Congressman Luis Gutierrez joins us to talk about the government shutdown, his recent arrest, and his new book, Still Dreaming: My Journey from the Barrio to Capitol Hill. Read an excerpt from the book below.

Chapter One

Ring of Fire

It wasn’t the heat or the smoke that woke me, it was the crashingsound, like a car accident right in my living room. I opened my eyesand saw flames shooting all the way from my floor to the ceiling.

Even though I was disoriented from coming out of a dead sleepat three fifteen in the morning, I noticed the fire didn’t look normal.It looked as if it were created by the special-effects guy in a science-fictionmovie. It swirled like a Hula-Hoop of flames, blasting up fastfrom the floor, like the song “Ring of Fire”—except real.

Waking up to a crash and a burning living room gets you movingquickly. It was hot, and the ceiling was turning black. I jumped off thecouch, where I had fallen asleep, and ran up the stairs, shouting to myfamily to get out of the house. I went to my daughter Omaira’s bedroomin the back of the house and grabbed her, still sleeping soundly.Then I sprinted to our bedroom, directly above the burning livingroom, to get my wife, Soraida. She was already heading down the hallway,still groggy. She had heard the crash too. I yelled, “The house ison fire, we have to get out!” Carrying my little girl in my arms, we randown the stairs, straight for the front door. We could see that the entireliving room was burning. The couch was on fire and the flames wereattacking the ceiling.

I had dry-walled that ceiling myself, and gone to the emergencyroom when I stepped on a nasty, rusty old nail from one of the boardsI’d ripped from the ceiling. Our house was an old, single-family, brickhome. It was our little part of the American Dream. It had big doublewindows in the front and a postage-stamp-size Chicago front yard,

where we had planted azaleas. We had three small bedrooms on thesecond floor. The house was a wreck when we bought it, and we haddone most of the work ourselves. I wanted it to be the nicest house onthe block, determined not to let even one of my mostly white neighborsthink the new Puerto Rican family was ruining their nice community.Now our home was going up in flames.

It didn’t take us more than a minute to grab Omaira. By the timewe headed down the stairs, the living room was practically destroyed.It was 1984, long before cell phones, so we were nearly out the frontdoor when it occurred to me that we hadn’t called the fire department.I handed Omaira to Soraida and doubled back inside to call

911 from the phone in the front hallway. It was hot and I was sweating.The walls looked like they were melting. I shouted “Fire, 2246Homer!” into the receiver and then ran down the front steps, awayfrom the flames.

Just then the front windows exploded from the heat, sprayingglass into the front yard. Some of the shards landed inches away fromme, close enough to make me wonder why I hadn’t called 911 froma neighbor’s house. Lights went on up and down the block and thestreet started to fill with curious and concerned neighbors. We lived

three blocks from the fire station and you could hear the sirens almostimmediately. Now the flames were jumping out of the first floor windowsand the smoke was rising toward the second story, where my wifehad been sleeping five minutes before. Soraida, Omaira, and I stoodquietly and watched our house burn.

I loved our house. I couldn’t believe we were losing it. I thoughtabout my daughter’s room filled with her huge stuffed Big Bird thatshe loved so much, our wedding album by the TV in the living room,my record collection. Then I thought about how much worse it couldhave been, about how rare it was for me to fall asleep downstairs.

Soraida and I had gone out to dinner with friends that night. On theway home, I stopped to get the early Sunday edition of the ChicagoTribune, to catch up on the Mondale-Reagan coverage, hoping thatMondale might still have a comeback in him. It was October, a mildIndian summer night; Soraida had put Omaira to bed and I fell asleep

watching the news and reading the paper. Our house was quiet—soquiet that Soraida and I had slept soundly while burglars stole everythingfrom unpacked boxes we’d left downstairs the very night wemoved in. If I had been sleeping upstairs, and the crash hadn’t wokenme right away, we might have been jumping out a back window to

escape the fire. Or maybe we wouldn’t have gotten out at all.

Omaira did what any five-year-old would do; she cried and askedabout her toys, her room. We told her we would save everything wecould, but as I looked at the house I didn’t think we were going tosave much besides ourselves. Soraida took Omaira to our neighbor’shouse and they called my wife’s sister, Lucy, to tell her we would need

a place to stay for a while.

Before long, the firefighters were there, breaking more windowsto let out the heat. The water from their hoses gushed into the livingroom. It didn’t take long to get it under control, but as I looked at thegiant streams of water pouring in through the windows I knew thatwhatever the fire didn’t get, the water would.

As the firefighters moved their hoses around for better angles, aChicago Police Department cruiser pulled up. I hadn’t yet completelyembraced the idea that the police could be your friends. I was a PuertoRican who grew up in a neighborhood where cops stopped you wheneverthey felt like it. They asked you and your teenage friends whereyou lived and what you were doing and where you were going. Theyassumed you existed to cause trouble. Seeing the police as allies didn’tcome naturally to me.

So I wasn’t expecting a warm blanket, hot coffee, and a lot of sympathyfrom the police, but I thought the officer might at least have gottenout of his cruiser. Instead, he turned on his spotlight and motioned meover to his car. He stayed in the front seat with his report book open.He hardly looked at me while he took notes, as if it were nothing morethan a routine fender bender. He didn’t seem thrilled to be called outto a burning building on a Saturday night. His physique suggested hewasn’t crazy about much of anything that required movement.

“This your house?”

I told him it was, and what happened. I described the crash that Ihad heard and the way the ring of flames had shot up from the middleof the room to the ceiling.

“Probably an electrical fire,” he said.

I told him I had rewired the whole house and put in 220-amp circuits.I wanted him to understand my hard work, that I was a responsiblehomeowner. Besides, the fire looked like it had started right in themiddle of the room. And what about the crash?

