BEFORE THERE WERE TECH BROS, THERE WERE PATRON BOYS
[Disclaimer: this piece collages images from my paternal family's oral history, which may or may not be misremembered below]
They came to this landscape already busted
pocketing hard boiled eggs. If ever you asked them,
the Patron Boys were Spanish and California Indian.
[ … ]
Theirs was the San Jose of bolo ties, the San Jose of big deal department stores.
Cannery workers by day, the Patron Boys wore full suits downtown to the movies.
They started their hearts with a shot in the morning and slowed them at night with another.
[ . . . ]
The Patron Boys shrank from the wraith of an addled dead woman
—wringing her sick bloodied hands. She wailed near the creeks
where their own mother sent them with a bag full of kittens to plunge:
furred newborns writhing in sackcloth. When The Patron Boys drowned
their hands and the litter deep in the cool swollen bed, it was not
that old wailer who rattled them. They spotted a fouler beast
snarling—crazed or undead—known to The Patron Boys’ lineage
as the devil dog with eyes as red as glowing embers.
[ … ]
A Patron Boy as quoted in the San Jose Mercury News
more than 100 hundred years ago:
As you can see, I have my head all bandaged up.
I have got some bad bruises on my forehead
that I got in the fight. I did not make those bruises
myself either.
[ . . . ]
A local Prizefighter when paid to rough up a Patron Boy:
That’s no Frenchman! That’s so-and-so Patron
and I’ll have no quarrel with the Patrons.
[ . . . ]
Years hence, when two shaking prisoners were lynched in the trees,
The Patron Boys stood watching: their eyes in the mob. One Boy
would pilfer a length of the rope that the prisoners were hung from.
When placed on a table, the relic waved of it’s own accord: moved
by some unseen hand.
They came to this landscape already busted
pocketing hard boiled eggs. If ever you asked them,
the Patron Boys were Spanish and California Indian.
[ … ]
Theirs was the San Jose of bolo ties, the San Jose of big deal department stores.
Cannery workers by day, the Patron Boys wore full suits downtown to the movies.
They started their hearts with a shot in the morning and slowed them at night with another.
[ . . . ]
The Patron Boys shrank from the wraith of an addled dead woman
—wringing her sick bloodied hands. She wailed near the creeks
where their own mother sent them with a bag full of kittens to plunge:
furred newborns writhing in sackcloth. When The Patron Boys drowned
their hands and the litter deep in the cool swollen bed, it was not
that old wailer who rattled them. They spotted a fouler beast
snarling—crazed or undead—known to The Patron Boys’ lineage
as the devil dog with eyes as red as glowing embers.
[ … ]
A Patron Boy as quoted in the San Jose Mercury News
more than 100 hundred years ago:
As you can see, I have my head all bandaged up.
I have got some bad bruises on my forehead
that I got in the fight. I did not make those bruises
myself either.
[ . . . ]
A local Prizefighter when paid to rough up a Patron Boy:
That’s no Frenchman! That’s so-and-so Patron
and I’ll have no quarrel with the Patrons.
[ . . . ]
Years hence, when two shaking prisoners were lynched in the trees,
The Patron Boys stood watching: their eyes in the mob. One Boy
would pilfer a length of the rope that the prisoners were hung from.
When placed on a table, the relic waved of it’s own accord: moved
by some unseen hand.
PAST GENERATIONS OF patron PEOPLE in the valley of the heart's delight
LESLIE PATRON was born and raised in the Alum Rock neighborhood of East San Jose. Her poems have previously appeared in Harp & Altar, La Petite Zine, Swine Mag, and others. You can find her online at http://romancingthevoid.tumblr.com.
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