Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  “Well, what’s it about? What’s going on? Is it your life story?” he inquired, elbowing me playfully. I looked hard at this man, his tie askew, his ruddy complexion brought out by the afterschool patrolling of campus, and now from the teasing he was giving me. My teeth involuntarily clenched under my closed lips. I was aware of being subtly condescended to.

  “No,” I retorted. “It’s fiction.” I paused. “About a girl named Ali Milan. And,” Shit, I think, I’m giving it away, “her boyfriend.” Make this more innocent-sounding. “And her family,” I added. I felt out of breath. My voice had gotten louder, surer.

  “And I never want my parents to read it when it gets published,” I said. Mr. Ivers was still smiling at Eva and me.

  “Why?” he asked, and I saw a man, for an instant, who was enjoying two young girls that he thought he had something over. I made my move.

  “Well,” I started, looking sidelong at Eva, whose eyes were open wide, her hand to her mouth to stifle giggles, “because there are parts in it where people are, you know, making out, doing more than that, you know. And. Well. It’s in detail.”

  Eva’s face was red. Mr. Ivers took a deep breath.

  “My parents probably wouldn’t like that, because it’s based on personal experience,” I lied. My feet suddenly felt hot in my black boots, rooted firmly to the cement.

  “Well, get those pages to me! I need something to get my blood racing!” Mr. Ivers bellowed, and we all laughed. I wanted to linger over what he meant by this, but I stood stock-still, even as my knees felt loose and I wanted to flee. He was looking at me expectantly. My face was hot. I started to rifle through my bag.

  “I can’t be here while you read it,” I said. “Here, Eva, show him.” I handed her the bulky red binder. My heart pounded and I scurried away as soon as she took the manuscript. I watched them from a discrete spot near the manicured bushes that surrounded the A-frame office. They were leafing through the pages together. I put my hand over my mouth, forgetting the other students nearby.

  When I spied my mother arriving in her station wagon to pick me up, I quickly retrieved the red binder from them on my way to her car.

  “Hey,” Mr. Ivers called out to me as I started to open the door to the car, “I wanna talk to you about that book!” I gritted my teeth even as I smiled, waved, and got inside the car, glad that my mother was not conscious of this last exchange, this exchange that made me shift in my seat the whole way home. I was full from this series of recent events, happy I had something to mull over when I got home, something to write about. Still, in the midst of my excitement, I noted the straight line of my mother’s mouth and the wrinkles on her forehead. There was an electric tension buzzing from her. Her sunglasses hid her eyes and I snuck a look at her short skirt, which I disapproved of. The radio blared Erasure, a British band my mom loved, which horrified and sickened me because I loved Erasure. I listened to her talk about hot flashes and stared straight ahead. If she flipped the turn signal and maneuvered into the Dales Market parking lot, I knew that the weekend might be flawed with the smell of vodka, the lull of heavy cigarette smoke, my father escaping the house or retreating to the room where he buried himself in hours of Saturday afternoon sports, a fresh beer within reach. I was suddenly still, muscles tensed in the burgundy passenger seat of her car. My body relaxed just slightly as the car turned away from the market.

  Hours later, Eva called to tell me this:

  “Mr. Ivers wants you to call him at home. Here’s his phone number. So you guys can talk about your book.”

  I didn’t question why my friend had my teacher’s phone number. All I could think about was when.

  It was the beginning of a long weekend. I waited until I had a chance, a perfect opportunity, to call Mr. Ivers, the phone number written in my careful script waiting to be used.

  NOVEMBER 9

  1986

  Sunday afternoon.

  I had the courage to use the phone number entrusted to me.

  I checked to make sure my mother was busy reading and dozing in the living room. My father was stationed in the TV room, reading a true crime book from the library, ignoring a sporting event on television.

  I crept to my bedroom and closed the door.

  My toes felt ice cold and I put some thick white socks on and tried to keep from shivering. My room was eternally the coldest or the hottest, depending on the season, and shutting the door only magnified either effect. I closed the window to muffle the sound of the nearby freeway. I pressed the square buttons on my Princess telephone and listened for the ring.

  Two and a half hours quickly passed.

  I had been talking, laughing, hooting with Mr. Ivers, my eighth grade English teacher. A constant smile on my face threatened to break when my cheek muscles quivered.

  We talked about my writing, which he raved about, having read the contents of the red binder, my novel in the making. Films we hadn’t seen but wanted to see. Museums he wanted to check out now that he lived in Los Angeles. He talked about his hometown and his ex-girlfriend, the college where they met, my own plans for college. The pros and cons of commercial sporting events (he was for, I was against). Whether (my) eighties music could compare to (his) seventies music. Whether or not I was wasting my time reading Stephen King (“Waste of time,” he decided).

  I was reeling.

  Over an hour into this conversation, this conversation that forced me to listen, reply, and think swiftly to keep up with the speed and flow of it, he used the word “crush.”

  He said “crush” like I said it in sixth grade when I was talking about Marc Hendricks.

  He said, “you” like I was the embodiment of some kind of dangerous elixir threatening to seduce him, forcing any control he might have over himself underground.

