by Obed Silva
My father, I’m beginning to realize, was sometimes a sinner and sometimes a saint. My father loved us, but he loved us in the way that only a sick man can love anybody: indelicately. Because all my father’s love did was drive us mad. He would kiss us one minute, and ridicule us the next. He would hand us a dream with one hand and crush it with the other. He’d kill our dreams and make us feel stupid for having dreamed them. “I love you,” he’d say, “but you’ll never amount to anything.”
This was why my brothers stopped going to school. They believed him when he told them that it was a waste of time. “Estás loco, güey,” I told him once when we argued over this. “That’s not true, school’s the best thing for them. They should stay in school until they graduate, and then they should go to college.” But as my mother always says, there’s no use in arguing with a drunk—and sometimes even when he’s sober, because my father was set in his belief and didn’t give a shit about what I had to say. To him, that I was working on a bachelor’s degree in English at the time and finding success in my studies didn’t mean anything when it came to my brothers. “It’s true that you might be able to do something with an education over there, but here, all your brothers can look forward to with an education is hunger,” he argued back. “An education in Mexico isn’t the same as an education in los Estados Unidos. Here, in Mexico, all that really matters is hard work.” And to support his argument he used my uncles Juan and Chuy (my mother’s brothers who live in Chihuahua). “Look at your tío Juanito, he studied to be an engineer and never finished. Now what is he doing? Working in a maquiladora like the rest of the poor bastards around here. And your tío Chuy, have you asked him how much he makes as a schoolteacher?” It was true, my uncle Juan never graduated as an engineer and my uncle Chuy doesn’t earn much as a schoolteacher; but both my uncles Juan and Chuy have never gone a day without being able to put food on their tables; more importantly, what my father overlooked is that both my uncles are men who, unlike himself, know what it means to be a decent and productive man, regardless of what the pay is at the end of the day.
* * *
When I was four, my father came to visit me at my grandmother’s house in Westminster, California, where my mother and I were living at the time (with about twenty other family members). He came bearing gifts for his little boy: He-Man action figures that included Orko, Skeletor, He-Man himself, and his cowardly green tiger, Cringer; he even brought Castle Greyskull to close the deal and a BMX bicycle with training wheels for good measure. He was playing Santa in the middle of summer.
In the picture, I’m standing on the sidewalk next to my father behind all these gifts. The action figures and Castle Greyskull are still in their original packaging and some parts of the bicycle are still wrapped with plastic. Standing in my tight brown corduroy pants and red fake-leather Michael Jackson jacket with a thousand zippers, I barely come up to my father’s waist. I’m a happy boy, and my father’s a handsome and happy man. He’s got a lot of hair, and it’s as black as his youthful mustache. His smile shows off a full set of teeth. My father’s a cool twenty-five here, healthy and strong, even a bit muscular in his red-and-green long-sleeve button-down shirt. He could still breeze through a couple twenty-four-packs of beer with no problem; could still drink himself an entire fifth of tequila without worrying about blood disgorging from his ass and mouth. His liver’s still strong.
But in the same way that a picture can capture such happy moments, it can also hide horrific ones. My grandmother’s house, which is the backdrop to our perfect father-and-son moment, for my mother and me can evoke painful memories. A lot of ugly things took place within one of its rooms.
I’m a child and I’m searching for a place to hide. The room is lit and I don’t want to see what’s taking place, what my father’s doing to my mother. I grab for a blanket, but it’s too thin. I can still hear the muffled sounds. I try to crawl beneath the bed, but that, too, doesn’t work. My ears are too big. My mother’s telling my father to get off of her and my father’s telling her to shut up. I hear a slap and then my mother’s cries. I’m crying now, too, but my father doesn’t stop. I keep hearing the pushing and I want to run out, but I don’t because then everyone else will hear and everyone else will know. So I cower into a ball on the floor with my blanket over my head and press my hands against my ears. “Please stop, please stop, please stop,” I keep saying to myself. But time is too slow and the ugly sounds only seem to get louder. Somebody save this boy from his father, somebody save this woman from her husband. But salvation never comes, and the moment lasts forever.
