Now, as we prepare to take the Eucharist and fuse the body of Christ with our own, we make our confessions. The priest enters the confessional and we line up to enumerate our sins before him. The disgrace sucks all the blood down to my feet and I feel faint. I feel sick. How can I tell him? How can I admit that I stole candies just for the fun of it? Father, I’m nothing but a little thief. I don’t deserve absolution. I’m unredeemable shit.
Approaching the confessional, my mind drifts to that forgiven thief, whom I envision as Cantinflas, the funny man of those old Mexican movies at the drive-in. I think of him prowling around heaven in his rags, wondering at his good fortune. I see him marveling at the splendor and riches that Divinity has laid before him, the crowns of light, the piercing rays of heavenly grace, the pealing bells of holiness and joy. He’s in the company of saints and angels and now all the gente he’s known are washed clean of their sins too, stepping through what looks like a human carwash, coming out on the other side all blow-dried, waxed and shiny. I see him greeting them, embracing them warmly, with tenderness. Then I see him nimbly picking their pockets. I see him robbing seraphim too, filling his bag with unanswered prayers, breaking into heaven’s vault to steal everyone’s jawbreakers and running off with the loot like the bandit he is. Because it’s his nature. Always a thief. Thief everlasting. Even at this sacred moment, while I kneel before the waiting ear of the Father, he’s creeping in through the unlatched window of my soul to steal the self-incriminating words from my mouth, ’cause five minutes later, I’m stepping out of the confessional without having said them and lining up to receive the host on my absolvéd tongue like it’s candy. Into the cleansing glare of the noonday sun I come, newly made in Christ by His grace, and the dirty grace of a sanctified thief, strutting down the gilded streets of paradise in his peed-on pants.
MY MONSTERS
I LOVE MY MONSTERS. I watch them all the time. They roar and rampage and scare the hell out of everyone. But not me. I’m old enough to know they exist only in scary movies. Still, I love them so much, I troop to the tiny 16 Food Corral convenience store at the butt end of every month to ferret through the magazine racks for them. Usually, they’re stacked at the back of the lower shelf and all I have to do is reach past True Crime, Mad Magazine, and Guns and Ammo, and there they are: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, the Mummy, Dracula, the Beast from Another Planet. All in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. I flip through and there’s Bela and Boris, Lon and Lon Jr., Cushing and Christopher Lee, movie stills from the great Universal Studios horror flicks and low-budget sci-fi of the ’50s, interviews with directors, makeup artists, stop-motion animators. Everything a brown kid with a runaway imagination needs to know about movie horror is in here.
My room is a shrine to scary movies. Painted models of the Phantom of the Opera and the Mummy glower from my dresser, and Frankenstein and the Alien from This Island Earth glower from the posters on my walls. I have pencil drawings of otherworldly creatures everywhere, inspired by the boxloads of magazines I keep under the bed. Yes, there really are monsters under my bed. Everyone wonders how they have this hold on me. Don’t you think it’s a little immature? Don’t you think it’s kinda retarded? they ask. But I don’t understand the questions. All I know is that on the days when it’s hard to be me, these monsters are my solace. I put on fangs and practice snarling like a vampire in the mirror. I walk around sullenly scratching my palms on full moons because this is the first sign of a deadly metamorphosis. Open up the family dictionary and look up lycanthropy. Next to the definition, someone with my twelve-year-old cursive has scrawled “Oh god, it’s true!” I keep the severed, decomposing head of Dorian Gray in my closet, a Styrofoam wig-head that I carved a mouth and eye holes into, covered with clay, and painted. It almost looks like the one in the magazine.
This day the sun is plummeting faster than I expect as I walk down this little street called Manor Place to see if my monsters have come. I pass a house with wainscoting over these little red bricks that make it look prim and toy-like. There’s a kid sitting on the porch, a little younger than me and fatter, and he’s got a look on his face that says Don’t look at me, but I do. His face is puffy with some kind of anger. He’s got a plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex and he’s forcing its open jaws onto the long neck of a Diplodocus. He’s doing it with personal fury. There are noises in the house that sound like laughter, but it’s a woman crying. A man yelling and throwing things and a woman crying. The kid doesn’t look up and now I know he’s not puffy from anger. I head on to the store.
