Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  “Why?”

  “You might need it.”

  “Why? You know I don’t wear makeup.”

  “You just might need it. That’s all.”

  A few days later, Leopoldo brought home a box of wine, since that didn’t count as alcohol. And he insisted that he and Claudia drink together, like husband and wife, matching each other mug for mug. My mother went silent, clenching her jaw in anticipation of the inevitable. But then some dark idea flashed across her face, and she reached for the chipped mug of cheap wine. “This is what you want? This!?” She drained the mug and then went for another, and another.

  Leopoldo seemed delighted. “What you want to say to me!?” He encouraged her. “Tell me! Tell me what you want to say!”

  My mother slurred her words: “You’re emotionally four years old! The age you were when your mother abandoned you. Well, I’m not your mother. I didn’t abandon you. I’ve stuck by you, and what do I get? You listen to me, you make your sexist homophobic jokes, then you hit me. And around it goes. And what about poor little Josh!? We keep promising him again and again a real father. And look at you!” I was hiding in my room, freaked out by my mother’s addition to the list of drunkards in my life. She was screaming now. “You’re an asshole!” Dishes were smashing against the wall like heavy artillery. She was shrieking.

  “Josh! Josh!” Leopoldo was pounding on my door, half-laughing, half-screaming. “Josh, come out here!” I didn’t move, so he smashed through the door, his fist driving right through the wood paneling like he was the Hulk. “Josh, come see your mother.” He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pushed me out in front of him like a human shield. “She a crazy bitch!” He was laughing, sharing a joke with me.

  I ducked as a green plate shattered on the wall over my head. “Look, Josh. See your mother?” Claudia’s face was bright red and her eyes were wild and watery behind her glasses. She was shaking another green plate in her hand like a deadly frisbee. Leopoldo grabbed my hair and shoved me toward her. “Claudia! I bring the boy. He see how you crazy. You really loca, más loca que yo. When you drink, you crazier than me.” He seemed to be enjoying her rage. It proved that she was no better than he. When he finally punched her in the face in front of me, he did it calmly, almost mercifully, as if he were showing me how to put down a lame horse.

  The next week we went to Seattle to meet with Dale Ramerman, Leopoldo’s immigration attorney, to prepare for his first INS hearing. The attorney asked me if I was willing to testify that their marriage was not set up to circumvent immigration laws. I stared back at him and solemnly swore: “I’ll do whatever you need me to do. Everything I can possibly do to help Leopoldo’s case.”

  The attorney nodded and said: “Good.”

  Leopoldo went misty-eyed for a moment and put his hand on my shoulder to let me know he was proud of me. We brothers had to stand up for one another.

  It was, perhaps, that brotherly bond that caused Leopoldo to yell, “Josh!” through the hollow walls a few nights later. From my mother’s caterwauling I was pretty sure they were having sex, but maybe they were done now. I knocked on the door to their room, and Leopoldo called out: “Josh, come in here!”

  Leopoldo’s naked backside was rising and falling on the bed in a series of slow push-ups. His back glistened, and his hairless butt was flexing up and down. My mother’s white shins were propped up on either side of him. I shivered at the sight of them having sex, as if I had just brushed up against an electric fence. I must have heard wrong. “Josh!” he called out again. “I show you how to make love to a woman.” I stayed where I stood, still not sure that I had heard right. “Josh, come climb on my back. Come!” He was saying the words I thought he was saying. He was telling me to come climb on his back. This was, of course, unthinkable, like punching a baby in the face. But what did I know? I felt my active brain shut down, and a kind of haze slipped over me, as though I’d taken a big hit off of a bong or stayed up all night suffering through a never-ending drum circle. “Climb on my back, Josh!” It took me a hundred thousand steps to get to the bed, but I marched forward on autopilot and climbed onto Leopoldo’s back. His skin was hot and greasy. His muscles were thick and undulating like a machine. Leopoldo bucked beneath me in long, slow gyrations. I couldn’t think it, I couldn’t let my mind grip on to it, but somewhere down there was my mother. What was supposed to happen now? When was this gruesome piggyback ride over? Could I leave? No, he wanted something from me.

