Mean

by Myriam Gurba

She nodded and returned to her conversation with her son.

  Lying on my bed on my stomach, I listened to the news. Commentators kept saying it was the end of an era. It didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel real. Mr. Osmond was still alive and Michael Jackson lived through him. Mr. Osmond was Michael Jackson. Tommy was Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson was my childhood. Michael Jackson was my innocence before I knew what innocence was. Michael Jackson was my mother and father. Michael Jackson was my sister. Michael Jackson was not my brother but he would’ve loved my brother. Michael Jackson was my skin. Michael Jackson was my thighs. Michael Jackson was confusion. Michael Jackson was virginity. Michael Jackson was my country. Michael Jackson was the white knight of my soul and the dark night of my soul and the dark light of my soul and, most of all, Michael Jackson was a donut.

  Michael Jackson was now another racially ambiguous corpse. As a racially ambiguous living person, he’d been tried in a courtroom presided over by the whitest of judges. A Melville. He got Moby Dicked.

  I wondered about Michael Jackson’s dying. I wondered about Michael Jackson dying his skin. The idea of his corpse moved me. All racially ambiguous bodies move me. They feel close. Like family. The dead are still our family.

  On this historic evening, I revealed my connection to Michael Jackson to Dorothy.

  “You know how Michael Jackson got tried for molesting kids?” I began. “Well, that happened in my hometown. The judge who was in charge of his trial presided over a trial I was supposed to be a part of.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. When I was nineteen, I sort of got raped.”

  Dorothy was trying to think of something nice to say. She leaned against her elbows, faced me from her bed, and said, “Maybe he couldn’t help himself because you’re so gorgeous.”

  I thought about all the ugly people who get raped. Was I one of them? “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Dorothy was quiet for a little while. Eventually, she asked, “Why didn’t you go to the trial?”

  “I was embarrassed,” I said. “And I felt guilty about being alive. The guy who attacked me attacked other women too. One got her head smashed. She died.”

  Hugging my pillow, I looked at our nightstand. Michael Jackson’s ghost was in everything.

  “My son’s in federal prison . . .” Dorothy began. She tried to console me with an account of her imperfections as a mother and the sinful ways of those she’d parented.

  Justice Thomas sat at the highest bench in the land, staring at the ceiling. Besides sexually harassing Anita Hill, that’s what he’s most notorious for—being the quietest and weirdest Supreme Court justice in American history. The judge who stares at the crown molding and says nothing during arguments.

  I sat in the audience with the other teachers, watching Justice Scalia read a majority opinion. Nearby, Justice Ginsburg rolled her eyes.

  Justice Thomas leaned back in his chair. A mug of something devoid of pubic hair rested in front of him. The ceiling’s corners fascinated him. His mind was so far away.

  Was he thinking about Michael Jackson?

  I jogged in Washington, DC. I jogged and jogged and jogged. I jogged to the Library of Congress. I jogged to its walls and I leaned against them and I touched them and I touched them and I touched them.

  Flower Girl

  Have you ever made a pilgrimage in a Chrysler?

  I have.

  When I went home for Thanksgiving, we rode to Oakley Park as a family. I’d anticipated squeezing a catharsis out of this pilgrimage, but I should’ve known my dreams of closure would remain dreams. I was traveling to the park with Mexicans, and Mexicans ruin everything except grass. I’m Mexican, so I’m ruined. My mom is Mexican and, thus, she gave birth to my ruin. My dad is half Mexican, which is the same as all Mexican. My white girlfriend, the mannish woman I married, came with us.

  The night she met me, after I told her I was Mexican, she announced, “I love Selena.”

  “The president of her fan club shot her,” I said.

  We danced.

  Dad’s PT Cruiser coasted to a stop at Oakley Park’s curb. Dad parallel parked. The engine quieted. Dad’s hands stayed on the wheel. He didn’t unbuckle his seatbelt.

  “Are you coming?” I asked.

  He shook his comb-over. What a dick.

