Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  I felt like a sucker for telling that counselor woman what I wanted, what I wanted to be.

  I felt like a fool for wanting something I had no right to want anymore.

  MY DEAD ABUELO NEEDS A SUGAR DADDY

  JULIANA DELGADO LOPERA

  WE DIDN’T HAVE MONEY TO BURY HIM OR BUY FLOWERS, THAT WAS THE REAL problem. My grandfather, El Paisa, was the first one to die en Estados Unidos, mysteriously and abruptly, and nobody knew exactly what to do.

  At the hospital, after staring at the cold, yellowing body, with the protruding nose not covered by the white sheets and becoming the joke that night amidst the endless tears—how are we gonna find a casket big enough to hold both him and his nose? Maybe we can get some money for that nose in this hospital, maybe a gringo wants it—after every woman in the family circled him, once, twice, three times, after the pastor elevated one of those prayers on the afterlife, after all the tías yelled at the doctor and female wails reverberated like ping pongs all over Miami, after Mami fainted and Grandma lost control of her feet, there was the inevitable List of Things to Do After Death.

  My family is no stranger to this list. Every two years or so, someone inevitably dies and we plunge into this ritual, this process, all over again.

  We understood The Economics of Dying in Colombia, but here it was a mystery. We’d been in Miami for three years, Mami didn’t have a job, and this was our first American funeral.

  Dying is gratis but the rest is business.

  Dying is gratis but the rest is business, mi reina. And of course there had to be a funeral, of course it had to be pomposo and grand. Con flores y, si se puede, mariachis y quien tuviera un dinerillo para pagarle un par de lloronas. Como Dios manda.

  After all, this was El Paisa: Gabriel Lopera Lopera, father of five, grandfather of nine. Motherfucker from day one, now gone. We had to send him to Papi Dios like a prince, pa’ que sí lo reciban. Pa’ que Diosito le de gold wings y un puestico especial.

  IT DEPENDS WHO YOU ASK, BUT NOBODY REALLY KNOWS EXACTLY how El Paisa died.

  According to Tía #1, he was rushed to the hospital because he was “running out of air.” Doctors were supposed to evaluate him and send him home that same day—instead, they sent him to the morgue. When pressed for details, Tía #1 simply shook her head, lit a cigarette, and murmured, I don’t know, Juliana. Yo no sé muy bien.

  If you ask Tía #2 she’d tell you, those hijueputas killed him. Es que tu no sabes la que nos hicieron. She’s visibly exasperated, reliving every second, picking her dry hands. Se me parte el corazón, se me parte el corazón.

  Tía #3 says they’re both wrong. She says he stopped breathing in the middle of the night and nobody came to help him. The nurses ignored his pleas. And the doctors? She chuckles. Descarados. They told us it was a heart attack but mi papi had no heart issues, she insists.

  Then again, he was old, so who knows.

  Then there’s the story I heard the day of his death: They transfused the wrong type of blood. El Paisa’s blood was O-negative, but the nurses said he was O-positive and filled him up with the wrong blood.

  The tías sent people all over Bogotá searching for his medical records so the Lopera Juan Family could sue the hospital, but there was no suing. Nobody could pay for it. We wanted to pay for an autopsy, someone explained later, to make sure they didn’t kill him, but did you know an autopsy costs approximately $3,000? We didn’t have enough money for that either, so eventually we had to call Tía L.

  (Side note: Tía L. A lot of families have one. L is that far away tía who, from the moment she could say Colombia es una mierda and por favor to me don’t speak Español, yearned to be rich and powerful [if possible blonde and white]. Unlike most tías who yearned, slapped-a-bitch, changed their names to attain crumbs of this rich, white life but never got close, Tía L sits at the top of my family’s Who’s the Bitch with the Cash Flow scale. The epitome of good, successful, white-passing assimilation—without ever dropping that accent, ’cause forgetting your panela roots follows you to the grave. Because of all of this, Tía L walked dignified and earned prestige—adoración, really—in the family and will be called upon throughout the story as the one person who could drop some Gs).

