Across from their house on Oklahoma Avenue, there was a forgotten brick shanty that had at one point of usefulness been a kind of storehouse used to keep feed or bales of cotton, some sort of farming thing. It had fallen into disrepair and was quite uninhabitable, but that didn’t stop a series of families from taking residency in it.
For most of the time I can remember living on Oklahoma Avenue, a small dirty family of white transients had taken squatters’ rights on the spot, which was eventually reduced to a triangular mud hole, next to a stinking stilled drainage ditch that I believe was used as a septic system and garbage disposal. There were no other amenities to be seen, besides a perpetually smoldering fire pit by a gutted car shell.
They had a boy about three years older than me, named Stephen. Stephen was a skinny, dirty boy who had been the focus of periodic intimidation from Dan some mornings on the bus to school, I think to impress me. I never said much to Stephen, except once when he’d been recruited by the Army, and, excited to talk to anyone about it, he tried to read the recruiting literature to me while we waited for the bus on his last morning attending class. He’d had trouble sounding out the most basic of words in the propagandist promises of the brochure, and I felt awful for him.
I never saw him again. Then the rest of his family moved, overnight. They were just gone one morning, after five or six years of living there.
Eventually a large Mexican family moved into the spot. They never quite mingled in Grampa’s barrio. I don’t know if they ever really tried and were rebuffed, or if they were simply met with a cold reception and took their cue from that, but there were no formal introductions, no shared breakfasts or gossip, or work. They remained unto themselves. They were male, mostly: teenage boys and a few men, maybe a matriarch, if I remember correctly.
And it was one of these teenage boys who found himself a bit too tempted by the fruits of Joe’s mother’s house, the large looming green house with the brown trimming, with the three girls and the mother just living there, with the boy. Sure, the big one was retarded, but, as the comedian Dave Atell once horribly said, “ . . . those titties weren’t retarded. . . .” (And shame on me for repeating a terrible joke.)
One night, the eldest Lupíta, the mother who was at this point long widowed, woke up and decided to get a drink of water. She walked right by a shape in the dark, said she didn’t realize it was a boy at first, but then the shape moved, broke, and ran—ran right for the door and ditched her purse in the living room, spilling its contents as he kicked out the screen door.
He had been interrupted in his burglary, and Lupíta had watched him run right straight to the squat across the street.
The next day, the barrio was abuzz. Gramma came in and told Mom and me over breakfast, and later I got the story from Lupíta herself, as she told and retold the story of her nocturnal visitor and his unsuccessful theft to anyone who’d listen.
She performed the story like Blanche Dubois, fanning herself at the memory and playing up the sympathies of her audience, but—like most everything else in the barrio—I got a sense of something vaguely sexual in her retelling, like she was really saying, “Why, I’m just not sure what he all wanted with little old me; I’m just a lonely old widow with an empty bed. . . .”
However, I’m sure the terror she felt at the moment of realization was severe: The few times I’ve discovered I’ve been robbed, the shock of it stupefies me for a minute; I can only imagine what it was like for her to catch the thief under her roof, and the fright she must have had.
For a full day, nothing happened. The incident seemed to pass and life went on as usual on Oklahoma Avenue, and I’m sure the kid across the street in the squat was finally breathing a sigh of relief when out of nowhere the night ignited like the Alamo over at the brick shanty.
Richard and the Rubio brothers, Grampa’s nephews, all of them in their twenties and in varying involvement of cocaine smuggling at this point, the “trucking business” having adapted to the 1980s recession, and all of them with large shiny 4x4 pickups with chrome roll-bars and KC lights—they descended roaring into the property, coked up and locked down for war.
Four or five trucks broke through whatever flimsy fencing surrounded the place, and six to ten men with guns shouting in Spanish erupted from the cabins of the trucks, kicking down doors and setting fire to anything that would catch.
