When my father returns from the toilet, he notices the angst on my face. He tussles my hair.
“Are you getting anxious?” he asks.
“A little,” I say.
“Tell me—” we both say at once, and let out a laugh together.
“You tell me first,” he insists, even though he's the superior storyteller.
Ghost Whisper to My Lover
Tell you something else about my father? Claro, querido.
My father holds a peculiar fascination for extraterrestrial life. He was pleased to discover that a magazine existed for people like him, the Spanish version of UFO—OVNI: Objetos voladores no identificados, which came packed with firsthand narrative accounts of close encounters with space aliens. He sought out the magazine for years even though his reading skills weren't very strong, but it didn't matter since the stories came fully illustrated with amateur drawings depicting these intriguing and evasive creatures.
In the afternoons when he came home from work he parked the car behind the back porch since only my grandfather was allowed to park in front. When he wasn't having a beer with my uncle after dinner, he liked to stand against the car through the evenings and look up at the stars. I never got tired of him pointing out Polaris. I pretended to be surprised each time. And on one occasion he confessed to me that one of his fantasies was to be abducted by a UFO.
“For what?” I asked, shuddering at the idea of space travel. At the time, our favorite show was Battlestar Galactica. Our favorite reruns: Star Trek and the black-and-white Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes. But I suspected that the imagination of special effects and costume artistry did not even begin to address the disconcerting reality of what was out there.
“Just,” he responded quizzically. “Just to know.”
I didn't ask what it was exactly he wanted to know. I simply gazed up at the stars with him and tried to imagine the extraterrestrial forces that had mesmerized my father so much he wanted to become part of it. I also suspect he has kept his fantasy alive after all these years, even if tucked safely in his house, his weary eye catching a glimpse at the evening sky from his living room or the kitchen as the day comes to a close and his mind escapes however briefly from the turmoil of worries and responsibilities. My father, the farmworker and cosmonaut, floats out into space with his back turned to the world, his face looking fearlessly into the great abyss of things mysterious, unknown, and new.
Childhood and Other Language Lessons
Bakersfield, California, 1970–72
My father gave up boxing a few years before I was born. According to my mother's sisters he wasn't a very good contender anyway. Their assessment was based entirely on the only match they ever saw him fight. This was also his last match. His humiliation at being knocked out seconds after the first-round bell was so great that he never returned to the boxing ring. My aunts wouldn't let him forget the day he had wanted to impress my mother's family and they lorded this failure over him as a tactic to keep him from coming around to ask for my mother in the evenings.
“You should have seen your father,” my aunt once told me, pleased that she could keep this story fresh after all these years. “He barely had time to lift his glove when his opponent floored him with a right hook. Even the referee thought it was a joke and nudged him with his foot before he realized he should start counting. Isn't that right, you?” My father grinned sheepishly from the corner.
My father's post-boxer years are the beginning of my story.
Since no level of ridicule could keep him away from my mother, my father continued to court her. On their dates they had to take a chaperone, usually one of my mother's sisters, who had to bring back a full report to my grandmother to insure the honesty of his intentions. But my father suspected that my grandmother and aunts were scheming to break up the relationship. My grandmother wasn't too keen about having her oldest child marry a farmworker/defeated boxer, and a probable drunk to boot. Wasn't he a bit quick to accept an offer for a drink? And what of those awful tattoos? Had he needled them in himself? So my father, out of desperation, did what any young man from Zacapu, Michoacán would do in a situation like this: he skipped town with his girlfriend.
My parents eloped the summer of 1969, leaving Michoacán behind and shacking up in an avocado-colored one-room house in Mexicali, where they planned my mother's crossing into California. My father had his work permit, so he crossed the international border every day to work the fields of the Imperial Valley, usually picking beets. Every paycheck brought him one step closer to earning the fee for borrowing a passport for my mother. In front of the house grew a dwarf palm, across the street stood a bakery, and across the international border awaited the promise of a better life. The goal grew in urgency once my mother realized early the following year that she was pregnant.
As my father tells it, by the middle of spring my paternal grand-parents were already following the grape route north into central California, but my mother had reservations about joining them since she wanted to start a family independently of her in-laws. My father convinced her that there was safety in numbers and that they should live near family, especially in a foreign country. So before my mother became too big to travel they crossed over using a borrowed local passport for my mother and once it was returned, favor paid for, they simply drove north, past the Coachella Valley, past Los Angeles, and into the county of Kern. When night fell they took to driving through the back roads because the highways and the speeding cars with their maddening bright lights frightened my mother. They came across a fork.
“Which way should we go, you?” my father asked my mother.
My mother contemplated the two paths before them for a few seconds. The roads were dark and neither gave any hint about where it was heading. My mother said that it really didn't matter. Both roads were going north. Since she was pregnant and an undocumented alien, she only wanted to make sure that her child was born a U.S. citizen. Any city would do.
“Which way then, Avelina?” my father pressed on.
