Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez: Relief in Self-destruction
...untouchable. He could be ravaged, he could “bang his head against a wall”(102) and feel no pain. He was “transported away from what was really there” to a place full of light, that “wondrous beacon full of sweet promise”, where he was free from fear and inferiority and violence (102). Yet, it always came crashing down when the high broke, and the dream ended. He was Luis again and it was worse than before because of the contrast. The euphoria emphasized the dramatic antithesis between the two worlds and only served to intensify his disparity. The irony of the drugs was that while it created a haven of safety for those few moments, it destroyed his mind and body. However, with no foreseeable hope or help for a better life, he was willing to take that risk. Many times death would have been a welcome relief: “Death seemed the only door worth opening, the only road toward a future. We tried to enter death and emerge from it. We sought it in heroin, which bears the peace of death in life” (125). Nothing in life had value; prejudice, blood, and dead-ends had tainted it all. Luis sought the same escape in women. Women could make him forget the world. He could lose himself in “the fire-eyes of a woman, stripped of soul and squeezed into the shreds of her humanity” (125). These women with exotic eyes were the “churches he worshipped in” (104), the largest trace of spirituality he could find. These women shared the same pain and sought the same escape in him. They used sex like drugs, blindly and carelessly, almost because it was expected of them. Just as they were expected to waste away on drugs, they were expected to have multiple teen pregnancies that virtually eliminated the slim chance of opportunity. For most, the alternative was too daunting, so instead of fighting the losing battle, they joined, they accepted, and they lost themselves in each other. Ironically, Luis used sex and drugs to salve the pain caused by sex and drugs. When Luis found that Roberta was a prostitute, he slept with her sister and began taking heroin to soothe his betrayal. He knew no other release. Eventually, some of them sought the ultimate escape of life. When the hopelessness became too overwhelming, death seemed the only relief; “In death we sought what we were groping for, without knowing it until it caressed our cheeks…This fever overtook us, weakening and enslaving us” (125). When Luis was just 13, he had already seen enough to despair of his future. Drunk and high, he w...