  “Wheee,” I said, like a sarcastic teenager pretending to enjoy the thrill of a toddler swing. Suddenly, over his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of my mother’s face, eyes closed, expressionless. Wires were crossing in my brain, and I felt the sudden need to curl up and die. I jumped off of him and ran from the room, down the hall, and out the front door.

  I sprinted down the alley, oblivious to the dirt and gravel I was kicking up with my bare feet. I fled down the darkened streets until I collapsed in the wet field behind the Lutheran church. The cold dew leapt through my pajamas, and I was suddenly shivering, my feet howling with dozens of cuts. I was panting. “I’m going to throw up now,” I told myself. “I feel sick and I won’t be better until I vomit this out of me.” But I didn’t throw up. I couldn’t. I just sat there shivering, holding my arms across my chest. Avoiding that flash of my mother’s face, trying to spin away from it, trying to go back in time so that I would never enter that room. I was polluted somehow and needed to vomit. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I throw up?” I was sick… and they were sick. Sick beyond measure.

  Everything had changed. I would never be able to look at their faces again without seeing a little of that sickness in their eyes.

  EIGHTEEN

  Bankruptcy

  When I received her undivided attention, Claudia had a way of staring deeply into my eyes, as if she were scanning my inner soul. Maybe it was just her instinct to stare directly into people’s souls, or maybe she had picked up the technique in psychic circles. I didn’t know, but I couldn’t look her in the eyes anymore. That searching, wide-eyed gaze was unbearable. I wanted to hold up a mirror and say: “What do you see in there? Pretty messed up, huh?” But I wasn’t that mean.

  My mother pretended nothing had happened, and I did my best to pretend too, darting my eyes around the perimeter of her face when we spoke about the television I wanted her to buy. Our move to Stanwood had brought with it the blessing of electricity, and I had dared to dream that the blessing of television might soon follow. But Claudia was not about to give corporate America an audience in our living room for their brainwashing lies. Didn’t I know that television would ruin my mind?

  But now it was different. My seventh-grade teacher had assigned watching the nightly news as homework for our current events unit.

  “It’s homework, Claudia,” I pleaded, staring down at the floor. “I have to watch TV.”

  She wouldn’t throw down fifty bucks for a used television of our own, but she reluctantly agreed to let me sneak into Inga’s house after the old lady and her adult daughter were asleep. There I could watch the eleven o’clock news under Claudia’s vigilant supervision. I stared at the strange glowing screen hesitantly at first, like a novice snake charmer, ready to jump away when I felt the first sting of brainwashing. From time to time, I averted my eyes from the screen to exercise my mind, reciting famous quotations from memory to test myself for brain damage. After a couple of nights, I dismissed my mother’s concerns as paranoia; television was harmless. Although I had to admit that the moving color pictures gave me a new perspective on certain news stories. The Midwestern drought that Claudia had dismissed as a corporate scam to gain more farm subsidies sure looked like a bona fide disaster to me. And, despite his evil policies, Reagan actually moved and talked like a nice old man, not a demon loosely draped in human skin.

  But the most startling difference was my take on the intifada. This was an issue that kept me awake at night. How was I supposed to take pride in being Jewish with geno
cide being committed in my name? But now the intifada was being televised. Instead of a still, grainy picture of a Palestinian boy holding his leg in pain, I was presented with broad pans of hundreds of men hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at almost impossibly restrained Israeli soldiers. I peered in to look at their skin color. Claudia had characterized this conflict as a redux of the Civil Rights Movement, except this time around the dark-skinned oppressed minority wasn’t just being denied its basic human rights and dignity, it was also being targeted for extermination. But that wasn’t what it looked like on camera. When presented with my thoughts on the issue, Claudia assured me my conclusions were all the result of selective editing and government manipulation of the media. But I wasn’t so sure.

