Author Archives: RPM

Cigarettes

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, USC
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

A friend who has moved around the United States frequently during lifetime noted that there was a vast number of ways to refer to cigarettes.

In New Orleans, where he lived the most substantial part of his life, they were referred to as “Joes” :

“When I first got there people would ask, ‘Can I bum a Joe?’ ”

After his confusion subsided he realized Joe was not a person, but merely another coy way to ask a stranger to donate a cigarette. In different parts of the country he has also encountered:

Stoges, stogies, cigs, fags, and cancer sticks.

The regional renaming of cigarettes is a common phenomenon, particularly in places were smoking is still deeply entrenched in the culture.  People use these alternate terms to identify themselves, and potential test others, as frequent smokers who are intimate with the terminology of smoking of their region. Opting to use a term other than cigarettes is also used when someone is “bumming” – asking for a cigarette without anything in return. It is implied that if you yourself are a smoker you will understand the need to acquire a cigarette when someone has to ask to bum. People don’t necessarily want to bum, so if they are it is because they absolutely are fiending. As a good smoker, identified by your knowledge of alternate terms, you are expected to comply.

La Llorona

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Residence: Lakewood, CA
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

My brother claimed to know the story of La Llorona and recounted it here:

“In some poor part of Mexico, supposedly some lady went crazy and drowned her kids or killed them somehow.

And now she goes around crying ‘n shit about her kids.

And if she sees a little kid being bad or something… bad to parents, she snatches them away and takes them. And then she probably does to them what she did to her kids.”

I’ve heard many versions of this tale. In some she is intended to be more believable than in others. In this one she is a less developed character so her actions are given more attention than her motives. She punishes children that are out of their parents’ control without personal reasons. This suggests to the children that their transgressions are so grave they will not go unnoticed and are the concern of greater powers. Parents tell their children this tale to instill a fear in children they hope will make them more obedient.

The Ice Cream Truck

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Residence: Lakewood, CA
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

Ice cream trucks were a common sight any time of day in North Long Beach neighbors. There was one very special truck that supposedly made its rounds during the late 90s/early 2000s.

“It was just an ice cream truck. It came up to your house & you would just go to it. Your parents would give you some money if it was the weekend to go to the truck.

And the guy would just know. Just by looking at you he would know if you were talking about some ice cream or not.

And each ice cream or whatever meant something else. It was like a secret menu.

Where you ordered a fucking big stick you either got a big stick or you got some heroin.

The only thing I never saw there was LSD.

It was crazy when he got busted. He got busted, but then people started copying his idea. And now there’s way more and it’s way shittier than when it was just him.”

According to my brother and friends of his generation, the ice cream truck truly existed and sold drugs. I could not find any official records of its bust although they also maintain this happened. Parents, at least in our neighborhood, seemed to be familiar with the story. During the time that the truck narrative was most popular parents started banning children from going to ice cream trucks that drove into the neighborhoods. Every once in a while parents who had to refuse their children allowance money  on the weekends would say it was because they were just going to waste it all on the ice cream truck. This accusation was enough to keep children from arguing if both parent and child were familiar with this story.

This story was fascinating to most of the children because of it’s ingenious business model, and many grew up admiring its creativity regardless of truthfulness. Parents on the other hand were genuinely disturbed by the prospect of drugs sneaking into even the most innocent activities of their children.

De Forest Crack

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Residence: Lakewood, CA
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

This legend is about a park in North Long Beach called DeForest Park. As kids we always just referred to it as DeForest which made many of the younger kids believe it was our North Long Beach version of a forest. The park is intended to be a nature park and also runs along the length of the Los Angeles River bank. It is shrouded in mystery because of its vastness and notoriously sketchy population.

My brother told this legend about DeForest from when we were in middle school:

“So they say that in some parts of De Forest there was a crack den. These people made this special strain of crack there that was the most addictive.

The reason it was so addictive is cause they used homeless people. They would take the homeless people from like off the train tracks and kill them in De Forest. Then they would cut up the poor old hobos and cook them up. They would boil them in with the crack.

The den was located right where the river is …the little river bed that’s in De Forest it was right by there.

That’s where they manufactured it and like broke it down n shit.

They were selling it to like middle schools so they could all grow up addicted. To whoever had money.”

Around the time this legend became popular North Long Beach had a notoriously bad reputation. It was known for drug houses and dens and high incidence of violence. DeForest was truly a spot where people knew they could find drugs that would otherwise be off the mainstream drug market of North Long Beach. DeForest was also known as the stomping grounds for middle schoolers and high schoolers trying drugs for the first time.

Due to the truly dangerous nature of DeForest this narrative acts as a practical warning for residents and especially non-residents to stay out of the “park”. It could also warn non-residents in general from venturing to North Long Beach. It was implied around this time that people who ventured into this area did so for drugs and there was a strong culture of fear surrounding drug use.

For those who were actually from North Long Beach, DeForest was an often sad reality.  This story was not frightening to them because drug use in the area existed, but because it was suggested that the practice was so fatal for everyone in the community. Crack’s production required unsuspecting lives and it’s consumption was somehow cannibalistic and gruesome. This says a lot about the anxieties of North Long Beach residents at the time – not only preoccupied with the reality of drugs in the community but to the costs imposed on the community by those who profited the most.

 

Death on an NY Subway

Nationality: Korean-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, USC
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

A New York native heard the following story recurrently during her high school years – mostly from fellow students but also from a larger population including adults and strangers:

“They were sitting on the subway and someone across from them was asleep. You know their head was bobbing along with the subway.

And apparently this person was on for many stops and so finally someone notices and gets up to check. And it turned out they had no pulse.

I heard this every once in a while not just from school but people in New York in general.

I wonder if someone just like imagined, ‘Hey what if the person on the subway across from me is dead’… and then the story just caught on?”

This story might be recurrent in New York’s subway system in particular because of the city’s notorious crowding. New York’s subway experience more use than those of other metropolitan cities, certainly LA, and it makes sense that lore would rise from such a distinctive method of commuting within the city for most residents. The concern with overcrowding spills out of just the subway system to the city in general. As the pseudo-farce political party to emerge from New York The-Rent-Is-Too-Damn-High suggests, overcrowding has become a serious problem in New York. This story reflects the fear that overcrowding isn’t only uncomfortable and inconvenient (often driving the rent ceiling way up) but also an interpersonal problem when residents stop interacting.  Even though the subway would likely have been packed during the dead man’s entire trip no one manages to notice he is dead for a substantial amount of time. The issue then becomes the isolation experienced by residents despite, and possibly because of, the overcrowding of New York.