I hadn’t cried for hours and hours and hours on a daily basis for months on end since my self-imposed Santa Fe exile a decade earlier, when I’d followed Estéban into a new identity in the hope it would keep me from confronting my loss-of-revolution grief, my traumas, and, ultimately, myself. I’d been running from singleness all my life. This time, though, I was falling apart outside a relationship, no new lover in sight to witness my breakdown, blame, or take it out on. I decided to stop chasing men, stay put, look the void in the eye, and let it rip. One of my roommates had broken her back and she’d lie on the kitchen floor next to me. We’d wail together, her pain physical, mine emotional. We christened our apartment the House of Pain.
The loss of that relationship had taken me on the most terrifying journey yet: confronting my fear of being abandoned, of being alone. If the conscious peeling back of layers had begun in theatre school almost ten years earlier, then that devastating breakup forced me finally to face the self-destructive, petrified young girl who lived inside me, the girl who’d been clamouring for my attention my entire life and whom I was now ready, in my aloneness, to face and embrace. I had always equated solitude with abandonment and various living nightmares that fell under the heading of the Terror, such as being left to fend for myself as a child after my parents were killed in a concentration camp, being murdered by firing squad right after the coup, being dragged away in the middle of the night and thrown into a car by four armed secret policemen, being tortured and made to disappear without a trace when I was in the MIR, being chopped up and buried in the bottom of the forest in a large black plastic garbage bag while my parents spent the rest of their lives looking for me.
I started weekly therapy sessions with a straight, male, middle-class, Buddhist WASP and began confronting the Terror head-on. I had stopped seeing the Birkenstock-wearing lesbian counsellor during my last year at theatre school, after I’d been told I wasn’t an actor, but she had paved the way for the rape to now elbow its way front and centre, where it stayed. I’d been turning the kaleidoscope intermittently for years but had yet to focus on its nucleus: the rape itself and the effect it had had on me and my intimate relationships.
Over the next decade, each terror took its turn in the spotlight, and my therapist guided me on my demon-facing journey with the compassion and assurance of a master who’d been counselling survivors of trauma for twenty-five years. I allowed myself to fall apart during those two House of Pain years, and would later refer to that part of my life as my Saturn Return Nervous Breakdown, because the relationship had begun when I was twenty-eight, ended when I was thirty, and had me crying until I was thirty-two.
In the fall of 1999, I got a part on a TV show playing a devout Catholic mother of two East LA gangbangers. All I had to do was fall to my knees a lot in front of my Guadalupe shrine while sporting fake grey in my hair and painted-on wrinkles. When the actor flown in from Los Angeles to play my older son walked into the makeup trailer (at thirty-two, I was only five years older than him) and turned out to be the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, I was hit by the recognizable fever that had frequently consumed me since the age of four. I also recognized him in the literal sense: he was a California Chicano, and thus reminded me of the place just down the coast where I’d first experienced exile.
At the end of our week on the North Vancouver set, we got it on at the Sutton Place Hotel, where LA actors were put up. After two years of celibacy and soul-searching, the stakes were extraordinarily high. The man who’d played my son and been romancing me all week was now making love to me, the first to touch me in those twenty-four months of raw pain. I’d been spit out the other side of the rape-confronting period of my therapy back into the light in a state of such innocence that it was like being reborn, like being a virgin, as though the rape had never happened. I could start over by opening my legs to a lover of my choosing: a North American Latino, the male embodiment of my own dual identity.
Two months after our Vancouver night together, I found myself on an LA-bound flight, going to spend a week with this man whose Chicano-ness had me remembering my first encounter with North America, when I was six years old and spoke no English; and California, the original exile-home, was where I discovered what brown was, what poor was, what Latina was.
He picked me up at the airport and drove like a maniac along the 405 freeway. We passed a mint-condition baby-blue 1970 Chevrolet Malibu, the same colour, make, and model that my family and I had driven to Canada lifetimes before. Its bumper sticker asked,
If not for love, then why?