“Probably something with the boiler.”

“But there is nothing wrong with the boiler,” I said. “It’s a warmnight, it’s not even on. The boiler’s in the back of the house.”

“The TV probably overheated.” The officer had still barely lookedat me.

I try to get along with people. Really, I do. That’s a statement somepeople would laugh at, including Republican members of Congresswho’ve fought with me about immigration, or Democratic membersof Congress who’ve fought with me about stopping their pay raises.I can hear laughter from Chicago aldermen who screamed at mewhen I read—out loud, on the city council floor—the surprisinglylow amount they paid in property taxes. The president of the UnitedStates, who saw me get arrested on Pennsylvania Avenue in front ofhis house, might even be amused at that assertion. But I do try to beagreeable.

I have my limits. I had just raced up and down my stairs to getmy family out of my burning home. Many of my belongings weresmoldering twenty feet away. My burning couch was lying in my frontyard, where it had been tossed by the firemen, and it was crushingmy azaleas. My daughter was crying. My heart was still pounding. I

didn’t expect much sympathy, but in exchange for my tax dollars andmy burning house, I was hoping for at least a little courtesy. But it wasobvious that the policeman assigned to the fire that night was aboutas interested in figuring out what caused it as he was in running theChicago marathon.

I resisted the urge to call him the names that were on the tip of mytongue; instead I explained to him why I didn’t think it was the TV.Or the boiler. Or the wiring. I was still talking when he looked up atme for the first time and said, “Board it up and call your insurancecompany.” And he drove off.

By 1984, I had come a little ways from being just another kid ina poor Chicago neighborhood who stood politely with my hands ona car hood whenever a policeman stopped me on my own block. Soinstead of just calling my insurance company, I also called my newboss, Ben Reyes, the deputy mayor of the city of Chicago. He reporteddirectly to the mayor, a mayor I would soon meet with pretty regularly.I explained my situation. My house had burned and the policeweren’t exactly being helpful. He called the deputy mayor in chargeof the police and fire departments. Just as the last flames from myhouse were crackling out and the smoke was starting to drift away, twoyounger and more interested investigators from the bomb and arsonsquad showed up. They had gotten a call.

I told them what happened. The crash, the weird cone of flame.They didn’t look at me like I was crazy. They were less interested intheir report book and more interested in what I had to say. We talkedwhile the water dripped off the front of my now-exposed living roomand the house started to cool down.

The younger investigator said we should go in and look around. Itlooked dangerous to me, but I was eager to see what I could salvage.The glow of his flashlight illuminated what was left. The fire departmenthad put the fire out quickly, and the back of the house was stillin decent shape. The front—upstairs and down—was burned down to

the floors, framework, and bricks. I hoped I could save a few toys frommy daughter’s bedroom, maybe a few things from the kitchen. Therewasn’t going to be much. As the investigator and I carefully walkedthrough what used to be my living room, he stopped. It was hot. Hesniffed and looked at me.

“Electrical fire, huh?”

I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me or the other cop. His flashlightscanned the floor, then stopped.

“You collect bricks, Mr. Gutiérrez?”

He shined his light on a brick smoldering in the debris, just a fewfeet away from where I had been sleeping on the couch.

“No sir, I don’t collect bricks.”

“You ever seen that brick before?”

He moved his light over the area around the brick, and then lookedback at me.

“Have you been drinking, Mr. Gutiérrez?”

I wasn’t quite sure whether to be mad or amused.

“No, I haven’t been drinking.” And I hadn’t. My only liquid vice isdrinking Coca-Cola for breakfast.

“Well, that sure looks like the bottom of a big jug of wine to me,”he said.

He was right. Near the brick was the still-intact bottom of a Galloor Paul Masson wine jug. It looked like a green Frisbee made outof glass.

Then he leaned down and found the handle and the top of the jug,with part of a rag still sticking out of the hole. He held it up. He wassmiling. He pushed the rag up toward me.

“Take a look at this, and smell the house. What do you smell?”

I hadn’t thought too much about the smell—it just smelled like fireand smoke. It smelled like it was going to cost me a lot of time andmoney. But once I really sniffed, the smell was unmistakable, thesame thing you smelled every time you pulled into the Mobile station.It smelled like gasoline.

I was still confused.

“Why the brick?”

“They threw the brick through the window. That was probablyyour crash. Then they threw the jug filled with gasoline through thehole where your window used to be. The jug filled with gasoline won’tbreak the window. It would just break and catch on fire when it hitsthe window. That just gives you an exterior fire, and they wanted to

make sure they got the gasoline inside the house.”

“But why?” I asked, still not quite convinced.

He looked at me like I was a little slow.

“Because they wanted to hurt you.”

Excerpted from Still Dreaming: My Journey from the Barrio to Capitol Hill by Luis Gutiérrez with Doug Scofield. Copyright © 2013 by Luis Gutiérrez and Doug Scofield. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Related Links:

Roll Call: Luis Gutierrez

Rolling Stone article on Luis Gutiérrez: Congress' Rebel With a Cause

Chicago Tribune article on Gutierrez book criticizes Obama on immigration

Chicago Tribune article on U.S. Reps. Gutierrez, Schakowsky arrested during immigration protest

The New York Times article on World Leaders Press the U.S. on Fiscal Crisis

The New York Times article on Immigration Reform Falls to the Back of the Line

KPCW article on Rep. Gutierrez: I Am A Product Of The Civil Rights Movement

The Christian Science Monitor article on Luis Gutierrez: pivot man on House immigration 'gang'

BuzzFeed article on The Congressional Odd Couple That Could Save Immigration Reform

Chicago magazine article on Congressman Luis Gutierrez on His Surprisingly Lively New Memoir