“You're going to break my fucking glasses!” I yell. When he strikes me on the face my glasses fly off. I have to wait for him to locate them because my vision is so bad I can't search for them myself. But he doesn't pick them up and simply mocks me.
“Get them for me, you asshole,” I demand. I don't know if what is running down my chin is blood or mucous or tears.
“I want to see how long it takes you to find them,” he says, amused. Through my blurry vision he looks like a mound of dirt. Out of anger I begin to stomp around, hoping that my foot will land on my glasses, shattering them so that I can't see anything anymore.
“What the fuck are you doing?” He opens the car door, bends down, and picks my glasses up.
“Psycho,” he says when he hands me the glasses. And when I put them on it's only in time to see him drive out of the parking lot without me.
A few days later, he calls me and tells me to get ready. We're going to this party in Beverly Hills. “So look fierce,” he tells me. I dig through my closet for a black silk shirt my lover gave me. I wear the black Italian leather shoes he picked out for me. Despite all this he never shows.
“All dressed up and nowhere to go?” my roommate asks me. He sits in front of the television with his feet up on the couch. I sit down next to him, kick off my shoes and reach for the bowl of stale popcorn. This is roommate number four. By next month I will have roommate number five. All of my roommates bore me with their simple and uninteresting college lives. I move as often as I can because I don't like them to know too much about me. As soon as one of them gets too friendly I know it's time for a change. None of them, as far as I know, suspects that I'm gay. I have outlasted the rumors from the dorms that I had AIDS. In college, where students come and go each semester, it is easy to outlive anything.
I don't hear from my lover for the next two days, and when he finally calls with an invitation to a boat trip around Catalina Island I don't mar the occasion by reminding him that he left me hanging a few nights ago.
“You'll enjoy it,” he says.
On the small boat, which belongs to a friend of my lover's boss, there are mostly gay men, all of them in their forties, like my lover. Most of them are with young men, like me. We eye each other suspiciously, as if we want to prove to the rest that we are more than a weekend trick. We don't speak to each other, but we beam when the older men address us. Each couple takes turns going down into the small sleeping quarters. When our time arrives, my lover makes a big show of our descent, guiding me down with his grip on my ass for the benefit of the other old guys. But once we're down there, he flings himself on the bed and leaves me standing there.
“I'm tired,” he says. “I only have energy for you to give me a blowjob.”
And I comply, because I know how important it is for my lover to ascend from the room a victor.
Once we're back out, it doesn't take long for my lover to get drunk and high. He claims a chair on the small, crowded deck and doesn't bother to look after me the way many of the other men are doting on their young lovers. Instead, he volunteers me to make the margaritas when the previous bartender passes out.
“He's Mexican; he knows how,” he announces. And everyone laughs.
Begrudgingly I enter the compact service area and collect my supplies: ice, mix, and tequila. Outside the sky is darkening and when other party boats pass by there is an exchange of cheering and hooting. I'm excluded from all of this, stuck in the kitchen like the help. A few times a fellow guest walks in to grab a beer from the small fridge and feels obliged to pat me on the ass. And even though I run out of mix by nine in the evening, I keep making margaritas for another hour. The guests can't tell the difference.
The boat trip is the ammunition I need to antagonize my lover. I'm in his living room the next day, kicking the oversized vase in the corner.
“If you break that I'll break your face,” he threatens. He holds his head between his hands, dehydrated and suffering from a headache.
“Go ahead,” I dare him. “Break my fucking face. I'll kill you.”
He lifts a finger up in warning. He thinks he can control me with one finger, holding it up to say what he doesn't need to put into words. But I've had enough of his stupid finger so I bend down and bite it.
Then everything goes black. When I awake, I know I need to assess the damage to determine whether I'm able to get up or not. The lining inside my mouth, behind my lips, has been split open where the teeth cut into my flesh. I run my tongue on the wounds and it stings. My nostrils feel clogged up and when I breathe I make a whistling sound. I have no idea what my lover has used to sodomize me, but I'm hoping it's still not inside my rectum because it feels as if it is. The couch has been smeared with blood. So has the side of the oversized vase. I have a faint recollection of doing this myself—marking any surface I could with the evidence of my lover's brutality. From the corner of my swollen eye I catch sight of the phone. He used this, too, as a weapon. Or maybe I did. I know that in the scuffle I managed to pick up a blunt object to hit my lover with. Perhaps the blood on the phone is his. If it is still working, I will not call the police or the ambulance. I will call Indio and let my lover pay for the long-distance call.
