by Jaime Cortez
“Good job, everybody!” shouts Cookie. “Tiny, stop copying everybody and make up your own steps. Keep dancing, everybody. This is better than American Bandstand! This is MEXICAN AMERICAN BANDSTAND!” Everybody goes “Woo woo!” and “Awright!” and “Right on, sister!” and we all clap. Cesar is rocking out, man. He is dancing outside of the dirt square and moving through the group. His fists and feets and bony elbows are kung fu’ing all over the place. He pushes out his lips and looks at everybody all suspicious out the sides of his eyes, like Bruce Lee. He pretends he’s dancing with nunchucks, and it looks so real that we circle around him and start cheering. The song finishes, and we’re all breathing like we had just finished a race.
“This is a very hard decision,” says Cookie. “There are many champeen dancers here at Mexican American Bandstand, but the winner is … Cesar!” Cesar pumps his arms in the air. He does a quick double kick and bows to the clapping.
“Now, it’s time for the grand prize,” says Cookie. “Winner takes all.” She holds up a big, shiny coin.
“Fifty cents? Wow,” says Sylvie.
“That’s right,” says Cookie. “This is for the big prize.” Next on the countdown is song number three. It’s “Rock Your Baby.” I like this song. Everybody looks happy to dance, but Cookie starts complaining again.
“No! Not like that, you guys! Listen to the song. You have to dance with soul. Put some soul into it!”
“‘Dance with soul’?” says Cesar. “What does that mean?” Cookie squeezes her head with her fingers to show that we’re giving her a bad headache.
Then Cookie steps in and she starts to dance. At first, she looks kind of goofy, hardly moving at all. Her head is down. Her hair is hanging in front of her face like a black curtain. She’s listening. Then something changes. Cookie lifts her big round face to the sky. Her hair falls back, and she begins to move. Wow. The way she dances. It’s pretty. It looks easy, like she’s not even trying. She never looks at her feets. Her hips and shoulders go with the song, like she belongs to it. At the end of the song, the voice of the dude who sings it goes really high, like a girl’s. Cookie’s hands start drawing butterflies in the air. Is this soul?
When the song finishes, we all clap.
“Okay guys,” says Cookie. “Show’s over.” She goes to her radio and shuts it off.
“What about the prize? Who won the fifty cents?” asks Cesar.
“I did,” says Cookie. “I danced better than anybody. I’ll see you kids later. I gotta go, I’ve got a big life to live.” Cookie picks up her radio and walks back toward the houses, moving her hips and swinging her hair. As she walks away, a bunch of us flip her off. She doesn’t even turn to see it.
“She thinks she’s so big, but all she is is a big cheater,” says Sylvie.
“She thinks she’s better because she tricked us, but she’s not,” says Cesar. “All she is is fat and dark and mean and kind of ugly. But she did dance good.” We laugh because it’s true.
* * *
The next morning, Cookie doesn’t show up at the school bus stop and we don’t see her at school. After school, I decide to spy on her house to see what’s going on.
“Sylvie, go with me to Cookie’s house,” I say. “Maybe she’s sick or something.”
“I don’t wanna go. Her mom is mean. Remember what she said to us the day of the fight? She hates us. Besides, our ma said not to talk to her.”
“You don’t have to say nothing to her,” I say. “I’ll do all the talking. Don’t you wanna know what’s happening with Cookie? If you go with me, I’ll let you look at my new Archie comic. C’mon.”
“Hmmm. Okay, I’ll go with you.” She goes with me and we knock on the door. Nobody answers the door, but we can hear The Price Is Right on TV, so we knock some more. Nobody answers, so we knock harder.
“All right, all right!” says Cookie’s mom from inside. I hear her moving in there, and it’s kind of scary to hear her walking to the door. She opens the door. Wow. We can see and smell that the kitchen is wrecked. Dirty dishes and cans of Olympia Beer lined up on the counter. For once, she was wearing a normal mom nightgown instead of a mini skirt. Her face looks really different with no makeup.
“What do you kids want?” she asks.
“We came to see if Cookie wants to come play with us, maybe listen to music on the radio.”
“Play with you?” she asks. Yeesh! Cookie’s mom smells like a dad coming home on a Saturday after disappearing since Friday.
