Mexican Hooker #1

by Carmen Aguirre

  My ongoing therapy had taught me that the only barriers that had ever held me back on my artistic journey were psychological. Nothing was stopping me except myself. I was middle-class, I was privileged, hence I had options. When I was young, I’d opted to join the MIR so that everyone would have access to basic human rights. Now I was choosing to follow my artistic calling, and with that decision came the same ruthlessness of the earlier choice: what are you willing to do, how far are you willing to go, what are you willing to give up for something you believe in this much? And although I struggled with going to the United States, the heart of the empire, to pursue my calling even further, I was actually doing it, and not only that, I was doing it by myself, for myself, with no one to answer to, no one to consider but me.

  I drove the 101 freeway through California and remembered the books of John Steinbeck, gasping at the superlative beauty of this place. When I turned off the freeway to check out a seaside town, I inadvertently joined a pageant. Cholos showed off their art-piece cars. Elaborate paintings of Aztec warriors holding maidens in their arms, adorned skulls, roses and thorns, the words La Raza and Lowrider, juxtapositions of Emiliano Zapata with Guadalupe, Queen of the Americas, took up the entire hoods of vehicles from every era, bouncing up and down, chrome motors on full display. Unable to find a way out of the car show, I blasted Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” and waved at the crowds that lined the sidewalks, my Virgin of Copacabana pendant, a gift from my grade seven classmates in Bolivia, swinging from my rear-view mirror, until I saw the freeway entrance and continued south.

  Upon my arrival in LA, I went for dinner at La Parrilla, a Mexican restaurant on César Chávez Avenue, in Brooklyn Heights, Eastside Los Angeles. There, two Salvadoran crooners of a certain age with Elvis pompadours, Elvis sideburns, and white polyester seventies suits with matching white patent-leather shoes, serenaded the tables with the classic boleros “Perfidia” and “Sabor a Mi,” and the undocumented waiters served the undocumented families on the land they had lost a mere century and a half before. I was home.

  Within two days, I found a summer room rental in a rundown building just off the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue—the dead centre of Hollywood. My roommates were two undocumented Mexicans; they slept in the living room, I in the bedroom. One was a bartender at the Gaucho Grill on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, the other a massage therapist who moonlighted as a conga drummer. The building was inhabited by some of the Mexican and Central American families who made up the millions-strong invisible brown workforce of LA—gardeners, janitors, car washers, mechanics, sweatshop workers, construction workers, truck drivers, parking lot attendants, groundskeepers, pool cleaners, vendors, maids, and nannies. Everyone looked out for each other, as it was evident that almost no one in the building had papers. When there was a dispute in an adjoining apartment, instead of calling the police, the men in the building, including my roommates, went to the door of the home where the yelling was coming from armed with baseball bats. Phoning 911 was out of the question.

  My bartender roommate had already been picked up once and put in jail due to his undocumented status. While he was there, the tattooed Latino gangsters who protected their countrymen no matter what their reason for being inside had taken him under their wing. After a few months in jail, the judge had given him two options: immediate deportation or community service. It was not clear what would happen to his status when the community service was over, but he chose the latter. For six months, a white van picked him up at seven every morning. Inside were others who had been caught, people of all ages, even entire families, small children in tow. They were driven to South Central Los Angeles, where, armed with large plastic garbage bags, they cleaned up the alleys in one of the region’s twenty-five neighbourhoods for eight hours straight. Under no circumstances could a day be missed, and, this being community service, there was no remuneration for the work. Once it was over, the van simply stopped picking them up and the state turned a blind eye, releasing them back to their undocumented, precarious lives in a land their Aztec ancestors had named Aztlán.

  The people in the building had come to the States looking for work. As for my two roommates, they were from middle-class families and were fleeing traumatic childhoods. The three of us stayed up all night on a regular basis, discussing the history of our tortured continent, admiring the Cuban revolution, always a beacon, philosophizing about the imminent defeat of neo-liberalism in Latin America. Evo Morales in Bolivia was yet to come, as were José Mujica in Uruguay and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, but Hugo Chávez in Venezuela brought a smile to our faces, our hopes pinned on the Bolivarian Revolution. We discussed the United States’ history of slavery of Africans and genocide of its Indigenous people and the social movements that had marked the preceding century. Silvio Rodríguez played on the stereo, hard-working families rested above and next door, while a regular red carpet unfurled religiously a mere block away, where movie premieres happened and celebrities posed for a hundred flashing bulbs on the star-encrusted boulevard, the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  That summer, I fell even more head over heels in love with the Latino Los Angeles. The Latino arts community welcomed me with open arms. I went to plays, concerts, art openings, parties, and spent afternoons writing at one of the many Latino cafés, Espresso Mi Cultura, in East Hollywood, also known as Little Armenia. A Chicana scholar who had written about ?QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, one of the plays I had co-written with the Latino Theatre Group, not only introduced me to the Chicano playwrights, producers, and actors at the Center Theatre Group, California’s regional theatre, she invited me to a family gathering in Southgate. A whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth was the centrepiece of the outdoor dining room table, mariachis played, tequila was drunk, and a marriage proposal happened, sending the future bride into a near fainting fit. Candles burned around a statue of the miraculous Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, in whose honour the party was being held. The hostess had prayed for a top-secret favour and it had been granted.