When I get there, I almost forget why I’m there. I buy a Creamsicle and half-heartedly turn to the rack. The old guy says, It hasn’t come in yet. Try again tomorrow, he says. I nod and head back down Manor Place. Now it’s so dark, it should be night, but the last traces of day linger in the high clouds. I can hardly see my hand in front of me, while high overhead a long ghostly thread spools from a jet plane. I pass the house again, and this time the porch light is on and it’s quiet as death. The kid is gone but his dinosaurs are there. I walk up the sidewalk to the porch and look them over. The head of the Diplodocus is gnawed down to a nub. But not by the T Rex. I hear some noises in the house and move away across the lawn. There is a window, and I imagine it’s his room. I imagine pinned all over his room these horror movie posters and on his desk, delicate pinprick brushes, small vials of glue and paint by the unfinished model of the Wolfman with that frozen snarl on his face. I imagine him in bed unable to sleep, chewing on the head of his dinosaur while he’s thinking of ways to beat me to my magazine, which comes to the 16 Food Corral for me, and a hate rises in my throat for him. Then I imagine him reading my magazine with unwavering focus while the walls of his room thump violently over the yelling and crying of parents in their lycanthropic breaks, and I hate him all the more for that.
BEN
THEN THERE’S BEN. EVERY WEEK the old man comes by the house on his way to somewhere. He knows I’m waiting. Sometimes I’m outside and he sees me and waves from across the street, and the time it takes him to get to me lasts as long as a dream. He’s in no hurry. The world inches along with him.
I know he has something for me. He always does.
Sometimes, it’s little plastic cowboys with chaps flared and guns drawn. Coins with holes in the center from other countries with names I can’t pronounce. Old Louis L’Amour paperback Westerns with the colorful cover illustrations. He even gives me his entire stamp collection. I see his spotted, crinkled foolscap hands, holding this book with stamps from all around the world, and through his wire-rimmed glasses, I see the scuffed grey of his eyes as he drawls, I’m too old to finish it, son. You’ll have to do it for me.
My mom knows him from the soda fountain at the Gunning-Casteel Drug Store where she works. He comes and has his coffee and sandwich and chats with her. He sits like something out of another time, cross-legged in his baggy khakis with suspenders over a plain cotton shirt. On his head sits a well-worn wide-brimmed fedora that he never takes off. It’s his soft ruddy leathery face that draws me in. The face of a man who’s seen more good life than I think I ever will. A face that looks like the grandfather of my old black-and-white fantasy reel.
Finally, he’s on my porch smiling and I say, Hi Ben. He nods and says something about the heat and the days counted since the last rain. He even has a little book where he keeps the tally on the dry spell, a remnant from his old rancher days. He asks me to put out my hand and I do. And on it he places a hard, red gourd-like thing. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s a pomegranate, he says. He takes out his knife and pries it open and shows me the embedded seeds like drops of blood in a bowl of wax. I pick a few off the blade and they’re the richest, sweetest nuggets my mouth has ever tasted. Beaming with all the teeth he has left, he says he has a small orchard in his yard full of them. September sun has been good to them. He says, Come by sometime, son, I’ll give you more. Then he’s off. Seems like ten minutes later, I can still see him down the street,
shuffling like a patient tortoise on his way to lunch.
Where is Borneo? Where’s Luxembourg? The stamps in the stamp book seem to come from made-up lands. Fantasy places where people like Ben can come and go at will and have adventures that they keep hidden under their fedoras. Does he ride his pony there and chase after bandits and reap his reward in otherworldly fruit? Are these stamps taken from the letters of a lady-love who wanders the world for him? I’m thinking all this one day later that month when three of my buddies show up on their bikes and beckon me. I ride off with them like the posse in my Louis L’Amour.