“Let me tell you something, Gordo. Cookie plays with boys all right, but not the little ones like you.”
“Is she okay?” asks Sylvie. “She wasn’t at school.”
“She’s not okay, and she’s probably not gonna go back to school. She thinks she’s too grown-up for school. Tell you what. If you kids see her and that punk Manny, tell them to give me back my radio and that I’m glad they’re gone!”
“Okay, I will,” I say.
“Is that all you kids want?”
“Yes that’s all,” says Sylvie. “We thought we would see Cookie.”
“Too late for that. Won’t see me either in a little while. I don’t belong in this camp, and I’m going someplace nicer. I’ve got a big life to live. Goodbye, you two,” she says.
“Goodbye,” says Sylvie. Suddenly, the face of Cookie’s mom changes, and her voice changes too, and she’s really nice. She looks at Sylvie and says, “Mija, you got such pretty green eyes. You’re as pretty as a gringa. Boys are gonna love you.”
She looks at me and touches my hair. “Nice curls, mijo. I’d kill for curls like these,” she says. I pull back my head. She reaches again, and I step back.
“Remember,” says Cookie’s mom. “If you kids see Cookie and Manny around town, tell them what I told you, okay?”
She steps back inside and she is about to close the door, but suddenly she stops.
“Hey, one more thing,” she says.
“What’s that?” asks Sylvie.
“Always be nice to your mom.”
“Okay,” I say. She closes the door on us. We walk away and I whisper to Sylvie. “That was weird.”
“Yeah, it was,” says Sylvie.
“You think we’ll ever see Cookie again?”
“Yes,” says Sylvie. “We’ll see her around. I don’t think she’s gonna go far.”
The Nasty Book Wars
When you leave a grapefruit on a countertop for a couple weeks, the membranes and fruity ligaments that hold together that nice rounded shape slowly weaken. Gravity insinuates itself, and the citrus’s bottom begins a relentless downward migration. The underside spreads and takes on the flatness of the counter, while the top thins out. That defeated grapefruit shape was precisely the shape of Primitivo Doblado’s head. Primi, as everyone called him, was a summertime fixture in the sunblasted garlic fields of Gyrich Farms. No one knew how he first arrived or how the lucky bastard managed to get hired as a garlic topper summer after summer when better workers were turned away by the proverbial truckload.
“How does he have the luck to get hired? I’ll tell you how,” my nana Lupita would explain. “In his wallet, Primi carries hairs from the ass cheeks of Satan himself. The luck of the Devil is with him. He is protected. No matter how he works, smells, or drinks, he’ll keep getting hired.”
By late July, the garlic had been pulled from the dirt and heaped in the fields, where it dried in the baleful San Benito County sun like mounds of tiny skulls. The stoop labor was performed in afternoon temperatures that hovered in the low nineties and sometimes more for weeks at a stretch. For this reason, summer was a season of dread to all the children age five and up, who harvested garlic alongside their parents. The worst day of school was better than the best day in the garlic fields, which to my child eyes stretched impossibly to the hazy edges of the Gabilan Range foothills, gold with paper-dry grass. My sister, cousins, and I were nothing special for working. In the early and midseventies, labor laws had not tightened up in farm co
unties, and children were commonly brought in to help with summertime harvesting. It saved on childcare expenses and added to the farm family incomes.
The workday started early, to beat the heat. Getting out of bed at sunrise was hard for kids and adults alike, but for Primi, it was unthinkable. He rarely made the 6:00 a.m. start on time or sober. Didn’t have good hands, either. Shaky. His fingers were sunbrowned and clumsy, wrapped in filthy white medical tape to protect the many cuts he had self-inflicted with his garlic shears.
He had bulldog magic, Primi did, though, that charm of the grotesque. Quick to smile but no fucking neck. Nada. His head, jowly and big lipped like an Olmec idol’s, sat squarely on his collarbones. To look to the sides, he had to turn his entire torso. Primi was a beer guy and looked it. A riverine network of dilated capillaries marred his cheeks and perennially swollen nose. His beer gut jutted imposingly over improbably scrawny legs.
