American Orphan

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Genuine disdain. I like that. No pretensions.

  I sit, lips clamped tight, not knowing what to say.

  “But,” she adds, “you can park that loathsome creature and you can walk me to class if you wish.”

  That evening she comes over to my apartment on Sycamore and Central. She walks in, pushes me back on my couch and has sex with me.

  Eva Romero, 5’8”, twenty-three-years-old, black hair, caramel complexion, bright brown, intelligent eyes. She has a hiker’s body with commanding breasts and a compelling laugh. A warm personality, great talker, she chatters away over a bubbling pot of pasta on the stove, sipping a glass of red wine. I sell my scooter and move in with her.

  I am back to 1964, to the little boy in the orphanage bell tower with the pigeons, where I dreamt of meeting someone like her. Beyond and below the entrance with the grotto of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I see the gravel circular driveway, cars coming and going, the women dressed in black high heels, tight skirts, blouses that pressed their breast, red lips, long hair, thick eyelashes and painted fingernails. I dreamt of the day when someone might be my wife, lover, girlfriend. No more being different, existing on the outskirts of society. No violent, chaotic environments, no disastrous existence, no more trauma, no more DYA, no escape into what my intuition tells me; no more endless depths of brown, suffering eyes, no more having to be prepared to do whatever is necessary, no more sacrificing youth, no more embracing danger, finding refuge in penance; no more offering of my life to win approval, no more eyes that hold the sadness of deprivation and neglect, no more jail guards I resent.

  Now, it’s only a child in the cupola, now the bell tolls to awaken the world, to send the pigeons flying, the sun to enter the lair of iron and feather. Now, the little boy sings to the eastern sun rising above the Sandia Mountains.

  It doesn’t matter when she tells me she was married, then divorced her husband a month later, is currently having an affair with two married men, both drug counselors. From the first day we meet, she decides to make me hers.

  She needs to control me, benignly. She regards me with rare sincerity and passion. I am a colorful, plumed exotic bird she keeps in her cage. I learn to talk to her. I learn to fly out and return. I learn to take food from her hand. I am a rough gem, someone to shape to her liking, mold to her preference without too much push-back. I rarely argue. I defer to her experience. She has parents, a sister, an older brother—a normal upbringing.

  My outlaw past fascinates her, my orphan status evokes compassion. She harbors a misplaced narcissistic duty to “fix” me, to make me social, to make me “normal.” She doesn’t see what I see: that she needs someone to control, needs to have power over me. I am okay with that. After all, this is my first face-to-face relationship, no letters.

  It surprises me that most of her married friends are having sex with someone on the side. Even though she is studying to be a drug and alcohol counselor, she snorts coke, drinks and smokes cigarettes and weed.

  I drive her to school, she persuades me to sign up for classes. I lie on my application about not having a criminal record, get a grant and small loans. I find myself strolling the university quad or walking home with a backpack of books, just like a regular student. I excel in my creative writing classes, nearly have a draft done of a new poetry manuscript. I start a long narrative poem, carry it with me everywhere, work on it a little here and little there: Dunkin Donuts, park benches, bar tables.

  After I move in with Eva, I sit at her kitchen table, comb through every stanza and line at least a dozen times. I read the work aloud late into the night, turn it in at the end of the semester, simultaneously submit it to a poetry house in New York. The class scoffs at any chance I have of being published. My professor shakes his bespectacled head and mutters, “Ridiculous,” and admits he’s been submitting to the same house for years with no success.

  “You simply don’t understand,” he repeats, “how difficult it is to write a good poem. You think you can just flip open Grandma’s recipe book and cook one up like you do your tortillas?”

  He doesn’t know he is dealing with a renaissance Chicano, an outlaw Buddha who has found love, has seen death at a time when others kids were learning the alphabet, who never had anything guaranteed and once had bitterness against the world, struggled to endure his own barbarism, and now knows a woman’s love. He has been blessed beyond his capacity to express it.

  This May 19, 2019, a wife in the next room practicing yoga, a daughter in her room studying for pre-med, a son in his room studying to be a photographer. I can tell you that beneath the brown parchment of my face that this is what you’ll go through to get there: another and another violent subjugation of an American orphan caught in the system who will survive, though many will not.