One of them says, I know. Let’s go get some grenades. Grenades? What are you talking about, I ask. What grenades? They laugh and tell me to follow them to this place. We ride into an alleyway and park our bikes against the tumbleweeds and clamber over a wall into this lush open garden with grass so green it’s almost blue. There’s a clump of small trees, wide at the base, thick with pomegranates. Granadas, ese, my buddy says with a wink. We yank a bunch of the biggest ones off the low branches and shove them into our pockets and inside our shirts, some of them already bleeding their juice into our hands, and this is how we know we’re stealing. Then I hear the slap of a screen door and we turn tail for the wall and leap over it giggling and snorting like idiots. I look over my shoulder and see this bald-headed old geezer, shirtless and pale, waving his hands, feebly shouting. Goldurn punks! Git! Git out, you! Go on! You’re trespassin’! But we’re already ripping down the alley on our bikes, dropping loose pomegranates in our wake.
Later, we’re at the levee by the río digging our faces into the granadas, laughing at our escapade, going over it again and again, embellishing things here and there until it becomes the heroic exploit of our summer. Then I picture again that comical screaming old man in my head and I realize it’s Ben. Ben of the old fedora and the slow walk and the little gifts. And these are Ben’s pomegranates. I feel my face on the inside turning as red as the little seeds in my throat. I feel Borneo and the cowboys of Louis L’Amour slipping away. I feel a hole in my heart as wide as a coin, and then I throw up. The sickly, cloying taste of the pomegranates rises in my gullet and up they come. All my buddies shriek with laughter and add that one more crazy item to the exploits of the day.
I see Ben walking by again, but I won’t go out to see him. I won’t go and see what new thing he has for me today. He’s looking from across the street, hoping to see me step out on the porch and wave, but I won’t. I won’t do it. He walks on. He wipes his wire-rimmed glasses against his old plaid shirt and walks on.
OUR OTHER HOUSE
THESE WEEKENDS WHEN WE ARE little mocosos come and go like dreams, but encased inside of them are fainter, stranger sueños that make so little sense, we brush them off like the airy cotton from the cottonwoods of our old house. They start with Mom home alone with us and us watching Johnny Quest or playing with our cap pistols while she hangs the wash on the line outside. My father’s white work shirts puffing up like ghosts with the hot desert breeze. Suddenly, she gets a notion in the middle of the day and abruptly orders us to put on our shoes and herds us into the car. The Ford Galaxie is almost on empty, so there’s always a stop at the pump station where she buys fifty cents’ worth of regular. The whole way there, she won’t tell us where we’re going.
We’re just driving around, she says.
But she always winds up in that strange little ward, driving real slow down the same pleasant cul-de-sac, looking out at one particular house with people washing their cars or mowing their lawns or some kids playing on the sidewalk, racing the sprinklers back and forth. We ask her, What are we doing here, Mom. She says that she wants to see the true lives of real people, see the real house we’ll live in someday. This is her dream neighborhood, she says, but there’s nothing wistful in her voice about it, and I can’t see her eyes in the rear-view mirror, only her bangs draped over her brow like Natalie Wood in This Property Is Condemned. She leans forward in her seat to get a better view of the pretty bungalow with its well-tended lawn and ivy winding up the trellis on the porch, and we all lean forward too, but somehow we can’t see what she sees.
In these car dreams, I think about how different I would be if I lived in that house. I wonder if I’d be happier, if I’d like myself more. One time I think I see my other self standing at the window looking back at me. Another skinny brown kid in a checkered shirt, only not so skinny and not so brown and the sun catching some of the hazel in his eyes. Catching some other thing as well, some question or resentment or guardedness about something forbidden. Eyes that say don’t stop here.
Anyway, Mom drives by once, maybe twice, then turns to go home. We’re strangely silent all the way back, each of us in our own secret haze. I’m teasing back the vinyl from the armrest with thumb and forefinger, laying bare the foam stuffing underneath as the AM radio sputters out some oldie from my mother’s youth. It’s her youth I think we’re drifting on, the distillation of her own private hopes, now distant and residing in a cul-de-sac we’ll see only from our Galaxie. That’s almost us in the house there, with a greener lawn, a diorama of the family we could have been.