  My teacher was revealing to me, admitting to me, that he had a huge crush on me.

  He said he wondered what it would be like to have his face between my legs, and I crossed my legs hard, trying to imagine what this must mean, flipping mental pages of Cosmopolitan in my head to remember what I had read of oral sex, what it might feel like, and I found myself enjoying the way he growled these desires in my ear. There was a tingle that started on my insides and floated gently to the surface of my skin. The cold of the room no longer made me shiver; my socked feet were banging together silently as if part of a strange dance I couldn’t control.

  I had only made out with someone a handful of times at that point.

  Most recently, there was Cougar, a tall, cute, barely-literate boy of twenty. We plunged into back-to-back weekend romps complete with necking in his El Camino and in the courtyard of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. This minor fling was already over and done with, though, because I didn’t have the freedoms of a twenty-year-old, or even a sixteen-year-old. And I knew nothing of faces between legs—it was like imagining esoteric customs of people in foreign lands, like what I read in social studies class.

  I absorbed the sound of Mr. Ivers purring in my ear, because it was peppered with things I did understand. He told me of my beautiful mouth, intense eyes, the way he watched my body at school. I was suddenly privy to the details of an oft-imagined scene that involved him and me, where he was pressing his “hardness” against me and then licking my thighs, then my “clit.” These words traveled the phone lines from his apartment in Pasadena, a city where I had not been, to North Hollywood, my parents’ house by the Hollywood Freeway. When he asked me to touch myself, I sighed and murmured in the right places, but refrained from laying a hand on myself. I didn’t really know if masturbation was a true sin or not. I was thirteen, and this had been a solitary, secret act, not something I wanted to be guided towards by a voice on the phone, though I was intrigued by the intimate details he described.

  The conversation was punctuated with his heavy breathing, soft words. I heard intakes of breath, like he was smoking a cigarette an
d exhaling large amounts of smoke, which was not how I smoked at all. He told me, as if I couldn’t already guess, that this was our secret, not to be discussed with anyone, not even my best friend Abigail, and it definitely couldn’t be written anywhere, like my journal. Duh, I thought, rubbing my hand on the side of my thigh, perched on the edge of my bed. Steeped in the praise he gave my writing and the dormant sexiness he had discovered in me, I half-listened for any movement outside my closed bedroom door, any change in volume of the two television sets my parents employed to help them forget a forgettable weekend. No one was drunk, and it was not likely to happen now, since we made it to the finish line of Sunday. The likelihood of my mother bursting in to slur, “How are you? Is everything okay?” and then lingering until I yelled at her to leave, door slamming, was nil. I hid a sigh of relief, not wanting to sound like I was bored.

  I was not bored.

  I was over-fucking-whelmed. And then we hung up.

  My heart felt like it was hovering somewhere outside me, rocking the room with its beat. This day felt like too much to keep inside my body. My lips were dry and my hands trembled as I opened up my journal, the one hidden between my bed and the wall.

  I opened its black folder and my fist touched the yellow legal pad.

  I committed Mr. Ivers’ words to paper.

  I remarked on school events from the Friday before—LB made me laugh the other day and I may spend next weekend with Abigail if she stops acting like a bitch—between the verbatim words I heard that afternoon, the words I was hardly able to process without grinning madly, tapping my foot excitedly on the carpet, feeling like I had to pee.

  It was Sunday. Mr. Ivers was twenty-eight.

  NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION:

  OPPORTUNITY SCHOOL 2002–2004

  During the years when I lived alone in an apartment in Hollywood, I would wake up early once a week and drive out to the westernmost part of the San Fernando Valley.

  In my car I carried a binder with a syllabus, study plan, photocopies of writing prompts and exercises, and a handful of excerpts from books. My little literature-mobile, traversing the punishing traffic, all to get to boys I thought of and spoke of as “my kids.”

  I turned right at the final stoplight on my journey and parked on the quiet street. Yellow hills were not far in the distance, where I’d driven from. I walked onto school grounds, flicking the metal door handle into place once I was inside.

  At this school, anyone could walk out. The boys who went to this school were often here because of impossible home circumstances that pushed them out, or problems with the law or other schools. They had the freedom to decide to stay or go, and I felt an immeasurable sense of relief every week when I arrived and saw the same faces. They hadn’t left. They were there for something.

  The boys lived next door and walked onto the school campus and went to classes. The class I taught was one of their options for ten weeks out of a semester. We would meet in the library, with its posters advising students to READ. We would meet in a classroom, with chalkboards and bulletin boards and desks we pushed together so we could face one another.

  I was twenty-nine, thirty years old. These boys were fourteen and fifteen years old.

  We read excerpts from books that are considered great literature. We talked about the meanings in the stories, the techniques used. Then we bent over our own papers and wrote stories.

  These boys took the task to heart. They often wrote their autobiographies, their memoirs. These were gripping, heart-wrenching, incredible stories—when they weren’t pushing the envelope and trying to write out all their sexual experiences in one fell swoop.