  This is the place I call home now, where I answer to the name Papi. I speak four languages fluently, wherever I go, I carry my notebook, jot down notes of things I see, remember, want to do and dream of one day achieving.

  When I married Eva, when our first child was born a year later, no bestial purpose corrupted my courteous demeanor or veiled insidious and selfish motives or lewd cravings. Others envied my humanity, others mocked me, smirked that no matter how much time passed I was still a criminal, an addict, a drunk, a womanizer, a scammer. They rumor-mongered, the one-book sensations who puppet courteous Spanish culture for white approval. Noses lengthened more to snarly hooks with the evil intent of their gossip—I let them be to gnaw on their own witchcraft brew-spoons. No more howling in the deep forests and hills of my heart, despite the lettered brutes spewing venomous banter simply because they could not understand how I could write such lovely poetry and get published. No matter. Eva loves me, my children love me. At dawn, I step out of the shower, see myself in the mirror, love myself; my big ears, my thick lips, my big round head, little pot belly, runner’s calves; love the folded-up pieces of paper I find with my scribbled thoughts, pieces of paper that declare me no self-deprecating charlatan, no grant-award-grubber, no. . . .

  I wait with a sense of dread for grades to be posted on the English department bulletin board. Except for one or two token Chicanos, the professors in the English department are white men and women who hardly understand Chicano culture. They’re recruits from the Midwest, infatuated with our indigenous culture.

  It’s my turn to go the professor’s office for consultation on one of my assignments. I’ve turned in the same manuscript I submitted to the publishers, I’m certain to get an A+. I haven’t yet learned the importance of keeping a copy. He has the only copy besides the one with the publisher. I imagine, after gloating during his praise of my brilliance, I’ll bring his copy home, congratulate myself with a good dinner and sex with Eva.

  I go into the building, climb the steps up to the English department on the 2nd floor. His door is open, so I walk into his office, take a seat. Without wasting any time, he looks at me, says he isn’t reading narrative poetry and, besides, that wasn’t the assignment.

  What?

  He continues. “Narrative poetry is dead, Orlando. Now it’s Language Poetry, that was the homework assignment: to study and write about the Language poets.”

  I almost pull an imaginary pistol from my waistband and shoot the bastard.

  I picture myself lunging at him, slamming his head against the wall. I bang my fist down on his desk in repentance that I was such a fool. I beg his forgiveness for having the gall to believe I could write. I do none of this. I only sheepishly apologize for having misunderstood the assignment. I walk out of his office, detached from the world of the living.

  I don’t remember much else about that day, except getting home, drinking some tequila, sitting around and staring out the window until Eva comes home. When I tell her about the professor, she is pissed. I’m telling you, you don’t mess with Eva. She goes into a hallelujah rant about how she’s going to go over there tomorrow and deal with him.

  Later that afternoon, when I’m heading out to apply for
a job, Eva runs out to the driveway and asks, “The manuscript? I want to see the comments this jerk wrote.”

  “Threw it away.”

  “You did what? Idiot!”

  “In the dumpster at the post office.”

  She opens the door, leaps into the passenger seat. “Drive.”

  She’s still in her work clothes, but that doesn’t stop her from jumping into the dumpster at the post office, wading through all the discarded papers. Minutes later, her arm shoots up, shaking my manuscript, her begrimed face appears with an aha! smile. “Found it!”

  I think she’s nuts, and I tell her as much, but she doesn’t care what I or other people say, she loves my poetry. That manuscript went on to later win the American Book Award.

  The second week in April I turn twenty-three, for my birthday Eva gets me a job as a night watchman at the adolescent treatment center she works at. It’s weird getting a job for a birthday present, but I like it.

  I go in for the interview, get the job. The next day I start work at LoveMore house, situated on the outskirts of Albuquerque. It’s as isolated, forgotten a house as any I’ve ever seen, but perfect in its negligible decrepitude for its teen-aged delinquents and homeless immigrant clientele. It houses court referrals for up to a year. They’re mostly kids with emotional problems who have committed minor crimes.

