When I was in junior high, I wore faded jeans and rock and roll T-shirts. My straight black hair was long, down to right above my butt. I was skinny, and I was often stoned. I sold pot in the bathroom between classes and brought bottles of whisky to school in my pants to get drunk with my friends during lunch. But then something happened in high school that changed my life: The movie Saturday Night Fever. That movie, in the form of John Travolta, somehow captured what I then believed was the real me.

For the first time in my life, I began to dress “nice,” which meant polyester slacks so tight your butt puckered and your members bulged in front. I never put a sock in my pants, but I arranged things down there for optimum visual effect. I wore fake silk shirts unbuttoned at the top to show a fake gold chain, on which hung a Catholic cross.

Every day before school I shined my shoes, tried various outfits before the full-length mirror, pushed open the door from my home, and strutted John Travolta-like to the high school. I bounced down the hallways of campus with so much confidence that people couldn't help but turn their heads to look at me. I didn’t have hair on my chest, but back then it would have been cool if I had. Chest hair was cool back then. I wore my clothes very tight, and I cut my hair too, so instead of the un-styled, rock-and-roll stoner look, it was now feathered and gelled. I used Dippity Doo, a jar of green gel my mother had on her beauty. After my hair was sculpted just right, I sprayed with aerosol hairspray, Aqua Net Unscented, which I can still smell today.

Livermore, California, in the 70s was a culturally non-diverse town of about 15,000 people, many of them cowboys. Although San Francisco was about an hour away, it took fashion and trends several years before they would reach our town. So the fact that I dressed disco style was cutting edge. I was the first one in my high school to dress that way.

Except for a guy named Buddy. He was a good-looking, light-skinned Armenian kid, the only other kid on campus who dressed Disco style, which meant Angel Flight pants and silk shirts, only his silk didn’t look fake. Somehow there was something authentic about the way he wore the disco style. His gold chains and gold wrist band looked real, and he had what I wanted, hair on his teenage chest. I didn’t really know him, but we nodded to each other and occasionally we shared a word, but that was it. But still, there was an unspoken mutual respect that we had between us, maybe because we were the only ones who had to leave town to buy our clothes. We had to go all the way to Eastridge Mall in San Jose, or Southgate in Hayward. 

Eventually disco would hit the entire town, like it did every town, and every radio station, ad nauseam. A few teen discos opened up, and I’d get on my Angel Flights and fake silk shirt. There was only one store in Livermore that sold a limited selection of Angel Flights. The store was called Master Jacks, and it was downtown and it also sold Army supplies like canteens and fatigues. Angel Flights cost 20 bucks and stayed that price for years. I had to use all my back-to-school money on only two pairs of pants, and I had to wear them over and over, and they begin to fade fast.

One time Joe and I were walking downtown when we decided to go inside of Master Jacks just to look through the collection of Angel Flights. I couldn’t believe what I saw.

They had on the rack a brand-new pair of never-before-seen white Angel Flights! White. They looked just like the pants John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever. I knew if I got those pants my life would change, and I would never need anything else. I tried them on, and they fit perfectly. Joe looked at me, and he said, “Those pants are you.”

I never say this, so forgive me now when I do, but I looked great! I stood looking at myself in the full-length mirror, hardly believing that the boy looking back at me was me. I had to have those pants. I looked at the price tag, expecting that they would be the normal 20 dollars, but they were 22 bucks. The two bucks wasn’t the problem, the twenty bucks was the problem. I knew there was no way my parents would buy them for me. Joe and I left the store, but they were all I could think about. I had to find a way to get them. In that store were my pants, without me inside of them.

I would save up for them, but one of the things that made them so cool was that no one else in school had white Angel Flights! I went home and gathered together all the money that I had, which wasn’t much. When evening fell, and part of the family sat at the table for dinner, I asked my parents, but they said no. No discussion. I looked in the want ads to find out if there was a job I could do to earn the money. I ended up working for this young guy, not much older than me, who fixed washing machines out of his garage. “When will I get paid,” I asked him. “Two weeks,” he said.

I was about a week away from buying the pants when Joe, Natalie, and bunch of Chicanos were hanging out during lunch time. With us was Pete de la Cruz, who was the cholo among us, cool in a way that we were not cool, Chicano cool, lowrider cool. He had long black hair in a ponytail and wore a bandana and tank top undershirt and baggy Ben Davis work pants. There were so few of us Chicanos at that school that it didn’t matter if you were cholo, jock, geek, or preppy, we all hung out with each other, we all knew each other. So one day, some of us we were hanging out during lunch in the cafeteria. Suddenly I looked across the cafeteria and who do I see walking in but Buddy, the Armenian Disco guy. He was wearing a pair of white Angel Flights!

People looked up from their lunch, froze with forks midway to their mouths. Some girls at a table pointed at him. Buddy looked good in those pants.

“Hey, Danny,” said Joe. “He’s wearing your pants!”

I was filled with rage. I was filled with jealousy. Now, even if I got those pants, everyone would think I was copying Buddy.

“That son of a bitch!” I said.

I told my friends how close I was to getting them, but that rich bastard got them first, only because he had parents that could afford them. It wasn’t fair.

Pete tapped his fingers on the table in rhythm. Then he said, “I got an idea.”

He held up his big paper cup of red soda, and shook it around, red as red, ice floating on the top. I looked into it, and he twirled it around, the red liquid swirling. “He’ll never be able to wear them again.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“Let’s pour this shit on him,” Pete said.

“Okay, I’ve heard enough,” said Natalie. “That’s wrong. I’ll see you guys later.”

Pete kept spinning the liquid in the cup. Across the cafeteria I could hear someone commenting on Buddy’s white pants.

“Like you said, he’s a rich fucker. His parents can just buy him another pair,” Pete said, looking right into my eyes and smiling.

