Joe Loya (Interviewee) (15:10)
Okay, so I was born in East Los Angeles, the old Matavia housing projects, back in those days. My parents were 16 when I was born. Actually, my mother had just turned 17 when I was born. And so my mother and dad found out my mother was pregnant. They went to their parents. Their parents said, you're getting married. They were in 10th grade. I said, you're getting married. And it was a loving home. Cool. Loving home. The love story that I was raised in with my parents, they loved each other since they were 12. Everyone loved them. I was raised in that love story. I was raised in the love. We went to church, and our church was our life at that time. I was raised with Bible stories. I was raised at church camps. I was raised potlucks, man. I was raised in the church, and I was raised with a dad who wanted to be a preacher. And he had a love of language. He was very smart, and he was devoted to learning. Everything was cool until 7. I turned 7. By that time, we'd moved out to Pico Rivera, and my mother got sick. Always, man. This always gets me, man. I remember my mother got a job at the Sears Tower over here on Olympic. I don't even know if the Sears building is still there, but there's a big Sears building there. And she got in the typing pool because she. Apparently, she was like, she's a typing foolia, man. But what I remember about that is my dad would. Would go warm up the car. My dad would go warm up the car outside. This is the days when you weren't afraid someone's just gonna steal your car, right? He would go warm up the car, you know, turn the heater on in there because it's cold. It was, you know, it's early morning, like three or four, maybe it was. It was four or five. Who knows? But it seemed super early, dark, cold. And then he would wrap us up inside, and they would take us, carry us to the car. We. We do in the back, sleep, sleeping. That was also in the days when you didn't need to buckle your kids in the backseat. And then he would take my mom. And I remember I would get up and I would look out, and there was fog over there by the. By the LA river. When you would go over, like, first street or one of those bridges in la. And I remember, like, wow, this is weird. It's like when you see those old movies and, like, Casablanca and there's just fog going by and it's Dark. It was like that, but it was early morning and. And she was a sharp dresser, you know, I remember her looking sharp. That's one of my first memories. But it's not until age 7, right? She was already sick then and very sick and didn't know it. She was just tired. She thought it was just because of her work, whatever, and she had to take a physical. That's when the doctor was like, oh, shit, something's wrong. And then she was in and out of the hospital. Like our life was just kind of what it's just. It was topsy turvy after she got sick. I remember once I visited her. I hated that hospital. I hate the smell. I hated being there. I hated her shuffling over to us and her chanclas and her little, you know, the hospital dress thing they had. I hated her smell of. Of spongebob. I hated it. All the beeping, all that stuff, man, it brings back crazy feelings of helplessness. Remember when she was in junior high, she had been voted tower queen of Griffith Junior High. She was beautiful. When she got sick, the medications that they gave her made her look like she was nine months pregnant. But she also got really skinny and gaunt everywhere else. And she lost the body in her hair. She got dark circles under her eyes, and, you know, she could barely move. She kind of shuffled when she was home. She was feeble. She was so drugged up. Her back. I would scratch her back sometimes. She loved to scratch her back. And I stayed home a lot. I was sick a lot. I was a sickly boy. So I got to spend time with my mom. And I would scratch her back and I would. I had this. I knew the pattern of her back that I could scratch because I would scratch her back. I would come across this rough skin. I realized, okay, I'm going into the. The volcano head of the. The boil. Let me move around it. And I would just find the pattern and scratch her back. And she loved that on her wrist. The vein was raised on the wrist because they were constantly putting needles into it so that it almost looked like you could see. You could see the blood flowing through it. It was really creepy. And then her mind left her periodically. It would leave her and in dramatic ways. So one day we came home, you know, like we always did. Mother was still in the hospital that day. It was a Thursday. But we're outside playing basketball. Me, my brother Paul, Mike Hart, some of the other fellas. And I get called in, and my grandma said, hey, man, come on up. I come on up. And I knew Something was strange because there's people in the house, they're all dressed up. People from church, family people. And this doesn't happen during the week. A week night, Thursday night. I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I have no clue, really. I'm a clueless nine year old boy is what I was. And my dad comes in and everybody moves towards my dad and there's just like somber hugs, whatever. And nobody's trying to reveal to us what's going on yet. We're just dopey boys. Our life about to intersect with chance like a motherfucker here. And he comes, he gets us, he walks in the room, we sit down my grandma's bed. And then he tells us that, you know, my mom's, you know, I can see her again. She. She died, she's in heaven. And yeah, it breaks it to us that she's dead and it's just us. And I remember thinking that I was going to be strong. For some reason I felt like I need to be strong for this. And I tell my dad that I'm not going to cry. I said, don't worry, I'm not gonna cry. I'm still gonna be strong. He goes, no, you know, you need to cry. You know, men cry. He says, you know, and then he went through a little list. George Washington cried, Moses cried, Abraham Lincoln cried. I'm like, well, shit, all right. I said, yeah, you know, King David cry. You can cry. And so after he lays down this list, a bunch of crybabies, I feel like, all right, I'll cry. So I cry. And then it comes, you know, it's heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy. And then Paul's crying, my dad's crying. And it was actually one of the best moments of my life in that the feeling you get when my dad leaned forward and pulled us into him and it was just us. And we're all crying and we just become this one spasm of anguish and pain and there's this unity of our grief around the same thing. And it's one of the most beautiful moments I've ever had with my dad. Because around this morbidity, the death of my mother is also one of the most erotic feelings that you have. By erotic, I don't mean sexual erotic. I just mean feeling like just all this emotion and all this body chemical stuff going on. You're crying and you feel near to these people. You're literally hugging and touching and crying and shedding tears and kissing each other. It's a moment of unity. It was like a brief moment. All the pain that we've been struggling with, she's gone. There's relief in that moment. And we had just cried our eyes and our heart out. And it's like, oh, and he gives us the gum and he says here. And we all like, he's giving us like breaking bread. It's like a fucking. It's our thing, right? It's a pet. So now we got a physical thing that we can all physically do together for a little ritual here. And he says, we're going to be fine. We're going to do this. We got this. Got this.
