Pour Vida Zine 3.2 (San Bernardino Issue)

Table of Contents “Highways, No Way” by Michael Tesauro……………………………………………….…….p. 2-3 “Santa Fe Whistle” by Adam Daniel Martinez………………………………………………....p. 5 “Scribbled Notes on a Nameless Mass Shooting from Someone Who Wasn’t There”

by Danny De Maio………………………………………………………………………………………..p. 7-9 “Berdoo I love you, but you’re bringing me down” by Diego Napoles……………..p. 10 “Yell like Hell to the Heavens” by Jonathan Gilcrest…………………………..……p. 11-14 Photos by Nick Serrato…………………………………………………..……..p. 4, p.6, p. 10, p. 14 For all inquiries or if you wish to contribute: pourvidazine@gmail.com Editor’s note: Dedicated to the place that made us—San Bernardino, CA—this one-off issue is a short collection of writings and photography by 6 friends/writers who have respect, love, admiration, and sadness when they think about their hometown. This is our gesture of solace, goodwill, or simply what we felt in our hearts to offer to our city in light of our recent trauma. We at Pour Vida have always believed in the power of writing through traumatic experiences to produce meaning, or to find refuge within the chaos that is life. Thank you for your support.

- a.m.

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“Highways, No Way”

By Michael Tesauro

I hadn’t been back in San Bernardino for more than a few hours. I was back for a funeral. A homeless man approached me outside of the CVS where I bought Advil and a bottle of water. He had a glass vial in his hand. I know now that this was for crack cocaine. I still remember his hollow eyes. He asked for a dollar, and I gave him one. This is what he said to me: “I grew up in sagging shadows, fine dust, ash. The sun always set to ringing gunshots. You can smell the construction. I’m part of this tribe, right? The Inland Empire Savages. We’re always walking, walking back and forth and there is never enough and never in the same direction. Others drive, but we walk. We pass the dead yellow hills. We walk past fires burning in the empty streets during this perpetual night. We see so much— “We see graffiti that runs along buildings so high you can see it touch god.

Graffiti on the walls, on homes, fences, signs, bricks, buildings, you know it.

Lightning neon paint say names that spit like hieroglyphics. Nobody stops walking back and forth ever. Like me, I’m walking I was walking before you came and I’ll be walking still. Earlier, down at the carnicería I saw these animals that hang skinned and naked in the window and these mamís with broad smiles and broad bodies sang hymns in their native tongue. Spanish, you know it?

“It was down, way down there, downtown where the men in rags push carts filled with treasure. Men like me, I’m the king of 3rd and Baseline. King rag man. I walk over the grime and pave gold. I’m paving gold. I’ll get you back on this dollar. But you gotta watch out, because out in the deserts the clouds from burning meth labs fill the sky with black smoke, like volcanos ripped open just above the desert towns. I’ve seen it first hand. And I’ve been with it, you know.

I’ve been on the glass and with a hit, you see it, the burning skies. But you got to keep walking— “If you keep walking up over there, you hit the mountains. I’ve got a lady up there in the mountains where life has stopped communicating with the outside world. We used to smoke glass and look down into the valley, down west at the cities blooming from the freeways that pump their smoke into Berdoo. I’m still walking yeah. You still walking with me? Still walking like the crows overhead and the flies buzzing in my ears and landing on my eyes.

“This is what I see when I close them. A thousand rag man of all colors, no shoes, no shirts an exodus of herds pushing through the swollen cities. They walk slow, with me. The cars drive fast around us, and we start to run wild. Out in the streets dodging traffic, weaving with the cars as they weave silken strands of smog in a beautiful, wondrous quilt that covers the city. We don’t think, we’ve thought, we don’t worry, don't care, don't need to care, don't stop to think. We cross road blocks, parking blocks, block parties, block upon blocks of landscape where garbage spills out of the trash bins and couches grace the cracked

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sidewalks. Still walking, a fast walk now, the fastest walk with a hurried step and we cross the barrios and listen to the sweet trumpets blow flaming melodies. We, them, us, and I are the same crowd. The crowds of savages. The crowds spill and move and more people join the walk. A walking crowd, not just ragman, regulars, everyone.

