by Alisa Valdes
“God, Roberto. Shut up. You’re losing your mind.”
“You knew.”
“No, I did not. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Hey, hey. Don’t speak that way to me,” he says, chest puffed out, his voice reverberating against the tile floor even louder than normal. “I’m just warning you. I don’t want you hanging out with her anymore. She’s a pervert. I don’t want to see her in this house again. And I better not find out you knew about this before, you understand? I don’t want to find out I married a pervert.”
“She’s Elizabeth, Roberto. My maid of honor. My best friend. Our sons love her like an aunt. Why would you care so much who she sleeps with? My God.”
“My sons love no lesbians.”
“You don’t even know if this garbage is true!”
He taps his watch. “I have to go to work. I don’t want to come home and find out you’ve talked to her on the phone. No calls. Understand?”
I pick the newspaper up from where he has dropped it and look at the picture again. It doesn’t look fixed. And that’s her truck in the background.
“No,” I say, dropping my head to the table. I try to hold down the urge to vomit. “I don’t. I don’t understand at all.”
So I noticed the gym was packed today, where it wasn’t packed last week. My cycle class must have had thirty new people in it, all with the same New Year’s resolution: to lose weight. The instructor reminded us all that most of the new participants would drop out in two weeks, or by month’s end at the latest. She said it’s that way every year. That’s so sad! I don’t want to be one of the ones who gives up, and I don’t want any of you to give up either. So I called my friend Amber, the most persistent person I know. She’s been hoping for a record deal for almost ten years now, and still thinks it will happen. Her advice? “Believe in yourself, especially when no one else does.”
—from “My Life,” by Lauren Fernández
amber
GATO WANTS ME to go down in the mosh pit. Dude, he’s out of his mind! The last time I did that I ended up with a bruised rib and some Ecstasy chick puked all over me. I’m fine right here, sitting up on the edge of the stage, watching.
They wanted us to play here New Year’s Eve, and we agreed at first but then we got a better gig offer in Hollywood and blew this club off like a-holes. It was worth it, though, because we got a good review in the LA Weekly for the Hollywood deal, with a photo of me screaming into the microphone. We’re making up for flaking on this club by doing the next three weekends here, up until the end of the month and the real New Year. New Year’s Eve. What a joke. Gato and I had reservations about celebrating that holiday at all, because it’s only New Year’s Eve on the gringo calendar. I called my friends in Boston on New Year’s Eve. They all still get together to do something called “First Night,” where you walk around in the cold and look at ice sculptures of clowns on the Boston Common. I caught them at Government Center, on those Stalinesque outdoor stairs, staring into the sky over the harbor, waiting for fireworks. I reminded them they were celebrating a false New Year, told them the pre-Hispanic new year in the Americas isn’t until February. I could almost hear them rolling their eyes, all except Elizabeth, who listens, and Lauren, who’s angry enough about everything in general to humor me. Rebecca didn’t want to talk to me, of course. Too close to home for her. So I asked Usnavys to give her the list of names to think about. So many of us, gone. Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Otomies, Tarascans, Olmecs. A whole continent disappeared, except for those few of us who remain, and now all the world trying to call us Latinos so this hemisphere’s bloody history will disappear for good, so we’ll seem like foreigners even though we’re the only ones who can truly stake a claim to these lands. What’s up with that?
I’m buzzing. The club has black walls and red lighting. It’s one of the leading rock en Español clubs in Long Beach, which is the most important city in the international Spanish-language rock movement, believe it or not. Our leading magazines are based here, our major critics.
Gato’s band, Nieve Negra, or Black Snow, just finished their set and now the DJ is spinning some Manu Chao and all these beautiful brown faces that a minute ago were staring up at my Gato swirl around and around like messed-up wheels on a Mayan calendar. Did you know the Mayans created the perfect system for telling time, that it’s more perfect even than the calendar the pinche gringos force us all to use? That’s right. And my people invented the zero. Mexica people have excelled in the arts and sciences since before the Europeans were pulling their women by the hair into caves. Qué padre, no? I think about this for a minute while I watch the dancers, and decide I’ll write a song about it. I take the notebook out of my pocket. I got me a theory see / Must be a big fat conspiracy / ‘Cuz it don’t seem all right to me / For Mexica to decorate a Christmas tree / Why add a day to February / When the Maya understood time perfectly / You’d rather be wrong than brown, whitey / It’s leap year genocide / Leap year genocide.
