Rocky Dennis In Heaven | Stuff About White People

(*Thanks to Jens Lekman, Swedish singer-songwriter, for penning such a great musical homage to RLD.)



This week I owe journalist Daniel Hernandez my gratitude for bringing Rocky Dennis back in to my emotional motherboard and pop cultural imaginary. Hernandez, of course, being the writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the LA Weekly, is poised to have a successful career in journalism. Rocky and Rusty Dennis are of course the real life folks that inspired the film Mask. Rocky Dennis was a boy with a disfiguring disorder called craniodiaphyseal dysplasia that caused his head to grow to twice its normal size, and his mother, a biker named Rusty, was determined he live a normal life.

Mask, or I should say Rocky’s likeness as rendered wonderfully by Eric Stoltz, became a perplexing footnote in DH’s either ambiguous putdown or passive aggressive come-on to my friend, Dino Dinco, who just opened a solo exhibition of his multimedia work in San Francisco.



The blog post was written under his nom de gay on another person’s art blog and it sounds like it is promoting the exhibit but I am not entirely sure. This blog in particular goes over my head with the psychically violent esoteric references that I gather are supposed to be somehow ironic. It’s like if Patsy from Ab-Fab was Latina, on Adderall and art theory, and emboldened to be racist and messed up so her mean gay rich white friends would like her better. In DH’s post however I cannot help but read his insertion of Rocky Dennis image above Dino’s image as ill-intentioned. Was it supposed to insinuate that he was an ugly freak? Or a lovable, brilliant, funny guy cut from working class cloth and dearly loved within his own biker kinfolk and the people that meet him today.

I am going to go with the latter because if Dino Dinco is Rocky Dennis then hooray for my ability to judge characters.

One of the first memories I have of living in my Bell Gardens barrio was of seeing movie trucks around the corner from where we lived. My mom walked us to the little corner park on Loveland Street and Eastern Avenue to see production assistants milling about the motorcycle garage across the street. Harley Davidsons would roar up and down, too, and these burly hairy guys would be hanging out waiting for their next scene. Later the following year when my parents took my sister and I to see Mask at the Fiesta Drive-In in Pico Rivera we realized it was Mask that had been filmed and Bell Gardens was supposed to be Azusa in the 1970s.



I believe that Rocky Dennis was an affable young kid that took the time to get to know people because he saw the inner good of the world around him and that his mother, Rusty, did the best she could in fighting the institutional indifference rampant in medical and educational spheres. A classic underdog story.



I find the film itself terribly satisfying even if it does fall prey to Hollywood hyperbole. Nevertheless, there is something terribly raw about a mother who turns to Quaaludes and handlebar mustaches when unconditional love becomes unbearable. I also find it brutally sweet when tough biker dudes kick into high paternal mode when the red-haired monster boy is in trouble or ridiculed by the world at large. A kid like Rocky inspires men weathered by life to be something other than what their caste dictates them to be—gentle.

More importantly, however, my friendship with Dinco and Hernandez’ post both prompt me to think through a personal trajectory scattered with different levels of amiability I have had with white people. Just like Rocky D’s own coping strategy of thinking of something good when something bad happens, I too think of my good interactions with white people to counter all the negatives ones that persist at my sanity. I am reminded of the poor and working class white people, particularly, the children and grandchildren of the Gran Torinos of that microcosm we inhabited in the Hub Cities of Southeast Los Angeles.






I remember Tommy Barton and his big ass ID bracelet, freckles and blonde hair in our kindergarten class at Colmar Elementary in Bell Gardens. I was one of the few Latina kids that spoke English pretty well so I got to be in his class and be chaperoned by his super mean mom that looked like Aileen Wuornos. She smoked Doral cigarettes in the playground while us kids ate lunch. Tommy would occasionally get picked up by a long-haired blonde man riding a motorcycle, this before helmet laws. My older brother had a motorcycle too and would let me ride on that back of his Kawasaki when I was 5. Tommy and I would talk shop about it.



