“You’re going home. Get ready. I’ll be back.”
His footsteps echoed sharply in the silent cell block. When he finally reached the landing below, I got out of my bunk.
“Captain Avenitti,” I whispered down to him, “what did you say?”
“You’re going home.”
“It’s not a set-up? I’m really leaving?”
“You’re really leaving, Jimmy. I’ll be back.”
I was going home. I scanned the dark and quiet cell block. I hadn’t pictured myself leaving like this. His steps and keys in gate locks gradually faded away. I didn’t dare believe it, not until I was outside the gates. Over the past month my emotions had been out of control, in free fall—one moment I was happy, and the next, brooding darkly with depression. I didn’t allow myself hope. It was best to expect the worst. But as I got dressed and boxed up my poems and books, I felt a great loss at leaving my friends behind. I wanted to wake up some of the guys on the tier to say good-bye. They were closer to me than any family had ever been. But then suddenly the door creaked open and I looked out and saw the tier guard. I stepped out with my box and walked down the tier. I looked in the cells at my friends, all asleep; I felt for each of them. I wanted to take them all with me. All they needed was a little help. I felt again as I had felt at the orphanage when I ran away—a despairing, horrible sense of leaving so many human beings like myself with no resources to make their life better.
Outside, under the night sky, I felt myself solidly placed. In many respects I was not ready for freedom; I didn’t know what to expect, how to live in the world. But as far as having changed, and being proud of what I had accomplished here, I was okay with it. I felt like a star in the sky, glowing, with darkness all around me.
At the property room, Captain Avenitti gave me twenty bucks for the road. He handed me a paper bag with the clothes I had worn when I was first arrested. The big spotlights illuminated the deserted main yard. The captain’s black boots crunched on the hard-packed ground. Everything here had weight and substance, intended to silence, imprison, destroy. Yet somehow, I had transmuted the barb-wire thorns’ hostile glint into a linguistic light that illuminated a new me. In a very real way, words had broken through the walls and set me free.
Avenitti led me to the main gates. He called up to the catwalk guards to lower the bucket. He handed me my release papers to sign, and I did. He put them in the bucket dangling at the end of the rope. The guard hoisted the bucket back up. He signaled the guard tower and the gate slowly slid sideways, letting us through. The stars flickered. The moon glowed in the sky. A prison bus was waiting, sputtering smoke out of its exhaust pipe. The sun was just coming over the horizon. It would be another hour before it emerged but I could smell the sage, the parched dust sucking the moisture of the night.
“I never thought you’d make it out alive,” Captain Avenitti said. “Good luck.”
I didn’t say anything, I just nodded and walked to the bus. There were two other inmates aboard, a black dude and a white one—enemies of mine at one time, because of their skin color. They looked at me and I looked at them, a hard glare, and then we smiled, on the same side now. I sat down. I didn’t dare look back as the bus drove us away. I was scared, vulnerable, believing at any moment we might turn back. I looked out the window, the inside bus light reflecting a stranger’s twenty-six-year-old face off the glass.
EPILOGUE
I was still a convict at heart. I didn’t know, when I left Florence and went to live in North Carolina, that I was going to have such a difficult time being with people. Many times, standing in a corner at a cocktail party, or in the office of a magazine editor, or at a gathering of writers in Raleigh, I yearned to be back in prison. But the thought of going back made me grit my teeth in bed. I gritted my teeth loudly the whole time I was with Mariposa, not because of anything she was doing, but because of the nightmares I was having. I stayed with her for two years, and then, toward the end of 1980, I moved up to Blacksburg, Virginia.
In Virginia I picked some strawberries in the fields and loaded tobacco leaf in tractor trailers to earn enough money to buy myself a beat-up Harley, and here and there I managed to contract my services as a poet to community centers, art centers, and schools to feed myself. But I couldn’t afford an apartment, so I slept in my sleeping bag by the nearest river I found myself. Then, since I had been thinking about Albuquerque almost every day, I decided to go back.
It was a long hard ride on that Harley, but I took it easy, stopping and camping out, eating free fruit from orchards and other vegetables from fields as I encountered them along the way. After I finally rolled in, tired, hungry, thinner, but happy, the first thing I did was look through the want ads. I managed to land my first job on the graveyard shift as a night watchman at a house for court-supervised adolescents.
In 1981 I met the woman I married. She was a counselor at the house, and one cold evening when I had come in on my Harley, freezing, wrapped in my jacket and mittens and scarf, carrying a backpack full of books, she asked me what I was reading. When I showed her all my poetry books, she smiled and invited me to her house for dinner. After that, we met on a regular basis and became good friends. One snowy morning she called me to say she was driving a kid to his village in the mountains and wouldn’t be back until late. I told her the roads were dangerously icy up there and I would drive them. I knew the roads, she didn’t.
