Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad)

by Rigoberto González

  “You useless drunk,” she scolded my father. “Your son could have bled to death, you!”

  That weekend we went out to the movies, a rare family outing we couldn't really afford. I fell asleep in the middle of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, waking up when the theater lights went up. I was too drowsy to remember what that patch of gauze was doing stuck to my face.

  Soon after that incident my father returned to work in the United States, a birthplace I had no memory of. Most of the house was empty by then, the furniture sold. Only my mother held on to our few belongings, as if keeping at bay the day we would finally have to leave as well. I was very glad when it finally came, because the months before that moment were the days of want.

  We were going hungry. A person who experiences hunger never forgets that feeling. It is more than emptiness, more than an ache at the center of the stomach—it is a waking up and going to bed with shame, as if this stiffness of the jaw and hardening of the belly is part of some punishment. The flesh begins to feel transparent, and a strange echo resounds in the room when you admit to your weeping mother that you want real food, not tortilla with cheese and hot sauce, which she's been feeding you the entire month. But my mother insisted on keeping it a secret, even from her family who lived across the main highway in Colonia Obrera, where the town cemetery lay. No one would have thought it possible anyway, since our building had been built on dollars and, filled with all the contemporary furniture, it housed the former musician's family. I felt as vacant as the tears of wax running down the candle lit for the bedside portrait of Jesus. The flame illuminated his Sacred Heart, which was already bursting with rays of light. Jesus looked well fed and healthy—so unlike the rest of us, sallow and sorry-eyed. I would spend the rest of my childhood making up for that empty stomach by overeating—by digesting the memory of hunger.

  At night, after slipping a sugar cube into my mouth as she put me to bed, my mother went to her bed to cry. I thought it was because of the sugar cube, a treat I never shared with my brother, who fell asleep sooner than I did. I thought that maybe she'd stop her sobbing if I gave it back to her. But I didn't. I jealously guarded the small rock of sweetness behind my tongue, knowing that if my mother returned to reclaim it I could quickly swallow it.

  Into the second month, my mother finally relented and told her parents, who were beside themselves with outrage. They came to the rescue immediately and sent word to my father that my mother was leaving him for abandonment and neglect. I remember finally tasting milk and how the ecstasy of it made me break out into tears.

  It was never made clear to me why my father didn't send money the entire time he was gone. Even more confusing was how he had survived his return to Zacapu. Whatever collisions of wrath took place happened offstage. I only remember that my father brought back for me a large bag of candies and that I stuffed myself with sugar all evening, hoarding the sweets beneath my pillow and taking one into my mouth each time I woke up during the night. The next morning I was sick to the point of vomiting, and I recall my grand-mother standing over me as I wretched into a bucket. She yelled out to my father, “Even your candy is worthless, you!”

  Another migration was imminent. I can only speculate why my mother agreed to the move back to the United States. Perhaps she wanted to save her marriage. Perhaps she wanted to keep my father on a shorter leash. On his own he was undependable and careless with his earnings. In any case, my paternal grandparents came down from California to help convince my mother that the best option was a return to the United States. My Purépecha grandmother was given the task of convincing my brother and me that the move to the north was a good thing. Her selling point was the school lunch.

  “They feed you there,” she said. “For free.”

  As for the house in Colonia Hidalgo, it remained an unfinished dream home, the largest structure on the block. The dogs eventually died of sickness or old age and the first floor became as hollow as the second. I last saw the house in 1984 on a trip I took with my grand-parents, who arrived in Zacapu that year with the sole purpose of getting rid of it. The house, which had been built on the backs of my grandparents and their children, had lost its charm. The once lush garden had been neglected for years and a broken water pipe flooded the floors, soiling the lower edges of the walls like the corrupted hems of ankle-length dresses. The lonely custodian—an old widow with a severe case of edema—seemed grateful that my grandparents had arrived from the north to relieve her of her duty. She greeted us from the window to the room that used to be mine as a child, and this pained me. Especially since instead of a diaphanous curtain, she had hung a thick wool blanket to help insulate her sleeping quarters, now only a dark shadow of what used to be my private space. The house was no longer my home, and I felt intrusive going in. My grandfather gave her the news of the impending sale, his voice echoing in the empty hall, and we left within minutes, none of us commenting on the mossy smell that had permeated the brick and cement. The loss of this house was the final gesture of good-bye and the clearest evidence that I would never return to live in Michoacán again. But most distressingly, I had lost the first home of my memory yet again.

  Thermal, California, 1979–80

  My family came to settle in the southern California desert, in the town appropriately named Thermal in the predominantly Mexican Coachella Valley 130 miles south of Los Angeles and 95 miles north of Mexicali and the international border. This town was known as the Grape Capital of the World because of the endless acres of the crop spread across its landscape. The town also conveniently housed many of the farmworkers who worked the maintenance and harvest. My family believed that by moving here we would never run out of work again.

