LA MARISCAL
WE SHOOT OUR MORTARBOARDS HIGH up in the air, pose for the Instamatics with our parents, bounce around some parties in the area and now it’s time for whores. ’Cause we’re eighteen, legal and free, our lives fully ours to blow, and yeah, some beer and mota for the jubilation, spinning the world with the flat of our hands, making the day bum-rush itself into night, four maniacs hanging out of our cars, waving and screaming and cheering like guerrillas at the end of a war. We stop at my house for some of Mom’s caldo de pollo to steady the floor, give us pause. My mom pours us each a steaming bowl of laughter with some of that Mexican Coke and, bless her gracious heart, looks past our inebriation. We’re not that drunk anyway; we just act like that to spur the giddiness on. While we slurp our caldo we talk about the school year, the good times and the shitty, the pretty girls we’ll never see again, the damn bullies we’ll never have to dodge, the courses we’ll have nightmares about no more. My mom is right there, beaming through it all, but when she leaves, one of us says, Let’s go. Go where? You know where. Vato, you mean Juaritos? I mean, La Mariscal. What for? You know what for. You serious? Serious as fuck. I don’t know. C’mon, everybody goes, it’s a rite of passage. You guys wanna? I will if you will. I will if you will. All these wills being passed around the table, not a single won’t. So I tell Mom, we’re driving over to Juárez. She says, Are you sure? We’ll be okay. Be careful, mijo. We’ll be all right. We’re fucking heroes tonight, Mom, I wanna say. We own this night.
We stop at the drug store, pick up a packet of rubbers and pile back into the car. We try one on to see how they fit and it’s the funniest shit we’ve ever seen. It don’t work if it ain’t hard. The drive over the Bridge of the Americas is swift and easy, no hassle, no waiting, and soon, we’re in the bar district near where we wanna go. We pay an attendant ten bucks to park our car and keep it safe for us, and we head into the first club. The lights are strobing to the pounding disco beat. The drinks are cheap, sweet and strong. The bartenders are short and dark and they don’t smile. We overtip but they don’t seem impressed. Disgusted, in fact. But they swipe the Lincolns off the bar just the same. The girls sitting in a booth at the back, talking Spanish and smoking like sailors, they’re mighty cute, their short skirts showing off their sturdy legs. They don’t want shit to do with us, though. One of us tries to buy them some frou-frou drinks, but they shift their bodies away and draw their hair over their faces, while one of them sneers, No te metas donde no te llaman, pinche gringo. Hey, we say, we ain’t no gringos. We’re Mexicans like you! Without missing a beat, the bartender takes our drinks off the bar and says, Buenas noches, señores. Fuck you all, we cry and stagger out full of the bluster of the moment into the searing Juárez night. Gringos. Where do they get off? ¡Somos como ustedes! All of you and us, we’re the same people! Just ’cause we’re born over there, that don’t mean shit! Cars grind along the narrow streets, every other one a crummy taxi jammed with more besotted graduates. We look at each other and one of us says, Time for La Mariscal. Now? Now. Are you sure? Why not? Are we ready? We got rubbers, don’t we? There’s a man in a black cowboy hat holding a guitarrón standing outside a bar and I ask him for directions to La Calle Mariscal. Por allá. That way? Yes. That way. So that way nos vamos.