The young thief had unknowingly stirred up a cocaine-fueled hornet’s nest. The group of squatters were beaten, rounded up, and terrorized, and though many guns bristled, none of them were fired, I remember, and I was impressed at their discipline, because they didn’t want the sheriff called. Or maybe they just forgot their bullets, because mean-fighting, coked-up Mexicans aren’t exactly known for their foresight.
Whatever the truth, no one was shot, no one injured critically, and no sheriffs were called. The transient family was run off in the one vehicle they owned, piled in and bloodied.
The day after, while the heroes were still off celebrating their victory in some port-side bar that was tolerant of their cocaine use, the morning sun rose on the smoldering ruins of what just the evening before had been a perfectly good brick shanty.
Joe and I heard the battle reports from his mother, Lupíta, who told us about this new development while Joe finished his breakfast, like we should learn a lesson from it, that if we make a life of stealing, a horde of coked-up Mexicans will kick down our doors and run us out of town, and that this was right and good, and how justice is meted out here. More border justice.
We listened to her solemnly, but were suddenly itching to get to the scene of the fight and see for ourselves what had happened.
When she finally finished, and Joe shoved what was left of his breakfast into his mouth, we bolted (well, I bolted: Joe waddled enthusiastically) through the same door the kid had kicked apart in his hurry to get back to his hovel, the same place we were now in a hurry to reach, before the fires died out, where it had all just happened, not a few hours before. The place was still smoking, the ashes of burned belongings still warm.
We picked through the rooms, and Joe looked for things to steal while I just felt a sense of shame at the abuse these people had just suffered—all of them, as a clan—because of what one of them had done, and at the smoldering piles of secondhand clothes, mismatched and moldy, and their mattresses made from cardboard boxes and unwearable denim, all of it half burnt. This was the undeniable ugliness of border justice, at our adolescent feet, and I was confused by feeling aligned to our men, and ashamed of what they’d done.
The rooms were uninsulated, open to the weather, and even through the disruption of the attack of the night before, it was evident to my eyes that this place was not habitable for people, that humans should not live like this, and even then, they had fought to defend it, and that then, even this—this—was taken from them.
I thought back to Stephen, who had attended the same school as me, walked the same hallways feeling the same teenage crushes on the same girls, likely, the same desires, and I remembered the first night I saw that kid in the barrio, his family’s first night on Oklahoma Avenue. How he leaned his whole skinny body on a loose board on the wire fence and howled in imitation of a dog who barked relentlessly back at him—how wild and dirty this boy looked—and realizing that this is what he had to come home to, every night of high school.
And besides feeling so terribly sorry for him, for the people who had just been burned out of this hovel for breaking the peace of the Rubio Barrio, I felt odd, picking through there, an uneasy gratitude for everything that Dad and Mom and Gramma had endured to keep us together, however uncertain, in that house on Oklahoma Avenue.
I found a burned up tin of ravioli, split at the top with a knife and two plastic forks still sticking out of it—an interrupted dinner—and I felt like I had to give a little prayer of thanks to Dad, Mom, Gramma, for being stronger than this whole fucking system of peasantry, and exclusion.
Rummaging through the dirt, Jo
e found and began eating a Li’l Debbie snack cake with the plastic only slightly melted, fairly recoverable. He pulled at the plastic and didn’t seem to mind as he chewed his way through the ash.
Chapter 21
CHEERING UP PHILIPPE
It must have been New Year’s Eve 1988, maybe 1989, and I was finishing high school, nearing graduation. All around Brownsville, preparations were being made to ring in the New Year joyfully, and I was stuck with Segis and his sidekick, Arnold, yet again. Segis had become my friend by default, because he lived out in the sticks near Oklahoma Avenue and had a car. He was also marginalized, strange in his conviction to reinventing the 1960s in his fashion and music. We had very little in common except that we both liked to drink beer and talk about “profound” topics that neither of us knew anything about. Arnold was Segis’s neighbor, and knew even less, but you couldn’t get one without the other, so I was stuck with both of them.
