Jubana!

by Gigi Anders

  “Eric and Big Red Al will sing for Jesúcristo too if you send them there,” I said. “Good luck to you.”

  “Dahveed!” Mami cried. “¡Has algo!” Do something!

  “¿Qué coño tu quieres que yo haga?” Papi said. “Yo ni coño sé de que coño tu ’stás hablando. Lord y Taylor, Jesús Cristo—¿qué coño? Estoy, pero, perdido total.” What the hell do you want me to do? I don’t even fucking know what the fuck you’re talking about. Lord and Taylor, Jesus and Christ—what the hell? I’m, like, totally lost.

  “Joo know what?” Mami said. “Ees time to do some beeg-time seenahgogh choppeengh. Like, NOW.” We loosely belonged to a Reform temple near our Southwest town house, but it was tiny and didn’t offer much in the way of Sunday or Hebrew school.

  “Yo, bitch,” I said to Mami. “It wasn’t MY idea.” As in, to send me to this charming Quaker school where Juban kiddies are forced to learn classic Yuletide ditties in order to sing them to residents of the Home for the Incurables, a Boo Radley sanatorium just up the street from the middle school on the corner of Thirty-seventh and Upton Streets, Northwest. At Christmastime the nurses would wheel out the superannuated vegetative patients, whose laps were covered in heavy crocheted afghans. Once they were all lined up on the balcony, we’d sing carols up to them. It’s the Quaker Way: community service, civic participation, peace, etc. I once asked my teacher if we could try the Chanukah song about the dreidel or maybe fry up some nice greasy potato latkes with the applesauce and sour cream and bring it over to the incurables, maybe share a smoke with them as Mami did with the St. Elizabeths patients. The teacher regarded me like I was the Juban anticristo. My classmates convulsed in hysterics.

  The Frenzy kids mistakenly thought that my suggesting a more inclusive holiday experience meant I was making fun of the incurable patients, patients they themselves were mean about, afraid of, and creeped out by. Patients they themselves feared they might someday become. But youth is cruel and has no remorse and smiles at situations which it cannot see.

  Mrs. Blanchard and her spouse dog awkwardly declined the invitation. For whatever reason, the Jubanese Way just wasn’t cutting it. So I opted for rebellion against the status quo. There were a few choice windmills down those elite Anglo hallways I could expertly tilt at. If I was gonna be shipwrecked on this preppie sea of embroidered whales, if I was going to fail—and this was a given—then I’d have to be the best failure these Quaker crackers had ever seen. Bangs, not whimpers.

  Years later, too late to be of any use for Ivy League college admission purposes, one tweedy pre-Gramps Jewish-American Ivy League shrink named Dr. Band—whom I nicknamed Dr. Band-Aid—posed the obvious question: “So one could say you were an achieving underachiever during your time at Sidwell.”

  “One could,” I agreed.

  “With no direction,” he added.

  “‘With no direction hooo-me,’” I sang. “‘Like a rolling stooo-ne.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in iii-t…’”

  “Come again?”

  If you have to explain Bob Dylan lyrics to a person, there’s really no point.

  “I do have a plan,” I said. “My plan is to have no plan. I expect to be dead before I hit thirty. That’s about as planny as I can get.”

  “You hope to die so young? You expect to?”

  “No,” I said. “I just think I will. I’m a fatalist. What if just having fabulous nails and smoking isn’t enough of a reason to live? Then what do you do? Even if Castro dies tomorrow—and he won’t—the damage has been done, you know? Sorry to whine, but it’s inexplicable to a non-Cuban. What are we gonna do when Castro ever dies, just pack up our monogrammed bath towels and pick up where we left off? I think Cecilia not dying would have made a big difference.”

  “Are you depressed?”

  “If you could exorcise this, it would be amazing. Pharmaceutical intervention! Is that pure enough? Have you seen Moscow on the Hudson?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a good movie. Robin Williams? He plays a Russian sax player who defects in Bloomingdale’s. I was just reading the New Yorker review in your waiting room. Pauline Kael loved it: ‘It’s about going away forever, about not being able to go home.’”

