Ramón and I and a couple of other vatos were put in a corner so we could finish learning our alphabet. It was really embarrassing with the other kids—who all knew their alphabet—watching us. Finally, Ramón refused to be tested anymore, and I couldn’t blame him, the way the other kids kept laughing at us. This was when it got so bad for us—the slow learners—that I watched Ramón close up as tight as a cow refusing to give milk.
But myself, being a coward, I was finally able to learn most of the alphabet except for the c and z which seemed to sound the same to me. And also, the d and the b, which gave me trouble because they looked so much alike. But still, I did well enough, so they finally put me in with the circle-reading-kids again, and I thought that I was doing pretty well until they showed us how to break the words down into groups of letters, saying that when these-letter-groups were put together, they made up the different parts of many words. Here, I got all mixed up.
Hell, it was just easier for me to memorize every new word that we were taught, and so I was doing pretty well doing it this way for the better part of the first grade, but then, when the sentences began to get longer than “Sally sees Spot” and “Spot sees Sally,” I began to get behind on my memorizing.
I began to suspect that maybe, just maybe, something was wrong with me. I started developing a whole secret life in school that no one knew anything about except Ramón, who quickly figured out what it was that I was doing. And what I was doing was simply “thinking ahead” and figuring out who was going to be called on to read next, so that I could make sure to be gone to the bathroom or change my seat so I could act like I’d already had my turn at reading.
Sometimes this would be real hard to do, no matter how much I’d think and plan ahead, so when I did get called on to read, I’d lie and swear up and down that I’d already been called on two days before.
This was really awful! I didn’t want to become a no-good lying Mexican, but every day I couldn’t see any other way of getting around being called on to read. Life at school became a living nightmare, because now I could see very clearly…that I was becoming what everybody told me about Mexicans; they were stupid-liars and sneaky and couldn’t be trusted, and why? Because we were no-good people.
But to not lie and have to get up and try to read in front of everyone and not be able to see the difference between “spot” and “stop,” or “do” and “to” and have the teacher look at me like I was stupid and have the other kids laugh at me, was a fate worse than death. So I chose to lie, and change my seating so as to get out of reading.
Finally, the other kids caught on to what I was doing, too, and they told the teacher that I was a liar, that I kept changing chairs, and that I hadn’t read out loud in class in weeks.
The teacher asked me, right there in front of the other kids, why was I doing this—lying and changing chairs. Did she really think that I was going to say in front of everyone…that I did it because I was stupid and couldn’t read? So I just sat there with my head down like a “broken” horse, hoping to God I could disappear.
It was a kid named Fred, who wasn’t a very good reader himself, who then broke out laughing and said, “He does all this because he’s a stupid Mexican!”
All the kids burst out laughing and the teacher told Fred to not talk like this, and asked everyone to stop laughing at me. But after she did this, she just turned around and told me to go to the back of the classroom with Ramón and the other slow-learning Mexicans. And we weren’t all Mexicanos. There were two other guys in our slow-learning section who were local Indians. The two local Indian boys were brought in every day to our school from clear out by the San Luis Rey Mission.
I put my book down and got up, and it was the longest walk of my life to go down the aisle between the desks to the back of the classroom. Everyone’s eyes followed me. Some kids snickered, other kids laughed. And the teacher told them again to stop it, but if she really hadn’t wanted them to do this to me, she could have taken me aside and spoken to me quietly and then told me to change my seating after recess.
Shit, on our rancho grande we treated our livestock better than they treated us Mexican kids at school. On the ranch, we never took a steer from the herd straight to slaughter. No, we first penned him up by himself, fed him real good for about a month, befriended him on a personal basis, then early one morning, took him down the road to the tractor shed, gave him grain, kept him calm, then killed him so quickly that he never knew what hit him. And this we did far away from all the other stock so they wouldn’t catch the scent of blood and go crazy. I could feel that some of my classmates had gotten the scent of blood by the time I got back in the slow-learners’ section.
