I press my lips against her sides until I feel her ribs with my teeth. I kiss her hip bone, rub my cheek against her inner thighs, lick and moan.
I wrote: “I want to feel like I have just fallen and landed in an overpowering and strange place.”
I whip her more
She winces. “Master, my love . . . you will give me anything, that’s what you wrote.”
“Yes,” I murmur.
She gasps as I reach out, stroke her with the leather along her sex, then I lick her, soothing her burning flesh.
She cries, “Yesssuuuhh!”
I wrote, “I am burning up with the need for sexual foreplay, and beyond that. My words take on a life of their own, buoyant and tossed freely on the enchanted elixir of my power over you, my blood mushrooms with a fierce desire to consume you, signal my departure from all confinement.”
I don’t need saving anymore. I am fine.
Then I feel him take over. Ghost Boy grips my forearm and walks me through the ritual, wills me on. I watch from outside of myself as Ghost Boy blinds me with a violent hunger, relishing her submission. I trust him to protect me. I follow him deeper into what decency prohibits. Our dark longing and willingness imply that Lila and I will be together forever.
Ghost Boy fixates on her flesh, with his unwavering authority. I plunge my fingers between her legs, wanting to forever ingrain myself in her soul, inscribe my love on her heart, wrest it open to make a place to bury my innocence, replace it with Ghost Boy’s lust.
Until I can’t, until it’s too much for me, until I’m scared of what I’m doing, until I want to flee because I am going to get in trouble—because people are going to find out what kind of evil boy I am, they will find out what the priest does, until the devil owns my soul and makes me his, until, whip in hand, breathless, I sense a dark covenant of forbidden trust born between us. Ghost Boy, who protects me, takes me with him, we exit the real world, lose ourselves in this quandary of illicit, formidable perversions, where all else seeks shelter in the trenches of the written word.
I don’t remember what happened, didn’t want to, or how I ended up sitting at the lake on a park bench, staring at the dark waters, the moon bobbing on the surface. My arms are trembling. I can’t stop my hands shaking. My teeth are chattering, but it’s not cold. I am consumed with panic, I look back at the cabin and see no lights. I keep thinking I encouraged her, boasted I wanted her to give me all of it. I told her I could handle anything. I expected her to prove her loyalty, and she did. I was the disappointment.
4
MY FIRST EXCURSION into the world was riddled with doubt, failure and confusion. Time has not diminished the wonder I still feel when looking back at my Green Mill days. I’m amazed that I somehow was able to walk away from that experience.
Today it’s June 3rd, 2019. The days here in northern New Mexico are turning hotter than usual with climate change clawing the land. It’s not that bad, though. It’s still good weather for hiking. Way up here in the towering heights of the Santa Fe forest, I rest on a boulder and drink spring water pouring from a boulder crevice. I think about Lila, how kind and generous she was with her time and affection.
The incident made me question everything I knew about what a man was. It was clear my ideas back in the early 1980s about what made a man a man were wrong. Those ideas were grown and harvested out of the smoky ruins of warfare and hostile landscapes of reformatories, orphanages and youth facilities. They came out of the jagged land strewn with missing parents and abandoned kids, uneducated fools, deceptive predators, drug addicts and trusted adults sexually abusing children.
It was hard to trust kindness, especially when it hurt you, lied to you, exploited you. But I did accept it from others because it was part of living. I practiced some kindness myself toward others. It was one of the most difficult exercises in my reentry. I repeatedly failed to perform it as I had wished.
Out of insecurity and fear, I was enamored with being a tough guy, a man who didn’t cry or admit to feeling pain. Being a bad boy. Acting like I didn’t care about my socialization enough to be civil toward strangers. I immediately assumed their intent toward me was malevolent.
Grown-up people in power, the authorities, were resentful—maybe because they hated themselves or their lives, maybe they were hurt or had lost hope—they took it out me. They targeted me with labels that suited their needs, to raise more money, to build more facilities, to feel better about themselves, to get more power, to feel in control . . . who knows? Because of my background they assumed I was violent, an addict, a drunk. It might have been as true as it is for anyone for a time. But it didn’t remain so, even though their labels stuck to me and branded me as such.
