Read Online The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana - Free Book Online Page A

you grow up and put the toys away, but for a while that child needed to be expressed. I’m sure Deborah must have thought I was a peculiar dude.
    What I went through was what all we Santanas went through. Everybody worked. After we were old enough to take care of ourselves, Chepa left (plus we couldn’t afford her anymore), and Mom needed help to run the house, clean, and cook. So Laura and Irma helped Mom at home. All of us did whatever we needed to do to make the rent and get the food on the table. That part of my childhood I’m really proud of—nobody ever complained or asked, “Why do I have to do this?” or anything like that. It was just understood.
    We moved a lot during those first two years—it felt like almost every three months we moved to another place in Colonia Libertad. Then we moved across the Tijuana River, which runs right through the middle of the ghetto and into the United States, to a small placeon Calle Coahuila, in Zona Norte, a neighborhood that was a little better. Two years after we came to Tijuana, we moved to Calle H. These were bungalows, almost like a trailer park. I was ten years old, and I noticed people around us had little black-and-white TVs. We kids used to sneak around to the neighbors’ houses and stand on our tippy-toes, peeking in their windows until—
snap!
—they closed the curtains. That’s how I discovered boxing. It was funny—I remember every few months there was a matchup between Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Graziano—on TV, in the headlines. And there was my first
hero
hero: Gaspar “El Indio” Ortega.
    Ortega was a welterweight and was the first boxer to come out of Mexico and go all the way up. His hometown was Tijuana, so as you can imagine the whole place talked about him and supported him. We followed every one of his fights, especially the one in ’61, when he fought Emile Griffith and lost. It didn’t matter—he was
our
hero.
    Ortega was one of the first boxers to be very evasive in his fighting. He knew how to bob and weave. Years later I got my chance to meet him—he was living in Connecticut then and had to be in his eighties. He was proud of his fights, but he was proudest of one thing. “You know what, Carlos?” he told me. “I still got all my teeth. They never knocked them out.”
    I can still remember those fights, watching them and getting down on my knees and praying for Ortega and for Sugar Ray. “Don’t let them beat him,” I would say and squeeze my eyes shut. That’s when I really learned to pray from the gut—when I first began to realize that God might be listening.
    If it had been up to my mom I would have been doing my praying in a different place. As usual, my mom was diligent and relentless—“You’re going to do this and you’re going to do that.” One time she decided I had to go to church and learn to be a
monaguillo,
an altar boy. It’s all about ritual and regalia, learning where to be at the right time, grabbing the book when you’re supposed to. The very first time I was in a mass, there was this other boy who was training me—he had done it, like, five or six times—and I remember he was a jokester.
    At one point this guy started cracking up. Then I started cracking up, and the more we got to laughing the angrier the priest got. Then the next thing I know, all the people in the church started laughing, too. I didn’t know what was so funny—I was just trying to keep it together. Then the priest picked up the chalice, and I tried to pass him the book at the same time—“Okay, here it is; now read it.” The boy didn’t tell me exactly what I needed to do—I didn’t know you’re not supposed to give it directly to him. You’re supposed to put it in a certain place, and he’ll pick it up.
    After the mass, the priest gave me a smack in the head. Of course that put a damper on my wanting to go to church ever again. I was thinking, “If you’re going to be with God, aren’t you supposed to be merciful