We turn a corner into a wide lane closed off to traffic and walk along the broken sidewalk toward the clubs and storefronts. The streetlights are burned out and it’s hard to see. We are getting pumped up for this. Or maybe we think are. We’re tittering like eighth graders on a field trip, making jokes and flashing the condoms to passing drunks. A man in a guayabera with his hair slicked back sits outside a door smoking Virginia Slims and through the doorway we see some women talking. We ask, ¿Cuánto por la hora? But he doesn’t answer. Maybe he thinks we don’t mean it, and maybe he’s right. We pass another stoop with an immense woman in the tightest short dress I’ve ever seen and again we ask how much? Without looking at any of us, she says in her broken English, how much you want, and grabs her own monstrous tit. We crack up like it’s the punch line to some inside joke and back away, but already I feel my teeth chattering. At the next door, there is no door, but a red dirty curtain on a curtain rod. A man in a bow tie and dinner jacket comes out, a baseball bat in his right hand, and he’s no dilly-dally. You want girls, muchachos, I got girls here, come, I got many girls for you. He keeps waving us over, the bat hid behind his leg, and his grin looks more like a grimace. We’re already mumbling no thank you, no thank you, but the man feels no sinew in our words. He takes one of us by the arm, it could be me, it could be all of us at once, and pulls us toward the greasy curtain. With a magician’s flourish, he draws it back to show us a garishly lit room with a large poster of Elvis, the words “Love Me Tender” inscribed at the bottom. Then a bed presents itself to us and dancing on it like a stripper is a naked young girl, she might be twelve, she might be our kid sister, and she looks tired and high and probably fucked into a stupor. The man says, Very clean, muchachos, she do anything for you, anything. We’re shaking our heads, feeling like it’s time to go home, but also feeling, to our disbelief, to our dismay, to our bitter shame, a little hard. I tell the man, We’re just looking, thank you. The man yanks the curtain shut, and says, Cabrones gringos turistas. Always just looking, ¿verdad? Pues, que se vayan a la chingada, pinches babosos. Don’t call us that, we’re solid Mexicanos, one of us protests. The man raises the bat like he’s looking for an inside slider and hisses through his gold teeth, your padres are Mexicanos, but you, you are nothing but gringos to me! ¡Lárgense!
For a full hour, we wander around trying to figure out where we left the car. By the time we find it and pay the attendant, one of us has thrown up my mom’s caldo de pollo and another has decided to marry his girlfriend instead of trooping off to college. We count our measly dollars and somberly drive over the river back to where we’re heroes. Only we’re no heroes and we never owned the night. The night, in fact, owned us. She’s the true whore slipping off our assumptions like a pair of dirty shorts and dancing on the condoms of our sweet American life for whatever it’s worth.
TUMBLE-DOWN
I’M A YEAR INTO COLLEGE, home for the summer. One of those blistering late afternoons that turn us into stupefied lizards. The Brady Bunch is already into daytime reruns. I’m wondering what guys see in Marcia Brady. Her vaunted purity, her flyaway hair, maybe the idea of a sanctified sister keeping all the horny boys in check. Which I tell myself is not me. By chance, I glance out the window at the girl standing on the corner like she’s waiting for Rhett Butler. Her black hair and umber skin stand out against the frilly white dress, high heels and white ankle socks and, oh yes, a white parasol trimmed with lace. She’s looking like she’s missed the last train to the ball. I step outside, and when she smiles at me, I recognize her. We were in fifth grade together, we went to the same high school, we have each other’s names on the burnt flat of our tongues. Because I want to help, I offer her a ride. She needs to go to this church. We go to this church. There’s some kind of wedding going on. I see the limo parked out front, decked with white streamers and white balloons. I wait in the car while she goes in. She’s gone less than two minutes, then she comes back. He’s in there, all right. We’ll wait for this wedding to be done, then she’ll see him. She tries to make small talk about how much she loves going with him to Elephant Butte Dam. She laughs about how as a little girl, she thought there were elephants in Elephant Butte Dam but now that she knows there aren’t, she’s so . . . It is such . . . She can’t finish what she says. She’s gnawing at her fake nails. Her dress is drawn up to her thighs. I feel myself getting hard. All of a sudden, we’re making out. I don’t know how it happens, but there we are, kissing and feeling each other up. Her skin is so brown it’s almost black. I feel her up right in the middle of this blazing hot church parking lot, this girl I’ve known since the fifth grade, writhing and arching her body back so far, she almost lands in the back seat, and she cries out the name of
this other guy, but I don’t care because my mind is flashing for some reason on Marcia Brady. Who is judging me. Brushing her hair and judging me. Goodbye, Marcia Brady. You don’t know this like I know this. This is ours, this is how we rip through our bliss. This is how. Then she starts to cry. Not Marcia but the girl. Grinds out these hard, disconsolate sobs like lug nuts are caught in her throat. Like she’s coughing blood kind of sobs. It scares the fuck out of me. I think I have a crazy girl in my dad’s car and I wonder about that white dress and parasol. I wonder about that guy in the church. I wonder why I stepped outside to see her in the first place. I should ask her if she’s okay, but I’m shaking so hard I can hardly form the words. The people begin streaming out of the church and I have to drive away. She laughs and mutters his name again and finishes off her own palindrome with another laugh, then tells me to take her to this house, but she doesn’t know where it is. So I drive around these strange neighborhoods I’ve never been to while she carefully scans houses for something familiar, for some sign that this is the place she wants. Finally, she tells me to stop in front of this tumble-down old house with exposed adobe bricks and bedsheets for curtains. The house is set far back from the street, the front yard bristling with weeds and dog shit. She kisses me nowhere near my mouth and says she’ll be right back. I watch her walk up the crumbling walkway to the front screen door and peer in for a second. Then she slips in. She doesn’t even look back. I sit with her smell in the car. I wait, I wait for her, I wait for her till night falls, but she doesn’t come out.