“Go right,” my mother said, pointing. And right they turned, arriving in Bakersfield, California, where I was born on July 18, 1970, and where my brother, Alexandro, was born almost two years later, on March 27, 1972.
My parents carried very few things with them during that crossing, but among them were the boxing gloves and shorts, the memorabilia of my father's bachelor years. In the old family albums there's a photograph that shows me trying them on for size. The shorts reach down to my ankles, and the gloves are so heavy that my father needs to hold my wrists up so that I can pose like a true champion. Behind us, the corner of a cradle is just visible, and over the cradle is my mother's shadow keeping watch over my newborn baby brother—keeping watch over all three of us, in fact, since it must have been for her amusement that my father dressed me up in his pugilist's garb.
The stay in Bakersfield was brief. Everyone had a different answer to the question: Why did we return to Zacapu in the summer of 1972? My grandmother said that my parents wanted to make peace with my mother's family, and that there was no better peace offering than a pair of rambunctious boys—the first grandchildren. My grandfather said that the family thought it was time to make use of that old house in Colonia Miguel Hidalgo that was being constructed the entire time they worked the grapes in Delano, Lamont, and Bakersfield, and what better time than in the middle of all this César Chávez-inspired strike-and-boycott furor. My father said that he and my uncle were afraid of that Viet Nam draft that kept plundering the fields of young men. My uncle said that they had misread some notification about the expiration of their work permits, but instead of researching a renewal, my father had gotten all worked up about using their savings to buy musical equipment, start a band, and live off paying gigs for a change instead of picking grapes. My mother said that all of those reasons were true, but that there were a few more. And that eventually I'd be old enough to know and understand them.
Zacapu, México, 1972–79
We descended on a half-completed corner building in Colonia Miguel Hidalgo. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had been the priest who in 1810 stirred the Mexican people into action, which eventually lead to México's independence from Spain in 1821—300 years after the conquest of Hernán Cortés over the Aztec empire. México had one long history of battles and it seemed appropriate that los González arrive to start some trouble of their own.
The construction of the second story of our house had been halted by a lack of funds but the ground floor was complete enough to inhabit. On the top floor we kept the dogs that barked incessantly at passersby through the ghost windows. The eight rooms below were purpose-shifters, always changing function. One year's kitchen became next year's living room. A bedroom became a rented storage space for the corn harvested in the field behind our house. Once, my grandfather briefly ran a small bodega from one of the rooms. The Pepsi logo outside the service window was still visible for years after it had been painted over. The main dining room became my father's rehearsal studio when he had his short-lived band. Although it had undergone a number of transformations over the years, the house always had the nicest garden in the block. My grandparents have always been skilled gardeners, and they successfully grew everything from medicinal herbs to papaya plants, from chile habanero to figs. At one time they even kept a talking parrot that made its home in the lime tree. This pet was the cause of my mother's consternation for months because my uncles had only taught it to cuss. The bird spewed out obscenities at every unsuspecting visitor. It never discriminated, squawking out ¡Chinga tu madre! at the neighborhood drunk with the same conviction as the insults he swore to our teacher-nuns from the parochial school, coming by to collect the monthly tuition. It took a stone's throw from a furious passerby to silence the bird forever.
As a reminder of my family's failed enterprise, the outdoor cement stairs led the way to the unfinished second floor where the dogs with an irrepressible hatred for strangers watched over us. This house was my world. My world was Zacapu—the place of my father's birth. His mother, a full-blooded Purépecha Indian, had been born in nearby Nahuatzen. My mother and her father were born in nearby Janamuato. Her mother was born in nearby Morelia. Only my father's father had been born outside of the country, in the north, like I had been.
In Zacapu (once Tzacapu) we also had the beauty of the surrounding mountains and not far off the enchanting Lago de Pátzcuaro, where Janitzio salutes from the center with its giant statue of José María Morelos y Pavón, the other famous Mexican priest who led the independence movement after the execution of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. The name of our town comes from the Nahautl word for rock, but the area was actually lush with the lumber-producing pino, encino, madroño, and to a lesser extent, tocuz and capiz trees. The greenery was ripe with apple, capulín, membrillo, zapote, and avocado trees. In the fields, corn and coffee were abundant. Much later I learned that the farmers were replacing the old crops on the fertile hills with the more profitable marijuana planted by the acres. And nearby was Anguangueo, the famous monarch butterfly sanctuary, where the fiery invasions took place in early springs. We'd walk around wearing butterflies like appliqués on our clothing. And when they fluttered by the dozens so close to the ground, I'd run through the sea of them, disappearing behind the bursts of light coming through their wings. I have never come across such intensity of breath and beauty since, and when I see a monarch pictured in a magazine or television screen I'm swept back into the strange but comforting intimacy of their winking paradise. I tried many times to claim a snippet of this spectacle by hiding a monarch in my pocket, hoping I could recreate the marvelous sputter in the privacy of my room. But all I ever pulled out was the orange-black powder of the crushed insect, and the specks of debris evoked nothing of its original shape.
