Sniffing
To kids looking for quick thrills, painting the town has a meaning all its own.
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Every few minutes, as we drove along, Pacheco would announce that we were in some new area—Mirasol, say, or Alazan Apache—but the borders we had passed through to reach them were invisible to me. The main arteries were a long pastel wash of bars and panaderías, of meat packers and Spanish drive-in movies. It was a cultural continuum broken only rarely by an intrusive Pizza Inn or Dairy Queen, grafts from another world that the living tissue of the barrio seemed to accept tentatively at best. The westside imparted that sort of cultural integrity and was vast enough to suggest, in itself, a foreign country. It had the air of a Mexican border town that had suddenly lost its tourist trade and was beginning to recede into its own legitimate heritage. The vibrancy managed to survive even in the residential neighborhoods, where what little ethnic gloss there was was overwhelmed by drabness. We passed one housing project after another; each to me was identical and gave off a grim sense of déjà vu that reminded me of Indiana turnpike stops. All the projects seemed to have the same 400 or 500 units, the same rusting patio furniture, the same graffiti scrawled in gold or silver or copper spray paint on the walls. (These colors, more potent and aromatic than nonmetallic paints, were virtually the only ones that westside sniffers used.) Pacheco pointed out one of these units as his home, the place where he had been born and raised, and as we cruised through the neighborhood I watched the abbreviated, almost imperceptible signals he gave to the kids who were hanging out by the project. It was a kind of code—it involved maybe a faint raising of the eyebrows, a conspiratorial smirk, a certain cool cast to the face that implied empathy and tolerance and that seemed to me to instantly allay concern about the strange gringo in the van who was writing down things in a notebook.
When Pacheco was growing up here there had been gang wars, and he reminisced about how, when driving down this street at night, he had had to flash his lights, a code that demonstrated he was not from enemy territory.
“With gangs around, all the anxieties were directed outward,” he said. “Now it’s different. People go into themselves more. I think that’s why we have so many sniffers.”
Chagoya parked the van near a concrete culvert that seemed to stretch for several miles in either direction. We all got out and began to inch down a steep grade that led to one of the tunnels. I had heard of the tunnels before, that there were dozens of them in the city, that taken altogether they ran for hundreds of miles, and that each one was several miles long and wide enough to drive a car through. They were used for storm drainage, but they were also a system of catacombs marvelously suited to every form of criminal endeavor: dank, spooky, laced with smaller tunnels that could be used as escape routes should the police find the nerve to pursue anyone through them.
When we reached the entrance of our tunnel I could see that it was illuminated about every hundred feet or so by shafts of light that came from the smaller drainage tributaries. By that light we could see perhaps a half-mile of a corridor that ran all the ay to Concepción Park on the other side of town. I had a brief, apocalyptic image of the Alamo, of La Villita and Hemis-Fair Plaza, of every prim, quaint, well-tended structure in San Antonio suddenly plummeting through their foundations and landing in these nasty vaults that latticed the city.
There were no sniffers down the corridor—had there been, they had probably long since heard our echoes and scurried out one of the side tunnels. There was a fetid smell emanating from the inch-deep water that was seeping into our shoes. Names of sniffers were written on the walls in florid, oversized script. In the half-light these names looked like pictographs, and I felt like an archeologist on the trail of an unknown civilization.
Pacheco’s shoes had slick soles and he was having a hard time keeping his footing. “Kids play hooky here in the daytime. They go down to HEB and steal some potato chips or something and then come hide out in the tunnels all day and sniff paint.
“When we first started coming over here they thought we were undercover cops. We used to come through on motorcycles form Concepción Park and chase them all the way down. We’d have guys waiting at the entrance to catch them. Then we’d talk to them and try to get them involved in the program.”
On the way back out of the tunnel I noticed a few empty Coke cans, and there was a puzzling postscript to some of the graffiti on the walls—the notation c/s. Later I found out that this was an abbreviation for con safos, which meant that the name after which it had been written could not be defamed, not even if someone came later and wrote joto or some other slur beneath it. The name stood as it was written, inviolate.
When we left the tunnels we headed for a vacant lot where a good deal of sniffing had reportedly been taking place lately. On the way we picked up a boy named Eduardo, a fourteen-year-old who billed himself as a reformed sniffer but about whom, Pacheco admitted later, he still had his doubts.
When Eduardo climbed into the van Pacheco explained to him in Spanish what I was doing, and although I couldn’t quite follow the conversation I was able to assess well enough the tone that Pacheco brought to it: a concern so easy and authentic it seemed far removed from the bureaucratic grantsmanship, the paneled offices and Selectric typewriters of the organization he represented.
