I never understood why they called this graffiti-scarred alley lucky. Still the same as when I lived here, littered with abandoned shopping carts, broken-spring couches, pools of dirty oil, and a million shards of glass. Vatos living in parked cars swigging beer and selling dope, clouds of black flies buzzing over mounds of garbage, and stray cats under stoops with yellow fear in their eyes. Piss smell so thick in the air, even weeds, sprouting through cracks in the asphalt, look like they want out of this place. At sundown, the hazy light filtering between Victorian-vintage tenements makes even the dust motes seem dangerous, and you know nothing but bad luck is going to happen here.

Going by Lucky Alley always reminds me of Catarino Marana, drove a pearl white sports car, a '60 Triumph with canvas top. I sold him the top after wrecking my own Triumph. Funny that when I think of other people's bad luck I think of my own. During my bad days I wrecked plenty of cars; the last one, a signal-red TR3, happened one Saturday night when I turned, piss-drunk, into Lucky Alley and never saw the street light step in front of me, I woke up in General Hospital, an intern stitching my forehead like he was mending a sock, leaving this crescent scar to remind me.

I wrecked the Triumph after an all-night celebration drinking shots of tequila with beer chasers. My girlfriend, Alba, had agreed to move into my studio apartment, 25 Lucky Alley. I'd just left her old flat, and her face was the last thing I flashed on before the pinwheel of nausea exploded in my head; then, like in a movie, everything faded to darkness.

Alba is the most beautiful woman in the Mission. She has brows that are charcoal smudges and eyes like a pampas night. She's Argentine, elegant as a pedestal, and can't stand stereotypes, hates tangos, Juan Peron, and the films of Armando Bo and Isabel Sarli. Peron kicked her family out of Argentina, and she's lived her whole life here in La Mission, like everyone else I know. Her main love is films. Always with a Super 8 camera, she'd film a sparrow's burial if she could. But I'd been into movies way before I met her.

She appeared one day at the Ribeltad Vorden, that place across Precita Park where I tended bar, a red beret cocked over one ear, a light meter around her neck, asking if she could film the poets, locos, revolutionaries, and anarchists who hang out there. Why not? I said, and offered her an Anchor Steam.

She filmed the junkies nodding in the park, the drunken poets reading from up on the little stage, even me, pouring a draft. I got her number before she left and a week later took her to dinner, then a double feature at the New Mission, El Santo Contra el Medico Asesino and another one I forget. El Santo, the Mexican wrestler with white mask and tights, el enmascarado de plata, in once scene he drives a white Corvette into an alley and about seven thugs jump him. The bad guys attack with two-by-fours, chains, and clubs while El Santo fights back with all his champion wrestler moves, flying kicks and all. Cut to the next scene: El Santo is having dinner at someone's house and you never know how he escaped. We laughed it was so bad.

Later that night we wound up at my studio in Lucky Alley, a couple of blue candles lit for atmosphere. We were fooling around on the mattress when she picked my hand off her breast. "Would you ever lie to me?" her mouth was so beautiful I felt I was in a foreign movie, something by Lina Wertmuller.
"Never," I said, and meant it.
"Not telling is also lying," she said. My tongue was already dipping into her navel, and her words were lost on me. I grunted what sounded like agreement. "Good", she said, "because I never forgive a liar." That's how our affair began.

I met Alba she was a film student at the Art institute and worked nights at El Gaucho on Mission Street, serving drinks in a fluffy skirt and low cut blouse. I could never reconcile to that part of her. In those days Alba wore spike-heeled shoes, red ones, looked like one of those Helmut Newton models, all legs. Would wear them when we made love. Even after everything that's happened between us, the deal with Catarino, and her chasing other men, I can't stop loving her, not even now when things aren't so good for us and there's no art or glory in our lives. She burns steady, just enough and every day; I like to fire up both ends and the middle. I guess our contradictions unite us.