In the summers, my father hunted for wild fowl, squirrel, and hare, carrying my younger brother with him in a knapsack. I complained about the long walks but I was too heavy to carry on his back, so he left me at home most of the time. I didn't object. I had already been through too many ordeals up in the mountains.
Once I had been following a string of three hunters at night, my father in front of the line. I lagged behind because the three men carried miner helmets with lights that illuminated my path. Since it was the rainy season, the marshes grew out and the grasses covering the waters had softened. As we trudged along my legs submerged up to the ankles in the soggy soil, making sucking sounds each time I raised my feet to take the next step. The slingshot in my back pocket kept digging into my buttocks and I remembered with much guilt all of the lizards I had decapitated or disemboweled with my cruel aim. All of a sudden my foot sank knee-deep into a hole. I let out a scream and this aroused quick action from the men, who all turned to face me, their lights shining down on my body. I looked down. The hole was a nest of water snakes and the disturbed hatchlings twisted wildly around my leg as I imagined that the severed lizard tails had come back to seek vengeance. I must have jumped like a frightened cat because in the next moment I was out of the hole and skipping my way out of the marsh. My father's laughter echoed behind me.
My most fearful moments on the mountain seemed to amuse my father, who was more than willing to embellish the details as he told the stories repeatedly. I became resentful. I never forgave him for the day he made me ride a donkey up to the mountain by myself. He met up with a friend who was going up for firewood, the long-eared beast at his side. I heard them discuss how intelligent these animals were, that they were able to memorize paths and retrace them at their master's bidding. To prove this point, the men put me on the donkey's back and gave it a swift slap on the ass. Cold with fear, I rode nearly lying down as the donkey galloped at a steady speed, finally coming to a halt when it reached a small cabin a long way into the woods. My father and his friends found me there some time later, still grasping the donkey's stringy mane.
That same evening he put me on a makeshift swing—a log with a rope tied around its middle, the other end thrown over the high branch of a tree. He made me sit on the log with the knot at my crotch. He then pulled the other end of the rope to lift me like a swinging piñata in the air. The more I cried the more he pulled on the rope, as if he were pushing my lack of bravado further away from him and his friends. I realized that time that my father was intoxicated, that going hunting up to the mountains was his way of hiding his drinking from my mother.
“I'm going to tell Mami!” I threatened out of desperation. This only fueled the laughter.
“I'm going to tell her you were drunk!”
A silence fell on the revelers. When I began to descend I knew that I'd found a way to keep my father in line. The log reached the ground and I fell to my knees, my legs too weak to prop me up. I saw my father release the end of the rope and walk away without saying a word. When we returned home, I didn't mention any of what had happened to my mother. In fact, I realized that my mother already knew what went on during these hunting expeditions. Her stoic reception of my father's kill said it all.
At about this time I began to recognize the signs of bad things to come. My father began drinking more heavily. Dinastía, the fantasy musical venture, fell to the wayside; the sound equipment was sold. My paternal grandparents returned to the United States, followed shortly by my uncle and his family. Only my parents were left behind to look after the house and share babysitting duties.
My father was expected to look after my brother and me when my mother went shopping or went to church with my maternal grandmother. He wasn't very dedicated to the task. As soon as my mother was out of sight he found his way to Zuniga's Bar at the end of the street. Since he could see us from the stool at the bar, he probably deduced he was technically still keeping an eye on things.
One afternoon I tired of running around in the street and stuffing my face with candies I bought with the money my father gave me before he entered the bar. I went inside to catch my favorite cartoon, Archie and Friends. My brother preferred to s
tay outside, riding his squeaky bicycle up and down the cobblestone street. As soon as I turned on the television I was excited to find out the program was just beginning. The opening tune was a familiar one, with Archie and gang playing in their band. I became so wound up I decided to jump from my mother's vanity table to the bed and then back again. I did so repeatedly and with so much success that I became overconfident, paying closer attention to the cartoon. Distracted, I miscalculated a leap and struck my head on the corner of the wooden table, breaking open my skin at the eyebrow. I felt the blood gushing out quickly. A piece of toilet paper wasn't enough to stop the flow, neither was one of the kitchen towels. I panicked. Through the garden fence I waved at my brother for help, my face watery with tears and blood.
“What happened?” my brother asked, rushing over for a close look.
I burst out into uncontrollable sobs. “Get Papi,” I demanded.
Before running out to the bar, he came inside and brought me the entire roll of toilet paper, which he pressed against my forehead. The roll dampened soon enough.
As I waited for my father to arrive I anticipated the beating I was about to get. But when he finally came he was more panic-struck than I was. Tipsy, he tried to stop the bleeding but nothing worked. I was too relieved about not getting punished to worry about the visit to the Red Cross, the stitches, or my mother's anger at my father when she returned later in the afternoon. My maternal grandmother also came over to have to her say.
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 5