An American Family: Living on the Verge

Having nothing else to offer Luis, Boyle tells him he can come in and answer phones.The job is little more than make-work, but it pays off when a new city-funded training program comes across Boyle’s desk, and he suggests that Luis go downtown for the interview. Five other guys go too, but Luis is the one who gets the callback. The deal is, he will go to Arizona for two weeks of training in underground construction, which should eventually lead to a job. There is only one slight hitch: The conditions of Luis’ parole restrict him from traveling more than 50 miles from L.A. Screw it, he thinks, and decides to chance it.

“Your parole officer is supposed to help you out,” he says. “But in my life, I’ve never seen anybody be helped by their P.O. They just give you the $200, throw you out on the street, and say good luck. It’s like survival of the fittest. So I choose survival. I’m going.”

When Luis returns from Arizona, no job is immediately in the offing. But by the end of May, a position opens up on a crew that’s putting in a new sewage system in South L.A. at Exposition Boulevard and Arlington Avenue. After a week on the job, Luis’ frame of mind has done a 180. “Now Luis leaves the house at 5 in the morning, sweats like a perroall day, and he loves it,” Francis says. “Now he comes home tired and happy.”

Growing up in L.A.: "Bola" and Elijah head around the block; Estephanie at home; snack time for Elijah.

The new job has also had a salutary effect on the marriage, which had grown strained during the months at Homeboy. Wishing to use the momentum, Francis talks Luis into setting aside one night as a sort of date night. “The rest of the time we’re with the kids. But Saturday is for just Luis and me,” she says, suddenly lapsing into Oprah-speak. “I tell him that’s what you have to do to work on a good relationship.”

In June, a new wrinkle appears when Francis slips up on her birth control and gets pregnant, the baby due February 22. Rather than being horrified, she seems delighted. “The doctor already told me I’m having a daughter,” she says. “I’ve never gotten to buy all those pretty, girlie things for a baby before.” When asked about Estephanie, her 13-year-old daughter, Francis flashes a small, grim smile. “I wasn’t really there for her until she was 5,” she says. “That’s when I started to wake up. Before that, I was a stupid teenager, out in the street, not a mother. Estephanie’s had it the hardest of everybody.”

When Luis is asked about the pregnancy, he appears to be measurably less enthusiastic. “I think we’ll work it out,” he says, but his tone suggests he might have wished for another outcome.

Although it’s hard to see an upside to adding yet another kid to this still precarious family, it’s clear that, now at least, Francis has a real knack for the nuts and bolts of parenthood. She likes taking all the boys every other Saturday to their favorite $4-a-cut barber shop on César Chávez, likes holding family meetings on her and Luis’ big bed during which she encourages each kid to speak out about their problems, likes taking Estephanie to drill-team practice, likes the weirdly peaceful meditation after everyone’s asleep of sorting out a hundred pairs of clean socks, which is what the number comes to when she does everybody’s laundry on alternate Saturdays.

Not surprisingly, Francis’ nurturing urges extend to adults as well. She cooks regularly for a small herd of neighborhood strays who appear to have no other family to speak of, and does errands for the 80-something-year-old, blind Holocaust survivor who lives around the corner. And, of course, she nurtures Luis. “I need her,” he says. “She calms me down. I might be out there being stupid if it weren’t for Francis.”

The fact that Francis exudes maternal warmth like a form of light is ironic since she received so little of it as a child. The youngest of 14 kids fathered by three men who managed to absent themselves (the first committed suicide), Francis was an oops baby conceived when her 42-year-old mother believed she was already in menopause. Soon following Francis’ birth, her mother developed arteriosclerotic Parkinsonism. Unlike regular Parkinson’s, this atypical form rarely produces tremors. Instead, the disease’s most common feature is dementia caused by damage to brain vessels due to multiple small strokes. During Francis’ childhood, her mother descended gradually into Parkinson’s dementia. By the time Francis was 8, even routine errands with her mother were problematic. “We’d be at the store and my mom’d talk to people who weren’t there,” she says. When Francis was 14, the mother’s condition deteriorated to the point that she was institutionalized. (She died seven years later, when Francis was 21.) After that, an older sister tried briefly to raise the girl, who was by now wild and disaffected. One night the sister’s boyfriend crept uninvited into Francis’ bedroom. The next morning, she packed her belongings and took to the streets, staying first with one friend then another. At 16, Francis got pregnant, moved in with her boyfriend, and left her family for good. .