Everything about Primi seemed to invite teasing and mockery. Fortunately for him, he was unflappable and emotionally indestructible, able to absorb levels of mockery that would fell a lesser mortal, and funny enough to dish it right back. This created an entertaining and virtuous cycle of insults and comebacks that livened up the tedium of the workday. One afternoon, Primi fell asleep while enthroned in the porta potty toilet. His drinking buddy El Cuatro heard him snoring from a distance and called forth a trio of workers who stopped their labors and gathered around to laugh, jam the door with a stick, and throw dirt clods at the plastic walls as Primi cursed them from inside and pounded the walls, a cantankerous genie demanding release.
Primi had no wife to enforce grooming. The more forensically inclined garlic toppers studied his queerly angled bangs and sideburns and deduced that he had been cutting his own hair with garlic shears or a perhaps a bread knife. At lunch, Primi ate like a twelve-year-old boy blowing his allowance—Laffy Taffy, Cheetos, pickled pig knuckles, and Rainbo white bread sandwiches with triple baloney, double slices of American cheese, and, peeking out from underneath the meat stuffs, representing the vegetable kingdom, what might once have been lettuce.
The oracular musings of Primi were a source of fascination. The workers would lob questions at him.
“Primi, you wanna get married? Don’t you want a wife?” He mulled over the questions like an ascended guru.
“No, ese. I don’t have money, so I couldn’t attract someone better looking than me. I’d have to stay in my own league. Imagine a woman with looks like mine. No. No marriage. Besides, it’s cheaper to rent.”
“Primi, what’s the best beer?”
“Whichever one is in my hand, loco.”
“Primi, why do dogs love humans?”
“If you gave me free cans of food and cleaned up my caca, I’d love you too, homeboy. Woof.”
When Ligo and conspicuously pregnant Chelo had an August wedding, they invited Primi and scores of other garlic toppers. The weddings of the poor are often anything but poor. They function as working-class Oscar nights, a rare avenue for glamour. The young women were unrecognizable out of their dungarees, work boots, straw hats, and sun-blocking sleeves. Their hair cascaded about their pale, exposed shoulders. Their painted lips left red marks on the lips of cups. The men did the opposite, covering up to mark the occasion. They covered their tanned forearms and necks in long-sleeve collared shirts. Tidied up their mandatory mustaches, draped their necks in gold crucifixes and chains. My eyes were most drawn to handsome Chulis in his slacks, worn tight as a tourniquet, at once concealing and showcasing his thighs and sundry goods. I could not yet understand why I was riveted so, but neither could I stop gawking.
* * *
Primi loved a party. He splurged and rented maroon Bostonian lace-up shoes and a matching tuxedo with ruffles that cascaded down the equator of his beer belly, making him look like a downwardly mobile rain forest rooster puffing up his plumes for one last mating dance. When he stepped into the San Juan Bautista VFW hall with a living, breathing, live, and unknown female escort, everyone whistled and catcalled. He took it all in like the pope, bowing slightly to the left, the right, and the center of the hall. For Primi, she was a looker, and the gal had personality. She didn’t know anyone but was social and sparkly, laughing and chatting with folks as soon as she arrived. Her name was Anamaria and, like Primi, she had arrived pleasantly tipsy and quickly got to finishing the job. Primi made several rounds to the bar, returning with multiple cups in each hand. He lined them up, and they tossed them back, getting louder and looser with each drink.
When the DJ kicked off a set of cumbias with Rigo Tovar’s “La Sirenita,” Anamaria grabbed Primi by the hand and pulled him toward the dance floor. That cumbia was a huge hit, an irrepressibly buoyant story song about a fellow who goes swimming, impregnates a mermaid, fathers a cute merbaby with her, is arrested by King Neptune and charged with eating her as seafood on a Good Friday, and is sentenced to death, only to be saved by the last-second arrival of his mermaid with their merbaby. The dance stylings of Primi and Anamaria perfectly matched the musical shenanigans of the song. Primi couldn’t dance well, but he could dance committedly, wobbling like a purple top on the verge of tipping over but never straying from the rhythm, even when the syncopation got tricky.