I didn't know Catarino in those days I was wrecking cars, but he lived on Folsom Street, around the corner from Lucky Alley. I met Catarino a few months after my last wreck. I'd gone to the North Beach office of Revolutionary Films, a foreign film distributor, to rent Mexico, the Frozen Revolution, about government corruption after the 1910 Revolution. I wanted to impress Alba by starting a Latino film society in the Mission, a cine club to bring underground classics like Memorias de Subdesarollo and Reed-Mexico Insurgente, something really political, to the barrio, an alternative to the telenovela mentality.

Catarino was sitting in their snazzy offices, at the edge of the front desk, rapping a mile a minute on the phone, a huge orange-and-brown poster of Zapata on a wall behind him. He sported wire-rimmed glasses, a big mustache, the tips waxed and curled to a fine point, and a tie loosely knotted and looped around his neck like a strip of film, or a noose. He cupped the receiver on his thigh to greet me, pushed the glasses back with one finger, then asked the receptionist to send a memo. He set the receiver down while he stuffed an envelope with publicity flyers and explained the hardships of the movie business to me. The problem was cash flow, he said. In three seconds he returned to his phone conversation like I wasn't there. He smoked as he talked, mouthing his words around a cigarette stub like Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I barley got a word in before he rushed out for a business lunch, telling the receptionist he'd taken a twenty from petty cash.

My father started me on movies. His addiction goes back to the first reels carried on muleback over narrow trails to his small town in Jalisco. At dusk, silent movies on a stretched cotton sheet hung in the open-air plaza, the flickering projector light blinding the fruit bats swooping through the royal palms. Later, in Mexico City, the classic leading men of the golden age of Mexican cinema were his idols, but in particular that scowling film-noir legend, Pedro Armendariz. My father fashioned his life after those Mexican matinee idols, except he didn't sing or ride a horse. Rigid in his honor, brave around men, courteous to women. That's where I got my code of honor that a man's word is worth his life. And about women, if she leaves you for another man, burn every scrap of her memory like Cortes torching Tenonchtitlan. I didn't know any other way. That's how I'd been since that movie with Pedro Armendariz where Maria Felix tells him she's been raped by a troop of soldiers, and he responds with contempt, "You should have let yourself be killed instead." That was me.

The third cine club night at the Precita Community Center some sprockets tore while I was on the phone with Alba; by the time I heard the audience howling, several hundred feet of good film lay piled on the floor like black spaghetti. I refunded the gate to placate the mob. What money was left I used to pay for the damaged film. Somehow it didn't seem right to continue with the cine club, so I filed away the idea and chalked it up to experience.

A couple of weeks after the last cine club showing, a pearl white Triumph pulled up outside the Ribeltad Vorden. But a Triumph without the top isn't so hot. Right away I recognized Catarino when he slid up to the long mahogany bar and ordered an Anchor Steam. I said hello, reminded him about our meeting at Revolutionary Films, and slipped him a draught on the house, but hell, I did that for everyone. No one I knew ever went thirsty when I worked the plank.

Catarino's voice was like a rasp file, the words scraped from deep in his chest where the cigarette smoke collected. At thirty-seven, he was fifteen years older than me, he knew plenty about the movie business, and spoke with authority about films, directors, and life. You'd maybe not guess he'd spent ten years in the joint, but he had, for possession of heroin, a kilo and a half. When he told me I wasn't shook by it. Cat, as he liked to be called, never sat still, always moving around the bar, beer in hand, sleek and intense, always ready. I liked that about him. You might call him a hustler, vivo, my father would say. Neither would be wrong.

Catarino came from El Paso, where he learned early about girls, mota, and Johnny Law. In and out of Texas reform schools, he survived by picking cotton for the Texas Rangers, he came out to the Coast and settled in the Mission. I offered him the white canvas top, the only thing I salvaged from the Triumph I wrecked in Lucky Alley. I asked a hundred but took eighty and got fifty, the rest an IOU I still have. That's when I learned Cat was often a little short, light in the wallet, he'd say with a sly smile. Glen, who managed the Ribeltad and was an old friend of Cat's, often let him run up a tab. Glen used to say: Forgive your friends their sins or you'll live a lonely life.

