I will mention here one very embarrassing incident that took place behind the scenes, which was of little significance to anyone but me.
Tucson is an unusual place, as I said before. The Barrio was surrounded by many cultural clashes. During my seven years in Tucson, I had rubbed shoulders, some pleasurable and some not so, with many sub-groups in the City. They included many from the Communist Party, and there were many active members in Tucson; there was a significant number of environmentalists, at a time when the environmental movement was still about the environment and not about taxes, money, and extortion; groups of artists, performers, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, gangs, and Mexican mafia, drug peddlers, although the police at that time were doing a good job controlling drugs especially when compared to Miami and San Francisco. There were politicians and ex-convicts, Mennonites and active Atheists, group orgies, and music groupies, members of organized crime, law enforcement, and communes with geodesic domes rather than adobe.
Some of my activities took me to unexpected places where I had experiences with construction workers, the Free Clinic woman’s Lib, the Young Women’s Company, political campaigns, university faculties, friends of some of the girlfriends I had along the way, and with some very wild four-wheeling free spirits and motorcycle groups and gangs. I always tried to stay within the law and out of serious trouble, but I didn’t avoid interesting encounters when they came my way. Despite all of that, besides facing the end of a gun barrel a few times, and being involved in a few sporadic group fights, there came an incident that tested my courage, and I didn’t do well. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is in how we handle that fear.
On my way back to Tucson, I knew that I would have to confront Juanito face to face sooner or later. We had had several unfriendly confrontations in the past that he would not leave alone. Having learned my lesson in front of the Elks Club, I decided to prepare myself as best as possible. Three things were on my list, and I did all three of them. The first was to join a karate class. I told the instructor, “I will be going against a person bigger and stronger, what can I do other than run faster?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. Every time someone tells me not to worry, I start to. “I’ll teach you three things that in the blink of an eye will put him out of commission.”
Good, just what I wanted to hear. I joined his class.
Second, I got an appointment with the Chief of Police. I took with me a bulky file folder of things we had compiled on Juanito over the years. There was enough there to warrant jail time, but most of it was hearsay.
“Chief,” I told him, when he and another officer saw me in his office, “This man has done so many things that the only reason I can think of as to why he is still walking free, is because he is getting police protection. Maybe he is being used as a conduit to get bigger fish. I don’t care why, but I want your department to stop giving him special treatment, or protection inside the Barrio.” As naïve as that may sound, that is what I said. Who knows if my words went any further than the walls in that room? Probably not.
Third, I went to visit a person in another Barrio whose name I will not mention. He had a criminal record an arm long. He had been evicted from Tucson for several criminal atrocities he had committed, but now he was back. I went to his house and asked him to join me in my truck. We rode around the area for a while. I had done a big favor for his younger brother, and I knew that he was very appreciative of my help. How much, I didn’t know, but I asked him, “Do you know Juanito?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I don’t know if anything will happen between him and me, but I want you to do to him whatever he does to me.” I was thinking leave him a bloody mess, same as me. Then I felt a little guilty, “Not more…, just the same.”
“I will. You can count on that,” he said very seriously.
I was ready, or so I thought, certain that Juanito was going to be waiting for me somewhere. For the whole month before the board’s meeting, I had kept a low profile, finding a temporary rental across the street from Dave Parslow, outside the Barrio. I went back to my routine: Café Olé in the mornings, visiting friends during the day, practicing karate in the evening, and avoiding any confrontation with those who were not happy to see me back, besides Juanito, not many, but they were there.
The meeting-day came, and I had not slept well. That afternoon I was concerned. I took a shower thinking that if I had a confrontation with Juanito the next shower I would take, I would have to wash off plenty of my blood with it. I put an old throw-away shirt on. I just knew he would be waiting for me.
I got in my pickup truck to head to the office building, La Pilita, where the meeting was to take place. Terror struck. The inexplicable occurred. I have no memory of the next few minutes, but when I woke up from my stupor, I was doing more than 90 miles per hour on the freeway heading away from Tucson.
It was the first time in my life that had ever happened to me. I slammed on the brakes, and without looking for an exit, made an illegal U-turn through the median, and headed back to town. Even today, I am still ashamed of that behavior of running away. My only excuse, as if there is any, is that I did not do it on purpose. But the fact is that I did it.
Everybody went to those meetings walking. Although late, I found a parking space right in front of the building and started walking toward the front door. I could hear the voices of many people inside, but no one was outside except, standing by the front door, in the dark, was the lone figure of Juanito waiting for me.
I walked right up towards him. Before I got to the door, he moved, not at me but sideways, while saying, “You have to get past me if you want to go in there.”
I was calm and collected, “Okay. Let’s have it out right here, right now.”
Then as he walked in a semi-circle past me and we had now reversed places, I was closer to the door and he was closer to the street, he said “Let’s go to the back alley, where it is dark.”
“No,” I said walking at him, “Right here right now, where everybody can see us.”
There was in me not the slightest intention to get into a fight. Nor was there any intention to avoid a fight. I was simply going through the motions, as if talking to a normal person on a normal day. He hesitated, his face showed it, and I kept moving toward him. Then he moved sideways, in a semicircle reversing what he had done before, and passed me at a distance. Turning around he went back inside the building.
Surprised, I followed him by a few steps. First through an empty reception room, and then a doorframe to a larger room full of more than thirty people, most of them standing around the table where the thirteen board members were seated. Juanito walked around the table past all the people standing, to be next to his wife in the back of the room. I stood by the door looking at him all the time. I didn’t take my eyes from him. He whispered something to his wife, they both looked at me for a while, then looked away for the rest of the night.
I do not remember a single thing that was said at that meeting, but I was voted in as Executive Director without a single question being asked of me, as if I were not there. When the meeting was over and people began to exit, I stood by the door. People said “Hi” and shook my hand, until Juanito walking ahead of his wife went by me without looking at me, so I elbowed him in the ribs hard as he went by, my one and only physically aggressive move while working with the TBA. He kept on going. His wife, who saw what I had done, didn’t look at me either as she went by. For a whole year, I didn’t see them again except at a distance. Physically, they never bothered me again.
Things balanced out. I had been a coward, but no one knew it, and I won the non-fight by calling his bluff, not by beating him up. I am still curious as to what would have been the result of a fight. I had been a motivated karate student. Now, I think I would have won, for he was not that tough after all. But not in the dark alley. Who else he may have had waiting there for me?
The next day I moved to a small one room, one-bathroom separate structure renting to an elderly landlady, in the middle of El Hoyo. I had no furniture, no bed, only my same old foam and sleeping bag on the floor. The bathroom with a door to the outside had no doorknob. Other than staying with girlfriends, I kept that rental for my next few years in Tucson.