NOT AN AMERICAN

by Stanley W Rogouski

"He gave you his ID?"

  Avellanos reached over, took the glass of gin, and drank it down in one gulp.

  "Yes," he said, getting visibly choked up, trying to stifle a sob. "Yes he did."

  "When were you really born?"

  "1991."

  "Where?"

  "South of the border and not in that tacky place in South Carolina."

  "So you were brought up in Mexico?"

  "Yes."

  "And you're in the country illegally."

  "Yes."

  “Why do you have an American accent?"

  "I was a theater major. I took diction classes."

  "Why do you have a Poison Springs accent, just like me?"

  "You can learn a Poison Springs accent."

  "Why do you look just like Nicholas Felton?"

  “You've heard of Laura Felton?"

  "Everybody knows who she was. I learned about her in history class. She's the most infamous character ever to have come out of this stinking little town. I like her. Sometimes I want to blow shit up too."

  "She was my mother."

  "What was your birthday again?"

  "1991."

  "So you're 23."

  "Yes."

  "Laura Felton died in 1971. I learned about her in high-school history class."

  "She was my mother."

  "You're 43?"

  "I'm 23. I can pass for 30. But 43 would be a stretch."

  "I can pass for 40. I just have to unsex myself. I can look just like a dried-up little middle-aged Irish nun if I want. I used to fool people into thinking I was my shrink, Sister Mary Elizabeth McCarthy. It's easy. I've fooled people into thinking I was a PHD. That's why I read Freud and Thomas Aquinas together. You mix the Catholic Church in with psychoanalysis and they have no clue what to make of it. They believe everything else you have to say. I'm good at it."

  "I'm not. I'm 23 years old. I have trouble passing for 30."

  John Avellanos went back over to the table and fished the 8 x 10 photo of the 50 year old Laura Felton he had shown George out of the waterproof, plastic envelope. Cathy Chegoffgan looked at the dark haired women in the Nirvana T-shirt. She looked at John Avellanos as a little boy, nodding as if to say 'of course it's you.' She looked at the surrounding landscape. She looked back at the picture of the middle-aged Laura Felton. It was astonishing how well Laura Felton had kept her good looks. She was tall, graceful looking, even in a still photo. The trace of gray in her hair had appeared when she was only 18, so she wore it almost as a badge of youth. There was another worldly glamour about her appearance, some of which, but certainly not all of which had been passed down to her son. John Avellanos was right about himself. He did come off as a big, clumsy dork. Laura Felton did not. She had the quality of a fallen angel, of a Lucifer, of someone who had once been the brightest star in all the heavens, but then rebelled. Cathy Chegoffgan suddenly felt plain, ordinary.

  "Tell me how she faked her death," she said. "The way my life is going, it could turn out to be a useful skill."

  John Avellanos walked over to the bottle of gin, and poured himself another glass, which he drank off in one gulp. He walked across the room and flopped over on Cathy Chegoffgan's futon. She followed him over and flopped down next to him, throwing both her legs over his as if to say "I've got all the time in the world." Avellanos took a deep breath and started to tell his story.

  Chapter 20 - A very slow fuse

  For most of her youth, and well into middle-age, Laura Felton, with her long black hair, pale skin, and luminous dark eyes, had the kind of glamour and striking, magnetic presence that sometimes led people to wonder if they had ever seen her in a movie or on the cover of a magazine. Born in 1952, she matriculated at a large, private university in Boston at the very height of the protest movement against the War in Vietnam. Though the bomb that she planted at the university chemistry lab, which was developing a more effective type of napalm, had been intended to destroy property, not people, it killed one temporary janitor and maimed two more, both of whom had been working late. A local newspaper described the explosion as "a ghastly act of terrorism carried out by a fiend with professional training in demolitions."