“I see us all running down Waterman. We’re a living, breathing savage of a thousand thousands. We run over glass with our bare feet, baring our teeth and bare arms full of track marks and no marks. No sleeves, shirtless, bold and wild spirited, the asphalt bakes under the sun. It smells of rubber. An ocean of black asphalt swells underneath us. We fill every vacant lot with our loose bodies. We tear at our skin. We’re screaming at the tops of lungs. We suck in the smog from the air, and fill up the emptiness with our sick breath. We’re running now, not walking, not walking any longer.

“We make it to the freeway and run like wild dogs and Berdoo is void behind us. We don't look back, back like Sodom back like Gomorrah; not back to Berdoo, back to the Inland Empire. We don't look back anymore. A thousand rag men, a thousand savages. We’re yelling now, screaming in tongues, a thousand languages. Sprinting now, sprinting. Never fast enough and then we're outta there. We’re the inland empire savages. We run, we run and you follow. You follow. Can I get a dollar, sir? Excuse me sir, you got a dollar. God bless.”

He stopped rocking back and forth, then he snapped his eyes up. I felt his gaze deep inside of me. I took a step back. He turned and walked away, as if we hadn’t been talking. His ear was bleeding. It had been six years since I was in my parents home off Del Rosa. It had been six years since I felt the hot breath of uncertainty blow against my neck.

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“Santa Fe Whistle”

By Adam Martinez I’ve roved around but here you remain in the same bed you’ve slept in all these years I’m reminded upon return death is near home is queer after awhile it no longer exists you just float along like stagnant water in urban lakes or putrid ponds where people pour pollution and graffiti lines the public restroom walls clear signs of a poor economy A few miles from where Mago sleeps sits Seccombe Lake Once a pristine park near a presently dilapidated Downtown San Bernardino My parents took me to feed the ducks old hard bread now a haven for vagrants vandalism and violent crimes druggies and hoes earn cash in an urn with ash, divers comb the muck for evidence of a holy war Mago made a living working many years at Santa Fe Depot I miss hearing that whistle blow.

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“Scribbled Notes on a Nameless Mass Shooting from Someone Who Wasn’t There”

By Danny De Maio

*Author’s note: When we decided to do a San Bernardino issue I struggled with which direction to take my piece. After a few attempts of fiction that rang hollow, I decided to organize a few pages of fevered notes I’d jotted down at work between the afternoon of December 2nd and Christmas 2015.

San Bernardino. Berdo. Berdoo. The Dino.

Whatever you want to call it, however you want to spell it, it’s what I’ve been running from my entire adult life. As begrudgingly as I might have attended Riverside Community College, I always reminded myself that I wasn’t going to school in my hometown. At least there was that. I remember the moment I received my acceptance letter to Loyola Marymount in LA, finally able to transfer to a university and finish my undergraduate degree. Even still, the majority of my excitement came out of the idea that I was escaping the clutches of Berdoo. I’d made a silent pact with myself that it would be a place that I’d only visit.

A few years later when I was forced to move back to my childhood home following a botched first attempt to make it in the corporate world, I still acted as if I were just visiting. Dropping by for a bit. Gracing this decrepit city with my presence. I never phrased it like that out loud, but anyone within earshot of my complaints would have been able to parse as much.

During those nine months I was there much of my disgust for my hometown permeated the pages of a novel I wrote. Hell, the novel was about San Bernardino. I was only in my hometown to finish the novel, I told myself, to better feel the place out again in my true adulthood. I was “home” because my life was in a transition, but I’d be damned if I didn’t write something scathing about it before I left.

I wrote about a corrupt government that had pissed away all of the city’s money on silly ideas, like a riverwalk a lá San Antonio. A sister city that housed a long history of darkness hidden in the sunlight. A young detective trying to keep his head above water. A murder that tied all of these loose ends together.

I was pretty proud of myself, too. I was doing it, thinking I was the true writer I had wanted to be since I wrote for the Cajon Courier. By day I devoured books while I was substitute teaching. By night I was drinking bottomless cups of coffee while banging out a first draft of the novel.

And when I got what I wanted I left. Less than a month after that first draft was completed I moved to Chicago. I’d finally escaped.

Five months and one day after that, fourteen innocent people were murdered in San Bernardino.