I tried to emulate this tone when I asked Eduardo a few routine questions about his paint-sniffing career. He was nervous, chewing on a pop-top and periodically taking it out of his mouth and inspecting it, as though he were an artisan fashioning a piece of jewelry with his teeth. There was a Rimbaud look to him, some sediment of innocence that was constantly being stirred up. He answered my questions in imperfect, staccato English.
“This friend Armando,” he said, “he was sniffin’ and he went to that half-way house and he saw how all the sniffers were—skinny, you know, and you could see their brains—not their brains, their skulls—and he came home and was pretty scared you know. So I don’t do it anymore.”
“This area we’re going to,” Pacheco said as we drove off, “is totally isolated. There’s nobody working in there. We’ve been trying to make some contacts but it’s pretty slow at first.”
I realized that in this business of making contacts a suspicious-looking gringo could only be excess baggage, but since nobody else seemed to worry about it I didn’t either. We came to a part of the westside where the trappings of Mexican culture simply gave out in the face of utter poverty. We tramped through an overgrown vacant lot with Eduardo leading the way like a hunting dog, even letting out a factious howl when he reached a clearing circumscribed by empty soft-drink cans.
We were on their trail. I picked up a 7-Up can and gingerly put my nose to it. No anise there. This sniffer had been using some other flavor. There was a pebble in the bottom of the can, in imitation of the little ball that keeps paint stirred up in spray cans.
Eduardo began stomping cans under his foot. There was a manic, self-righteous gleam in his eyes.
“That’s so they can’t use them again,” Pacheco explained. He picked up a Budweiser can. There were screwdriver holes punched in its bottom.
“Good to the last sniff, huh?”
Holes had been punched in the spray cans as well. There was an old car seat on the other side of the clearing.
“Boy, these kids thought of everything,” Pacheco said. “All the comforts.”
I made several more visits to San Antonio during the next week but my prey continued to elude me. One morning I rode with Juan through the housing projects and into a neighborhood of prim little houses with pastel picket fences and plaster statuary scattered about the yards. At one of these houses he stopped and honked his horn, startling a wino in a fur hat. When no one came to the door he got out of the car and yelled up and down the street the name of the kid he was looking for.
“I thought he might be home today,” he said. “They tend not to go to school on Monday. They like to take a long weekend. This kid we’re looking for has been through a lot. He just got out of Gatesville. His mother doesn’t give a shit about him, either. I think there’s maybe thirteen in his family. The majority of kids we get—I’d say about eighty per cent of them—are from one-parent families, the father’s gone off somewhere. To distribute the love and affection all these kids need is hard because there’s so many of them. Probably what they do is ignore all of them.”
Later that day I went out with Garcia on the same errand. Several times he pointed to some teenager leaning against a housing project dumpster, staring sullenly at me as we drove by. “That guy there’s a sniffer. Only I don’t know him too well. He wouldn’t talk to you anyway.”
Once or twice we saw kids sitting on the sidewalks holding Coke and 7-Up cans under their noses, not even bothering to go through the pantomime of sipping. They would eye us suspiciously, ready to break and run if our car should slow down.
Finally I hit upon the simple expedient of bribery. Garcia said he was sure he could find a few sniffers who would be willing to talk in exchange for a small “honorarium,” though he was concerned they might spend the money on paint. We decided to keep the cash minimal and take the kids to dinner.
Since Garcia needed a few days to set this up I returned to Austin, where Jesse Flores, director of the Youth Advocacy Program there, had arranged a sort of symposium with about ten of his former sniffers, eight boys and two girls. Several of the kids, in an effort I think to put me at ease, said they admired my tennis shoes. They said I could go anywhere in the eastside and be accepted because I wore Converse All Stars. But several times during the discussion I think I blew this advantage, as when a kid told me how, on paint, he had “ripped off a house.”
“What? You ripped off a whole house?”
“No man, no a whole house! I ripped off the stuff in the house!”
A small boy of about fourteen with a look of beatific self-reliance told me a story so plaintive and lovely it reminded me of Huckleberry Finn. He used to get high on paint, all by himself, then sneak out of his house, away from his alcoholic father and nagging mother, and break into a house several blocks away whose inhabitants were apparently on vacation. All alone in this house he would sniff paint, watch TV, sleep in the bed, wake up sometimes unable to remember where he was, but unconcerned enough about it to make himself some breakfast.
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