A WALL BETWEEN
THERE ARE MORE THAN FOUR walls in our kitchen. When I’m at the table and my brother walks in, another one shoots right up between us. It’s invisible to my family but not to me, and surely not to him, but neither of us mentions it. He steps in to get some leche from the fridge while I sink my head into the El Paso Times like it’s all in fine print without either of us saying boo, and he don’t even look my way. That’s how the wall works. We can be gabbing with my mom or my sister about anything under the western sun and it don’t matter; my bro and me don’t see or speak a word in any language to each other ever, unless silence is a language, and I’m beginning to think it is. We’ve applied a lot of it in the last couple years. Ever since that night. Which is another thing we don’t talk about.
That wall follows us all over the house. We course past each other without any reaction, except for that subtle look that passes over our faces sometimes, like something died and we forgot to take it out. What’s stinking up the works is all that bad blood between us. What bad blood. What fucking night. I didn’t say anything.
One early evening, he’s watching TV in his gym clothes, ’cause my brother is now a badass football player for our school. I can’t believe how tall and hulking he’s grown. Muscles like those my dad had wished for me. Of course, I don’t give him more than a quick skimming glance ’cause that would piss off the wall, so I stand nearby focused on the TV show, which I don’t even want to watch, and he’s trying to be all cool and stretches his legs out to make himself seem more unperturbed by this skinny asshole home from college messing up his prime-time viewing enjoyment, but the wall pushes his legs back up against the couch and five seconds later, he’s stalking off to his room where those other walls can seal him off from my view.
This wall’s been growing thicker between my carnal and me for almost eight years now. It’s so old that we take it for granted. Early on, we were thankful for it. It kept us from yelling mean shit and ripping each other’s faces off, and later spared us the embarrassment and the pain of having to admit that one of us, or maybe both of us, were wrong. The worst could easily have been said many times, if it weren’t for that wall, but then it might have crumbled to nothing if we’d said it anyway. Now it seems like, by keeping us from each other, that wall is validating its own separate existence. A weird consequence of abiding by its rules is that when my brother comes by, it’s not only him I cancel out, but me. I’m disallowing parts of myself which I desperately need him to see. Who’s sorry now. What night. What pinche wall.
My mom, though, is a walking votive candle. She’s been praying for this wall to go away for years, though she’s never really mentioned it either. Nobody has. That’s how families are. We just wait for shit to right itself when it’s time and if it doesn’t, we give it more time. But the longer it takes, the harder it is to look even once in the direction of my own damn brother. The handsomest of us. The freest. The carnal walked to school with me and played Star Trek on the swing set out back in that old house where our purer, simpler childhood got left behind.
Just half a mile down the road from our house is another wall. This one is real. They put it up after I left for college when the government freaked out about all these people crossing the river at will. They laid down a big six-lane border freeway alongside of it, too, just to drive the point home. I’ve heard that people scale it, dig under it, find every possible way through it; it’s been the subject of international condemnation and political debate, and yet the wall’s still there. Just like ours. My mom tells me, though, that since I moved away to make my life somewhere else, my brother has begun to ask about me every now and then. She says he’s proud of me and my accomplishments. This startling communiqué from the other side is hard to believe, given our longstanding mierda, but maybe it’s his way of digging under the wall, his way of chipping at the wall’s need for grudges and rancor between brothers.
Maybe that’s why something is different today. My mom is flipping the huevos estrellados, causing them to spit and gurgle on the pan. I’m rinsing my plate over the sink and my dad is already lacing his breakfast with salt and green chile. Lurching in from his shower, still looking sleepy, my brother thrusts his face through the neckhole of his tee-shirt, his eyes consciously directed at the pan.
¿Que pasó, Mom?
