(My dear friend, veteran journalist and author Fernando Romero is seriously ailing. For the life of me, I can’t understand why his truly important and amazing book has not been turned into a screenplay and movie by now. My warmest wishes and most profound prayers for Fernando, his wife Denise, and their son, Dennis Romero, who is a journalist in Los Angeles. This was originally published in 2015).
A double — or quadruple “WOW” — on “The Colors of Eden: Memories of a Runaway Boy,” by Fernando Romero. And for several reasons: literary and personal. It’s a book I couldn’t put down until I finished it (I was reading it at lunch and dinner) — and it held some shockers for me.
First, a trip in a time machine:
In January 1982 I joined the staff of the morning San Diego Union, which then competed with the Copley company’s lively evening Tribune. One of my favorite people was Fernando Romero, who covered Baja California and Tijuana for the Tribune. There was something special about Fernando — he was sincere, cheerful, professionally impeccable, and you sensed he had an effusive spirit that couldn’t be beaten down. At one point, we competed on our beat (I did the border for a while). I loved reading his stories, admired his reporting, his writing — and Fernando himself. Once I did a held party at my then-new condo. I played the piano, he played drums like a professional. And he told me that at one point he had indeed played drums professionally with various bands. I left the paper in 1990 and have not seen Fernando since.
Fast forward now to last year.
I learned he wrote a book. So I bought it and, in the end, I thought the reviews missed the point. Some compared called it a Mexican version of Angela’s Ashes — the story of a poor boy’s struggle for love and survival. Nope. It’s a combination of Angela’s Ashes, Oliver Twist and the film Slumdog Millionaire.
It focuses on the story of a 10 year old boy’s horrific childhood: living in a broken home in Tijuana, and being sent to live with his Aunt Dolores in Mexico City. When she was mad at him she’d grab his hand, put it in her mouth — and bite down hard on his fingers. He was also beaten in his new always temporary “homes” over the years. The youth finally became a runaway, desperately looking for love, for acceptance and for anything to eat and he occassionally finding refuge — only to be betrayed, robbed, hoodwinked and used by thugs, professional beggers, and having to grapple with constantly shattered dreams of love and of living in a non-crisis mode.
He battles drugs, alcohol is constantly betrayed by people he trusts, and when he’s jailed just what you think would happen to a youth in jail happens. Then he discovers sports — and music, which put him on a path that would lead to things that totally changed his life.
There’s far more. But read the book.
As someone who lived in Spain and made Baja California my world during the 1980s and into the 1990s, and who visited other Mexican cities, The Colors of Eden’s portrayal of a seamier Mexico in the 1950s was an eye opener to me. I had spent nearly three years living in india in the 1970s and was well versed via study and interviews as a student, then as a freelance reporter on that country’s seamier part of life. But I had not understood — in detail — what the non touristy side of Mexico was like, even though my Little Brother in the Big Brother program in Mexico in Kansas from 1980 through 1982 was here illegally.
The Colors of Eden isn’t all just about the story. It’s the way it’s communicated via Romero’s compelling not-a-word-wasted writing where you feel the longings, dream the boy’s dreams, and feel the mental and physical the shock he feels when dreams are shattered and people he trusts betray him. And when he knows he knows he betrays himself and who he really is inside.
But here’s the shocker that most people who bought the book got right away and I didn’t.
Because I met Fernando, I didn’t know until the end that it’s not a novel.
It is the story his life.
It’s not a fictitious story of the memories of a child. He had worked at jobs, met a wonderful American woman named Denise, and they had a child named Dennis. After playing in various bands, he had started writing for my paper’s evening paper and the L.A. Times. And then he became a freelancer — and his son is today a journalist in LA.
I KNEW there was something special about the SPIRIT in the Fernando Romero who I knew and admired as a journalist and person and who I haven’t talked to since 1990. But I didn’t really know him.
Fernando, I hardly knew ye.
You most assuredly don’t have to have known Fernando to love and read the 244 page book. My only question is why someone in Hollywood hasn’t snapped it up to turn it into a movie.
In both the book and in his life, “The Colors of Eden” shows that, yes, sometimes there are happy endings — and that nice guys can finish first.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.