  “How’s your writing going?” Dr. Band asked me, shifting in his worn brown leather club chair that matched his worn brown leather wing tips. Both the chair and the shoes could’ve used an Eric Anders shine.

  “I’m writing, I just…When I was in high school Papi walked in on me one day while I was writing a poem. He looked like he’d just caught me masturbating. Not that I ever did.”

  “You never masturbated?”

  “Mami and Baba Dora always told me that proper ladies always wear their underpants under their nightgowns. They did. Baba Dora suggested I keep my bra on, too, to keep my breasts intact and upright. I never had an orgasm until I was in college, and even then it was accidental. I had no idea your body could do that.”

  “That’s rather amazing.”

  “It sure was news to me. But once I realized that I didn’t need a partner to get one I was off and running. Anyway, my dad comes into my room and goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I go, ‘Writing a poem.’ He goes, ‘Why?’ He actually asked me why. He goes, ‘You’re going to starve to death with your little poems.’ The poem got published in the Sidwell literary magazine, The Quarterly. Then Papi had it framed and put it in his office. It was about picking flowers with his parents in El Jardín Botánico in Miramar. They illustrated it with a black-and-white photograph of a little girl sitting alone on a picnic bench, looking far away.”

  “So in the end your father was proud of you.”

  “After. After it got published. Not before. I’m on my own here. Each keystroke types me farther away from them and the past. How are we gonna reconcile this?”

  Dr. Band stared at me sadly and strangely in his worn tweedness.

  “You won’t be able to help me,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I know you’re trying but I think I’m gonna have to figure this out by myself or maybe with a different doctor—no offense. I’ve been around shrinks my entire life. I can tell.”

  He sent me a final bill and a handwritten note on very fine stationery, saying to keep in touch. My parents never paid. I guess they felt he didn’t make me “well.”

  How do you explain to high-level WASPs who can use their platinum AmEx cards to pay for primo blow and weed, Ann Taylor sandals, psychedelic Peter Max outfits, and Harvard tuition how all-consumingly important it is to maintain your overall Jubanique individuality by looking beautiful and having great nails? Well, mostly you can’t. They’d laugh you off the lacrosse field. Or, in one particularly excruciating case, out of the music class. Poor Mr. William E. Fuhrman (B. Music, Catholic University). He just didn’t know what to do with me or my frets issue. All of us had to play a musical instrument. I wasn’t that interested, really, but I settled on the acoustic guitar; my parents played Segovia at their parties a lot and I loved the sound of classical Spanish guitar. So I got a beautiful curvaceous blond guitar on which to learn slightly more contemporary tunes, such as Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man.” Jewish pop star, easy chords, what’s not to like? Mr. Fuhrman, a seemingly mild-mannered sort, went around the room, inspecting our mouth or finger placement on our various instruments. My chord knowledge and strumming technique were decent but I was having trouble pressing down hard enough on the catgut strings to create the desired notes on the frets because my leche evaporada-fed veal cutlet fingers were so little and tender. The catgut always left painful grooves in them.

  “I see the problem here,” Mr. Fuhrman said, studying my left hand.

  “Wrong instrument choice?” I asked. I was thinking maybe I should conduct, not play. After all, I was hell on wheels with a mascara wand.

  “Wrong fingernail choice,” he replied. “Why are your nails so
long?”

  “Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, the Beatles, some members of the Edison Lighthouse, Jimi Hendrix, James Taylor, Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-Young, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Segovia all have long fingernails, excuse me. It’s not a look I personally go for in men, but—”

  “On their strumming hand. They have longer fingernails on their strumming hand.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not on the hand they use to make the chords. Your fingering…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You need to trim those nails.”

  “I drink Knox to grow them like my mom’s. Cuban girls have to do it.”

  “Not Cuban girls who have to play the guitar.”

  “Them, too. It’s cultural. And I don’t have to play the guitar, by the way.”

