Then we’re speeding off. They’re talking about drugs and brindle pitbulls and what they’re going to buy their girlfriends. We get back to Camilo’s. I’m too paralyzed to move when Camilo tells me to get out, but when I manage to move. I drill my eyes into the others with a promise that if I ever see them again, I’ll mess them up.
We go inside, Camilo grabs the truck keys and tells me, it’s time to celebrate. He holds the door so he can lock it behind me. I follow him out the back to a fence. We climb over, walk into the field, stop at a thicket of weeds.
“See?. . .” He parts the weeds.
I stare at a pile of salvaged 2x6s and tangled fencing and broken fixtures and rubbish.
“I been taking material off job sites so you and I can start our remodel business. And here. . .” He steps a few paces to the left, tosses off old rotten plywood, broken benches and tables, and pulls off shredded blankets and carpets. “Yours.” He smiles, indicating a desk with three legs and a chair with a cracked seat. “I’m going to fix them up, varnish them for you.”
That moment splinters me. Do I show my gratitude with a false smile that our lives are good and we have a future, or with the fatal acceptance that our lives are fucked up?
I mean, he meant well. I tried to act happy. For the first time since I left DYA, I saw my chances of making it going down. Was it even possible for me to make a new life out here, in a place where I feel as out of place as any human being ever felt? An anchor drags across my heart, digging deep with the answer, There’s no way you can do this reentry thing.
I don’t know what to say. I’m sad, confused. Afraid. I walk around in the weeds looking at the ground where someone dumped a bunch of trash. Old Rolling Stone magazines. Headlines: Nixon resigned; Vietnam War ending; Jimmy Carter; Roe v. Wade; Jim Jones; 900 people in Guyana die in a mass suicide; Iranian militant students seize the US embassy in Tehran; César Chávez; Brown Berets; Black Panthers; Patty Hearst and black revolutionaries. George Wallace is shot; Elvis dies. What I read makes me feel like I’m waking up from a decade-long coma. At that moment, I realize while I was in the devil’s daycare, time had left me behind.
We drive to the foothills in silence. It’s August, early afternoon, and the sun warms the Tijeras Canyon. At a steak-house, we drink a few tequilas. Camilo is wired from meth. We recall the old times.
“The keggers after the games, vato, and all the chicks . . . man . . . you had a sweet jumper.”
“You remember . . . what’s her name? María?”
“You kidding? I had the biggest crush on her, but she only loved you.”
“Yeah! She takes me on the ditch bank in the trees to make out, and I caught you spying on us.” He laughs.
“Man, was I soooo embarrassed,” I say, feeling great that we’re bonding. “I remember when you were at the Cactus Motel, all you talked about was meeting Evel Knievel.”
“Yeah. . . . Remember we souped up that Karmann Ghia, we cruised Louey’s hamburger joint for chicks?”
Camilo nods, cheeks and forehead blushing. As we toast our third shot, his eyes glaze. A second later, he threatens to kick my ass. His words hit me like a wrecking ball that comes out of nowhere, crashing between us, shattering me.
Fears surge up in me at his threat. I want to warn him that I’m different. In DYA, another part of me was born out of survival, a necessary evil. Ghost Boy. When he takes over, he doesn’t care about anything. I don’t know where Ghost Boy came from, how to reason with him. All I know is that he is the angry part of me. The one with no memory, uncontrollable when he surfaces. He emerges when I’m threatened. I want to tell Camilo to pull back, chill, he can’t threaten me. He doesn’t know that if he touches me, Ghost Boy will bare his claws and lunge.
I wanted to say, “We change, Camilo,” but I don’t.
He is not the brother he was a minute ago. He raises his hand to slap me. I catch it midair, stare, gritting my teeth.
“Please,” I say, “. . . some . . . thing happen-ed-to-me.”
I can’t breathe. I hold my palm to my mouth, like I’m about to weep or puke, to motion him stop. I feel heat all inside me, rushing from my heart to my veins all over my body. My hands shake from the burning, my head and neck tremble, and Camilo swings and hits me with his free hand.
A dark force whirls inside me, suffocates me. I cough. I choke on the bitter bile in my mouth, in my nostrils. My mind goes into a white-out. The whiteness spreads to my knees, and I can’t, I can’t take it. I leap out of my chair, grab Camilo and shove him outside.