  Claudia’s grip on my worldview began to erode in front of the television, and it disintegrated completely a week later at Video Farm, the popular video store and arcade where I had taken to loitering after school. They showed previews on the television up front, and you never knew when they might start projecting a free movie on the big screen in back. On the day in question I found Erin, one of the popular girls, eating Twizzlers next to the poster for Dirty Dancing.

  “Hey, Erin,” I said casually.

  “Hi, Josh.” This was a pleasant surprise. We were assigned partners in home economics, but I didn’t expect her to acknowledge me in public. She was smiling at me. “They said they’ll show The Princess Bride in back if I set up the chairs.”

  “That’s rad,” I said. “Do you need help?”

  “Yes! You can carry that stack of chairs. It’s too heavy for me.” I started unstacking the chairs, but Erin interrupted me: “What are you doing? Take the whole stack.”

  “If it was too heavy for you, it’ll be too heavy for me,” I reasoned.

  “No it won’t. You’re a boy.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Hello!? Boys are bigger and stronger than girls.”

  Oh, that’s what she meant. Poor, sweet clueless Erin. I looked at her with her massive hair-sprayed bangs and makeup and frilly white shorts. She was such the victim of societal brainwashing that she didn’t even understand the basics of feminism. It was time for me to set her straight.

  “Boys are not bigger and stronger,” I lectured her. “That’s just a sexist myth that’s been taught to you your whole life. Anything a man can do, a woman can do. Men and women are exactly the same, except for their you-know-whats. You’ve been programmed to think that boys are supposed to play sports and girls are supposed to be weak, but that’s all a lie.”

  “No it’s not. Boys are bigger and stronger than girls. Duh! Think about it. Think of all the men you know. Now think of all the women you know. Most men are bigger and stronger than most women.”

  I humored her and embarked on her little mental exercise. Skimming through a list in my head of everyone I knew, I realized the men were stronger in every case. She was right. I grudgingly conceded the point and then hauled the entire stack of chairs into the back by myself. I didn’t focus on a single frame of The Princess Bride. Men were bigger and stronger. It wasn’t a sexist construct. It was biology. How could I have been so blind?

  If my mother had been so wrong about this, what else had she gotten wrong? What else was a lie? Maybe the Israelis were actually decent people trying to make the best of a complicated situation. And if this were true, maybe the same could be said for America. Maybe the police and the government and the corporations—everyone I’d been taught to hate and fear—maybe they were all fundamentally good people, trying to do their best in complex times. And what if black and brown people weren’t morally superior to white people? What if we were all just individuals who should be judged by the content of our character? Wasn’t that what Dr. King had been talking about anyway? And, if that was the case, maybe your politics shouldn’t define your moral worth. Maybe you could be an über-Republican but still be a good person. And, maybe, just maybe, you could believe in the Revolution and the People and still be a terrible person.

  I walked back, thinking about the river of ideas I’d been swimming in my whole life. All of the life choices my mother had made, all of the deprivations I had suffered—were they all premised on delusions? What the hell!? The river had started to evaporate around me at Video Farm and had run dry by the time I reached home. The walls of my room were plastered with protest posters I’d picked up over the years, and I looked at them now with new eyes. First, I tore down ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! And then I tore down U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA! And then I ripped at my political wallpaper with the zeal of a recently deprogrammed cult survivor until all that remained was one anti-nuclear war poster. Then I tore that down too. Who knew? Maybe you could hug your child with nuclear arms.

  Me, at age twelve, gaining perspective in the boughs of a tree.

  With the fog of Claudia’s dogmas suddenly lifted, I felt like a window had been opened in my mind. I was breathing fresh air for the first time in my life. At the same time, fear of the Immigration and Naturalization Service began to inhabit our home like sinister vapors. They were hovering around us, just out of sight, watching and listening, judging our every action. With the wave of some papers the INS could break up our family and send Leopoldo to his death on that sizzling tarmac in San Salvador. Now the vapors were taking shape. Our attorney told us that the INS would begin conducting interviews in a month. They wanted assurance that the love between Leopoldo and Claudia was real and not some cooked up sham.