  They are me . . . not long ago.

  The first Saturday in May, Eva and I drive around looking at houses. Buds on the trees are fattening to the edge of unfurling, city workers are out spreading manure over the parks, homeowners rake their garden beds and women exit garden shops with baskets full of flowers and fertilizer. A sense of optimism fills the air.

  Real estate agents have advised us on the desirable neighborhoods. We turn our attention to the South Valley, a semirural area still unincorporated by the City of Albuquerque. As soon as you turn off Bridge Street and go south to La Vega and Riverside, you can smell dung, earth, water, humidity, the river and the hefty scent of cottonwood leaves. You can hear geese migrating north again, see horses, goats, cows in fields.

  I feel at home.

  This is where we both agree we want to live. It seems the type of community where you find poets, folks sharing meals, women running life, a bartering system in full operation (goats for wine, veggies for fruits) and a good night’s sleep. The Rio Grande runs parallel to La Vega, with a burly forest of giant cottonwoods, cranes, herons and hawks ascending and descending. The land has its own conscious mind, is preparing for a celebration to commemorate ordinary life, welcome all around to its sensory feast.

  One of Eva’s friends is starting out in the real estate business. He urges us to buy a house. He’s certain we can qualify for a small loan for a down payment. He can arrange the sale. We don’t have credit or much money, but we rationalize that it can’t hurt to look. We have fun riding around. Eva is curious about the South Valley.

  As we ride, I show her the place where a family fed me, where I used to sit under a store awning, a road where I had to leap from a school bus to escape a bully, until we come to a FOR SALE sign in front of a rickety shack by the Rio Grande. To say it’s in bad shape is to be generous. Six hundred and fifty square feet of boarded up, uninhabitable shack. A first glance evokes my sympathy and pity. No structure should have to stand so wounded by time and negligence. It has taken every abuse, the worst, most vile derelicts can dish out. The shack clings to life only by a few formidable nails that refuse to let go out of sheer stubborn resistance to all who entered intent on destroying it.

  We peek inside through the board cracks and are shocked to see piles of booze bottles, junkie needles and discarded clothing and blankets that homeless addicts have left scattered about.

  “I can do something with this,” I tell Eva. “I can make a home.”

  I see myself in all the places I slept before, on couches in people’s houses who were kind to me, in small, cubby rooms of friends who gave me clothes to wear. In my heart, I always dreamed of one day having a place of my own, but never believed for a second it might be possible. Now, I realize dreams can come true, even dreams that are old, wretched, broken down, smelly, caving in . . . a dream that crawls to me with its last breath, trampled, beaten beyond recognition. I can pick it up and nurture it back to health. It can give me my wish. It whispers, I am yours. I embrace it.

  I jot down the number on the FOR SALE sign and we have our real estate agent look it up. He says a couple of thousand down will get us in the house, no credit check, just a simple real-estate contract between the owner and us.

  Eva and I empty the bank, borrow the rest from friends. We come up with the down payment, and within a week, we are homeowners.

  Without a second’s hesitation, I get up at 4:30 am and jump into the work with joy. I pull out and strip the interior, clean the boards, cut off the warped ends and use them again. What old stuff I can’t scrub new or clean up and use, I replace with donations from neighbors, who are happy to see the old eyesore undergo a facelift. They give me bricks, cement, roof tiles, windows, boards, linoleum, old sinks, a used propane heater, a kitchen table, bed frames and electrical wiring.

  Within a few weeks the house transforms into a home. We cook our first meal, sleep in a bed with clean, open windows letting in the Rio Grande river breeze and the sounds of birds. The house makes me someone. I am somebody I always knew I was meant to be but never had the opportunity before to prove it. I am someone who can make a home, offer shelter to loved ones. I understand the damage inflicted on this shack, so I am tender in re-building it, often talking to it, saying, “It’s going to be okay, I’ll take care of you, treat you good, I promise.”