“Ah, that ain’t right,” Joe said.

“Yeah, he’s right,” I said. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Your choice,” Pete said, and he took a sip of the soda and pulled it away, red drops on his lips. He smiled big, devilish.

“You wouldn’t really do it,” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “What’s he going to do? Kick my ass?”

“Well I couldn’t do something like that,” I said.

Joe said goodbye to us, because he wanted to go find Natalie. After he left, I saw Buddy talking and laughing with a table full of his friends, Buddy shining in the center of all those dull-colored people. Suddenly he looked over at me, nodded, and then went back to talking with his friends. In my mind it seemed like he was saying, See, I got the cool pants now. You’re a loser.

“All right,” I said, “Let’s do it.”

 

 

 

 

For the rest of the lunch we secretly watched everywhere Buddy moved. He must have had a lot of friends, because he walked from table to table, talking, laughing with people, who, sitting down, looked up at him and admired his bright, white Angel Flights. The more we watched him the more jealous I became, because he seemed to be the kind of guy that I had always wanted to be, good with people, making people laugh, allowing people to touch parts of his clothing--a hem of his garment—girls wanting to touch his hair, the gold chains around his neck, Buddy holding his head back laughing, high-fiving his male friends, girls tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing at Buddy as he walked by.

He was getting all this attention, and I wasn't getting any. The pants that I wore that day were old news, black Angel Flights so worn that the seams began to come out of the fabric. I grew more and more angry, bitter, jealous, hateful, but somehow I justified my hatred for Buddy, convinced myself that it was morally justified. This was not only Daniel Chacon fighting against Buddy (whatever his last name was), it was also the poor fighting against the rich. If my parents had had enough money, I would have white Angel Flights, too, I would have gold chains, I would have nice shiny new shoes. I was defending the poor. He was a rich kid. He was a white boy. Need I say more?

After spending the entire lunch inside of the cafeteria talking to people, and looking wonderful, Buddy and his two male friends walked outdoors into the sunlight and across the quad towards the gym. Pete tapped me on the arm and said, “Let's go.” I followed him outside. Buddy stopped in the middle of the quad to say a few things to his two friends, and then they gave each other cool, teenage boy handshakes and walked off, the two going one way and Buddy walking by himself toward the gym.

“Orale,” said Pete. “Let’s get him.” 

We ran like spies in the night the long way around the quad, along the edges, so we could end up in back of the gym. Our plan was to walk all the way around the building and then by the time that Buddy got to the gym entrance, Pete would pretend to have been clumsy and he would spill the strawberry soda all over Buddy’s pants. Pete would do it, and I was going to enjoy every second of it. The image of Buddy holding his hands over his cheeks in a scream as he looks down and sees his red-stained Angel Flights thrilled me. 

When we turned the corner to the front of the gym we saw Buddy disappear into the entrance, so we ran as fast as we could, the soda cup in Pete's hand spilling red drops on his fingers. Something began to tell me that I was making a great mistake. I mean a big mistake. I had an image of myself deeply regretting it, not in terms of getting in trouble, but in terms of the despair it would cost me, that somehow I would take this with me into eternity and relive it over and over again. This feeling got stronger the closer we got to the entrance of the gym. I almost wanted to tell Pete to forget it, but I was more afraid of what Pete would think of me chickening out. So instead of telling him that I changed my mind, I said something like, “Well it's too late now, he's in the gym.”

“Bullshit,” Pete said, and he kept running toward the entrance.

We entered the gym, into the smell of wet cement, showers, soap, and sweat. All the aisles of lockers were empty of boys, except for one clanking locker at the end of the gym. We looked and saw down the aisle that it was him. It was Buddy. He was taking something out of his locker, I'm not sure what it was, but he placed it in his pocket, slammed shut the locker and began to walk out of the gym. Pete waited for him on the other side of the aisle, behind a wall of gym lockers. Buddy was walking right toward us.

The moment Buddy reached the end of the aisle, Pete pretended like he had been taking a casual walk. He might even have been whistling, as if it were just a stroll. He took the cup, and he held it out for a second for me to see, and he took the cup, and he pretended to trip. He threw all that red stuff down Buddy’s body, all over his crotch, all over his White Angel flights. They were all wet, and as the red color soaked into the fabric, it turned light pink, and spread everywhere. Immediately I felt bad. I had somehow expected it to be casual, that Buddy, being a rich kid, would say, “Oh, well. I guess I'll have to get another pair of pants.” I knew that he wouldn't have tried to fight Pete, because nobody in school wanted to fight Pete. He had that kind of reputation. Even football players wouldn't fight with him. Pete was crazy. But Buddy just stood there, his arms out, pink splotches all over his white pants, and his face caved in with sorrow. He looked up at Pete, crying, his face contorted, as if asking him why. Pete stepped up to Buddy as if ready to fight. He pushed him back and said, “It was an accident, fool. You want to do something about it?”

Buddy told us that he just got those pants and now they were ruined and he had saved up his money to buy them. Of course that made me feel even worse, but Pete got more defensive, pushed him again, knocking him to the floor, and he said, “What are you going to do about it? It was an accident, mother fucker.”

 

After that day, I would find out a lot more about Buddy. I found out that his dad was a plumber. They lived on the side of town just as poor as where we lived, and we didn't live in a poor neighborhood. We were lower middle class, two cars, had our own house with three bedrooms. Buddy’s family was no more rich than we were. And as if God wanted to really drive the point home, about a week after this incident, I was driving downtown Livermore with my brother Ricky. We were going to the store or something, I don't remember, but we had to pull over to put air in his tires. Across the street was a car wash, young men wiping cars down and cleaning windows, and I saw Buddy working. He wore dirty jeans with wet spots all over.