I HAVE BEEN A DEI writer all my life, I suppose, without ever knowing about it even when the invisible branding behind my back by some editors and insecure, fucked up colleagues was there for everyone else to see and laugh about.
My response has always been the same: Screw you. I don’t give a shit what do you think. You will never convince me of that.
I once saw my old man, a decorated World War II army veteran, beat the crap out of a Texas redneck on Austin Avenue in my hometown of Waco, Texas. The man had called my father “a worthless greaser.”
While I stood nearby fearing that the police would show up and arrest my dad, he leisurely pulled down the front of his suit trousers. I was stunned. I was four and thought he was going to pee all over the bleeding white man whimpering on the sidewalk.
Instead, dad showed the redneck the 11-inch scar snaking from well above his abdomen to just about where his penis hung out. He pretended he was going to urinate, then laughed.
“You see this?” he asked the beaten man who stared at the war scar. “I got this in World War II defending my country for my family and yours while you were hiding safely here in school at Baylor. Fuck you!
“But I’d be careful. The next Mexican-American, you call a greaser or a wetback might do more than beat the shit out of you. I’m tempted to do that myself, you worthless piece of shit, but I don’t think that would be a good example for my son here, would it?”
I could never have measured up to my old man, either in war scars or toughness. Fortunately, he didn’t want me to be anything like what he was. His guidance was simple: Be better. Be kinder. Be gentler. He was a conservative Democrat who didn’t seem very Democratic except that he supported JFK and LBJ. He voted for Eisenhower twice, Nixon, Ford, the Bushes and Reagan. He befriended John B. Connally when he was governor of Texas and even registered as a Republican with him when he was President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary.
Dad’s belief system was God, Country and Baseball, which was later replaced by the Dallas Cowboys — all in reverse order, I should add.
I loved him dearly, even though we didn’t agree on much.
I was always getting into trouble and disappointing him, never more so than my first big city by-line, with a huge headline as the lead story on a Sunday edition of the Dallas Times Herald. it was my first week at the paper, just a few days after graduating from college, and he and mom were visiting me in Dallas.
“I hate the by-line,” he said, a look of disappointment on his face. “That’s not your name.”
I hadn’t even seen the paper. But there it was:
“By Antonio Castro”
I hated the byline, too. I had never used my given first name. I had worked full-time through college at my hometown daily, earning a couple of hundred by-lines, if not more, as “Tony Castro.” All the clippings I had submitted with employment applications to various newspapers showed that as my by-line as well. I don’t think anyone even knew that Antonio was my legal name except the publisher and editor of the Times Herald.
What the hell had happened? Antonio was the name of some Third World dictator or a crooked politician at worst. At best, it was the maitre’d at some fancy restaurant I couldn’t yet afford.
I spent much of the next Monday and Tuesday, talking to the newspaper’s longtime publisher-editor face-to-face at his request, as he tried to convince me why I should use “Antonio” and not “Tony” on my byline. My city editor had printed the name Tony on top of my story copy that Friday afternoon. I later learned it had been the publisher-editor who had taken the liberty of changing it to Antonio and instructing the City Desk and my editors that it stay that way.
And when we met he was telling me that we should keep my byline name as Antonio and if I still didn’t like it after a month, the by-line would be changed back to Tony. Could we agree on that?
“No, we can’t,” I said. “I know why you want to use ‘Antonio’ on my by-line. But I didn’t accept the job offer from the Times Herald to be your nerwspaper’s ‘House Mexican.’ I’ll resign my position instead of being that. If you’re looking for a ‘House Mexican,” make your butler or housekeeper a reporter..”
My next by-line at that same newspaper was “By Tony Castro.”
My dad, I suspected, was a little disappointed that I hadn’t had to beat the crap out of an editor to get my by-line changed. That’s what dad would’ve done.
That’s also what Kamala Harris should do to all the convicted felon president’s men and women who have forgotten about all of the legacy headstarts they and their pals have profited from in their careers.
As the great Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach Barry Switzer used to say, some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author, is a writer-at-large and the national political writer for LAMonthly. org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
