Crux

by Jean Guerrero

  * * *

  •

  The summer after college graduation, I interned at the Los Angeles bureau of the Wall Street Journal, where I wrote stories about marijuana dispensaries and other local issues. A few days before the annual Electric Daisy Carnival, the largest anticipated rave in U.S. history, I pitched a story about it to the bureau chief, Gabe. Deaths at a San Francisco rave had caused officials there to call for a ban on the events. I was pretty sure the same would happen in Los Angeles. Gabe guessed I was looking for an excuse to rave; he turned down the story. The night of the event, I dressed up as a fairy and smeared my mascara to make it look like I’d been crying. I approached a security guard near an exit and told him, in an anguished voice, that I had left the festival because I believed my friends were in the parking lot but they were actually inside. I shivered and hugged myself. It worked—the security guard let me in. More than a hundred people were hospitalized that night. A fifteen-year-old girl died, allegedly of an MDMA overdose. When an outcry for prohibition ensued, Gabe asked if I could still churn out a piece. I could.

  * * *

  •

  At the end of my internship, I learned that the Mexico City bureau was seeking a correspondent to cover Mexico’s and Central America’s soft commodities, like coffee and sugar, for the newswire and the newspaper. I had recently watched the film Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character dies on a mountainside while exposing corruption in the mining industry. I was desperate to die young in a similar dramatic way, on an altruistic mission. My conversations with my father were making me aware of my privilege as an American with a private education in the planet’s most powerful country. I wanted to unshelter myself. The prospect of doing so in my father’s birthplace seemed a dream come true. I could explore my paternal roots while exposing corruption in commodities sectors. I applied for the Mexico City opening. A hiring manager informed me the position required at least four years of reporting experience; I didn’t qualify. I asked Gabe for help. He made a few calls to vouch for my abilities. After a few weeks, the job in Mexico City was mine. I was heading to my father’s country. Papi bought a one-way ticket to go with me.

  CURSE

  As a little boy, you scrutinized the world with ochre eyes. You had an intuitive understanding of simple machines and you built them: wagons, slingshots, animal traps. Living creatures and complex machines like cars shared a mesmerizing characteristic: self-generated movement. What was the mechanism behind it? You threw open the hood of your stepfather’s car and ran your hands over the metallic maze of the engine. You fiddled with pumps and filters and coils. Some aspects struck you as remarkable in their simplicity. You tinkered with toys and televisions. They had been tossed on the Tijuana streets, broken or dysfunctional. You dissected them until you mastered them. Then you fixed them.

  You could have been an engineer. But it was the calamities of human beings that most concerned you. If you could figure out the secrets of human life—its whys and hows—then you could fix people. You dreamed of becoming a surgeon.

  At night, your parents’ fighting kept you awake. You hid under the covers, heart thundering like a freight train along old tracks. Screams. Smashing plates. Curses and threats. Weeping. When you slept, you had nightmares of discovering your mother’s corpse in the kitchen. One morning, as she served you breakfast, she stared at you with a monstrous, bulging black eye. Your stepfather had slammed the telephone into her face. It was horrifying. You loved your mother more than anything in the world. You craved her warmth, her touch, her love—but she gave it to you in clipped gestures and cutoff looks, like humiliating secrets. Sometimes you feared she saw you as the disgusting symptom of a terrible sickness she would not name—she refused to tell you where you were from. It was too shameful, too awful to mention.

  You knew Don Jesus was your padrastro, not your padre biológico, because one day your mother’s friend asked her, ¿En qué año conociste a Jesus? And you overheard your mother reply that she had met him in 1958. You were born in 1956. You concluded that Jesus was not your blood, and probably not Alejandro’s, either. Your brother was born at the end of 1958. You had long wondered why Don Jesus had always ignored you and Alejandro, while showering his youngest son, Jesus Jr., with affection. Sensing a change in your attitude—perhaps greater confidence born of understanding—Jesus began to pay attention to you. He disciplined you with his belt. He whipped you and cursed at you, treating you like the repulsive creature you often feared you were.

