MY FRIEND MEMÍN
THERE’S THIS CRAZY BLACK KID I know. He’s always pulling shit, trying to do the right thing, but running up against scary people and dangerous situations. Getting in and out of trouble trying to help out his friends and maybe defending some principle for good measure. He usually ends up in his mama’s arms or across her lap getting his bare ass spanked with a flat stick. But he’s all right. He’s my friend. His name is Memín Pingüín and he lives in the pages of his own Mexican comic book.
In the comics of our youth, all the people are white and their exploits are super-hero exploits with villains we’ve never seen in real life. But in the vividly colored pages of the comic books we find in Juárez, it’s all Mexicans, and their cartoon balloons are filled with Spanish, from the cops and the teachers to the parents and street thugs. Memín is different, though. He’s smaller than all the other kids in his striped teeshirt and cap with the brim pushed way high, but it’s his dark skin, big ears and oversize lips that set him apart. A nasty stereotype, but I don’t know that yet. He’s my hero, and his adventures are real-world adventures that reflect the poverty, injustice and violence of everyday life in Juárez. I can’t read Spanish, but I know Memín is a street survivor with a pure heart. Even when he suffers through calamities over which he has no control, he knows the difference between good and bad, kindness and cruelty.
That’s before I have to fight him. ’Cause somewhere in school, sometime between third period and lunch, somebody heard Mike throw my name around like dirt and somebody else told him that I wanted to know what his deal was. And that’s pura mierda, ’cause Mike and me are supposed to be best friends. But now los chamacos are saying I called him nigger and he called me wetback and so the word goes out that we’re gonna settle this after school in the Big 8 parking lot. Neither of us can figure out how this started, neither of us knows how to get off the ride, the current’s fierce and we need to save our strength for what’s coming. All day I’m nervous, all day I’m thinking how can I get the nurse to send me home, all day I’m thinking he’s going to beat me silly, all day I can hear Mike and me calling each other names we didn’t know existed before this.
The bell rings like it’s round one and we’re rushed out of our classrooms straight down the halls and through the schoolyard, out of the gate and across the street to the parking lot. Everyone seems to know exactly what’s going to happen but Mike and me. There he is across the tide of frenzied faces looking just like I feel, unsure, helpless, scared shitless. He’s sweating all over, looking at me through bloodshot eyes like I did him some wrong, and I want to say, No, vato, we’re camaradas, but behind me, hands are shoving me into him, shrill ten-year old voices yelling there he is, don’t let him get away, beat that nigger, show that monkey who you are, while on his side, it’s all get that spic, cut that dumb Frito Bandito face wide open. I clench my teeth just as the bell for round two goes off in our heads and before we know it we’re flailing at each other with little fists, each blow calling out more ugliness, each kick taking us to that stark place where hurt is the rule, wrapped in each other’s half nelsons, rolling in the hard gravel of the open lot with everyone shouting and laughing and raging ’cause it’s 1968 and it’s how we get along now, heat and hatred shaking the blood out of our noses, painting dumb hurt all over our faces while our ears ring with the crack of bonds broken and all of a sudden, it’s done, we’re pulled apart by a teacher and everyone disperses into their separate worlds but me and Mike held apart by our scruffs like cartoons panting and swinging at the air and the teacher shaking his head and yelling at us to go home and we do.
I don’t talk to Mike after that. He don’t talk to me. And Memín, I don’t read his comic books anymore ’cause I figured out that shit is racist.
EL JUDÍO
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT Judío means.
I thought it was his name. El Judío, my dad would say to my mom. Ay viene el Judío. Here comes the Jew. But what is a Jew? I never saw one before. I never heard that word before except in reference to Christ, King of the Jews. I thought it meant he was like Jesus. Three of my friends are named Jesús, and they aren’t as half as good as the one in the Bible by a long shot. In fact, one of them shoots birds out of the mimosa trees with his BB gun for the pleasure of it and that seems completely the opposite of Jesus. But something about the way my parents say the words—el Judío—makes him seem special and sanctified, a man with the kind of spiritual dimension that demands his name be uttered in hushed tones. The Jew is coming today. Have you got enough for the Jew? El Judío is at the door.