  I feel like the house recognizes me, as if it has been waiting. I feel it. Seeing gouge marks in the walls, burn marks on the boards, gashes everywhere. I ask myself the same question many times: How could they do this to me? I was warehoused for smuggling weed at eleven years old, locked up for seven years. Everything about the house, my work on it, has an origin; it goes from an eye to a brain to a tongue and lips and gives purpose and worth for its being: windows, doors, beds, tables, light switches and laughter inside, strung together to implicate me in something bigger than just this day and this body.

  One day, Eva comes home and says she asked her boss at Lovelace hospital if I can come in and read poetry to the patients. Her boss invites me with open arms. Most are addicts and alcoholics, my age or younger. Since I’ve been down that road, I gladly agree.

  I’m so busy renovating the house, I put the poetry reading out of mind. A few days later, I’m busy wiring the closet in our bedroom to install an outlet so I can have a desk and lamp and make it my cubby for studying, when Eva rushes in.

  “Hurry, hurry . . . we have to get ready! We have to go, we only have half an hour before we’re to be there.”

  So, I just drop everything, throw tools and material on the floor, clean myself up, throw on some washed jeans, a denim shirt, and we head out. Around two in the afternoon, I follow Eva up to the second floor and enter a large room. She introduces me as someone who has been where they are now. Tongue-tied at first, I look out the windows that wrap around the room, giving a view of Albuquerque. I remember so many episodes of my life, homeless experiences when I roamed the streets: places I slept, stores I stole from, highway underpasses where I hung out, parks where I got into fights. I don’t know why, but standing right there in front of everyone, I lose it. I see myself bawling like a baby. I see myself cry for my beautiful friends at the orphanage; Tony (the Clubfoot) Baloney, Coo-Coo Clock, Big Noodle—all huddled on a sunny afternoon on the ditch bank, rolling dried elm leaves into a strip of comic book paper and trying to smoke it like a cigarette. I cry for the pigeons in the withering cupola, the bell I longed to ring, but every time I tried to push it, it wouldn’t budge. I would rap my knuckles against its dark brooding metal and all I got was sore knuckles. I remember the light that shot through the slats like golden sabers, cutting at the dust and feathers a
nd nests and bees, me raising my hands to the light, picking each length of sunlight from the air to clutch it, wrapping it around me like a golden glove, wrapping the sunlight around my waist like a sash and around my head like a sweatband. There and then, in the small space of the bell tower, I became a superhero, I became the Sunlight Kid, able to shoot my light over the world, to fight the darkness, to light the path of orphans as they walked toward their parents again. I see myself crying at all these memories flooding through my mind. . . . No, I don’t cry, despite the memories flooding in, saddening me.

  Instead, I breathe in with great effort, stare at my boots, at the glistening tiles of the hospital floor buffed with wax, then at the back of the room lined with the hospital staff in their crisp, white uniforms and smocks, then at the eighty or so people sitting in steel folding chairs staring at me.

  I pull out the chapbook Denise published for me. I open it and read my poem, “I Just Want to Communicate.”

  I can’t say it’s an Oscar-winning presentation, but at least I haven’t passed out like I thought I might. When it’s over, to my utter astonishment, I get a standing ovation. It feels so good to be recognized for something I do. I don’t know how to take compliments, don’t know how to act in the face of approval and am very self-conscious until, thank God, Marium, my wife’s boss, comes up to me, places an envelope in my palm. I open it, a hundred-dollar bill.

  Later, flush with fulfillment, I turn down the street we live on, Vito Romero. I see smoke. It billows out of the roof and windows of our home. There’s a crowd of neighbors. A couple of men spray the flames with garden hoses. I pull over, park in a daze.

  Everything I own, all my DYA notebooks, all my writings are in the house. Even as onlookers and neighbors try to hold me back, I rush into the smoke-filled, still burning interior and see the flames consuming everything, mostly coming from our bedroom. They spread and the heat is intense. I choke on the smoke, cough, cover my face. I go to grab a stack of my writing and then see our couple photographs, recently taken. I push forward and grab as many pictures as I can from the dresser and walls and bedside table. Then I glance at my boxes of notebooks and manuscripts. I realize I have to leave them all behind as flames ravage them, curling pages into ashes and embers that float red on the air.