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

by Rigoberto González

  “There he is,” he announces. My grandmother comes up from behind him, a worried expression on her face.

  “Give your father a hug, you,” my grandmother says. “He came to congratulate you.” She then says to my father, “He's so thin now.”

  I embrace my father uneasily. To my relief, he only sticks around to chat with my aunts and grandmother for another fifteen minutes before he announces his departure. And as he excuses himself, he asks to speak to me privately.

  In the room he pulls out a small box from his jacket pocket and hands it to me. The box is illustrated with a black tuxedo and a red bow tie.

  “I'm allergic to colognes; you know that,” I say to him.

  “But this is the good kind,” he says.

  I take the box and thank him anyway.

  “Well, I'll be going now,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I'm going to be heading back with my woman and the kids, probably by train,” he says.

  “I'll be fine,” I say. “I know how to get back to Mexicali from here.” The thought of returning by myself makes me a little uncomfortable, but I don't want to return with my stepmother, her three sons, and my father's young daughter.

  “Well, I was going to ask you for a small favor,” he says, sheepishly.

  “You mean for money,” I say.

  “Not much,” he says. “Just enough to cover the train tickets. We're going second class.”

  “You'll never change,” I say.

  I make a huge production of looking for my wallet and then of opening it. In a side pocket I have set aside what I was planning to give my grandparents before I left Zacapu. Impulsively, I snatch out all the bills and thrust them at my father.

  “That's all I have,” I say, aware that he has to accept this money on my terms.

  “But what about for you?” he says.

  “I'll figure it out,” I say. “Take it.”

  My father stuffs the money into his jacket. “That cologne was expensive,” he says.

  “Of course it was,” I say.

  My father leaves, saying his awkward good-byes to my mother's family. He rushes out into the street as if I could change my mind at any moment and demand the money back. My blood is pulsing, and it's not going to be enough to cry or to complain to my grand-parents. I want to do the only thing I know how to do—fly.

  “I'm leaving tomorrow,” I announce to my grandmother.

  “What? Why? But you just got here, you,” she says. “If you leave now it will seem as if this were all a dream.” Dreamed words are empty words. My grandfather also objects, but he knows that they can't change my mind.

  As a ceremonial farewell, I climb up to the roof of the house to watch the dark clouds creep over the mountains for the last time. Every roof is used to hang the wash out to dry. I sit with the sheets behind me as I stare at the life above the houses of Zacapu: pants and blankets waving on clotheslines, chicken coops, dogs that look down for the next passerby, clouds thick with rain. And across the street, the neighbor's son is piling brick. Each time he bends down to accommodate another pair, his head turns and we lock eyes. He removes his shirt in a vain display of his torso, which is smooth and fair-skinned—nothing like my lover's body in Riverside. It doesn't take much coaxing to find myself on the rooftop across the street. He spreads a blanket on plywood to protect us from the red grains of the bricks. The sky begins to drizzle. Not a single word passes between us when I remove my shirt, when I bring him down on top of me and slip my hands on his hard crotch, when he unbuttons my jeans and pulls them down, when we kiss, caress, and fuck with urgency because my hours in Michoacán are numbered. When the rain begins to pour I see that one of my aunts has run up to the roof at my grandparents' house. As she frantically pulls the clothes off the line she spots me lying across the way underneath the neighbor's son. I look back at her defiantly, but then my aunt turns away and keeps collecting clothes as if she hasn't seen two young men scrubbing heat out of their flesh. She's gone by the time the drops grow as heavy as old Mexican coins.

  “I think we should go in, you,” he says, placing his arm over his face for protection. He has broken the illusion. He has expressed weakness.

  I roll over on my back, shut my eyes, and spread my arms out. The rain continues to pin me to the roof.

  “I'm going in,” I hear him say, but his voice seems distant, drowned out by the force of the rainfall.

  It had also been raining during my mother's funeral. The mourners dragged in the mud off the street and every once in a while a woman volunteered to pick up the mop and clean a path across the living room. Funerals in México are also about drowning sorrow with liquor. The coffee is spiked with tequila and even the town drunks find a place among the mourners. My brother and I were too young to drink so we were fed constantly. We were sitting at the neighbor's table picking at bowls of beans when, from out of the shadows, an intoxicated old man emerged, speaking to us through his drunken drawl.

  “Losing a mother is the worst thing that can happen to a child,” he announced.

  Immediately the other adults tried to pull him away, but he jerked his hand free.

  “Then the father remarries,” he said. “And the new wife doesn't treat you like a human being.”

  “Please, don Ramiro, please,” a woman said as she tugged at his coat.

  “I was only five,” the old man persisted. “My stepmother beat me when my father wasn't around. She only looked after her own children.”