  I didn’t think of him as a pussy—he hadn’t earned that compliment. He was huddling in the driver’s seat to avoid gory memories. What’s more familiar with gore than the pussy, the vadge, the bivalve, the clam? All gore originates from this blind sea creature, this moist, briny, hungry anemone. Every day, she belches fresh tales of life, death, and every weird thing in between. Chorizo can’t compete.

  My girlfriend and I climbed out of the backseat. Mom climbed out the passenger-side door. The three of us walked the landing strip of grass between curb and sidewalk. We crossed into the park. I watched my girlfriend lunge at a palm tree. She clung to its ashy shaft. She smiled an apology.

  “You’re not gonna come?” I asked.

  Desperation strained my come?

  “Go,” she urged. My girlfriend slid her phone from her pocket. She fingered it. (Did junior high ruin that word for you too?)

  A Yoda-like inner voice addressed me: “Patient with your girlfriend and your father be . . .”

  Maybe this was a hard thing for my family to do. To come to this place with me. We were here at the urging of my therapist. So far, she had been my best therapist. She hadn’t fallen asleep on me. Yet.

  I smiled at my girlfriend, giving her permission to stay. I turned. I stared at the park’s lawn. I thought of the Mexicans who probably tended it.

  I lifted my foot and brought it down. My shoe crushed a dandelion. It wept cheerful milk. Together, Mom and I entered the grass. We meandered this way and that way and this way and that way and that way and another way and this way and that way and this way and that way and this way and that way and this way and that way.

  Mom muttered, “P’aquí, p’allá, p’aquí p’aquí, p’aquí, p’allá, p’aquí, p’allá . . . parecemos gitanos,” which translates to “This way, that way, this way, that way . . . we look like Gypsies.” (It’s not PC, but that’s what she said.)

  She asked, “Adónde quieres ir, m’ija?” “Where do you want to go, my daughter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I almost added, “Where they found her body,” but then I remembered police found bits of her scattered all over—the entire park was her grave. “How about over there?” I pointed left, at a cove of trees.

  Mom and I trudged to the trees.

  Surrounded by them, we stared. The trees’ mightiness dwarfed us. They had nothing in common with the nice plants poet Joyce Kilmer described in his poem “Trees.” These assholes slouched. They sneered. They emitted carnivorous desire. My arm hairs prickled.

  “Pon lo allí.” Mom gestured at the tallest tree’s skirt.

  Penetrating its canopy, I lifted drooping limbs. I exposed trunk. Tree torso.

  I leaned the yellow rose bouquet I’d forgotten was tucked under my arm against the gray bark. This was what we’d come here to do. To abandon dead plants with living ones.

  I eyeballed my tribute, waiting for relief to wash away my shitty feelings, but my offering suddenly seemed insignificant. Dumb, in fact. The breeze whisked the cellophane wrapper, crinkling it. Its orange price tag made me feel cheap. “I’m gonna take off the price tag,” I said. I knelt and clawed at it, peeling it away.

  Behind the trees, chubby Mexican girls, versions of me forever ago, sprinted across playground sand. They panted prediabetically. They had cheeks to feed families with.

  I wondered which little girl would steal the flowers once we left. I figured one of them would get the idea to use them as a prop in the not-quite-rapeish game of You’re Gonna Marry Me. When I was those little girls’ age, I’d excelled at You’re Gonna Marry Me liztaylorishly. My size facilitated my polygamy. Skinny fuckers had to accept my proposals or
I’d sit on them.

  The damp grass was making my knees prune, so I got up. I turned. Mom turned with me. We stared at the baseball diamond. We stared at the elementary school behind it.

  I wondered, “How do you beat someone to death feet away from where children will be eating paste in a few hours?”

  Little Leaguers were jogging the bases. Their cleats kicked up puffs of dirt. Their coach yelled something indecipherable at them. Good coaches speak in tongues. They’re Pentecostal.

