The spell of the Transformers would last for days. I’d replay entire episodes in my head, identifying narrative inconsistencies, and reconciling them with elaborate back stories that I’d compose in a little journal. Sometimes I’d stare intently at my broken Walkman, half believing that if I stared hard enough it would transform into a little talking, walking friend for me.
But it never did. Instead, I was left to ponder the essence of Transformer nature. Were they fundamentally people that could disguise themselves as cars, or were they cars that could suddenly become human? I posed this conundrum to Crazy John, who became very skittish and paranoid, wondering aloud whether he was actually a transforming robot. Then he took off his pants and disappeared into the woods yelling: “I’m not part of your System!” When I posed the question on a long-distance collect call to Uncle Tony, he explained to me that the Transformer conundrum I was describing was just the latest in Cartesian Dualism—a struggle between the mechanical body and the immaterial mind. And when I asked my mother what she thought, she responded decisively. They were people. Every person, no matter what shape they took, bore a fundamentally pure soul. You had to see through the rough exterior and recognize the shining light of human goodness. She applied this conviction to the Transformers—and to a man named Leopoldo.
At the time, Claudia was consumed by her History and Culture of Central America class at Antioch University. Her homework was to interview someone who had been directly impacted by US foreign policy in Central America, and she knew why the teacher had assigned it. Her class had been reading about US atrocities on foreign soil and looking at grainy black-and-white photos of disturbing consequences. But none of it was real. It took a living face sitting across from you, crying three-dimensional tears, to bring it to life. At the food co-op she’d heard that one of River Kerry’s new migrant workers at the ganja farm was a refugee from El Salvador and had many stories to tell.
When she reached the doorway of River’s pagoda construction site she paused, and the Spirits whispered something in her ear that gave her the courage to cross the threshold. Inside, she found Leopoldo, wrapped in a woven blanket, shivering under the burden of so much pain, still tortured by memories of the death squads.
“Are you Leopoldo?” she offered him. “I want to interview you… to hear your story.”
“You have come to see me?” He was full of humility, surprised and honored to receive this unexpected guest. He sprung out of his chair, gently took her hand with a chivalrous bow, and then moved the greasy hot plate that served as his kitchen from the other chair. Once she was seated, Leopoldo squatted and gathered up scraps of wood to build up the fire in the little black stove. “I make it warm for you.”
He answered all of her questions and brought her to tears. He had been tortured by the death squads. Tied up for days at a time. Beaten. There was a tough interrogator who’d been trained by the Americans. He’d kicked Leopoldo in the head over and over until he thought his skull would break. They beat and tortured everyone: campesinos, students, old men, women, children. Leopoldo escaped from El Salvador, but the death squads were still tearing him apart inside. When he’d unburdened all of his pain onto her, Claudia could hardly move. He told her it felt good to finally talk about these things. Could he talk to her again? Of course, of course, she promised him. Of course.
She walked down the mountain in a daze. When she got back to the cabin she told me that her world had just changed. That our war in Central America had just become real. That there was a living martyr up the road, a beautiful man full of so much suffering. But she didn’t tell me then what the Spirits had whispered to her at the threshold of his door. She only told me later. The Spirits had whispered: husband.
I hadn’t seen him yet, but I already knew what Leopoldo’s whimpers sounded like. He was sitting on the bed down the ladder from me, pouring out his heart to my mother. He was telling her about his son back in El Salvador. The boy’s grandmother had written him a letter. It was almost too hard to put into words. The boy… there was shooting… cross-firing… he was cut down. The boy… was dead. I shut out the grieving man below me and focused myself on the epic dragon war unfolding in my book.
Eventually the whimpering petered out and new sounds caught my ear. Slapping and grunting, animal noises. It had been several months since the last time sex had trapped me up in my little loft. When Claudia brought a man home during daylight hours, I’d usually pop down to say hello and then excuse myself to wander around in the woods until he left. But this visit had caught me unprepared. The refugee was now going at it below me, and there was nothing left to do but wait it out with my head buried in a pillow.
