¿Y ahora quién eres? ¿Junior o Tavo Jr.?
WORLD GOES AWAY
I’M IN DISBELIEF. I’M AT a loss to explain how I got here.
It’s my first week as a sophomore, and instead of enjoying the afternoon watching TV and doing my homework at my leisure, I’m at the first reading of a play at my school. The Diary of Anne Frank. All these poor idiots sitting in a circle with me are wondering how they got here too, some of them pleased as punch, others with the same perplexed look that’s plastered on my face. We’re assembled in the auditorium, which also passes for the basketball court and gymnasium. Listening to our drama coach laying down the laws of daily rehearsal. Miss Griffing is a feisty West Texan, short and sturdy, with close-cropped hair and glasses, and she’s calmly setting forth the hours and days we’ll be working, and underscoring her expectations of us as actors. She’s grinning all smug and shit ’cause she knows some of us will defy these expectations, for which she’s got gallons of two-fisted fury saved up in her compact frame. For now, just her bearing is enough to keep us in line. All I’m thinking is, shit, my afternoons are shot to hell forever.
What’s worse is that now she has us holding hands and bowing our heads for prayer circle. She’s calling for Jesus to bless our production, assuring him that we’re only here to do his will, even though the play is about Jews in Nazi Europe. I’m confused and dismayed as this cycle of prayer goes on for a full fifteen minutes, with other students chiming in their amens and yes-fathers. If this is going to happen every time we meet for play practice, then I’m done. I’m already suffocating with all this sudden godliness, all these rules, all the hours wasted in a cavernous gym with this tough-ass teacher crying hallelujah. I don’t know how she managed to get me to agree to be in this show, but I’m shaking out of this obligation quick. I resolve to sit through this one session with as good an attitude as I can muster up but when it’s over, it’s over. I’m not coming back. Not even if I’m playing Peter Van Daan, one of the young leads in the play. I don’t care. Let them find someone else.
Finally, with everyone ready and worked up on Jesus, we take our seats in the circle as Miss Griffing passes out the scripts. She reminds us who’s playing what role and directs us to read loudly, with feeling and enunciation. That last word is new to me but it sounds pretty religious. We open the scripts and begin reading, and gradually with the first girl’s voice taking on the words of Anne Frank, the physics in the room begin to change. I feel the voice of this dark long-haired Mexican schoolgirl peel away the walls of the gym to reveal wartime Amsterdam, and then I see Anne herself huddled with her diary in the secret attic of her tragic story. Within the empty space of the circle, other voices around me lay down the vivid action of the play with passion, energy and conviction and then it’s my turn. Some impulse takes over and I’m not me anymore but Peter Van Daan aching for sunlight and a place of no fear and the love of a young girl. The words go in my eyes and come out my mouth with more heart than I thought I had, and in that moment, the school and the impossible classloads and the gangs that chase me on the way home and the Border Patrol and the tensions of home and my personal anxieties about who the fuck I am and all the lived experience that make my town this unspectacular, sporadically dangerous place simply go away. I am somewhere in the mind of a teenage girl who disappeared into the death camps, inhabiting her words like they’re the only world that matters. When we get to the end, our Anne is openly crying as a mournful hush falls over us. I am bewildered. I want to know how this happened, how we made the world vanish for these few hours of reading.
After we stand and hold hands one more time for an adjourning prayer, Miss Griffing comes over to me while I’m gathering up my homework and getting ready to leave. She obviously senses my confusion. With my eyes on the script, I want to tell her it’s a miracle, this play is a miracle, how it made all the people and things, all my cares and worries of my world, evaporate to nothing.
But she beats me to it, saying, Well. You’re still here.
I look at her. I want to ask what she means.
She smiles that smug smile and goes to switch off the gymnasium lights, and I walk home in the dark. But I’ll be back, script in hand, to find my heart again.