  Decades later, when I am reading Tarot cards for you, I pull the card of the Devil. I try to explain that it isn’t a bad thing—only that blocked natural impulses must be embraced in order to move forward. I tell you about Baphomet, the Sabbatic goat of lust who represents the triumph of matter over spirit, a carnal creature who isn’t necessarily evil—he has merely and paradoxically become vulnerable to material impulses because of his unhealthy suppression of them. You interrupt me: “The lust thing. That is very relevant. Sometimes I think I’m the way I am because I was the product of pure lust. My mother’s lust…not love or destiny or anything good. Pure lust. Hers and my father’s.”

  I want to tell you her story—the story she told me about Mario Perez, a story she has never told anyone else. But something holds me back.

  “Papi, what are you talking about? Your mom was innocent,” I say simply.

  “She was never innocent. She was never innocent.”

  Your first memory is of being left alone in a house because you wouldn’t stop crying. The walls began to move toward you. The air curled itself around you like a snake. You couldn’t breathe. You broke a window. Crawled out and walked to a bench while the tears dried on your face.

  One day, you asked your mother for a doll with yellow hair. You had seen little girls in your neighborhood cradling Goldilocks muñecas, caressing their cheeks, running fingers through their curls. You were overwhelmed with a desire to do the same—to express that level of tenderness for something. But when you made your request, your mother gasped with horror, as if you had blasphemed. “You don’t know how badly I wanted a muñeca,” you recall decades later, laughing at yourself. “When you were born, it was like my dream came true: I finally had my little doll.”

  As you grew, you ignored your desire for affection. You had to cultivate toughness. You had to learn to move. When your stepfather tried to beat your mother, you threw yourself between them, to protect her. But she did not always protect you. Once, Jesus called you into his bedroom and demanded that you remove your shorts and underwear. He was drunk. When you refused, his face turned bloodred like carne cruda, and he unbuckled his belt. He whipped your face, your arms, your shoulders, the backs of your legs. Your mother observed passively, having decided to be selective with her battles. Strip naked! Jesus roared. You crawled under the bed, terrified, and he dragged you out by the shoes. Finally, you pulled off your shorts and underwear and stood there, exposed, trembling. Your stepfather doubled over with laughter, pointing. He said he had never seen anything so small. You were five or six years old.

  Why are we broken? How can I fix us? What is the secret?

  You knew, from the machines you dissected, that often what seemed inscrutable could be mastered through careful study. In the backyard, you built a large wire-mesh cage with shelves for jars of creatures you captured in the desert. You cut lab coats, surgical caps and masks from a large white sheet you found in a dumpster. Dressed in medical costume, you sliced open spiders, snakes, lizards, tarantulas, frogs and scorpions with Alejandro, your medical assistant, who handed you tweezers, needles, strings. You were averse to hurting mammals and birds, but you believed that anything cold-blooded was fair game, so long as you tried to keep the animals alive. You sought to determine how hearts pump blood, how intestines digest food, how brains form thoughts. You surveyed fluid-filled bags, entwined tubes and elixirs, coaxing mysteries from their labyrinthine conglomerations. The
n you sewed the creatures closed and set them free.

  Blood did not make you queasy. From a young age you had accompanied your stepfather to the carnicerías where he chopped the meat of cattle and pigs. You scrubbed blood off the floors with rags, organized merchandise, wiped windows after school and on weekends. Jesus let you keep your earnings. You saved each coin for medical school.

  One day, you found an enormous toad by a river. It was the largest amphibian you had ever seen. It stared at you with almost human eyes. You brought it home running, clutching it to your chest. In your laboratory-cage, you asked the toad’s permission to proceed, and as you held it down it seemed to relax, submitting to your scalpel. You saw its slimy heart reverberating in its chest, impossibly fast, like yours when you lay awake at night terrified. In a fit of inspiration, you pinched the heart between your fingers and plucked it from the toad’s chest, severing its connections to the circulatory system. The bloody bead seemed to pulse the secret of life into your palm. As you attempted to decipher its speech, blood filled the lines of your hand. The heart stopped beating. You shoved the heart back inside the toad, sewed shut the little animal’s chest and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It was too late. The frog was dead. You felt guilty, evil, horrible. You buried the toad with tears in your eyes.

