by Myriam Gurba
In college, I met a conservative gay writer with HIV.
He was dating the roommate of this boy I was having experimental sex with, and once he walked into their sparely furnished living room while I was hanging out on the couch in sweats and radiating viral heat. My immune system was fighting something fluey. I could feel coughs growing inside me.
The writer strode toward me. I remained seated. He reached out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Andrew.”
“Hello,” I replied to the Englishman I already knew to be Andrew Sullivan. “I’m sick.”
In a tiny way, I felt powerful. Powerful enough to kill Andrew Sullivan by coughing on him.
Andrew Sullivan made a yikes face.
He waved at me in place of a handshake and paced to the balcony. There, his date, a gorgeous white boy, was waiting, leaning against the railing. Andrew Sullivan put his hands around the swimmer’s shoulders. He pressed his chest against the boy’s back, HIV positive to HIV negative.
Pedro’s accent soothed me. His beauty soothed me. The high stakes of his life so inspired me, they almost made me want to have AIDS. But I think being in love with a mean white girl was enough. She was my AIDS.
The Real World: San Francisco had a gay. The Real World: Los Angeles had a lesbian. The roommates found out when she wore her “I’m Not Gay But My Girlfriend Is” T-shirt to shoot pool.
Pedro partly made me come out to Mom.
If he could argue with a bike messenger on international TV about sticking his finger in peanut butter, the least I could do was acknowledge that I was bonkers for a white girl.
Scarlett O’Hara, Lana Turner, Divine. White girls.
Baltimore drag queens make the prettiest white girls.
White girls are the Holy Grails of Western civilization. I wish they could be replaced with something else. Let there be a new grail. Let that grail be a dead Mexican woman in a long dress. Let her name be Wisdom.
Let her ghost unmoor the hero’s journey. Let the ghost whisper her sibilant name. Let her breathe it right into your mouth.
I still hang out with white girls. I still hang out with ghosts.
When do you think white girls will go extinct? We are more than a decade into the twenty-first century, and I see no indications of their decline.
There are still plenty of them to feel inferior to.
There are still plenty of them to get high with.
The last one I hung out with hates men.
She lives with her partner on a street with a funny name. Something like Cerulean or Imbroglio.
The white girl delivers marijuana. Unlike Puck, she uses a Honda. One of her clients is a high school teacher who invites her to sit at her kitchen table. The teacher will pack a bowl and ply the white girl with weed, peppering her with questions about transgendered womanhood. Since the white girl is kind of new to her job, she feels like she has to humor the teacher. She can’t stand it, though. She’s not a teacher. The teacher is.
The white girl and I are pharmaceutical sisters. I take estradiol twice a day and progesterone once a day to supplement my failing ovaries. I take spironolactone to fix the mess my adrenal glands make. The white girl takes these same hormones and androgen blockers for other reasons. Mainly, it’s because her ovaries exist on an alternate level of consciousness. She’s trans.
We squatted on her tiny stoop together. The night sky gave us a whole bunch of black to stare at. Her cat pranced along the lawn. With cautious paws, she crept toward my feet. She crouched as if she were going to come at me and then leapt back and darted into the grass.
Her tail twitched. Its tip seemed to have been hacked off and then peeled. “What happened to her tail?” I asked.
The white girl said, “Bob accidentally slammed the door on it and she tried to yank it out and ripped the fur off. When Bob opened the door, it was just bones and blood. He felt so bad.” The white girl shook her head. Her strawberry-blond curls bounced.
She crossed her legs and tugged her miniskirt toward her knees. “We had to put a cone on her because she kept chewing it. It’s healing now. It looks way better.”
We stared at the cat. I wondered what the raw tail would have tasted like. I considered the default: chicken.
The cat twitched her nub.
The white girl asked, “Want some?” She held out a smoldering J.
“No thanks.”
The cat frolicked. The white girl asked, “Do you like acid?”
“I’ve never done it,” I said.
“Oh, I love it,” she said. She scrunched her curls and sang acid’s praises. It was her favorite.
After she finished telling me about some trip she went on using experimental drugs, I told her, “One time, in junior high, this boy gave me a tab. Since it was wrapped in foil I thought it looked like jewelry, so I kept it in my jewelry box. That way my parents couldn’t find it. It just blended in.”
The white girl reached for her curls. She scrunched. “Coke makes me so horny,” she said. “I love coke.”
We wandered back inside her house. The soft recessed lighting made me feel like we were in a peach. I was sitting on the carpet, hating my body. To my right, a huge flat-screen played a music video. White girls in swimsuits ran on a beach, showing off their peaches. The white girl’s endless legs hung off the couch. Her fingers curled. Purple acrylics scratched her thigh, tattooed with the word misandry to express her hatred for the male sex.
This tattooed thigh makes her the ultimate woman.
Baby rocks tumbled from a plastic sack that she tipped over her phone. They hit the screen and she set the phone down on the glass-topped coffee table. Swiping, she pressed a Costco membership card to the rocks, flattened them, and made little white beaches. She raked the plastic across them and chopped.