And at recess, boy, did they come in on me and the other slow learners, like chickens on a crippled chicken, pecking at us with the most vicious, insulting words that they could find to hurt us. And hell, some of these kids—who were calling us names—they, too, were Mexicans like us, but because these kids had somehow managed to learn their alphabet and were reading, they now also felt superior to us.
I’d really tried so hard to memorize the alphabet, but I still had trouble learning my right from my left. After that public shaming by my teacher, school now went from being terrifying to becoming a living hell.
I began to get headaches every morning when my mother drove me to school, and I’d see my fellow classmates snicker at me even before I’d gotten out of our car. By the end of the first grade, I was no longer a very happy kid, not even at lunchtime when the other vatos and me got together to eat our burritos. We could see that all the other kids ate baloney sandwiches on white bread. It just seemed like there was nada-nothing that we Mexican kids could do that was right.
Ramón, on the other hand, was doing pretty damn well. Because, you see, by refusing to allow himself to be tested anymore, he had, in my estimation, cut right to the core of the situation and saved his ass and even his dignity. Myself, I’d become un buey, an oxen, a bull who’d been castrated and put to a plow.
Still, almost every day they’d find some excuse to send Ramón to the principal’s office and he’d get hit or put in a corner, but this was a small price to pay—I was beginning to see—compared to the price I was paying by still trying to go along with what was expected of us.
And at home, I kept praying to God to please help me become brave like His Holy Son, Jesus, but it just didn’t happen. I was a coward, a weakling. Just a no-good-for-nothing!
I began to wet my bed almost every night, and my parents kept asking me if something was wrong. But how could I tell mi papa or mi mama, that I’d found out that I wasn’t just “a dirty, no-good, lying Mexican,” but also “a stupid, slow learner” and a coward to boot. So I said nothing and my mother bought a rubber cover for my bed, as I mentioned before, and every morning, the first thing I’d do when I’d wake up was check to see if I’d wet my bed. And if I had, I’d quickly strip my bed and open up the window to get the stink out of my room. No one but my mother knew about my terrible secret. I’d sworn my mama to secrecy, asking her to please never, never tell my father or brother or sister.
I began asking my mother to please not give me anymore burritos with chorizo and egg to take to school for lunch. I wanted her to give me a baloney sandwich on white bread with a doughnut or Twinkie, like all the other kids. But my mother kept insisting that burritos were better for me. Finally, one day my mother surprised me and sent me to school with a baloney sandwich and a doughnut and a Twinkie in my paper bag.
I was so happy! At lunchtime, I’d sit as close as I could to the Anglo kids and I’d take out my baloney sandwich real carefully so they could see it. Then I’d eat it real slow so they could see that I was getting better, smarter, and learning how to do things right.
But then, horror of horrors, at lunchtime, I couldn’t find my lunch bag. I looked everywhere. I ran this way and that way, trying to remember where I’d put it. Then, out of the blue, I kind of remembered, like way in the back of my head, that I
’d left it on the bus. Because, you see, my mother was no longer driving me to school. I was now catching a bus. I went and sat down with my vatos-amigos and I was so hungry and feeling so lost that I swore to God that never again would I complain about my burritos if He just gave me something to eat.
It was at this moment that Ramón got up, stretched, and said that he didn’t want to finish his burrito, and he offered it to me, then walked off, going to the bathroom. I took his half-uneaten burrito of egg with potatoes and a little chorizo, and I swear it was the best-tasting burrito I’d ever eaten in all my life.
That night, when my mother put me to bed, I told her what had happened, that I’d lost my lunch and I’d been so hungry I was going crazy. But then I’d prayed, and out of the blue, Ramón, my friend, had given me part of his burrito and it had tasted like the best food in all the world.
She laughed and told me that this was wonderful. “See,” she said, “with friends, life is always easier. And with prayer, miracles do happen.”