One morning, I’m watching cartoons on the TV and the picture is flipping like crazy and the vertical hold doesn’t work and my bladder is telling me to march in place before I pee myself in my pajamas. I hear a knock on the door and I open it. Standing real close to the screen door is a tall ruddy-faced man wearing a golf shirt with some design on the pocket, and at the base of his corpulent neck is a gold chain with a little star on it. He runs his hand through his short reddish hair and good-humoredly asks ¿Está Papá?
My mom and dad are in the bedroom reading the paper while my brothers and my sister fight over the comics. All of them sprawled on the same bed in what is our Sunday morning ritual. But out here it’s me and the man’s benevolent smile. I like his watch, gleaming like a holy relic. I like his blue eyes squinting against the sun to peer into the dark of our house. I tell him to wait and I turn around and shout over the TV, MOM! DAD! ¡EL JUDÍO! He blinks and blanches a little, never letting the smile teeter off his face, and then I see my mom come rushing out to grab me by the wrist and pull me into the kitchen with a mortified look. Then my dad yanking his pants on and counting out some cash takes my place at the door. A few words and a couple of bills are exchanged, my dad ending the whole thing with an earnest and apologetic gracias. Both of them incapable of letting their eyes meet.
Don’t ever call him that, they tell me. That’s not his name. His name is Señor Rubinsky. You got that? ¡Malcreado! But that’s what you call him, I protest. I hear you calling him the Jew all the time. That’s none of your business, they fire back. He’s Señor Rubinsky to you. David Rubinsky. ¿Entiendes?
It turns out that David Rubinsky has loaned my dad some money to get him through our tough times. He’s borrowed money from him for Christmas too, so we can get the bikes we plead and pray for. In fact, Señor Rubinsky has given countless low-interest loans to the many struggling Mexicans in the greasy spoon business and beyond. The local banks don’t trust our dads much during these recession days. Why should they when these so-called unaccountables might just default and disappear over the border? The loans of El Judío are the difference between making the house payment or not, buying groceries or not, getting new clothes for school or not. Whatever they say behind his back, their gratitude for his service is deep and authentic. He’s well regarded among these families. When he dies, they will come to his funeral, their cars lined up for miles to pay their respects to him. It’s ironic that all my varied and valued experiences with Jewish people began with the most pernicious stereotype, but we were stereotypes then too. Poor backwater Mexicans who had to borrow against their own futures to realize them.
The following week, he’s at the door again. This time he’s wearing a paisley tie over a damp white shirt. I meet him at the door and politely say, Mr. Rubinsky. His ruddy complexion turns redder still and he looks at me like he’s stung more by this salutation than by what I said the week prior, but then he pulls up his chin and confers on me the thinnest drollest smile.
Tell your Papá that el Judío is at the door.
EL MAR
APÁ THINKS WE NEED TO know the world so he gets us a globe. It’s a Rand-McNally globe in a box with a stand and when it comes out, it’s as big as a basketball. In fact, my little brother wants to bounce it on the floor. But once we put it on its stand and set it in rotation with a swish of our fingers, we know we’re looking at our planet.
The fi
rst thing we do is find our home. We run our calloused little fingers across the brightly colored countries till we locate the United States and then pinpoint Texas. El Paso’s not there, though. It’s not even a dot. Only the major cities like Houston and Dallas get dots, and Washington D.C. gets a red star. Later on, one of us will scratch a crude X into the desert where our city should be just to confirm that we’re actually there. Still, I’m proud beyond words to know that in our dusty little house we have a globe just like the one in our first grade classroom at Hacienda Heights Elementary.