Un caro que no pitó, she says with a laugh. She’s always ready with the gag, like it makes any difference to the wall. ¿Quieres unos huevitos, mijo? I got them fryin’ right here for you.
I could eat. He turns to my dad and says, Morning, Dad.
Buenos días, mijo. How did you sleep?
My brother takes his time replying ’cause he wants to. He’s become more deliberate these days. I slept okay, he says.
Sit down, Mom says.
Although my back is to him, I know he’s looking at the chair where I’ve been sitting. I can feel the wall trying to figure out how long I’m gonna be around, I can feel it thinking that maybe it’s better if my bro takes his breakfast in his room. I should shut the tap off and get going. Instead, I decide to wash the rest of the dishes in the sink. Why not, since I’m not really here anyway? Neither is he, for that matter.
My brother sidles around the table in our cramped little kitchen to the chair opposite the one I had breakfast in and plants himself there. Already, his morning looks shot. I glance over my shoulder and see his strong hands rubbing themselves into fists. He tries not to show it, but his jaw is tight, his eyes darkening with the grievances of the young boy who still haunts him, who craves to be understood but can’t find the words, or maybe he has, maybe he always had the words, but they’re carved into the wall where only he can see them, like a secret testimonial, scrawled on that fucking wall where they remain unspoken and unseen by us.
But it’s my wall too. And on it are projected all the memories, good and bad, that we have shared, all the intimacies of childhood, the games, the laughter, the shit, the agonies of adolescence that brutalize us well past our teens, as well as my own personal family grievances and stories, in which I sought to grow myself away from them and failed them, but failed him more. I’m not washing dishes now. My hands are wrung around the kitchen towel so tight, the brown in my fingers is red, and I can’t look at anything but the dead space between us. Even my parents are aware of the tautness; they’ve fallen silent, the spit of grease in the pan almost hissing, What bad blood? What lost time?
Someone’s gonna s
ay something. Someone’s gonna lose his shit. I can feel it. It might be him. Or me. Or the wall might shove both of us out of this tiny house and into that bigger room called life where bitterness will work us over as it pleases.
We’re held like this for a tense moment, then my dad reaches over for the carton of leche on the table, and our uneasy eyes track it as he proceeds to open it, like he always does, from the wrong side, peeling off the adhesive that binds the flaps together. We watch him awkwardly pouring the milk into his glass and we can’t resist smirking at each other through the wall. If we lock eyes another second, if we allow ourselves a shared chuckle at this irrepressible quirk of our good father, if someone says anything at all in any tongue but silence, that wall is gone.
EL SEGUNDO
I’M AT THE WHEEL WHILE my mother and I tour the sun-seared streets of El Segundo in her car, doing some drive-by retrospection. I don’t know why we need this at our age, but we do. She points out that tenement apartment on old Paisano Street where she, my dad and her mother, my Mamá Concha, all lived together. The facade is different, renovated with bright red fake brick, and the front yard is fenced in now, but it’s still the same old ratty place. We lived here till I was five. Although I have little recall of anything that came to pass within, the outer walkway and staircase where we played bristle with sunlit idylls of childhood. My carnalito Gordo playing with his blocks, my near fall from the top landing, the churning eighteen-wheelers barreling past like buffalo on the move. I see myself rolling on my tricycle over the uneven planks of the second-floor landing. I see, sometime before his death, Ernesto in my mom’s arms as she tries to nurse him in the doorway while my dad showers before he goes off to his dishwasher job. I see Dad again through the bars of the railing getting out of that used ‘58 T-Bird with the gill slits on the side, smiling up at me and gesturing with those powerful arms that he proudly shows off in that shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, his hair slicked up and back in a bouffant that merges Elvis with Cuco Sánchez. He races up the stairs three steps at a time in those billowing pants and hoists me up like a barbell with one hand and laughs the way he no longer does. And there’s old Candelaria next door, known to us as Cande, morena like an india, shrunken down to her essence, all smiles and wrinkles, taking me in her arms and letting me play with her earlobe. I can’t remember how it was inside, but I peer with my infant eyes through the window and see myself in a dark room, supine in a crib, the smell of stale milk on me, turning my head toward this blue flicker, where I see with fear and fascination on the screen of Mamá Concha’s TV this man with a scar on his forehead and bolts on his neck coming toward me in this elegant stagger. In my imagination, he’s real, a tall, pale man who speaks halting English and watches over my sleep.
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