Atop a shelf were portraits of deceased family members. That’s how I knew of Juan Perez’s strong brow and arrowhead nose pointing downward, because of the small watercolor of mom’s papi on her altar. It was the sole surviving image of my ancestor. A wealth of statuary stood on pedestals. Plaster Indian busts, Catholic figurines with black and white faces, and African carvings, each radiating a distinct vibe. Babalú Aye was an aria of trauma, the biggest statue, but hardly the fanciest, and less prominently placed than Changó and Obatalá. His tattered rags showed a meadow of open sores. Dogs gathered at his crutches, licking the cuts. You could count his ribs. It reminded me of Big Vic after he grew skeletal and got what looked like skinned knees all over his face. How had Babalú Aye predicted, centuries prior, that SIDA would take down my older cuz?
Over months and then years, the altars taught me how to pay attention and see them. On one occasion, I’d gotten so proficient at Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor that I could play it eyes closed, without minding the fingering or keys. This allowed me to plunge into the song’s eerie melancholy, and playing it left me emotionally raw, missing dad so hard it hurt. With arm hairs raised and tears falling, I fled to the sunroom. The estera, the straw prostration mat, was rolled up in a corner. Just as I had seen mom do, I unrolled it, lay belly-down before the Orisha, and shook the rattle. Just as I had heard mom do, I called out in a loud intentional voice, like an arrow shot toward the sky. “Eleguá!” I called out. “Olodumare! Babalú Aye! Changó! Oshun! Obatalá! Ogun! Oyá! Thank you!” I returned the mat to its proper place, then continued practicing Chopin. The Orisha now lingered on my fingers, dancing with the nocturne, and I sensed the dawn of a real bilingualism, appropriate and specific to me.
* * *
—
Mom was a decadent warrior seamstress. She knew every fabric store on South 4th Street (Italian-owned) and the Main Line (WASP-run). The proprietors saw in her a kindred soul, won over by her textile acumen. They squirreled away fabrics till her next visit. Together mom and I scoured hundreds of bauble drawers to find the perfect silver fringe for Yemayá or the best gingham button for Obatalá. We searched cubbies of trim, boxes of tassels. We unspooled ribbon to make Oshun glow. The day mom found Changó’s red satin, the cashier measured four gleaming yards and sliced it with professional scissors—a scrumptious, clean cut. Then he folded the satin loosely, so as not to crease it, and carefully slid it in a paper bag. Mom could get lost in those fabric shops, same as me at the Free Library. Shelves stacked floor to ceiling beckoned to ardent believers. En route to finding whatever she had come for, a different treasure might tap her shoulder: “Take me home.” That’s how she found Obatalá’s opal sequins. That’s how I found Allen Ginsberg. He had been shelved, on accident, beside Eugene O’Neill and joined the altar of my backpack.
Mom sewed her paños late into the night. Thread spools clicked as she loaded new colors and her Singer’s kick-drum pedal stirred me awake. “Mom’s home, she’s back from work,” the sewing machine said. Lulled by the clatter, I returned to dreaming. Hours later she’d still be sewing, such was her devotion. The gift that stirred when mom was five had been advanced through rigor, discipline, and study. I had visited the homes of other babalaos and santeros, seen their living room altars—some simple, some fancy. But mom’s were of the most magnificent order. Each detail chosen with reverence and surrender. Animal sacrifice was traumatic, spirit possession was disturbing, but the splendor in our sunroom merited contemplation. Only a fool would scoff, and a system that credited Duchamp’s visual acumen above mom’s was no ally, I knew. Mom had mastered a symbolic language. I was not yet there with Chopin. But I was trying.
Silence=Death
Once upon a time Vivi was like Cuca, Nuchi, and Flor—another big cousin in the cosmology, almost-woman to my tater tot awe. Huddled together on Abuela’s steps, Vivi and co were a Mount Rushmore of cool. They ordered me to acquire chicle from the bodega and chipped in a dime for Now and Later payment. When my early-bloomer feet grew to size sevens, Vivi laced me into her skates and hollered about oncoming sidewalk cracks. They all had inner-sanctum ways of lacing off-brand kicks—spiral and macramé that elevated bargains to street art. They never revealed methods, boosting my admiration through mystery.
