The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (4 page)

Still, in the first years of their marriage, sometimes my mom would take her babies and go back to Cihuatlán. This happened a few times, until my grandfather said, “Look, this is the last time. If I’m going to take you in, you need to stay here. But if you’re going to go back with him I don’t want to hear about him mistreating you. You need to make a choice.”

My mom made her choice—she stayed in Autlán.

After a few years my dad was in better graces with my grandfather, who invited the whole family to come to his ranch. At one point, my mom told me, her father asked my dad to join him and his workers in a big room, and they all gathered around.

My grandfather was going to play a joke on my dad. “José, would you like a coconut?”

“
Sí; gracias,
Don Refugio.” Don Refugio was what they called my grandfather.

He gave my dad a big machete and a coconut. “Okay, go ahead,” he said. My dad didn’t know how to hold the knife, so he started hacking at the thing, making a mess, and everybody started laughing. My mom immediately saw what her father was doing. She stepped up and said, “Don’t do that, José. You’re going to cut your fingers. You’re a musician.” Then she opened my father’s instrument case, grabbed the violin, and handed it to my grandfather. “Okay, now you play a song,” which of course he couldn’t do.

Everybody was stunned, you know? In that culture at that time, you never questioned your parents. But she didn’t like what her father was doing and wanted to make a point. My mom was really different.

It was years before we kids could piece together the story of her family. My mom would open up now and again and give us a little information, such as the fact that she was one of eight kids and that she grew up with her grandparents. It was common in Mexico:
some children were sent to live with their grandparents for a while, then they’d come back home. She never told us why she was the one in her family who was sent away, but from an early age my mother was strong-willed and would speak her mind. I think her grandmother enjoyed hearing her opinions and allowed her to say things and spoiled her a little, so that when she came back home and tried to do that she’d get into trouble. Plus she wasn’t the center of attention anymore.

My mom did mention that her father was well-off, and that after her mother died—this was in the early ’50s, when I was still very small, so I don’t remember my grandmother at all—my grandfather didn’t know how to keep things together. He started lending money to people who couldn’t pay him back, which was something his wife would never have allowed. She had been in charge of the family’s finances. That’s what I heard from my mom. What I heard from other people is that my grandmother died from some intestinal problem that developed because she found out that her husband had a child with one of their maids. From then on, everything went downhill, and my mom was at war with her dad and his new lady.

Later I learned from my mom that my dad was not an easy person to live with, either. He was very old-school in his way of being a husband. My mom told me what he said to her when they decided to get married: “You’re never going to get a ring, or a postcard, or flowers, or something special on birthdays or Christmas.” He pointed to himself and said, “I’m your present. As long as I come home to you, that’s what you get.” I was like, “Damn, Mom! That’s a little intense. Would you still do it all over again?”

“In a breath. I always wanted a real man. He’s a real man.”

My mom never rolled with any man other than my dad. She only danced with him maybe seven times, if that. But she never danced with another man, either. And he never got her a ring. I don’t understand that, and I’m sure a lot of women today would scratch their heads. But most women I know didn’t grow up in that generation or in that culture or experience what she did.

My sister Laura told me years later, when she had a beauty shop in San Francisco, that my mother was there having her hair and nails done, and the women were talking. This one lady is going on about her rings: “See? I got this from my first husband, and I got this from my second husband.” Someone said, “Hey, Josefina, we notice you don’t have a ring.” She looked at them and said, “I may not have a ring, but I still got my man.”

In Autlán, it seemed my dad could not help but play around—he just loved women, and women loved my dad. He was a charismatic man, and he had a way with women. He knew his music had an effect on them—any good musician knows that and can see it. I notice it. If you play from your heart, as my dad would, it can sweep women off their feet. You don’t even have to be good-looking, man: just play from the right part of your heart, and women are transported to a place where they feel like they’re beautiful, too. He was part of a very macho generation. You showed how much of a man you were by how many women you had.