When Revolutionary Films folded, literally went under, Cat started hanging out more often at the Ribeltad. The time when he appeared flush with cash, I never asked where it came from since it wasn't my business, he always paid off his tab and left a nice tip. On a slow night Cat cruised into the Ribeltad and invited me to the storage room. There, among stacked beer cases, he fired up a wheat-paper rolled joint. After a couple of tokes, he laid a pair of tickets on me to a special screening of Les Blank's, Chulas Fronteras. "For the free beers, Felix," he said. High on that purple smoke, I figured Cat a vato who'd give you the last sip of beer in his mug.

A few nights later Cat dropped in near closing time and helped me shoo out the last customers. I dimmed the bar lights so cruising cop cars wouldn't see us, and, with the bar closed up, we drank free till four in the morning and talked films, Fellini, Herzog, Bunuel. The burning ember of Cat's cigarette reflected in his deep-set, beer-bottle-colored eyes. This became our ritual. Two, three times a week, Cat would appear around closing time, and after I'd shut down the plank, we'd sit in the dark sharing a pitcher or two of steam beer. One of those nights, well into our third pitcher, I'm not sure which of us had the idea to lease the York Theater on Twenty-fourth Street in the heart of the Mission. The York had been closed for years, but as a kid I'd spent many Saturdays mesmerized in the plush velvet seats, and during intermission I'd sit back and, looking up at the ceiling, trace every curlicue on the gold-leaf design. To this day, the smell of roasting popcorn conjures up the York Theater and those Saturday afternoons.

At first I wasn't sure, but little by litter, night after night, in the empty bar draining pitchers of Anchor Steam with Cat, I started going for the idea. I knew the theater was an architectural gem, and a gala premier featuring the golden age of Mexican cinema, movies like Los Olvidados, Nosotros los Pobres, La Mujer del Puerto, would blow everyone away.

Cat located the owner of the York, a guy in Hollywood named Brody. We needed a five-grand deposit for a one-year lease. Cat said he had a thousand, could I raise the rest? I had to think about this. Alba and I had two grand saved for her to finish school, we'd even mentioned getting married. Alba really wanted her degree more than she wanted marriage. But it was something to think about, since my studio in Lucky Alley was tightly crammed. Every Saturday we'd go looking for a bigger flat; we looked at some real dogs and some nice ones we couldn?t afford.

Those nights after drinking and talking with Cat, I'd come home to Lucky Alley, my head full of ideas about the York, and I'd lie awake thinking how to tell Alba. I knew already what she'd say. Alba is a practical, food-on-the-table, all-the-bills-paid kind of woman. Like her mother. Don't come to her with get-rich schemes, cause she'll tell you every reason why they'll fail.

So I called this one alone-and took the two grand from the savings. It was my money, too, and I figured it'd be better not to give Alba a choice, just present her with the done deal. Glen cosigned for the other two grand from a loan company at 22 percent so we could make the deposit. That was the biggest debt I'd ever had in my life, and when I signed on the dotted line the pen was trembling.

The next day Cat came into the Ribeltad Vorden with ten crisp hundred-dollar bills, and I turned over my share in a white envelope. We called Brody from the bar phone and he agreed to fly in on Saturday to show us the theater and sign the papers. Cat said he'd get a cashier's check for Brody. We toasted to success with a pitcher of Anchor Steam, on the house.

The rest of the week I'm so high I can barely eat. I'm bursting inside to tell Alba, cause I want this for her just as much as I want it myself. I know she's tired of waitressing at El Gaucho, tired of the cheap tips and lewd comments. And her negatives piled in boxes. So each night while she's sleeping I'm thinking of running the York, of that moment we throw open the doors for the grand premiere and the house lights dim, the credits come on, and the faces light up. Alba can even show her own films. One of her cinema verite black-and-whites that haunt you days later with their powerful images. That's what film is all about, subliminal messages. Film is also about forgetting, just sitting in a darkened theater losing yourself in those evanescent images, forgetting everything. You should see Alba's Super-8s, very much influenced by Shirley Clarke. They showed one last year at the Roxie, an interview with a woman who'd been waitressing twenty-four years, and they gave her a standing ovation. Alba still talks of making feature films, and she will, but for now she's editing commercials for Channel 5. She hates it, says she wants to do subversive work, not this garbage.

