THE MEXICAN I NEEDED
HERB ALPERT IS THE MOST beautiful Mexican I have ever seen. This is what I believe in 1960-something. My mom has a robust collection of albums by this man and when she plays them, the house seems to break into that sunny Tijuana Brass smile. We’re not sure how she manages to afford so many of them. But there they are. The Lonely Bull. Going Places. Casino Royale. What Now My Love. And of course, that wet dream of every boy across the country, Whipped Cream and Other Delights. While the cheery horn plays through our hi-fi console, I’m all over that naked girl on the album cover. Sitting in a cake with cream covering all her strategic parts, she’s eyeing me as she licks a dollop of the risings in my own body off her finger. And yet, in the end, it’s Herb Alpert himself who intrigues me.
I know the songs are ridiculous, even at my age. Rock is maturing into a social movement all around us and grabbing all the cool in the world, which makes these jaunty tunes like “Mexican Shuffle,” “Tijuana Taxi” and “Surfin’ Señorita” seem as mild and middle-brow as his renditions of “Love Potion No. 9” and “Walk, Don’t Run.” After all, it’s our parents’ music. But something about that well-kempt man and his shiny trumpet draws me in. He’s so easygoing and smooth, the hair on his forehead angled like a beret, his smile roguish and sly ’cause he’s got that girl on his arm who can’t take her eyes off him. Mom says, Este hombre es guapísimo, fanning herself with her open hand to prove it. But I need no corroboration.
I study his songs, the corny ones like “Spanish Flea” and the more sentimental numbers like “Marching Thru Madrid,” trying to decode in the music that special quality that makes him so damn suave. One song in particular feels more Mexican than anything on the Juárez radio stations my dad prefers. For me, “The Green Leaves of Summer” bares the essential soul of that ancient país across the río. Those percussive pulses of Mexico, it’s gotta be the real deal, right? It has to be, if it’s stirring up the Mexican in me.
I play the albums end to end until I can see myself playing his golden horn. But to be him I gotta have a trumpet. Where am I gonna get one? How in this crummy corner of El Paso is a ten-year-old brown dreamer gonna find a shiny trumpet like the one in Herb Alpert’s hands? I beg Mom to get me one, but she just laughs. Maybe when you’re older. I need it now, though, I want to be cool now.
So I make my own. On a shoebox lid, I draw the outline of a trumpet. I cut it out, meticulously shaping the valves, the curve of the bell and the intricate mouthpiece. I color it in yellow crayon, which is as close to gold as I get. When it’s done, it doesn’t seem like much. It looks smaller than the one on the album covers and none of the pistons move, but it fits in my hands, which is all that counts. Just add music. When noone is home, I set the needle on “The Lonely Bull,” and when it starts, I’m breathing notes into that trumpet with such ease, it’s like the air for that music was always in me. Herb Alpert is in my lungs.
I play “Tangerine,” “Blue Sunday,” “Zorba the Greek,” and “Struttin’ With Maria” in the living room as I lead the band in one number after another. The mouthpiece gets moist and crumbly from my spit, but I don’t care. I’m coasting on kid euphoria, acting out a fantasy that carries me out of this grey little house in the desert to zones that throb in the grooves of those records. My own 33 rpm rabbit hole that nobody knows about.
Until they do. My kid brothers find my shoebox trumpet stashed under the bed. Except that instead of being disgusted, they’re actually intrigued. Carnal mayor has a new bag and it looks kinda fun. Later, when we’re older and our hair is longer, when we discard our baby dreams for dreams of rock and roll, we fashion guitars out of cardboard boxes and drum kits out of empty ice cream canisters from the soda fountain where Mom works to jam along with CCR, the Grassroots, Steppenwolf and Santana.
That’s the thing about our home. Fantasy was indulged. I wouldn’t have dreamed if it hadn’t been. My dad tolerated music in our house and Mom encouraged it, and more than once, I caught them smiling in on my performance to “Spanish Flea,” even if it came out of a fake cardboard trumpet with a crayoned-on mouthpiece. Not one of us ever learned music. Not one of us ever played an instrument. Like it mattered. One day, thirty years later, someone tells me Herb Alpert is actually of Ukrainian and Romanian extraction. But what do I care? To me, he’ll always be the Mexican I needed for dreaming.
