, and I knew just the place.

"I love you, Isaac, So much. Why do you think that is?"

"Well, if it's anything like what I'm feeling, then it's because of the nostalgia we inspire in each other. "Yes. You were so sweet to me back then." We had worked in the mall together; she at a small women's accessory store and I at the movie theater directly across from it. "The poems you wrote… I had no idea they were about me. You always stopped by my job, listening to all my teenage problems. But are you saying our love is nostalgic?"

"I recently heard an older friend of mine mention, the older you get the less people you have around that remember what you remember, share memories with, and who simply knew you when you were young. You and I share a past; we love that."

It had taken us a long time to have our first date. We had been just friends during high school, something about my shyness. I'd spent those 25 years growing, suffering through bad relationships and two engagements. I had no children and had, for the previous five years, lived as a bachelor. She had also spent the elapsed time traipsing through love, was divorced twice and childless. Both of us had almost given up on love and marriage and children all together.

"The park is so beautiful today;' she said.

"Yes. For once I'm glad to see hipsters. Means someone saw something here that was beautiful and invested in it. They didn't let it go to waste."

Things had changed. I had changed. I wasn't the skinny, pimple-faced kid who gawked at the prettiest girl in the mall. I wasn't the teenager who hid his feelings in poetry written to impress the finest girl within I 00 miles. I was now the neo-hipster in love with nostalgia; she was now the English professor, even harder to impress.

The echoes from our adolescence sang to us. Memories resurrected like the lake itself, baptizing us in the name of love. We were reborn, living a new moment, that would also eventually join those memories reverberating loudly enough for us to hear again if we ever needed to be reminded.

We took a selfie for Facebook, shared a kiss, then stared at each other, listening for the slightest echo.

"I love you so much, Isaac.

But ... why now?"

"Maybe your memory of me has been echoing in your mind since we were kids, and you in mine:'

Caught trying to be clever with the "echoing in your mind" allusion to our tranquil setting, I was, in turn, schooled by Patty through the story of Echo and Narcissus from Greek myth. One day, on a hunt, Narcissus is seen by Echo, she began. “She falls in love. He hears her as she watches him, hidden in the brush, but doesn’t see her; so he shouts, ‘Is anyone there?’ Echo, cursed, can only respond with the words spoken to her and so replies, ‘Is anyone there?’”

According to Patty, he eventually finds her, but can’t communicate because of her cursed condition. So Narcissus denies her. She wants to call to him, to profess her feelings but can’t so her feelings stay trapped within. Of course, I had to draw a conclusion since Patty had aired a long-held belief that I had never asked her out because I was so into myself. In that version of the story, I was Narcissus. In response, I suggested we were both like Narcissus.

For the preceding quarter century, we had each been too involved in our lives to notice this kind of love (a fermented love, aged to perfection) or acknowledge it as love for each other. We’d been shouting, “Is anyone there? Is anyone there? [to really love us].” But we never waited long enough to hear a response. We were both finally still, and the stillness brought back the echoes, allowed them to fall upon the person they had been destined for from the beginning.

I sat there smiling at her, feeling something I hadn’t ever felt next to a woman—happy. I realized why all my relationships really had failed. They weren’t what I was looking for. I’d been trying to recreate the perfection I had encountered at the shop in a mall. It was possible she had been doing the same. Yet the love I felt was no longer merely an echo, it spoke with a voice all its own. Echoes of my boyhood adoration were not just reminders of her anymore. Reaching their ultimate destination, the echoes subsided, having made their way home to my heart. After almost a lifetime, Echo’s curse had at last been lifted; she could now let Narcissus know what she was feeling, too.

“I love you.”

“I love you.”

This essay ran originally in our March/April 2017 print edition. Despite its obvious promise and the author's natural instinct for storytelling, it will remain his first and only published work. Earlier this summer, we were saddened to hear from Dr. Patty Godinez, "Patty Fine" in this touching piece of creative non-fiction, who informed us that her husband Isaac had recently passed. We extend our sincerest condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. The news of his untimely death has strengthened our resolve to develop a Brooklyn & Boyle Digital Archive which would provide online access to content previously only available in our print edition.