Then when I switched schools there was Amanda Novak, one of the few white girls at Saint Rose of Lima in Maywood. She was straight off of a Holly Hobbie lunchbox who kept to herself but the Mexican and Cuban boys would torment her so badly she finally went off and shook one of them by the hair so hard I thought she was going to snap his pencil-thin neck. Gangster. We were both in an honors literature class so I knew she was writing a book in seventh grade and into all of the Little House in the Big Woods books—two things I was also doing, but I had a survivor’s instinct that went deep so I never wholeheartedly befriended her. I was too vulnerable myself as a nerdy honors student to risk social pariah status.

Then there’s Katie O’Donnell, white girl with a thick Huntington Park barrio accent that liked punk rock and kicked it with Mexicans into Brit-pop. I secretly enjoyed her and her punk girl gang taunting my friend, the bourgeois Chicano boy from Downey’s upper echelons, after he had broken her heart with such typical lame boy callousness.

Many come from the kind of life where it is nothing but the taps on a chin, getting looked down on by rich folks with alligators on their shirts, losing their factory jobs, fighting against the yellow man—the burdens described in many a Bruce Springsteen song (whom Rocky Dennis loved by the way) as well as Los Tigres del Norte. Both artists open up different aspects of my child of immigrant sensitivities—I remember blasting the emotional heat of Born in the U.S.A on my Walkman headphones to temper the self-loathing from those untamed Tigre accordions in “La Puerta Negra” spilling out of my parents’ van stereo. A typical soundtrack for many road trips to Baja California just so my mother and father could see dentists and doctors and buy cheap medicine in Tijuana and Rosarito.




Diles por "hay" a tu padre y madre,
que si ellos nunca el amor gozaron,
y si se amaban tambien la puerta,
la puerta negra, se la cerraron.

Others might manage to improve their station in life and go beyond a pre-destination and get to another place, make a different world beyond the values systems of our Reagan Democratic parents. I speculate if people of working class backgrounds feel it easy to reject white privilege since it might feel like none of it exists. I say this only because sometimes I feel strong enough to reject my oppression because it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course these are just my utopic musings of an otherwise complicated mixed consciousness that would incite rage in your run-of-the-mill tenderhearted leftist reactionary. The by-product of that being an inexplicable resentment of all white people without recognizing the large handful doing their best to resist their privilege and make a better world free of racist and economically unequal bullshit by organizing their communities or raising their own mixed-race babies.

Does that mean there are good whites and bad crackers? I don’t know but I would expect and take offense and totally understand if anyone rendered me an apologist. Candy-assed, sure, but I apologize for no one. Maybe I am just hyper aware of all the complicated sites I inhabit. Maybe the 90s made it impossible to avoid these observations. Maybe I’m tired of being burdened by anger. Maybe it will be different for the generations that follow. Maybe I am tired of putting up walls when I really want new thresholds to cross.

All I know is that are white folks in my life for good reasons, many with experiences that parallel my own. They hail from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, North Carolina’s Appalachians, Reseda, California and beyond. I think about the circumstances that have made them accessible to me, which leads me to think more about the kinds of white people available to people of color. Not just funky white people, who seems to be shorthand for lame Djembe-drum playing types, but the barrio and ghetto white folks that contribute to our sense of self and belonging to the worlds of our making, some that even go without usurping them for their own gain. Shit, even Santana had a white homeboy that served as his right-hand man in the making of La Eme in American Me.



White people. You guys get a bad rap. I say that with irony and earnestness. I get it. You get it.



I leave you with this poem written by the real Rocky L. Dennis himself that leaves me somewhat feeling less burdened by the identity game:

These things are good:
Ice cream and cake,
A ride on a Harley,
Seeing monkeys on a tree,
The rain on my tongue,
And the sun shining on my face.

These things are a drag:
Dust on my hair,
Holes in my shoes,
No money in my pocket,
And the sun shining on my face.