I would not be like them. I remained hopeful, full of brash love for life. I dismissed those sticky, warted tongues pandering for insectual-approval from the industry (literary, financial, educational, etc.), ensuring those bigots would reap rewards for their subsidized subservience—plaques, money, positions. . . . I witnessed them fall prey to the cultural auctioneers who bought and sold authenticity and unique family legacy and ethnic pride and replaced it with their skin-shed cures to make us appear white, demeaning us in order to make themselves feel superior. I would not bend, I would never become a company-bought and industry-molded idiot who’d commit any indiscretion to get ahead.
Never.
Lila wasn’t one of them. She had three bilingual books of published poems, but to see her you wouldn’t think so. She was down-home, country-modest. Lila’s strength of character exuded love, even though that word, abused, faded to lusterless shreds by most, had no meaning for me. The way I used the word love with Lila meant strength. She was the strong one, I was weak. She stood by her words. I didn’t. She was sincere, I was opportunistic.
I was a superficial kid, full of myself.
In the beginning of our correspondence, language foamed over the page margins freely from my sweltering imagination. Her friendship made me feel part of something special, made me feel smart. Important. I mattered, and that meant I had something other kids in DYA didn’t: purpose.
She had published poetry, was a scholar of pre-Colombian literature, a translator of Nahuatl poetry. For being only thirty-two, she kicked butt. No matter what side you looked at, she was impressive. I wrote her about the barbarian life in Gladiator School, our exchanges lathered into flowering gardens of abundant romantic confessions and sexual fantasies. They were instigated and prodded on by me.
I knew I needed fixing, that there was something missing in me—seven years in the orphanage, two in juvey, one in Gladiator School and seven in DYA would jack any kid up. Those years did something to me. There were invisible but virulent vestiges in my every step and gesture. They made it difficult to talk to women; when I talked about love, it always had to be sexual, sex-sex-sex, lacking tenderness or affection. I just thought that was normal. I was a twenty-two-year-old with a six-year-old’s emotional make-up.
I guess it was the six-year-old grieving his mother’s absence, the six-year-old angry over her abandonment, the six-year-old not knowing anything about affection, not trusting it, afraid . . . saying all the words and making all the promises. And it was the six-year-old also believing in super-human heroes performing amazing feats, all according to the words he had written in letters to her, believing in the most outrageous and extraterrestrial powers he thought he had. I thought if I willed it, it would happen. I mean, I really thought she could hear me thinking and feeling, like words spoken aloud in her presence.
Still, writing was new to me. I was amazed at how one word followed another to invoke an unexpected image, how they were arranged on paper and called sentences. They made me embrace a whole new world of possible meanings. They could carry one’s feelings, hopes or dreams, be sent off, received on the other end and start a full, new life unguessed, unimagined.
That’s how it was for me. Once I started writing Lila, our correspondence taught me how to talk to a woman, tru
st her enough to divulge my deepest erotic fantasies, even create wildly pornographic scenes to quench years of deprivation and curiosity.
It was heaven for me, got me through some dark times.
One letter every two weeks turned into three a week. Soon I was counting the days by the arrival of her letters: so many letters made a month, months became a year. Somewhere in the middle of those letters I was writing her love-me-forever letters. Besides the obvious, the exercise improved my writing, helped me express my feelings, broaden and deepen my vocabulary.
Her words were enchanting music. I was so easily affected by them, going from deep, tumultuous agony, rising to ecstatic soaring so liberating that for hours I was not even conscious I was confined.
Even as I tested the virginal shores of my imagination, even while realizing with an infant’s delight that I was writing something verging on the occult and it was wrong, I still wanted to be bad. I was defiant being bad. My words summoned nuns in my head screaming at me that I was a heathen, bound to burn in hell. I smiled as I wrote even more disgraceful sentences.