A few days later, Claudia led me up the rickety steps of River Kerry’s pagoda and introduced me to Leopoldo. He stopped smiling when he saw that I was in tow, and nodded at me—man to man. I extended my hand and stepped in for a handshake. He crushed my fingers in a vise of callused, scarred, and nicotine-stained digits. Then he brought out his jar of fermenting fruit pulp to share with us. It was called chicha, and it was fuzzy and mildly alcoholic. Claudia purred over her mug. I sipped the rotten brew, spit out a hunk of moldy orange peel, and tried to be polite. “Wow!” I said without a hint of sarcasm. “This tastes like the nectar of the gods.” Leopoldo shot me a look that I would come to know well. It meant “Why are you talking?” and it also meant “You think you’re better than me?” I quickly learned that I was his competition for my mother’s affection, so the more noise I made, the more I pissed him off. I also learned that his command of English was quite limited. And it wasn’t just English. He’d never gone to school past fourth grade and didn’t even know the Spanish alphabet in order. So when I pulled out a phrase like “nectar of the gods,” it translated into “These are fancy words that you’ll never hope to understand, you fucking peasant.”
The chicha flowed and fizzed, fueling the air between my mother and Leopoldo until it grew heavy with romance. I excused myself to take a leak off of an unenclosed wooden ledge. The root structure of a tree was inexplicably protruding from the side of the pagoda above me, and I grabbed on to a gnarled root for balance while I stared out at the mist-laden trees. I felt sorry for myself, trapped out on a ledge, trying to estimate how long it would be before I could safely reenter the amorous construction site behind me. And then how long would I have to wait for this relationship to end? Three more weeks? Three months? Hopefully not. Thaddeus the Mennonite Rastafarian, Gunnar the Norwegian carpenter—none of them had been longer. I gave it six months, tops. Six unbearable months. Then my mother would process all of her feelings of hurt and indignation with me, and then we’d be back to our manless status quo.
Ignorant of the short life expectancy I’d given their relationship, Leopoldo became a persistent visitor. He came down the mountain every day or two for counseling sessions with my mother. The ratio of therapy to sex dropped so quickly I barely had time to put on my jacket before Leopoldo was dropping his pants. Outside the dripping forest was growing brittle and frosty. The mud underfoot was turning crunchy. I stamped my feet to keep my toes warm and imagined transforming into a Porsche and driving off to someplace warm.
Throughout his many consultations with Claudia, Leopoldo remained oblivious of me. I was a wraith in the shadows, a stranger he passed at the door of his therapist’s cabin. Then one day he took notice of me. He and Claudia were sitting cross-legged on her bed, enjoying a postcoital joint. Leopoldo was saying: “River Kerry, him exploit me. I am like a slave to him. In the pagoda, no heat, no hay nada. I almost slip on the ice and fall. He exploit me, Claudia.” There was an insistence in his words and a plea in the way he said her name, Clow-thia. He looked up to watch me climb the ladder to my loft and then called out to me: “Chosh,” which was his way of pronouncing Josh. “What you have?” He was pointing at the white plastic samurai sword hanging from my belt loop. “Come, venga aquí,” he said, waving me down.
Suddenly I was the full focus of his face. Between dee
p drags off the joint he began to tell me a story. His voice grew lyrical, and he waved his fingers as he serenaded me with a remembrance from the Revolución. My mother translated earnestly where his English failed, and where the Spanish was too obscure for her, I flipped excitedly through the pages of our yellow paperback Spanish-English dictionary.
The samurai sword had brought him back to the darkest days of the Revolution. They were low on ammunition and hungry up in the jungled mountains of the North. The cells of the National Liberation Front of Farabundo Martí were being hunted down one by one by the death squads. A traitor in San Salvador was giving the army the coordinates of their camps. Leopoldo’s squad had been on the move for days and was laagered in a streambed when a lone figure darted out of the woods. They nearly shot him, but spared his life when they saw that he was a small Chinese guy, armed with nothing but a couple of samurai swords. He was all smiles, scraping and bowing.
“What are you doing here?” they demanded of him.