  Recounting this decades later, you become out of breath. You look at everything in the room except me. Your forehead fills with lines and your eyes become heavy and you say: “I wouldn’t have done that if I had other means.”

  You sought to operate on dead creatures, but carcasses were hard to come by. You abandoned your experimentation and visited the library for anatomy books instead. As you scrutinized those tomes one evening in the living room, Don Jesus stumbled through the front door, reeking of alcohol. You kept your eyes on the textbook, tense with fear of his drunkenness. You felt warm liquid splashing the back of your head. Your stepfather was urinating on you. You ran into your bedroom.

  You sought refuge in the library, staying in its dusty rooms to consult the books on medicine. A thin brunette noticed you. She introduced herself as Elizabeth. Unlike your brother Alejandro, who broke hearts even before his voice turned deep, you were terrified of women even at the age of fifteen. Girls provoked in you an anxiety so profound it paralyzed your capacity for conversation. At school, your classmates teased you for your awkwardness. You preferred to be alone—reading, thinking, learning. But when Elizabeth asked you to walk her home, you agreed. You were mesmerized by the graceful curve of her neck, the sway of her hips, her large brown eyes. You walked beside her, speechless as she sung her thoughts into the air. She showed you her house. Come over later, yeah? Just whistle here by this window. That evening, you obeyed. She crawled out the window and led you to an empty parking lot around the corner. She lunged. For hours, she moved her lips against yours, explored your mouth with her tongue. You loved kissing her—her purring limbs, her smell of flowers—and hoped you were doing it right. You returned the next evening to kiss her again. On the third night, your whistle failed to bring her to the window. A fat girl emerged from the house next door. Elizabeth isn’t here! Were you looking for her?

  You nodded, mute.

  Do you want me to tell you the truth?

  You waited.

  She ran off with another man. A man, who’s, well, an older man. She told me you just take her and make her horny but don’t do anything to her. This other guy knows how to satisfy her. He has a truck.

  You were mortified. It wasn’t until your eighteenth birthday that some brothers who lived down the road took pity on you. Vente, pinche Marco! they said. Vamos a desquintar este guey! We’re going to de-virginize this guy! They took you to Calle Revolución. They grabbed a prostitute and said, Desquinta este cabrón! De-virginize this fucker! They paid for your very first time.

  * * *

  •

  Your first real friend, Charlie, completed the corruption. He was hired at a carnicería where you worked alongside Don Jesus. Charlie was the first person who made you feel comfortable. He treated you like an equal, confiding his exploits, inviting you to parties to drink and smoke weed, which eased your social anxiety. When he caught you collecting pennies off the floor of the carnicería and delivering them to the owner, Charlie laughed in your face, pocketing $20 and $50 bills from the cash register. Nobody noticed but you. You marveled at his confidence. Whenever a pretty girl ordered a piece of meat, Charlie grabbed his crotch and said, You mean this piece of meat?

  Charlie made you question the value of morality. The universe did not reward good intentions, he argued. Success was tied to greed. Principled behavior led to poverty. You realized as he spoke that your ambitions had nothing to do with morality or money. Cash seemed an empty pursuit. Ethics was a fixed concept; the world was not a static place. Of course you wanted to be good—your mother had instilled in you that desire—but you sometimes feared it was impossible, like you were innately evil, dirty, vile. What you valued above all else was exploration, inquiry, discovery. Movement—constant movement, mental and physical, internal and external. The owner of the carnicería had always complimented how swiftly you mopped the bloody floors and wiped the grimy windows, how spotless you left them. You moved white chalk along the blackboard at school, scribbling neat solutions, and the teacher stood agape at your speedy acuity. It was movement that inspired you; that is why you took joy in both your body and your mind, in cerebral calculations, in connecting disparate objects and information. And yet, it seemed you were doomed to be an outsider because of this. Only Charlie appreciated you. When you confided in him your dream of becoming a surgeon—to uncover the secrets of life—Charlie encouraged you, calling you chingón.