LA MIGRA
THAT’S WHAT WE CALL THEM. That’s how I have always known them. La migra is a derogatory term, but we don’t even think of it like that. It’s just what they are. Ever since we moved into the Lower Valley, the green and white cruisers of the Border Patrol have been everyday fixtures in our lives.
In the early days, they are older guys who take their jobs in stride. They ride on patrol like hired cowboys roping in the errant dogies. Or maybe more like Texas Rangers patrolling the wild frontier. They know a large portion of the migrants will slip through their net, and they know many of those they catch will be back through the fence in a matter of days. They’re philosophical about their mission. What’s the harm in a few mojados coming through? Don’t we need the manpower anyway?
Then in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there’s a new breed of officer. Stern all-American types, ex-soldiers who got their asses kicked in the jungles of Vietnam and now look to settle that score with these wetbacks and their smuggled maryjane. They take the job seriously, consider themselves a cut above the average city cop. What they do is harder and makes a bigger difference in the complicated world of la frontera. That’s my take on them, anyway.
I start noticing something else in the early ’70s, though. Maybe it was always there and I just didn’t see it, or maybe it’s a result of the recession and the lack of good-paying jobs. Suddenly there are more Chicanos manning the vans and cruisers. The iron in the faces, the edge in the eyes, it’s all the same, only now the faces and eyes are brown. The badges say Marquez, Armendariz, Lujan. Some are even rougher than their Anglo counterparts. It doesn’t matter that their parents probably came over the same river with the same intention; one generation is all it takes to keep the past and the legacy of their migration at bay. They’re American now and this is how they show it.
We’re used to them, how they slow down whenever we’re outside drinking Cokes by our bikes. The officer in his Aviator sunglasses looks us over, scouring our skinny bodies for the one thing that marks us as foreign. Kino and I point to each other and mouth the words: take him, take him. My sister takes exception, though. She thinks the border cop is checking her out, and she’s probably right. But the fact that he’s even scrutinizing us this closely is disturbing. His look lingers just long enough to make us feel like strangers to ourselves. All the mojaditos that we generally scowl at when we spy them tramping restlessly past our house; he’s consciously connecting them to us. We’re nothing like them, we’ve conditioned ourselves to say. We’re legal, born on this side. But the border cop with his steady gaze is telling us with his look that the distinction is very thin. Thin as the lenses on his Aviators. Thin as a line on a map.
This day I am waiting for the bus to take me downtown to see a movie. The bus stop is just across the street from my house. The Border Patrol comes up the street and stops right at the curb. It’s that Mexican officer again and he’s wearing the same reflective shades. His partner is this white guy who looks like he’s been badly sunburned. Both of them are giving me a once-over that makes me nervous. It’s the Mexican who talks to me.
You seen anyone go by here lately?
No.
Anyone wearing a red tee?
No.
You’re wearing a red tee.
I look down at myself and look at the red tee-shirt with the lettering of some band I used to think was bitchen.
Where you from, kid, he asks.
Here.
Where.
America.
Where do you live?
Right there. I point at my house.
What’s the address?
Then he does something unexpected. He removes his shades and asks me, ¿Hablas español?
Now I’m trapped. I want to say no, even if it’s a lie. ’Cause to admit that I speak Spanish would put me in the other guy’s red tee. Just like that, he’s made me ashamed of my original tongue, forced me to deny my father’s language and thereby deny my father and his fathers before him. And the crazy thing about it is this man is using that very same Spanish against me. There’s only one thing I can say.
A little.
¿Quieres pasar tus días allí?
What?
You know what I said.
No sir.
He smirks at my lie and looks me right in the face. Do you want to spend your days over there?
I’m an American, sir.
Barely. Where you going?
The movies.
In my peripheral vision, I sense my mom at the front door and the white officer nudges his partner, who puts on his Aviators and tells me to keep an eye out for a mojado with a red tee-shirt. Which is what I see reflected in the lenses.
If you spot him, you call us, okay?