  By the end of that 2002 summer of love with a capital L, I knew I had to move to this city where South and North clashed, converged, and gave birth to the kind of plays that spoke to me and moved me, that reminded me and reassured me why I had chosen to follow my calling after the terrible defeat of the 1980s revolution.

  TEN

  In May 1995, ten years after Oughton was caught, we were in Mountain Institution, the first time that a group of victims were attending a parole hearing in the pedophile wing there. The guards who dealt with us were born-again Christians, the prison smack in the middle of one of Canada’s many Bible belts. Some were elderly and had tears in their eyes. Our presence caused a stir amongst the guards who worked with Oughton day in and day out. Seeing so many of his victims was hard for them because it made the abstract concrete.

  We were taken to a waiting room, where coffee and cookies were served. There were eight of us, all female, most with our parents, one with a girlfriend, another with a husband, as well as a woman about my age, twenty-seven, who, like me, was alone. While the hearing went on, my mother and Ale had organized a protest outside the BC Legislature, demanding that Oughton’s eligibility for parole not even be a possibility. A woman from the parole board walked us through procedure and then answered questions. Elizabeth Aird, a Vancouver Sun reporter, was present, interviewing us with the utmost care and respect.

  I learned that three of the women, Barb, Laura, and Jean, had seen Oughton during the attack. They had been part of the case against him and hence had been in court with him for months. Barb, the woman there with her husband, was the oldest of us; it was she who had gone to the Sun inviting fellow victims to come to the hearings she’d been attending alone. Barb was the only known adult victim, and was also the final one, her attack leading to Oughton’s arrest. He’d been blindfolding his victims for years, but after almost a decade of evading capture, in his cockiness he hadn’t done so with her. She was raped in Bur
naby’s Central Park while she held her little one in her arms, gun held to the back of her infant’s head.

  “My baby was so scared, he scratched my neck to shreds,” she told us.

  Laura, the other lone woman, a star witness at the trial, was attacked at eight years old, along with a friend the same age, in the early days of Oughton’s rampage. He’d walked through their west-side school in a policeman’s uniform, found them playing in the playground after last bell, and lured them into the adjoining woods by claiming to have lost his puppy.

  “I had to sleep with my parents for years,” Laura confessed.

  Jean, there with her parents, was raped at age ten with her friend while at a Fraser Valley sports day event. Also one of his earlier victims, he hadn’t blindfolded her.

  “I have nightmares to this day,” she said in a quiet voice.

  Like me, the remaining four had been blindfolded or had a paper bag put over their head. They had gone to the lineup and hadn’t attended the trial. For these four too, this would mark the first time they’d be in the same space with him since being attacked.

  Laura’s and Jean’s friends, like Macarena, had chosen not to come. We realized that all eight of us were the ones in the duo who had been raped, while the ones made to witness were absent. In Barb’s case, the reason was obvious; she would not bring her son, now ten years old, to a hearing. The stories, never shared in detail during the trial, flew out the way one exhales after holding one’s breath for a scary amount of time. Overlapping, leaning in, we heard the penny drop: he’d done the same thing to all of us.

  The woman there with her girlfriend said, “I was with my friend when it happened. We were being kids, that’s all.”

  Her words and the tiny stuffed bunny she caressed for comfort were jolting for me, because in them was an empathy I’d never had for myself.

  We were being kids, that’s all.

  We were being kids. Right. That’s what Macarena and I had been doing. Being kids. Yet as far as I had always been concerned, I had brought the rape on myself. For being physically developed at the age of thirteen, for wanting to check out guys on the day it happened, for smoking a forbidden cigarette in the woods, for not being a little blond girl skipping rope in a frilly pink summer dress, the way I imagined these women (with the exception of Barb) to have been at the time of their attacks. For being from the dirty refugee class that scrubbed the toilets of the privileged, for wearing Salvation Army clothes my whole immigrant life and having the mouth of a truck driver since elementary school. For being brown.

  But being in that room of blond women confirmed one thing in flashing neon words: it wasn’t my fault. Not only that, it wasn’t personal. The more detail I got from the others, the more I understood what a modus operandi was. It was something he did to everyone, exactly the same way, regardless of who the victim was. To hear that every single thing he’d done to Macarena and me had also been inflicted on them filled me with an immense sense of relief. Not only was I free of blame, there was nothing I could have done to stop it, to control the outcome. Following the impulses of a lazy Sunday afternoon all those years before did not get me raped, did not give me “what I deserved,” did not land me in the hands of a psychopath. If it hadn’t been me and Macarena, it would have been two other girls—or boys—and so it might as well have been us, because in the end, the experience had led me to this room of sisters, converged in the pedophile wing of Mountain Institution, connecting on a level so deep that it cut through all social protocols. It made us speak the unspeakable, name the unnameable, stare into each other’s eyes and read each other’s thoughts:

  We’re alive. We survived. He didn’t kill us. We are here.