“Ah-soh, yo quiero Revorrución,” he said, squinting at them.
He’d come all the way from China or Japan—one of those—to join in their Struggle. They didn’t believe him at first, but he brought a sack of rice with him and was hardly a threat, so they let him stay. They called him El Chino—the Chinaman. A few days later, they were ambushed by a troop of soldiers in the heat of the afternoon. Leopoldo’s squad had been caught napping, and now they were pinned down. A little guy known as El Gigante was hit in the arm. Leopoldo was about to risk a hail of bullets to come to El Gigante’s aid when El Chino leapt up, yowling and howling, his two swords flashing in the afternoon sun.
Leopoldo leapt out of bed at this point in the story, wearing only his gray briefs, to pantomime the ensuing fight. Jumping around with my plastic sword, he yowled like Bruce Lee, his chiseled muscles rippling as El Chino whirled and deftly stabbed at the soldiers. In five minutes flat, all the soldiers lay dead. Leopoldo and his comrades sat up with wide-eyed astonishment. They began shaking their heads and then laughed. And that was the story of how El Chino came to join the Revolution.
It was a good story. He was a great storyteller when he was high. Compared to all of the other men who’d come to my mother for counseling, this guy wasn’t that bad. My mother beamed with delight, seeing her two men connect over something so deep as the Revolution. Leopoldo slept over that night, and in the morning I heard him tell Claudia: “That boy, he need a father.” A couple of days later, Claudia wrote in her dream journal: “How very open and tumultuous it was the night before last with Josh, Leopoldo, and I all intensely interacting. That scene seems a faraway dream now. Can hardly believe that he will be back tonight.” And then, to Leopoldo, she wrote: “I have taken another bite of you and spent this time of separation digesting your being into mine.”
Leopoldo would have slept over every night if he could have, but Claudia was still spending three nights a week down in Seattle to attend Antioch. Most nights she crashed on the couch of a Seattle commune, but sometimes she had to sleep in her car when the commune was overrun with other couch surfers. Some weeks she would stay in Seattle for a fourth day, doing research for a professor in exchange for a free course on the literature of black women writers.
Even when she was home, Claudia didn’t have a lot of time for me; she was absorbed in books, writing papers. Leopoldo found her preference for schoolwork over him unbearable. When my mother began studying for fall quarter finals, Leopoldo paced around below me like a panther in a cage. He stopped his pacing and spoke: “Claudia. Claudia! Hay algo to tell you. I love you.”
A long silence followed and then Claudia chose not to hear it. “Sweetie, I have to study. I have a big test tomorrow. I told you today wasn’t a good day for a visit.”
Leopoldo stomped his way out and slammed the door behind him.
My mother sighed and breathed heavily. She cried for a time and then resumed flipping pages. After the final exam, she wrote: He tells me he loves me. I feel guilty because at that moment I am unable to answer… less song-in-the-heart because of this… guilty and fearful of losing him.
A couple of evenings later, Leopoldo was back to spend the night as though nothing had happened. In the morning, my mother was almost inaudibly talking to herself: “That’s weird. I had a five and two ones. Where’s the five? Not in here. It couldn’t have fallen out. Leopoldo, did you borrow five dollars?”
“What!?”
“It’s OK if you did, you should just tell me.”
He was screaming at her. “You call me a ladrón!? I’m a robbing to you!? Now I am a liar!? You don’t trust me!? What I need!? Money!? It is a nothing to me. You think I am stealing from you!?” On and on it went. He ended with a cold, disappointed “I am so hurt, maybe I don’t come back,” and he walked out the door without closing it behind him. Downstairs, she was crying again.
The next day, she wrote in her dream journal: “After the indescribable closeness—the incident of lost money—today’s terrible fear waiting for L—as though his vision of me will condemn or absolve me in my own eyes, and as though the possible dissolution of this relationship were like the doctor’s announcement of a cancerous growth.”