  “You need to trim those nails.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I could not say to him how important it was to Mami, and therefore to me, that I work on growing my nails. Nails that were infinitely more important in the long run to the chuppah than being able to play a friggin’ guitar on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Mami had even gone all the way to the Safeway and bought me a whole orange box of Knox gelatin packets. The least I could do in return for such maternal sacrifice was to drink it. “Husbands like joo to have nice long nails,” Mami had explained. “Joo can eh-stroke der back an’ hair with dem an’ look like a lady of leisure an’ luxury with de beeg reenghs, like, from Teefany’s, not like a fohkeengh peasant sans goo’ jewelries.” Mami had never once stroked Papi, but the idea was there.

  Next music class my nails may have actually been a few nano-centimeters longer. The Knox was kicking in! But Mr. Fuhrman took me aside and we had another charming little tête-à-tête. “I’m not kidding,” he admonished me. “I really mean it. Those nails have to get cut or there’s no point in going on here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I kept right on with the Knox. Mami the Beautiful knows best. The class met again. Same thing happened. Only this time, Mr. Fuhrman didn’t take me aside. He motioned me to come up to the front.

  “Show me your hands,” he said. I stuck out my arms. I noticed they were trembling.

  “Spread your fingers wide,” he said. He took hold of my left wrist to demonstrate it to the class. “This, this is unacceptable in a right-handed guitar player.”

  The class and I went silent. Then Mr. Fuhrman very calmly took a pair of men’s nail clippers out of his pants pocket and clipped each of my Knox-grown fingernails, one by one. I heard them drop on the linoleum floor in tiny tinny hits. I felt hot. The roots of my hair were burning up like someone on fire. Juana de Arco. Hatuey. Anne Frank. Gusano.

  “I warned you repeatedly,” Mr. Fuhrman said, as blood rose up through my cheeks into my temples. I was sweating in my armpits and under my breasts and on the bridge of my nose, making my hideous eyeglasses slide down. My eyes got watery (thank God for waterproof mascara). I heard a few gasps and giggles. “Now sit DOWN,” Mr. Fuhrman commanded, “and play that guitar PROPERLY.”

  My guitar may have gently wept for me, but if it did I never heard it because I never went near it again. I should have broken it over Mr. Fuhrman’s head like Katherine did to her music teacher with a lute in The Taming of the Shrew. Anyway, the Knox stopped working after that. To Mami’s infinite aesthetic disappointment and acute fear that I may never make her a grandmother, I resigned myself to having short, soft fingernails. I may never look beautiful and wear a Lucida diamond engagement ring from Tiffany. I may never be married and have babies. But at least I can type easy and not worry about chipping my polish, and I can do precise makeup application without worrying about poking out a Helen Keller eyeball, and whenever I cuddle Lilly I know I won’t hurt her, and every time I touch the one I love I’m not afraid that I’ll scratch his face or mangle the apprentice. That’s got to count for something.

  My small circle of Frenzy friends were people with an outsider feeling like mine whose intimate preoccupations were things like, Am I too black? Are Angela Davis ’fros really okay here, or will they send me home to get a less overtly political Black Panther haircut? Am I too gay? Daddy hates me for being a fag and the locker room shower jock homophobes will hurt me if they see my red-painted toenails. Am I too fat? I’m gonna try the wheat germ–strawberry yogurt–cheddar cheese diet next and if that doesn’t work I’m giving bulimia a whirl and if that doesn’t work I’m going to Lourdes to bulk up my body on fabulous fattening French food so at least I can get credit for extracurricular activity to impress all my Ivy League admissions officers. Am I too transitory? What a D.C.-government cliché. Daddy may lose the next election and we’ll have to go back to the relative sticks of Michigan/ Pennsylvania/California.

  My personal issue: WHAT THE FUCK WERE MY INSANE JUBAN PARENTS THINKING?