All this happened in the middle of that seven-year drought. Newspapers said the planets were lined up all wrong or something. Winters came dry as parchment, with no rain but a few pissy storms. And summers like tinder, radiators would suddenly blow, and a spark would incite riots. At night, young cholas strolled the sidewalks on Twenty-fourth Street in Scanty shorts, the half-moon of their nalgitas showing, and vatos low-riding behind them, tooting "La Cucaracha" on those insane car horns. And drunken fights at the Ribeltad all the time. Nights so wild I had to use the little bat behind the bar. And gunshots in Lucky Alley and around the corner keeping us up till four in the morning, like all hell wanted to bust lose that summer. I knew things had to change or I'd get my skull cracked one night trying to stop a fight at the Ribeltad or walking home through Lucky Alley.

That's when Alba and I found a flat on Twenty-fourth and San Bruno, next to Tede Wong's Chinese laundry. The walls soaked up gallons of paint and Lysol, but it was our first real place together, big enough for Alba to set up and editing table in a corner of the living room. But at night before sleep crept over us, we'd hear mice loud as horses between the walls. By the end of that summer I was so worn out with the drunks and the fights at the Ribeltad, I gave up that gig.

After laying the money on Cat, I waited all week, tense as a death row inmate, jumping each time the phone rang. Every glance I stole at Alba tied loops in my stomach.

Alba keeps house so clean you can eat off the floor, but that Thursday night for some reason there's a cucaracha poking two thin feelers around the edge of the kitchen table, unsure whether to come out into the light. I had one eye on Alba, one eye on the cuca, but I was thinking of Cat.

Finally, like I'd just learned to talk, the words came and I told Alba where I'd put all our money. She thought I was kidding. No, I said, I'm serious as the Ten Commandments. She stared at me like I had burned her negatives and smashed her cameras, her eyes pinpoints of black light. "How could you without telling me?" is what she said. "And if it doesn't work out, can you trust Catarino?"

Trying to hide my doubts, I kept talking about other things taking off for us. Then I stopped. She had me pinned with those Argentine eyes of hers, but she wasn't seeing me, she was seeing her dreams slipping away like a boat from the dock.

Then she locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn't open the door, but I could hear her smashing things. The lamp. A framed picture of us when we first met. I slumped in the kitchen, my scar throbbing like an open vein, feeling like I had slept with another woman, or worse, and nothing since has made me feel as bad.

For a long time I stared at the bubbled-up linoleum floor, followed the cracks across the kitchen wall. The sour odors in the woodwork we tried so hard to scrub away seemed to raise up and mock me. When the lousy cockroach finally made a dash across the kitchen table, I put my thumb on it and squashed in into the next world.

Friday morning, the brown egg yolk of the sun tried to break through the dirty industrial haze of the city. Glen, the manager of the Ribeltad, woke me with an urgent call. He wanted to meet at the Hall of Justice on Seventh Street. Something urgent. Wouldn't say what it?s about till we're going down the hot, piss-smelling elevator to the morgue. At the mention of Catarino's name, my heart wrinkled up like a balloon without air.

A sheriff, pale as a maggot, led us to a walk-in freezer that smelled of chrome and formaldehyde. He pulled back the white sheet on a corpse laid out on a gurney and there's Cat dead and naked, one eye closed and one partly open, face and chest a gray, pasty color. Death had stripped away his cool-as-ice look. There's a smudge of gunpowder and a little burn hole on Cat's forehead like the dot on a question mark. Anger, rage, I don't know, made the scar on my forehead want to burst.

Can we indentify the body? It's Catarino all right, that's his mustache still waxed and curled, though the tips looked a bit singed. In a monotone voice, the sheriff told us the district attorney would be holding an inquiry, but it was pretty much a routine case. Catarino and a partner were scoring some Mexican heroin, but the deal was a setup, the dealer an undercover narcotics agent.