These guys are the butts of our jokes. Now they have me shaking all over. They say, Have a good day and drive on down the street. The bus comes right after they leave and I go to my James Bond double bill at the Palace Theatre downtown, and the whole time I’m watching the screen, I am hating these men and thanking them at the same time. Because they’re right. I am the guy in the red tee. I am him. And he is me.
THE LITTLE WOODS
ALL THE BLISSFUL PLACES HARBOR danger. They bring you to heights you’ll never experience anywhere else, but then they teach you other things, too. Things you’ll learn later anyway, but the way you learn them here becomes a sickness you carry the rest of your life. This virus called knowledge.
We’re riding there now. My brothers and me and Marcos and Kino. Watch us tearing through the streets of Cedar Grove on our bikes like runaways. Shirts billowing behind us like superhero capes. A man watering his lawn looks at us and wishes he was ten years old, too. If he only knew where we’re going. But he wasn’t there under the willow tree at Kino’s house when Kino told us about this secret place he heard of. He called it “the little woods,” and that was enough to captivate us, thrill us, charge us with the duty to seek it out. Our own summer Shangri-La.
We get to the end of the paved road where St. Paul’s church sits like one of God’s forgotten outposts and just beyond that, we see it. The little woods. We pull up right to the edge of it and look down at this dense little clump of stubby trees and scrub brush submerged in a wide irrigation channel. It doesn’t seem like much from this vantage, but once we descend into the trails winding up and around all the trees and hills and sand pits, the woods seem to go on forever. ¡Chingao! ¡Puta verga! It’s perfect! It’s our new private bike course where we can speed through the length of the woods and find air and fall in the bushes and skin our knees and laugh and scream and cuss like pirates and ride the high of our crazy blood till we drop! And after that we ride some more!
Sitting in one of the myriad sagebrush hollows that we find all over this scrappy desert eden, panting like crazy dogs, the sun painting the pits of our tee-shirts with sweat, we tell the happy lies that all boys tell each other when they feel their lives throbbing with possibility. Who’s got the bigger dick. Who saw their sister in the shower. Who was chased by a gang and almost got beat up. Who has seen the strippers at the Martinique Club. We promise that next time, someone brings cigarettes. The sun is stretching shadows to remind us it’s time to go home, but we’re coming back for sure. Tomorrow for sure. We straddle our bikes, and then one of us, my littlest brother, I think, finds something weird thrown back under the tumbleweeds. It’s a long white wad of cotton and there’s charred blood on it. We think it’s blood. Strange, ese. What could it mean? What happened here? There’s a couple of empty Coors bottles too. Then we come upon this little elastic thing half-caked in dirt. I pick it up and show it to the others. What is this? It’s a rubber, Marcos says. A what? What’s that? What’s it for? Marcos turns pale and all the rest of us follow suit as I fling the damned thing back into the bushes. We know what it’s for.
Next day we coast into the little woods again, blasting through the afternoon like happy demons. We trash our bikes a couple times, but they’re hardy and can stand up to it. We have a silent compact not to ride near that dirty little hollow and that makes it a great day.
Then some time later, at the summit of July, when the heat is so unbearable the sky itself is blanched and sere, everyone goes for a swim at the community pool. But I stay home. I’m writing stupid poems about stupid things that I think are deep but are really someone else’s insights put through the sieve of my stupid mind. I want to ride out to the little woods by myself. To suck up the specialness of that grove all by myself. So I go.
I pedal over the shadow of the cross on the steeple of St. Paul’s and roll down into the obstacle course that we’ve made of the little woods. I see more tire treads on the course, which means that other kids have found our secret place. Maybe it was their secret to begin with and we invaded it. For now, it’s all mine. Riding and braking and soaring over the hills and bumping over logs and snaking through the bristling weeds and dusty leaves of scrub oak and manzanita, I feel the meter of my real poem pounding through the handlebars, all boyhood and body heat. Panting hard, I stop my bike to earn the moment in stillness.
