Justice: A Semi-autobiographical Fiction

by James Rovira

Downtown Dairy Valley, California, 1968: the intersection of two lane Gridley Road and Artesia Boulevard. On one corner the Tastee Freeze stood like a fortress of pleasure fortified against the summer heat; in spite of its outdoor seating it still cooled us off with ice cream cones dipped in chocolate, hot fudge Sundaes, and ice cold Cokes. A Texaco and a Mobil station occupied two other corners. Locked in a gas war to the death, they volleyed lower prices and various goodies from fully loaded painted windows. A family owned drive-through convenience store stood on the fourth corner sheltering a pony ride immediately behind it. Dairy Valley surrounded Artesia like a horseshoe; Artesia was the hub of a rural wheel encircling the neighborhoods, the older library, Holy Family Catholic Church, the elementary school, and Faye Ross Junior High, while Dairy Valley itself consisted of farm after farm after farm.

“Madonna and Child” (oil on gessoed wood board)
by Kay Darling

Until 1968, the year Dairy Valley began its transformation into Cerritos, California, home of one of the country’s first indoor malls and its first solar powered city hall. My family moved into one of the first subdivisions built over a cow pasture. The day the Cerritos Chamber of Commerce erected an ornate, wooden sign marking the entrance into our newly renamed city, a sign resembling a Cub Scouts wood burning project, my father and I with several other families planted trees around the sign. My own house overlooked the railroad tracks that ran awkwardly through our city. The last dairy farm in the area lay across the tracks from my house. Eventually one of the two gas stations closed and the other was refurbished, developers plowed down the family owned convenience store to make room for a 7-11, the empty lot next to it became a Bally Health spa, and a small community of closely huddled duplexes meant the end of the pony rides. Both Gridley and Artesia were widened to four lanes. Eventually the subdivisions took over the entire block, their roughened yellow masonry walls marching down the street like an unassailable army.

My neighborhood grew fat with young families and their small children, and like the Star Trek utopia we admired on television our neighborhood was a model of racial diversity. Mexican, Vietnamese, Scottish, Irish, Chinese, Puerto Rican, African American, Filipino, and Korean families all lived on the same block, shopped at the same grocery store, met at the same PTA and Cub Scout meetings, and saw their children through the same elementary, junior high, and high schools. We got into fights and played on the same little league teams and attended the same Catholic Church, our one real common denominator. We had to work through the accents of our friend’s parents and learn each other’s food when we visited for dinner. Our front doors were thresholds between an outer Southern Californian suburbia and the more intimate world of our family lives, a world dominated by what was foreign furniture, language, art, foods, and smells to everyone else. Everyone I knew was comfortably well off, and most of the people I knew from the neighborhood lived there for years. We grew up together.

I wasted hours looking out my window over that last cow pasture. I’d study the cows whenever I got too bored and wondered about the people who lived in the house across the railroad tracks dividing the farm from my subdivision. The farm family seemed alien to me, not Jon, my Chinese best friend down the street. The cows were a grotesquely familiar study in tedium. They sat. They stood. They slept. They ate. Then they defecated, feeding the grass that fed them in an endless cycle, seldom approaching the boundaries of their world. They seemed to see no sense in wandering, staying happy so long as the grass was green and they were left alone, living to produce milk until slaughtered for their meat. In the middle of the cow pasture the ranchers built a structure to keep the rain off the hay – probably three stories tall with no walls, just a frame supporting a roof stacked to the top with hay. Shortly after the cows left I watched it burn. Someone set fire to it. Dairy Valley was gone forever, a sick tribute to its last farm being the Black Angus built over the site.

By 1980 the only remaining vestiges of the old farm community were the Tastee Freeze and the Catholic Church, the twin suns around which my young soul revolved. One particular trip to Tastee Freeze stands out in my memory, one summer between fourth grade and fifth. The sky hung like a taut blue tent that day and perfectly shaped little white clouds rolled across it like tanks across a desert. I could actually see the clouds moving. I made my way across the street and ordered a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. Round concrete tables with stone benches the shape of bent rectangles surrounded the entrance of the Tastee Freeze, dwarfing the ants patrolling the sidewalk cracks into miniature irrelevance. A patio sheltered some of its outdoor seating, protecting it under the overhang of a large, high peaked red roof, while the seats nearest the road stood right out in the sun. I didn’t feel like sitting down, and no one was around, so I just stood over by the tables near the edge of the sidewalk, right at the edge of the shade.