BAD BLOOD
HE’S THREE YEARS YOUNGER, BUT don’t call him kid brother. It’s late. Ten o’clock. My mother, she’s crying, wailing to beat the band. My dad is sitting mopey and useless in his easy chair. What’s wrong, I ask. He’s run away from home, they say. He left because of what I said. I didn’t say shit. But apparently, I did. I’m being quoted back word for word. Words like, Fool, what were you thinking. Words like, When are you gonna grow up. Words in Spanish like pendejo and cabrón. All that just for a traffic ticket he got in the family sedan. And now he’s gone. Thirteen years old and gone. So now it’s up to me to find him. My father puts on his jacket, gets the keys and out we go.
He can’t be far. But maybe he is. I scan around for anything that moves. Old borrachos waiting by their cars to sober up. The stray dogs in their wanton quest for anything worth a raised leg. The sign on the storefront reads Bolt and Screw. That’s what I’d like to do right now. But you know what? I brought this on myself.
Is that him there? With those other two little punks, hopscotching shadows and sucking on cheap cigarettes? I say, Pull over, and my old man does and stays in the car while I jump out and dash across the street straight for them. They break off in all directions, my brother sprinting behind an old grocery store long shut down and boarded up. I head him off on the other side and find him dangling from a chain-link fence, snared in the coils of barbed wire lining the top. Every move he makes puts the rooster tips on his back, his legs, his face. I yell at him to hold still and I’ll help him get free, but he snarls something mean and tries to smash me in the face. I disentangle him and drag him back to the car by the scruff of his jeans jacket, yelling at him about Mom and what a dope he is and other incoherent crap. My dad sits there silently driving us back.
When we get home sometime around two a.m., my mom is ironing shirts, my father’s shirts for work. She’d stopped crying sometime while we were gone, but she starts all over again when she sees the nicks on his face and arms. She says, Did you hurt him? I say, No, but what are you doing with those shirts? Your father needs them, she says. I turn to my brother and tell him to apologize for scaring our mother by running away from home. Instead, his face splits almost in half as he unloads on me the ripest angriest shit I’ve ever heard. Motherfucker. I hate you. I hate your fuckin ass. You’re no brother to me. I say, You don’t mean that. He says, I mean every word. You’re nothing to me. I hate you, I’m done with your fuckin arrogant shit. I’m stunned at the force of his rage, all that invective streaming out of his mouth with such conviction. I tell him I love him. I say, I’m doing this for you, you jerk. But he says, Don’t. Don’t do me any favors. Just get the fuck out of my face. He’s crying the whole time and I am too, if I’m honest. What have I done? Who put me in charge of my own kid brother? How am I gonna get him back? I reach for him and he spits, Touch me and I’ll kill you, fucker. I wish you dead, so help me God! Get outta my face! Get outta my life! Fuck the fuck off! He stalks off on legs stiff with loathing to his room, where he proceeds to pound his fists through the walls and destroy his model airplane collection. I have specks of his blood on my fingers. My dad wipes a paw across his tired face and goes to his own room. My mother takes up her iron and presses steam into another shirt. The hoarse bilious shouting continues to barrel through the walls straight into my dreams. I’m standing there, looking down at those little black specks thinking Jesus, let this day end, let it burn itself out, tomorrow will be different, tomorrow will see us through. Then I realize it’s already tomorrow. This is tomorrow, the first morning in what will be a decade of dead glances, bitter stalemates and bad blood.
PENITENTE
THERE HE GOES. EVERY MORNING he passes by our house, walking that strange halting walk of the beaten-down t
o the Little Flower Church up the street. His back so bent he can see his old man shoes with every step. My mother tells me he volunteers at the church when he’s not praying long hours. He polishes the saints, dusts the pews with a rag, sweeps and mops the floors, and at dusk hobbles back to his mom’s house, from which he’s apparently never moved out. In a few years, this penitente will be dead of complications from the injuries sustained at the plant where he worked and his obituary will pass unnoticed by most of the people who knew him.
Years ago, we were inseparable buds. Those were the times when I was still lost inside myself, as most acne-ridden teens are. I thought I needed some guidance and I thought he offered it. Two years older and two inches taller, he started coming around the house, mainly to catch a glimpse of my sister, who completely ignored him. It didn’t stop him from leering at her whenever she went by. But I didn’t care. I thought he was funny and wise about the ways of girls, and that wisdom was a faculty I profoundly lacked.