That’s when I see them. He’s hunched over her, with his pants and underwear in a gnarl around his knees, his bare buttocks clenching and unclenching in rhythm. And her brown legs are splayed flat and motionless, like she’s dead. Her hands are clamped onto the slender trunks of brush directly over her. Nothing under them but dirt. They are doing it in the dirt. He’s making grunts and noises that sound like Spanish underwater. And she’s repeating ay, ay, ay, ay . . . until she says, Cuidado, pendejo and slaps him hard on the shoulder. He laughs and adjusts his position and settles into her again with a groan. But she sees me without even looking in my direction and immediately throws him aside, covering her breasts as she stands directly in my path. I pedal down past her to get away, but she screams something that I can’t make out and spits at me. The words miss but the spit lands right on my face. I ride all the way home and sit in my room until I realize I want to take a bath. My nakedness in the tub reminds me of them and I feel ugly. So dumb and ugly.
Over the rest of the summer and the summer to come, we go back to the little woods. We find more condoms and tampons amid the weeds and sometimes soiled underwear and sometimes needles and cotton balls. We see two guys sitting around a clump of beer cans smoking mota. They look at us with eyes full of dull hazard. We see a group of people, four or five, changing clothes silent as thieves and Kino says they must be mojados hiding from la migra. All this we can live with. What we can’t bear are the other kids that are using our little woods for their own adventures. For one thing, they’re better at maneuvering their bikes through the trails than we ever were. Then my mom hears that some girl was raped there one night and makes us swear never to go again. That’s the end of the little woods for us.
When the junior high school is built, the property is just a stone’s throw away from the little woods. I’m an eighth grader spending the lunch hour with my friends the Rodela twins playing chase through my old stomping ground, running and dodging and squealing with joy and for a while my childhood treasure is restored, but when one Rodela lobs a large rock at the other and smashes him badly in the face, cleaving wide his forehead with blood, we get in trouble and the principal commands us to stay on school grounds. One of you is gonna get himself killed out there, he drawls. For the rest of the year, I see the little woods through the chain link fence of the schoolyard.
I don’t know when it happened. It must have been in my senior year, maybe later. Maybe it happened after I left for college. The little
woods were burned, bulldozed over and covered with landfill. St. Paul’s was renovated and its parking lot enlarged, the junior high school remodeled and added to, and the space where the little woods used to be is now an unremarkable stretch of barren real estate. There’s nothing there to tell lies about. Nothing of ourselves and the hardscrabble world hidden in the weeds. Just a dried tract in the desert with an almost imperceptible depression, like a grave.
THE COTTON
I GO INTO THE COTTON. When the world is too much and I can’t take the yelling in the house, I go into the cotton fields and ponder. There’s one three-acre lot right over the wall in our backyard and another across the street on the right flank of our house, the last agricultural holdouts in our modest working-class subdivision by the river, and in a few years they won’t be there at all. It’ll be all ugly little houses like ours. But in this phase of my childhood, these fields are a real and steady comfort in my life, especially when the crop is tall and bristling with cotton blossoms.
We’re playing hide-and-go-seek in the waning rose of dusk. My brother is counting backwards to one with his head bowed against the front door of our chante. Everyone scatters. Someone hides behind the juniper bush. Someone hides under the old rusty Opel with the weeds growing through the floorboards. Someone crawls into the big pipe in the drainage ditch with the crayfish. I go into the cotton. The stalks are four feet high, the green leaves as stout as the burgeoning bolls of white fiber. I run through the narrow ruts between the rows until I’m twenty feet in and kneel on the cold, caked earth feeling the pointy leaves against the back of my neck. I’m panting with the thrill of my hiding place, and to hear the countdown to “ready or not,” I hold my breath for a second and listen. In that stillness, I begin to hear sharper, shallower panting coming from behind me. Slowly, I turn my head and see a girl crouched in the bower of the same rut. She’s dark as an Indian, her black hair braided and pinned around her head like a crown, and she’s clutching close to her chest a mesh tote bag. Soaking wet in her blouse and cut-offs, her feet shod with muddy canvas sneakers, she keeps silent and immobile, like she’s growing out of the ground with the cotton. Her eyes fix on mine and I realize I’m in her hiding place. But she’s in mine too. We’re cowering in the same lair, but for different reasons. I’m hiding for fun. She’s hiding for her life. The fugitive dullness in her face, the animal lurch, the heat of her blood leaching into the air around us tell me: you are the world and I dread you. My name is being shouted from a hundred miles away. My brothers and my friends are calling me back to base, but I’m hearing only her labored breathing and the buzz of drowsy bees.
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