Inexplicably yelling all the way to West Hollywood about how busy he was and how this was a really bad time (no mention was made of the fact that he’d been the one to invite me), he went to a baptism after dropping me off at his apartment with a promise to return that evening. He was the only person I knew in that vast city. I took a lonesome stroll along Sunset Boulevard, a block away, and was approached by a nineteen-year-old, nine-month-pregnant Romanian fortune teller who pulled me up a flight of spiral stairs, sat me down in front of a crystal ball, and assured me that he was The One. After twenty-four hours of waiting for him to materialize while his roommate loudly masturbated to phone sex lines in the other room, I went back to the airport and boarded a return flight to Vancouver, sobbing into my journal the whole way home. Litanies and laments filled its tear-stained pages, and this entry was no exception:
All the work you’ve done over the last two years on your core belief that you do not deserve to be loved has been for nothing. You’ve just thrown it all away. You must keep digging deep, you must keep confronting your fear of being alone, you must stop chasing men who are unavailable, you must stop looking for love in all the wrong places, you must stop working for love, you must stop looking for love outside yourself, you must stop being a fucking addict.
Insight into my self-destructive patterns hadn’t meant I was ready to break them. Chasing a man so unavailable that he’d disappeared upon my arrival had proven that.
My best friend, Jamila, a queer first-generation Egyptian-Canadian refugee counsellor and reiki healer, waited for me at the airport and shook her head with fury all the way to her place, where she played her CD of oming Tibetan monks and cursed the ground he walked on.
“That man is so pathetically dark, kinda like a limp dick, that I don’t worry too much about all the damage he’ll do in the world, you know?” she’d noted while pouring me a cup of Tension Tamer tea.
A few days later, she gave me one of her beetle paintings and ordered me to hang it over my bed, for protection.
That twenty-four-hour passage through Los Angeles had sealed the deal for me. I would never EVER return there, what with its twenty million cars, endless sea of hundred-foot billboards, charlatans, and despicable men.
Two months later, in February 2000, I found myself at LAX again, visiting another Chicano actor who was part of a renowned Chicano theatre troupe. I had met him in Seattle, where Jamila and I had gone to see one of their touring plays. We’d waited around after the show, and had all gone for drinks. During his run, he’d come to Vancouver for a visit and had invited me to LA. When I landed at LAX this time, I wasn’t met by a mind-blowingly self-centred boy in a man’s body, but by a little red carpet leading to the door of a gold 1970s Cadillac, against which Chicano Actor #2 leaned, white wife-beater showing off the Virgin of Guadalupe and chola tattoos on his brown arms. Upon seeing me emerge from the automatic airport doors, he yelled out, “You’re a fuckin’ queen, baby!”, a bouquet of red roses in his fist.
We laughed all the way to his downtown loft, Santana’s Supernatural album blaring from the ghetto blaster resting on the back seat of his vintage vehicle, also reminiscent of my family’s baby-blue Chevrolet Malibu, passing a car with a Powered by Mexican Huevos bumper sticker. We stopped at a botánica in Echo Park so he could buy a votive candle to burn for his recently deceased uncle. One glimpse of that east-side-of-LA neighbourhood, with its murals of Mexican screen ic
ons Fernando Soler and María Félix, Aztec serpents, Quinceañeras, and a brown boy holding planet Earth in his hands, streets with names like Alvarado, Quintero, and Laguna, mariachi bands tuning their instruments outside the many Mexican restaurants, avocado, champurrado, and ice cream vendors with carts displaying names such as Delicias de Michoacán, not to mention its majority population of working-class brown people from Mexico and Central America, and I knew I’d arrived home.