There wasn't much I could do for Catarino, he seemed at peace, much more at peace than I was. I wondered what movie his eyes were looking at now. Pobrecito. Then I thought, why should I feel sorry for him when I have Alba and myself to feel sorry for? Then I got angry, thinking, damn it, Cat, what were you doing? And what about your friends, did you ever think of them? Anger pulled me one way, betrayal another.

We tried to claim the body, but they wouldn?t release it till after the autopsy and the inquiry. The did turn over a manila envelope with Catarino's belongings, a wristwatch with a worn leather band, an empty wallet, his wire-rimmed glasses with one lens busted. Days later, still unable to accept what had gone down, I went to the sixth floor of the city jail to visit Catarino's partner in the deal-gone-bad. Pablo Damian, on the other side of the glass, was a guy I didn't know, had never seen before. The little mustache in his fat face looked run over by a truck. Bruises still showed from the beating, lots of purple around the bloodshot eyes and a red lump on the jaw. Damian was up for hard time, so I think he told the truth, why bother lying when you're facing twenty years? This is his story: He and Catarino were scoring a kilo of Mexican tar in Lucky Alley to resell the same day. An easy hundred percent profit, Damian said. I just listened. They came up to a blue car where the connection, a Mexican, was waiting with a paddy guy. Cat, holding the money, leaned in to check out the goods and found a gun pointed at him. Oh, no, Cat said, stepping back from the window. Then the two guys jumped out, guns drawn, no badges, nothing. While the one narco pistol-whopped Damian, Cat scuffled with the Mexican, thinking it was a rip-off. Cat fell, wrestled to the ground, then the narco blasted him in the head, point-blank. And that was that. What about the money Cat had on him? I asked Damian. Narcos kept it, never turned it in. Only about three hundred appeared as evidence in the report. I don't know why I asked if Cat had ever mentioned the York Theater. Chale, not to me, Damian said. That's all I needed to hear. I took the elevator down. Out on the street, not a breeze or leaf stirred, flocks of blackbirds perched on the chestnut trees in front of the city jail like mourners. Walking down Bryant Street, the sky gray as cinders, rage boiled inside me, I wanted to hurl stones at windows and shoot every cop that passed. By the time I reached home I felt worse than a piece of liver thrown to dogs, and I just didn't care anymore about a lot of things.

Life took a turn after that. Alba walked around for days like nothing was the matter, but I could tell she was seething inside. But the worst was yet to come. Weeks later, after I'd left the Ribeltad and thought we had healed from this disaster, Alba volunteered as an user for the San Francisco Film Festival, where she met this Brazilian filmmaker. She wound up serving him as camerawoman, secretary, and lover. When I found out, a great fight exploded between us. I came home one day and her cameras were gone. That's all she took, and she moved to Project Artuad with a girlfriend. What could I do? I slipped deep into darkness and bad dreams. I'd show the film she'd taken of me at the Ribeltad over and over, trying to see what she'd seen, and I couldn't see a damn thing. All I saw were black-and-white images on her little editing machine. Light and darkness. Then just the darkness. And one peek at her red spike-heeled shoes, which I kept under our once-happy bed and I'd walk around torn up for days. Still, I was glad she wasn't wearing them for the Brazilian. After the Brazilian dumped her, we ran into each other one night at the Roxie at a showing of La Hora de los Hornos. We went out for coffee afterward, and she said she'd never really loved the Brazilian, the affair was just revenge for betraying her. Betraying her how, I asked? By lying to her about the York deal. Too late I remembered her definition of a lie, not telling when you should is also lying, and I saw how I'd killed something between us when I lost that money, something I can't repay or splice back in.

She moved back a week later. I just don't know if she feels the same as before, though she eats and sleeps with me, sometimes I catch her singing to herself in Portugese, and her eyes focus on my forehead when we're talking. She keeps saying we're so different because we're from opposite ends of the continent. I guess it's only a matter of time, I don't know what else to do. You make peace in your head, but there's a piece of your heart that never heals. I hadn't thought about Catarino and Lucky Alley in a long time. Usually I take my bus on Potrero, today, for some reason, I walked down Twenty-fourth Street to Mission and passed by the York Theater all boarded up and still dying for affection. This set me thinking how sometimes you work so hard for something, still the results turn out just the opposite. When I came to Lucky Alley I remembered Catarino, I wish I could forgive him, wish I could believe in friendship, honor, and law, but I can't. True, Cat paid the the ultimate price, but he also gave me his word with no intention of keeping it. In the barrio a man has only his word, and if his word is no good, he's nothing.