What was it that I was hearing? What was it that my father had been doing to my mother that I couldn’t see? I know now what I didn’t know then. Just like I know now that—while we lived in this house, in this room—the reason my mother often wore sunglasses was because behind them was a pair of black eyes. I know now what everybody who also lived in this house with us knew then: that my father often brutally beat and abused my mother during the time he lived there with us.
So the picture’s a fraud, another way by which my father, to this day, is able to bring me joy one minute, and suffering the next.
* * *
I don’t know from where my father had come when he appeared with these gifts. All I know is that he didn’t stay for long. The last picture we’d ever take together this side of El Rio Bravo would be taken later that evening at LAX by my mother: my father is squatting next to my mother’s brown ’67 Nova and a portable stereo that almost comes up to his knees. On my feet, I’m leaning into his chest and facing the camera. His left hand is gently on my back while his right sustains my head like a pillow. It’s dark now and in a few moments my father will kiss me on the cheek, gather his things, then walk away to catch a plane to El Paso, Texas, from where he’ll cross the border into Juárez, Chihuahua, and never come back, at least not to California.
Months later my mother would bring me with her to Chihuahua to formally divorce him. After that, I’d be the only link between them, and all of the memories of their relationship would become me.
* * *
Sitting on the edge of the bed reliving these painful memories, I recall the previous day’s drive to the Tijuana airport. My girlfriend Shirin is behind the wheel and my sister Samantha is sitting in the back seat. Little is said during the two-hour drive. I rest my head against the passenger door’s window and stare out at the world I’m leaving behind. It all seems unimportant, and all of it is moving away from me faster than I can hold on to; but I can’t help looking out at it as it rushes by and turns into a blur. It’s better than looking at Shirin or my sister. Shirin is one of those women with an amazingly beautiful face that most can’t resist staring at. It’s achingly captivating, and her eyes are like two golden suns set next to each other. They can hypnotize any man and turn him into melted wax in an instant. I’ve been that wax many times, and I’ve loved it every time: being their victim, the flesh and spirit they burn right through. They’re eyes that know me, eyes that have seen me cry and have seen me laugh, eyes that have seen me strong and have seen me weak—but not this weak, not this pitiful, and not this vulnerable to their compassion. So for fear of breaking out in tears at their sight, I prefer to curl up in the coldness of my own heart and to focus my eyes on the meaningless: on the cars with faceless people in them, on the trees, the buildings, the homes, fences, churches, bridges, posts, signs, and all the things that make up a civilization, on all the things that never last. And suddenly I’m asking myself, “Why, Papá, why’d you hit my mother? Why’d you hit your wife? Why’d you go?” Then Lennon reaches my ears and I see my father walking away from me:
Father, you left me but I never left you
I needed you, you didn’t need me
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye …
I’m singing in silence, but what I really want to do is scream. I want to sing the song the way Lennon did, like someone was ripping his heart out of his che
st.
17
When I get out of the shower, Aarón is the only one in the house; everyone else has already left to go to the funeral parlor. It’s already nine a.m.