At our table, my pa watched the couple on the floor with a faint smile that I understood to convey affection and amusement. He raised his beer to them as they danced and shouted out encouragement for more, more, more from the couple. His excitement was contagious, and I also cheered them on, clapping and stomping my foot. Pa was possessed of an alchemical Mexican genius for transmuting physical defects into nicknames. He broke into raucous laughter as Primi shook his beer boobs and gyrated his flat ass. Primi strutted to the left and right, stalking the equally animated Anamaria. Halfway through the cumbia, Pa christened Primi “Head and Shoulders” and announced the name in his bullhorn voice: “Orale Head and Shoulders, dance loco!” The name stuck. It had to, because it was perfect: slicing clean to an undeniable truth about Primi. Besides, Pa had a christening reputation to uphold. He was almost synesthetic at times, able to confect nonsense names that sometimes worked at the level of pure sound. Bucktoothed Chendo, with his voracious chewing patterns became Chaka Chaka. Pretty chubette Rosa became La Burbulina. The Durango shitkicker Javi became the Quadruped. There was El Cuatro, Barrilito, Chulis, so many nicknames, all undeniably right, like Head and Shoulders.
The men in the garlic fields were relentless on the Monday morning after the wedding, batting Primi’s new nickname back and forth across the fields like a badminton shuttlecock. Some of the young men could barely pronounce his English nickname, but it was too delicious, too perfect, not to take a jab at Primi.
Head and Shoulders here.
Head and Shoulders there.
Head and Shoulders up.
Head and Shoulders down.
Until the novelty passed, it would have to be this way, and Primi knew it, so he patiently smiled through the ordeal, periodically insulting everyone’s mother, like a good sport should. When I called him Head and Shoulders to his face by accident, he actually laughed, releasing a great cloud of beer breath into my face. I was being disrespectful. He could have cussed me out, probably even smacked me, not on the face but upside the head, with full approval from my parents. I liked him in that moment. Not for the beer breath but because he kept his cool.
Head and Shoulders’s last day at the Gyrich Farms Worker Camp came within a week of the wedding. Three dark-green migra vans descended on the garlic fields right before the midmorning break. They braked hard, kicking up clouds of dust. Four Immigration and Naturalization Service agents in khaki uniforms exploded from the opened doors. It scared me when several young workers bolted. They seemed so adult to me mere moments before, so full of the bravado and that physical competence of young men, hefting bushel baskets of garlic onto their shoulders with thoughtless ease. In a moment, they had been stripped of that and had been made into prey, fleeing to hide underneath cars or be
hind the stacked crates of garlic. I panicked and turned wide-eyed toward my mother.
“Should we run, Ma, should we run?”
“What are you talking about? You’re a citizen. You were born here. They can’t take you away.” I was not reassured by her words.
“What about you, Ma? You were born in Mexico.”
“Yes. But I have my papers,” she said. “Now mind your own business, and keep on working.”
* * *
I watched as Head and Shoulders rose up slowly, calmly. He walked a few steps, then he began running. It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but he had already sucked down two Coors tallboys and was working on a third, so he was wobbly. Lurching toward the tall cattails on the banks of the irrigation ditch, Coors in hand, he tripped over a clod. Primi sprawled on the ground, arms and legs spread out like the Carl’s Jr. star. His beer shot forth a geyser of foam, but amazingly he never let that beer can go. Two INS agents surrounded him and one helped him up by the elbow. Primi stood, and with his free hand, he sheepishly dusted himself off. He exhaled slowly, his shoulders dropping and eyes turning dirtward as he emptied his lungs. Oh no. I looked at Primi, and he winked. He raised his beer can to his lips, tilted his head back, opened his throat, and poured in the pissy remains. Conspicuously pregnant Chelo cried silently as Head and Shoulders bent his back and entered the rear maw of the INS van. Ligo tilted his head, sucked his teeth, and intoned, “Oh well, at least he got to finish his Coors.”
That evening, the foreman’s wife, Clarita, cleared out Head and Shoulders’s tiny rental room in the big house. We called it that because it was the only two-story building in the worker camp, with three little rooms on the ground floor and three little rooms on the second floor. The rooms all held a wardrobe, a chair, a twin-size bed, and a night table. Only the colorful calendars, family photos, and knickknacks differentiated them. Clarita packed his clothes into grocery bags in case he should return, looking sadly at his undershirts, stiff and murky gray from bad washings with colored clothes, insufficient detergent, and clearly no fabric softener.