They called me El Gordito, but it was a term of affection. I think.

Throughout my early childhood, my family never lived too long in any one place. We stayed in California, but we shuttled up and down the state, between Eureka and Modesto especially, as if running from something.

In a way, we were. My dad by this time had his mental illness diagnosed, and was on an ever-evolving spate of drugs, experimenting with different combinations to find out which pill cocktail offered him the best chance at normalcy.

At the time, Eureka’s mental health system was abysmal, so we left a so-called bad doctor and his ineffective treatments to migrate south, eventually ending up in Modesto again, my dad’s hometown, at my paternal grandmother’s house.

Here, at age 7, I was shoved out the door on the day of my arrival with a plastic Army figurine and three marbles — one of which was a cherished Bumblebee shooter, I later found out. Shy at first, and overwhelmed by the new sights and scents wafting over the neighborhood fences, I was initially paralyzed. For what seemed like hours, but was likely just a few minutes, I hid out behind two massive hedges, peaking my head out occasionally to spot the other kids moving in a cloud of dust and elbows between several nearby houses.

Inevitably, I was attracted to the sound of laughter coming from across the street when the whole group of white and brown faces merged in the dirt driveway across from our house.

Before I knew what I was doing, I had opened the front gate and crossed the street. From the edge of the crowd of about 10 kids, I could just barely see the action at root: Juan and Dumb Juan — so named by the group for the seemingly practical purpose of differentiation — were in the midst of a duel.

Juan, a handsome 12-year-old with perfect hair, squatted on his haunches and took careful aim. His marble, strangely, was pinched by his left hand over the middle finger of his right, which was drawn back lethally like a catapult primed to fire.

Dramatically, he held it there, suspended in a supreme act of concentration, for several seconds before releasing the digital mechanism. From four feet away, his red shooter clobbered Dumb Juan’s white marble into fragments, then smoothly took its place in the dirt, spinning off what was left of its momentum.

I was hooked.

When my grandparents bought their four-bedroom house, it had just been converted — along with the rest of the neighborhood — from an almond orchard to yet another post-war housing subdivision.

It was a largely homogeneous community of blue-collar white families, most of whom made their living in construction and agriculture.

Yet by the time we arrived in the early 1980s, the demographics had shifted. Kenneth Street, where we stayed in the Spartan attic of grandmother’s house, was in the midst of a sea change as the white workers gradually moved away and were replaced by Mexican families anxious to live the so-called American dream.

I was quickly absorbed into a wild pack of kids of both backgrounds, a chubby sidekick with a sense of humor and a good-natured willingness to follow.

The latter was key as Gamaliel, the leader of our tribe and younger brother to our hero Juan, was forever in the midst of manufacturing games. War games, ball games, word games, Star Wars games, and, of course, marbles.

Eventually, I earned a place as Han Solo to Gama’s Luke Skywalker, and I liked it there. He would lead, fearlessly inventive, and I would follow, cracking jokes and embellishing his sometimes bland creations with superfluous detail.

Over the next three years, we became best friends while I learned to identify ignorance at home, and loathe it.

My dad was a racist, especially against African Americans, but he was generous with his genetic disregard and never missed an opportunity to wax hateful.

Before that most recent move, I’d never had a point of comparison and so largely ignored his daily diatribes against this or that group as it made no sense to me, and applied to no one I knew.

Thank God for cognitive dissonance. While never allowed to contradict dad, when he’d talk about the Mexicans in the neighborhood, I’d compare that with what I knew of their families, their kindnesses, their gloriously rich food, their religion, and it finally occurred to me:

This guy is a fucking idiot.

And even as he’d carry on with the drivel, he’d allow me to spend almost all my weekend hours with the Padillas. I’d attend Mass with them, mystified by the language of the priests, and the gothic attire, the Easter ceremonies and the theater of a live Jesus walking through the church’s courtyard with a heavy wooden cross bound to his shoulders.

An uncle managed a garbage dump nearby, and the Padillas brought me along one summer afternoon. Gamaliel and I spent hours foraging, claiming all sorts of relics and broken toys, as well as a Mother Mary figurine that Gama later gave to his mother.

In a valley between hills of garbage that day at the dump, Gama and I found ourselves struggling through deep shadow and mud pockets, trying our best to find again the uncle’s house where we knew his parents were impatiently waiting for us.

We’d finally oriented ourselves toward what we thought was the proper ridge, and made haste for safety. Some three steps in, however, my foot sunk deep into a foul hole, where the mud sluiced out around my thighs and my foot got caught in a sopping vacuum.

Despite our desperate attempts, my leg had become part of the landscape. It wouldn’t budge. Finally, Gama bid me a tearful farewell and promised to return with help. As he trudged away, stooping once to collect half a He-Man figurine, I almost wet myself. I was lost at sea in an ocean of garbage and mud, and besides a port-a-potty that sat diligent watch on a nearby hill, there were no signs of civilization.

Full dark arrived moments later, and I began to cry out for help. I waved my arms in the air, and yowled like a wounded dog — anything to attract attention.

Finally, over a hill behind me, I heard a buzzing sound like the muted engine of a lawn mower attacking a thick bank of weeds. Soon after, a beam of light crested the hill opposite the shitter, and the silhouette of Gama’s dad on an ATV was clear and angelic as he peered down at me buried up to my waist in offal.

Using the ATV, he grabbed my hand and slowly goosed the engine, pulling me out of the muck with a satisfying splash but leaving one sneaker behind to satiate the Gods. He immediately gave me a fierce hug, and a long lecture in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. Setting me in front of him, he threaded his way through the garbage and up onto the ridge where the uncle’s house was brightly lit, some 20 yards away.

For the remainder of that trip, after I’d changed out of my clothes and borrowed a pair of flip-flops, I sat through several retellings of the story where the only words I understood were “El Gordito,” and the good-natured laughter that followed.

The next afternoon when I squeezed out the screen door into the blazing front yard, I found a pair of brand new sneakers — Adidas — perched on a plastic lawn chair.

Gama, as always, was waiting for me by the gate.

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James Faulk is a writer living in Eureka. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com.