  That the bomb had been set off by a 19-year-old college student was suspected by nobody except her older brother, Nicholas Felton, who had recently graduated from law school. He called the FBI and turned his sister in, giving them a detailed description of her fiery letters denouncing the "genocidal" war in Vietnam, and her training in explosives that came from working at the family owned demolitions company the summer after her graduation from high school. Nicholas Felton regretted his decision almost as soon as he made it.

  Laura Felton, on the other hand, was unrepentant, even more so when she found out that the university had decided not to rebuild the laboratory she destroyed, and to phase out all military research on campus. After a miserable existence in a series of safe houses, she managed to fake her death in El Paso, make it across the border to Mexico, and lose herself in the immensity of the western Sierra Madre.

  Nobody ever quite figured out how Laura Felton set off the explosion that supposedly blew her into a million pieces, or faked the evidence that allowed a sympathetic medical examiner to issue a death certificate. She later wrote a taunting letter to her brother claiming to have packed explosives in a body freshly dug up from the morgue. She told him that she "accidentally" set off the bomb with the Swiss watch he had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Nicholas Felton never passed it on to the FBI, but a demolitions expert that he queried told him that yes, it was possible. Once a year after that, his sister would send him another taunting letter with no return address, letting him know she was keeping tabs on his political career, but telling him nothing about herself.

  In 2001, the letters abruptly stopped.

  Nicholas Felton eventually figured out that his younger sister had spent decades living underground in a small city along the Gulf of California, hoping she would eventually repent of her violent crime, and turn herself into the FBI. He never found out how she died. Laura Felton had taken to growing marijuana, setting up a neat little series of greenhouses that sustained her comfortably while she painted, eventually becoming an underground artist who worked under the name Laura El Guero. She wrote poetry, raised her son John, and lived with Rosa, her female companion. One of the earliest memories John Avellanos had was the ease with which his mother crossed and re-crossed the border to Taos and Santa Fe. He could never be quite certain whether he had been conceived in the southwest part of the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico or in the closet of an art gallery during one of his mother's openings in Santa Fe. But he did grow up believing that there was an extensive network of old, new left radicals who would eventually overthrow the American government, and welcome his mother back home to the United States as a conquering hero.

  In 2001, Bug Eye Jimenez, an agent of one of the Sonora cartels, was sent to ask Laura Felton to shut down her greenhouses, to give her at least one warning before killing her. Laura Felton, not a woman to be intimidated, told him, in bad Spanish that had to be repeated several times before it was understood, that, no, she would not shut down her greenhouses, that he was a short, fat, ugly little dog, and that he should remove himself from her premises. Bug Eye Jimenez, no slouch in the art of verbal abuse himself, told her, in bad English that had to be repeated several times before it was understood, that she was an ugly, middle aged gringa whore who would, if the greenhouses remained, not live to regret it. A week later the house where John Avellanos had spent his early childhood was sprayed with gunfire, and his mother and her companion were found, slumped over her latest painting, the bottom of the canvas soaked with blood and brain matter. When the police found John, who survived because he had accidentally locked himself in the basement, he began to scream uncontrollably, but not because his mother was dead. Laura Felton, frustrated that her son was continually locking himself in the basement, had told him that if it happened again, she would c
all the police. John, who had not heard the gunfire because a thick wall of earth and cement had muffled the sound, had thought the police were there to arrest him. They were, in fact, a little confused about what to do with him.

  His biological father showed up the next day. The grandson of Spanish Republicans who had come to Mexico in the 1930s under the amnesty given by Lázaro Cárdenas, and who married into country's ruling elite, Oscar Avellanos had studied petroleum engineering in Texas before he came back home to Mexico City where, after a hiatus of a few years, he began to add to his family's already considerable fortune. Bearing a slight resemblance to Jesus as painted by El Greco, he was, in spite of his wealth and good looks, a virgin at the age of 23. He was also in a mode of post collegiate rebellion against his parents. He even tried to join a small, anarchist sect in Austin, but got turned down for being "ideologically unsound."