She snatched a dollar bill off a closed laptop and rolled it into a tight tunnel. Leaning over, she placed the money between her nostril and the whiteness then dragged it along the beach. The beach vanished.
Crack
Ida, the white girl who smoked crack on accident, was back.
We got separated by the medieval period known as junior high, but her mom sent her to Catholic school even though they were Lutheran. We had most of our classes together. Any time we could, we sat next to each other. Our teachers yelled at us for talking to each other too much, and when we got home from school, we sprinted to our phones so we could call each other and keep talking. I slept over at her house even more than I slept at Frida’s. That’s what you do when you love someone a lot. You spend time unconscious with them.
We held hands under Ida’s covers. Her sheets smelled hellish because her water came from a sulfurous well. She, her mom, and her stepdad lived in a canyon that the city water didn’t reach—you had to drive over several dirt roads to get there. Wild turkeys loitered in these roads. Mountain lions and rattlesnakes frolicked amid the surrounding oaks. Spanish moss hung from the branches.
Ida’s stepdad, Ralph, was such a white guy. He sat on a rocking chair on their front porch, wearing flannel, mom jeans, and trucker hats. He chewed tobacco and occasionally let the juice spill onto his Santa beard. His cheeks glowed merrily. He kept a rifle nearby.
Glancing at him from behind the living room’s white lace curtains, I knew I would be the perfect thing for him to kill. That’s what men who looked like him did in the olden days in California: they killed Mexicans. They lynched us. Made us into strange fruit. Mangos, maybe. My death would’ve made Ralph a better white man in California’s past.
My death would’ve made Ralph a better white man in California’s present.
Ralph loved whiteness. When we weren’t around, he sniffed it up his nose and revved his truck. He barreled out of the canyon and into town to hammer buildings together. At the moment, he was resting. Thinking. Staring at the lawn, which was strange. A savage hill and then suddenly, civilization. A house and a lawn.
Sun-bleached Weimaraner shit speckled the grass. I scanned the green for reptiles.
When rattlesnakes slithered onto it to tan themselves, Ralph would take care of them. He’d reach for his rifle, aim, and shoot. I never saw him do it, but Ida explained: “When the bullets hit them, their bodies look like exploding ropes.”
Ida could be a dumb bitch sometimes.
Like during the fifth-grade race war, as I was lamenting getting called a beaner and a wetback, she said, “I know how you feel.”
I squinted at her.
“How?” I asked.
She pointed at her head. “I’m blond,” she answered. She got teary-eyed. “I’m sick of the jokes.”
I rolled my eyes and said a silent prayer for every blond Mexican.
The phone was ringing. It was Sunday. Maybe Ida was calling to tell me something dumb. Like that reverse racism is real.
“Hello?”
Crazed sobbing. The only other time I heard a girl cry like that was when Tupac got shot.
“Ida?” I said.
Weird syllables broke through the sobs. Maybe Ida’s stepdad had accidentally shot her mom. Maybe she’d found out Santa wasn’t real.
“Ida!” I demanded. “What happened?”
“His dogs,” she choked. “They got Golem!”
She resumed sobbing.
The news was so horrific I had to stifle laughter. Golem was the love of Ida’s life, a black cat that slept on her face and tried to sleep on mine. She talked to him almost as much as she talked to me, and now her stepdad’s hunting dogs had assassinated him. I imagined them getting into his drugs and making a coked-out sport of cat shredding.
“I’m not coming to school tomorrow!” she cried. I heard a click.
Memories of every mean thing I’d ever done to Ida returned. Freshman year, when she forgot her grammar and composition book in her locker, she’d call me so I could dictate the sentences we were supposed to diagram. I’d made up extra ones for her. I laughed along with her brother when he teased her and intimated she had sexual relations with her cat. When she called me crying to share the score she’d gotten on the Advanced Placement Language and Composition exam, a two, and asked what I’d gotten, I answered honestly: “A five.”
Was it an act of meanness to admit that I’d gotten a perfect score, especially when one of my parents wasn’t even a native speaker of the language?
Maybe.
Monday, at school, Ida’s chair remained empty.
In religion class, I tuned out a lecture about miracles and lepers. I slouched behind my Bible, which was propped upright on my desk. I skimmed The Communist Manifesto, which I’d wedged into the Gospels. Vague as it was, I still preferred Marx’s alms-for-everyone utopia to the snow-white heaven we got snapshots of in class. White is so hard to keep clean.
I looked at Ida’s empty seat and imagined her heaven: No sex. Plenty of cats. I contrasted hers with mine: No cats. Plenty of sex. This daydream fused with Marxist theory and I succumbed to fantasies of feline free love, an orgy of proletariat meow, which ended with the sound of the lunch bell.
“My mom keeps telling me it’s OK if I’m gay, but I’m not gay.” Ida spoke from the corner where she knelt shoving sneakers into a pile. Softening her voice, she added, “I think I’m asexual.”
“Tell her that,” I said.
“I did, but she keeps pushing.”
“I like girls.”
Ida flinched a little—my lesbianism hurt her. She’d recently fallen in love with Jesus and had been spending a lot of time with him.
