After the Border Patrol van departed carrying the boys who did not run fast enough, Carlitos whistled, the sound echoing in the park beneath sun-glazed downtown office towers.
“They’re gone!” he shouted in Spanish, inhaling a blast of Octane Booster–a gasoline additive and makeshift drug–from a Coke can. “I chased them off.”
A dozen youths emerged warily from the trees: homeless illegal immigrants who earn a living in a verdant corner of Balboa Park where the cars circle day and night. Where the drivers in business suits and BMWs seek out children who survive by prostituting themselves and selling drugs.
Unfazed by the Border Patrol raid, the diminutive Carlitos, 14, led the way through the brush as he described the suburban home of a man who picked him up recently.
“He has Super-Nintendo, a video, a big television, a pool,” he exclaimed, black hair falling in his eyes. “Like the movies.”
Carlitos reached a freeway interchange that cuts through the park and gestured at a row of blankets in the dirt where he sleeps beneath a concrete bridge. “We’re from Tijuana, Sinaloa, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Honduras,” he said. “This is our new house.”
Carlitos and his friends are the children of the border.
–Sebastian Rotella, “Children of the Border” — Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1993
So begins a heartbreaking article by Sebastian Rotella in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1993. Bruce was living in California at the time, raising two young children. Like any parent coming across Rotella’s essay, Bruce must have been shaken to his core by it.
Bruce discreetly tried to contact Rotella about his article through Terry Magovern (who didn’t identify who he was representing), but Rotella was in Mexico at the time and didn’t return the call.
Nevertheless, in 1995, Bruce adapted the article into a song, recorded it, and released it on The Ghost of Tom Joad. He named the song after the location both the song and article centered on: Balboa Park.
“Balboa Park” is truly a solo recording. Bruce plays guitar and keyboards–the only instruments to be heard–on the track, along with vocals so soft and intimate that it sounds like you’re listening to a story told around a campfire.
The song reads like a musical adaptation of the article. Bruce makes no attempt at a chorus and puts very little effort into a melody. The story’s the thing, and Bruce wants nothing to detract from it. The story of Spider’s Balboa Park is a million miles away from Spanish Johnny’s 57th Street.
He lay his blanket underneath the freeway as the evening sky grew dark
Took a sniff of toncho from his coke can, headed through Balboa Park
Where the men in their Mercedes come nightly to employ
In the cool San Diego evening the services of the border boys
The first verse is lifted almost directly from the opening of Rotella’s article. The BMWs have been changed to Mercedes, and while Bruce uses the street name (toncho) for the Octane Booster that Carlitos sniffs to ward off the cold and hunger, he retains the Coke can imagery.
The second verse focuses on Martin, another boy profiled in the article:
He grew up near the Zona Norte with the hustlers and smugglers he hung out with
He swallowed their balloons of cocaine, brought ’em across the Twelfth Street strip
Sleeping in a shelter if the night got too cold
Running from the migra of the border patrol
In Rotella’s chronicle, the boys–as young as age nine–sleep in a row of blankets underneath a concrete bridge by a freeway interchange, taking colorful nicknames like “Batman, “Squirrel,” Little Dracula,” and “Karate Kid.”
In Bruce’s version:
Past the salvage yard ‘cross the train tracks and in through the storm drain
They stretched their blankets out ‘neath the freeway and each one took a name
There was X-man and Cochise, Little Spider his sneakers covered in river mud
They come north to California, end up with the poison in their blood
The boys know the danger they live in (the poison in their blood is the HIV virus), but they also know they need the sex trade money to survive. In the article, the boys eat at Burger King and show off their high-top sneakers and Levis 501 jeans.
He did what he had to for the money, sometimes he sent home what he could spare
The rest went to high-top sneakers and toncho and jeans like the gavachos wear
The vignette that closes the song, though, is Bruce’s–the boys of “Balboa Park” are so invisible, that one of them gets hit hard by a passing car. The driver speeds away, and Spider retreats to his refuge, hiding in nowhere as drivers speed past, heading to anywhere else.
One night the border patrol swept Twelfth Street, a big car come fast down the boulevard
Spider stood caught in its headlights, got hit and went down hard
Car sped away, Spider held his stomach, limped to his blanket ‘neath the underpass
Lie there tasting his own blood on his tongue, closed his eyes and listened to the cars rushing by so fast
Bruce performed “Balboa Park” nightly throughout the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, but never since. The tale is too intimate, too quiet to translate to any setting other than a small theater. And when he played it each night, Bruce always took care to explain the emotional inspiration for the song–the grace of childhood that a parent wants to protect for as long as possible.
There were as many as fifty boys in Rotella’s original 1993 article. More than a quarter-century on, who knows where or who those boys are now? We don’t, and that’s just one more haunting aspect of “Balboa Park.”
Balboa Park
Recorded: March-August 1995
Released: The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995)
First performed: November 21, 1995 (New Brunswick, NJ)
Last performed: May 26, 1997 (Paris, France)
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