  I remember this time in a blur: The perpetual rush of women filling papers, chain smoking, murmuring the loss in shame because there was no money, mi reina, ni para el casket, ni para las flowers. We were sending El Paisa to be cremated in the cheapest little hole in the city when he deserved a gold urn and a procession of millions.

  I remember Mami, forever pale green and dragging her feet, fainting so often I started carrying alcohol and cotton in my purse. From time to time I slapped her. From time to time I shook her. But Mami could barely take it all.

  I can’t believe we are not going to properly send my father away, she said.

  The impotence undid her.

  LET ME EXPLAIN SOMETHING TO YOU. EL PAISA HAD AN INSURANCE plan, not a real one but the underground kind sold by Cubans in certain “clinics” in Miami. The kind that solely exists as a tiny pink card inside immigrant mamas’ wallets in South Florida. It exists in every señora’s mouth as part of the immigrant advice you receive when landing in The Promised Land. I imagine these underground clinics were created by the Cubans in the early ’70s; I can picture the señoras phoning one another, setting up infirmaries so their families wouldn’t die just because they couldn’t pay the outrageous American health care fees.

  My entire family was enrolled in this insurance. Each person paid $20 a month to visit a doctor in a desolate tin house next to the highway with wooden links barely holding it together. It was all super clean but it looked like a Red Cross makeshift tent in some war torn place. Still, I dreaded going to this place. The TV was perpetually on, blasting Univisión or Telemundo so loud I couldn’t read, while women yelled at their kids.

  It was a reminder of what we’d lost. I had been a privileged teenager once, back home, where we could go to real hospitals. We’d come all the way from Colombia for what? For this? This place held together with babitas? One time, a patient asked the receptionist to put his lunch in the fridge. When she responded that the fridge was full of people’s excrements, he said, no importa, mama. Put it in there.

  My grandpa was insured there, of course. A Colombian doctor worked there sometimes and we all went the days he was available. The problem was that when shit hits the health fan, the $20 pink card is worth exactly that: a $20 pink card. It doesn’t cover the ambulance or the emergency room or the tubes to keep you breathing or the exams or the blood transfusion or the aftermath of death. When your homeboy dies and the forms pile up, under insurance you can’t just write I got some pink slip from the Cubans.

  ONCE SHE STOPPED FAINTING, MAMI GATHERED ALL HER STRENGTH and walked to the nearby cemetery with some tías. Someone looked up “cheap funeral services” online, and this somber, gray yard was the closest one to our home.

  The smell was horrid, the place buzzing with mosquitos.

  A señora greeted us, a Cruella De Vil in black with parted white hair and an air of terrible indifference, and told us the prices.

  Like we were picking fruit at the plaza.

  Nobody respects your pain in this country. A man is dead and it’s like you’re at the supermarket or choosing a vacation destination; everyone tries to sell you a different packaged combo. For a burial without the body, you get ten percent off; you can rent the casket for a discounted price, but only for an hour. For $500 extra, you can get two lloronas to honor your dead father.

  The entire funeral would cost between $7,000 and $10,000 and we had to pay it up front. Nada de descuentos, mi reina, que esto es un negocio como cualquier otro. There are no discounts, because capitalism respects no one and this includes the dead.

  At some point, Mami needed to breathe and walked into the cemetery’s garden. It was here that Mami talked to Papi Dios; it was here that she reprimanded The Lord for creating outrageous prices when all she wanted was
a nice funeral and some flowers. It was here that she yearned for Colombia. La Tierrita. The país de mierda that held all of our dead in gothic churches and cold cemeteries. All she wanted was to bury her dead with dignity but, in this country, she didn’t know how to. In this country dignity has an impossible cash price.

  On her way back she stopped by a water fountain.

  Dios mio, how is it possible that you will not let me bury my father?

  God in His infinite wisdom just shrugged and whispered it’s time to call your Tía L, mami.

  EL PAISA WANTED TO BE CREMATED BECAUSE IT WAS CHEAPER. AT least, that’s what Tía #2 told me. As things go in Miami, one tía knew another señora whose best friend had owned a funeral company in Colombia and was just starting her business in Miami. Tia #2 called her.

