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

by Rigoberto González

  I became ecstatic. I watched the other schoolkids climb on the buses, and then I watched the yellow busses take off down the road to their respective destinations, and still no Dolly. I became nervous. If I stayed any longer my mother might begin to worry about where I was. If I left then Dolly might get upset at me for not waiting like she had asked. Another fifteen minutes passed before Dolly walked out of a classroom, looking calm in her dark sunglasses until she spotted me.

  “Goodness gracious!” she cried out. “I thought ya'd left when I saw the last bus leavin'. I guess I'm takin' ya home.”

  I saw the panic in her eyes as she rushed over, took me by the arm, and then led me to her car, parked a few yards away. I became so excited to be riding in Dolly's beetle that I couldn't put the words together to explain that I didn't usually take the bus and that I lived within walking distance. The novelty of taking the long route home from school in a car made me give her unclear directions. Repeatedly.

  “Oh, no,” I said, giggling with embarrassment, “that's not the way either.”

  Exasperated, Dolly pulled over to the curb, snapped her neck back and yelled, “Well goddammit, kid, don't ya know where the hell ya live?”

  I kept a silly grin on my face until I finally steered her to the right place. I stepped out of the car without thanking her or saying good-bye, and watched her small white beetle drive off, vanishing like an ice cube melting. I looked up from the driveway and saw my mother in the kitchen through the high window. She hadn't noticed I had been dropped off by Dolly, my favorite teacher's aide. I recited a few lines of a poem I had memorized to impress Dolly. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” I knew Dolly wouldn't be mad at me the following week when we met for speech therapy. And I wasn't mad at her for forgetting about the book she promised me. I understood Dolly. And Dolly understood me.

  I became such an exceptional speller in the fifth grade that my teacher had high hopes I would become a champ. The teacher was Ms. Burnett, an older woman who suffered from a mild case of osteoporosis and had a loose flap of skin hanging down from her chin and neck. The cruel kids in school used to walk behind her and gobble. She was my favorite teacher because we used to correspond through a private journal she made us keep in class. I wrote in mine faithfully once a day.

  In this journal I wrote about my family: how I hated seeing my mother's health degenerate; how I hated to see my father drunk; how I had begun to dislike our little home on top of the garage because the toilet would stop working, the refrigerator door was broken, the windows sometimes wouldn't open, and the floor had a few holes in it through which we could see the landlord play on his pool table or climb inside his truck to rev up the engine the way I had seen the racecar drivers do on television. Ms. Burnett wrote back in a calm and composed tone that soothed me. She had a way of making me think through her responses to what I wrote.

  Once, for example, I told her a long story about how my father had been looking forward to seeing this war movie on television. My father always watched anything that had to do with the military and the great battles of history. He especially liked movies that dealt with Pearl Harbor or Viet Nam. I would comb through the TV Guide each week and keep him informed, and then I'd remind him about it on the day the movie was scheduled to be aired. He never asked us to keep him company and my brother and I rarely did, except when Hell in the Pacific was showing because he felt we could learn something from this movie that had no dialogue.

  One week I showed him a publicity page in the TV Guide for an upcoming movie, and my father immediately became excited by the shot of the desert and the armed men in funny caps standing around in front of camels and a fort. All week he kept asking, When is it again? At what time? On the night of the big event my mother made popcorn and her special homemade donuts, and we all sat around in front of the television. The credits started rolling, and there was no music, just the sound of a dry wind and an opening shot of sand dunes glaring out beneath the hot sun.

  “This movie's going to be good,” my father said, hopeful. He and my mother sat snugly on the couch. My brother and I were lying down on the floor in front of them.

  The camera zoomed in on a man looking out at the expansive desert through a pair of binoculars. He began to speak to the man standing behind him in a jeep. They spoke in a language we had never heard before, and then the English subtitles popped up on the screen.

  I tried hard to read snippets of the dialogue but I wasn't a fast reader and kept getting stuck on certain words. My father could understand spoken English only. We then tried to follow along guided by the tones of the conversations but the story didn't make much sense. It came across as boring and too talky since an hour into the movie the battle scenes were brief and the bloodshed short on body count. Defeated, we ended up turning the television off and going to bed early.

  I wrote to Ms. Burnett that I felt sorry for my father, who had missed out on a movie because there was no way for him to understand it. And I also felt bad I wasn't any help. When we turned the television off, neither of us had said much.

  Ms. Burnett responded in her typical manner: one line heavy with wisdom and insight. You just learned a valuable lesson, she wrote, that sometimes words matter plenty, and other times they don't matter at all.

  After a while the other students in class began to notice I had become Ms. Burnett's favorite, but no one resented me for it. I was the shy, quiet kid in the back who had arrived from México a few years before and who turned out to be an accomplished speller. I became the school Spelling Bee champion, beating out the eighth graders as well, with the word “lapidary.”

  I was a celebrity for a few months and I basked in the attention. Other teachers knew who I was; kids I had never met pointed me out during recess. Ms. Burnett baked me a cake. As John Kelley's spelling champ, I was going on to the next level of competition—the district Spelling Bee. I was given a large packet of vocabulary words to study.