Somehow we managed to scrounge up enough money for a rack and a half of Busch beer, which is a dreadful fortified swill unfit for hobos, but perfectly appropriate for underage drinkers, with their livers of coal.
I forget how we got our hands on it. Buying the beer was never really much of an obstacle, but finding the cash for it always was. None of us worked, and our parents were close to indigent. But there we were: flush for the night. Segis and I were the juicers of the troop; the booze was for us. This overlap was fundamental to our friendship. Arnold was a sissy, but he was a faithful sissy, as all sidekicks should be, though his lackey personality annoyed me most of the time.
We started the evening out friendly enough, holed up in the parked single-wide trailer house Arnold’s sister lived in with her brand-new family, behind Arnold’s dad’s house. There was no running water, no plumbing yet, so in order to relieve ourselves, we had to go outside and find a shrub. This was all right, civilized, for Brownsville.
Something was troubling me this night. I was seventeen, had made a mess of things with high school, and I had no plans for the future after graduation, which was coming up soon. There was a palpable sense of despair everywhere that no one seemed to feel or want to talk about. Segis was going on and on about how he was going to “start a rock band, man,” and “make it really big, man” and “go on tours, man,” and I just wasn’t seeing a way out except through the military, through the Marines, like my brother Dan was doing, except in the Army. The despair was growing in me, but wasn’t as yet conscious.
I was moody, morose this night. Not the best frame of mind for a teenage piss up.
About ten o’clock, Arnold’s sister’s husband returned from his shift managing the nearby Pizza Hut. He brought home his spoils: two large, cold, and incomplete supremes, which Arnold and Segis set upon hungrily, relishing this perk of management.
I demurred, a few beers up. Rather, I took a moment alone with the husband. I cornered him in an unused room, full of yet to be sorted boxes. I sat down with my beer in hand, and he stood, obviously uncomfortable, holding his latest baby and bouncing it on his hip.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Well . . .” [this is in Spanish].
“I don’t mean to be . . . I mean . . . ”
“Mira,” he says. (“Listen.”)
“No; wait . . . I mean . . . Is this all there is?”
I think he relaxed there. He didn’t know what to make of me, and I’m sure he had no idea what I meant, because he certainly did not take offense. In fact, he seemed visibly relieved all I was up to was soul-searching and rhetoric. This, he could get out of easy, as there was none of it for him. For a minute there, he thought I might have been getting frisky, in front of his wife and child.
He didn’t even take offense at the implied judgment, or insult. “Is this really all there is? Work at a Pizza Hut and come home to your wife and kids?” I think I started to weep.
“Pos, es lo que pasa,” he said, bouncing his newborn up and away from me. (“Well, that’s just what happens.”)
And that’s what was bugging me, I remember. This was one of two possible outcomes in the Brownsville I knew—falling in with some local hussy and having your first kid before you turn twenty-one, and thanking your lucky stars when you can pilfer some extra product from a franchise restaurant after the other help has gone home, or, if you’re luckier, enter the unexceptional redneck low-literacy state university system, like my sisters had managed, and work for the city or state of Texas later.
Now, this was my problem with that: For all my advanced wit, I genuinely had no idea what college was. My entire life, I had been told my responsibility and goal was to graduate from high school. Then it was over. I would get a job with Dad or something similar. When others talked about college, or I would see it on TV, I would pretend to know what they were talking about and that I was going along with the program, but I had no clue what the hell it all meant. I certainly didn’t think it was more schooling. I sincerely couldn’t conceptualize what it was. Labs, and people sitting on lawns, talking about Aristotle, smoking pot with professors who looked like Donald Sutherland, like in Animal House. I had no idea what it was for. Seriously. No one told me. I didn’t think to ask.
This is the reason I was so blasé about just skimming through high school. I had no idea there was more beyond it. College was not spoken of in relation to me or Dan. Though I can’t really speak for Dan, but I do know he joined the Army a year earlier than was allowed, because he couldn’t wait to get away from Dad, and I can attest that when it was spoken of, college was—at least for me—something vague and reserved for privileged white people, in places like Connecticut.