The controversy of my mother asking Leopoldo whether he’d borrowed five dollars continued to rage. A couple of days later, she wrote:
L is sleeping home tonight but will come for coffee tomorrow. The intensity of the storm has died down having lost momentum in distrust… now that seeming distrust on his face produces guilt in me—even when I’m innocent. Fear that he will refuse to believe in and therefore make room for my love for him.
Lost in all of this, of course, was the mystery of what actually happened to the five dollars. I hadn’t taken the money, so in my humble opinion that left only one suspect. But when I asked my mother about it, she told me the whole thing must have been some sort of a test, challenging the sincerity of her love for him.
The next morning was filled with laughter. Claudia had apologized for asking if he’d borrowed money. He’d told stories about the death squads. And then they’d made loud and incendiary love. I was holding my bladder upstairs, weighing whether I should sprint past naked sweaty bodies to take a leak out in the snow or whether I should top off the putrid apple juice jar I kept by the bed for just such occasions.
Then they called me down. Claudia had figured it out. It was so simple. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Leopoldo was moving in! That way River Kerry couldn’t exploit him anymore, and I’d finally have someone to look after me while my mother was at school. “Joshey, doesn’t that sound crazy?” This rebel leader was going to trade in his AK-47 for a babysitting job. I agreed that it did sound crazy and then excused myself to take a wizz outside. Dancing around to keep my bare toes from freezing off, I took measure of my new reality. On the one hand, Leopoldo was scary and casting some sort of a spell over my mother. On the other hand, the single greatest trauma of my latchkey existence was boredom, and Leopoldo promised to be interesting.
As my mother’s Chevy Citation sputtered down the mountain, Comandante Leopoldo moved in and embarked on his first day of babysitting. Everything he owned fit inside an army footlocker: a few changes of clothes, a couple of books in Spanish, and a whole bunch of bandanas. These he folded up carefully and wore as headbands—blue, black, or red—depending on his mood. With his headbands, shaggy black hair, and well-worn white shirts, he looked like an Apache brave from a distance. But up close, his face was all wrong. His cocky sneer was too cowboy and not enough Indian. And it just wasn’t a warrior’s face. His features were too thin and delicate, bunched up together over high cheekbones. He wore a wispy goatee to make his face look tougher, but it was still too slight and birdlike to inspire fear at first sight. He relied on a pronounced swagger for that.
My mother thought he looked like an Indian. She was convinced that Leopoldo was as indigenous as the ancient Mayan shamans who had perfected astronomy when the West was still in the throes of the Dark Ages
. But Leopoldo set her straight. One night on a romantic walk, she later told me, they stopped to kiss, and she caressed his face, cooing: Mi Indio, “My Indian.”
“What!?” he sputtered. “I’m Spanish,” he spit out. “¡No Indio!”
Indians, Leopoldo later explained to me, were sneaky little fuckers who spoke like birds. He hunched his shoulders, covered his mouth, and gave me a taste of the peeping gibberish the Indios spoke. He shook his head, dismissing their primitive stupidity.
Gringos, on the other hand, he told me, were OK. But you had to watch them. They’d exploit you every chance they got, people like River Kerry. But some of them, like my mother, were good people. Augusto Sandino said that the white people from the cities would support the Revolution, and those were the people you had to get close to. They had the money.
“The Blacks” were another story. They were mean and tough, but not too smart. If you stood up to the Blacks, and popped them in the nose before they had a chance to try anything, they would respect you. He illustrated his point with a story about a time in Seattle when three of the Blacks had tried to jump him. They thought they spotted a little Latino guy they could push around, but they hadn’t been expecting Leopoldo. They were big, but Leopoldo was stronger and faster. They punched and kicked each other until they were all panting and wheezing. Neither side could get the upper hand. Then the cops showed up. Leopoldo and the three Blacks looked at each other and nodded. Then they joined forces and beat up the cops.
The worst, he said, the absolute worst, though, were the Mexicans. They were liars and cheaters and would smile and then knife you in the back without hesitating. You could never trust a Mexican. This was a lesson Leopoldo had learned the hard way, and he showed me a couple of long knife scars that he’d received from Mexicans trying to murder him.
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