I put on black jeans and a sprightly white T-shirt. I’d brought a black suit and tie to wear, but as I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at it in the suitcase, I think about how it isn’t even worth the trouble. No one had worn a suit the day before, and I’m certain that no one will wear one this day either. It’s Juan Silva for God’s sake, who the fuck cares? Besides, my father had never worn a suit in his life. Suits were for those people, not for him; he was an honest man, not some crook ready to swindle you for your hard-earned money as soon as you let your guard down. Suits, to my father, represented el gobierno—the government—all the fat-bellied bastards who lived grandiose lives off the backs of the poor and hardworking people of all the world. To him, a suit in China or Russia or in the United States was no different from a suit in Mexico. “Son una bola de rateros,” he’d say whenever the conversation turned to politics. “¡Nomás saben chingar al pobre! There is no place in this world where the government is not fucking the workingman. Te chingan aquí y te chingan allá. En todos lados te chingan.” He especially felt this way about the suit-wearing government engineers who overlooked his work when he’d work on government projects. He’d call them imbeciles and good-for-nothings. Every time he’d spot one walking down the street of a neighborhood being developed as a government project he’d yell out to him from the car to get to work, to do a man’s job, to get dirty. One morning, as I drove him and my brothers to work, my father, upon seeing one of these engineers walking in his black suit, holding a clipboard and shaded by a black umbrella that was being held over his head by the man next to him—who was wearing not a suit but old ripped-up jeans and a dirty white T-shirt—stuck his head and arms out of the car window and yelled: “¡Pinche ingeniero mamón! ¡Porque mejor no le dices que te detenga los huevos!” My brothers and I all laughed. And when he brought himself back in he looked at the three of us with a triumphant expression, like he’d just led a Marxist revolution through all of Mexico. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata had nothing on Juan Silva. “Estos güeyes no hacen nada, nomás se la pasan caminando con su trajecito haciéndose pendejos,” he said to us like a general relaying to his soldiers the ways of their enemy. “¿Y cómo la ven con el güey ese que le carga el paraguas? Ni que ’stuviera lloviendo. Y mira nomás que clase de casas diseñan. Ni talento tienen los güeyes. ¡Que se vayan a la chingada!”
That’s right, you tell him, Dad! Tell him how useless and stupid they all are. Tell him who’s the real man! Juan Silva is the real man!
* * *
When we arrive at the parlor, the casket is already outside. The lid is open and there are people standing around it. “What time is it?” I ask Aarón, thinking we had made everyone wait for us—for me—again. But this isn’t the case. It’s barely 9:45 a.m. and my father still has fifteen minutes before he has to be completely removed from the premises. Someone must’ve been in a hurry though, and that’s why the casket’s outside. Someone had made the call to push my father out early. Not even in death could people stand him in their homes for very long. As I think this, I’m reminded of the Mexican saying my mother loves to repeat when she gets tired of a houseguest: “Despues del tercer día el muerto y el invitado ya empiezan a apestar”—After the third day, the corpse and the guest alike begin to stink. I find amusement in the fact that my father has managed to become the real-life example of this maxim. Here he is on the third day getting rolled out of the parlor before he could stink up the place. “That’s it, Juan, your time is up,” I imagine the director of the parlor saying to my father as he hurryingly pushed him out. And I imagine my father saying back to him, “But I got fifteen more minutes, hold on, why the hurry?” And the director replying, “No, no, that’s it, you gotta go. Now hurry up and have your people roll your ass out of here—apurale, que ya estás empezando a apestar!” And as I laugh at this scene I’m constructing in my head, I feel glad, because in a way, I’m in a hurry, too. It’s already too fucking hot out and the truck we’re in doesn’t have air-conditioning. I’m beginning to sweat.
The people standing around the casket are mostly the same people from the night before, and most of them, I notice, are still wearing the same clothes they had on the night before, too. This makes me wonder whether they even went home, or was it possible that they’d slept with a dead man? I ask Aarón this question and he tells me that some of them had in fact slept on the concrete benches outside the parlor. “Víctor-Manuel, Veronica, Timbi (all siblings), and three of my friends slept here last night,” he says, pointing them all out to me. At first I’m surprised by the idea, but when I factor in that the people he mentioned were people who’d also joined me in my drunken revelry the night before, it all made perfect sense: when fucked-up enough, drunks will sleep anywhere, even on a pile of shit, and even next to a dead man. Yet I couldn’t help but think of the devotion such an act—whether done sober or inebriated—revealed; because after all, had they really wanted to, they could’ve gone to any of my father’s relatives’ or friends’ homes and slept warmly within walls and under a roof. That’s impressive, viejo, I think to myself, people did love you after all, at least enough to keep vigil over you while you peacefully wait to be buried.