  I was born into a culture of work. Since the age of the Bracero Program of the 1940s, the state of Michoacán has been the number one exporter of Mexican farm labor to the United States. It is not out of the ordinary to witness entire communities of farmworkers migrate back and forth between the two countries—an echo of the region's famous monarch butterflies who do the same for survival, their spectacular flights across the continent retraced generations later through genetic memory. When we descended on Thermal, los González were no strangers to dramatic change. We had been moving north and south for four generations, which explains why my great-grandfather and father were Mexican-born citizens, while my grandfather and I were U.S.-born citizens.

  And now here we were in Thermal, three generations living under the same roof: my paternal grandparents, all three of their married children plus their bachelor son, and their ten grandchildren. Only my aunt's family came from Mexicali, where her five children had been born. My three older cousins had already completed elementary school and had been enrolled in secondary school in México when they were pulled out. They frequently voiced resentment for the move and never quite adjusted to the United States until they were old enough to marry and settle down many years later.

  Despite the communal arrangement, with each family unit contributing to the overall household budget, we still failed to make ends meet at the end of each month. One of the great ironies of southern California is its susceptibility to even mild winters. Winter is a critical period in the lifeline of crops because the orchards and grape fields are maturing in preparation for the spring harvest. A winter in a landscape where temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer is relative and doesn't need to reach a low extreme to damage the tender citrus and grapes, shortening the picking season.

  With a body count of eighteen, we lived squeezed into an apartment with four rooms. Clothes and bed sheets were public property and during mealtime the dining room was as mad as a cafeteria, one person looking around for the next available seat, plate in hand. Our extended family was a necessity for socioeconomic livelihood, not a romanticized notion of togetherness and unity; by sticking together there was less of a chance of going hungry. But the compromise was the loss of privacy.

  The grandchildren spread out on the living room carpe
t to sleep at night. Each morning I woke up among contorted bodies pressed against another in an effort to accommodate bent elbows and knees, jigsaw puzzle style. There was only one bathroom, so getting up earlier than anyone else meant no waiting in line with your legs crossed. Females had priority because males could go out back and piss in the brush. Our grandfather showed my boy cousins and me how to do it after he had to give up his turn to my mother. We all stared down at the spots of damp soil behind the van. He pointed.

  “See there? For us men the world is our toilet.”

  Having one bathroom also led to a number of embarrassing encounters. If someone knocked on the door while you were in the shower you had to wrap a towel around you, suds stiffening your hair. And no matter how large the towel, there was still too much exposed flesh. I could have lived without having seen my grand-mother's wrinkled cleavage, or my uncle's dark and slightly uneven nipples, or the look of terror in my cousin's eyes as he struggled to conceal his prepubescent erection. Those indiscreet moans and groans escaping through the house at night concretized into the images of skin and coarse hairs. The bras, the panties, the stretched-out underwear waving from the clothesline in the back suddenly claimed their owners. How real my family had become as I witnessed their belching, farting, vomiting, and fucking. Still, I longed for the days my father could afford to pay our own rent. I scavenged for scraps of hope at the crowded dinner table where the adult conversation always centered on paychecks and job prospects. At that time my father and my uncle were unemployed. Our families were feeding off the reluctant generosity of my grandfather, a man so thrifty he would wear a shirt as long as the biggest holes were the ones through which he slipped in his head and arms. Once he even bragged that a white woman saw him walking down the street and stopped her car to hand him a bag with her lunch because she thought he was homeless.

  “Dark cookies and a ham sandwich,” he replied when someone asked him what was in the bag. “More like dog biscuits and a shoe sole,” he added. My youngest cousins giggled.

  My grandfather was the man with all the confidence and the money to back it up. My father's was the loudest voice at the table, but my grandfather's was the voice with the fury of a pickaxe. He knew how to chip a person's confidence down to the size of a quarry pebble.

  “I think Leonel will talk to his boss about giving me a chance with the tractor,” my father said, throwing out a spark of enthusiasm on the dinner table.

  “Leonel?” my grandfather cried out, incredulously. “That good-for-nothing drunk? A recommendation from him is like telling the boss he wants to take his beer buddy along to keep him company. No, you'll get nowhere with that lazy friend of yours, you.”

  “Well, if that doesn't work out, there's Sancho—”

  “Sancho? Are you out of your mind? He's got a callous on his fat ass from sitting around at the unemployment office. They should label a chair for him. That man can't keep a job for a month.”

  My uncle tried to save the day. “There's always Ricardo.”

  “Ricardo?”

  I lost steam much sooner than my father and uncle. I withdrew from the table, defeated. My most intense fantasy at that time was that my grandfather keeled over from a heart attack, making us heirs to his hidden riches. But I suspected that he lived for those tugs-of-war over dinner. Besides, there was not much of an inheritance, only the small stash of savings he kept in a secret pocket on the inside of his belt. (He didn't believe in banks.) My grandmother revealed the hiding place to us in case my grandfather kicked the bucket in the middle of the street. She wanted to make sure the cash didn't drive off with the paramedics.