Within a few months, she was pregnant. We moved in together. Shortly after that, we bought our first house with a thousand dollars down. It was an old, seriously wrecked fixer-upper. When I took a claw hammer and yanked the nails from the plywood covering the front doorframe, all these drug addicts who had passed out in the living room woke and stared at me, wondering if I was a narc. They’d been using it as their crash pad. When I told them I had bought the place, they laughed that anyone would be stupid enough to buy such a decaying heap. For a whole year, every day from dawn to dusk, I fixed the place up, rebuilt the entire house, and trucked more than fifty loads of trash in the backyard to the county dump.
After my first son, Antonio, was born in 1983, my mother came back into my life. I was thirty-one and I hadn’t seen her since the brief encounter shortly before going to prison. I had friends always coming by to help out, and on this day I was up on scaffolding taping Sheetrock and smoothing stucco in the cracks in the cathedral ceiling, when she drove up in a new Lincoln Continental. No one knew she was my mother. She was quite a sight. In a short red dress, lush sandy hair curling over her ample cleavage, big diamonds on her fingers, and silver and gold bracelets on her wrists, her green eyes sparkling, she looked up and greeted me cheerfully.
“Hi, honey.” She exuded health and optimism.
I climbed down the scaffold. “How’d you know where I lived?”
“Your sister told me,” she said. “We’re best of friends now.”
My sister had tried to persuade me to see my mother, but I had declined. She had bought my sister a new house and Mieyo a new motorcycle and had given them both additional money as they needed it.
“I came to see my grandbaby,” she declared, with a big smile.
“They’re not here. They’ve gone shopping for food.”
She left after visiting awhile, but after that she stopped by every day. When she came, I stopped working and we went outside and sat on a plank bench in the shade. She asked if I would teach her Spanish, and I told her she could hang out and pick up the language as we spoke it. She had not spoken Spanish in so long she had almost forgotten it. She started coming by a lot, hanging out for hours, mimicking our Chicano language, practicing her words against ours. We had a good time. She’d spoken Spanish as a child, and it came back to her. I guess to compensate for her guilt at leaving, she offered to buy me a house, give me money, help me out in any way she could, but I told her I was okay and didn’t need anything. I was working on a book of poetry at the time and asked her if I could stop by sometime to interview her. I wanted to
know more about her life growing up on the ranch in Willard and what her family was like, her childhood, and her life with my father.
It was a beautiful spring day when, with a recorder and legal tablet, I drove up to the affluent area where she lived. Her house was white brick, red shingle roof, impeccable lawn and garden, the perfect magazine cover for Good Housekeeping. She hugged me at the door and led me to the kitchen table. She was always busy and vibrant, on the go, planning this or that social event, shopping, receiving friends. Her life seemed perfect. She introduced me again to my stepsister and brother, in the same manner as she had introduced me years before, as her good friend. Richard, who had never liked me, greeted me in the kitchen, his cordiality overlaid with mistrust.
He left us alone, though, as we proceeded with the interview. At first she was all bubbly and eager to tell her story. But as the interview stretched over days and then weeks, she began to skirt certain questions I asked. Full of euphoria about how good times were growing up, she abruptly stopped and then burst out weeping. She tried to light a cigarette but her hands were shaking too much, so I lit it for her. She looked at me, tears streaming down her pretty face, and broke down, muttering through convulsive sobs that she had been raped and her brothers had made fun of her when she was young for being overweight. That was why she kept herself so attractive, because it was what men wanted. If you were pretty, she had learned, men would give you anything you wanted.
Then I asked about why she had hid her past and her identity from her children. She said her husband had forbid her to tell them. And his parents thought she was white. She exploded in telling me this—her teeth clenched, her fist slammed the table, spilling my coffee, and her face flushed red with rage.
“All my life I’ve had to hide who I am, because Richard’s parents wouldn’t let him marry a Hispanic. But I’m going to tell them. I’m going tell them everything and I’m going to tell my kids the truth too. I’m leaving him. I can’t stand him, or the lies I’m living. I’m going to go out whether he likes it or not. I’m filing for divorce. I can’t take it anymore.” She reached into her purse, twisted off the cap, and swallowed some pills. “I can’t live without drugs. Just to go home, I’ve got to be drugged!”
A few weeks later, while I was loading my truck with trash, she came by to tell me she had told her husband.
“And what’d he say?”
“He said if I tried, he’d kill me.”
“Does he mean it?”
“He’s said for a long time that he’ll kill me if I leave him. But I can’t lie anymore. I have to tell my children and his parents the truth. Only then can I start living my life.”
