Thin, Cobalt Blue Line

Maybe it was the Heineken I drank in the terminal before boarding my usual BUR to OAK flight. Maybe it was the late, hazy hour. Something drew my attention out the window of the Southwest commuter plane, to the cobalt blue runway lights that looked so familiar and in an instant conjured a long lost memory, and closed a loop of associations. I laughed a little to myself, realizing that the backside of Burbank was Sun Valley. The backside of the suburbs was the ghetto. The backside of 2009, for the moment, was 1992.

Claudia and Letty, the older sisters of two of my friends clamored into the room where Lisa, Tonie and I were still sleeping at noon on a Friday. We were ditching and had no intentions of making it to school. The older girls, both 19, woke us up to say we had to come to a costume party.

“It’s Halloween! We got matching masks for all of us. Aren’t they cute?” Letty pulled simple black satin eye-masks with feathers out of her aqua plastic swap meet bag.

Lisa sat up and said, “Uhhh…no. We’re not going to anymore cholo parties. Everytime we go with you there ends up being drama.”

“But these aren’t cholos! They’re techno guys!”

“What’s that?”

“They’re just chill. They’re not from nowhere. They’re completely different.”

Claudia added, “They don’t bang, they don’t claim no neighborhood. They just chill and have parties, and they all dance.”

“Aaaayyyy! You guys have to come! We need more girls. We can’t go just the two of us!” Letty was not giving up.

“Fine, but if there’s cholos there, we’re leaving.”

“I promise they’re not from nowhere.”

We got up and made our own trip to the swap meet for some Mary Kay and Merci Gelle. In those days, we spent a lot of time getting ready. After the shower, the hair had to be scrunched with mousse and left to dry before you could do your bangs. The bangs involved curling irons, hot rollers, round and vented brushes, and lots of Aquanet. I was still learning, so I pretty much copied whatever I saw, down to the Light Ivory foundation, and I was not a Light Ivory girl. We all shared makeup, Light Ivory Coverstick, great for undereye circles, zits, and hickeys. Everything else was brown: blush, shadow, lipstick. This was the mark of fashionable girls, girls who weren’t cholas. Cholas were forever wearing hard black eyeliner and burgundy lipstick, but we knew better. Brown makeup was softer, more natural, and it separated us from the gang bangers we were outgrowing.

When we got to Tonie’s house that night, Letty and Claudia instructed us that when you went to techno parties, you could either wear baggy pants with suspenders and cute little tops, or short shorts with cute little tops. Since I didn’t have baggy pants, they cut my jeans into Daisy Dukes, lent me a pair of cowboy boots and a tube top, and I was ready to go. None of us had cars or knew how to drive, so we made some phone calls looking for a ride, but there were no takers, so we headed out to the party on foot.

It seemed like we walked for hours through different residential and insdustrial neighborhoods, finally ending in a warehouse district. We followed the sound of heavy bass to where the promoters had broken into an abandoned warehouse. Once we knew where the party was, Letty and Claudia decided we needed to get some drinks before going inside. We found a liquor store and the girls got some guy to buy us each a 40 of Mickey’s. While we drank, Claudia told us how she’d kicked it with Everlast from House of Pain after a concert a few weeks earlier. They’d spent the night drinking Mickey’s and she was convinced it was the best malt liquor around.

It was two weeks before my 14th birthday, so the girls dedicated their first 40s to me and Letty, who would be turning 20 the following week. Once the beer was gone we paid our $5 and went into the party. I realized walking in that I didn’t know how to dance yet. I’d never been to a dance party before and certainly wasn’t prepared to show off up on a go-go box, but there I found myself, thick little thighs and nalgas hanging out of my Dukes, stomping along to some deep house song I’d never heard. In those days, you could always count on one of the DJs playing Tainted Love, and we danced to that too. Our love of KROQ was a symbol of us not being ghetto. Sure we listened to HipHop and House on Power106, but we also knew our Cure, Smiths, and Berlin.

Sweating, buzzed, feeling more grown up and having more fun than I ever anticipated, I still had to pee like crazy. 40 ounces of malt liquor goes through a 13 year old bladder like malt liquor through a seive, and I quickly learned that party girls don’t need no stinking bathrooms. No, we were worldly, rebel women who could pee in the bushes just like the boys. We were squatting behind a white, tagged up delivery truck when we first heard the popping sounds. We paused in our peeing, “Are those fireworks?”

“Maybe it’s coming from inside.”

And louder, closer, guns started blasting everywhere. We didn’t stop to drip-dry, just pulled up our tiny little shorts and ran, and ran, and ran, fiercely clinging to each other’s shirts and hands so we wouldn’t get separated in the crowd.

We stopped at a fence. Nowhere else to run. Behind the fence a field of cobalt blue runway lights stretched as far as we could see. “Where are we?”

Tonie sat on the curb, crying. “Where’s my brother? You guys have to find Eddie. He can’t be back there. Oh my god, what if he got shot?”

“He didn’t, he was inside, I’m sure he ran like everybody else. We’ll look for him once the crowd dies down.”

“Oh my god, what if the cops got him? Look, see who they’re arresting. Is that Danny Lugo? Eddie was with him.”

We prayed, we worried. I already had a reputation for predictions because one night I’d had a bad feeling about going out and the party we’d gone to had gotten raided by the cops. So everyone looked to me to see if I thought Eddie would be ok. “He’s fine. Nothing happened to him. We should just stay here for a while, then look for him if he doesn’t find us. Do you guys know where we are? What airport is this?”

“I don’t know. How far did we walk? Maybe we’re in San Fernando or Sylmar.”

“How are we gonna get home?”

“We’ll have to get a ride.”

“From who?”

“We’ll just have to get one. Don’t worry, I’ll get us home.” Letty always knew what to do.

“O.K.”

And she did. We waited for a long time. A cop came along and asked what we were doing. We didn’t run, figuring we had a good excuse. Tonie explained that we’d gotten separated from her brother and were waiting for him to find us. “You need to get going. It’s past curfew. I’m not gonna call your parents, but you need to go ahead on home now.”

So Letty got us a ride. She flagged down some guys in an Oldsmobile and sweet talked them. Asked if they’d give 5 cute girls a ride home. When he asked what he’d get in return, she said he’d get the honor of giving 5 cute girls a ride home. He laughed, said we’d have to pile on laps (the car was already full). So we sat on his friends’ laps and got home, where Eddie was waiting for us and watching a re-run of S.T.U.D.S. on channel 9. We ran to the fridge, heated tortillas on the stove and spread them with peanut butter and jelly, ate and fell asleep like little angels with our make-up on.

On the plane, looking out, I realized how close we’d been to home that night, how close the good neighborhoods are to the bad ones, and what a thin line there is between the little raver girl who found safety in those runway lights, and the woman who was flying over them.