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

by Rigoberto González

  My blood rose to my cheeks. “Why don't you go to hell then,” I said before I went back inside. I immediately felt guilty, but I didn't turn around to apologize. Like every other time I had snapped at my father, I felt he deserved my abuse.

  The next day, I dressed up in slacks and a long-sleeve shirt. I covered up the wrinkled shirt with a brown argyle vest, and thought it would be wise to slip on the blue graduation gown as soon as I arrived to the school, to cover up that drab-looking vest as well. I didn't even bother mentioning my graduation to my grandparents since I knew they never left “el campo” unless they had to. My father didn't object when he saw me take his car keys. I popped open the trunk to the blue Mustang, threw in the cap and gown with a hostile gesture meant to hurt my father, and then drove off on my own.

  When I parked the car in the school parking lot, I opened the door, set one foot on the ground, and then thought how ridiculous this was, arriving to my graduation alone, without a single family member cheering from the stands, without a close friend sitting near me on the rows of 650 chairs arranged on the football field for the graduating class. I pulled my foot back into the car and drove down to my aunt's in the neighboring town.

  “What are you doing all dressed up, you?” she asked when I walked in through the door. My cousins were sitting around in front of the television.

  “I was going to some party, but I changed my mind,” I said.

  “Well, make yourself at home,” she said. “We're going with Maggie to her son's graduation. You don't want to come along?”

  “I'll wait for you here,” I said, finding a pinch of humor in remembering Maggie's favorite phrase when she couldn't get her son to do his chores: “Are you a macho man? Or a macho minus?”

  When they all walked out the house went silent. No one else was around. The evening was just as hot as that afternoon. I removed the vest, unbuttoned the shirt, and stood in front of the opened freezer for a few minutes. A gallon of vanilla ice cream glared at me from the back. I pulled it out and sat on the kitchen floor, deliberately dirtying my clean slacks. I began to shovel in spoonfuls of ice cream, and as it melted in my mouth, I let the cream run down the sides of my chin, like tears.

  As the summer passed I counted down the days to my departure to Riverside. I began to fantasize about the new me: I would walk differently, talk differently, even sneeze and cough differently. I would lose all the excess weight I had put back on in the last few months. Without my grandmother to feed me, change was possible. I was going so crazy keeping this knowledge to myself that I revealed it to my brother, who wasn't really impressed, so then I told my favorite cousin, who didn't understand what all this college stuff was about anyway. She did, however, buy me a few vests at Goodwill because she had seen me wearing one before and she thought I should look grown-up if I was going to be attending an important school.

  July. I turned eighteen: I could vote, buy cigarettes, and drink alcohol across the international border. But none of this thrilled me as much as what was waiting for me. I pulled out my acceptance notification and held it to my naked chest at night. We were becoming quite intimate, my ticket out and I. But then the guilt began to settle about leaving my grandmother, who had been, after all, something of a mother to me.

  I decided to tell her the week before I was set to leave.

  “And where is that, you?” she asked.

  “Just up north, not too far from here,” I said.

  “Will you be coming back soon?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I lied. I didn't want to alarm her by telling her the truth—which was that I wasn't ever planning to return.

  I asked my grandmother not to say anything to my grandfather, and she kept quiet. We had been sharing secrets all along, like the fact that she kept a loaded pistol safely hidden but easily within reach.

  “What do you want that for?” I asked, frightened by the thought of my grandmother firing a weapon.

  She pulled out the gun from the linen closet and waved it in the air, handling it like a sharpshooter.

  “I'm not going to be like your grandfather, going to doctors here and to doctors there,” she proudly replied. “The day I'm sick and useless I'm putting this to my head.”

  My secret was just as dangerous. I was leaving home, finally. I was starting my own life, finally. I was leaving all this behind—“el campo,” my grandfather, my father. Suddenly the possibility of complete reinvention presented itself: could I even possibly change my name?

  August. On the morning of my planned departure I stuffed most of my clothes into a large black bag that doubled its packing room by undoing a zipper around its middle. I had bought it at the Chinese flea market, where I also purchased a small box of detergent and a sturdy plastic laundry basket. My grandmother gave me an old faded comforter with lace coming loose at the edges and a beige iron and towel one of my cousins had pilfered from the Marriott Hotel where he worked. The last item I packed was an old portable Royal typewriter my father had found in a yard sale. He brought it to me the year before; it was one of his many peace offerings, and the only one that came in handy when I needed to type book reports or essays for high school. The black Royal came with its own black carrying case worn at the corners. I realized then that even these few items were too much for me to take by myself on the bus, so I reasoned that I could convince my father to drive me to the college dorms, where a room had been reserved for me.