  Tía #2 is the official family Hustler, known to get people to drop sixty percent of the price plus give her a ñapa after speaking to them for fifteen minutes. Homegirl can get you to agree to sell your house in exchange for some eggs if you give her enough time. I’ve seen her in action. It’s mesmerizing. Tía #2 hustled the Colombians, who agreed to drop the price because, ajá, we’re Colombians, too, and how you not gonna help your own people?

  This audacious guilt-trip move (plus Tia L’s money) got us three hours in a funeral home where we all cried, wailed, sang, and fainted. El Paisa got three hours in a rented casket, a crown of yellow flowers donated by a cousin, and a last trip to that sad cemetery, where he came out of the crematorium in a brown box.

  I don’t even know why we paid to cremate him, someone said to me. It’s probably only half of him in that box and a bunch of other people.

  AFTER HIS DEATH, MAMI KEPT RECEIVING EL PAISA’S MAIL, INCLUDING endless hospital bills. At some point, she stopped opening them and returned them to the mailman with a note that said He doesn’t live here anymore, he’s dead. Then Mami enrolled all of us into a funeral insurance plan that she still pays for to this day. Because this is not happening to me again, she says.

  Now, if one of us dies, you can put us in a casket, add some yellow flowers, light a candle, and call it a day.

  REVERSE

  SILAS HOWARD

  Donut Shoppe, 1978

  I watch through the rain-streaked windows of the camper.

  The Formica counters in the doughnut shop are chrome-lined, chipped, and faded to the color of Miami pools. Fluorescent lights flicker as the television plays: a blue Cycloptic giant announcing the news of the day: Christopher Reeve plays Superman, Carter meets with Middle East leaders at Camp David, and Jim Jones kills a congressman and then orders his followers to commit suicide. Sun-washed posters along the walls feature colossal close-ups of French crullers, maple doughnuts, and old-fashioneds. A couple sits drinking free refills and contemplating the responsibility of leaving town with a child, a fat golden retriever, seventy-five dollars in their pockets, and the camper. This is their escape hatch—a family vacation, an extended Sunday drive, travel through the nice neighborhoods to envision life in the ornate homes of the well-to-do.

  At the doughnut shop that night they decided that, yes, they would go across the country. They would ignore the grinding, almost suffocating lack of money that kept them in a never-ending state of panic, a feeling that staying at home averred. This trip would be a clean slate, a new page, everything still to come. Necessity makes reality real.

  I watched the highway from the bed that sat over the cab of the truck. Yellow lines moved hypnotically, miles and minutes passing, boredom into daydream. I wondered, my eyes wide as marigolds, where the dashes of yellow would take us. Like most kids I had ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up, and many were the usual—veterinarian, farmer, Olympic figure skater. But when things were very chaotic, my ultimate fantasy was to grow up to be a housewife who watched TV, baked, and stayed home a lot. Things must have been bad during this time, ’cause I never remember having the dream so powerfully.

  I became allergic to security, as if it might pull me into a slumber and I’d wake up making donuts.

  In the end I became allergic to security, as if it might pull me into a slumber and I’d wake up making donuts.

  It never occurred to me that taking a family vacation on seventy-five dollars that lasted almost a year was strange until I talked about it with some friends recently. What, not all families take vacations this way? The “vacation” was scintillating and nerve-wracking. When there was no food, we always had television. Commercials filled with sexy, slow-motion shots of cheesy pasta dishes and tender prime rib steak.

  The money lasted from Burlington, Vermont, all the way to that town in Virginia where some pilgrims landed, I forget the name. There we landed, tired, lost, and out of money. My stepmother got work as a cocktail waitress, and my father took a job at the local Red Lobster. The plan? Zoom to California and then drive back home again by the end of that summer. We made it to Atlanta, Georgia, my parents taking work along the way. The trip was extended past Christmas. Our family vacation lasted eight months and caused me to miss most of fifth grade.

  By the end of that family vacation, the thing I wanted to be was an actor, California my mythical oasis. It was my obdurate belief that I need only set foot in Los Angeles and all my dreams would materialize. I wanted to be part of the lust-and-danger-drenched Hollywood fantasies that served as our weekend drug. Only I wanted to play the leading man—a role young girls were not encouraged to play.