Then she had me say my prayers and thank Papito Dios, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus for the kindness that Ramón had shown me. Then mi mama began to sing me to sleep. Oh, my mother’s singing to put me to sleep at night was quickly becoming my favorite time of each day.
“Coo-coo-roocoo-cooo, sings the turtledove,” mi mama sang to me, soothing my forehead with her hand. “Coo-coo-roocoo-coooo-coooocoooo, sings the turtledove,” mi mama sang to me. “Close your eyes, mijito, says the turtledove, and your Guardian Angel will then appear to you in your dreams, and take you hand in hand like a bird, up, up to Heaven to be with Papito Dios, your Heavenly Father. Then in the morning you’ll awake feeling all good and warm and soft and rested. Sleep, my little child, sleep. Go hand in hand back up to Heaven from where you came to visit with our Holy Family.”
And each night, my mother would sing to me and massage my head and I’d fall asleep feeling so good. Then in the morning, it was true, I’d wake—having forgotten all about my terrors of school—and feel so good and warm and wonderful until I’d remember that I’d have to go to school again.
Later that year, I took Ramón aside and I told him that calfing season had come again and I needed him to give me back my father’s castrating knife. “You see,” I said to Ramón, “that’s a very valuable knife. And the other day my dad was looking for it again and I had to pretend like I didn’t know where it was.”
“So why should this bother you?” asked Ramón in Spanish. “In school, this is all you do all day long, pretend to be a clown or stupid puppet for these pinche teachers.”
I felt like Ramón had slapped me across the face. But I also knew that what he’d said was true. I was no longer un Mexicano de los buenos—a weed, a yerba that was so strong it would break concrete, reaching for God’s sunlight. No, I’d become exactly what they’d told me I was; a stupid, dirty liar, and the biggest coward of all of us vatos.
“Look, Ramón,” I said, beginning to feel tears come to my eyes. “I need my father’s knife back.”
“And what will you do if I don’t give it back to you?” he said, not giving me an inch. “Rat on me, and tell your dad that you stole it and that I now have it?”
I just didn’t know what to say or do. I finally shook my head. “No,” I said. “I won’t tell him.”
“Well, then, good,” he said. “I see that you still got at least one tanate left.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes, and I knew that he was right, again; I was a buey. Hell, I’d already let them cut off one of my balls without even putting up a fight.
“Stop squirming,” he said, “like you always do for these pinche teachers. Look,” he added, “your family is rich. Everyone knows about the castle that your papa’s building. So grab hold of yourself, and hold tight to what you got left. Your father can buy himself a new knife. I need this one.”
“But it’s razor-sharp,” I said.
He laughed. “Of course. What good would a knife be if it wasn’t razor-sharp?” he said. “See you around,” he added, turning around and walking off.
I took in a great big, deep breath, trying to stop crying, and I watched him walk away with that special walk of his. Ramón, he was just a little kid like the rest of us, but it was easy to see that he’d already become un hombre—just as my own father Juan Salvador Villaseñor had had to become a man at ten years old back in the days of the Mexican Revolution, in order to protect his mother and sisters.
I couldn’t stop the tears running down my face. I, on the other hand, was a little crybaby coward, all confused and falling apart, but Ramón, like my father, they were hombres a todo dar, fighting cocks de estaca, willing to die before they allowed anyone or anything to cut off their balls.
Then I saw it. Oh, my Lord God, Ramón, he was like our very own Jesus Christ. I could now see this so clearly as he walked across the school ground. He had a glowing light all about him, because he, just like Jesus, was willing to carry the cross of crucifixion for all the rest of us lesser kids.
I dried my eyes, and made the sign of the cross over myself and then, strangely enough, I began to feel a little purring behind my left ear. And this purring, this little humming, this little vibrating behind my left ear, my grandmother had told me about, and she’d explained to me that people got this when they saw the magic glow of God’s Sacred Light.
