King of the Californias, Pt VI

by Monk Eastman, New York City, USA

There is a story about Cecilio Goncz that comes to me as he rushes from the bedroom, chrome pistol in hand. It's a second-hand story, something I heard from a survivor in the Watts Refuge about three years ago.

The first wave of emergency workers descended on Southern California shortly after the Little Big One. Historically, the area known as the Inland Empire suffered the worst casualties. Nascent attempts to coral survivors into 'rescue stations' soured relations from day one. The Sharon J. Carter Center's archives have survivors' video records that show crowded camps hemmed by razorwire, without plumbing, electricity, or potable water. Security was provided by a dozen private firms, which in the days before the United Nations Private Military Oversight Committee, were quite literally at war with each other in hot zones across the globe, and only barely committed to defending the rescue effort. Such conditions made a difficult relief effort almost impossible. Movements such as the San Bernadino Popular Front, Claremont Defense League, and Twentynine Palms Irregulars were born in those days. But before Tweaks Neuman armed his first IED, or Kelvin Black organized his first slaver ring, there was the Moreno Valley riots, where BRK private security killed over 143 people, in full view of a busload of refugee children, up from Pico Union. By nightfall, those children were cycled into the camp's general population, while camp veterans were forced to pile their dead neighbors into funeral pits at gunpoint, and spray them with decompiler foam. It was all very unsubtly painted over. News was sequestered, video lost, blogs blocked by service providers. In later years, we would discover these were not isolated incidents. The ineptitude and corruption were persistent, institutional malfunctions that contributed more to the President's famous 'Southern California is no longer viable for reclamation' than the actual earthquake.

As the abuses at Moreno Valley continued, the children took it worse, without guardians or legal status. In the aftermath of the riots, these orphans were known as los polvos, dustbabies, raised on casual violence, systematic brutality, and sparse rations. Southern California had a tradition of gangsterism known across the globe, but its latest iteration, remixed in the deep shadows of the rescue stations, was perhaps its most vicious. Initiation rites were not complete until a child had taken the life of at least one person from their camp, with proof of kill. Rewards were usually meager: an extra ration bar perhaps, or a new blanket.

It is said that in exchange for a teddy bear, the sole reminder of his dead parents, a ten year old Cecilio Goncz returned one night with a guard's genitalia, removed with scalpel precision.

And that it, along with the teddy bear, is the one souvenir he left Los Angeles with when the provisional government took over.

Some take this as a tale of sentiment, or innocence lost.

I take it as a cautionary tale, of a man who knew even at ten what he wanted, and was quite capable of anything to get it.