Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  Ervi slept over at my place exactly once. We woke on one of those rare mornings when Leopoldo and Claudia were both home. Ervi watched in silence as our breakfast ritual unfolded. Leopoldo, still drunk from the night before, pushed my mother around in the kitchen and cursed at her in Spanish. When he looked over to see me and Ervi staring at him, he accused us of being maricónes, and turned to my mother to tell her: “If Josh is going to be a gay, I’ll be his first one.”

  “That’s just my mom’s husband,” I apologized as we walked quickly away from my apartment. Ervi didn’t say a word, but his mother invited me along with them to a family reunion up north the next day. More than a dozen of us impossibly squeezed into an old white van, and Rosa made a big show of pretending to sit on my lap. I told her it was fine to sit there. “You’re so strong,” she stage-whispered seductively and then called my bluff. I gladly traded forty-five minutes of inhaling her floral shampoo for the loss of all feeling in my lower extremities.

  The extended Sánchez family filled an entire field outside of Burlington, and needed two accordion bands, multiple barbecues, and a row of porta-potties to provide for the whole group. As the lone gringo in the field, I felt like all eyes were on me. My out-of-placeness peaked when my turn finally came in the dinner line. For some inexplicable reason, a whole cow head, complete with eyes and horns, was being peeled of its flesh on the serving table in front of me. “What part do you want?” the smiling man in the cowboy hat asked me in Spanish. I pointed to a pink, fleshy part of the cheek, and he plunged his oversized fork into it. After I escaped from the serving area, I slid my cow cheek onto Ervi’s plate. He was too busy talking to his cousins to notice.

  Listening to the cousins rap about the chicas in Spanish, I realized that I knew a mamacita was a hot girl, in general, while a guera was a hot white-looking girl. And guey was literally a “castrated bull” but was used to mean dude, asshole, or a pause word like uh or um, depending on the context. My fluency in Spanish had reached a new level. And so had my fluency in the language of Leopoldo. I could read him now, using his face as a weather vane for how the day was going to unfold. A deep yawn meant he was playful. A rub of his lips together meant he would try to sedate himself with marijuana before resorting to booze. A flex of the upper lip meant he was manufacturing an excuse to fight. And a sulking brow meant it was only a matter of time before he began beating my mother.

  Watching Ervi and his cousins laugh over their lunches of cow meat, I suddenly realized how ironic it was that we were vegetarians. Claudia passionately believed that violence against animals was barbaric, yet violence against her was perfectly acceptable. I slid the cow cheek back to my plate and took a bite of the forbidden flesh. Better to be the adopted son of this playful carnivorous migrant family than return home to my violent vegetarians.

  That night I finally mustered the courage to be the caller in the Sánchez family game of Lotería. The third card I threw down was the black man with the cane. “El Africano Americano,” I called out, and the table erupted with laughter and applause.

  Summer drifted along until one day all of the spinach had been picked. At the edge of town the fields stood bare in lonely furrows. I stood on the cracked sidewalk in front of the Casa Sánchez. The house was dark and empty. They were gone. On my door I found a note from Ervi saying: “See you next year. Keep making deals.”

  Seventh grade began, and apparently all the apples and cherries in Eastern Washington had been picked as well because Leopoldo was back with a vengeance. He filled up the house with a new high-intensity rage that threatened to overload every one of my circuits. If only there was some way of grounding his energy. Or of jolting him out of his furious stupor. If he wouldn’t listen to reason, maybe he’d pay attention to absurdity. One night I came out of my room in a turban fashioned from a black turtleneck and sang “Ali Baba’s Camel” by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I pranced around, kicking and faux camel-riding with such dedication that Leopoldo’s drunken fist seized-up in midair. He stumbled around, pointing and laughing at me, and when I ran out of lyrics I improvised with gibberish words, bouncing around like an old vaudeville puppet. When Leopoldo began to tire of that routine, I tapped around the room, grinning with ingratiating absurdity like the butler from the old Bojangles movie I saw at the library. It worked. I danced us up a night of peace.

