Jetfoil

The Ballad of Elsa Morales

You don’t find homes of the well-to-do under the flightpath of a busy airport, a stone’s throw from the runway where the roar of jet engines moves the air like thunder. That real estate is reserved for working-class folk. The same is true for the land abutting railroad thoroughfares. Have you ever taken the Northeast Express from DC to New York City? If you do, you won’t see manicured lawns and whitewashed fences backing up to the tracks. No, your comfortable seat affords you a blurred and passing view of warehouses and factories and the terrible townhouses of forgotten Baltimore whose backyards terminate at the rail grade.

Back now to California: In 2013, I became acquainted the Morales family, of the Pacoima Moraleses. Elsa and her husband, Joseph, and their five boys: Arturo, Pablo, Eduardo, Joey Jr, and Marcus. I never had the opportunity to speak with Marcus but I once sat behind him in a courtroom when he was on his way to the state institution where he lives for the time being.

I met the Moraleses because a friend and I were doing a short documentary about their youngest, Pablo. We were with him on Friday, September 13 when when he walked out of juvenile detention with Elsa and Joseph Sr — happy, all of them. We spent the next week with Pablo and his family, to capture the challenge of reentry, and what families go through when one of their own is freed from incarceration.

But we had a dual purpose: we figured it might do Pablo good to have a couple of guys with cameras following him around, making sure he didn’t get into trouble over the course of the seven days before he was to board a flight to Colorado, where he would attend a rare and remarkable school for kids from underserved communities.

We only had seven days with Pablo, or so we thought, so we spent a lot of time at the two-bedroom apartment to which he was confined on house arrest, the judge’s own measure to keep him out of trouble until his departure. Over the span of that week we got to know the Moraleses pretty well, because all of them who weren’t locked up lived in the apartment: Elsa and Joseph Sr, Pablo, Arturo, Joey Junior and his girl and their two-year-old, Little Joey. Eduardo came and went. I met him a few times. He was leery of these strangers with cameras in his family home and who could blame him.

I won’t take you down the rabbit-hole of Pablo’s story. Suffice to say that he didn’t make the flight. The hundred year flood that hit Colorado that fall closed the school and a week later, maddened by the uncertainty of ‘what’s next’ and the Siren song of crystal meth, he cut off the ankle monitor and went back to the streets. Ten days later Elsa got a phone call that he was locked up again.

For all of the time I spent with Pablo, I spent more with his mother. I came to admire Elsa for the depth of her strength and perseverance. She was the sole breadwinner for the family. Her husband is plagued by diabetic seizures and other demons that prevent him from holding down a job. He used to have a good gig, then the seizure started and it was downhill from there. Elsa works 50-some-odd hours a week at In-n-Out Burger, has for nearly 20 years.

I’ve walked with her the four blocks from the apartment to the restaurant, two of which cross the notorious street that lends its name to one of the most reviled gangs in the San Fernando Valley, the gang that rules four of her five boys. On her way home, Elsa would stop at the small market run by a member of her extended family, buy groceries and an 8-pound bag of ice for the cooler that was standing in for a refrigerator back at the apartment.

Between the long hours of her work routine, of her cooking and tending to the endless tide of laundry (with Arturo’s help, to his credit) Elsa cared for and worried after the men in her life:

For her husband, and his repeated trips to the emergency room;

For Pablo, who was finally out and bound for something good, if only he could stay on track;

For Joey Jr, who was finally out and starting a family, but who was also answering the call of the streets and disappearing for a couple days at a time;

For Arturo, though for Arturo least of all, because he was a student, a good son, gang free, and his transgressions rarely fell outside the domain of normal adolescent shenanigans.

Marcus was locked up and bound for a two-year bid, so she didn’t have to worry too much for him. At least he was ‘safe’.

Eduardo didn’t show up often and I couldn’t say where he stood at the time, but I could hazard a guess. You can tell a lot by the way young man carries himself and what you could tell about Eduardo was that Elsa’s worry was well-founded.

But through all of her worry and failed hope, Elsa kept going. And she was kind and gentle and so incredibly strong, stronger by a magnitude than her strongman, streetwise kids. Somehow juggling the perils of her children has not driven her to cynicism or worse. She stands four-foot-ten, and I swear she could carry the world.

Yesterday we buried Eduardo. He made it to twenty-four before the life caught up with him. Another Latino shot on the streets of Los Angeles… El Niño this year, and did you hear? Game of Thrones is coming back, and how about that Donald Trump?

It wasn’t until Elsa draped herself over Eduardo’s coffin that I saw her cry. I mean really weep. Her chest bucked and she wailed and her hand caressed the fabric-clad coffin as if it were the body of her son. One hand opening and closing, opening and closing. There, over the hole where her middle son would soon be lowered, she released a little bit of that sustained sorrow and pain, and Good Lord, I hope it brought her a moment of relief.

Now all eyes are on Pablo. He gets out of prison in September/October and if he can escape the Siren’s call, maybe they can pack up and go to New Mexico where another node of Elsa’s family is living a life that more closely resembles the Mexican-American Dream. But for now she’ll pray. And she’ll work. And Elsa Morales will carry on.

They laid Eduardo Morales to rest a few hundred feet from the end of the runway of Bob Hope International Airport. His service was punctuated by the roar of 737s lifting off, the occasional howl of a private jet. There are no headstones in that corner of the cemetery, just small marble slabs recessed in the grass, no character. In a few years it’ll be tough to find his grave, but they’ll find it thanks to that little stone tag.

Toward the end of the ceremony another familiar rumble rolled through the calm as an Amtrak train slowed to a stop, splitting the distance from the grave to the runway. I saw a guy disembark: orange shirt, rolling suitcase. He glanced at the funeral, looked at us for a beat and then back to the sidewalk in front of him, head down and thinking, perhaps, ”sad day.”