A teenage boy came flying by on a skateboard and jammed his open hand against my chest, making me drop my ice cream cone. I looked down and saw ants swarming greedily over the white mess as it melted away, chewing randomly at my foot as well. I barely heard the boy say, “Move it or lose it!” as he flew by me. A neighborhood girl came by right then, a small drop of beauty so fine looking at her was like looking into the face of God. Zöe. Right then she was laughing. With her perfect ten year old mouth, her blushing ten year old cheeks, she was laughing.

At me.

I wasn’t going to put up with that. I pushed her down.

I should have known better, of course. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment and her eyes red and wet with the beginning of tears as she stood back up, but somehow there wasn’t a trace of anger behind them when she asked me what had happened. She was laughing at the expression on my face, not at what happened to me. She hadn’t seen that. To laugh at what happened would have required at least a slight cruel streak. She had none. She was kind, the Madonna of west Cerritos, maybe of all Southern California, and I swear if I were to unbutton her shirt I’d see a pierced, bleeding Catholic heart through her translucent skin.

As Catholic as she was, I didn’t think about Zöe when I thought about the Catholic Church. I thought of my grandmother. Holy Trinity Catholic Church – the other pole of my existence – and my grandmother were made for each other. I grew up living with both. She was a worried old woman. Not about anything in particular because worry for her was a frame of mind, a commitment she kept, a view of life. She had her share of pain: her husband died in the 1950’s leaving her to raise five children on her own. Even though life had done all the damage it intended for her she was still worried. Rocking chairs, rosaries, Jean Naté perfume, the same five flowered print dresses, McDonald’s after church, puttering around the house, frowning, furrowed brows, television, and stories about the children she taught: my grandmother. Her love of Jean Naté perfume, purchased in industrial size bottles, was especially entertaining. I remember seeing her empathetic smile one night as she watched a Jean Naté commercial on television. A young blonde in a jet setting crowd, surrounded by men, walks into room after room, situation after situation, always in control, always the center of attention, always wearing Jean Naté.

Just like my grandmother.

My mother drove my grandmother and dragged me to church every Sunday. I went to CCD until the fourth grade but quit when I was given a choice. Religion was something to be experienced but not forced upon my young psyche, a joint decision made by my agnostic father and marginally Catholic mother. Over time I learned that agnostics were thinking atheists while self proclaimed atheists were fundamentally religious but too stupid to know it. My CCD teacher dressed like a woman in her late 60’s though no older than 35, typically adorned with horned-rimmed glasses, blonde hair pulled back tight, a long sleeve cream colored blouse and a beige skirt. If I were making this woman up I’d be less cliché.

She taught us that the Holy Spirit was distributed in degrees based upon the worshiper’s piety, keeping a big red cardboard thermometer in her classroom to illustrate the point. A person who went to Mass every major holiday and gave a little once in a while had about 10 degrees of the Holy Spirit, assuming they had been baptized and made their first communion. This made up the vast majority of Catholics. Future experience bore this out. A person who went to Mass maybe once a month, now, that person was about 40 degrees in the red, safely above freezing but still cool. Going to Mass every week, giving to the church, participating in all the sacraments, and living a good life brought you up to a comfortable 70-80 degrees. Give yourself another five points if people point at you when they hear that Billy Joel song, an extra ten if you’re a male and they point at you when they hear that Billy Joel song, and an extra twenty if you’re a male and not gay. I imagine priests reached well over 90 degrees, completely alive. I figured the teacher was over 100 degrees, maybe dangerously feverish. Feverish to the point of delirium, in fact. The heat of the room was stifling. No, not just the heat, the very air, the stillness of the children sitting rigidly in their seats, at attention, listening to drivel even my ten year old mind knew enough to reject, that, that was stifling. But Catholic timing was always perfect: just as the atmosphere became unbearably maddening the bell would ring, our signal to file out of the classroom to go to Mass.