  I had had many communities in my life thus far—the Chilean community in exile, the underground MIR community in South America, the Latino community in Vancouver, the theatre community—but in that room I encountered a tribe that would have verged on the surreal two days earlier. It was the community of the Paper Bag Rapist’s victims and their families. Although I had known there were others and had seen them at the lineup a decade earlier, I had lived that defining story in isolation. It had never occurred to me that perhaps I could have reached out before now, formed a sisterhood. Thankfully, Barb had, and now here we were. I listened and listened and couldn’t get enough of their words. I sat close and smelled them, wanted to squeeze them. We smiled and laughed together, a palpable sense of consolation hitting us all, the recognition of our shared experience transforming the molecules in the air, while the parents, silent witnesses, sat back, my heart breaking at the sight of their pained faces, the set jaws of the fathers, the wet eyes of the mothers holding their purses to their bosoms, as we held our boisterous conversation.

  “He told you he’d kill your family too?”

  “Holy shit, that’s what he told me!”

  “He said you were a hooker who was asking for it by wearing that skirt?”

  “Fuck. He said that to me too.”

  “He told you it was making love and not rape?”

  “No way, he said those exact words to me!”

  Our subtext was:

  I thought I was the only one.

  One of the men present was Rick, the RCMP detective who had headed the thirteen-strong investigative team that caught Oughton. He would become a steadfast friend of ours.

  When the time came to go into the parole room, over an hour had passed. In those sixty minutes, a group of strangers had formed a clan whose bonds would last forever, and I only wished Macarena hadn’t refused to attend. For five of us, it would be the first time since the rape that we’d be breathing the same air as, occupying the same space as, listening to the voice of the man who had changed our lives in ways so profound it would take a lifetime to understand the depth of the wound inflicted by his cruelty.

  His mother was there. Sitting by herself. She wore dark glasses and a large white summer hat decorated with fake fruit and flowers. She had on a gauzy white dress cinched at the waist, white pumps, white gloves, and gave the general impression of being dressed for church. Gaze fixed forward, heavily powdered face set in a frown, she refused to turn her head and acknowledge our collective entrance. The victims sat in the first row, our supporters behind us. Members of the parole board faced us from a table on the opposite end of the room.

  Once we’d all settled, a door near the table opened. A guard came in, and behind him a man about my mother’s age. The man who had graced the covers of so many newspapers over the last decade and a half, who had monopolized the evening news so often, whose moniker, the Paper Bag Rapist, incited the same reaction in Lower Mainland children that “the bogeyman” did in other places, was here now. Dressed in jeans, denim shirt, and cowboy boots, he still sported a moustache.

  Watching him walk towards his place at the table, where he would sit with his back to us, I was grateful that I was seated. My knees had shaken when we’d entered the room, and now my stomach flipped at the sight of his hands making fists and opening. It was Number Twelve. I took note of how fear and excitement caused the same sensations in my body. I had no idea if I was shaking and flipping out of fear, which would have been irrational, what with his being in jail, or with excitement at finally confirming that it was him. Or both. I would spend my entire life trying to distinguish between the two, most notably in the romantic realm, which was indeed driven by fear, or excitement. Or both.

  And now here I sat with my new-found sisterhood, seeing the man whose loaded gun was still at my temple, his finger on the trigger, pulling it whenever a worthy romantic companion got too close. This man who still held my life in his hands was in the room now. He was always present in my bedrooms of love and sex, in the four chambers of my heart, my guts, my womb, in the childhood forest I hadn’t returned to since the rape, present in the booming recital hall of my skull. He was here. Touchable, smellable, audible, present inside these four walls that contained him, contained us, contained our supporters, contained those who wo
uld decide his fate, contained his mother, whose down-turned painted pink mouth spoke of misery, of shame, and yet of strength, the determination to be there for her son, no matter what. The Paper Bag Rapist was loved by his mother. Air filled my lungs when that realization hit me, and I took her in, my peripheral vision heightened to the nth degree.

  He sat down and I wondered if the eagle still flew above, outside the jail, where the camera crews and reporters waited, circling the sky, watching, protecting. The tips of my lungs’ branches swelled with my every inhalation, and my spirit did not shoot out of my crown, ricocheting off the ceiling and walls, seeking a way out of the prison and onto the wings of that loyal bird. It clung to my bones instead, stayed with my vital body, with my deep and steady breath.

  The hearing lasted all of one minute, because as soon as the parole officer started his welcome speech, John Horace Oughton interrupted by yelling, “They wanted it!” He then leapt up, ran towards us, brushed by our knees, and dashed through the door we had come in from, two guards in hot pursuit.

  Parole was denied, and the request was made that he be cuffed at the wrists and ankles at subsequent hearings.

  “I’m not the rapist. I’m not him.”

  Phrases spoken by my husband, Alejandro, in moments that threatened too much intimacy. The drawbridge would come up, the crocodiles would snap their jaws, and the cannons would get their order to launch. Outwardly, my fight against intimacy with him was the opposite of violent; rather, it was the defence that only a corpse can offer, the resistance of lifelessness. The words would be spoken when my spirit had left, my body in a state of general anaesthesia, ready to be cut, entered, consumed, chopped into pieces.