by Myriam Gurba
Spring Semester 1998
ENGLISH 117T
HISTORY 103B
HISTORY 150C
PHYSICS 10
DELIBERATIONS UNDER WAY IN MARTINEZ MURDER TRIAL
A jury of eight women and four men began deliberations at 3 p.m. Tuesday on the fate of Tommy Jesse Martinez Jr. and is scheduled to resume this morning.
Martinez, 20, is accused of murder in the rape, stabbing, and bludgeoning death of 35-year-old Sophia Castro Torres in a Santa Maria park on Nov. 15, 1996.
He is also accused of three other incidents, including attempted assaults against other Santa Maria women from Nov. 3 until Dec. 4, 1996. He has confessed to attempted robbery and assault in two of these incidents, including the latter, after which Santa Maria police nabbed him.
He has denied charges of attempted rape and one count each of kidnapping and attempted kidnapping.
The jury can work until 5 p.m. nightly until it makes its decisions, according to instructions from Superior Court Judge Rodney Melville.
The trial began May 19, after a week spent in jury selection.
District Attorney Tom Sneddon and assistant prosecutor Tracy Grossman have asked the jury to find Martinez guilty of first-degree murder. Sneddon announced months ago he would seek the death penalty.
If the jury does find Martinez guilty of first-degree murder, the trial will go into a penalty phase. Melville said this second phase would begin immediately after such a decision.
During closing arguments Tuesday morning, defense attorney Peter Dullea urged the jury to look at the “reasonable doubt” on the basis of circumstantial evidence without the “loaded emotional phrases” offered by Sneddon.
Much of this evidence has two possibilities for interpretation, he claimed.
Evidence, including DNA, shows that Martinez had sexual intercourse with Torres before her death.
Earlier testimony showed that Torres had been profoundly depressed, isolated, and dysfunctional.
Although she appeared quite reclusive, Dullea suggested that she sought release from her emotional pain not with drugs or alcohol, but by finding warmth in the arms of a stranger.
“People do things like that,” he added.
Warmth in the arms of a stranger. Wow.
German Jewish toker, hiker, and intellectual Walter Benjamin wrote an essay titled “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” In it, he describes his musty zeal, intoning that “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” The chaos of memories. The chaos of mammaries. That chaos that comes after being touched. The chaos of penetration. That chaos of breath. The chaos caused by quiet ghosts. The haunting.
Fall Semester 1998
CHICANO 198
HISTORY 103E
HISTORY 171A
SCANDIN 116
I really like the phrase “the chaos of memories.” My spirit latches onto it and wraps its arms around its queer, hairy legs. The phrase expresses what kind of happens to your brain during and after trauma. Chaos roots itself in memory. My chaos came when a Mexican man sexually assaulted me on a sidewalk in the afternoon sun. Birds watched and kept the story to themselves. I told a detective about it, but I didn’t tell him everything. Some parts felt too personal for the historical record. Some of my reality wanted to, and wants to, remain private. By denying certain events a place in the historical record, there’s a certain denial of truth. With that denial comes dignity. Belief in one’s basic dignity is like makeup. It helps you leave the house. It protects your real face, the you-est you, against judgments.
Sometimes, it’s best to protect what the arms, faces, fingers, and mouths of strangers have done to you from misinterpretation. Like a chipmunk, I hoard the memory of all the sensations that happened to me that afternoon by the railroad tracks. I invite some people to experience parts of the assemblage.
Like Benjamin, I am a collector.
Spring Semester 1999
ANTHRO C147B
CHICANO 198
HISTORY 101
WOMENST 199
I could tell you about meeting my wife, our courtship, and our relationship, but I’m not going to. This is not a coming-out story. This is not a romance novel. As René Magritte would say, “Ceci n’est pas that kind of thing.” As Gertrude Stein would say, “There is no there there.” As Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins would say, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
Fall Semester 1999
HISTORY H102
HISTORY H195
I graduated cum laude with a history degree. I think I minored in women’s studies. History is the place where I got molested. History made me cum laude.
The Return of Elizabitch
I rarely let myself think about Sophia. In fact, I never let myself think about Sophia.
My brain, though, wanted to think about her.
My brain was obsessed with her.
It sought a surrogate.
It chose the Black Dahlia.
I came across her in a book subtitled “An Illustrated History of the Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner.” I ogled the book’s black-and-white photographs of her pre and post mutilation. They joined the chaos in my brain and fused with my memories of the human sacrifice at Oakley Park.
After staring at her crime scene and autopsy photos, I thought about the Black Dahlia all the time. I thought about her while I pooped. I thought about her while I ran. I thought about her while I ate fried chicken. I thought about her while I cut my bangs. She’d been a pretty white girl, the depressed kind, my favorite kind. Then somebody molested her, tortured her, chopped her up, and dumped her in a weedy lot. Los Angeles went nuts over her lust murder because she’d been so pretty, so white, and now she was in pieces. Who could do this to such a pretty white girl? Apparently, somebody. Pretty white girls needed to be careful. Pretty white girls needed to stay home.