Much better.

Mass was odd. Three almost young people played acoustic guitars and led the congregation, off key, in Kum Ba Yah and other deeply meaningful songs. I know enough now to know Yah is an allusion to the Hebrew name for God but I still don’t know what the hell that song means. It keeps getting mixed up in my head with Kimbaa the white lion. Then the formal part of the Mass began. We all had books, the priest and the congregation. The priest would read his part. We would read our part. We would stand. Then we would sit. Then we would kneel. Then we would stand again while the priest recited the reading for that week. Then we would kneel while the priest read something else. Then we would bow our heads and beat our breast. Not really. The book said to “beat our breast” but we skipped that part. Then we would stand, then we would sit, then the priest would preach for 20 minutes or so. I don’t recall a single word he said. He spoke perfect English, clear and direct, every sentence declarative. I imagine they would have been breezes to diagram. But I sat there and listened like he was speaking Greek or Spanish.

All that was bad enough. The real problems began when I started asking questions.

“Mom, why are we sitting now?”

“Just do it.”

“Why are we kneeling here?”

“Because that’s what we do.”

“Why do we stand at this part?”

“¡Hay Diós mio! Que jodon.”

“C’mon, if we’re all doing it, what does it mean?”

“Don’t bother me now. You can ask the priest later.”

I looked to my right and saw an older woman kneeling before a porcelain statue of Mary, surrounded by candles, their flames quivering in rhythm with her silent, passionate mouth. I glanced over just a bit and saw the doors of the confessional, remembering its hushed silence and the tattered outline of the priest visible through the partition, remembering my cold curiosity about the necessity of exposure for redemption and forgiveness. Then I surveyed the congregation and saw an ocean of hair, hair of all kinds; black and gray, blonde, red, short, long, well-groomed, messy and nappy, all standing, all sitting, all kneeling, all listening, all doing, none asking, none knowing why. Just meaningless repetition. Sit. Stand. Kneel. At the end of the sermon everyone filed to the front to kneel before the priest and be fed their share of the life of God, quietly leaving afterwards to smoke cigarettes outside the church. The church provided for its members all the spiritual sustenance they could possibly crave while the crowd acted obediently, in unison, like a well trained herd, never exceeding the boundaries set for them. I had the program down. I hated it. I caught sight of Zöe’s face as she filed out with the rest. Her long brown hair wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl, almost concealing her face, like a holy cave within which she would hide. Tears glistened in gentle, loving eyes that caressed the floor as she left, keeping her oblivious to her surroundings. On my twelfth birthday I happened to ride by the church on my bike, remembering most of what I had seen inside, and swore to myself I would never set foot in a Catholic church again.

I kept that promise until my grandmother’s funeral. She had a stroke when I was seventeen years old, right after I’d just been saved, an Assemblies of God filled with the HolyGhost brand new Christian. Zöe was part of that too, getting saved a year before me, sweet sixteen for Jesus then sitting next to me the very next year in our senior high school English class. She’d write in my journal and I’d write in hers, usually love poetry that embarrassed her and excited her more than she would admit even to herself. I looked over at her one day when she was writing in mine. “What’s your favorite kind of car?” “Challenger.” “Uh hum.” I watched her intently but she refused to let me see what she was writing until she finished. “What color would it be?” “Black. Black or deep blue.” Soon she quit writing and was just reading. I wanted her to stop. I wanted her to read it all. Ten minutes short of taking forever she finally returned my journal. I flipped straight to the last page. “Hello, I’m Jim’s conscience. I don’t get too much attention around here…hey!…I almost got run over by a blue Challenger…Anyway, I wish he’d listen to me more often. I really do have good things to say.”

It wasn’t that my Christian friends seemed to genuinely love me while my druggie friends, for the most part, didn’t. It wasn’t that I’d been reading the Bible (along with Shakespeare and Plato and Aristotle and Orwell and Moorcock and Louis L’Amour) for the last four years. It was the persistent voice of God. Nothing audible, just usually a slight quality laid over another person’s voice, like two people saying the same words at the same time, like a whisper through a bullhorn, like a subtle unrelenting vision of love and beauty. Always something I could ignore if I chose to be dishonest. Getting saved was surrender. I had a lot of resistance to overcome.

