You know, today was the first day I got a chance,
and it was great.
I got to meet my escort, there she is.
Yes, she's one incredible people you have, wonderful people.
But actually, it was such an extraordinary thing
that I went hiking after the first month of not hiking,
just being so inundated with all the projects we're doing.
We're doing some projects you would not believe, just
[MIMICKS EXPLOSION].
We took 41 women--
by the way, guys, check this out.
Who has the biggest prison in the world
with the most women in it?
America.
Do you believe that?
It's a city, it's a city.
And guess how many-- guess what, 80% of that women are white.
Not Black, not Hispanic, the system
has got to a point where it's locking up its own now.
Isn't that's amazing?
It used to be, these prisons are built for these Black women
and those Brown women.
But now, every three out of five are white.
And the system is breaking down because that's not
what it's supposed to be.
You know what I'm saying?
Well, it's supposed to be that.
And it's creating a problem.
But we're doing an amazing project
in Oklahoma City at the Mabel Bassett Center in new McLoud,
and we're doing some other stuff that just defies imagination.
I'm going to read this one, that'll be it,
then we can talk a little bit.
"Tire Shop."
I went down yesterday to fix the leak in my tire.
Off Bridge Street, there's a place $0.90, flat fixed.
Smeary old paint on a warped wood
plank between two bald tires, and I
go in there's this old Black dude with a Jackie Gleason hat,
grease off for the years of sweat,
and a master cigar stub in his mouth.
And there's this old pachuco chicano
working the other nomadic hissing tire changer.
And the walls are Black with rubber, soot, blown,
brown dust everywhere, rows of worn tires on board racks
for sale, air hoses naked and looped over the floor,
and I greet the two old guys: hola, ¿qué está pasando,
hombre?
"How's it going?"
No response.
They look up at me as if I just gave them a week to live.
"I got a tire that needs a tube."
And Rodolfo, a young Chicano emerges
from the darkest part of the room in the back pony-tailed
and walks me out to my little trokita and looks at the tire,
"It's going to cost you $5 bro to take off and change,"
and I nod.
And he tells the old Chicano who pulls
the roller Jack with the long steel
handle, and I wait in the middle of the grunting
oval tire changing machines, while the old guy goes out
and returns with my tire.
He looks like a disgruntled carny handling the Ferris wheel
for the millionth time and I'm just another spoiled kid.
I watched The two old men work the tire machines, stepped
on the foot levers that send the bar around flipping
the tire from the rim and I wonder
what brought these two old men to work here
on this gray evening in February.
Are they ex-cons, are they drunks, are they addicts?
He whips out the tube--uy, Rufo, mira.
He kind of yells and I see a gaping hole in the tube.
"I can't patch that," Rudy says.
And then in Spanglish, hombre, no podemos pachiar esto.
"Now we got a pile of old tubes over there," he adds,
"And we'll do it for 10."
At first, I think he's taken me but I hedged from that thought,
and I watched the machines work the splits of air
the final begrudging of rubber popped loose,
then the holy clank of steel bar against steel.
And gently, the old pachuco instead
of throwing the bar on the floor, he takes the Iron
and wipes it clean of rubber bits gently in his waist belt,
in such a way that I've only seen mothers
wife their infants mouths at the table.
And I turn, and I watch Mash on TV suspended from the ceiling,
it's an old rerun.
6 o'clock news comes on, Huntington Beach
blackened with oil.
Rodolfo comes out and says, "Fucking shame,
isn't it, that they do that to the ocean?"
And I realized suddenly how I love these working men
in the heft dark, working with bald tires
like medieval hunchback and a dungeon.
Who eats soup and scrape along in their lives
and these little tube for five rooms on central.
How can they live on $0.95 of tire change in today's world?
But I'm pleased to be with these guys
and feel how these Barrio Chicanos and his old Black men
have given up some nice jobs somewhere else
to live by friends working in these places.
And the old Chicanos grumbling at me as I'm thinking that's
how cheap I am.
When he learns that all three of my tires outside a ball, even
the spare's flat, shaking his head
as he works the tube in the tire well,
I notice his heels true to the nails, his fingernails black,
his face a weary, room and board stairwell,
given over to drunks and derelicts.
He had that kind of face that was hand worn by people
leaning on it all their lives.
Wooden step grooves beneath his eyes
by heart soul men and women just out of prison.
He had a face condemned by life to live out
more days in futility.
And I bid goodbye to the beautiful Black man chomping
his ancient cigar, and I bid goodbye
to the beautiful chicano with his head down,
and somehow I felt ashamed that I couldn't live their lives
with just a minute for them.
Grateful they were here, I respect
such men who have stories that'll never be told.
Who bring back to me my simple boys days,
when men and oily pants and grubby hands
talked in rough tongues and worked at the simple work,
getting three meals a day on the table the hard way.
"They live in an imperfect world," I thought driving away.
Unlike men with money who have places to hide their shame,
these men had none.
They had no place to put their shame but on their own mothers,
their kids, themselves.
Unlike men who had places to put their shame so they never
have to face it, these men had become more human with it,
more vulnerable.
And I thought of the time that my brother betrayed me.
Leaving at 14 when we vowed we'd stay together forever,
he left to live with some folks who
adopted him and I was taken to the detention center
with no place to live.
And I became a juvenile filled with rage
at my brother who left me.
"These tire shop men made choices never
to leave their brothers," I thought,
"And that's why they were suffering poverty."
And in them, I saw no shame, I saw shame with no place to go,
but in a man's face and back to his hands and back to his work
and back to his silence.
And as I drove away nearing in my farm,
I saw water sprinklers shooting an arc of water
over the grass and fence it was intended to water.
I looked at that water and it was
a fountain hidden a weed stickered
spot that grew a single flower.
And I looked around, it was the only flower around
and it was in the midst of winter,
and in the midst of the rubble and the brush and the stones
that water hit for some reason.
And it touched the dormancy that blossomed itself
and to what it was.
Despite the surroundings and the weather,
something made sense to me in that flower and those old men.
Now I'm not quite sure what.
An unconditional love of being or accepting your life
or taking what comes one's way.
Whatever it was, that night in my dream,
I cried for the first time as my brother was leaving me.
And all the words I used to use against myself
like, you're no good, you're rotten, you're shitty,
you're a failure, all of that dissolved in my tears,
and my tears poured out of me.
And in my dream I wept, because my brother turned and left me.
And when I reached out for him, he was gone.
And I wept in my dream because he was not available
when I needed him.
And all my tears flowed and how I wept.
And my feeling, my pain for the first time of abandonment,
all my tears became suddenly that arc of water.
I became the flower by sheer accident,
in the middle of Tucson blossoming today.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
You're out of time.
Huh?
You're out of time.
Yeah, yeah.
Talk about perfect timing.
Thank you all.
We're going to sign books down there.
So get down there so we don't have
to carry our books back home.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]