Season by season they peeled away. For Cuca, it was college. For Nuchi, it was having kids young. For Flor, the constant chase of the next bump or line. It’s hard to remember why Vivi peeled away, but the stoop hangs were a long-past memory when she took that bullet. Vivi disappeared into the witness protection program and mom had nothing further to say on the subject. Not how it went down nor who pulled the trigger. Wrong place, wrong time. Case closed. The bullet entered Vivi’s skull and never left and her survival, mom said, held the grace of one crucial centimeter.
Despite the awkwardness of a few years apart, when Vivi resurfaced on Abuela’s porch my relief was real. “Guess who’s out front?” mom asked. And through the banged-up door I saw an adult who half resembled the stoop girl. “Vivi!” Running outside to say hello, our greetings caught between gears. Did our old multistep high-five make sense now? A cheek kiss became the compromise. “Is that Qui Qui?” Her volume was brash, over-projected, and I wondered if her hearing had been affected by the gunshot. Vivi’s face had filled out. Her jaw was wider now, almost square. There was enough gel in her cropped curls to repair a broken bowl, and her eyelids were painted thickest electric blue. Before, she had been an au naturel stoop kid. She removed her sunglasses, inviting me to look. Her eyes wandered. Blue contact lenses did their best to cover milky-white irises. Before, she had the same brown eyes as the rest of us.
Our conversation took place on Abuela’s threshold. We were neither outside nor in, and I propped the door with my foot the whole time. It was as though we couldn’t choose who we were now, where we belonged. Our small talk was clipped and her loudness jangled me. We tried to fill awkward silences without seeming overeager. What tapes was I listening to, what was my favorite subject in school? Did I still play piano? I returned the courtesy. Where was she living now? How was Florida? I heard rumors that she’d gotten a bachelor’s. “Yup, top of my class! They do all the textbooks in braille, or give you an assistant to read it aloud to you. Gurl, I’m fixing to get my PhD next!” Finally, she asked if I wanted to talk about the incident.
“How fast did it happen?”
“The bullet blinded me instantly.”
“Was anyone with you?”
“Nope. It was a hit and they waited till I was alone. I was laying for a long time in a pool of my blood.” An accidental assassination, Vivi explained. Dealers had a hit on some fulana de tal with the same name.
“Do you believe in miracles, Qui Qui?” The question was far too chipper, with the rehearsed lure of a sales pitch. When I didn’t respond, she tried again. “Do you believe in miracles, Qui Qui? Because we’re not supposed to be having this conversation. I felt the gun on my skin, that’s how close they held it. Then left me for dead in my own blood. The surgeons couldn’t remove the bullet, so it’s stuck in me forever. Want to feel?” She guided my finger to a small round bald patch above her ear, smooth as a penny’s edge. I hugged Vivi. Burying my face in her crunchy hair, I could almost taste the bullet’s metallic scent. It all seemed the opposite of miraculous, but Vivi was floating, inches off the ground. She began again. “Do you believe in the Bible, Qui Qui?” I was unsure what she knew of mom’s Lukumí path. Puerto Ricans could be judgmental as fuck—Catholics and converts of fair complexion often hated on Ifá with particular finesse. (Oh no, we’re not that kind of Puerto Rican!) And while I had begun attending Quaker meeting, admitting it might come off as affiliation—I wasn’t there yet. Smiling, Vivi awaited a reply. My silence sufficed. “Whaaaa? You mean to tell me you don’t believe in the oldest book ever written? Gurl…!” Lowering to a sultry baritone, she assured me the pages were a riot of drama and intrigue. There was incest
, murder, revenge—and wasn’t I a literature and drama fiend? “You’ve got to read it, Qui Qui! Te juro, it’s a page-turner!” Returned to me in her fresh-scarred incarnation, my cousin hadn’t lost her wit.
One more notch on the tally: Vivi was the latest bead in a necklace strung with disappearance and decline. Roll call at family affairs grew threadbare. Maybe best to ignore who was missing any given holiday and why. Best to hope they were stuck on the couch, barrio-depressed, or that their secondhand tire blew out on the expressway. Alone, each case study’s dull ache allowed room for a joke, like Vivi’s literary sales pitch. But seen as a whole, the grim panorama began churning my stomach acid. During Wednesday assemblies at school I began to lip-synch “I pledge allegiance.” I wasn’t bold enough to stop right-hand-to-hearting, but I was pissed, too grief-swamped for the actual pledge.