Meaning that, besides blowing it academically, I was fairly guaranteed that I couldn’t continue my education past public high school because I wouldn’t have the grades, not to mention any sort of financing. I had blown my chance at escape, I was beginning to understand. I was getting scared that I might be stuck in Texas.
So my only other option was now in the room across from me that night, holding a sweaty, milk-caked infant, uncomfortable in the presence of the darkly introspective drunken teenager.
It was going to be this or the military, it was slowly dawning on me, and the military was looking really, really good. Maybe the Marines. No babies in the Marines.
I drank far many more of the Busch beers than was really necessary. At some point, Segis’s father joined the party. He was a diminutive carpenter, slow to anger, quite loveable. He was low to the earth and dark skinned, humorously bitter. It was from him that Segis inherited a certain gentleness that made the high school girls buckle at the knee and belt. He picked up one of Segis’s guitars and took the piss up outside, brought it out into the driveway, presumably to watch the fireworks way off in town, but Texas is flat: no curvature of the earth here, and as such, no fireworks to watch from a distance. Well, not in the sky.
Segis’s father’s guitar playing and joking around made our having beers in the cooler acceptable, in a way. When he wasn’t playing, sidekick Arnold marshaled the boom box and cued up some Led Zeppelin or Motorhead, and we set to bring in the New Year, Texas-style.
A while later, something else started to bubble up, watching Segis’s dad and his family enjoying themselves like that. The atmosphere was nevertheless tense, with Segis’s mother bemoaning the fact that we’d bought beer. (Not so much that we were drinking it, but that we had spent money on it, though she was convinced we were doing every drug under the sun as well. Truth be told, had we access and the money, we probably would have been guilty of that, but alas: We were innocent of the charge. No, she was upset because we’d spent the $20 on the beer, when we could have bought a nice shirt, or a pair of shoes. Obviously she did her shopping outside the mall system.)
Actually, that’s not altogether accurate. She blamed all of Segis’s misdeeds—his drinking especially—on me. I was the bastard that made him drink. The year prior, or perhaps the year before that one, when Segis had been one of the regulars who skipped
with Tony, he had been picked up in the parking lot of Sunrise Mall, pissing against a Buick. The mall cops caught him in mid-stream, while Tony and his other group were watching from the safety of a car, getting stoned. They laughed, and left, as the Brownsville Police Department came around to arrest Segis and book him in the city jail.
His mother had been called, and when she’d sprung him and started to read him the riot act, he did something he’d never before done, and raged right back to her in an adolescent fury, yelling and throwing things and otherwise acting out like a drunken teenaged kid would, against an oppressive mother. He said terrible things to her that she now liked to wear like jewelry, to keep him guiltily obligated to her. And she’d never forgiven me, though I wasn’t involved.
So things might have been uncomfortable if I’d have paid her any mind, but I didn’t: Segis’s parents were more peasant-minded than even Gramma, and if I didn’t have to answer to my own family, there was very little chance I’d answer to his. But this was, in fact, the problem.
This is what was bubbling up: The house on Oklahoma Avenue had been functionally vacant for months now, with Mom and me communicating exclusively by scribbled messages left on the kitchen counter, or on the answering machine, when I needed $5. When Derek was home from kindergarten, he’d have to suffer Gramma’s daycare, which meant his watching her watch Spanish television and smoking menthol cigarettes while she blended sweatily into her easy chair. My sisters were off in school, and Dan was defending South Korea.
And Dad, well, Dad was doing long-distance hauling now, driving 18-wheelers from Brownsville to Detroit, moving GM parts from their cheaply manufactured origins on the Mexican border to the dying rust belt.
The isolation was finally settling into me, into my heart, after being left alone for so long, and I was becoming a real son of a bitch.
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