They’re not teaching us English there—it’s just happening by default—but I’m keen to learn it fast. Maybe I just want to know what the teachers are saying to each other. Maybe I want to talk like the people on TV. I’m developing a vocabulary, too, though I don’t know what that word means yet, and I’m extra dogmatic about my pronunciation. I learn that there’s both a hard c sound and a soft c sound and I memorize the words that use them. Cowboy is one of the first words I learn, even before the word cow. I am in Texas, after all.
At home, I practice my pronunciation by picking the names of countries and places on our globe. I spin it fast and then stop it at random locations with my finger pressed over some exotic part of the world. Uganda, I say. Spin. Stop. South Korea, I say. Spin. Stop. Iceland. Some place names are easier than others. Spin. Stop. My finger’s held hard against the middle of this blue expanse that I only know as el mar. I lift it and see a word I’ve never encountered before. OhKee-An. Ohkeean. What is the Pacific Ohkeean? It’s spelled o-c-e-a-n but my tongue doesn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve heard Pacific before, it’s almost the name of the beer my apá likes to drink on his days off. I remember the label with the anchor and the mountains in the background framing the simple blue sea. Pacific has both the soft “c” and hard “c” sound. But how do I pronounce this other word except as Ohkeean? That must be it. I’ve never seen a body of water larger than the Rio Grande and it’s mostly dammed to a trickle now but saying that word brings the vast open sea all the way here. In fact, this dry scrabbly desert we live in is an old prehistoric seabed itself. The surf, the spray of the crashing waves, the gulls scolding the surging swells. It’s all in this curious ancestral word. Ohkeean.
The next day at school, I am looking for ways to demonstrate my knowledge. To show the teacher how well my pronunciation is coming along. I can’t think of ways to bring it up. She’s a nice, older black lady who seems to understand that the education we’re getting is also teaching us to use a new language, and she’s reading to us from some book, but I am hardly listening. I’m staring at the globe by the window, larger than ours, with defined topography, rivers, mountains and ohkeeans etched in and labeled. The sun through the louvered window is warming China and the Soviet Union. The world of knowledge. When she is done, the teacher orders us to take out our pencils and paper for a test on what she’s read. I see my opportunity. I rush to the pencil sharpener and add a new tip to my stub. On the way back to my seat, I stop by the window and lay a dreamy hand on the smooth curve of the globe. Everyone is looking. The teacher too. She asks me, what are you doing.
I say, Nothing, miss. Just looking at the ohkeean.
She looks a little confused. Gently, she says, The what?
The Pacific Ohkeean, miss. It’s so big. I think I want to see it someday.
Then she gets it. I see her face beam with what seems like satisfaction and pride. She’s even chuckling a little bit. Someone in the back of the room has started to snicker along.
Oh. I see. You mean ocean. It’s pronounced o-shin. The Pacific Ocean.
Now the room is all laughter. Laughter drowning out the sounds of the surf, the seabirds, the swells and ripples on the beach. Laughter reaching into my mouth and ripping out my tongue for thinking it could own this new language so easily. I’m tensed up and loose around the knees at the same time, my face all on fire, and I blunder to my seat in abject shame. The teacher’s calling for silence in the class, while I hear voices around me mutter baboso, estúpido, and other words for fool that I can’t remember as well. The rest of the day drags on, the minute hand on the clock weighed down by all the mortification in my bones. In my head on the way out of school I keep hearing one word. One word.
I come home twenty years later. That old metal globe is still there in the closet, dented and rusty, crudely marked up with crayon. It’s been bounced around like a ball, after all. I’ve traveled to many of the dots and some of the stars. I’ve lived much of my life near the sound of foghorns and seagulls and surf. I turn the globe in my hand to the word. It’s still there. Still spelled the same way. Still insisting that to get the pronunciation right in the end, I had to get it wrong in the beginning. This was my entry into the complexities of our spoken English. But somewhere in the imagination of a little boy who has only beheld the sea on a beer bottle, there really is a special body of water known to him as an ohkeean.