  Another night I emerged into the middle of an escalating argument with an empty macaroni box strapped to my face. I sucked air through a hole in the plastic siding, peered through a broken pair of my mother’s glasses, and walked in slow motion under a suit of pillows and duct tape. I was an astronaut. I moonwalked in long strides and radioed dramatic and garbled transmissions back to Houston. Another successful intervention. But I soon ran out of routines, and Leopoldo lost interest in my increasingly repetitive distractions.

  We were back to the alcoholic cycle of horror and honeymoon, and I fled to the library again. But the long stacks of books didn’t captivate me anymore. I’d exhausted the fiction section, and was tired of reading about Judaism. I wanted to practice it. But the twenty-two inscrutable letters of the ancient Hebrew alphabet stood in my way. It took me an hour to crudely sound out the shortest prayer in the book, and that was for drinking wine, which was the last thing I needed more of in my life.

  On Sunday afternoons, a group of elderly Christian ladies met in the backroom of the library to discuss nuclear disarmament and friendship with Russia. They called themselves the Stanwood/Camano People for Peace and were delighted to have an unthinkably young new recruit. One of the ladies invited me to attend Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, where I was drafted to be the first real Jew to play the role of “Jewish Shepherd” in their Christmas pageant. I attended Lutheran Sunday school for a few months before parting ways due to theological differences and the teaching that you had to unconditionally obey your parents.

  “Even your stepfather?” I asked.

  “Even your stepfather,” answered the Sunday school teacher.

  “Even if he hits you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if he hits your mom?”

  “Yes.”

  One evening back at the library, I spotted a yellow casting call on the bulletin board for the Camwood Players, a community theater group. Their production was Keep the Home Fires Burning, a comedy about the power of Christmas. I tried out for the part of the Yuletide Yahoo, who was supposed to be a cross between Puck and Harpo Marx. Because the character had no lines, my audition was a series of pantomimed emotions, comedic dance, and pratfalls.

  “I got the part! I got the part!” I announced to my mother as I jumped around Inga’s house.

  “Tell the boy to go feed the horse,” said Inga from under a cloud of dementia.

  “Joshey, I knew you’d get it,” said Claudia, hustling me out the back door before Inga’s tyrannical daughter fired her for bringing her kid to work again.

  I had first taken to the stage as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz back in Shingletown. When I heard the applause after I finished screeching the last notes of “If I Only Had a Brain,” I knew I’d found my calling. Standing in the spotlight, a hundred faces fixed on me, wanting me to entertain them, to carry them deeper into a fantasy world where tensions escalated dramatically and then burst into happy endings. When I was on stage the audience was mine. I deserved and received their undivided attention. No one could ignore me. No one could upstage me.

  As the Yuletide Yahoo, I wore a red jumpsuit and, on cue, had the power of honking a magical horn that froze the other players and cleared the stage for my antics. I dinosaur-walked, grimaced, and spun myself silly. I puffed out my chest and strutted. I stumbled, fell, and picked myself back up again. And when the audience couldn’t laugh anymore, I honked my horn again and let the conventional actors continue their spoken words. On closing night, I wowed the crowd in the first act, working myself into a prolific sweat. I toweled off backstage and then ducked out a side door to get some fresh air before my next
entrance. I had exactly seven minutes. I sat on the steps for a minute, panting, and then foolishly walked down to the sidewalk. A group of boys from my class in middle school passed by, punching each other as they walked home from Video Farm.

  “Dude, is that Josh?”

  I turned to run back up the steps, but it was too late.

  “What a faggot!”

  One of them caught me in a headlock, and the others began kicking at my groin.

  “You look like a freak!” They had caught me wearing a red jumpsuit and court jester hat, and could hardly contain themselves.

  “Kick his ass!” they goaded each other.

  My turn as the Yuletide Yahoo.

  “Stop,” I choked out. “I’m in a play… have to get back.”

  They didn’t hear me or didn’t care. I pried at the arms around my neck and curled my legs up to protect my nether regions. The whole time I was counting in my head. Four minutes. Three minutes.

