Grown Men Cry

I don’t know about you, but even without a television, every few hours I get such violent depressing breaking news stories.

Try as I might, it skews my worldview. This week was overwhelming.

I keep reminding myself that goodness, kindness, and happiness also exist in ample supply if we look for it. Or better yet, make it.

The other night I was in the living room writing away when I hear a quickly escalating argument between two people moving toward me. Yelling, cursing and crying seemed to turn into physical fighting from what felt like just outside my door.

Having grown up in the challenges of a poor and violent downtown L.A., I have an instinctual routine that makes sure I’m not going to get caught in a crossfire before I go stick my head out the door.

To be fair, we haven’t had a crossfire in this neck of the Koreatown woods, but we do get our share of messy.

An interesting aspect of living south of Olympic is how just one intersection, 250 feet away from exclusive Hancock Park, separates the homeowners from the renters.

I am on the intense densely populated working-class side, composed of Mexican, Central American, Korean and Black folks.

I am always surprised by how many of my neighbors wear uniforms for their service industry jobs. The philosopher, Mr. RuPaul Charles, says ‘we’re all born naked, the rest is drag’. My playwright Guayabera and professor jacket speak to my station in life.

When something goes down in this neighborhood, people don’t lock their doors, they do the opposite and open them wide, running out to see what’s up. Even the cholos can be counted on to be emergency personnel.

It is at once a communal immigrant response and a crowded neighborhood flex to see whatever is happening because it is probably involving someone you know.

One day there was a tragic crash when a senior accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake in his car and ran over some folks on the sidewalk. Everyone was out on the street helping in seconds. Even non-social Jun from upstairs came running out with his Costco first aid kit.

Another day, our neighborhood homeless man had a seizure while lying on the bus bench at the corner, and folks went to him without question. I saw the old lady from next door coming back with a little plastic bucket of wipes and water. When I asked her what she was doing, she said in Spanish that she ‘cleaned him up a little’ while they waited for the ambulance.

The fight seemed closer, but it turned out to be on the tiny lawn of the apartment building next door where a couple were having it out in public. They’re both so nice to me, spending their unemployed days hanging out behind the Mobil station sitting on two abandoned office chairs smoking pot.

Someone had already separated them, and a small group of neighbors were there when I nosily strolled over to see what was up with Jun, William, Ana, along with the new young hipster Korean couple from our building.

The couple looked a mess. He was bleeding from his nose, and her hair and makeup looked wild and destroyed.

There was a born-again homeboy who lives down the block counseling them both. He told everyone not to call the police as it would make things worse.

She looked calm and collected, and I heard her tell my neighbor, “I’m fine, he’s the one that’s not in a good place”.

He was sitting on the curb with his head tilted back to stop the nosebleed, openly crying, unable to stop, wearing a Lakers jersey and basketball shorts. Watching such a destroyed human sobered our small crowd immediately. I could see him telling our spiritual center vato, “I’m just so sad”.

The effect of a such a public declaration took a hold on our nosy little group.

In retrospect, this was probably not the best move, but I went back inside and got a bag full of all the leftover snacks from my class that I was dying to get rid of and brought them out for the couple, saying ‘you should eat something’.

Everyone started passing around the snacks and it did lighten the mood. I was terrified someone would ask me where I got them and I would have to say, “Oh, you know, from Surfas, the high-end culinary warehouse down the street. The cookies are from France, Italy and Belgium.” That would have surely destroyed my street cred.

Anyway, I was jolted by the public display of such intense emotion. Lord knows, I get my fair share of it working in the theatre and teaching, but even then, it always seems so private n the sanctuary of a theater or the intimacy of a classroom.

I only openly weep in my bedroom.

That’s not true.

What I just did was bury the lead.

The last few days of war mongering, election tampering, and Epstein filing, has made me feel sheepish about sharing good news. Like there isn’t room for it.

The truth is, I had a good week in a year, and a neighborhood, of a lot of challenge.

I truly was moved to get an honorable mention for the Glickman prize, the highest honor in Bay Area theatre. I’ve won the award twice and it’s a beautiful endorsement of the work I have been doing at the Magic Theater in San Francisco with Campo Santo, especially with ‘Aztlan’, a play about contemporary redemption that not even I knew would travel 939 years and 22 generations to ask who we are as Chicanos today.

Sometimes your mentors, in this case Morgan Jenness and Irene Fornes, now ghosts, sit on your shoulder and guide you on a process in the dark towards some light.

A few months ago, the Dramatists Guild asked me to write a short piece about grief for an upcoming themed issue, which just came out in their winter quarterly in a two-page spread. I love it when you write something and let it go, never knowing where it will end up.

This week I received a copy of a new book about my work. I feel sheepish to say that there are now two books in which I am in the title. I feel like I have joined the ranks of ‘Barbara Cartland’s Jigsaw’ or ‘Judith Kranz’s Scruples’, although mine are academic and less romantic; ‘The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro’, and now this one, ‘Reimagining Classics, the Classroom, and Community with Luis Alfaro’.

The truth is, even at this age, it’s hard to feel like I deserve such a thing. Then I started reading the introduction.

It was written by Young Richard Kim, a Korean American historian of the ancient Mediterranean world.

If only I knew Young as simply his title, a classics scholar.

We met in 2019 at the Society for Classical Studies conference at a big ocean front hotel in San Diego. I was invited to give a keynote speech by my longtime friend and dramaturg, Mary Louise Hart, of the J. Paul Getty Museum. Young was the Director of Educational Programs for the Onassis Foundation USA at that time.

One of my tiny joys is seeing Young in the video of Patti Smith singing ‘People Have the Power’ with the community Choir Choir Choir in the lobby of The Public Theater in New York, which the Onassis co-presented.

We started talking at that conference and we had a lot of reasons to become friends, including our shared SoCal and religious upbringings.

Young has an intense desire to bring the classics to a contemporary world. Even the way he talks about it in his classes to young working-class kids in Chicago is inspiring.

Then we started dreaming together and the project that this book is based on came to pass.

‘Speaking My Mind’ was a community engagement, sponsored by Dr. Rebecca Rugg, Dean of the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts at UIC, that was full of events like lunchtime testimonies with medical staff, administrators, doctors, social workers at the hospital, listening circles with medical students, pozole with the community at the Pilsen Food Pantry, community breakfast at Gage Park clinic, open forums, dialogues, etc. at the University of Illinois in Chicago, with inspiring trips to the Springfield and Champagne Urbana campuses as well.

I taught, I listened, we fed people, we talked about illness, mental and otherwise, in the medical community.

It was in those late-night car trips back to the city that I really got to know Young as a deep friend. True confessions, corny jokes, memories of youth, venting about systems.

Over group lunches, and long car rides, I began to intimately know the dreams and desires of the small crew that made this impossibly large idea happen; Dr. Christine Dunford, director of the School of Theatre and Music at UIC; Dr. Xiomara Cornejo, my project partner; Wendy Madrigal, our coordinator; and Jacob Clinkscales, our assistant.

I loved the early morning freezing cold rides to the Pilsen Food Pantry and the Gage Park clinic. Even when it was snowing.

Young’s intense devotion to his wife and children left a profound impression on me. His leaning into faith, religious and otherwise, to get through difficult times.

Young describes the book as our friendship in pages.

I’ve only been able to get through the introduction because, I am sure this is not true, but right now this book feels like it’s only for me.

And like my rebellious unemployed pot smoking neighbor next door, I can’t stop crying.

Celebrate the good, even if it brings up uncontrollable feelings. We only get to take this trip once.

Make it a happy productive one, full of service, and joy.