Excavation: A Memoir

by Wendy C. Ortiz

  I pondered with curiosity and subdued anger the arguments made by people on the Donahue show that said music lyrics, movies, and television were too sexually explicit or violent, made by people who could not possibly be referred to as artists. I considered my pot pipe, hidden in its drawer, my friends and their lost virginity, and my desires that had me running back and forth from bus stops in weather hot and cold, ready, waiting for the next sexual encounter that I imagined spoke of love.

  One day I was walking home from the bus stop, books balanced in one arm, book bag on my shoulder. I pranced down the familiar street in my uniform that hung loosely on my body, aside from the tucked-in blouse.

  A truck driving towards me suddenly stopped, pulling up next to me. A man was in the driver’s seat. The huge, elevated tires of the truck gave him an inflated presence, and I looked up, squinting in the sun, expectant of his question. It wasn’t unusual for people to get lost in our maze of houses by the freeway.

  Instead of rolling down his window, the man opened the driver-side door. He turned his body, lengthened and tan, and exposed himself to me: shiny naked skin, muscle, and hair. He jumped back into his seat, slammed the door, put the truck into gear and sped away.

  I stood there for a moment.

  I searched my head for a proper response.

  Finally I looked around to see if anyone had been looking out their windows. It was hot and sunny, curtains were drawn, driveways were absent of cars. I switched my book bag to my other shoulder and resumed my walk home.

  As I stood in front of my screen door, I decided the thing to do would be to tell my mother. She was sober, just home from work. She listened to me, and then sat down at the kitchen phone. I heard her fanning herself in frustration as she indignantly reported this act to the police. I parked myself in the living room where I could listen to her conversation and watched my reflection in the mirrored wall, trying to hold back laughter.

  NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION:

  TOOLS, 2012

  There are materials and equipment required for excavation. These things I learn from my toddler’s books.

  Curious George visits an archaeological dig and before he upends everything in sight, notices a pick-axe, brushes. Shovels.

  My toddler and I learn about the bulldozer, backhoe, grader and excavator. Names of things that move earth around.

  First holes, then a foundation. The teeth of the excavator chomp on dirt. Excavation begins and at first glance it is a sign of progress. And yet there is a dismantling that must occur first—perhaps a demolition of buildings that came before, then a cut in the earth, an opening, then the dig.

  “No bones here,” the archaeologist says in the Curious George book as she sifts through dirt. What looks like bone might just be rock. She is looking for clues. There is a timestamp sealed in the bone’s marrow. The bone is a puzzle piece. The bone is a treasure, if only it can be found before “progress” arrives and buildings go up over it, burying it forever.

  Opening up my old journals feels like a dig. I wet a finger with my tongue and turn the pages.

  NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION

  FAMILY, 1987

  Though not divorced yet, my father was mostly living elsewhere. My mother and I lived among each other, having the necessary conversations people who live together have, people with full-time lives and open weekends. One of us split, the other stayed in the house. Both of us used whatever potions we had at hand to make us forget a difficult existence until Monday, when we re-entered the world that seemed normal, the world that might not have forgiven us had it known the oblivion we stepped into each weekend.

  My grandmother was a pleading voice on the phone, a plaintive tone of worry. I grew to understand that she helped create the mother I lived with, the one who told me dark, cautionary tales spackled together from news stories she read or heard about, stories she hoped would scare me into being a “good girl.”

  These were the words I grew up hearing: “Have you been a good girl?”

  These are the words my mother says to my own daughter even today. At two, my daughter simply says yes. I wonder what makes a good girl at the age of two. I wonder how we will define, or redefine, what “good girl” means as she gets older because I know my mother will never stop asking.

  As I write of my mother and my grandmother, I can’t help but think that I wasn’t a good girl.

  I ran wild. I unleashed rage as often as I could, within boundaries I created in my head, stopping short of physical violence with my mother at least twice. These are instances she would never remember—she was drunk, and one of the times, I was keenly, sharply sober. I wanted to push her away and hoped she felt the push. When she was sober, I wanted her contrition and I wanted to pull her in closer. Closer still.