  I decided they would be done with me sooner if I stopped resisting. I took a deep breath and went limp. They landed some good solid kicks in my belly and one in the groin. Two minutes. They pushed my head into a cedar hedge, trying to shove me all the way through. And then something else caught their attention and they left me crumpled up on the sidewalk. One minute.

  I sprinted back up through the side door and burst onto the stage on cue. I limped and dragged myself around at first, letting the audience believe I’d been clobbered by unseen forces backstage. But then I erupted into a frenzied primal dance, the kind of physical celebration early man must have used to communicate a great triumph over superior forces. I swung around the stage and ended my set with a series of headlong clumsy flips that would have made Buster Keaton proud. The audience clapped and howled.

  “Wow, Josh,” said the director after the show. “That was great! It was nothing like what we practiced in rehearsal, but you really pushed yourself to the limit. In fact, it looks like you gave yourself a black eye.”

  “I did, but the show must go on, right!?”

  “Yes, the show must go on.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Men Don’t Cry

  Snow fell, and it was too cold to wander around outside anymore. Claudia was sleeping at Inga’s most nights now, and the old lady’s daughter had set a strict policy of no Josh in the workplace. At the same time, my beloved library announced it was closing earlier for the winter. There was nowhere left to go but home.

  This felt like more than a conspiracy of circumstances. Fate itself was telling me that I couldn’t hide from my stepfather forever and was marching me back to reenlist under the command of Comandante Leopoldo. My stepfather came home to find me reading in the living room.

  “Why you are here?”

  “The library’s closed,” I apologized.

  Leopoldo took charge at once. My standing orders were to have dinner waiting for him on the table when he came home from work, or wherever it was he went during the day. My culinary skills were limited to pasta, rice, and sandwiches, and Leopoldo told me I was a “bullshit cook” of even these simple dishes. I had done it all wrong, he told me. The food was terrible. But, by the end of his critical tirade, I noticed he’d eaten everything on his plate and demanded seconds.

  After dinner he would take to the couch for refreshment. On the bad days this meant drinking beers and accusing me of nefarious crimes like ratting him out to my mother after I’d seen him shoplifting again. He would stab at me with his calloused finger and indict me: “You being mafia with me! This bullshit, Josh, bullshit.” I would usually receive a sentence of push-ups.

  On the good days, he converted his paycheck into marijuana. The herb made Leopoldo so pleasant that I began hoping he would spend all of our money on it. As the smooth smoke slowly slid out of his nostrils, he would tell me happy stories from back home. Stories about the time he made a hot woman’s pussy dripping wet on the bus by rubbing on a secret pressure point between her thumb and forefinger. Or about the time his friend El Flaco took a dump off the back of a moving truck onto the windshield of a passing Mercedes. These stories left me feeling a little nauseated, but I could tell they were his attempts at acting fatherly.

  Sometimes Leopoldo wouldn’t come home for a day or two. Claudia told me he was probably out “whoring” with his new friend Carlos. On those days I had the apartment all to myself and would initially feel a surge of freedom. I could do anything I wanted! But this gave way to boredom and loneliness, and I found that I inexplicably preferred Leopoldo’s company to his absence. I had developed a strange dependency on him. He wasn’t a father exactly—more like an older brother who was psychotic most of the time. The rest of the time, he was something like fun.

  Leopoldo must have felt some brotherly impulse too. He began to open up to me, telling me that his father used to beat him and his mother mercilessly. But when his mother remarried, her new husband taught him how to defend himself and be a man. Now Leopoldo was going to teach me how to fight. And, so our push-up and sit-up regimen began anew. “Get down, cabrón, get that butt down, hijo de puta.” Asshole, son of a whore! He brushed off his kung fu moves for me and promised to teach me how to box. I was terrible, of course. A total disappointment, not worth wasting his time on, but it was the thought that counted.

  If I was too weak to box properly, Leopoldo decided the least he could do was teach me how to wrestle. Several weeks of rug burns followed. Leopoldo never let me pin him but, when he was feeling generous, he would award me points for a clever hit. When he was less inclined he would throw me around violently, blurring the line between horsing around and a beat-down. Sometimes he would put me into headlocks until I couldn’t breathe or punch me on my shoulders until my arms went dead. Once he threw me into the side of a table and bruised my ribs. Another time he grabbed me by the testicles and brought me to my knees in tears. “Mens don’t cry,” he warned me, “only pussies cry.” When I “chose” to be a pussy by crying, he stormed out of the house and was gone for the night.