1947 was the Black Dahlia’s big year.
She became famous for being lifeless, pretty, and white.
Dad was born in 1947.
He is part white. The Black Dahlia was white in parts. Two. Her killer bisected her at the waist. He also etched a smile into her face that extended her natural mouth beyond its perimeters. Sophia’s face got cut too. He never threatened to cut my face, but he threatened to cut other girls. He told them he wanted to cut their pretty faces. He breathed on them. His breath smelled like peanuts and chocolate. He smiled and smiled. He wrote poetry and he murdered. He cut, beat, and came. Cum laude.
The Black Dahlia’s real name was Elizabeth Short.
Elizabitch.
Elizabitch.
Elizabitch.
The Collector
Mexicans are naturally inclined to steal. I succumbed to this natural inclination at an Oakland cemetery.
I’d convinced my friend, a chain-smoking gay named Bob, to drive me there so we could visit the Black Dahlia’s grave. We stared down at its dirt.
I didn’t realize that I was staring at my Sophia surrogate. But I was.
“What’s the point of this?” asked Bob.
I looked left. I looked right. I pulled a plastic sandwich bag out of my jeans pocket, knelt, and clawed at the dirt. I scooped it into the bag. (This was premeditated.)
Bob said, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea. What if you piss her off?”
“She can’t get pissed,” I said. “She’s dead.”
Bob chuckled. He ashed on the cemetery dirt.
This is not a love story, but I must discuss the white girl I mentioned earlier, the white girl who would go on to become my wife, a white girl I met in college. She was my favorite kind of white girl, the depressed kind who gets chased out of bathrooms for looking like a boy, the kind who has suffered and suffered and suffered, and one day, I would say “I do” to her.
We were living together in Berkeley, but I talked her into moving south with me to Long Beach.
The Black Dahlia had lived ther
e.
Bob moved to Long Beach with us.
He slept on our living room floor.
He went out at night to get his dick sucked.
In our neighborhood, it was easy to get your dick sucked.
In the moonlight.
One morning, I found Bob sitting on the living room floor eating a cold cheeseburger.
“Good morning,” I said to him. “Did you have any disgusting adventures last night?”
Bob was usually giggly, but he didn’t giggle. He set his cheeseburger down on the floor. He looked up at me and said, “I saw her.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The Black Dahlia,” he said.
“What? Where?”
Bob explained how he’d gone to the bars, had some drinks, wandered home, and crashed on the floor. He woke up at some point, probably in the early morning, and saw a black-haired woman walking through the living room. “I thought it was you,” he said. “But then she turned to look at me. She looked at me over her shoulder. When she showed her face, it wasn’t you. It was her.”
I got quiet and probably pale.
I had to get rid of that dirt.
The Post-traumatic Bitch and the Sea
My girlfriend was at work and Bob was on a date.
It was perfect. It was nighttime and I was alone.
I approached my jewelry box. The same one I’d kept acid in as a teen. I opened its lid. The ballerina didn’t spin. I reached for the plastic baggy and shoved it in my sweatshirt pocket.
I left our apartment, headed through our courtyard, and made my way past the gay bars. The gayborhood smelled of wine and precum. Stars twinkled.
I marched the few blocks to the concrete stairs that cut down a cliff. I headed down to the beach and padded across its darkness, to the tide.
At the edge of the dry earth, I pulled the bag out of my pocket. I untwisted it, turned it over, and let sand sprinkle into sea.
The sea took it.
I dropped the bag in, too.
I wanted all of it to go back to the sea even though I hadn’t stolen it from the sea.
I wasn’t only trying to get rid of the Dahlia.
I was trying to free myself from the other ghost, too.
Jobs
I worked as a receptionist.
I worked reading books to the blind.
I worked as an artist’s model. You don’t have to be pretty to do that.
I got a job teaching history.
Doing Donuts
I was checking out the merchandise at a donut shop.
It was the kind that sells novelties. They had dick donuts, bacon donuts, donuts covered in different sugary cereals, and post-mortem pastries filled with jelly. One donut caught my eye. Its laminated label read, “The Michael Jackson: a chocolate cake donut covered in white powdered sugar.”
The people I was hanging out with launched into a debate about whether or not this donut was racist. Was the creation of this donut a racist act? Was this donut an act of violence? This was the only time in my life I’ve heard the words hegemony and donut used in the same sentence.
What I found most interesting wasn’t the debate about the racial implications of this donut. What I found most interesting was that everybody dominating this debate was white. The two of us listening to this debate, the two of us whose opinions were never solicited, looked at one another. We locked eyes. We were the only two mud people there.
I don’t know if Michael Jackson molested kids. I don’t know if the Michael Jackson donut molested kids.