  My mother was yet another adult with whom I was wrestling for power. As the adult, she had power but she relinquished it with the vodka pour and ice clink. I grabbed what tendrils of power I could, tried to completely render her powerless. I didn’t yet know the potency, the intensity of mother-power. I thought I saw glimmers of it in the threads that bound my grandmother and mother—the daily phone calls my mother insisted on making to my grandmother though the conversations might be short, sharp, ending in arguments. The pull towards my mother was and is profound, enough that as a teen I tried to pull with all my might in the opposite direction. Not a good girl.

  Even now, faced with telling a story in which my mother plays a role, I find myself protective, hurrying to excuse her behavior: she did the best she could. And it’s true; she did. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to claw my way out of her house. It means I stuck by her, lived with her, did not emancipate myself legally. I made sure she was breathing as she lay passed out before I stole money from her wallet and left the house on an adventure; I continued getting decent grades and behaving with a modicum of decency when she was sober. But I felt I could never be the good girl she or my grandmother had hoped for.

  Meanwhile, in the background, my father appeared in and out of my consciousness, an occasional apparition I snuffed out of my head. I could easily imagine his disbelief, his possible anger and disappointment with me had he known my truths. I could easily lie or omit information to my mother and grandmother. I felt lucky I didn’t have to also do so with my father. He did not ask me questions about anything other than school when I saw him. Our relationship was based on quiet drives and an understanding that we might not understand one another. Music filled in the silence in the car.

  The adults in my life had the power: my parents, Jeff. The girl I was—good, bad, neither or both, saw the discrete openings, the loopholes I could manipulate, and did what she could with them. It was the best I could do.

  1988

  JANUARY

  1988

  Hollywood.

  Movie theaters seemed to have a more magical quality than in the Valley, where I’m from. Plus the sidewalks glittered.

  My friends and I ambled around Hollywood on the weekend nights I talked my mother into letting me leave the house. Before stepping foot outside the door, my fingers clandestinely pulled the plug on the kitchen telephone. After doing the same to my bedroom phone, click, we were off.

  There were carnivals visiting town; the Cinerama Dome Theater, round and impressive; weird, spacey-looking people walking the streets; long-haired men that softly accosted us as our shoes hit the concrete in synchronization: Grass. Weed. Acid, the best.

  We stepped into a smoky diner and sat in a booth. A man called Alley Cat approached us. Veronica introduced him, and I remembered the pamphlets he gave her of drawings and typewritten manifestos, with the self-titled “Alley Cat” on the front. After coffee mugs were replenished and chugged, Alley Cat led us to his one-bedroom apartment on Cosmo Street.

  A fluorescent bulb lit up one end of the room, and the walls were covered in strange posters and drawings I was too shy to
look directly at. An electric hum sealed us off from the street. Aquariums lined the room, holding various animals: a pigeon, a cat, a rattlesnake, iguanas, a tarantula. As Alley Cat spoke to us in his gravelly tone, I snuck looks at Veronica and Abigail’s faces. Is this real? Is this normal? My body felt tense, preparing to run if need be. The glow of the bulbs made my skin feel itchy.

  I was awash in relief when we finally stood up to go. Alley Cat handed us another of his photocopied zines, and we hit Cosmo Street, a faint smell of sewer air hitting my nostrils. We headed back to our friend’s car.

  Back in the Valley, we smoked cigarettes and drank cup after cup of bitter, wretched coffee served by Carlos, our waiter with whom we all proclaimed we were crushed out on. The circular booth, with electrical tape patching up rips in its beige vinyl, felt secure, warm and peaceful. Abigail laughed as she lit up a cigarette, and I wished I could spend every night this way, embraced by a smooth diner booth, drinking coffee and talking for hours with these brilliant, beautiful people.

  I explained this to Jeff after I came home and plugged in my bedroom phone. My mother was crashed on the living room sofa. I wrapped myself up in blankets on my bed, whispering to Jeff about what I wanted, what I wished.