I make it a goal to have the song completed by the gig we have here at the end of February. It will be the perfect debut.
“I’m going,” Gato says, “I’m descending into the pit.” His dark brown eyes glow with intensity. He liberates his long hair from the rubber band, and leans over so it cascades down his legs. He shakes his head, then flips his hair back and jumps up. He is an Indian prince, dark, powerful, and proud. He’s ready to take on the universe. He’s pumped, man. His set was incredible. He had the slide show tonight, and I did the projector from the back of the room. It went perfectly. We used the pictures we took in Chiapas last summer, black and white portraits of people involved in the struggle, the beautiful Mexica faces of our people. We used pictures Gato took of the janitors from that L.A. strike, too, and we mixed them all up so that people would understand what we were trying to point out. Los Angeles isn’t America. It’s Mexica. It’s time to wage Xochiyaoyotl on the oppressors, once and for all, brothers and sisters. We were here for tens of thousands of years before all those Europeans came. Spanish is as foreign to our genes as English. The kids in the crowd roared, man. They dug it. They get it. Every time they look in the mirror, they get it.
My parents don’t, but lots of other people do.
My band, AMBER, is up next. This is the first time Gato has opened for me. I’m not sure how he feels about it. He didn’t reply when I asked if he was okay with it, just like he didn’t say anything when the manager called from Club Azteca after getting both our demos (we like to send them together). The manager said he thought mine was a lot stronger. I told Gato he’d said it was “slightly” stronger, to soften the blow. Gato hugged me and told me he was proud of me, but I don’t know if he really meant it. It’s hard to tell with Gato. He’s still doing battle with all the demons that come with growing up male in Mexico. I shouldn’t even bring it up, because he’s as much of a feminist as I am. Did you know the Mexica of the Anahuac had coed universities thousands of years before the Europeans? It’s true. The Spaniards were the ones who imposed the machista culture. Gato knows that, but his parents are part of the elite in Mexico City, so he grew up with the ranches and horses and his dad has a big black mustache. The stuff you grow up with is hard to shake. I think Gato has freed himself, but sometimes I’m not certain.
With me, it’s that my mom, for all her sexist posturing, for all the times she says “You know how men are” or “You know how us girls are,” was the one who lorded it over our family. She couched everything in sweet language, but she controlled my dad from the first day they met. In public, she expects him to do the talking, but in private she tells him what to say. They’d never admit it if you asked them, but it’s the truth. She still does it. And he still loves it.
Sunday, I was visiting them and they were sitting in front of the TV—or as my mom says, the TEEvee—on that weird love seat thing they bought that has the table built in right between the seats. My mom got bored with the football game. “Honey,” she said to Dad, all sugar, “don’t
you want to change the channel?”
The usual routine is that he would say yes and ask her what she wants to watch, or just hand over the remote. He knows a question from my mom is an order. But he was feeling a little frustrated—or, as my mom says, “fust-rated”—because he woke up wanting to go for a ride on his mountain bike but got guilted into watching football because my mom thinks that’s what “real men” do. She asked him, over breakfast, what he wanted to do that day, and when he said, “Ride my bike,” she gave him that “sweet” look and said, “But the football game is on, I know you love to watch football.” He shrugged, scared to stand up to her, and she kept at it. “I could make some little smokies. You want a beer? Don’t you want to watch the football game?”
He gave up pretty quickly, sat down in that contraption, and flipped the TEEvee on with a sigh. It was a gorgeous day, too. I felt so sorry for him, man. So maybe just to spite her, when she asked about changing the channel, he said no, for the first time I can remember. Didn’t say it loud, but he said it. She didn’t know how to handle it, so she did what made sense to her. She glared at him with all the rancor in the world, then snatched the remote out of his hand. “Who listens to you anyway?” she asked, smiling as if it were a joke. It wasn’t. I knew it, and she knew it. And most of all, he knew it.