This Chicano theatre artist came from a line of farm workers, and his father had been one of the founders of the United Farm Workers union, alongside César Chávez. A massive United Farm Workers banner hung on one of his edge-of-downtown loft walls, while a mural of La Lupe, Frida Kahlo, and Che Guevara took up another. Visitors from the Chicano arts community, be they rappers, visual artists, or actors, dropped by nightly. Days were spent at diners, burrito stands, Olvera Street, and driving the gold Cadillac down Sunset Boulevard and César Chávez Avenue, all while discussing ideas for plays, taking notes on napkins and the tops of our hands. Evenings took us to the theatre, where Chicano stories were told, he always knew the players involved, and discussions with fellow North American Latino artists took place. On my last day there, the space shuttle took off from a Southern California air base, the earth shaking so hard I was sure disaster had hit in the form of a major quake. As serendipity would have it, the takeoff happened at the moment of climax during a passionate morning embrace.
The trip was orgasmic in the metaphorical sense as well, and I wept with relief. Full circle, my Saturn Return had brought me right back to where I’d started, the state of my first exile-home. I belonged in a city in the United States, the last place on earth I’d expected to find roots. A place where over 50 percent of the population was Latino, a metropolis that was a haven for my dual identity. Although he was emotionally unavailable and juggling a dozen women across the country I would be forever thankful to Chicano Actor #2 for swinging open the doors of LA’s east side and its Latino artists to me.
No words could do justice to what I felt when I discovered that just down the coast there was a thriving community of Latino artists creating the kind of content I had been exploring in complete isolation as the sole Latina in the Vancouver professional theatre scene (both Lucho and my Argentinian mentor had moved to Toronto). In Vancouver, the closest I’d come to working with fellow Latino actors in recent times was playing Chicano Actor #2’s saintly mother, and pretending to suck off a renowned East LA stand-up comedian in a straight-to-video movie. I had worn red polyester lingerie; he’d been in animal-print Lycra bikini briefs, a fake hard-on made by the props department stuffed inside. My only line as Mexican Hooker #1 had been “Ay, señor,” my only blocking that of being on my knees, my face an inch away from his crotch.
The role had been vaguely reminiscent of what I considered to be one of my first paid acting gigs in the mid-nineties, a phone sex operator for an illegal call centre on Vancouver’s East Hastings Street. Although it operated out of Canada, the sex line serviced the States, including its military bases around the world. It was a sweatshop: forty booths stuck together under fluorescent lighting in an airless room and a boss who listened in on your calls and fired you if you failed to keep a customer on the line for at least five minutes. I had got the job shortly after graduating from theatre school, as an alternative to waiting on tables.
Questions about the integrity of prostituting my voice quickly turned to outrage when I realized they charged five dollars a minute and we got eight bucks an hour. I worked forty hours a week, sometimes took two calls at a time (there were two phones in each booth), told the callers my name was Miranda del Amor (double Ds, long wavy hair), heard up to 120 men come per day, and suffered from neck and jaw problems. I also worried that my saliva glands would give out as I spent an average of six hours out of the eight-hour shift sucking on a soother. When I wasn’t sucking on the soother, I was tickling the inside of my cheek with my index finger while keeping my upper teeth touching my bottom teeth. This sounded like pussy being eaten.
Some of my co-workers had no papers. They were Guatemalans, Mexicans, and Salvadorans, there to speak Spanish to the Latino callers who wanted service in the mother tongue, the men working the phones pretending to be women. There were a few punk rockers, an old lady who crocheted baby blankets, and an ex–football player whose persona was Candy (four foot nine, blond hair down to her bum). He was goal-oriented:
“Hey everyone! Ten minutes says I get this one to stick a frozen wiener up his ass!”
When I got a call, I immediately asked the caller’s name, wrote it down on my list, and then said his name over and over again. It was called intimacy. Every booth contained a mirror in which you could see the reflection of your own face eight hours a day. This was to make sure you were always smiling. So you sucked on the soother, whipped the phone, and finger-fucked the inside of your cheek to your own image, which was about a foot away from your face. After twenty-two minutes the call was automatically cut off so you wouldn’t develop any real intimacy with the clients.