Of course that didn’t square with my mom. She did not buy into that excuse, and it caused problems between them. She took the fight outside the house, and she didn’t care who knew it.

One evening around six or seven my mom yelled, “Carlos, come here!” She started cleaning me up, combing my hair. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“We’re going to church.”

“But it’s not Sunday.”

“Don’t talk back.”

Okay, we’re going to church.

So she’s ready, I’m ready, and we headed out of the house like it was on fire. My feet were barely touching the ground she was walking so fast. We passed the church and kept going. “Mom, the church is over there.”

“I know.”

Okay.

Two or three blocks later we suddenly stopped outside of a store. We waited outside until the last customer left and the lady behind
the counter was by herself. My mom went in and said, “My name is Josefina Santana, and I know you’re messing with my husband.” Then she grabbed the long, beautiful braids this woman had, pulled her right over the counter, got her on the floor, put her knee on her neck, and started beating the crap out of her.

You know, when you go to a boxing match it sounds so different from hearing people getting beat up on TV. It’s so different when it’s happening right in front of you—you never forget it. Then when it was over Mom walked out, grabbed my hand, and we walked back just as quickly. My mom was strong. Of course my dad heard about what happened and came home and they fought. I mean really fought—he shut the door to their room, and it was terrible. We kids were all scared. We could hear everything and couldn’t do anything about it.

Years later my mom told me stories that were kind of brutal. She didn’t need to tell me—I remembered hearing those sounds and not being able to do anything about them. I’d say, “I don’t know why you stayed with him so long.” From what I learned later, there were mainly two things that set things off for my dad—my mom getting jealous and her getting between him and his family. My dad loved his mom and his sisters and provided for them when he could. But my mom felt he had his own family to take care of, and sometimes when a letter would come to my dad from them my mom would open it and start arguing with him. He’d get angry because she was opening his mail and getting into his stuff, and
bam!
That door would slam shut again and we’d hear the fighting.

One time after we moved to Tijuana, Tony came home for something that he forgot and witnessed the whole thing going on. But by that time he was old enough to do something. He kicked in the door and picked up my dad from the floor so that his legs were dangling in the air. They were looking at each other eye to eye. Our dad was tight in his arms, and Tony said, “Don’t you
ever
touch my mom like that again.” Then he put my dad down slowly and walked out. It got really quiet in there. That was my brother Tony.

The last time any of that happened was in San Francisco. Dad came near Mom, and she grabbed a big black frying pan. “No, José. We’re in America now,” she said. “You try it and you’re going to get hurt.”

I think the cycle of violence has to stop, and it’s up to each of us to do all we can to stop it. So much violence comes from fear and ignorance, and from that word I truly hate:
macho
. Because macho is fear—fear of being too “feminine” and not being man enough, fear of being seen as weak. It can be like the worst virus, an infection that starts in the family and goes out into the street and spreads through the world. Violence has to be stopped where it starts—at home.

To be honest, I once hit a woman.

When I left home for the first time I moved in with a woman who had two children, and we got into it one night. She got a little crazy, then I did too, and I tried to avoid the argument but the next thing you know we’re throwing punches at each other.

To this day I ask myself why I didn’t just walk away. It wasn’t complicated. I had four sisters and my mom at the time. Now I have an ex-wife, a new wife, and two daughters—I would not want
anyone
to treat any of them like that. In fact, I don’t want anyone to treat anyone like that, male or female. As men, we are given power, but with that power comes responsibility. I think that’s something that should be part of the curriculum in schools—how to treat yourself and others.

For me it happened that one time, never again. That was enough for me to see what was happening, how I was going down a path of false, macho bullshit. Knowing it happened in front of my girlfriend’s two children made me sick to my stomach. It made me think back to when I was a child in Autlán and the way I felt when I would hear my dad hitting my mom.

I still wonder how much of my dad spilled into me. In so many ways I can thank my dad for being an example of what I should and should
not
do.