  There was another place I went, lugging my little totes of books and paper and pens and stories.

  This place was juvenile hall, downtown, where I always had to drive past the county morgue.

  There was an entirely different system in place. There were guards who looked like ex-military and sort of acted like it. There were convoluted locks and mazes to navigate, and code words to understand in case of emergency. I felt less inclined to call or think of these boys as “my boys,” as they circulated in or out enough to make me lose track of names and stories. The oppressiveness of the walls and grounds seemed to seep into our interactions.

  And why not? Why should they trust me? I was some stranger, coming in from the outside with ideas and words and papers and imploring eyes. I told them I wanted their stories. That the world needed their stories. Who had told them the world needed their stories before?

  Other teachers might have. Other adults. But then the adults would move on, the school year might end, or the kid might be so demolished from dealing with shit at home that the words fell away like dirt through your hands.

  When I taught girls at juvenile hall, things were no better. In fact, they might have even been worse. I became educated immediately in how these girls saw me and my every move, because they told me. Watching them “act out” was like revisiting my own teenage years, only one thousand times more intense than I had ever seen or experienced. I couldn’t begin to know what these girls had gone through.

  Before I was allowed to teach girls at juvenile hall, though, there were the girls at the all-girl “juvenile camp” east of downtown Los Angeles.

  Here the girls were in perpetual lockdown. The staff often forgot we were visiting at the same time every week and we came in late through all the layers of locked doors, delayed by red tape.

  The girls were often medicated to the hilt. There might be slurring, a little drool, or just silence. Big-eyed silence. We were overseen by someone who they sometimes called “Mother.” I tried to overlook this arrangement, this surreal circumstance, and “get to work” with them, asking them to read aloud this, consider writing that.

  We brought our medium-sized satchels of hope—writing prompts, passages someone picked out for us to teach.

  When they wrote, their stories were unlike anything I’d ever heard. At our final reading, I left somewhat devastated. It was like a long, burning blood draw. I willed my body to not tremble, not cry, because I thought it best not to do so in their presence.

  I was twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. The girls were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

  There were moments when I was alone in my apartment that I found myself despairing over stories I’d heard from my students, these girls and boys I’d come into contact with. And there were moments when I remembered: we are almost the same age difference as I was when I met and studied under Jeff.

  Nausea. In those moments I coughed, gagged on my cigarette, stared out the window some more.

  Could I ever imagine having some kind of sexual relationship with these kids, kids who had found themselves in the intimate space of sharing and writing their stories?

  Absofuckinglutelynot.

  The fact that this question even had to rise, bubble up in me, made me angry. I might never have come up with such a question had it not been my own experience. The story I carried would never be shared with any of the kids I taught, because they had their own traumas to lance, drain, to exorcise.

  I asked myself these questions to place the greatest distance between me and Jeff as I could. And it worked like a charm.

  1986

  At thirteen, I harbored strange and beautiful conditions in the landscape of my body. Like fast-moving weather patterns, I could be embraced by a storm of arousal, experience an onslaught of brush fires that started beneath my skin and ended in a brief rush of rain, all behind my closed bedroom door, pressed against the yellow carpeted floor, panting and writhing.

  I didn’t call it masturbation. It had no name. I pretended this rapture did not exist. I was fresh from my grandmother’s warnings and astute enough to figure out that humping the carpet with nude women etched in my mind’s eye was, somehow, wrong. Just the fact that this act entailed a softly closed door and a deep intake of b
reath to withhold the revelatory sigh so it did not travel—these things told me that this was an act that must not be named.

  Shame lent a soft, tragic hue to each and every fantasy.

  To loosen its grip on me, I added men to the images in my head, men who appeared blurry and peripheral to the contours of the imaginary women lovers. I assured myself I was not a lesbian as I watched men and women have some adolescent, groping version of sex behind my eyes.

  The fevered rub of hips against floor, the burn of carpet through clothes, the clenching of toes, the heat spreading into, over, around me as I locked my teeth together and shut my eyes tight: then, finally, the women in my head, and the blurry men, disappeared.

  ✵

  Outside the door to my room were my parents.

  It was always this way: my mother folded into a comfortable position on the living room sofa, reading. My father in the TV room reading with the television on. Me in my room with the most windows of all the bedrooms, wishing I could get out but with no destination other than a friend’s house or the Galleria, or school. There was a comforting stillness to this bookish family I was in, when my parents weren’t drinking and my father came home from work on time.

  I was brought up on weekly trips to the library. I culled first from the children’s books and later the books in the adult section, where I still feared someone would tap me on the back and tell me I wasn’t allowed. The books were pleasure boats I could step into when my parents were despicable with drink. They taught me this pastime, gave it to me like a key. I took the books to my room and got lost inside stories so I didn’t have to think about the story outside the door, where a man and a woman yelled shitgoddamnfuck, slurring on occasion, slamming doors often, the man often leaving the house (either for the backyard or a bar), the woman appearing at my door, drunk, broken. Her own mother, my grandmother, knew the secret of this family, the vodka in the cupboard under the sink the source of all that was wrong with her daughter.