I learned a great deal about what men really wanted during that stint. More often than not it wasn’t sex, but love and intimacy. I had gone in prepared to listen to and follow commands; we had to say yes to absolutely anything the client requested. But instead of the callers issuing horrific, degrading, misogynistic orders, I’d been directed to say “I love you” almost every other time. Sometimes the men and boys, for there were teenaged boys who called as well, wept as the I love yous fell out of my mouth, always followed by their name. It was overwhelming, eye-opening, and heartbreaking, and revealed so much to me about the human condition and the state of the North American heart, the North being a place where so many people live in isolation.
Although I had come a long way since the phone-sex operator job of my mid-twenties, writing and acting in my own plays, facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, running the Latino Theatre Group for eight years, it wasn’t until the spring of 2002, post–Saturn Return, that I finally accepted the title of writer. At that time, I was playwright-in-residence at the Vancouver Playhouse, British Columbia’s regional theatre, and I’d written or co-written ten plays. All had been professionally produced, three had been nominated for awards, and two had been published, but I still felt that labelling myself a writer was self-congratulatory and putting on airs. The same went for calling myself an actor. I’d always felt uncomfortable with it, as I had so much respect for both those crafts that I’d decided I would only refer to myself as a professional when someone who was a master in the form bestowed that honour on me. It happened during the Banff Playwrights Colony, where I was working on the third draft of The Refugee Hotel. An autobiographical piece about the Chileans I’d met at the Refugee Hotel, it featured a main character based on my adored uncle Boris. I’d written the first draft during my House of Pain years, inspired by Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in England and as homage to my uncle, who’d drunk himself to death in 1995.
During the Colony, the great playwright Tomson Highway came to one of the readings and paid me the highest compliment from an artist of his calibre:
“Thank you. I learned so much from your writing that it’s cured me of my writer’s block. Oh, and I do have one note for you. The end of your play is sappy and sentimental. That’s all.”
I skipped through the cemetery at the bottom of the arts centre as I made my way to town to buy condoms for the looming lay with one of the actors, a sexy nerd who tended to brood. Clapping to myself, I finally admitted what I’d been working towards since my days in theatre school: I really was a storyteller. With that title came a responsibility so great I’d better brace myself for what was to come.
Miranda del Amor, gangbanger’s Devout Catholic Mother, numerous maid roles, and Mexican Hooker #1 had helped pay the bills, but now that I’d discovered a robust Latino theatre scene a mere freeway ride away, that June 2002 I drove down the coast to Los Angeles. The plan was to spend the summer there,
checking out the lay of the theatre land for a possible move to the City of Angels. Now that I’d decided not only to embrace my calling but to take responsibility for it, the realm of possibilities was endless. Life had taught me that anything could happen and did, and ever since deciding to follow the dream of being an actor, and now a writer, I was committed to going wherever that dream took me. In the summer of 2002, it pointed south.
Stevie Wonder’s Musiquarium album blasted from my stereo as I drove through Washington, Oregon, and California. A brand new chapter was about to begin, the tears of the House of Pain left behind, along with the exile-country of the far north, the one that had taken me in, educated me, held its doors open time and time again. A country that I loved but which, alas, did not live in my marrow, now a mere image in the rear-view mirror. I drove south for three days along the west coast of the Americas, towards my place on planet Earth, the mountains a spine to my east, the potent Pacific the blood that rushed through the veins and arteries pumped by my ever-expansive heart.
I let the memories of driving north along this very coast in 1974 in a baby-blue Chevrolet Malibu bombard me, tears falling at the recollection of my devastated parents—at the thought of their youth, their courage and terror, their superhuman effort to give my sister and me a good life no matter what the cost. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” played at full volume as I mourned the loss of my original plan: to return to Chile or Argentina right after theatre school and leave the North behind, forever, for good, a project abandoned because I went wherever my calling took me and it hadn’t taken me back there. I confronted, foot flooring the accelerator, eyes on the freeway that stretched into the horizon, the booming voice in my head that still told me I did not deserve to follow a selfish dream, to do something only for myself, to do the opposite of what a revolutionary would do.
Mexican Hooker #1 Page 17