So by the time my grandmother had her stroke and I started visiting her in the nursing home I didn’t resent it as a chore. I just knew I was supposed to. Acceptance. Acceptance of the soft slapping of my tennis shoes against the highly polished linoleum tile. Acceptance of the pale electric translucence of the dingy fluorescent lighting. Acceptance of the smell of old, of the creak of the door into her semi-private room, of the old familiar worry in her face even though she had absolutely nothing to say. The worry seemed just slightly intensified now, like a very mild panic, like she was either looking at someone she didn’t recognize or was afraid to finally meet death. For the first time in my life I wanted to pray with her. More than that, I felt like I should. I heard the words in my head…God, I just pray You’d give her peace, God, let her know that you’re with her and that You love her. But I’d pressed up against an imperceptible boundary, a limit I didn’t know was there because I’d never approached it before. So what I said was, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Grandma, ok?”

Then I stood up and left. I think I went to church that night. It must have been a Wednesday night. The very next day we got the call from the nursing home.

Attending Assemblies of God churches greatly increased my appreciation for the Catholic Church. Meaningless repetition wasn’t allowed but we were still repetitive. They just insisted that the repetition mean something each and every time, with the implicit demand that we didn’t notice just how repetitive it was. We had to feel, to personally experience, the presence of God, each and every time. There was no priest in robes; AG clerical gowns back then consisted of polyester suits in a variety of earth tones – picture the suits you see on the racks at thrift stores – matched with power ties that looked like a compost heap vomited on a wide strip of silk. The baby blues and creamy yellows and leprechaun greens and the wide variety of beiges and browns: it took real courage to dress that badly and real passion to sing off-key that loudly. My pastor favored a beige one with a cream colored shirt. It was tacky. It was loud. It was self-consciously unselfconscious, if you can imagine that. Nothing was figured out. If you were too smart you either weren’t trusted or, at best, pitied. Since Zöe got saved a good year or so before me she was praying for me with my other born again friends who’d waged a bet with my heathen, pot smoking friends that I would indeed get saved. It took me a few months and getting saved to figure out why they didn’t eat lunch every so often then not tell me why. But they won their bet.

Pascal would have been amused and maybe just a little bit proud. The first AG church I was really involved in gave me my first experience with church politics and pastoral sin: some of the deacons observed that the pastor was a little too affectionate with one of his female parishioners, a fortyish blonde that looked and acted in ways that reminded me of a high school cheerleader. There was just something…oh…backseat about her. Rumors started circulating about them having an affair. I didn’t buy it. Then I found out the financial mess associated with the new gymnasium was really behind all the rumors, which were just an excuse to get rid of him, and that made me even sicker. And it wasn’t just our church. Every large, visible AG church in my area saw similar pastoral flaps, usually over adultery or over money or both. I couldn’t stay oblivious.

I remember driving through the church parking lot one day, staring down the building like it was my cathedral of hate, I wanted to smash those stones, not leave a single one upon the other, what goes on in there, really, and what did they build it to house, frustrated and disillusioned to the point of swearing I’d never attend another Assemblies of God church again. I’d come full circle, first round the Catholic circle then around the Pentecostal and soon I was going to be out of churches to reject, the same stupidity no matter where I turned. And I remembered something, just an image, a simple one, common, from a field trip I’d taken to the Long Beach County Courthouse my junior year of High School. It was of a statue of Justice standing in the lobby, an impressive robed woman, blindfolded, holding a pair of scales, the circles of the scales tipped by an invisible weight. One foot stood in front of the other, like she was walking a tightrope. Then I looked up and across the parking lot and saw a group of ten year olds running and ducking and hiding and giggling and I saw her, I saw Zöe, facing toward a wall with her hands over her face, counting, her arms jutting out without weighing any balance, just the play of innocence on another summer’s day, that she knew and I wanted to forget was supposed to be devoted to joy. And I knew the blind, blessedly oblivious face beneath the blindfold was Zöe’s, and I just couldn’t leave, for she was holding me in her balance, and there was nowhere else I would rather be.