Had we done something to merit the havoc? Or had the vampire crossed our threshold uninvited? I’d visited enough Center City friends, spent enough time with dad in the burbs to know that this shitstorm, this run-on tragedy, was not everyone’s America. Seeing my cousins suffer was anguish enough. Seeing the disproportionality slayed me.
“Are we cursed?” The question had looped in my mind once the Perez deaths gained steam, but I’d never voiced it. Mom and I were driving home from Abuela’s, Vivi’s miraculous return weighing so heavy that potholes double-jangled the car. Mom shot me this look like why ask shit your gut already knows? Like why conjure vast complexities when I’m merging onto 676? She rattled off vaguest mumblings about certain of her sisters who fucked their karma, about children inheriting parents’ cursed fates. It was vague, purposefully diversionary, and all she could muster. Maybe mom felt the language problem, too—that no words could purge the maelstrom, no matter how fluent the speaker or how armed with facts. She’d spoken on Latina medical crises at Harrisburg’s dome, served on mayor-appointed health boards, so she knew the disproportionality down to hospital intake rates, blocks hit hardest, deaths per capita. But she didn’t say any of that. All she said was, “It’s worse being the titi. I changed Vivi’s pampers, Quiara. You never changed her pampers. Or Mary Lou’s. Or Big Vic’s. Or…” And the outspoken advocate, the bang-down-the-FOP hell-raising megaphone, fell into silence because when the zeitgeist sits on your doorstep, what good are words?
* * *
—
In October 1992, the AIDS Quilt went to Washington. I carried my dinner up to mom’s room, where the only TV was, and ate on the floor as Channel 10 covered the story. Grave-size rectangles of fabric stretched from the Washington Monument all the way to the National Mall. My family’s secret was a countrywide spectacle. What relief, what terrible grave solace: it wasn’t just us. I was not alone. For the first time, nightly news became my habit. I began reading Pop’s turned-over Inquirer, listening to KYW, using microfiche to explore periodicals archives and out-of-prints. There was mounting proof that others were bereft. Evidence that my cousins had a context beyond hemmed-in North Philly. Giovanni’s Room, a queer bookstore on Pine Street, became a regular after-school stop, and though I couldn’t afford the stock, they had beanbag chairs and lax browsing policies. It was there I first read Audre Lorde and Bitch magazine. I skipped lunch and bought a No Glove, No Love pin, a Silence=Death necklace. At Central, I became president of Peer Education Against Contracting HIV (PEACH), an after-school extracurricular comprised of zealots and the grief-stricken. The Red Cross trained us in STD prevention and we marched into health classes rolling condoms onto bananas. Doing dental dam and vaginal sponge show-and-tell was a great bit of sanctioned classroom rebellion. My PEACH friends told me of fallen family members. We raised three thousand bucks for the AIDS Walk and marched wall-to-wall with all hues of Philly queer folk and allies. We chanted in unison, no shame or apology, with joy and purgation. After completing all twelve kilometers, we headed for the water coolers at Eakins Oval. The small circular park faced the art museum steps where years earlier mom had let slip the possibility of Guillo having AIDS. My PEACH friends and I removed our sneakers and peeled socks from tired feet. Some were hippies with attendant foot funk, others were rich kids with new socks and fresh Pumas, still others athletes with sole-worn trainers. We let the autumn air caress our tired feet. In the wake of loss, we formed a barefooted community.
I had this big idea to organize a Central High AIDS Quilt. Central had twenty-four hundred students, so the pool was big. No way, statistically, it was just me and the PEACH kids who’d been touched by the virus. After a few bake sales, I purchased a garbage bag of felt scraps from one of mom’s fabric stores. Everyone in PEACH had to bring in sharpies, glue, scissors, sequins, buttons, yarn. “Search your parents’ junk drawers,” I instructed. Pipe cleaners? Cool. Feathers? Game on. Come lunch hour, we piled all the stuff on the floor. People stopped, asked what was up. “If you lost a loved one to AIDS, honor them by making a square.” For a week, people came and worked on their patches every day. Twenty squares or so. Each one with a name. All sorts of colors. Arranged into a grid pattern, the vibrant fabrics resembled mom’s altars. Trimming, scraps, and baubles stolen from her closet found new life. There was a little Ogun in that quilt, a dash of Babalú Aye.