  He grabbed me by the arm, his eyes cloudy with tears. “If one day you should find yourself in that predicament,” he said, “call on me. My name is Ramiro López.”

  At that point two men managed to pry him off me and lead him out of the house, but not before he yelled out again: “If one day! My name is Ramiro López!”

  Later that evening I was watching my father sitting out on the street with a few other men. I could see him clearly through my grandmother's bedroom window, though he couldn't see me because his back was turned. I was trying to catch a glimpse of the neighbor's son who was unloading wood from his father's truck. He had been staring at me awkwardly for weeks. That's when I recognized Ramiro López stumbling around the truck and across the street. He came up and stood in front of my father, still drunk and slurring his speech.

  “If your boys tell you she's beating them, you believe them,” he said.

  I wasn't sure if my father understood the context of his statement, but that didn't stop Ramiro López. My father looked around him and tried to conceal his discomfort with a weak attempt at a comprehending smile.

  “You'll have me to deal with,” the old man said. “My name is Ramiro López.”

  Again two men came over to escort him away, but not before the old man had the last word.

  “You love your boys!” he said. “You love your boys forever!”

  The pronouncement had been made on this street, calle Río Bravo, the street that ends at the gates of the dead like a modern-day Styx. Colonia Obrera had every river: Río Rodano, Río Colorado, Río Grande, and Río Copatizio. Perhaps it could also have a Lethe. I imagine Ramiro López's words disintegrating after all these years, the echo finally thinning down to fine dust breathed in, breathed out, and forgotten.

  I think, How clever time works, overlapping people's lives at certain stages, and as some eyes are waking up, others are already closing, securing the continuity of the world. My mother and I were connected for twelve years. She also lived during a time I didn't exist. And I, in turn, must now keep living when she does not. And yet my father, who still shares the same wheel of time, is more like my parallel line.

  The next day I will start all over again. I will board the bus to Mexico City and use my credit card to take a luxury first-class bus back to Mexicali. Two days after that I will hop on the Greyhound and disappear into Riverside. I won't speak to my father again for another year. When we finally talk it will be a brief exchange from that moment forward, nothing memorable, a
nd nothing worth writing about.

  But that's much later in the story. For now, I'm here, nude on the roof of a house in Zacapu. My hands under my neck, my knees pointing up at the clouds that are opening up in the miraculous way clouds disperse in Biblical illustrations. Light comes streaming down, comforting me with the realization that the sun has always been there, waiting, watching, and shining. My body is slick with wetness but will dry quickly enough.

  Unpinned

  Riverside, California

  Each time I return to my ugly old Riverside, where I have never seen a river, only bumper-to-bumper traffic that shimmers its strings of headlights into the evenings along Highways 60, 91, and 215, I remember that this is the place of my learning. I would be more embarrassed to admit what I didn't know if I hadn't come from the kind of place I did. I didn't know, for example, that jeans came in different widths and lengths. I discovered this fact when, as a freshman, I tagged along with some friends to the local mall. I walked into a Miller's Outpost because on the back wall there was a stunning display of pants of all shades of blue and black. I zeroed in on the stickers on the cubicles identifying the design and size specifications. 32 x 30. 32 x 32. 34 x 34. 36 x 36. 34 x 30. 34 x 32. 36 x 34.

  I voiced my wonder: “Jeans come in different sizes?”

  “Excuse me?” the store worker asked, puzzled.

  All this time my grandmother had been directing me to the Chinese flea market or to Goodwill, where the strategy was: as long as it fits around the waist, the length can be taken care of at home. I took these hemmed-up pants with me to college, and by the end of the year they were all high-water jeans because at eighteen I was still growing.

  I didn't feel betrayed by this knowledge, or even ignorant, but I realized I had to keep these discoveries to myself or else I'd sound like a fool. So even though I was awestruck with the power of my first credit card (no one in my family had ever had one), I kept the giddiness to myself. I had no idea what most other college students discussed when they talked about music or movies or places on the cultural or geographical map. But I caught on quickly. Pretend knowledge was easy. And so was latching on to those people who possessed these privileged keys to the wonders of the greater world, like my lover, mi querido.

  “Have you ever been to San Francisco?” he asked me.

  “I've only been as far as L.A. Once,” I answered, remembering my ill-fated trip to Disneyland with my family.

  “Well, I guarantee you that by the end of the week you will have been to L.A. five times,” he said. And he made it happen. Like magic.

  I needed magic during my first year in college. The students I met had an innocence about them that bothered me. I felt resentful that I was carrying guilt over my shoulders about having left my family the way I did, about having forced my father into dropping me off at the dorms the way he did. I wanted to be punished. That too was another type of magic.

  “I can tell you are lonely by the eyes that look like rooms with the lights off,” he said to me. And I fluttered my eyelids, recognizing seduction when it happened, responding to it the only way I knew how, by submitting, by letting the older man, who has done all this before, do it again.