  ✵

  “Yeah, so it’s over. Fara and I.”

  Silence. His voice was cracked with bronchitis, his nose stuffy and he was telling me what I considered the best news of my life.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see,” I said, urging a sympathetic tone in my voice.

  “Yeah, well, would you believe me if I said I don’t care if I live or die, I feel so bad?” He coughed and spit phlegm.

  My index finger touched the clear surface of the button that could hang up on him. I ran my finger gently over it, imagining a response if I were to push it, hearing a dial tone in place of his voice.

  I didn’t have to push the button. We hung up soon after. I got up and went to the kitchen, where I fixed myself a Lipton’s Cup of Soup in the microwave. I looked out the window to the next door neighbor’s house as the microwave whirred. The lights were on, the curtains closed. I wonder if they ever heard my mother and I yelling, the smash of a glass I had thrown out of range of her body so neither of us would get hurt, my point made painlessly. My chest felt heavy, like a storm was going to break inside me. The curtain moved next door. I looked away, down at the yellow Formica and the paper towels with their homey blue flower print. I touched my throat, swallowed and headed back to my bedroom, slamming the door.

  ✵

  At Moby Disc, I bought the records Are You Experienced? and Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits.

  I decided I was officially crushed out on Dennis Monroe, the senior from my speech class. I made a big commotion with my friends when I asked him to the Valentine’s Dance and an even bigger commotion when he said yes.

  “Realistically, Wendy, I hope I’m at least second on your list,” Jeff said after we made out passionately that weekend. We were hidden behind the front door, waiting for his roommates to get back from picking up some beer.

  “Realistically? What do you mean?” I asked, pulling myself back to look at his face.

  “After your beloved Dennis Monroe,” he said, bringing me close for another kiss. “Just wait,” he said when we came up for air. “We’ll laugh about all of this when we’re older.” Kiss. “That is, if I’m not married and you’re not fully attached to that Monroe guy.”

  Jeff got his way: Dennis broke our date for the dance.

  I slumped in my chair in speech class and decided not to turn in his direction anymore, even after he apologized, kindly, appropriately apologetic.

  “His loss,” Jeff said, and proceeded to outline a new fantasy, one in which I was fucking both of his housemates while he watched.

  I held the phone to my ear, curious, silent, listening.

  ✵

  Holidays seemed meaningful to Jeff. I received unexpected phone calls and a tone that spoke of deeper things, beyond lust, things that were hard to come by in our regular conversations that increasingly nosedived into silly, petty arguments.

  Holidays in my household felt staged. We celebrated the usual ones, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but my mother had long ago abandoned Easter or Valentine’s Day.

  “It’s that time of year when you tell the women,” Jeff said, chuckling, “or, the woman, in your life how you feel about them.” I felt acutely aware I was not going to any high school dance.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering if this conversation was in service to his dick.

  “Wendy,” he began, “you are one in a million.”

  “Cliché,” I countered.

  “Ooh! You’re tough,” he said. “Okay, okay.” I heard the sound of water roiling, the suck of air, the exhale of breath. When he finished taking a hit from the bong, he said slyly, “Will you…run away to Montana with me when you’re eighteen and have my children?”

  We laughed, although all my muscles clenched in surprise and disbelief.

  “You don’t know it yet, but you are all mine,” he said after describing scenarios involving marriage, children.

  I closed my eyes and considered my most secret thoughts, never brought out to see daylight: the fantasies of having children, living in a house with wood floors, lots of plants, and maybe even Jeff. I imagined small children whose hands I held in my own, their hazel eyes gazing up at me, their black curly hair pulled back in a rubber band. I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands: soft, lined, empty.

  I thought of these words, the steady stream of love-talk Jeff could initiate, that failed to emerge in our usual interactions. In one instance, he arrived at my door on his motorcycle. I gratefully let him into the house. I was on spring break from school, my mother at work.