  My father and grandfather were sitting on the living room couch, watching television. I slowly crept over and made my big announcement.

  “To where?” my father asked.

  “College,” I repeated. “In Riverside.”

  “Riverside?” my grandfather said. “I was born in Riverside, you.”

  “Did you ask your grandfather?” my father said.

  “I told my grandmother.”

  My grandmother sat in the corner in silence.

  “I don't understand,” my grandfather said. “What are you going to this college for? Is it a trade school?”

  “I don't know,” I said honestly, but then I regretted saying it.

  “You don't know!” my father said, agitated. “Then why the hell are you going?”

  “Santiago's son went to a trade school,” my grandfather chimed in, pointing his finger toward the back door for effect. “What a waste that was. Took out a loan from the bank and everything.”

  My knees started to shake. Things began to look blurry.

  “No, no, no, forget it,” said my father. “You're crazy if you think you can just pick up and go like that. You turn eighteen and you become your own boss all of a sudden?”

  “But I was hoping you'd drive me there,” I said.

  “In the Mustang? It'll never make it all the way to Riverside. That's almost to Los Angeles.”

  “But I got in with a scholarship and everything,” I said, knowing the uselessness of this information even before I said it.

  “College. Can you believe this boy, you?” he asked my grandfather.

  My grandfather shook his head.

  I walked back to the room to pine away among my belongings. But I wasn't going to give up that quickly, not after waiting all these months. I quickly devised an alternative plan. As soon as my brother came in I told him what had just happened, and then I revealed the great escape: we would sneak out my things through the window, pack them into the Mustang, and then take my father's keys.

  “I know how to get there,” I lied. “But you'll have to drive back on your own. It's not that far.”

  “I don't know, dude,” my brother said.

  “Please, please, please,” I begged, my body shaking, my sight dizzy with fear.

  “Well, all right,” he agreed.

  The scheme didn't get past the sneaking-the-luggage-out part because the huge black bag couldn't fit through the window. My brother waited on the other side for me to force the bag through the small opening. We had already pried the screen off, but after pulling and tugging for
a few seconds, a loud grating sound reverberated throughout the house. We had bent the glass guide out of place.

  My father came rushing into the room, catching us in the act.

  “What the hell is all this racket?” he said. As soon as he saw the comedy of our efforts, he understood.

  “So you insist on this college business,” he said. “Very well, then, let's go. But you're paying for the gas.”

  He took my bag and dragged it to the car. I followed with the laundry basket in one hand, the Royal in the other. My grandparents watched from the couch.

  “Where is everybody going?” my grandfather said.

  “To Riverside,” my father answered.

  “And when is he coming back?”

  “In November,” I said.

  “November?” my grandfather exclaimed in alarm. “Such a long time. Then why does he need all those things, you?”

  My brother rode quietly in the back seat next to the laundry basket since it didn't fit in the Mustang's small trunk with my over-stuffed bag. All the way to Riverside my father griped about how the car was breaking down, overheating, and getting its tires damaged because he was driving it such a long distance in the heat. The air conditioning didn't work, so our backs were damp from the vinyl seats. Matters worsened when we finally arrived in Riverside and couldn't locate the dormitories. We must have circled the campus three times before we came upon a picket sign stuck in a lawn, a black arrow pointing us in the right direction.

  I was overwhelmed when we drove into the dorm parking lot, which was already overflowing with vehicles and people. All around me I saw families helping their college kids into the building, a parade of move-ins complete with “Best of Luck” balloons, teddy bears, computer monitors, matching luggage sets, and a slew of cameras and video recorders documenting the momentous occasion.

  “I can't find any parking,” my father said.

  I was about to suggest he drive over to the parking lot across the street when he pulled over in front of the sliding door entrance and said, “Just get out here.”

  The trunk popped open. I got out and asked my brother to help me unload my belongings. My father didn't get out of the car or even bother to turn the engine off.

  A residential counselor, an Asian man, ran over. “Would you like some help?” he said.

  I looked over at my father, his face turned away from me. I looked over at my brother.

  “I guess this is it, dude,” my brother said sadly. He climbed into the front seat and closed the door. The counselor looked a bit puzzled.

  “Later, dude,” my brother said as my father shifted the car into gear and drove out of the parking lot, the Mustang getting smaller and smaller until it was tiny enough to fit inside a photograph.

  The residential counselor took me to the third floor and dropped me off in my room. “Dinner's at six,” he said.“ Anybody joining you?”

  I shook my head.

  “That's all right,” he said. “You'll soon find out how easy it is to make friends here.”

  “Thank you,” I said. It dawned on me suddenly that he was the first Asian person I had ever spoken to.

  He walked out of my room and I stared out into the hallway. My roommate hadn't arrived yet. Bodies shifted past the open door. When I began to unpack I thought about how lucky I was to have gotten out of Indio. I wasn't going to end up a farmworker after all. I had a good feeling about this decision even though my nerves were wrenching my stomach. The walls in the room were blank. The mattress on the twin bed looked new. And outside the tall trees were winking with the weight of fickle birds that hopped from one branch to another because there were plenty of directions to choose from.

  Zacapu Days and Nights of the Dead

  Summer's Passage

  Once we board the third bus to Michoacán on our third evening, I resolve not to antagonize my father for the remainder of the trip, though all the bus interiors look exactly alike and it feels as if we're climbing into the same cabin containing all the negativity I've been dispelling into its air. We have approximately seven hours to go and most of that time the bus will be cutting through the winding mountainous roads of the region in nighttime, which I know will turn my stomach and keep me quiet. I smell the faint odor of roasted pumpkin seeds. My mother used to make my brother and me eat them with salt when we were little to fight intestinal parasites.

  “Did I ever tell you about that time I sat next to an old woman who died on the bus?” my father says.

  I have heard this story before, about four times. But I decide to let my father tell it by not answering his question.

  “I can't remember her name anymore, but when you travel long distances like that, well, you know how it is. You make friends a lot faster. She talked to me about this and about that, and so did I. I wish I had had a tape recorder or something because now I regret not paying more attention to what she had to say.

  “Anyway, she liked to talk about everything. She talked about her pets, her family, and her plants. She reminded me so much of both of your grandmothers. Not just because she was an old woman, but because she gave her words a certain flavor.”

  I know what he means: the taste of language that is only spoken and never written because the speaker most likely doesn't read or write. My father has it, too.

  “She told me about how she sewed her money inside her quilt because she didn't trust banks. She told me about how her dead husband came to bug her on Sundays because his spirit thought it was still alive and kept reminding her it was time for church. She told me how her favorite afternoons were spent alone in a plaza with a piece of goat cheese on a slice of bread. I can certainly respect those simple pleasures.”

  My mind flashed through those imagined scenes of my father's poverty in childhood, of times my grandparents refused to talk about. The oldest sons were sent to scavenge the mercado trash bins for edible fruit, and my grandmother used to grow cilantro and chives to sell to the butchers. In those days, butchers provided all meat orders with garnish, and my grandmother was one of their suppliers in exchange for scraps.

  “Well, if that bus trip had lasted two years, she wouldn't have run out of things to say. But luckily that trip was going to last only a few days. Even less for her.”

  My father pauses for dramatic effect.

  “So the bus pulls up at a strip of restaurants on the side of the road, you know, like the ones we've been pulling into all this time. The people have to stretch and get some air. And they have to eat, why not?”

  My father pauses again.

  “And I ask la doña if she cares to step down to grab a bite. I mean, I couldn't guarantee her a piece of goat cheese but there were other good things: shrimp, enchiladas, maybe a sope with beans and nopales. Whatever. But she refused. She said she was feeling tired and wanted to stay on the bus to rest.

  “I can't argue with her. She's old and she knows what's best for her body. So I go down and buy a piece of fried chicken, I think. No, I lie. It was a ham sandwich. Just like the ones that el Chavo del Ocho used to eat on television.”

  I want to roll my eyes at my father's embellishments, but I allow him to proceed uninterrupted.

  “I speak to a few other people from the bus. We joke around a bit and exchange destinations until the bus driver calls us all back on board. Well, I walk in, take my seat, and notice the old woman is sleeping. I don't want to disturb her so I take a seat behind her, and I fall asleep as well. You know, nothing out of the ordinary. But then when I wake up the next morning, I realize that the old lady hasn't even shifted an inch. Which is odd on a bus, where you have to move every once in a while to keep your blood flowing. So I know something is wrong. I take my old seat again and I try to stir her awake, but she doesn't move. I alert the driver and he pulls over to check for himself. He confirms what I already know, that she has died peacefully in her sleep.”

  “What did the driver do?” I ask. I can't remember this part of the story.

  “What could he do?
We sat there waiting for the police to take her back to the terminal with her few belongings and hopefully find someone to claim her.”

  I squint my eyes. This isn't how the story ended before. In an earlier version there was a dying breath, a last-minute plea from the old lady to my father to tell her family that there was money hidden in the quilt. But my father was never able to play the hero because he decided to stick to his own journey instead of believing the ramblings of a moribund.

  “And what happened to the quilt?” I ask, hoping to jog my father's memory about how this story was supposed to end.

  “What quilt?” he asks.

  I roll my eyes. “Never mind.”

  “Are you going to eat carnitas in Quiroga, you?” my father asks, quickly changing the subject.