“Quit hitting me!” I yell, tears in my eyes. “Man. Some. Thing. Happened. To Meeee!”
The whole world beyond the steakhouse collapses, fills with those who have betrayed me since I was born: parents, teachers . . . I see me roaming the streets, scared, scared of women and men, boys who bullied me, frightened of shadows and strangers and being unprotected, a homeless boy, exposed and at the mercy of rapists, murderers, brutal police, drug dealers and gangbangers. Alone and hated by white society, stigmatized by every glare and every cruel word etching its condemnation onto my heart, telling me that I am worthless.
I strike Camilo. I knock him down on the asphalt. I swing at the malicious violations against me, at all the guilty perpetrators who scoffed at me as Camilo’s grin does, as my own grin used to sneer at enemies beating on me. His smile says to me, Beat me, little brother, break me into pieces that can never be put back together, and I want to wipe it off his face, because the pendulum blade swings back to a time when I too grinned at all the pain and sorrow as if it didn’t hurt or matter. It did, it did. It hurt bad, but I never let anyone know.
His eyes mock me like mine once mocked the world, saying, You’re doing right, little brother. We came into this world through a drug addict’s vagina, skittering like rats in the trash. Hit me! Every drop of his blood I spill on the pavement affirms my worthlessness, that I do not belong except on the ground with the world beating me, with me leering, my don’t- care grin—until I am gone, until I return to the nothingness from where I came.
Just then, he gets up and starts beating me. He picks up a board and hits me. I don’t fight back. I find love for him in my helplessness, solace in my surrender, because it is the only way I have of showing him I love him.
He says with his smirk, Yes, little brother, I’ll beat you until you can finally sigh with relief that you are no more, that this world can no longer hurt you. Like you, I crawled into this life owned by others to beat and starve, not allowed to speak, with no right to feelings, no right to my face or hands or feet or sleep or dreams. I am a mistake to erase from the page of the living. Make my blood wash over me and make me forget, force me to fade away, to drift into the unknown where men like you and me, unknown men, arrive unknown and live unknown and are removed as if they never existed. Remove me, little brother, please, like I remove you.
I want him to stop, but he keeps on until Ghost Boy whispers, Never go down. I want to scream to drown out Ghost Boy’s voice, but it comes: Don’t let life do this to you, fight back with every breath!
I attack. I try to wipe away the look in Camilo’s eyes that keeps saying in the language of the oppressed and hopeless: Hit me, make me vanish.
“Defend yourself!” I scream, and I beat and beat him until I can’t swing anymore.
When I stop, I don’t recognize where I am, except that this region of hell is unnamable. I back away in remorse and shock. I move but feel immobile, pant but can’t breathe, really frightened but fearless, in the world but out of it, looking in at me standing bloody-fisted over my brother.
I trudge back to town like a sleepwalker. A sad scene, me walking down that mountain road, embracing myself with my arms, head down, all the sorrow in the world rising to my eyes as I hold my tears back and refuse to cry.
Soon, I worry about him. So I return to the restaurant and find my brother has left. A cop car is in the parking lot, the cop questions me, handcuffs me, puts me in the back seat. On the way t
o jail I have the feeling my whole life is a crime scene, and I am a crime that corrupts everything I touch.
They take me to a hospital and X-ray me to check if anything is broken. The clinician comes out from behind the curtains to ask if I am wearing anything metal, a medal or chain, and I say no. She shows me the X-ray, dozens of scattered beads radiate light over the black plastic. I tell the clinician I was shot once, they’re bird-shot pellets. Thirty-two of them. I think the X-ray looks like a night sky with stars—Orlando’s night sky.
They let me go. I check in at the downtown Y and sit down in my room on the floor, feeling the floorboards shake with the industrial washer and dryer downstairs cycling the Y’s bedding. Late morning, I walk down 4th Street to a coffee house.
Caló, my people’s secret dialect, fills the air—voces de la plebe, mi gente, la raza, from Chicanos and barrio vatos y locos to abuelitos, city workers, college students, profes, tattooed pintos, political gangsters, muralists and Chicanas as beautiful as they are powerful thinkers and radicals. Their voices sooth my soul with the Chicano slang I grew up with:
¿Pos qué, chingao?