I know he really liked being around kids and shared his bed with them, which is weird. Come on, it’s weird.
I really like his music.
I was on the phone with Dad.
I called him and Mom every Sunday. Our conversations usually lasted about half an hour. Dad was yammering. He would not shut up about Michael Jackson.
His molestation trial had recently begun in the courthouse down the street from Dad’s work, the same one where the trial I’d been asked to testify in happened.
The judge who presided over Michael Jackson’s trial, Judge Melville, was the same judge who presided over Sophia’s.
I went to high school with Judge Melville’s daughter. She was a cheerleader. Everybody joked that she walked the way she did because her boyfriend liked to stick his huge dick up her butt. There might have been some truth in this.
Jackson’s prosecutor, Sneddon, was the same prosecutor who argued that Tommy Jesse Martinez Jr. was indeed a rapist, a murderer, and terrorizer of women.
I chose not to testify against him.
I did not want to see the other women.
I did not want to see his face.
And Ofelia tried killing herself the day after I got subpoenaed. I didn’t mention that earlier because I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be part of the historical record. I wasn’t sure how detailed I wanted to be regarding dead and dying girls overwhelming me that winter. I ran from them, but dead and dying girls have a way of taking up vivid residence in the post-traumatic brain.
It was weird watching people get famous through Michael Jackson’s body. It was weird watching people get famous through sick boys’ bodies. They never would’ve gotten so famous through a dead strawberry picker’s body. Through a Mexican woman’s semen-stained corpse.
Sophia had regularly eaten lunch at the Salvation Army across the street from the courthouse. Paparazzi now besieged it.
“There’s actually traffic! Traffic!” Dad cried in disbelief. “It’s pandemonium. I’m not joking. I can’t even walk to the mall for lunch. I tried walking up the street to go to the mall, and you know what I saw?”
“What?”
“Somebody dressed as a giant panda. It was on roller skates.”
“A Michael Jackson supporter?”
“No. It was handing out coupons to Panda Express.”
“Did you take one?”
“No. I prefer Pick Up Stix.”
“Oh.”
The trial’s most infamous moment didn’t happen in the courtroom; it happened in the parking lot.
Michael Jackson hopped onto a car. A sea of fans engulfed it. Michael Jackson waved at them, reaching out to hold hands with a few. Voices chanted, “Michael! Michael!” His music played. Fans cheered from the sidewalks Sophia had walked down glumly.
When his not-guilty verdict was announced, some crazy bitch released doves into the air outside the courthouse. They flew over the parking lot, over the Salvation Army, and into the sun.
Capital Murder
I got picked to go to Washington, DC.
I went with a bunch of other teachers from around the country to learn about the Supreme Court. This was supposed to make us better history teachers. We were going to get to be where judicial history was and is made. We were going to get to touch it. I didn’t want it to touch me back. I’m usually not a tactile learner.
We milled around in a room in the Supreme Court building. A handler was arranging us, posing us around the seventeenth chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Honorable John G. Roberts. The handler grabbed my elbow and shoved me next to him. Other petite teachers were propped close to him, too, and with those of slight stature surrounding him, an optical illusion emerged. Roberts no longer appeared elfin. He looked tall.
“Oh my god,” I thought. “He’s the Court’s Tom Cruise. He’s fucking short.”
“Cheese!” we shouted in the tastefully conservative reception room. Cherrywood paneling bedecked by portraits of jurists the average American probably can’t identify surrounded us. This meet-and-greet with an actual justice, this jurisprudential petting zoo moment, was supposed to be the highlight of three days’ worth of sandwiches, pizzas, roundtable talks, lectures, and PowerPoints from journalists, wonks, law professors, historians, bloggers, and the like.
Roberts showed up fifteen minutes late.
And to be honest, I was disappointed. I hadn’t wanted to meet the chief justice. I’d wanted to
meet Clarence Thomas.
I’d come prepared to meet him.
I was going to ask him to split a Coke with me.
“It’s a hoax,” I said.
We were stepping out of a makeshift dining room where teachers had just torn apart an Italian buffet. The teacher from Detroit was staring at her phone.
“Well,” she said. “That’s what the text says. Michael Jackson’s dead.”
Back at the hotel, in a room I was sharing with Dorothy, a teacher from South Carolina, we watched CNN.
News anchors were narrating what they suspected Michael Jackson’s last minutes were like. They described his thin, dead body. I pictured it as a Cheeto with vitiligo.
Dorothy’s phone rang. She answered. In her Southern drawl, she squealed, “We’re watchin’ the news about Michael Jackson!”
Seconds passed. Dorothy laughed. She turned to me. “Wanna hear a joke about Michael Jackson?” she asked.
I wondered if the joke would be racist, homophobic, transphobic, or a triple threat.
“Fine,” I said.
Dorothy rushed through the telling in a guilty voice. The punch line: Little Boy Blew.
“Didn’t you say you were a preacher’s wife?” I asked her.