My head spun, my heart froze. Violence is nothing new to anyone that’s grown up in the Inland Empire, but this wasn’t senseless violence. It wasn’t some

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sixteen-year-old kid shooting an old man in a gang initiation drive-by. This was heavier than that and out of the blue for me. Less than a month earlier I had been at work and watched the Paris attacks unfold on Twitter. I distinctly remember having the thought that weekend that something similar would never happen in San Bernardino. The city was nothing, I thought. Even when it was in its prime it was more or less just a sizeable pit stop along world famous Route 66.

As December 2nd dragged on I found myself growing annoyed. Co-workers shrugged it off. Maybe they took my lead. If the guy that was from San Bernardino wasn’t spooked maybe it wasn’t so bad. Could you expect people to be outraged with the same zest just a few weeks removed from the Parisian massacre?

Just as it had before, I watched the attack and its immediate aftermath play out on social media platforms. Watching the hashtag “#SanBernadino” balloon into the millions made my stomach turn. When a news station doesn’t have the forethought to spell check the name of the city it’s covering how the hell am I supposed to trust who is putting the show on? For me, it’s just another mark against social media activism. I wanted to be in San Bernardino with my friends sitting at Jersey’s Pizza nursing a beer while trying to make sense of something that never was going to make any. Instead I felt like an opportunistic voyeur peeping at my childhood roots from the safety of adulthood’s perch. It would have been naive to proclaim that my home needed me because it’s needed so much morefor so long now, but the fact that I thought of it as my home was a declaration the jolted me. Jolted me in all the right ways. At first I cared less about the details of the event. That came later. Initially I just needed to talk to the people that I cared about, the Pour Vida collective and family being first on my mind.

That night I waited for the CTA green line at the Morgan stop and stared at the looming Willis Tower (which all of you will know as the Sears Tower), once the tallest building in the U.S., emanating the colors of the French flag. Blue, white, and red. Strange symmetry.

A few days later the Willis Tower changed its lights to coincide with Christmas. Green and red. It sounds ridiculous but it felt like Chicago was depriving me of mourning. That I didn’t know what to do is probably closer to the truth. I meandered through my conflicted feelings. My fiancee was sweet enough to let me wax nostalgic about my childhood. I reached out to a few friends back home to see how everything was settling. But more than anything I marinated in my own emotions, stunted as they could be at times. I got quiet with myself. I listened to Benji on repeat. I called my mom. Who knows if any of it helped me cope. All I know is that at some point before I went back to San Bernardino for Christmas I stopped reading about the case and “Pray for Newtown” stopped putting tears in my eyes.

The aftermath of the San Bernardino attacks has been more damaging than the act itself. I keep waking up every day thinking that maybe this is the day that Donald Trump announces that his campaign has been one elaborate practical joke (the “practical” part is the kicker) and we can all go about healing properly. Instead the man at a podium takes over every screen in America to

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promote hatred and misunderstanding, lumping those deemed good and evil into their respective caste systems. All this is accompanied by the roar of applause.

When the man on the screen suggests that entire faiths and ethnicities be deported it makes me wonder if we are living the prequel to 1984. Or worse, if we are seeing the resurgence of an unutterable movement that the world hoped to be done with. I guess some rich men choose to destroy everything they can once they find out they can’t buy immortality. Whatever happens next, we are living in a fragile pretext of something important.

Now, at the top of 2016, my hometown is in the same situation that it was before December 2015. Yes, fourteen people were tragically murdered and San Bernardino now has name recognition around the world (and a misspelled hashtag), but it’s hurting about the same. It needs good people and it needs a revitalization, and in this respect my city is no different than so many others.

Maybe this will take decades and maybe I’ll be long dead before it happens, but the city has fight in it. I say that and here I am living two thousand miles away with no intention of ever living there again.

Still some of the most talented, inventive, and unique individuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing grew up in or in the immediate vicinity of San Bernardino. It’s that very fact that inspired Adam Martinez and myself to create Pour Vida. Maybe there were times that we all wore Berdoo like a boulder chained to our necks, but it’s from that same heaviness that so many of us have found our passion and strength. We all learned long ago on the playground that no one was going to speak up for us. Whether I ever see San Bernardino again (God willing), I can rest knowing it is the little city with the bad reputation that shaped a great many talented, wonderful people. A place that pumps through my veins whether I’d like to acknowledge it or not. It is a place that I can finally, and unapologetically, call my hometown. And that’s a start.