After a while, we stop going there. The weekends fill up with shopping sprees for school supplies and rides to my brothers’ junior league football games and my trumpet lessons. Our Dad’s Sundays open up, and when we’re not spending them at home with Mom and him, we’re picnicking in Ruidoso or driving to Carlsbad Caverns. In the years to come, though, I’ll head out on my own to find that cul-de-sac. I’ll cruise around countless times looking for that secret house. I won’t find it; even to this day, I can’t remember the street name. It’s an ill-fitting memory of a place that never was. But if I close my eyes and follow the crumbs of some old longing playing on the radio, I can almost dream myself back to the idyll of our other house, and to him, reflected at the window.
SATURDAY
LISTEN TO THAT. THAT’S JUÁREZ you hear. That is where we are once a month on Saturdays. Riding along la Avenida de las Américas with that crazed accordion erupting from the radios all around. Paleteros taking their smoke break on the curb. There’s the old cop who watches over our parked station wagon for a modest ten-dollar mordida from my dad. He’s got a gold tooth in his smile and duct tape around the handle of his gun. His armpits wet and ripe with his morning smell but it’s all a morning smell here. There’s the Centro Pronaf where we do our shopping, my mom filling her cart with things half the cost of those at our Piggly Wiggly. Plus the tortillas are always better here, chamacos. A short walk through the mercado, where the old woman sits on a stool hawking the leather belts in her leather hands, and the piñatas dangle from the ceiling like papier-mâché gods, and piles and piles of serapes and blankets amid black velvet paintings of Jesus and Pancho Villa and the Beatles. And the taquitos are fresh here. Sit outside and eat some with a Fanta while Dad throws a few centavos on the street to delight the urchins with feet hard as stone, and that little one looks like someone he remembers, maybe himself as a boy, and he gives him a half-dollar coin more. Poverty is obvious in Juárez; it’s out in the open, tugging on our sleeves, thronging around us for whatever surplus scraps of hope we’ve got. Now it’s time to see the barbers. My younger brother and I, and my youngest brother too, we’re all trying to cultivate styles that suit the time and we take pains to instruct the barbers how we want it cut, un poquito longer on the sides and the back, shorter on top, and can you make sideburns on us too like in those music shows on TV and the album covers of the bands we love, long hair is the way to go, por favor, and they nod like they understand, like they’re on our side, slapping their barber capes over us, spinning our chairs around so we don’t face the mirror, and then it’s all a chaos of clippers and trimmers and shears, our chins pushed into our sternums so all we see is our tufts wafting to the floor in clumps. We’re sobbing like fools when we finally see our scrawny bald heads in the pinche mirror, my father looking up from his Memín Pingüín comic book to find us wailing while
those perfidious barbers sweep the frazzle-ends of our yearning into a fuzzy little mound for the trash bin. Dad pays them for their trouble and appeases us with some Mexican Coke, but it’s scant comfort, we’re so disgusted at how four-sided we look, plus that one with the pompadour left nicks on my neck and even nipped my ear, but Dad salutes us ’cause we look like Ft. Bliss soldiers, making us bawl even more; the world is over as far as we’re concerned. That’s when Mom takes over. While my dad tanks up the station wagon for five bucks, she takes us by the hands and guides us just a few steps down the buckling walkway past the bony dog dozing under his halo of flies through the open door of a warehouse so we can behold in its dark metal swelter this astounding vision: a young man thin and shirtless, spearing a long hollow pole into a kind of furnace and taking out a glowing mass of molten red-orange light, hissing against the cooling air, pieces of it spattering on the cement floor like lava. Then he performs this magic: he blows into the pole and the glob swells as he spins it over a flame, shapes it with another metal rod into something unimaginable, shapes it into glass, it’s glass he’s breathing, crafting it into forms that begin to take on color and character; it’s a vase, then a panther, then a long lamp-like sculpture, wondrous and ghostly, this gleaming young Vulcan breathing structure into throbbing suns of incandescent glass. Now we’re not thinking haircuts or sodas or feeling anything but the lulling heat of this primeval forge where the most elegant fragile fires are blown into being. All the way home, on the slow bumper-to-dented-bumper drive over the bridge back to El Paso, as we shove chili-powdered chicharrones into our mouths, we marvel at the genius of Saturday, ay sábado, mi sábado, you took our hair and paid us back with a glimpse at how this beautiful messy world blazed when it was first created, might blaze again someday.
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