He believed disco was invented for him. He believed the music and the clubs and the culture of disco would get him laid for years. He bought piles of tight-in-the-crotch pleated slacks and slick rayon shirts with gaudy splashes of color. We’d sit in his room with the door closed and he would try on each of his shirts and make some disco moves to show how they draped and showed off his chest, and then he would brag about the size of his dick and his prowess with women. I never saw him with any girl, but I believed him because he was beautiful.
The one irritating thing about him, though, was the way he razzed me. He seemed to enjoy poking shit at me every chance he got, and he found my taste in music laughable, which let’s face it, it was. Jim Croce and the Grassroots were my idea of hip. He also got a real charge out of my name, which he took through so many permutations until he settled on Hor, as in Hortavio. Hey Hor, he would say. You gotta stay out of the sun, ese. You want chicks to think you’re black or what? I didn’t know how to stand up to that shit back then. I told myself he didn’t mean any of it. It was all for laughs.
He really fucked with me about my clothes, too. He said they were cheap. Cheap cotton, he said. His shirts were fine, silky to the touch. Feel, Hor, he said, feel the quality. The problem was quality didn’t breathe. Five minutes on the dance floor and he was soaked. Still, to retain the drape of the fabric, he eschewed washing them, and sending them to the cleaners was out of the question. Who had the feria for that? Instead, he’d douse them in cologne and hang them in his closet to dry. Whenever we went out to the dances, he reeked of English Leather and stale sweat.
He credited these shirts with getting him a girlfriend. And through his intercession, I was introduced to her friend, who, in fact, became the first real girlfriend I ever had. We partnered a lot on double dates. We strolled along the church bazaars, went to the local dances. We made out on carnival rides at Ascarate Park and stamped hickeys on each other’s necks. He showed us how to make the most of our Friday nights. Plus, he taught me how to do the hustle, which I practiced on the dancefloor of my bedroom every night, spinning like God on my axis.
That girlfriend dumped him, though, and he took it real bad. He called her all kinds of names and swore she’d phone him back for mercy, but mostly he just pined away, all flat-tire faced and blue. I remember him turning up the radio on that sad Chi-Lites song while he cried about how he missed her. So I guess he taught me about that shit, too.
I don’t know how long we hung out, maybe hardly a year, but one day I was just done with him. I found him ridiculous. I found him insulting. I got tired of being called Hor. Every time he came by, I told my mother to say I wasn’t there. But he wouldn’t take the hint. He’d constantly phone me. He’d walk by my house and shoot his gaze through the gaps in the curtain. He got to be so annoying that one night I wished to God that he’d make him disappear from my life. It didn’t matter that he was harmless. I didn’t care that he was lonely and insecure. God, I said, do something about him. Days later, school started up and I didn’t see him. For months. Then years. Anywhere. He was gone.
Decades came and went and so did I. All the lessons of my errant teens filed under So What. I’m someone else now and the town is another town to me, and “The Hustle” is an oldie with no air play. But there he goes, my inseparable bud, a sad misshapen penitent married to God’s little house in the desert. I’m at a loss to understand. I don’t believe in God, I’m not sure I ever did, so how can prayers forged in a young, unfinished heart lead to this? And how is it that now the penitent walking with his eyes on his old man shoes is me?
THE QUINCE
THIS IS MY FIRST QUINCEAÑERA. I have my tuxedo on with the frilly pink shirt and the oversize cufflinks. I have my shiny rented black shoes. And the boutonniere on my lapel is the same white as the dress of the honored girl.
The chambelanes are tuxed out like me and the damas are matched in their bright pink empire-waist gowns that run all the way down to the heels. Corsages on their wrists. I’m the only one wearing glasses. Pimply and fuzzy on the upper lip. We’re all lined up behind the quinceañera and her beau, marching in procession to the altar where we fan out and take our places in the pews.