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“Berdoo I love you, but you’re bringing me down”

By Diego Napoles Have you ever heard a song so loud, it made your ears weak?

Or saw something so harsh it made your eyes bleed? easy fix, they will say just move or look away I can’t. I won’t. I have to stay.

My home was my pride, something to boast about.

Only now, the place that was home for me…. will be remembered for tragedy. forever.

Have you ever felt so afraid to live, you want to move? or seen a city so low, you just drove through?

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“Yell like Hell to the Heavens”

By Jonathan Gilcrest It's the day before Thanksgiving, and a bunch of people are back in Berdoo for the holiday, and it's 5:30, so the sky is looking all weird like a black light giving my eyes those crackling electric jitters. Annie is in the kitchen pouring jello shots and she’s about to cry because it's so late, and she ain't even dressed, and the fucking jello ain't gonna solidify in that garbage fridge. I'm trying to hug her and wipe away her tears and all that shit, but she's not having it.

"Just leave me alone."

You know how it goes.

There's a good dump of dishes in the sink, too, and it's fucking rank. They have been piled so high for so long that if you move it the rotting food smell floats out from its caves? You know when you lift a dish to see some old spaghetti has fed a white mold to the point of overtaking the entire pot?

Yeah.

There's an excuse for this complacent filth, I promise. You can't wash the dishes without being electrocuted. I swear to fucking god. Something shorted out in the disposal, and enough current comes out of that thing to climb up the water and shock the shit out of anyone who so much as washes their hands.

Anyway, the party we're throwing isn’t for any real reason. Just to have bands play. Just to have a place in the city where something can grow outward: loose and shaking. None of this self-imposed weight that San Bernardino seems to shackle itself to. The beauty of this place, of any place, will always be in its people. And the people come: David’s and Jessica’s and Nick’s, and Sebastian’s, Carlos’ and Jordan’s and Emily’s. Emo kids and their snakebite piercings hidden under their dark swooping hair, metal head hipsters with a love of long paintstained shirts and machine shop sounding bands. “What is this shit?” a Gabby will say, “Turn it off.” There are the indie-pop kids with their brown shined shoes, and one of them brings over an acoustic so he can do his own show in the backyard by the fire pit. There are the “I listen to everything” kids with the Nirvana T-shirts and a distinct Everywhere America style of slightly baggy pants and skate shoes. Maybe a Famous beanie on a girls head here or there.

Interesting how I immediately go to the genre as a way to categorize. This isn’t right at all. There are no lines drawn between these people, yet I find myself branding them this way as if they intended to brand themselves. We’re all under the same roof, drinking the same beer, hearing the same jokes. We are facets of our time and each other. Canvases drenched in ideas and identity, never wilting under the weight of the paint. Crippled, loud, hopeful, and broken; a whirlwind of failures and astronauts, all dancing to horribly mixed amps turned to ten. All happy.

Do It Live is playing. Three guys are shouting into feedbacking mics, and I’m jumping up and down and smacking the ceiling fan so it spins. Annie is at the back of the room talking to the singer of Spirit Fang; she flips me off when I scream her name. There is this kid I’ve never talked to, but I recognize his blue (yes, blue) straight edge tattoo on the back of his neck. He’s getting wild up front

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screaming in the singer’s face. He’s not edge anymore, I think, because he’s spilling beer everywhere, but I haven’t seen him drink any either, so.

Annie takes me to the backyard, sticks her tongue in my mouth, bites my ear, says something I shouldn’t repeat.

You know how it goes.

Josiah is explaining permaculture gardening over a bowl with his curly long hair drooping dangerously close to the cherry, and a sparklingly coked out Juan is stoking the fire pit while dancing to the music from the house. We grab burning palm fronds and dance with him, spraying glowing embers into the air, ignoring angered looks from chatting semi-circles as they wave away our ashes.

We climb on the roof and light cigarettes against the wind. Annie is drunk enough that she tries to count the stars that haven’t been drowned out by the mustard gas lights of the Santa Fe rail yard. Says, “There are way more than thirty three, you fucking dumb,” and then she drops her arms, “Fuck. Which quadrant did I start in?” and starts all over.