  Hollywood Forever

  I now live in Hollywood and, while I’m not an actor, I did act in a movie my friend and I made titled By Hook or By Crook, a feature film that ended up winning several awards and being selected for Sundance. When Harry Dodge, my oldest friend and cowriter/director, and I were writing the script, we funded ourselves by hauling garbage. Two small, earnest guys filled with an ambiguous hope, to save people from the clutter of their material goods. There’s big money in trash. Our only setback—we couldn’t really afford the dump fees. Late at night we circumnavigated the industrial part of town looking for places to “store” our trash. Disposal turned out to be the hardest part of making money. All that effort to save fifty dollars. The risk of police and junkyard dogs. We’d tell people, “I didn’t go to college, I went to haulage.”

  Nowadays I edit the added features that go on DVDs. Mainly I work on horror movies, where the bad girls get killed first and the college students are chased by—as one director put it—“cross-dressing retarded hillbillies.” That’s me, I think, though most people I know would protest. I need a T-shirt that reads, “No one knows I’m a cross-dressing, retarded hillbilly.” The director states that his horror movie is about the generation gap—the youth running from the older, rural folks—but I think it’s poverty they’re running from. And run they should.

  Everything is up for grabs in L.A., even the ground. Los Angeles is a horizontal city on shaky little legs. It is a city with no center, where things are hidden—especially true feelings. A place, they say, where you could die of enthusiasm. I love that about this town. My life as a myth. When trying to have more in your future than you did in your past, a vivid imagination is key. Fake it till you make it. The pathos of endless hope and possibilities, of being taken advantage of, ahhh. I could be discovered, maybe, just maybe… Yes, I realize “maybe” is a thin thread to hang one’s hopes on, but I can still live next to my dreams and visit them—a little like having stuff in public storage.

  EVERY DAY I WAVE AT THE SANDWICH MAN ON MY CORNER.

  I drive by him every day. He stands on the corner with a handmade sign advertising inexpensive lunch specials. I think about his health and the tedium of it all. I think about him when I wonder what my next job will be now that I’ve moved from San Francisco to L.A. Actually, I don’t imagine his face when I think of him, but rather the face of his costume, which is a large (from above his knees to a few feet above his head), sun-bleached sandwich with a shop logo on it. The sandwich is made of bread and floppy lettuce, and on the bread is a big smili
ng face with two huge eyeholes cut out of it, for the sandwich man to breathe through. His hands are big and padded like Mickey Mouse’s, which I guess are the hands that a sandwich would have if a sandwich had hands. I wave to him when I’m stuck at that corner of Highland and Santa Monica.

  When the sandwich guy waves back, he seems so enthusiastic that it breaks my heart, although perhaps it’s only the big, cartoonish hands that I read as excited. It’s quite likely that the guy wishes I’d stop waving at him like some five-year-old at the poor kids’ Disney. Probably he should conserve his energy. It can’t be good for you, wearing a polyester suit in the middle of Los Angeles in summer, where the temperature frequently rises to 100 degrees. This is a dangerous combination—polyester, holding and shaking a sign, and the desert sun.

  I had a friend who worked for an ice-cream shop as a bear one summer, and she had a whole padding of ice that she kept in the freezer to put on for work. “You can faint like that,” she said, snapping her fingers for emphasis. Another friend of mine appeared on a talk show in an E.T. outfit. He nearly faded away because the costume was basically one of those rubber Halloween masks that almost killed you as a kid, but that went over your whole body. He was hunched over in the thing for an hour, waiting for his turn on the show, and by the time he got up there he was more like a sad, creepy, abused E.T. than the happy, bicycling-over-the-moon one from childhood. He made it offstage before passing out, but ended up, I imagine, depressing most of the audience.

  Sometimes I see the sandwich walking home down Santa Monica Boulevard with his big square head slumped down. Of course, the tilt of his head may be a logistical thing—so he can see—but I choose to read it as a guy down on his luck stuck in this dead-end job as a sandwich. I make another vow to bring him a cool beverage with lots of ice. I wonder what his pay might be.