Free The Hidden Law by Michael Nava Page B

council members carry a badge,” she said. “It gets us out of traffic tickets. You want to come inside with us?”
    He shook his head. “Hi, Henry.”
    “Hi. It looks like there’s going to be trouble here, Josh,” I said, indicating the Chicano demonstrators.
    “The cops will keep them away from us.”
    “I’d feel better if you came inside.” After a moment, I said, “You could bring Steven, too.”
    “Sure, if you don’t mind that we disrupt the funeral.”
    Inez said, “That would not be a good idea.”
    Josh touched my lapel. “Then I guess we better stay out here.”
    “Why don’t we both go home, then,” I said.
    He shook his head, “Those days are over, Henry. You can’t protect me anymore.”
    Inez tugged my elbow. “Henry, let’s go.”
    “See you later,” Josh said, and kissed me. “Bye, Inez.”
    “Good-bye, Josh. Keep your head down.” As we walked away she asked, “What was that all about?”
    “Marital discord,” I replied, and left it at that.
    Uniformed cops swarmed the entrance to the cathedral. As at City Hall, we had to pass through a metal detector. A tall man who looked like a cop in plainclothes called over to her. “Council-woman Montoya?” We walked over to him. “Fred Hanley,” he said. “LAPD anti-terrorist squad. If you’d step this way, I’ll have someone show you to your seat.”
    “What’s going on here?” she asked.
    “Just a precaution, ma’am,” he said, sounding exactly like Sergeant Friday. He handed us over to another plainclothesman who took us into the church and sat us four rows back from the altar. I could make out the backs of the heads of Peña’s wife and children in the front. Gus’s casket was on a flower-strewn dais. It had been left half-open, “half-couch,” in the argot of morticians with which I had become more familiar than I had ever wanted to be in the past few years of burying friends who’d died of AIDS. I could make out Gus’s stern profile.
    The service began.
    As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. As I watched the theatrics unfold, I thought of Gus Peña. Over the past five days, the news stories about Gus had filled in the holes in my knowledge about him.
    He was the son of Mexican immigrants and, as Inez had said, he knew what it was like to be poor. After high school, he’d joined the military, and done a tour of duty in Vietnam. Upon his return, he’d come back to the city and put himself through college and law school. In the sixties, he’d worked with Chavez’s farmworkers. Later, he’d come home to East LA where he opened up a law practice and began building the foundations of his political career.
    I’d grown up in a place as poor as East LA, and I knew what he’d bucked to turn himself into the suave politician he had become. Inez was also right that he had never forgotten his roots. That in itself was an accomplishment; self-made men had a tendency to generalize their experience into a sour kind of bigotry against the poor. Peña could have escaped into the reaches of the upper-middle-class, the token “Hispanic” partner at some big downtown law firm, but he hadn’t. Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he’d developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits.
    I could imagine all this because I had traversed the same trajectory. The difference was, being homosexual as well as Chicano, I’d had to learn a level of self-acceptance that mitigated my anger. Having had to overcome my own self-hatred, I couldn’t sustain hatred toward other people very long, not even the people who ran the Catholic Church, though God knows they