She switched the tube to the shop at home network, where they were selling ugly jewelry, and her face lit up. “Oooh, look, honey. It’s tanzanite. We love tanzanite.” He didn’t move, or breathe, or anything. Just grunted slightly. Then, looking at me, Mom said, “Isn’t it just so beautiful?” I said no, but she ignored me. “It’s so beautiful. Tanzanite goes good with everything you want to wear. Honey, wouldn’t you like me to get one?” Dad handed her the phone. She placed an order, with his credit card. Then she hung up, smiled at me, and said, “You know how us girls are. We love to shop.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know how us girls are. I don’t love to shop.”
She ignored me.
Dad ignored me.
It’s easier that way.
THE GUYS FROM my band are here already, hoisting the drums, amps, and microphone stands into place on the darkened stage. I’m nervous. DJs are starting to play my music on some stations in San Diego and Tijuana, and lots of kids in the movement are buying my CDs, which we produce ourselves. I got a postcard from a fan in McAllen, Texas, last week, who said she heard my music on a station out of Reynosa, Mexico. What a trip. It’s growing, my thing, so fast I almost don’t know what to do. People in the movement know my name. Last year at this time I was lucky if fourteen people showed up for my gig. Tonight they had to turn people away. That should tell you something. There’s a real hunger out there. You have no idea how happy I feel when I look out at this sea of brown and see mostly girls in the pit. Women. It makes up for every time some cabrón has asked me if I’m a groupie. It makes up for all those record executives who’ve sent back my demo saying they didn’t think there was really a market for the kind of Mexicoytl I channel out of the universe. Angry, strong, female rock in Spanish and Nahuatl. The last one who called asked me if I’d be willing to tone it down and do it more pop. “Like a Latina Britney,” he said. He wanted to team me with Latin pop producer Rudy Perez. That’s when I hung up on him.
I’ll do it myself if I have to, sell it on the streets. The execs don’t understand that you don’t make music to make money, not if you really mean it. If you really mean it, you make music to balance the energies of the universe. You harness the voice and the power and you unleash it. You don’t control it. You let it control you.
Gato dives into the swirling mass of glistening bodies. They swallow him up with a roar and then there he is, riding their shoulders and hands over the top. They rip his shirt off and spit on him. They love him. The spitting thing started in Argentina. If they love you in Argentina, they spit on you, at least in the rock world. Now the Mexicans are doing it. Everyone is watching, even that creepy midlife crisis sipping an umbrella drink at the bar. He looks like he fell out of Spago. What’s he doing here?
I study him and try to figure out his story, a bad habit of mine. Maybe his wife ran off with the pool boy tonight, and he came to the first bar he found. Maybe he’s looking to buy the club and turn it into a Hooters. He seems amused, as that type of man will. Maybe he’s a drunk. Men like that make me uncomfortable. They remind me of Ed, Lauren’s fiancé. They seem like the kinds of guys who come home, roll up their sleeves, and screw the maid.
Gato spreads his arms like Jesus and they lift him high. He’s feeling it. We smoked a little reefer a few minutes ago, and Gato’s flying. I smile. Gato’s deep. Gato’s got it. He’ll probably get a record deal before I do. We’re both after the same Holy Grail, you know? He’s suggested once or twice that we team up, which I found offensive. I don’t need his help. I know he’s trying to be nice. But I want the control of my art. I guess you could say I’m an egomaniac that way. I don’t want to share the stage with anybody. I got too much to say for that.
I walk across the creaky floorboards of the stage and through the dented black metal door that leads to the little dressing room. A cockroach scurries into a crack in the wall next to the mirror. I rub gel into my braids to get them to stand out more, and retouch the purple lipstick and black liquid eyeliner. For performances I go extra heavy on the makeup, the lights on the stage will wash you out. I want them to see me.
I have ten minutes until we’re supposed to start. I’m trying something new tonight with the clothes: a black rubber bodysuit, with a diamond shape cut out of the abs area. My friend Lalo drew Mexica symbols all over it. Tonight I’ll be singing part of a song in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Gato and I have been taking Nahuatl lessons from a shaman named Curly out in La Puente. He’s planning a naming ceremony for me at the Whittier Narrows next month, and I can’t wait to have my real name at last.