Ida’s mom was on the blue living room sofa, studying a medical textbook. On my way to Ida’s room, I peeked over her shoulder. Photographs of genitals blooming with sores decorated a page. I wondered what it was about Ida that had her mom convinced she was a lesbian. Probably that she looked so much like Kurt Cobain.
“Your mom is looking at pictures of herpes in the living room,” I said.
“I know. She does that all day long. Last night, she started talking about a calcified fetus in the middle of dinner.”
“What were you eating?”
“Stroganoff.”
“Why was she talking about a calcified fetus?”
“She found one at work.”
I imagined one in a desk drawer. I imagined one as a paperweight.
“Where was it?”
“In a woman. Wanna go to youth group with me?”
“OK.”
“Wanna get McDonald’s first?”
“OK.”
We tore out of her bedroom and sped into town. We got a cheeseburger and fries, split them between us, and gobbled them up before parking under a magnolia tree. We headed to the buildings behind the church. Back there, the hallways felt schoolish. A brick propped open a door. We walked into youth group.
Three boys looked at us from their chairs. Their eyes moved up and down. I couldn’t believe Ida didn’t understand this. She went to youth group because she was in love with Jesus. Everyone else went for sex.
“Hello, ladies,” said the boy in cutoff shorts. His head was shaved except for bangs. We slid into some folding chairs. I nodded at the other girls seated in the circle; three were Mexicans. One told me, “You look like an actress.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s she been in?”
“Movies.”
“What kind?”
“Many.”
Youth group got underway. Our leader, the apostolically named Steve, sat in a folding chair between the boy in cutoff shorts and the Mexican girl with the thicker sideburns. Steve was wearing flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a T-shirt with a surfboard on it. He was grotesquely good looking. I couldn’t trust him.
Steve talked to us about Jesus. I watched the boys. They seemed interested in the Mexican girls, especially the big-titted one. One of the girls would leave to go to the bathroom, and then a boy would leave to go to the bathroom. A boy would come back. A girl would come back.
We played musical chairs to Christian rock, and then, after about an hour, Steve asked, “Who’s signing up for the Mexico trip?”
Ida grabbed my arm. “You should come!” she insisted.
“Why?”
“Because you speak Spanish!”
Steve looked at me with interest. “You speak Spanish?” he asked.
I nodded. I looked at the Mexican girls. “You guys speak Spanish?” I asked.
They shook their heads. The one with a perm added, “Nope.”
“You’d be playing a very important role if you came,” Steve said in singsong.
“Please come!” blurted Ida.
I thought about the last time I’d gone to Mexico. It was three-ish years ago, when I was fifteen. I was supposed to go with Mom again this summer.
I asked, “How much does it cost?”
Steve said, “Nothing.”
I grew extra suspicious.
“Where to?”
“Baja.”
I narrowed my eyes and asked, “What’s the point?”
Steve said, “We’re going to spread the Gospel and build houses.”
I stared at Ida. I stared at Steve. I waited a minute. I said, “I’ll help build houses. But I’m not going to tell anyone about Jesus. They already know about Jesus. Mexico is filled with them.”
We were riding back to Ida’s, the sun was setting behind us, and Ida was singing, “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name!”
I joined, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!”
We followed the tune that we sang the Our Father to at school Mass.
“Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation!”
Ida grabbed my hand, just like at Mass, and we belted, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen!” Thrusting our hands to the roof, we screamed, “FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY, FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN!”
Our ears rang, ou
r cheeks burned, and we laughed so hard the sound possessed the car like a demon. What we’d done wasn’t for any father. It was to hear our voices in unison, to shout, to enjoy being animals together. We were animals deep in Eden. Animals that would never leave Eden. East, west, south, and north of a place that’s no-man’s-land.
Summer in Sumer
I spent the summer before I left for college peeing in a Mexican desert and trying not to strangle Christians.
Cyndi Lauper
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was originally a kind of rapey song meant to be sung by a guy. Luckily, Cyndi Lauper saved it. She sang it and danced to it and used it to convert girls to feminism. Have you seen the song title parodied on tote bags that read, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights”? I have.
I wanted to have fun the summer before I left for college.
One of my favorite things is when people misspell college. I like it when kids go online to announce that they got into the collage of their dreams. It sounds so surreal. I imagine Salvador Dalí on the admissions board.
I got into the University of California, Berkeley. Because I’m Mexican. And pretentious.
I was thinking about college when Steve loaded a bunch of chaperones and teens, Ida and me included, into a station wagon and two Broncos. We caravanned to a Mexican village without plumbing. It was named La Huerta.
At night, since the outhouse was in use, I wandered into the desert to pee.
Squatting over the dirt and cloaked in darkness, I let my sweats puddle around my ankles. I tilted my pelvis back. I pulled my sweats’ crotch forward to prevent it from getting a golden shower. I’d already killed my flashlight.
I considered scorpions. One could scuttle toward my wound and reach for it. She might trim my clit. I hadn’t learned the term female genital mutilation yet, but I feared it. I would learn about female circumcision at school, in my women’s studies classes. I think I minored in women’s studies, but I’m not sure.