Segregation Games (Archie Williams)

SEGREGATION GAMES

Our idea of cruising was to take the horses down to the highway on hot summer weekends—especially Saturday afternoons—to catch the tourist traffic coming back from the seashore. Used to be no traffic out here in the valley. But after Ladybird Johnson and her Secret Service came here in ’66, there’s been a steady stream of traffic ever since. Saturday afternoons, you could hardly cross the highway for the traffic. As I said, it was summer, we were all dressed up in halter tops and cut-offs, we’d collect our horses up between our creamy thighs and they’d rear and leap like Pegasuses. You know, like in the MGM movie? Not that I got to see that many movies, we didn’t have a car to get into town. On horseback, we’d race alongside open convertibles the size of boats, full of rich Sleepy Hollow boys all dressed in white tennis sweaters, sunburnt golden and blond, heading back to town. We’d try to catch their eyes in the hopes of tracking them down later on in school. But their girlfriends ran a pretty tight defence, with their dagger eyes. We couldn’t get past ’em.

Where the guys hung out in school was critical. The parking lot was segregated into the hard guys’ and jocks’ turf. Sometimes there were skirmishes when one gang crossed into another’s territory, but they saved the gladiator games for after the football matches. The cheerleader types sat on the jocks’ laps in their souped-up cars parked by the gym, smoking and necking during recess. The hard guys and Spics who hung out by the palm tree, all looked like James Dean, hair greased back, tight T-shirts n’ jeans. Tino was to-die-for-gorgeous, he’d wear these tight black jeans that wrapped ‘round his hips like snakeskin and teeshirts so white, they’d blind you, but those guys never went out to the ocean. Fourth Street was their turf.

You could always tell the greaser chicks, no matter where they hung out, they were always ratting their hair and spraying it until it was stiff as glass, and they were forever rebuilding their eyelashes with Mabeline. The palm tree in the hard guy’s corner always reminded me of the story of Jesus riding into Bethlehem on an ass. Or was it Mary? Once I had to play Joseph dragging my white ass through Marin City, with all these little Black kids who never even saw a donkey before, let alone a skinny white kid dressed in bedsheets in their neighborhood. It was a long way to Bethlehem at the bottom of the hill.