I go back to the stage and make sure everybody’s standing where they need to be. These guys give nothing but respect. At first they didn’t know what to make of me, my being a “girl,” but then they heard my music and decided I was okay. After they played in my band for more than a year, they decided I was better than okay, that I was really good. Now they treat me like one of the guys, and that’s fine. Brian, my drummer, is the short, powerful dude with the green skullcap and the feathered boa. He came to L.A. from Philadelphia to study law and dropped out to be a rocker. Sebastian, the tall skinny one with the shaved head, is my keyboardist and programmer. He’s from Spain and actually used to play with a famous band in Madrid before he joined my group. My bassist Marcos comes from Argentina; he’s the quiet one who looks like an accountant, saves all his pent-up craziness for when we play. The backup guitarist is a girl from Whittier I heard play at a festival at Cal State L.A. She had no idea how good she really was, and still doesn’t. Somebody must have beat up on that girl bad, way back. There’s Ravel, a Dominican guy who plays percussion and pan flutes and sings backup. He’s an incredible musician and so cheerful all the time it makes you want to hurl.
We’re all in place, and the lights go out. The crowd roars. A small blue light comes on, and we start the first song, a churning, angry thing I wrote with a mix of hip-hop, metal, and traditional Peruvian sounds. The fans go crazy. The spotlight shines on me and I lose myself to the trance. The adrenaline flows through me. I forget who I am or where, and become the music. I transcend time and space and I howl. They say my voice is rough, gravelly, and harsh, like Janis Joplin. There hasn’t really been a Mexica singing like that yet, at least not on record. Alejandra Guzmán’s voice comes close, but her music has too much girly pop in it. Mine is sharper and more painful, more mad crazy.
After the first song, I grab the postcards and address the crowd in Spanish: “Chingazos! Chingazos!” They go crazy. “Listen to me, chingazos. Did you see Shakira lately?” Everyone boos. “That’s right. She’s a pinche disgrace. Blond hair. She’s a disgrace to La Raza and La Causa. She might as well be Pa
ulina Rubio!” Everyone cheers. I throw the postcards out and they float down into the sea of brown hands. “They’re addressed to her manager, hijos de puta! We’re telling them we don’t want this kind of representation. We’re telling Shakira she’s a traitor!” More cheers. Then they start to chant. “Que Shaki se joda, que Shaki se joda, que Shaki se joda.” Fists raised in the air, teeth bared like animals. I let them go on for a little while, then I hold my hand up to silence them. “Your job is to get out there and educate people, Raza. There’s too much self-hatred going on, too much wishing we were like the white man.” Cheers. “Love yourself. Love your brown Aztec self, Raza!” More cheers. “Que viva la raza, raza!” Screams and hysteria. Then, in English, I say: “Love your big, bad, beautiful brown self, chingones!” It’s the lead in to a new song, and we begin to play. The mosh pit churns, and I float away in the magic of it. I’m gone.
When I finish the set, everyone is sweaty and crazy. They chant for an encore. I’m wasted, drained by the cosmos. I can’t do another one. I bow and start to pack up. The DJ puts some Jaguares on, quick, and everyone starts to bob and dance. A few people get past the bouncers and storm the stage in search of autographs, or just to touch my hand. I make contact with my fans for fifteen minutes, then turn my back to the crowd and pack up my guitar. As I start to break down the microphone and other sound equipment, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn and see the older man in the dark coat I noticed at the bar earlier.
“Amber? How you doing? Joel Benítez,” he says with what sounds like a New York accent, all business, holding his thick hand out to shake mine. I wipe my hands uselessly on my rubber pants and shake his, feeling filthy and sweaty. He searches my eyes in a way that makes me uncomfortable and holds the hand longer than is customary, turning it over to inspect my short, messy green fingernails.
“Magic Marker,” I say. “I paint my nails with Magic Marker.” It’s a stupid thing to say, but I’m overcome with nervousness.