  I need some of that magic now, I conclude as I move swiftly from the Greyhound station to the taxi to the housing complex on Blaine, which looks deserted because it's the middle of summer and most of the college kids have returned to the streets of their hometowns.

  As soon as I enter my apartment, I drop my luggage on the floor and pick up the phone. The only trace of my roommate is the sink full of dirty dishes, which will remain unwashed until the end of the week. Of the two of us, he's the only one who cooks because I never even learned to fry an egg—not with my cantankerous grandfather in the kitchens of my childhood. My lover answers on the second ring.

  “I'm back,” I say to him.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  “Very,” I say. And we immediately slip back into our customary language of double-meanings and innuendoes. I become aroused simply thinking of his smell. I have learned to latch on to this detail because even after he turns off the light, even after the ghost whispers, I can still hold on to him through the musk on his skin. He's my quickest ticket away from the places I came from.

  When I open the car door, the odor of pot assails me. I'm not much of a pot smoker because I get high on the first hit, which leaves my lover smoking alone and having to deal with my giddiness. I'm also not much of a drinker. After one cocktail I'm already relaxed and horny, which is perfect for an occasion like this. We don't engage in public displays of affection, but the compact car space is enough to make me feel intimate.

  “How was your trip back?” he asks.

  “Boring,” I say. “The trip down was more eventful.”

  We rush through the meal at the local Mexican dive because we want to have sex. The waitress recognizes this urgency and winks at my lover when he asks for the bill as soon as she drops off a second round of margaritas. My lover reaches under the table and pulls my hand onto his groin. I give it the squeeze he asks for and feel the familiar fit of his semi-erection into the palm of my hand.

  When I enter my lover's bedroom I seek evidence of other men and I find them: an empty condom packet on the floor near the bed-post, a cigarette butt on the ashtray—menthols, which my lover detests—and the scent of colognes that my lover would never wear. Despite this affront I find it easy to slip out of my clothes and crawl under his body. I remind myself that I wasn't loyal either. His fingers, rough as his kisses, press into my flesh with a fury that will leave traces behind. But I want him to remember my body this way. I want him to love me into escape. When he starts in on the butterflies I'm thrown into a fierce ecstasy that tells me I'm with another man's body, in another history that unfolds itself apart from my past.

  “Did you miss me?” my lover asks me.

  I take too long to answer. I want to explain to him that my delay is caused by surprise that he has asked this question first. I was just about to ask him the same thing. And doesn't that prove that we're on the same wavelength, somehow wired together because we belong together?

  “Bitch,” he says to me, and then turns away to his side of the bed, but not before he elbows me in the ribs. El golpe avisa, my grand-mother used to say. You'll know when the blow comes that you have done something wrong.

  I relax my body, defeated. I know this drill. He will wait for me to cool off my desire and then he will pounce on me at the most unexpected moment, so that the lovemaking hurts. I press my head to the pillow. Without my glasses I can't make out any object in the room. Everything is blurred and distorted, but I'd rather be here than anywhere else. And just as I'm about to drop into sleep, succumbing to my inebriation, my lover reaches over to clamp his teeth on my earlobe and pinch those parts of my flesh that hurt the most.

  “I'm not going to let it go that easy,” he says.

  I'm not quite sure what “it” is. The fact that I dared to leave him again? The fact that I returned? Or the fact that I'm squirming and crying out in pain for a merciful release, especially when he penetrates me without lubrication? As his heavy breathing grates against my ear, somewhere in the back of my mind I hear myself think: I deserve this.

  With classes still over a month away I spend too much time with my lover, enough time to know that not much has changed. Soon we are eating in the same restaurants, ordering the same dishes, drinking the same wines. Habit becomes us. I catch him staring at another man; he complains about my jealousy. I get bored watching him cut a rock of crystal down to fine powder; he gets exasperated at how easily I slip into a stupor after one small line. The only noticeable change is that he hasn't asked me to ghost whisper, the only part of our time together that feels truly intimate. This neglect makes me irritable. When I try to write about it, I can't get past the second line without tearing into the sheet of paper. Both my penmanship and my language are ugly displays of my frustration.

  Since he must st
ill go to work during the days, I'm stuck in my apartment, trying to avoid the heat in front of the air conditioner. By evenings I have flung whatever book I was reading across the room and have crumpled up my feeble attempts at writing. I feel trapped and restless, and blame my lover for not leaving work early, for not coming to the rescue quick enough.

  “I'll be there soon,” he tells me. And I demand sooner.

  “I'll be there soon,” he says again, and I walk out into parking lot of my housing complex as if that will help. I get anxious waiting, and when he drives up, as I start to complain about how late he is and question his whereabouts, he rolls the window down all the way and he reaches out to slap me.