THIEVES LIKE US
NEVER, NEVER CAN I TELL my mom. The mortification would kill her. And my dad, he’d be disappointed enough to find the belt and let me have it. So I keep it to myself, this unsaid potent thing, like an ingrown prayer. Only the grocer at the little market by Hacienda Heights Elementary and I know the truth. And the truth is he caught me.
We’re standing outside the tiendita after lunch, me and two other seven-year-old mocosos. We got this crazy notion that it would be so cool to take some candy without paying for it. The old man behind the counter is slow and easily distracted, and lately he’s seemed addled by all the Spanish the kids have been throwing around his store. Nervous and new at this, our little hearts rattling as hard as our teeth, we try talking ourselves out of it. We don’t need the candy, I say, I got enough to buy some for all of us. It’s not about the candy, the others say. Then what’s it about? Chingao, we know what it’s about.
Resolved at last, we put our plan in action. One kid walks in and starts to browse like he’s got bucks to burn, while the other kid and I slink down the aisle where the candy is. Rows and rows of colorfully wrapped taffies, kisses and mints. The old grocer in his blue smock and rumpled black necktie is reading his paper. But the whole time, ese, he’s reading us. The browsing kid goes over to ask him Cuánto cuesta un bag de chips while we shove as many hard candies into our pockets as we can and then casually turn around and make toward the free light of day. They’re wedging themselves through the heavy glass door, and I’m almost there too, but before I can push it open, I feel the old man’s claw squeezing my collarbone as he pushes me against the counter. He deftly locks the door with his other hand, stoops down to glare in my face and says, Empty your pockets. I’m in shock, I can’t move, can’t say a word, so he says it again, Empty your damn pockets, boy. I turn them out and three individually wrapped jawbreakers fall to the floor. Three stupid candies. I can’t believe that’s all I managed to get.
He snatches them off the floor and slaps them on the counter, then clamping his hand hard against the base of my neck, directs me to a cramped storage room in the back where he plants me on a cardboard box and stands over me with his arms crossed. His panting is loud as a bull’s. I’m sobbing, shivering with terror, my pants already warm with pee. Then he spits something like this right in my face:
You little thief. You people are all just little thieves. You thought you could pull one over on me, but I got you, didn’t I? Didn’t I? I should call the police, let them deal with you! You want that?
I’m wailing and shaking my head, blind with tears, smearing my wet nose across my dusty brown arm. The old guy’s face is all fire and whiskers as he rages on: I’m keeping my eye on you. Stealing is your nature, it sticks to you like dirt. Comprende, boy? Then he shoves me out the door, leaves me standing in the open to cry myself home.
Two days later, I have my First Holy Communion.
A shimmering Sunday morning in my white short-sleeved shirt and clip-on tie. A procession into San Antonio Church with my catechism classmates. Parents stan
ding inside at their assigned pews, faces beaming, Kodaks flashing. We kneel in place before the altar, rosaries draped meaningfully over our clasped hands. The Father in his perfect white vestment spreads his arms wide and begins the Mass. En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo . . .
Amen, we reply in unison.
We go through our prayers, the readings from the Old Testament and the Gospels, we conduct the call and response with the Father and stand, sit and kneel in due piety, just as we were taught. But under my ironed white shirt, every chamber in my heart is flooded with shame. I still feel that grocer’s hand, the pain in my collarbone, I see the candies on the floor and walk the heavy walk home in my pants reeking of pee. The Father gives a short sermon on the magnanimous grace of Jesus, who even as he was nailed to a cross, forgave the sins of one of the thieves crucified with him. Jesus assured the penitent thief a place in heaven, the Father says, because he renounced his sinful ways. But when he glances in my direction, I see the grocer’s face red and spiteful denying any such place for me.
Retablos Page 3