My mom never stopped getting upset when she thought about women messing around with my dad. I remember another time when she was boiling water to throw on this lady. Chepa wrestled it away from her and made sure she didn’t end up in jail. With my mom, when jealousy took over, she didn’t have the benefit of thinking about her children. She just wanted to beat the crap out of any woman who came between her and her man. I’m sure when we left Autlán, the whole town breathed a sigh of relief—definitely the women.

The end result was that my dad stayed away from Autlán more. He was making less and less money in the towns around Jalisco, and he didn’t like Mexico City, so he started to travel farther away, as far north as Tijuana, on the border of the United States. It was the mid-1950s, and Tijuana was a big party town with lots of work for musicians. He’d be gone, and then we’d get a letter with some money and sometimes a photo. One he sent showed him standing next to Roy Rogers and Gilbert Rolland—a Mexican actor who was making it big in Hollywood back then. I used to carry that picture of him in my back pocket all the time. I’d be riding around on a bike, take it out and look at it, and show it to everybody. “Just look at it,” I’d say. “Don’t touch it; you’re going to rip it, man.”

Dad’s career was not stable. Sometimes he got together a group, and they would travel caravan-style to a hotel gig for a few weeks—a large group of eight or nine. Many times he was on his own. He’d take a bus into a new place, find the musicians, arrange a trio or quartet, and play in the town square. They would go to various restaurants and ask if they could play inside or outside or go from table to table. Or they might find the best hotel in town and ask if it was okay to come in. “No, sorry—we already have a band playing tonight.” Or, “Yeah, okay, no one else is here; come on in.”

That’s how they did it back then. No posters or advance promotion, no ticket sales, no box office. All the business was done on the spot—asking the tourists for fifty cents or a dollar per song, asking the restaurant to feed the band if everyone was happy. Then it was back to a couch at one of the musician’s homes or back on the bus.
“This place seems to be a little slow. Should we try Tecate? Maybe Nogales?” Then it was back on the bus again.

That’s how my dad made his money—he asked to play. I really admire the fact that he was able to build a career that way, to bring in the money and feed us. It wasn’t easy.

After a while it seemed like he was always gone. When we were in Autlán, it got to the point that my dad would be gone for months and months at a time. Years later, when I’d hit the road with Santana and people would say something about the time I was gone away from my family, I’d say, “Nah, it’s not so crazy.” I would go on the road for four or five weeks at a time when my kids were growing up, but that would be the most that I would do. I learned from what I experienced in Mexico. I think I was pretty balanced compared to what my dad did.

At one point a year had gone by, and suddenly my dad had come back, and I was so happy and proud. He’d take me with him when he went riding through town on his bicycle, and he let me ride on the back, grabbing hold of his belt—he’d wear this thin golden belt, very fashionable at the time. I loved the way he smelled. He’d use this Spanish soap called Maja. I can still remember that scent to this day.

I was so proud—he’d be waving at people, and they would greet him like he was a returning hero. “Oh, Don José!”

“Hey, how you doing?”

Every few minutes someone would stop us. “Do you remember me? You played my
quinceañera!
” Or someone would say, “You played my baptism!”

“Oh, yes, of course. Please give my best to the family.”

“Oh, Don José, thank you. Can we take a picture?”

I learned early on that I had to share my dad—with my family, his work, and his fans. All us kids knew this. My sister Maria told me that after someone would stop to say hello, she would ask my father, “Do you know that person?” His answer was, “No, but saying that makes them feel good.” I always remembered that about my dad. It was part of the eulogy I read at his funeral in 1997.

When I was eight, we hadn’t seen my dad in almost a year, and we had gone from living in the middle of Autlán to living in the worst neighborhood in the area, just a few blocks from the edge of town. It was a small two-room place filled with cooties—that’s lice. It also had
chinches
—bedbugs—and
pulgas,
or fleas. When a letter containing a big check came from my dad, my mom had had it. It was time to leave Autlán.