I wrote on, sometimes recoiled at the metaphors of sex marathons, writing what I had been taught by pious, hypocritical people; priests, devout Christians—even my paternal grandma and grandpa, reading the Bible every day. They all scolded me in my head that what I was writing was evil. But I soldiered on, breaking through my fears, recklessly flailing my Chicano magic wand of a pencil putting it all down on paper: the most loving and precious scenes my imagination could summon, filled with promises and violent, erotic domination, imagining sadistic and cruel sex scenes . . . which she welcomed.
She kept asking in her letters: Are you sure you want to go this way, are you positive you want me to open up your fantasy world, trust me with your darkest fantasies, pour your soul into my hands? It can be dangerous, there’s no turning back, are you sure you want to go this way? Please, think about it.
I was not thinking. Here was an opportunity to know women, to revel in and understand how they thought, what made them love a man, how far they would go . . . could you possess them, was coupling eternal, was there even such a thing as love, or only lust. . . . ?
In her letters she asked that I tread carefully, consider where I was taking our correspondence, not to make light of it and be sure about the promises I was making, because she was changing her life around them.
I ignored every warning for the joy of unmitigated intoxication in what was taboo. Every day for a year, two people who had never met wrote each other ten-page letters. Envelope-freighters moved, brimming with the passionate cargo of our dreams to be together forever, criss-crossing America between North Carolina and Denver, drifting over cities and rivers, over the heads of millions entangled in their lives, dying or living, in sorrow or joy. Like clouds, our letters came and went, oblivious to the real world over which they sailed.
She put it to me in no uncertain way, and when I insisted, in one of her letters, she whipped out the hack saw, cut the bars of my sheltered innocence and wrote: Then tell me what the hell you really want to know, and I’ll lay it out for you on the table like gorgeous, gleaming knives you can cut your wrists with and kill this adolescent bullshit fantasy you carry called a woman in your screwed-up, institutionalized head.
Zero tolerance for the bullshit.
She had been Frog King’s mistress for years, now she was breaking it off to be only mine. That’s how loyal she was, how committed, how serious she was taking my words.
It didn’t even occur to me then, being locked up, starving for affection, that I would have to deliver on those promises. I realized too late and I paid the consequences for my naivety. I set aside all her misgivings, ignored the gravity of my words as something that would take care of itself in time. All was well. Even when she commented that if I followed the tip of my soul down to its thick and massive root system, it would be rooted in the poisoned soil of abandonment and drug-crazed parents—the toxins of my self-hatred, the hurt, the fear my mother caused in me when she left.
Did I dismiss Lila’s warning? Did I survive years of being alone in a hostile place, fending for myself in dangerous situations? I did. I assumed that Lila’s precautions on womanpower, with my sincere interest at heart, were less to be feared and easily handled, at least easier than facing gangs intent on raping you or being swept away in the middle of the night from your home at five-years-old and delivered to strangers dressed in dark gowns on a rainy night.
After writing her not to worry, I’d lay down on my bunk, mind depleted and on the edge of disintegration, waiting until lights were out. Then I’d conjure her image, masturbating with the thoughts of us having sex in a dozen ways until I was exhausted.
When I banged her in my fantasies, I was not in DYA. In the dark under the covers, I invented myself into a man with means who knew the world, and her into a woman in my mind, just the way I wanted her, doing and saying and behaving as I wished. I was with her in a field or in bed every way possible until I lay gasping with an erection under my blanket, sweating, my arms and hands cramped from stroking myself so long.
The written word opened a new world. It revealed such pleasures as never imagined.
I urged her to go that way, use our letters to break down sexual taboos, and she was only too happy to free me from the throes of my own parochial misgivings. Yes, at times I felt vaguely uneasy, told her so, but she swept aside my doubts, reminding me, You’ve committed yourself, no turning back, no regrets, no second thoughts. Follow through with the promises of eternal loyalty and love you’ve made. You are my master and I am yours to do whatever you want to do with me.