“Look out of the corner of your eyes,” my grandmother had told me to do when we’d be watering her garden by the side of her little house in Carlsbad, “and you can sometimes see the Spirit of the corn, a gift given to our people by God. And you can see the Spirit of the squash and the string beans. All plants have Spirits. All animals have Spirits. It is only the two-legged human beings who have lost theirs. But you look close, and here and there, you will see the Spirit of a human glowing, too. This is the Jesus in all of Us. This is the Sons and Daughters of Papito Dios inside all of Us.”
I watched Ramón cross the playground, and the purring, the humming behind my left ear, began to travel from behind my left ear to the base of the back of my head, then all the way over to my right ear. And yes, now feeling the Sacred Circle of Life about my own head, I could see that Ramón was an Angel of God, just as mi mamagrande had told me that we all were, once we opened up our Hearts and Souls to Papito.
A few days later, it turned out just like Ramón had said that it would, and my father went out and bought himself another castrating knife. This one was black and from Germany and had two little men facing away from each other, or something like that, at the base of the blade. Hans, our good German friend, had ordered the knife from his brother in New York City, who sold German knives and other German kitchenware.
The knife that Ramón kept was dark brown and made in the United States, with the finest of American steel, and was so sharp that my father had always been able to shave the hair on his forearm with it before he’d spread the legs of the pig, calf, or goat to cut open the sack that housed the testicles.
I hoped to God that Ramón didn’t hurt himself or someone with that terribly sharp knife.
CHAPTER eight
In the second grade, a bunch of us no-good Mexicans were told that we were being transferred to a temporary school out east of town, past the adobe wall park. But not all of us trouble-making Mexican kids got transferred. The tall, distinguished girl who’d walked down the aisle so bravely on our first day of kindergarten wasn’t. She and a few of the other Mexicanos were kept at the regular school.
Instantly we, los vatos, could see what was happening. These Mexican kids who weren’t being transferred were the ones who hardly ever talked to us other Mexican kids any longer, in Spanish or in English. No, they’d learned their English real good and now they mostly hung out with the Anglo kids. This was also when some of these smarter-English-speaking-Mexicanos began saying that they weren’t really even Mexicans. They were Spanish, or even better, they were French.
And I could see why they’d done this, because now here at this other school, w
here we were almost all Mexican kids and just a few Blacks, things got so bad that I don’t really remember very much, except that the janitor was a nice old man, and the only one who treated us with any respect or niceness. I mean, it got so awful at this school that now all I remember was that one boy, two grades above us, figured out that if we climbed up on the sinks in the boys’ bathroom, we could then peek in on the girls going to the bathroom next door.
And we thought that this was really great, and we all took turns climbing up above the sinks until one boy just couldn’t hold his laughter and the girls looked up and saw him looking down on them and they all SCREAMED BLOODY MURDER!
Then two girls came racing into our boys’ bathroom, and they proceeded to beat the living smithereens out of the boy whom they’d caught looking down at them. Immediately, I remembered what my dad had told me about always being on the look-out for powerful, strong women, and so I figured that these were the type of girls that a smart guy should want to breed with—I mean, marry and then breed. So after the two girls knocked the hell out of that one boy, they turned on the rest of us, and I made the bad mistake of smiling.
“Stop smiling!” yelled the Mexican girl at me.
“Did any of you other guys look in to see us girls?” asked the other girl. This one was Black and looked as cute as a baby lamb, I thought.
“No!” said all the guys, lying at the same time. “We didn’t see nothing!”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” asked the first girl, la Mexicana, and she was very beautiful, too, especially her large, dark eyes.
“Yes,” I said, still smiling, “we’re all lying. And I want you two girls to know that I think you’re the two most strong, beautiful—”
But I never got to finish my words, because it was now my turn to get the living hell knocked out of me. And damnit, I’d just been trying to make points with the two girls by being truthful. Besides, if the whole truth be known, we’d never got to see much of anything but the top of the their heads as they went in and out of their bathroom door. Hearing their toilets flush had really been the whole highlight.
Burro Genius Page 11