Sometimes, at four, five in the morning, when I've crawled in from the jale and have slipped quietly under the blankets not to wake Alba who is toasty next to me, I don't sleep but stare at the striped shadows cast by the venetian blinds on the bedroom wall and listen to the rumbling buses below my window and the occasional whoosh of a car going by, the only sounds in the city, then the welt from that old scar starts pounding on my forehead like a drum with an urgent message, and I think maybe I should have followed up with Brody anyway, tried raising more cash, maybe I quit too soon. Then I figure, hell, the theater's still empty and available, no reason why I can't do it, right? And just before I fall asleep a cozy feeling comes over me and everything seems possible, like the world will spin my way. But the next morning, in the cruel, unforgiving light of day, those dreams burn off like fog.

Today, when I passed by Lucky Alley and started thinking about Catarino and how different my life is now with Alba, who seems to be in a movie of her own, her resentment rich as silver dollars, and how all we do is argue about the bills and that two-thousand-dollar loan that burned my credit forever, cause I couldn't pay it back, I knewdefinitely and forever, I would never open the York Theater. It's all just theory now.

I kept walking to Mission Street and waited for the bus. I don't drive anymore, not since I wrecked in Lucky Alley. I don't drink either, ever since Alba came back; I don't want to fall in to parandas. I don't miss it, cept it's hard having to smell it all the time, that's the worst part of my job, the stink of spilled booze and urine. I should look for something else, but for now I work the plank in a downtown bar, the night run, six days a week till two in the morning, doesn't leave much time for the movies.

But I'm not complaining. My love for Alba is something I wouldn't trade for an Oscar. You have to forgive your lovers their sins; how else ill you know you love them? It's important to move on, even if it's a half-step at a time. Next year, if we're still together, the plan is for Alba to finish school and get her degree. At last. Then maybe she can get out of Channel 5 and into something she really loves. She's never stopped dreaming of making films, you know, and it would be a shame to waste her talent. We have rolls of he film we look at once in a while. Sometimes I mention kids, having some together, then Alba falls into moods when she won't talk to me, and I know she's brooding about how I betrayed her. That's when I feel like we're in a foreign movie with all the subtitles missing. Even though it's been a long time since we've mentioned Catarino, and we avoid Brazilian movies, you can understand why, I can't help feeling these mistakes have led to our present unhappiness, no matter how hard we try, and have tried, to forget the past.

So on Mission Street the number-14 Mission pulls up to the curb and I'm pushed forward by the crowd. I'm in the middle of a mob of high schoolers with their starter jackets, their baseball hats turned backward. They're all laughing, shouting, shoving, and I make some way so this little old lady, looks like your abuela in Mexico, can get on with her two hand-held bags. I mean, big deal.

I move to the back of the bus and I'm looking out the graffiti-tagged windows as we go by the New Mission Theater where big red letters on the marquee announce Corrupcion Encandenada starring Hugo Stiglitz and Patricia Santos, "La Tumbahombres." To me, all these young people are oblivious to the real world. It's like they're waiting for the curtain to rise, the lights to dim, waiting for the credits to start rolling. Life to them is a Saturday night flick, something starring themselves, and they're the hero in a fancy car who gets the girl, or they're dreaming of doing an ingrata number, cold-hearted yet they want jewels, a new house, and the leading man, anyway. They're dreaming. They think life is a movie with El Santo waiting in the wings. You can't blame them, you believe what you want to believe. Who wants to hear there's betrayal around every corner, that honor and friendship are lies, that somewhere, someplace, someone's got your name on their knife. But believe me, I know. So watch yourself in Lucky Alley, carnal.

written by Alejandro Murguia

from "Currents from the Dancing River"
--Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry
edited by Ray Gonzalez
© 1994