I don’t get off the truck. From the passenger seat I look out at the crowd and they look back at me, perhaps wondering if I’m going to get off before the casket is shut and my father is stuffed into the hearse. And when Aarón asks me if I want to see him one last time before we leave to the cemetery, I refuse. “Chale,” I say. “Vámonos. Let’s get out of here and bury this motherfucker. This scene’s getting old and it’s hitting ninety degrees already.” I run the back of my hand over my forehead and wipe the sweat away. The day isn’t looking too good. And to make matters worse, I can’t stop thinking about my stomach, about my intestines. I hadn’t been able to take a shit after waking up. I tried. I pushed. But nothing came out. It was official: I was—I am—constipated.
Months earlier I’d had a resectioning of my small intestine. One whole foot of it had been removed because it was gangrenous, and I was dying. In the months leading up to the surgery, I’d been heavily addicted to painkillers and cocaine. Neither of the two even alone is good. But there I was, easing both the physical and spiritual pain that comes with my disability with Vicodins, alcohol, and cocaine, and though I was succeeding in killing the pain, I’d also been succeeding in killing myself. If not for a cocaine overdose that sent me to the hospital the night before the surgery, I never would have found out about the gangrene and I would be dead. According to my short Korean doctor, the Vicodins had constipated me and the impurities in the cocaine had been the cause of the infection that eventually turned to gangrene. I suppose he was right. For over a week before the overdose I hadn’t been able to take a shit, but I never stopped to think that it was because of the Vicodins, so I just kept on popping them, and drinking, and snorting cocaine.
But the real lifesaver in that story is my sister Samantha. That night, I’d been at a friend’s house drinking heavily and snorting cocaine. When I came home, I was completely wired and out of my mind, but I kept snorting. And at some point it just became too much and it was time to go to the hospital. From the downstairs living room I yelled for my sister who was asleep in her upstairs room; it was way past midnight. When she heard me and saw me in my pale skin and wide-eyed condition, she hurriedly came down the stairs and asked me what was wrong. I told her. So she threw on some decent clothes and her shoes and pushed me to her car. Within minutes we were at La Palma Hospital, where my face was not a new one. As with my first overdose, the doctor injected me with Ativan to reverse the effects of the cocaine, and it worked, but this time something was different. I felt a pain in my lower abdomen that I had never felt before, and it was unbearable. Yet the doctor wanted to discharge me and almost pushed me out of the hos
pital herself, believing that I was not telling the truth and was only faking the pain in hopes of being prescribed more pain medicine. My sister, however, always at my side, stood between me and the doctor and told her that she was not taking me home until they checked my stomach. The doctor finally obliged. She asked me to raise my shirt. I did. While a nurse stood by, she placed her hand over my lower abdomen and found it swollen and hard. I was taken in for X-rays, and before I knew it, Dr. Kim was there telling me that I needed an emergency surgery immediately, that if they didn’t operate I could die. Within a couple of hours I was being prepped for surgery. By that time my sister had called my mother and the two were now at my side, seeing me to the operating room. The last thing I remember about that night is my mother telling me that I was going to be just fine, and Dr. Kim telling me that when I woke up I was going to have a shit bag attached to my belly. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.
When I woke up the next day, the first thing I did was check for the shit bag—nothing there, only a stitched-up incision from my chest to my pubic line, right over the incision that had been made on the night I’d been shot. Now I would have two zippers, one right over the other, but at least no shit bag, and more importantly, I was alive to tell another fantastic story about the time my sister Samantha saved my life.
* * *
My father is finally pushed into the hearse and everybody jumps into their vehicles. Some of our cousins and some friends of my father jump into the bed of the truck Aarón and I are in. The last time I rode in a truck with people riding in its bed with no camper was as a teenager, when—while (coincidentally) in Chihuahua—I was on my way to the river for a day of camping with my cousins los cuates and their friends. It was a happy time then. We’d been on our way to play with nature, to celebrate youth and to be the masters of our lives. This time, however, the bed is carrying a pack of lowly faces who signed up for a funeral. There is no celebration of any kind this time, only a soundless cry for mercy for one of our own. Our collective heart sings: