Even better than our outings to night school were our evenings together at home as we waited up for my father, who was out drinking. He was one of those drunks who came home soaked in sorrow, begging forgiveness for an act he would repeat the following night. As we waited for my father to arrive in tears, my mother would speak softly into a cup of tea cooling off in her hands.
“We'll have to plan a trip to Michoacán soon,” she said one night. Her statements usually hovered in the air without direction. And I sat there with her to listen to them. The nights were quiet and the kitchen was small. I could hear my mother gulp down each sip of tea. She had small, light-skinned hands with nails that didn't grow long because she worked in the vegetable packinghouses sorting corn and carrots in the winter, and picking grapes in the summer. Yet I suspected her hands were smooth. I don't remember actually touching them. Even though those hands had hurt me on many occasions I refused to think of them as rough or cruel. On those long nights that I sat beside her, my head nodding off to sleep, I forgave her. I understood that that's just how it was going to be.
“Go to bed, you,” she would say to me when she noticed I was falling asleep in my chair. There was no sense of urgency or demand in her voice. It was as if she had to say it out of maternal obligation though she didn't mean it. I was sure she wanted me to stay so I stayed.
As soon as my father arrived the usual drama ensued: the tears, the reprimand, the slow journey into the bedroom, the silence. We could hear his heavy steps coming up the wooden stairs. He'd fumble with the keys for a minute or so before managing the door. When my mother got up to help him inside I walked quietly to the couch, too sleepy to care about anything anymore.
The guitar, in the meantime, was collecting dust because my brother had lost interest in anything at all. He had been caught skip-ping school a few times and the school principal was concerned about ping school a few times and the school principal was concerned about his increasingly violent behavior with other schoolboys. And I, too, was moving forward in my own way: I had developed a crush on another man, another Dinastía member, pictured second from the right in that famous portrait on the south wall of the apartment above the garage. He was the musician with the strong masculine jaw and the funky pair of sunglasses. Both lenses reflected the camera's flash. For months I stared very intensely into those splashes of light, attempting to penetrate through those lenses. I just had to discover—I just had to find out—if indeed he was looking back at me.
Summer's Passage
“Son, are you awake?”
“...”
“...”
“What do you want?”
“Me? Nothing. I just thought if you were awake we could talk.”
“About what?”
“Whatever. Your friends. Do you have many friends in Riverside?”
“A few.”
“Any special friends?”
“They're all special.”
“And . . .?”
“And nothing.”
“Well, tell me more. Tell me anything. How did you meet them?”
“Which one?”
“Any one of them.”
My father and I exchange words in the dark. I can't even tell what time it is, but I know it's too early in the morning to be having this conversation on the bus, especially about my special friends. I can just make out the sky becoming clearer over the horizon and the dominant sound is still the rough engine shifting gears as it speeds onward to Michoacán. And then something takes hold of me. A need for sex, but not just sex with anyone; I'm hungering for my lover.
I want to believe that my lover is sitting up on the edge of his bed at this hour, his face inside his hands, letting the streetlight stripe the interior of the lonely room through the slits of the Venetian blinds. His body is a silhouette, but solid, which makes the expression of his grief more beautiful, like a flower growing out of rock.
I remember the times he rises in the predawn hours and how he sits back on the bed to have a cigarette. When he exhales, the smoke shoots out inside a heavy sigh that tells me he's more than smoking. I'm saddened that I'm not there to respond to him.
It's funny how memory works, where all that is recollected never comes back in its original form. To keep myself from going crazy with lust, I look at the two white marks on my hand.
“Is something wrong, querido?” I asked him on the night he gave me those scars. He took a few more drags from his cigarette, but he didn't answer. I repeated the question, and added, “You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”
And he did. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the stress on his face became more and more visible as I witnessed the filling in of the soft human features into the opaqueness of his head. He told me that when he was a boy his father had raped him.
His father had been out drinking as usual, and his mother locked him out of the house to teach him a lesson, forbidding anyone to let him in. The violent banging against the door woke him up and he opened his bedroom window for a better look. His father was kicking with the foot that still had a shoe; the other foot was bare and the second shoe was nowhere in sight. When he laughed at this comical scene, he alerted his father, who seized on the chance to get inside. His father crawled in through the window and my lover watched uneasily as he removed his clothes and settled into the bed to sleep. He wanted to avoid his mother's wrath at his betrayal, so my lover reached over his father's naked body to grab for a pillow in order to sleep more comfortably on the floor. He imagined how all of these details would entertain the family over breakfast the following day, his mother forgiving all as she stood over the stove, giggling. And that's the thought that took him into peaceful sleep, until the violent pain of penetration woke him in the middle of the night, his screams held in by the vice grip over his jaw.
“I would have thought it was all a bad dream the next day,” my lover said, “if it hadn't happened again before he left my room in the morning.”
“I don't understand,” I say, my voice shaking at the enormity of the revelation. “Did you tell your mother? Did you go to the police?”
My lover calmly stretched out his arm. “Give me your hand,” he said.
I offered him my right hand in comfort, but as soon as we made contact he swung his other arm around and burned me with the cigarette. The sting shocked me and I pulled my body in as I squeezed the knuckle of my wounded hand, unable to do anything but cry as I looked at the two spots of white flesh exposed when the cherry skipped on my flesh and burned off skin.
“That's for asking stupid questions,” he said. “Now leave me alone before I burn your balls off.”
The memory of the sting makes my eyes water. For months afterward I was unable to see a lighted cigarette without rubbing the scar tissue or without feeling warmth glowing underneath the marks. I'm doing precisely that when my father, sitting next to me on the bus, reaches over and places his hand over mine.
“Are you going to tell me a story?” my father asks.
I breathe in deeply and expel the heaviness of my thoughts.
“Let me sleep a little longer,” I say. I snuggle into my seat and drift off into uneasy sleep.
When I wake up again it's only the second morning of the trip. I'm relieved that I'm still moving away from Riverside, but the desire for my lover has not subsided. And I can't imagine myself walking into the tiny, stinky bathroom stall to masturbate on a shaky bus, so I squirm in my seat, pressing my fists on my erection. Outside the skies are dark and cloudy. I can tell we're in Nayarit by the lush vegetation and mountains that tower over this state and continue into Jalisco and Michoacán. My body feels numb from another night of restless sleep and I'm grateful to be sitting next to a window that can actually open. But soon the rain starts coming down. I pull out my light jacket from my backpack and use it as a cover. My father must have put his on sometime while I was snoozing. He looks up at the ceiling of the bus. I look up as well and find the leak he's staring at.
“I guess we
'll have to swim out of the bus,” I say.
“You know how to swim now, you?” he asks. I blush.
On the second or third stop after we cross the Sinaloa-Nayarit border, Zacatecas, my father's other traveling companion, gets off the bus and I'm pleased. I have grown annoyed hearing his voice call out to my father from the back of the bus all this time. In the end he didn't even do that but simply whistled. When people whistle-talk it irks me. It reminds me of my grandfather flagging down my grand-mother at the swap meet and of the many other women who also turned around because they mistakenly thought their own husbands were summoning them. Whistling to people is like whistling to dogs.
When Zacatecas bends down to shake my father's hand I glare at him. He's taken aback by this but graciously says good-bye to me as well. I'm further dismayed when he stands at the front of the bus and gives his blessings to the rest of the passengers, wishing them a safe arrival home. People respond kindly and I want to scream out in exasperation.
“He's a good man,” my father says. I leave it alone.
The mood becomes dull for the rest of the day without Zacatecas. The bus passes through Nayarit without any delays, but I can't help but gawk at the greenery and at the mango trees with fruits that hang like testicles on the branches. Soon we're in the state of Jalisco. A stretch of mountains in Jalisco appears desert-like because they have been cleared to let the maguey plant flourish. From this plant comes the tequila.
“Is your mouth watering?” I ask my father, who looks at me puzzled. “Nothing, nothing,” I say, aware that perhaps this comment went a little too far, even for me.
Also I feel like a hypocrite. My father's drinking has always been the perfect scapegoat for all of our family ills. My mother never forgave him for that, so I kept this grudge alive after her death. The truth is I have also learned about the pleasures of intoxication. But with my lover, drinking is a glamorous evening venture, not the sloppy, word-slurring, mouth-drooling after work activity my father engages in. My father and his beer buddies stand outside in dirty clothing, sipping out of cans in paper bags. When the night catches up to them nobody bothers to turn on a light. The bodies darken and their voices get louder until someone's wife sends a child to call his father home, breaking up the party until the next time. No one will know exactly how much has been consumed until the following morning when the sun shines on the discarded containers scattered on the yard.
My lover and I have cocktails—vodka martinis or manhattans. We attend socials at private clubs or reunions in fancy bars with mood lighting designed to make people look thinner and younger. No one stumbles home—they are escorted to a cab or to someone's car. It never occurs to me that my father could drive while drunk; I have never seen that happen. But my lover does, swerving through the freeways as I push my feet up against the dashboard to keep myself steady. The cassette tape plays music we have just been listening to at the club. I never worry about the danger because he always gets us home safely, me tipsy or nearly passed out in the passenger seat. The only part I don't like about these nights is that my lover gets horny and fucks me dry as soon as he peels my pants off. Even though I am numb with alcohol the sessions are still uncomfortable and painful.
“That's a good bitch. That's a good bitch,” my lover spits into my ear, and I clench my teeth, wondering if the women of my family ever had to deal with a man like this. I can't picture my parents in this role, not even when I recall the only time I have heard my parents have sex—my father huffing, my mother whimpering, but both complicit in the strenuous scuffle of passion. After this rough exchange with my lover, he always sits back and smokes a joint. I need another drink.
When I drink I believe I'm drinking much differently than my father. My father's drinking is an embarrassment to the family. My drinking is a way to be a part of my lover's world.
In my lover's world there are also drugs. Crystal meth, cocaine, pot. I like crystal because it keeps me up all night, and I can read an entire book in one sitting, my nose twitching from the flaring nostrils.
“I can't believe you're wasting time on that,” my lover chides me. He thinks he's much more productive, mixing tapes until six in the morning for our road trips up to Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I push myself into the seat on the bus. My throat tightens from the memory of snorting crystal. I try to relax my breathing. My father notices this and becomes alarmed.
“Do you need to vomit?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Do you need water?” he asks. “We'll be making a stop soon.”
“Quit it,” I tell him. “I just need some air.”
My father freezes the look of pity on his face. He always puts this mask on as a last recourse, when he doesn't know what to say or how to react.
I shut my eyes. I want to make my father go away, but I can feel his warm breath, and it's annoying me.
My lower lip trembles as I recall the evening my grandmother told my brother and me over dinner that our father had abandoned us. Less than a year after my mother's death, my father had moved out of the house while we were away at school. He had gone off to marry a woman with three sons of her own. She was carrying his child. As she revealed the last piece of information, I dropped the spoon on the plate and flung myself across the room in a fit of spasms and tears.
What no one knew was what had happened the night before. In the two-bedroom unit, my grandparents occupied one bedroom; my father, brother, and I the other; but I opted to sleep on the living room couch, where I could sneak peeks into the refrigerator at midnight, or watch the television programming of my choice, or simply read with the weak kitchen light in silence. I had been on a strange exercise kick recently, inspired by all the sightings of taut bellies and pubescent pecs at the school gym. I wanted to be with these young bodies. I wanted to be more like them. So I started doing sit-ups and push-ups before going to sleep at night. I did all this with the lights off, as if the blackness could help me push this fantasy for musculature forward. I had just completed a second set of sit-ups when my father walked out in his white underwear that glowed in the dark.
“What are you doing?” he asked. I didn't answer.
Suddenly, he swung around and dropped on top of me, pinning my head down with his forehead, his body balanced on his arms. When he smiled his teeth also radiated their whiteness. My breathing quickened and I was embarrassed to be feeling an erection. He lowered his body closer to mine, and his belly came into contact with my arousal. But I couldn't move. I tried to pry him off me but he wouldn't let me, so I simply succumbed, waiting to find out, wanting to experience what he'd do next. And then, just as unexpectedly, he jumped off and disappeared into the bedroom again, leaving me flushed and confused about what had just happened between us on the living room floor. The next day, he was gone.
Una desbaratada, my grandmother called it, this nervous break-down that kept me out of junior high school for nearly two months. My grandfather grew tired of shuttling me around from one doctor to the next, and of picking me up from the nurse's office in school, until finally the school counselor suggested a psychologist.
“In all of our family history we've never had a crazy person,” my grandfather replied with outrage. But he agreed to it, if only to appease the school counselor.
My grandfather drove me to the psychologist, a tall, neatly primped woman who kept peeling her eyelids back after every other sentence she spoke. Her suggestion, after less than an hour of talking to us, was that I should be thoroughly evaluated at a professional facility. My grandfather didn't even wait to leave the office before he went off on a tirade.
“All this talk is useless,” he said. “Can't you just give him some pill or something? What kind of a doctor are you? I'll be damned if I'm going to waste any more time on this kid. If he's that damaged then take him outside and bash his head in with a rock!”
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 11