  Our Southwest home address was deemed so über-gauche by Sidwell, so déclassé, that it was inaccessible to their school bus route. So I was sent to and returned from school each day by taxi, the other students greeting my arrival and departure by gathering at the windows to make fun of my four-hundred-pound driver—her nickname was Tiny. To brace myself for the daily humiliation, I’d dab on some extra Yardley lip gloss and tell myself I was a rich, famous, much envied Russian and Latina Jewess princesa–actress–prima ballerina from a banana republic whose potentate father had been illegitimately removed from power by a despot enemy’s radical rebel communist army. Strictly as an interim measure, my Israeli supermodel mother and my dashing Latin king father had decided to deign to have me chauffeured to this school in a limo, but just until Papi regained his rightful rule and supremacy over our heinously misunderstood and very beautiful little native land. Denial may have been my parents’ escapist drug of choice; mine was flights of imagination and, by and by, sex. Sometimes those tricks actually worked. Because every morning, it was the same horrible grind I’d have to rev myself up for, like Roy Scheider as Bob Fosse in All That Jazz, staring at his tired face in the bathroom mirror and saying, “It’s showtime, folks!”

  As I emerged daily from Tiny’s taxi I considered telling her, “Tiny, let’s get lost, let them send out alarms…Let’s get crossed off everybody’s list…And though they’ll think us rather rude we’ll tell the world we’re in that crazy mood…”

  Maybe Tiny, who lived in a trailer cahm with a skeletal unemployed chain-smoking cancer-ridden defeated husband named Cletus, would also like to be a little runaway from the reality of her life. We could just pack up the typewriter, Agua de Violetas and TaB, get in that cab—and drive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Will I Become Like the Swallow?

  In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler writes that you cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. That is patently ridiculous—for a Jubana. That’s like saying you cannot love an eyebrow, upper lip, jaw line, armpit, arm, knuckle, leg, or the top of your big toe unless you love hair. I love my body just fine, thanks (when I and a few choice others are not abusing or neglecting it), and I’m glad I have one, considering the alternative. But the only hair that I care to have on it is what’s on my head, and even that grows as if it’s on steroids, thereby forcing me into Jean-Paul’s very expensive hair chair on a strict monthly basis. Growth means roots, of course. When Papi had surgery for a (benign, thank God) brain tumor in September 1999—it was the second such surgery in two consecutive years—my otherwise auburn hair turned white in a week. It’s quite ugly and badly textured if left uncolored anymore, so I never do. Costs an unnatural fortune just to look Jubananatural.

  I have a dark-haired, olive-skinned Latina heiress acquaintance who’s had her entire body electrolysized from the hairline down—and even that was realigned.

  “I used to be a gorilla,” she said.

  Well, once my puberty kicked in at age twelve, I never resembled a gorilla—I’m too Ashkenazi fair, thank God—but hair that didn’t used to be there before suddenly was. And until I discovered shaving, tweezing, depilatories, waxing, and ele
ctrolysis for myself, that hair was there to stay, presumably even after I expired. The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai actually wrote a poem devoted to this unfortunately eternal grooming challenge, called “I’ve Grown Very Hairy”: “I’ve grown very hairy all over my body. I’m afraid they’re going to start hunting me for my fur.”

  Amichai started hunting me, and not merely for my fur, when I met him at a poetry reading in Washington in the early nineties. But that’s another hairy story. For now, let’s just leave it that he was one of my first older men.

  Older men would become a leitmotif in my romantic life. Though I’ve been lucky to have a healthy father throughout my own life—until the second and crippling brain tumor surgery—I’ve also had a remote father. Once I hit puberty, that remoteness became physical. I remember seeing Papi at the end of the day and when I’d go to kiss and hug him, he was like a bull butting heads with a cow.

  “Why did you ever have to grow up?” Papi would say. “You were so much cuter when you were little.”

  “How do you respond to that?” I’d ask Gramps, years later. “My father won’t even touch me. It’s like he wants to get it over with when he sees me. He’s so uncomfortable. He won’t sustain eye contact. It’s like he’s embarrassed to look at me.”

  “You hug him and kiss him and look at him anyway,” Gramps advised. “You take the lead, even if he doesn’t respond at first. Believe me, you keep that up, he’ll get the hang of it. You have to teach him how to show love.”

  “Why? Why do I always have to be the one to take charge of every fucking thing? Teach my own father. Why can’t someone else be the mensch for a change?”

  “Because,” Gramps said, “you’re stronger than the people around you. Certainly you’re the strongest person in your whole fucking fucked-up family.”