  I tried to interest Leopoldo in nonviolent activities, but it wasn’t easy. Whenever I read to him or tried to tell him about the things I was learning in school, he told me I was showing off, trying to embarrass him. I had more luck with chess and checkers. In El Salvador, he told me, he’d been a chess master, so I challenged him to a game. He knew how to use his knights well and had a few good moves, but I beat him handily. I assumed he had let me win the way Uncle Tony used to. But Leopoldo threw the board on the ground and told me I had cheated. When we switched to checkers, he gloated to discover he could kick my ass across the board. So, checkers it was. Night after night I let him double- and triple-jump me, and he was often so satisfied with beating me on the checkerboard that he didn’t need to take me down in the wrestling ring. Given the alternative, I was more than happy to let him win.

  One day I found a black T-shirt at the Salvation Army, emblazoned with sparkling pot plants and the phrase A TOUCH OF GRASS. Leopoldo understood the pun and thought it was the funniest thing he’d seen since El Flaco took a dump on that fancy Mercedes. By transposing class and grass, the shirt was uproariously upending the Capitalist class system. Leopoldo had to have it. He could have just taken the shirt from me but, instead, he offered to trade me for his sacred red tank top, the one with the Native American warrior silhouette on it. The tank top had been given to him as a parting gift by the shaman who had trained him in California, and now Leopoldo was giving it to me. He bowed when he gave it to me, and I felt like a karate student receiving his master’s black belt. The next day, Leopoldo proudly reported back that he had worn the TOUCH OF GRASS T-shirt to work at Twin City Foods, and the manager was scandalized beyond words when she saw it. For my part, I couldn’t bring myself to wear the special red tank top. I’d seen Leopoldo beat my mother too many times while wearing it. I folded it carefully and tucked it into my drawer underneath my plastic samurai sword.

  Another morning I awoke with an unfamiliar feeling of paternal affection.
It was one of the rare quiet mornings when my mother was home from Inga’s and we weren’t recovering from an alcohol-induced home-wrecking the night before. I didn’t love Leopoldo, but I was legitimately happy to have him around. I didn’t quite know how to express this appreciation—if I were too sappy, he’d call me a faggot; too subtle, and he wouldn’t get it. So I lied. Over a breakfast of rice and tofu, I told them I had dreamt that Leopoldo was a reincarnation of Lao Tse, the ancient Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism. From now on I was going to call him Lao as a sign of respect. Leopoldo nodded humbly, accepting the wisdom of the dream world, and Claudia looked like she was going to cry at the cosmic beauty of it all. She wrote in her dream journal: L’s impact on J has been extremely positive. The 2 are affectionate and playful with one another. L also has a serious concern w preparing J for manhood.

  Leopoldo’s next alcoholic rage was less destructive than usual, and his repentance the morning after was more heartfelt. “I feel like he’s spiritually purer this time,” I told my mother. “But he’s said he’s going to quit drinking so many times before, I don’t know what to think.”

  “Josh, you just have to love him. That’s what’ll cure him,” Claudia promised me. “Think about him with love. He really loves you, you know. Don’t worry, he’s going to get better.”

  Across the room, Leopoldo was frowning at himself and at my mother’s bruised face. How could he have done such a thing to his woman? He promised us he’d finally commit to one of those twelve-step programs. He’d become a new man.

  We came in for a group hug and told each other that we were all in this together. As we cleared the apartment of debris from the night before, our cleaning felt charged with symbolism. We were purging the cycle of violence from our family. Leopoldo nodded approvingly as I picked up the empty beer cans strewn around the house. But he stopped me when I began pouring the green bottles of Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor down the sink. “Josh, don’t waste that. I want to give to my friend Augusto.” His concern for needless waste expressed itself again when he saw Claudia throwing out the makeup she used to cover her bruises and black eyes. “You shouldn’t throw that away.”