by Micheal Leal Garcia
When the director says, “action,” I grab a fistful of the frightened blonde’s hair, slam her against the wall, and say, “Do you like chorizo?” In the next scene, I throw her off a roof.
At the King Taco in Cypress Park, as I’m chowing down on sopes, some homie in a Dodgers jersey notices me. “Oh, shit!” he says. “You’re that one foo in the movies.”
His homie looks me up and down. “He the foo in Fast and Furious?”
“Nah. He’s the foo that one motherfucka shot in the dick.”
The homie double overs laughing.
I smile, toss the rest of my sopes, and leave.
The next week, I play the head vato—that’s what the script actually says, HEAD VATO, no name—amongst a group of wife beater and khakis wearing cholos. Under the dying palm trees of Elysian Park, we chill beside our lowriders and drink forties. We use our cholo accents—think Edward James Olmos in American Me—and call each other “ese” or “homes” and tag every other sentence with “ey.” Then the hot new twenty-something actress who played Liam Neeson’s wife in her last movie gets a flat and asks for help. I say, “You wanna ride on my stick shift?”
For a more authentic cholo look, the makeup artist airbrushes a pair of praying hands on my neck.
At dinner my mom doesn’t say shit, just swirls her chicken around the salsa verde on her plate. She just saw my last movie. I played your run of the mill wetback.
“It’s just make believe,” I say for the thousandth time and fork another piece of chicken, hoping she doesn’t argue.
“It’s stupid is what it is,” she says. “Lo siento, meester. I too estupid to wash joo shoes. You took money to say that. Who the hell is that even supposed to be?”
“It pays the bills.”
She shakes her head. “Can’t you be a good guy for once?”
“I already told you. I’m too dark for that.”
My agent tells me about an urban adaptation of The Great Gatsby set in the seventies. “Here’s the twist: Gatsby’s a niiiii—black. He’s black—and he makes his fortune pimping bitches in Hollywood. I didn’t mean to say—never mind. You would play Jorge, the George Wilson character.”
I hit up the Barnes and Noble in Glendale for a copy of The Great Gatsby. In front of the F section, a woman holds two books: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. She scrutinizes one book and then the other.
“Give Homegoing a try,” I tell her. “It’s depressing, but it ends with a sense of hope.”
Before I finish speaking, the woman tosses Homegoing onto the shelf and walks away. I can’t tell if she heard me.
Michael Leal García is an English teacher in downtown Los Angeles. His fiction has been featured in Fjords Review, Huizache Magazine, The Acentos Review, Bluestem Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, Drunk Monkeys, Lunch Ticket, and Apogee Journal.