  When he met the beautiful, tall Laura El Guero, with her prematurely graying hair, and the air she gave off that came from living outside the law, Oscar Avellanos fell immediately in love with her, even though she was more than a decade his senior. Eleven years later, his youthful rebellious urges were gone. He not only disavowed his onetime radicalism. He became a tedious reactionary. "If you're not a socialist when you're under 30 you have no heart. But if you are a socialist when you're over 30 you have no brains." Oscar Avellanos knew the cliché in two languages.

  Laura Felton had long ago told Avellanos, who had married a woman of his own age, nationality, and class, and settled down to the task of raising children and making money, that his illegitimate son was none of his affair. He had also converted to evangelical Protestantism, mainly because he admired George W. Bush, and had been told to apologize for, and, if at all possible, to right any of his past sins. His son John could be safely ignored when he was under the care of a ferocious, ferociously independent, and quite possibly dangerous terrorist. But now that he was a helpless orphan, something had to be done. Oscar Avellanos had been regularly sending money for child support, which was, just as regularly, sent back. After he heard about Laura Felton's, he brought his son back to his house in Mexico City to raise him along with his three daughters.

  Oscar's experiment in personal responsibility did not go over well with his wife. Mariana Avellanos, knowing her husband was disappointed that she had given him three girls and no son, took John's presence in the house, her house, as a personal rebuke, especially after he adopted the boy legally. The little half Anglo bastard was also flat out weird. He chewed his food loudly, picked his nose, scratched himself at the most inopportune moments and in the most inopportune places, and liked to tease his step sisters by farting loudly at the dinner table. He couldn't even speak proper Spanish. He spoke only gutter Spanish, and a strange kind of hillbilly North American English. Even worse, he would often go into uncontrollable fits of hysterical laughter and then, just as quickly, start to cry, a cry that almost always turned into a deep, savage wail of grief that was impossible to stop. Mariana Avellanos knew that her stepson's behavior was perfectly understandable in an 11 year-old boy who had just lost his mother, but she did not want that perfectly understandable emotional anguish inflicted on her 7, 5, and 3 year old daughters, all of whom she insisted on raising Catholic, none of whom she wanted to come under the influence of her husband's youthful indiscretion, or his evangelical Protestantism.

  Oscar Avellanos, eventually, agreed. A whispering campaign had started up among his political opponents after 9/11, rumors that Oscar Avellanos, who was a rising young star on the Mexican right, had a son by an old left wing, radical from the United States. They insinuated that Avellanos had used his connections to prevent Laura Felton from being extradited to the United States for the entirely selfish reason that he did not want to raise his own son, insinuations that were, of course, entirely true. Oscar Avellanos had believed that by taking young John into his family after the murder that it would put an end to the rumors. It did not. John Avellanos gave off every indication that he would become a violent criminal, exactly like his mother. He got into fights. He was disruptive. He talked back to his teachers. When he finally stabbed one of his teachers in the leg with a steak knife in the school cafeteria, and the teacher, after collecting the hush money that the family had given him not to go to the press, went to the press, Oscar Avellanos decided, in what his wife thought was a perfectly elegant solution to their thorny little embarrassment, to ship him off to a private school just outside of Burlington Vermont. John Avellanos was officially a citizen of Mexico, but his mother had been a citizen of the United States. He belonged in the United States. He spoke English better than he spoke Spanish anyway.

  Once at the Worthington Syms Friends Academy, John Avellanos's life improved. The school had a student to teacher ratio of only 4 to 1, and a succession of instructors took a personal interest in him. They found him charming and eccentric. He had memorized the Bible and most of Shakespeare. He had large, hypnotic, green eyes. What's more, he had an elegant, aristocratic father who not only paid his bills on time, but also sent the school generous donations. John Avellanos was popular and quite happy. This was not the United States that his mother used to fulminate against. Creativity and independent thought were encouraged. He lost all motivation to stand out by acting out. His father even provided money for him to see a therapist twice a week. He started to write letters to his father, his three stepsisters, and his stepmother, who found him perfectly charming as long as he was thousands of miles away. Perhaps his almost bottomless well of rage had come, not out of his mother's murder, but from his having been deprived of his rightful identity as a United States citizen, Oscar would sometimes remark to Mariana Avellanos.