  The ghost I brought the flowers for appeared on the flat pitcher’s mound. In the long dark skirt the news said she was wearing the night she died, she began running toward home.

  Through the snack bar window, I glimpsed a man in a white jersey. He reached for a stereo sitting next to a bag of chips on the counter and cranked up the volume. The lyric “How far is heaven?” chorused.

  The whole neighborhood heard the question. Even Dad heard it.

  As he pulled away from the curb, Dad pointed at the grass.

  “That’s where the baseball bleachers used to be,” he said. “The city took them out because homeless people were sleeping underneath.”

  I imagined her beneath them, smashed like a cucaracha.

  “I think they moved them for other reasons,” I said.

  We cruised up the street and past tract homes with cluttered yards, shabby chicanismo. Sparrows bathed in a gothic birdbath. Christmas lights ringed a particleboard doghouse. A row of toilets lined a driveway. Piles of stuffed animals rotted beside a slumped porch. A blond Virgin Mary statue stared down a racially ambiguous one across the street. A plaster stag, doe, and fawn prettied crabgrass. A fading Lakers banner draped a hibiscus tree. A rusty flagpole waved the Mexican flag.

  “Huh,” said Dad. “I didn’t know the Mexican consulate was here.”

  A brunette Virgin statue, a decapitated Virgin statue, a concrete Virgin with fresh-cut cacti at her feet, a Virgin weeping blood, a Virgin wearing a Raiders jersey.

  “I remember when white people used to live here,” said Dad.

  “There were no virgins in the yards then, huh?” I added rhetorically.

  Dad parked in front of Super Food Co Max. He buzzed down the car windows. He and Mom left us.

  My girlfriend and I panted in the backseat. I felt like a dog. I said, “Tell me the story about your grandpa putting you in the dog cage.” She obliged, describing how her grandfather would babysit her and lock her in a kennel so she’d be safe while he drank whisky.

  Dad was back. He passed me a bag full of pastrami. I set it by my feet. He started the engine.

  “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” said Mom.

  “Yo también!” said Dad. To my girlfriend, he said, “That means me too.”

  “Thank you,” she said with almost undetectable sarcasm. White people are so good at modulating sarcasm. They do it so well you almost don’t notice it.

  Sitting in Taco Bell, I thought about how in my head, at the park, while glancing up at the clouds puffing innocent shapes in the sky, I had addressed her. I had addressed the ghost who’d haunted me for more than a decade. “I’m not glad you’re dead, but I’m glad I’m alive,” I’d told her. “I’m glad I can keep feeling sunlight fade my tattoos. I’m glad I can keep inhaling the corticosteroid nasal spray that relieves my allergy symptoms. I’m glad I can keep on listening to right-wing talk radio for fun.”

  I bowed my head at the chalupa on the tray before me. In the context of our morning pilgrimage, it assumed the status of holy object. Relic. I peeled off its paper wrapper.

  My fingers parted its doughy lips. Sealed by sour cream, they made that noise some girls make when you open them.

  A woman was sacrificed so that I might sit here, autopsying my chalupa.

  I noticed body parts floating inside the gooey rice: two coarse strands of hair.

  I was alive and she was dead, so I ate. I ate my lunch, hair and all. We are all cannibals.

  Radio

  She still doesn’t leave me alone. She’s still here. And it’s still mostly through the radio that she makes her presence known. I’ll linger on a station I can’t stand and wonder, “Why am I listening to this?” Then I’ll realize: she’s listening to this.

  She enjoys music through me. She enjoys food through me. She enjoys sunsets through me. She enjoys the smell of certain flowers through me. It’s OK for ghosts to exist through me. It has to be.

  Somewhere out there, Ida is probably smoking crack on accident. And a woman is getting touched to death.

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  Myriam Gurba lives in California and loves it. She teaches high school, writes, and makes “art.” NBC described her short story collection Painting Their Portraits in Winter as “edgy, thought-provoking, and funny.” She has written for Time, KCET, and the Rumpus. Wildflowers, compliments, and cash make her happy.