Up here you can see the Valley College football field, the roof of every other one story from here to the freeway, and the freeway, moving diodes and halogens with the speed of memories and Aerostars, glowing like a spotted snake, a vein pumping through the rest of the state. The kick drum pulses under my feet, and Annie is almost stumbling off the roof shouting, “You know what I love about the infinite? Well do you?”

There are a couple of cops parked on the block, but they don’t get out. The vultures wait for someone to stumble around throwing beer bottles or smoke a joint. They don’t shut us down because no one ever calls in a noise complaint. I love our neighbors.

The fire is down to a whisper and we are out of wood, and by now the endlessness of the keg is bringing new beasts out of everyone’s minds. Pine needles are collected from the tree across the street, weeds are uprooted, newspaper, grocery ads, cans, trash: all that can burn, all that cannot burn, throw it in, throw it in! And the fire eats it up, breathes green and orange for moments, burps chemical plumes into our noses, dies down again.

It’s not enough.

“What about those fucking chairs?” Tim asks.

I’m watching from the roof, perched all gargoyle style. He’s talking about our dining room furniture. I’m thinking, no way, we need those chairs.

Sometimes you got to sit.

“Nah, dude. I like chairs. Burn a fucking table. We have two. Why? That’s so greedy.”

“Damn. You’re right.”

And so it goes. We climb down, help them carry the table to the pit, lay the fucker across the whole thing.

“That’s gonna kill it.”

“Yeah, a fire’s gotta breathe.”

Tim kicks it in the middle. Drops his heel like he’s cracking concrete. It doesn’t break.

“Fuck.”

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I stomp it, too, and some kid joins in with long hair under a trucker cap that says FBI (Female Body Inspector). It stays strong.

Juan has a better idea. Juan jumps on it. He jumps in the middle of the table, right over the middle of the fire pit, he kicks down hard, he chants, “We. Want. To. Burn. We. Want. To. Burn. We. Want. To. Burn.”

You know what is going to happen. It does. The table breaks under him, and his legs drop into the coals below.

We’re all pulling him out, and he’s shouting, “GOD DAMNIT GOD DAMNIT GOD DAMNIT!” But he is wearing pants and boots, and in all reality he is fine.

Another Gabby dumps her beer on his pants as he stop, drop, and rolls in the weeds. The flames grow in the pit, finally fed by the broken edges of the table.

Black smoke and the smell of melting varnish rise.

Inside people are shouting along to Spirit Fangs, and someone is actually being thrown through the drywall into my bedroom, but that is another story.

Out here we’re all dancing around the flame. It branches into the air with deathly flicking tongues, and I’m taking off my jacket screaming, “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE SOMEBODY! EVERYBODY WANTS TO MEAN SOMETHING!” And before the song is over we’re circling the fire, our arms flapping shadows against the garage, screaming into the moon like a mic. It’s some kind of drunken labyrinth of freedom finding, searching for the core, the true birthplace of the myth of being chainless, where man stands above his kill, or his hill, and owes nothing to anyone. All of it fantasy, a dissociation from reality, or maybe just overcooked locale bombing up and down the streets in a fifteen passenger van, binging on light beer, head banging, pontificating: shits garbage/shits brilliant.

Everything: philosophy, love, nutrition, breath: all of it distorted and bent through burning vacuum tubes.

We are here as destroyer.

Breaking glass to signal distrust in gravity.

Shouting curse words to describe the infinite.

Laughing behind hands, hiding joy like it's some grotesque thing…

In a few years we will be gone from here. Homes will be grown in other towns. We’ll hail from LBC and LA, claim Portland and City of Oakland, grow into the end of our twenties, start making children, maybe fall in love, no, definitely fall in love, hopefully make it last, but likely razing it to the ground. We’ll talk to strangers about where we’re from, meet Berdoo people along the way, lament The Death of A Great American City of Its Size.

“It was never a place of greatness! It was never great!”

Some might say this.

“But that doesn’t mean it should dissolve into the abyss! Grain by grain, brain by brain, we’re becoming scentless ghosts!”

Others might say that.

And it might be true. But what if it isn’t?

What if Morris is right?

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So we burn our dining room tables in the night. We burn anything that lights.

Because we’ll dine on stone if we have to. We’ll dine on the floor before we give up the ghost.

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