  When he pushed past me into the living room, refusing to take off his helmet, I leaned against the open door in disgust. I watched him move from room to room, panicky and strange, and wondered how serious this man was about futures involving marriage, children, and me. At the moment he resembled a terrible coke fiend, unable to kiss me because he wanted to keep his helmet on, he was leaving that quickly. I let him pinch and grope my skin with mild interest until he left, roaring away on his motorcycle that made the curtains across the street open.

  After I locked the screen door, I went to my room and put on a Pink Floyd tape. I lay face down on the yellow carpet, angered but wanting, and rubbed myself to a soaring, bitter climax.

  SPRING

  1988

  Random days off from school, weekends I could steal away from home and say I was at Abigail’s, I spent with Nicholas.

  Nicholas wore black t-shirts, cut off at the sleeves, emblazoned with names of heavy metal bands. His curly blond hair was a little longer than I preferred. He was seventeen.

  Nicholas’s needs seemed as great as mine. Dramatic tendencies were injected into each encounter: slow unbuttoning of my blouse; the pulling off of my panties taking several long, delicious minutes, my hands eager, unbuttoning his Levis, then pausing, pulling back to stretch the time out long, long, longer. We never bothered with sheets or blankets, and rarely with condoms.

  Our clothes lay strewn on his bedroom floor until we heard his little sister moving around in the house, home from school. We emerged from his room, satiated. We turned on the television to a talk show, the traffic going by on Roscoe. After a plate of cookies and glasses of milk, we retreated to his room to smoke a pipe load and kiss goodbye.

  The bus stop was conveniently located a few yards from his door, and I hummed happily as I waited for my bus home, imagining the details I would include in my next journal entry.

  “Jeff, it was the best sex of my life,” I squealed into the receiver. I felt full of Nicholas, my clothes ripe with his scent, the smell of skateboards, clean cotton t-shirts and pot. My bare feet danced on the carpet.

  “The best, huh?
But was it the kinkiest?”

  I paused, uncertain. “Kinky” had no clear definition in my mind. Even the word itself seemed extraneous, unnatural. I flashed on the last time Jeff and I were together: my reflection in his mirror. Or the time we used the shoulder massager, does that count?

  “You better not get into any trouble,” he admonished, breaking my concentration. “Don’t get in trouble, get pregnant or anything.”

  I laughed. My mom was in the living room and I could hear the television blaring. A sitcom took up the air, canned laughter heading down the hallway. I lit up a cigarette and used the lit match to relight a roach in my ashtray and a stick of incense. The door was wide open and Jeff was lecturing me on the phone.

  I took a stiff inhale of the joint and waved the lit cigarette in the air.

  “I won’t,” I said finally.

  ✵

  Abigail had introduced me to Nicholas on a cool late winter night in a friend’s garage. After a few wine coolers and some shy conversation, we walked to his house, our hands desperate on each other, eventually unlocking the front door of his parent’s house. We entered his bedroom, turned out the light, and something shifted internally. A new chapter began. I left off writing in my journal for a month. When I returned, opening its expectant, empty pages, I felt an altogether new kind of alive.

  Years later, I think on it as a splendid fluke, another bad joke. Jeff broke up with his girlfriend. And me?

  Enter, official boyfriend of my life, number one! You are a high school dropout, and occupational school hopeful! You are just three short years older than me, and three inches taller! You are speckled blue eyes and curly blonde hair! You go on to become the new prototype for what I find attractive in the boy species! You are freckled and red-bearded and a heavy metal dude-turned-punk rocker! You enjoy smoking too much pot, drinking a whole lot of beer in your friend’s garage and haven’t had a whole lot of luck with the ladies in a while, which is where I come in! I am not quite fifteen when we meet, which freaks you out a little, but not when we are walking down the street to your house, wasted from rushing through several clumsy wine coolers, kissing under streetlights. You are sweet, boyfriend number one, and much nicer than the punks you hang out with! You are about to embark on a four and a half year relationship with me, in which I will be yours, and others’, and yours again, like a loose light switch. You are about to embark with me on an attempt at normalcy, puppy love, and teenage passion. Thanks for participating wholeheartedly, even if you were drunk or stoned a lot, number one! Thanks for playing, boyfriend number one!