Lou Mathews

L.A. Breakdown revolves around street racers in 1960s Los Angeles. They’re mechanics by necessity, hard drinkers by choice and regular guys with regular problems: money problems, girl and ex-wife problems, job problems, and in one case partial paralysis. Some eventually end up in Vietnam. Cars and racing are the things that loosely bind them. They race for the love of it, the crowd - the “speed addicts,” and the money wagered.

Lou Mathews knows this life. He describes the drivers, cars, the illegal quarter-mile races lovingly. “Moon’s Ford came out smoothly, no slippage, no tire smoke, no squealing, not even a chirp, just gone.”

It’s about the cars and racing, but really about life for young men at the time of war, when many of them would be pulled away from what they loved.

The cover of this edition is one of the best I’ve seen, just beautiful.… (altro)

A collection of linked stories set in a barrio of Los Angeles known as Shaky Town, at least in the book. Emiliano Gomez, self-proclaimed mayor of Shaky Town (when’s he been drinking) figures prominently. With his missing fingers, guitar playing, love of Hornitos tequila and hard-luck life, Emiliano is a good character to pull the stories together, although he’s not featured in all. There are also Korean store owners, Catholic high school boys and priests, and tough-guy delinquents.

In Huevos a group of boys cruise L.A. on Halloween with dozens of eggs, looking for trouble. In Con Safos Rifa some of the same boys get in over their heads trying to organize a gang fight with a rival school. Crazy Life features a girl still in high school whose older boyfriend gets arrested for a drive-by shooting. She sees that tough guys aren’t always. “Then he like started to cry or something. Not crying, Chuey wouldn’t cry, but it was like he had a hard time breathing. I couldn’t believe it.” An art teacher, “a half-time teacher at a third rate school” commutes home while getting progressively drunk and mourning his mother’s cancer.

Emiliano Part III: Last Dance is particularly strong. Emiliano swallows his bitterness to attend his long-time neighbor’s 75th birthday party despite the fact that “Anita Espinosa has been a cabrona for a lot longer than she has been old.”

The faith of Brother Cyril, a teaching priest at St. Patrick’s, is shaken to the core when he discovers what his predecessor was up to. A former boxer, Cyril turns to drink, women and door to door sales jobs that he can’t keep.

Lou Mathews deftly captures the flavors and life of the Los Angeles barrios and SoCal Mexican culture in these stories.… (altro)