  “Maybe your parents can come watch you compete,” Ms. Burnett suggested.

  I felt my body tingle as I stuffed the packet in my bag. The thought of making my parents part of this project made me uncomfortable. Neither of them would be able to understand what was happening. When we went into restaurants or stores they never spoke up, they simply nodded, smiled, and pantomimed like deaf-mutes. They relied heavily on me to communicate for them. I resolved to spare them any grief by withholding my new endeavor from them.

  At home I looked over the list and began to pronounce the words phonetically. I had learned, however, that this was not the way toward every word's proper pronunciation and I needed to memorize both the phonetic and the proper pronunciation in order to visualize the spelling when the word was called out. That was the secret of my success. I couldn't think of anyone to consult about the more unusual words except for Dolly or Ms. Burnett, and both were too busy with their usual teaching duties to go down the list with me. I decided to pose the problem to Ms. Burnett in a journal entry. I also decided to excuse my parents from any sort of participation in the process.

  I wrote that besides being a lack of help, my parents did not want me to waste my time on silly lists, and that they believed math and history were more important, so why was I wasting my valuable homework time on preparing for some spelling competition?

  Ms. Burnett read my journal entry and believed what I had written. She replied that she intended to do something about it.

  I was worried at first, fearing that she was going to pound at my parents' door and demand some sort of justice. But again, Ms. Burnett remained calm and composed.

  She found a tutor to work with me before and after school and during lunch. One of the office secretaries made all the meeting place arrangements, and since she was bilingual, she attained my mother's permission in person. My mother was puzzled by the afternoon visit but gave her consent without any objection.

  “How odd, you,” my mother said after the secretary had left. “What's so wrong with learning words?”
r />   I shrugged my shoulders.

  Day after day I memorized words without falling behind in my regular schoolwork. Ms. Burnett had high hopes for me, and she never failed to remind me at the bottom of my journal entries that the competition was so many days away, and that I would win for sure. She always initialed her responses: “PLB.” I knew the “P” stood for Peggy because I had seen it in the school yearbook. Through a journal entry I asked her what the “L” stood for, and she responded: “Lurline.” I loved that she had shared that information with me.

  When the day of the competition finally arrived, Ms. Burnett walked me across the school grounds to the Desert Sands Unified School District office. The conference room was filled with other Spelling Bee champions. At one long table sat the judges and the word caller, all of them dressed in business attire. In the corner stood the newspaper photographer.

  The entire episode happened so quickly that the next thing I remember is walking back out of the district office with Ms. Burnett's hand on my shoulder, comforting me. I didn't even place in the competition, but the experience left a lasting impression on me, especially after Ms. Burnett showed me the newspaper column about the event. My name appeared in print. Even my parents were proud when the secretary returned to share the news and paper clipping. To commemorate my achievement they bought me a bookshelf and a bicycle at Zody's. Ms. Burnett and Dolly helped me start my book collection by giving me an order catalog.

  It can't get any better, I thought. Until my mother began getting sick.

  The first time I noticed something was wrong was when she began locking herself in the bathroom for hours. I could hear her coughing, hacking, and whimpering. My father never seemed to be around during those evenings and for a while I believed his absences were the reason for her illness. Sometimes she'd let the shower run, but this white noise wasn't enough to conceal what I was hearing with my ear pressed against the bathroom door. I thought it impertinent to knock, so I never did. Instead I waited for a sign that she was ready to exit the bathroom so that I could make a dash for the couch on the far wall.

  When I wrote to Ms. Burnett about it, her one-line response disappointed me. She wrote that maybe my mother was homesick. I looked up at Ms. Burnett at her desk as I read this. The response was stupid, and she appeared equally as foolish to me in that moment with her old-fashioned glasses perched over her large, pointy nose. She had finally failed me. I didn't understand why she didn't have an answer to my mother's problem. At the moment I wanted to rise from my chair and confront her, yell at her for her useless opinion. All this time I had been writing to her about my mother, about my father, about me. She was supposed to know what I had to do. We had exchanged secrets. She had revealed to me her middle name; I had let her see a letter of endearment I had written for my mother on Mother's Day. She had helped me staple it to a pink construction paper folder and then she had tied a small, white bow on the cover where I had drawn a flower. And what of the time I had shown her the National Geographic article about the kangaroos and how the tiny hairless newborns travel from the womb to the pouch all on their own, vulnerable and pink in their exposed flesh? She had marveled at the photographs and I had blushed with appreciation.

  That afternoon my mother was locked inside the bathroom again, but I refused to stay indoors this time to hear her pain, so I rushed down the steps and hopped on my bike, speeding off. I rode down the longest street and then back again. I retraced my path, feeling my face get hot. I tried to steer with no hands, and then with my eyes closed, keeping track of how long I could last before I opened them again.

  One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. Three-Mississippi. M, I. Crooked letter, crooked letter, I. Crooked letter, crooked letter, I. Humpback, humpback, I.