  You decided to become Charlie’s accomplice. You took money from the cash register. You had no interest in unearned money, but you enjoyed the thrill of discovering you could break rules and not get caught thanks to the speed of your hands. You helped Charlie rob boxes of butter from a parked commercial transport vehicle.

  You continued to study. Tijuana didn’t have a medical school, so you made plans to attend the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara. You had aunts in Guadalajara who had offered to let you live with them while you attended college. In 1973, while you were a junior in high school, your mother revealed that she had secured permanent residency in the United States for the family. Jesus sold the house, and everyone except you moved across the border. You had no interest in los Estados Unidos. You felt it was an imperialist nation that abused its power across the planet. You had read about the country’s involvement in Vietnam, the military dictatorship it had installed in Guatemala in the 1950s, its meddling in Mexico’s affairs. You stayed in Tijuana, sleeping on a neighbor’s couch, intent on making your way to Guadalajara. When you graduated from high school, you took a bus with your life savings—a few thousand pesos—in your pocket. You visited the admissions office for information. The tuition, you discovered, was hundreds of thousands of pesos beyond your reach. Your grades weren’t good enough for a scholarship; you had never managed to get straight A’s while juggling classes and jobs. It would take you decades to earn enough money for medical school—at least while working in Mexico.

  You decided to follow your family across the border to accumulate U.S. dollars until you could pay for medical school. You were hired as a burner at NASSCO. The shipyard was a spiderweb of steel, black cords falling from the sky like tentacles. The Coronado Bridge arched blue over the bay. Thousands of dusty-faced men worked with cigarettes dangling from their lips. Seagulls the size of dogs soared in search of scraps. Through the whistling, blowing and beeping of machines, the roaring of torches and sandblasting, the barking of sea lions wafted in from the sea.

  You guided your oxygen-acetylene torch along steel, spitting columns of fire that sparkled and hissed. You kept your gloves in your back pocket. You cut shapes and eliminated imperfections from the plates, immersed in
showers of flame. You worked expertly, with agility. You grew into a striking man with a copper complexion. Molten metal dripped on your arms, boring holes to the bone. Injured men lined up at a medical station where nurses cleaned and bandaged wounds, then sent men back to work. One day, while hauling a heavy hose backward on an upper deck, you stepped through a hole in the floor. Time slowed: You dropped the hose, threw out your arms and arrested your fall at the height of your chest. You looked down. Darkness curled around your lower body from as far down as the bottom of the ship. You scrambled back onto the deck. Coworkers were less fortunate, plummeting to their deaths. Crushed corpses were hauled out on stretchers.

  You saved every paycheck. You enrolled in biology and chemistry classes at a community college in Chula Vista. You stopped seeing Charlie as often as before, too busy to join in his mischief. One day, you received a call from an old acquaintance from the carnicería, who informed you that Charlie had overdosed on heroin. His corpse had been found in a hotel room. Your only real friend was dead.

  An old chasm widened inside you. It was heavier than your body, threatening to consume you. I can almost feel it, Papi—stretching across countries, from San Diego to Tijuana, to the backyard of an old house, where the blood of animals failed to yield secrets. You absorbed yourself in toil. Movement, movement. Only when you were feeling yourself in your flesh did the doors to black-hole gravity close. You toiled at the shipyard, in the classroom. But your beginner’s English made it difficult to keep up in school. You took your textbooks to the shipyard, using every free moment to decipher them, until a foreman caught you and threatened to fire you.

  One night, you had a terrible dream. You awoke sweating and sobbing, certain you had foreseen an unspeakable future. “It was a revelation of some sort, that I—I blacked out,” you explain decades later. “I blacked out. I blacked out. But nothing that has happened in my life has been so devastating. It’s like something I don’t even wanna—it was so traumatic.” Your mother took you to a curandera, but you refused to pay the exorbitant fee for the cleansing. You started meditating. You read books about Eastern philosophy. As you erased thoughts and emotions from your mind, you felt yourself spinning inwardly and outwardly. You were connecting with the essence of the universe, perhaps God himself.