Problem was, none of us sewed. So how would we combine the squares into a quilt? Until we found a seamstress, all we had were AIDS patches. Mom was to a needle what Ben Franklin was to a key, but she worked nonstop, was perpetually exhausted, and the family ethos was that I took care of myself—homework, commute, piano, activities, all on me. The notion of parents helping with a school project was foreign, a sitcom contrivance. My adolescence had become pretty unsupervised, so that some days I hardly saw mom at all. But even more than that, I was afraid to show her the felt squares with Guillo’s and Big Vic’s and Tico’s names. Our family silence around HIV felt consecrated, a matter of honor, the only part of our narrative we controlled. Being the megaphone felt risky. I worried that, to mom, these fabric squares might brand me a turncoat. En el barrio, the shame and silence surrounding AIDS was stunning, complete. I knew a guy, a neighbor of Abuela’s, who thought if you go in a room with the disease, you get the disease. He skipped his own brother’s funeral, and they had been close. And yet, hadn’t lack of information caused the regret he carried with him and spoke about for years? In telling our family’s story, I sensed, for the first time, the possibility of healing, of forging love from affliction’s ore.
The Central High AIDS Quilt never got sewn together. Disconnected felt squares, that’s the best we could do. The principal gave us a bulletin board and we thumbtacked them in a grid, where they hung for a few months. The last day of school we packed them alongside our Red Cross manuals and leftover rainbow condoms in a closet. Returning to Central years later for an alumni event, I learned that the fall after my graduation, PEACH was disbanded by the Board of Ed. As ordered by the chancellor, after tremendous parental pressure, our archives and club materials had been disposed of immediately.
* * *
—
Tico’s was the loss mom and I spoke of least because while living with us, he became one of us. There was no emotional distance caused by separate homes. He was my second or third cousin who left PR to rake it in as my live-in nanny. I was a teen and required no childcare—mom was just helping a family member who needed cash and a change of scene. That side of the family was conservative, mom explained, and Tico deserved a place to spread his wings, tu me entiendes? A half-generation older than me, Tico was a party on legs. Despite being in his early twenties, he was a kid at heart with an easy laugh. The West Coast Video guys were on a first-name basis with Tico and provided a good opportunity for his wobbly English to improve daily. We scoured every coin jar and pants pocket in the house until the $2.99 rental fee was acquired. Tico’s preferred genre was stand-up, best for mastering American slang. Eddie Murphy: Raw and Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway became English 101. I sat by the VCR and pressed pause on command
. Then he would repeat some phrase by Eddie or Whoopi and go, “Yes? Did I say it good?” Tempestt Bledsoe’s workout became an obsession. I owned the VHS, so if we couldn’t cobble $2.99, aerobics was our backup. With a chestnut fro and slender-cut physique, Tico actually resembled Richard Simmons. Except his tan didn’t come out a can. Sometimes we raided mom’s closet and drawers to improvise trendy workout gear, like slipping on a bathing suit over tight jeans. And sometimes we straight-up turned my bed into a trampoline, bouncing for hours, trying not to hit our heads on the ceiling light. “Can you do a back flip?” he asked. “No!” I shouted. Then he looped his feet over his head, nailing a perfect-ten landing.
Tico, like myself, ate a lot. “Who needs plates?” That was his motto. So, two spoons dipped into the applesauce jar. Two forks plunged in the SpaghettiOs can. A full box of Kix was tossed, one by one, into open mouths. And when the pantry was low, Tico got creative. We studied the various microwave times for Cheez Whiz to melt, bubble, char, and explode. Once we ate ramen off the floor with our toes, laughing till broth ran out our noses. Mom had no clue of our antics because Tico was an exceptional cleaner. Her clothes were always returned to their drawers, the kitchen floor wiped to sparkling, Cheez Whiz scraped from the microwave ceiling.
He wasn’t out—gay was slander en el barrio, gay put a target on your head—but Tico was at ease in his skin. He didn’t temper his mannerisms or modulate them. That made him tougher than all the machos combined—his unwillingness to front, how he didn’t mask selfhood.
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