Later in the week, she called to tell me she had told her children about Martina, Mieyo, and me. She also told her husband’s parents that she was Hispanic. She planned on seeing a lawyer about a divorce and would call me back. I found out later that she was in her kitchen polishing her nails, preparing to go dancing, when Richard came into the kitchen and shot her in the face five times with a .45. Then he put the pistol to his temple and killed himself.
Mieyo never got over it. He plummeted into drinking and drugs. He lost all connections to reality and just wanted to find oblivion. He had loved her a great deal. He had always wanted a mother, wanted her love, and when she came back and they got together, he was happier than I’d ever seen him. After her death, he spiraled out of control, drank every day, and started using crack cocaine. When he called me once to come get him, saying he needed help, I went immediately. I hardly recognized him. He’d been beaten by several men with bats. He was six foot one, and normally weighed close to two hundred pounds. He was less than a hundred pounds, and because his arms had needle marks and because I wanted to make sure he didn’t have AIDS and his skull wasn’t cracked, I took him to see my doctor. After he checked out okay, he took a bus to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to live with Martina, who had moved there after Mother’s death.
Around this time Martina heard that Theresa had died from a drug overdose. She was not going to let the same thing happen to Mieyo, so everywhere Mieyo went she went with him. For the time being, he was happy and not using drugs. He was working and making a lot of money. He was exercising, riding his bicycle, lifting weights, and taking vitamins, and he weighed over two hundred, all muscle. I was happy to hear this, and once I even talked with him on the phone. He sounded great, saying how much he enjoyed fishing, how he loved Florida, that living there was like being on a permanent vacation. About six months went by. My sister had called me once during that time telling me Mieyo had gone back to drinking. She hadn’t seen him. She was worried about him. Then she called again, weeping, scarcely able to get a word out until finally she said that someone had killed him. They had found him in an alley, a bloody galvanized pipe next to his crushed skull.
I went to the funeral, and, using every bit of strength I had, I went up to his coffin and looked into his face. I touched his hands, rough from the carpentry work he’d done most of his life. What went through my mind was how he had never been able to express himself. Like my father, he was shut down emotionally. And I didn’t know even how to think about this, the three most important people in my life, with no linguistic skill to express themselves. They lived in shame. They lived with guilt. And then my father choked to death when he came out of a treatment center, my mother was shot to death when she was about to start living her life, and my brother, trying so hard to stay clean, relapsing, but always trying to stay clean, was bludgeoned to death in an alley. It has taken me a long time to understand how so much injustice could happen to such good people. Why had my family gone through so much tragedy? Why had they met with such horrible deaths? Why so much suffering? They were three people trying to regain their self-esteem, after being considered too brown, after being raped, after being abandoned. They kept trying to make a comeback and heal themselves. But they couldn’t seem to get past the pain.
Months later, still struggling to understand my brother’s death, I found myself one evening in Santa Fe, standing before Saint Francis cathedral. It was where I was baptized. I went in to see what it looked like. I didn’t know what the event was, but a lot of people were in the pews. On one side were Indios, on the other side parishioners. A young priest was shaking the hands of the Indios. The Archbishop and scores of other priests milled around, talking to the people. Everyone seemed in good spirits. I asked this lady next to me what the special event was and she said the pope had proclaimed that this evening every Catholic church was formally to ask for forgiveness from the indigenous people, the Indios, for the atrocities perpetrated on them in the name of God by Catholics. In essence, the church was apologizing for its acts of genocide.
I was okay with that and decided to stay for the whole service. Then I saw this young couple approach the altar and stand in the center. He looked just like my father and she looked just like my mother when they were both young, in their late teens. They were holding a brown baby that looked just like me in the photographs my sister had shown me. They were my parents and I was the baby they were preparing to baptize. I saw them exactly as I must have been here once with my parents, innocent, my whole life ahead of me, they with their dreams still intact.
And suddenly I began to forgive them for what they had done or had not done. I forgave myself for all my mistakes and for all I had done to hurt others. I forgave the world for how it had treated us. As the priest stepped up to the fountain to begin the baptism, I had so much emotion welling up in me, with such violent force, that I knew I was going to cry and cry and cry. As the ceremonies began, I left the pew, genuflected, and walked out.
Outside, tourists were laughing in candlelit restaurants, others were drinking and carousing loudly in open-door bars, and the streets were wet from a light rain. I walked down a deserted street, wrapped in my coat, my head down, feeling an overwhelming relief from giving and accepting forgiveness. I felt it was a new beginning. That little baby was me, before my father became a drunk and
died in the gutter, before my mother left and was murdered by Richard, before I was taken to the orphanage and the D-Home and then jail and prison, before Theresa overdosed, before my brother was murdered. I was innocent and pure. I was that child, free to begin life over and to make my life one they would all bless and be proud of. I was truly free at last. And as I thought this, it began to rain harder and the cathedral bells started ringing.
A Place to Stand Page 28