Everyone is looking at the priest as he gives his blessing to this fifteen-year-old who I know for a fact has been doing it with this white dude war vet in his Chevy Nova whenever they get the chance. My eyes, though, are on her cousin, who’s kinda been hitting on me the whole time. At the salón where we practiced our procession the night before, she came to me and nobody else and asked me to help her carry the decorations in from her car. She looks a little like Natalie Wood in West Side Story, except her skin really is brown. A shade of brown that knocks me out. Later at the pot luck, she brought me a paper plate of mini-flautas and frijoles, for me, no one else but me, ’cause I was setting up the speakers for the deejay in the backyard. She smiled like Maria when she first sees Tony and asked me if it’s okay if she got me a 7-Up ’cause they’re all out of Coke. Usually, I can’t stand 7-Up, but that night it was the elixir of the goddess.
At the Mass, I see her in the pew, her fine dress hiked way up her thigh. Her hair all done up with some kind of flower in it. She smiles when the quince receives her special Bible from the priest, then turns to me, to me alone, and extends the slightest, most imperceptible nod, as if she’s saying yes to all the implausible fancies building up in my throat like a song. It’s almost not even a nod, but because I notice it, I know it’s meant for me.
We arrive at the salón, which is really VFW Post 8782. Everything decorated for the baile. Here they dance amid the draping streamers to the music of some cover band that has to know all the current hits in addition to the basic playlist of rancheras and cumbias that the adults expect. Fathers and uncles will get smashed and old women will tend to the little ones, while the older brats wander around trying to look down the damas’ necklines. The chambelanes loosen their ties and some their cummerbunds to make room for the huge intake of beer and cake to come. I’m not drinking at all, partly because I’m not of legal age, but mostly because I’m keeping it together for the cousin. Soon as the lights dim and the slow number comes on, I’m taking her on the floor.
There it goes. “Adoro.” Best make-out song ever. The couples swarm the dance floor and clutch each other tightly and I bee-line it to the cousin sitting there with her family. She turns and gives me that Natalie Wood smile like she’s been expecting me the whole night.
Hey there, Mr. 7-Up. I was looking for you.
Yeah?
Can I ask you for a favor?
Anything.
Do you mind asking my sister to dance? She’s a little bit shy but she really likes to dance.
Where is she?
She points out the sullen girl three chairs down with a strand of her hair in her mouth, drawing smiley faces in the drink rings on the table with her finger. She’s about my age, but punier and darker-haired. I can tell she knows she’s being talked about.
Okay, but I was thinking—
Puro gentleman. Ándale, before the song ends.
I nod a not so imperceptible nod and navigate through the tangle of metal folding chairs to ask her. She doesn’t even look up, only shrugs and heads for the floor. I catch the glint of a metal brace on one of her legs. I notice that the shoe on the other foot is thicker by two inches. Polio, I’m guessing. She stands mute in the middle of all these couples swaying to the honey tempo of “Adoro,” daring me to beat it out the door. I’m thinking all kinds of things I can’t express, one of them being that I should, indeed, beat it out the door and catch a ride home before anyone sees me dancing with a cripple. But if Natalie Wood wants a favor that bad, okay. I walk up and take her sister’s thin bony hand in mine and lay the other on her waist, and just like that, we’re dancing. Or maybe just bobbing from side to side, but at least it’s on the beat. I’m looking to see if Natalie Wood is watching, but she’s not at her table. She’s in the arms of this older guy with a major ’fro, a good dancer too, and he’s got her real close and laughing. Now I know what the flirting was all about. This sister of hers, who won’t even look at me. I smell the perfume on her, way overdone, but nice. She’s chewing gum too, probably for her breath. Her small chest brushes once against the ruffles of my shirt, causing her eyes to flit timidly from blank space to blank space. She’s dark like her sister, but not so dark I can’t see her blush. I feel it in the warmth of her hand too, which is relaxing knuckle by knuckle into mine. I’m thinking this ain’t so bad. I’m thinking she’d be prettier if she didn’t have to be so tough, a hardass bitch in a bitch world. I’m thinking all kinds of things different from the ones I thought before, like am I the first one she’s danced with tonight and does that make a difference, like how strange that this big shoe with the triple-sole is forcing us off the beat, and like how suddenly we land in that song between the song that touches on sadness and longing and the strange erotic charge of loneliness that only the unwanted feel.
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