Those last words terrified me as much as they pleased me. I didn’t know their meaning, what they required of me. What was a master’s job? What did the work and responsibility of a master entailed? They also got me excited. A powerful, erotic force exuded from those words, strong enough to lead me on, straight into a matrix. So I went with it. Mine is not a cautionary tale, but a story about a fool’s mindless excursion into the lethal hinterlands of a woman’s most secret desires. I replied, I will be.
And so I was: vulnerable, willing to say anything to lessen the frustration of being so isolated, craving attention. I unleashed reams of sentimental infatuations I thought were God-inspired, earth-shattering truths, because as I did, I felt like I was flying high in the sky above the world as I knew it—so far up I could almost kiss God’s cheek, in some way creating, controlling my destiny, building a determined life. I wanted to believe everything I wrote her, that I could do it all. I believed it all, even up to the very moment when I heard Lila call my name and I entered the bedroom.
I knew nothing about love when I got released from DYA. I found myself in a van with a bunch of other young gangsters. I hopped into the van idling in the parking lot, breathed with relief that I was finally leaving.
There are only two things I’m afraid in this world. One is the court system, especially as a Chicano. They railroad you every time, they strip you of every right, you have no control over your destiny; you know that all the lawyers, judges and counselors are in the game for themselves They don’t care about you. They waste you every time, as sure as if they’re executing you before a firing squad. I tremble even at the mention of the words court, legal paper or official appointment with one of the legal ghouls. The second is being forgotten in the correctional system, like some of the immigrant kids. They’re ripped from their parents and hurled into the dark, oblivious pit of No-Return. They stay confined long after they’re supposed to leave, no one cares about them. I don’t want to be forgotten.
I sent my sister Karina two cardboard boxes of notebooks—mostly graffiti lettering, tattoo sketches, some cartoon drawings, some poems—books, letters. I kept one box. While waiting for my release escort, I checked the box a hundred times. A couple of paperbacks, a journal, letters, two changes of underwear, jeans, T-shirts, pairs of socks, toothpaste and brush. I folded the flaps, set it on the cot, minutes late
r, checked it again. To calm my nerves, I read one of the letters Lila had sent me saying she’d be waiting.
Finally out and riding away, we pass telephone poles, houses, wrecks on bricks being worked on in yards, office buildings, closed bars and gas stations. The exhaust pipe sputters, on the radio Willie Nelson croons “On the Road Again” and the guard puffs his discount cigarette from the rez.
Three other kids from a different part of the complex are released with me. We hunch in silence. I know them. Locked down in segregation for disobeying orders, they hate authority as much as I do. They’re the same kind of kids I’d known at the orphanage, except older than their years.
The black brother, Gary, nineteen years old, wipes condensation from the glass and says, “Man, ain’t shit out there ’cept them fields and lights on the golf course and pool at Sanford place where they keep them Watergate criminals.”
“Country club for whites—no black allowed.” Sickle, eighteen, an Aryan, comments. “Shoulda been a politician, Gary. What’d you expect, a welcome committee by the Queen of Sheba?”
Gary grumbles, spits sunflower seed shells into his palm.
“Much time as the State took, Queen of Sheba’d be a good start. I’m hungry for some fried chicken,” he says.
The Chicano seated next to me, Chuy, seventeen, says, “And mariachis, buttered popcorn, cocaine and a big mamacita with huge boobies and nalgas.”
“Calvinists believed punishment was a deterrent for your inherent evil,” the guard adds. “Ain’t none of you going to say anything? I’m giving you my best sermon, kind of a ‘Hey, you’re free, suckers, you’re saved.’”
“Let’s have fun on our way to hell,” Sickle says.
“I’m going to community college” the guard says. “And in my philosophy class, I read that Calvinists believe that if you’re born into poverty, you are the sinful, the wicked who can never change—criminals by your DNA. Ha, that’s right!”
American Orphan Page 5