  The impending interviews didn’t humble Leopoldo the way I thought they would. If anything they seemed to embolden him, adding a new level of cockiness to his dictatorial rule. He forbade my mother from socializing and required explanations for every errand she made. He took to referring to her as Janucha. When she asked what it meant, he laughed: “It’s a very bad word. I won’t even to translate it.” Claudia opened her dream journal one morning to find that Leopoldo had drawn himself walking a pussycat on a leash, saying, Mira, Cabrona—Look, Bitch.

  My leash was shortened as well. After dinner, I had to sit in the armchair until Leopoldo gave me permission to go to my room, ostensibly to ensure that I was digesting my food properly before lying down. When I made mistakes, which was often, he made me do push-ups. He’d count my mistakes all evening. I dropped a grain of rice on the floor—“That’s one.” I left a bit of grit on a plate after washing the dishes—“That’s two.” At five mistakes, I owed him ten push-ups. I developed a nervous eye tic, and I began to fantasize about him dying. Not so much me killing him, but an act of God. A car crash or an industrial accident. Maybe a lightning bolt. Pressure was building, and I knew something had to give.

  The day before the INS interview, I found Leopoldo and Claudia sitting at the kitchen table, rehearsing their lines.

  “Leopoldo, what side of the bed do I sleep on?”

  “Left.”

  “What do we do for birthdays?”

  “Have a party and go out to eat.”

  “What’s your pet name for me?”

  “What you mean pet?”

  “Don’t worry about it. The answer is honey.”

  “OK. Honey.”

  I sat down next to them and finished falsifying entries in my journal. In sixth grade Mrs. King had told me to keep a daily journal to practice my penmanship. Now Claudia wanted to offer it up as proof that Leopoldo was really living with us. The lawyer loved the idea but was worried about the gaps in time when Leopoldo had gone to Eastern Washington to pick fruit. Claudia asked me to rewrite those parts of the journal to gloss over the weeks of separation, and I had done it. But knowing that my journal was going to be submitted into evidence compelled me to make a lot of other changes as well. Leopoldo threw me into the table and bruised my ribs became I was clumsy and bumped into the table and bruised my ribs.

  I was lying. Claudia was also lying. She wrote a letter to the INS describing Leopoldo as: “A Central American Indian in tune with traditions of natural healing. I’ve se
en him work three different cures, including healing a deep cut of mine with the ash of burnt newspaper.”

  And Leopoldo lied too. In fact, over the next few days, we discovered that Leopoldo was nothing but lies. When we first met him, he was a refugee in deep mourning. He’d just received a letter from his mother in El Salvador, announcing devastating news. His young son had been tragically gunned down and killed in a cross fire. I remembered—right before he had sex with my mother the first time—Leopoldo had been waving the letter around and crying: “He dead! He dead!” Now we discovered that his son wasn’t quite dead. According to the translator at the law office who had sifted through all of Leopoldo’s boxes of correspondence, the letter was not from Leopoldo’s mother. It was from his wife in El Salvador. And the boy hadn’t been murdered. He’d just been sick. He was very much alive now and doing well. In front of the lawyer, Leopoldo concocted a long story about how he must have originally misread the letter, but not even Claudia believed him. He’d apparently been writing to the kid for years.

  Most astoundingly, there was no documentation whatsoever to support his claim that he’d been a guerrilla in the FMLN. It was clear, however, that he’d been a draftee in the US-backed Salvadoran army. He’d apparently served with distinction and appeared to have received an honorary discharge. Leopoldo explained that he’d joined the rebels after the army, but the time line they had put together for his Immigration filing was running out of room for a second military career. To bolster his credibility, he finally revealed the secret code name the FMLN had given him. It was Leo. I’d never served in a rebel cell, but even I knew code names weren’t just abbreviations of your real name.