A la verga, bro.
¿Cómo estás, abuelita?
¡Quiúbole, carnalito!
Fue un pinche desmadre.
¡Rascuache, mamón!
¡Paga la cuenta, baboso!
Te amo con todo, preem.
¿Qué onda?
¡Aliviánate, pelao!
I order pozole with cubed steak, garlic, red onion, lime wedge, potatoes, chile con cilantro. While I wait for my food, I eavesdrop on conversations.
“Quiúbole, ese, wanna get buzzed? I’m talkin’ lit up, all neon, Sunset Boulevard, shit. . . . I got some good coca!”
“¡Qué papote! Vato, ¿qué chingao tienes? . . . You’re always going to be a fiend, pinche ese.”
“Not today,” his friend says with conviction and smiles. A guy rolls up, slaps another guy on the shoulder: “Come on, vato, kick the chanclas and get your toes in the sand. What you doing?”
“You still a loco.”
“Always.”
“Whatever, Za-Pa-Ta, dial me up when you want, ese, and we’ll get down with some rucas.” He struts off, bumping his fist to his chest to mean, We’re down for the brown.
It’s our onda, our way, güey.
After I finish eating I sit and think, then pull out the envelope I’ve been carrying since my release. I place it on the table and study the airline ticket Lila included in her letter.
I use the café payphone, call collect and tell Lila I’m coming. We can do what we wrote in our letters. I’ll move there. We can make crazy love all night and day. Making love in every possible way we can imagine is almost all we ever wrote about. After being locked up as long as I have, my imagination has really gone wild. Now, after talking to her, I can’t wait to see her.
I take another way on my walk back to the Y, past the zoo, where I hear caged elephants moaning, lions roaring, bird cries raking across the hot sky. I sit down on a concrete bench and listen.
Across the street I can see a couple under a steel canopy in the park. I get up and walk toward them. I slow down on the sidewalk. I hear her reading him her poem. Or a letter maybe. I kneel to tie my shoe, which doesn’t need tying, and listen. It’s about them being in a forest, blanket on the ground or on a boulder next to a creek, enjoying cheese and wine and crackers while birds swoop in and out of branches, shaking sunrays from the leaves that light their faces with love.
2
I SETTLE IN A SEAT in the rear of the plane, look out as it taxis and soars. I look out the port window, see the South Valley barrio below, where Camilo lives. I recite a prayer asking God to bless him. He has lost his way and he doesn’t know how to get back. I can see the orphanage where the officials dropped us off that long-ago night. If I learned to adapt to orphanage life, I think, I know I can deal with this reentry. It just takes time and a couple of good breaks.
As I soar above the clouds, memories come flying back to me. I remember my aunt sometimes came on weekends and would drive us east through Tijeras Canyon, across the llano and past Estancia. She would drop us off at Uncle Max’s in Willard. I didn’t like him very much; his pretending to be John Wayne or some other swaggering hero, always wearing a big cowboy hat, clomping around in manure-stinking boots, making me clean his damn school bus. It was the longest model the dealership offered. After I had spent all day brushing and oiling its leather seats and scrubbing rubbermat floors, the miser would give me a quarter. Even an orphan who never handled money knew that was a lower-than-scrooge move. I also knew if I didn’t clean it, I’d get beat and busted up. That’s how John Wayne treated Mexicans in the movies, that’s how Max treated me.
I didn’t mind the treatment much because I knew that my four cousins would be there in the old board and tar-paper shack on the only one on the prairie. All four were beautiful, in their late teens, skin sweet as peyote petals, laughter fertile as an apricot tree in August. They were long-haired beauties in tight jeans, cowgirl boots, western shirts, muscled and tough enough to wrestle pig or man down for dinner.
They could plow fields dawn to dusk, cut a cord of cedar with an ax and fill the kitchen with the musky fragrance of sweat, their young bodies ripening into rare fruit. They were sensuous, defiant as a herd of wild, cliff-edge rearing mustangs. When it came to talk about boyfriends, they were boisterous, clamoring like a village marching band. After breakfast they would go off to work as truck-stop waitress, barmaid and junkyard dismantler.