  I wanted to ride right off the road, to the end of the sidewalk, like in my favorite Shel Silverstein book, a gift from Ms. Burnett. I thought I could manage it if I followed the path around the school. I circled again. By the third time I went around, my body aching with exhaustion, my lips trembling because I was on the verge of tears, I zoomed at full speed into the path of a small white Rabbit backing out of the faculty parking lot. I back-peddled to break, skidding as I did so. By then the driver had turned the car around and had shifted into gear, heading right for me. And just when I thought I'd be crushed beneath the wheels, the car stopped, jerking forward at the force of the breaks.

  Out of breath, I could feel my heart pounding like a constant kick against my chest. My left hand was slightly skinned and bleeding from the loose crumbs of gravel on the street. Behind the wheel, Ms. Burnett sat frozen with her eyes shut, her mouth open in shock. She clasped the steering wheel and dropped her head on her hands. She couldn't see me mouth that I was sorry. I had lost my voice that instant. So I picked up my bike and quickly rode off, faster and faster until I was so far away I knew I could forget the way back to the last place I would ever face her.

  The guitar hanging from a nail on the wall of our little home on top of the garage held a prominent place in my father's memory and heart. This instrument was a symbol of more than music. The dark glistening wood took us back to the homeland, and to Paracho, the nearby town that boasts the finest guitars in the Americas. The thin pick trapped behind the strings was a remnant of the fireside gatherings at dusk, at which I used to keep my hands close to the flame, my mouth busy with a piece of tortilla toasted over the glow of kindling. My father once told me that eating a burnt tortilla kept the witches from sucking my blood, so I used to crunch loudly enough for the witches to hear.

  On those wintry nights my father usually played the guitar because he owned the largest repertoire thanks to his days with Dinastía. That's another memory pinned to the south wall—a portrait of five attractive young men dressed in pink slacks and vests (my father the second one from the right in narrow-frame sixties sunglasses) and all sporting identical patent leather shoes. Dinastía.

  My father believes that women love musicians. To aspire to be in a musical group is to aspire to be a lover. And the guitar is a lover's choice weapon. A love poem turned to song weakens the woman's defenses. Confronted with it, she easily gives up a smile, a laugh, perhaps a bat of the eyelash. All the while, the man caresses the guitar, flirtatiously holding it close to his body in a show of passion. The guitar's sensuous curves and its smooth back are, after all, a suggestion of the female body. To play the guitar is to practice lovemaking; to master it is to prove one's skills in the art of carnal pleasure.

  I imagined my father using his talent to court and serenade my mother the way men did in those romantic black-and-white Mexican films from the fifties. At the completion of a ballad, the beautiful señorita consents to bless the handsome singer by throwing him a kiss over the balcony as a portent of more fiery things to come. Hence another valuable lesson: learn to play an instrument, learn to sing, get the girl in the end.

  But even in my prepubescent age—already familiar with the politics of courtship, having seen the singer-señorita exchange on television and having heard the Mexican love songs on the radio, both to the point of exhaustion—I had no desire to become a Don Juan. In fact I didn't want to please a woman. I only wanted to please one man—my father.

  Effeminate and demure, I always became self-consciously boyish around my father. When I hurt myself I tried to cuss like a male instead of simply yelling out Ay! like a girl. I played more aggressively with my brother's action figures and avoided having them sit around at a pretend restaurant with a building block jukebox that prompted Han Solo to ask Luke Skywalker to dance. At the dinner table I discussed P.E. soccer matches, highlighting the exploits of the better players, keeping to myself the soccer captain's usual decision to make me goalie because I was the slowest runner and worst kicker. I despised sports and the competitive nature of elementary schoolboys. I wasn't the last one picked; I was the one left over.

  My father had maintained his muscular physique and a left cauliflower ear from his years as an amateur boxer. He was small in statu
re, but his booming voice made him grow in size. Like a speaker behind a podium, when he said something he grabbed everyone's attention. And his tolerance to pain was impressive. Once my brother slammed the car door on my father's hand. Despite the swollen purple fingers, my father's eyes didn't water, though mine did. On another occasion he called us in to watch him pluck the entirety of a toenail that had been damaged after he had stubbed his toe. He didn't flinch like we had.

  When my younger brother and I outgrew our desire to simply listen to the guitar, my father had been more than eager to teach us. A traditional Mexican ballad was one of the heartfelt ties to México. I wanted to be as sentimental as my father, lifting my chin up at the final envoy as if the song had been sent off on an uncertain yet hopeful journey. Most of all I wanted to impress him with his own ring finger-thumb trick: using those two fingers he'd switch off plucking away at the strings, his hand shaking excitedly at the speed.

  At the first lesson we encountered a setback.

  Because I was left-handed I was deemed clumsy and awkward, especially after the infamous fly-swatting incident back in the old apartment. My grandfather had asked me to kill the flies buzzing around in the kitchen. I took the swatter with my left hand. And because of a nearsightedness that was not to be diagnosed until many years later, I missed each time. Furious, my grandfather commanded: “Use your right hand, you!” The pressure made my aim worsen. SWAT! SWAT! No luck.