  When John suggested a large, well-known, private university in Boston, Oscar Avellanos had been pleasantly surprised at how his son showed no desire at all to return to Mexico City. He might have been less pleased had he known the reason why. John Avellanos had grown up looking a copy of the college alumni magazine someone had sent his mother, that particular issue having had a long article about campus radicalism during the war in Vietnam. "Laura Felton," the writer speculated. "Where had it all gone wrong?" But the university was not the romantic bastion of 1960s radicalism he had imagined. It had never been. It was almost as safe, dull and middle of the road during Obama's first term as it had been during Nixon's. Avellanos, who eventually graduated with a double major in theater and English literature, found the workload depressingly easy, except for his Spanish classes, where he learned how to lisp his "THs" just like a real Spaniard, but where he also tended, even in his 400 level seminars, to lapse into English.

  "John Avellanos," one of his professors would always say. "This is America. We speak Spanish."

  Since Laura Felton had been murdered during the early months of the Bush administration, before the drug war in Mexico started up in earnest in 2006 and drive by shootings became commonplace, the usual conspiracy theories popped up in the usual places about her death. Bug Eye Jimenez would have undoubtedly been surprised, and perhaps even pleased, that, far from a small time drug dealer who had been humiliated by a crazy old woman, he was, in fact, a high level CIA operative who had murdered one of America's foremost radical, albeit highly obscure artists. But as ridiculous as he found the conspiracy theories, Avellanos couldn't get enough of them. Any mention of his mother by any strange person would re-establish, however, briefly, his connection to his early childhood. It eventually led him to "Guillotine."

  Guillotine was a "revolutionary socialist" newspaper that sometimes devoted articles to debunking some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories by the "Stalinist Left and the Libertarian Right," but, simultaneously, maintained an antagonistic attitude towards all forms of respectable authority. After reading an article with a one sentence reference to his mother, Avellanos started to follow the paper in earnest. He discovered that his lingering resentment at his biological father and stepmother coincided very nicely with the idea of class war against the rich. He
also discovered that their office was only a three block walk from his apartment near the university. After dropping in for a brief visit, the 20 year old Avellanos found himself sitting in front of an intense looking thirty something woman in thick, black frame glasses who not only talked him into volunteering for the paper and relieved him of his virginity, but also managed to convince him that, far from an outcast and a misfit, he was in fact a "cisgender white male who needed to check his cisgender white privilege."

  For the next year, John Avellanos worked on their website translating Guillotine's articles into Spanish for their bi-lingual edition. The year after that, he became their Latin American Correspondent, specializing in Mexican politics, and, more importantly, in attacks on Oscar Avellanos, who was suspected, in some circles, of having inside information about the disappearance of 3 union organizers in Juarez, and "his hellion bitch of a wife." Avellanos' articles, which were written under his own name, were well researched, rigorously argued, and viciously personal, soon developed a devoted following, increased the paper's circulation, and, inevitably, made their way back to his father.

  "I see you've turned into a communist just like your mother," his father said, calling him on the phone instead of writing him.

  "You didn't know my mother, but as far as I can categorize her, she was an anarcho-primitivist with tendencies, at her worst, perhaps, what Jurgen Habermas would have referred to as a left fascist. Calling her a communist just proves what a block headed reactionary you really are. You do know Jesus was a communist, don't you?"

  "Don't get pedantic with me. You know what I mean."

  "I have no economic interest in language that obscures, so no, sir, I do not know what you mean."

  "So now you're lecturing me about economic interest?" How about this? It's in your economic interest to stop writing for a piece of shit left wing broadsheet nobody reads just to spite your mother."

  "My mother is dead, and the sperm donor doesn't seem to understand that his cops, his soldiers, and his narco thugs can't threaten me all the way up here in Boston."