  She warned: “Those people peel off your jewelry and pluck your wallet. And how the hell do you prove it when you're lying there cross-eyed like a billy goat on a puddle of your own drool?”

  There were few choice activities for me during the suffocating evenings. Although I had eight cousins (all but two were male) and a brother to play with, I preferred to keep to myself. The boys were gruff and rowdy and spent too many hours exchanging dirty jokes. Riding bikes with them meant parking at the ravine to talk about tits and pussy. Our oldest cousin liked to brag he was the only one who had engaged in sex so he was the designated reader of the text in pornographic magazines. He even mimicked the oohs and ahhs. Too bored to bother with my cousin's fake orgasms, I usually hid away in my parents' room, where all our belongings were stored.

  In that cramped room there was a permanently sealed door in the wall shared with the apartment next door. The building had apparently been larger at one time, but the owners were making a killing with the division of that one unit into two, both for rent. The unit next door was not even a one-bedroom; it was more like a studio with one common area and a bathroom in the back. I knew about its size because I saw it frequently, through a small hole a few inches from the bottom of the door. The hole was small enough to fit a cable or telephone wire through, but now it was just my peephole. I had come across it by accident one afternoon after I decided to imitate my older female cousin who hid beneath her mother's bed to nap. She slept undisturbed and undiscovered by our grandfather, who detested finding anyone sleeping during the daytime. He said this was a sign of laziness. No one mentioned the fact that he himself napped in the afternoons, and he may have thought that none of us knew, but we could hear him snoring even with his room sealed shut.

  In the long lean months we lived there I saw plenty of the occupants next door. My method was simple: I lay down next to the bed, ready to roll behind the edge of the comforter in case either of my parents walked in. The light seeping in through the hole guided my curious eye.

  I knew nothing more gratifying than learning about people who didn't know I was watching. It was better than the school experiment of growing a potato plant in a cup of water. These were the people from the other side of the wall, not the dull, food stamp clan from this side. Exciting things happened over there, not here in the place of mismatched socks and plastic spoons that got washed for reuse. Another world spun into existence, and it was a little bit mine as well.

  Once there were four women in their twenties sharing the rent next door. They worked at the vegetable packinghouse with my mother and my aunts. My cousins whistled at them when they walked by; my oldest cousin claimed he had fucked one of them. Little did they know that in the mornings the women walked around in pantyhose, comfortable in their bare breasts. The curly-haired woman always sat on a cot against the opposite wall to apply her lipstick. She was the plain one, refusing to wear miniskirts and tube tops like the other women. On weekend evenings she stayed behind, watching from the cot as the others dressed up for a night out. When they left, she secured the door and then proceeded to look through her roommates' belongings. She never took anything; she simply held and touched, clasping her fingers around barrettes, combs, and an assortment of makeup kits. I watched her empty out entire bags and shoe boxes over her cot, only to take her time putting back the contents, sometimes sniffing the powders or rubbing the smooth plastics against her cheeks. Once she was bent over the cot and I zeroed in on a small bow in the center of her panties. The bow was tearing off, crooked, and the white flesh of her buttocks showed through the opening. I immediately shut my eyes and turned my head in shame, though that image haunted me for days. When the lights went off, the bow glowed in the dark of my mind. Each time I felt the urge to cry.

  The four women moved out after just a few months, but the unit didn't remain empty for long. A married couple with an infant child moved in. We heard them argue and throw things against the wall at all hours of the day. The infant's bellowing added to the chaos. The couple called each other names back and forth until the man beat his wife and the room quieted down to a muffled whimpering. My mother was fed up with these daily episodes so she urged my father to speak with the neighbor. He took my uncle with him.

  “So we told the guy it wasn't our business or anything like that,” my father reported over dinner, “but that he should be discr
eet about his ways.”

  My grandfather only nodded in silence. That was one of the few instances he kept his mouth shut, refusing to volunteer an opinion. The common knowledge that he beat my grandmother was left unspoken, yet it might as well have been announced by the way the dining room went dead silent.

  I never saw the couple's heads because they had propped a table against the sealed door. I could only see their legs—one pair following the second from one side of the room to the other. It was like watching leopards pace left and right in a cage at the zoo, felines bored to frustration. The man once pulled up a chair to the table and sat down in the buff. His shriveled cock looked down at me. It was a sad and delicate appendage, timid. It was the first adult man's penis I had ever seen that wasn't a photograph or a caricature. It looked nothing like the large erect ones in my cousin's porno magazines. This penis was pale and stubby. So powerless, it didn't seem like much at all. I became embarrassed for the man, and the shame of having seen him in such a vulnerable state kept me away from the peephole until the next tenant.

  The new tenant was an older white man with few possessions: a dusty bed, a chair, a tattered suitcase, and an orange steamer trunk I never saw him open. I imagined it held his paintings and supplies. A thick yellow light creeping in through the hole was my cue to look through. The old white man had a companion, a small brown and white basset hound with ears that dragged to the floor. While the man painted, the dog lay still as if the man was painting portraits of a sleeping dog.