I loved being around their voluptuous bodies, their carefree, husky way of talking about their secrets—how he wants to do it, but she wouldn’t yet—all said in innuendo and code. Even at that young age, six or seven, I sensed what they were talking about.
Now here I am, on a plane heading to see this woman. Every amorous yearning in my twenty-two-year-old body yowls in me, churning buttery honey between my loins, raising the dough-batter of my heart, making it a flame-toasted tortilla.
I’ve never had a woman. Due to circumstances, I’ve pretty much led a life of abstinence. But now, I can feel every nerve on fire, desperately seeking out a woman’s touch. When we talked about having sex in our letters, my imagination got the best of me. I told her how I needed minty, churned-earth, hardcore, skin-slapping, arm-wrestling, arms-and-legs-knotted-up-and-turning-in-physical-bites-and-buttslaps-and-lunges kind of loving. That’s what I thought love was. And she came right back at me with passages even more fierce and physical.
For the moment, I reclined and sighed a breath of relief. It felt good to be me, at this place, this time, this day.
I fall asleep easy, but am awakened like jumper cables hitting the battery posts, sparks and smoke, as the plane’s tires thump hard on the runway, jolt my paperweight heart, make it crack and release the butterfly inside to flutter above the heads of passengers in the cabin.
Once inside the terminal, I follow the signs to retrieve my cardboard box from the baggage claim carousel. Then I set out to meet the woman of my dreams, more nervous and intimidated than I’ve ever been. I freeze, too many people zigzagging everywhere. In the terminal I take the nearest seat. I spot the water fountain. I am thirsty but I dare not move. Next to me, a rangy kid plays on the floor with his dad’s shoelaces. Two chairs over, a man spits chewing tobacco into a Folger’s coffee can. Talk hums. Smug mothers and tired boyfriends clutch bouquets of flowers. Some people stand to greet sun-tanned students in school uniforms at an arrival gate. For a moment, it’s all too much—I am afraid. I want to leave, find the nearest interstate and hitchhike back to New Mexico. Maybe this ain’t a good idea. Maybe I’ve messed up again. I’m stunned with indecision.
My sister Karina’s voice comes back to me, at the moment when I told her I was leaving: “Don’t run away and give up.” Nodding her head, thin lips pursed with contempt, she said, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Listen to me, Orlando. You can’t make a living reading books or whatever the hell
you do. Work. Be a laborer, dishwasher or janitor. Be a man for once. Look at me. I dropped out of school at nine, married at fourteen—not for love, just to get out on my own and away from that bitch of an aunt. And look, I have a nice house and husband and money and kids—I’m doing good. You don’t need no school. Work.”
Steadying myself, I decide on this burning day in August 1980, my game plan is to plan nothing. To let benevolent coincidence lead me into the stewing maelstrom like a mountain ram rubbing its curved horns against a boulder, ready for battle.
I’m getting a chance to make a life and I’m going to take it. I gather as much courage as I can at that moment. I have an opportunity to change my life for the better, and all I can do is dig my heels in and make it happen. I feel like I’m on an important mission, although I don’t fully understand the mission’s purpose. I mean, yes, I’m following what we wrote to each other in our letters. Yes, the love letters I wrote Lila, promising everything under the moon, made me wonder how many boys are mad enough to lift the words off a page and live them. The kind of kid like me who has been stripped of any protections, with no life to protect . . . It makes it possible to throw myself wholeheartedly into her kindness, because there’s nothing else for me beyond her. Here and now, she’s all I’ve got.
I know without a doubt that I’m a special kind of emotionally deprived boy, that the trauma of abandonment and imprisonment and never having a girlfriend are beyond any fixing. Yet, none of this seemed to bother her. She never mocked my being an orphan or my inexperience with women.
Naturally, I have mixed feelings about what I wrote, but I trust her. Am I trying to excuse my sexual appetites, ashamed even, thinking I went too far with the sex stuff? But surely she understood they were only letters, not some biblical prophecy I had to abide by. After all, you can write anything in a letter when you’re sitting in a cell.
Our correspondence explored everything heretofore illicit in my life, opened our secrets to each other. I urged her to go even deeper, tread on more dangerous ground, use our letters to write really nasty stuff and to expose her deepest secrets.
American Orphan Page 2