I reach over and dial my grandparents' number. The phone only rings and rings because, as usual, my grandfather has turned the ringer off so that he can sleep undisturbed. I lie on the carpet, losing count of the times the phone rings. But that's all I have to connect me with family. My father in Mexicali has no phone because the lines have not yet reached the outskirts of the town, which is where he has set up his home with his new family and my brother. He's completely unreachable.
And yet this is no terrifying realization. It's more like a relief to liberate my family and my father from all responsibility. What was I going to tell them anyway? This is all my own undoing. I alone am responsible for myself in my journey into adulthood.
How odd to be experiencing a catharsis lying on the carpet of my lover's apartment after he has beaten me to the ground. Nonetheless it has happened, this shift into something else. Once I am rested, I will rise from the floor and shower. I will walk out of this apartment and never come back. I swear it on my mother's grave.
Suddenly I hear a cough. My lover is in his room, most likely in his bed. I can hear him exhaling the cigarette smoke. The good thing is that I won't have to walk far to tell him it is finally over. I'm in no condition to move more than a few feet at a time.
I drag myself off the floor and rest on my side. I locate my glasses nearby and slip them onto my face. The frames are crooked, and the left lens is smeared with either spit or mucus. In any case I can still see through it, and I catch a glimpse of my lover hunched over the side of the bed with a white rag against his head. How small he looks framed inside the space of his door, which is ajar. He turns to look at me and steps forward to kick the door closed so that the slamming seals him shut completely. I can't help but chuckle at the gesture. But even laughing hurts my side, so I remain perfectly still for the next hour or so, waiting to gather the strength to walk away.
Ghost Whisper to My Lover
I'll end with this, querido, one of those strange tales in my life that I didn't have the chance to tell you during our nights when I wanted to share everything, when I wanted you to know and possess all that was me so that I could close the book of my childhood and call it a past. So that I could make you my future. But that was not going to be possible, was it?
Every one is a lesson. I present this story to you now as a token of forgiveness because there is never a forgetting. Because you too have a father you need to contend with for the rest of your days.
By the time I was a senior in high school I had quietly crept up to the college prep and honors classes where most of the students were white. All of the brown kids were crammed together in the basic and intermediate classes. And though none of the brown kids were my friends, I felt more alone and alienated with the white students. Among them I had lost my
invisibility, my only defense outside of my home. The idea of speaking up terrified me. I felt somehow that I would say the wrong thing, proving to my classmates that my presence among them was a mistake. I'd hear them talking about their cars, trips to the Big Bear ski lodge, and their after school jobs. I had none of these things in common with them. How could I explain who I was at that point in my life without having to tell them the entire sordid story of the journey that took me there?
My ordeal only worsened when on two occasions, as I sat on the edge of a planter to read during study break, I was tapped on the shoulder by one of my classmates while a school janitor drove by in a compact utility truck.
“Is that your father?” I was asked.
I was startled by the question. The second time I was even indignant. The janitor, a plump man with short wavy hair and a pair of glasses as devastatingly ugly as mine, was not my father. We were both Mexican, but so were many other kids. Why was I being singled out with this question? Was I being ridiculed?
Since the janitor had been pointed out to me, I couldn't help but notice him each time he passed by. Perhaps I was trying to find some resemblance in order to convince myself that this wasn't some racist joke my classmates were playing on me but a genuine curiosity. The janitor must have noticed me staring at him intently because all of a sudden he started looking back. In fact, he began to acknowledge me by waving each time he drove by in his handy utility truck.
I became alarmed each time, afraid that the others would see this as a confirmation that the janitor was indeed my father. And then they'd wonder why I was ashamed of this fact, why I had denied it.
Now study break became a time of consternation for me as well. Since our mobility was limited to a patch of lawn, the smoking quad, and the planter, there was no place to hide, except behind the pages of my book. The print blurred when I heard the utility truck, and as it passed I prayed that the janitor wouldn't call out a greeting. I wanted him as invisible as I was making myself. Thankfully, he never made that choice and after a while I knew I had made myself clear because even when I dared to look at him passing by he didn't turn his head to look back.
At the beginning of the second semester another brown kid was moved up to the honors class. Part of me was pleased by this, but part of me felt a little resentful since I had worked so hard—an entire semester in fact—at becoming invisible. He was one of my kin; that much was clear by the clothing he wore, most likely from the second-hand stores. And now that he was here I could almost hear my classmates thinking: There are two of them now.
I resolved to avoid him at all costs, which proved to be difficult because he immediately walked up to me during study break. And just as quickly I resolved that we should become friends, compadres, allies in this mostly-white classroom where students talked about weekends on the beach and other mysterious pastimes.
He joined me at my spot, the planter farthest from the smoking quad where all the cool and edgy seniors sat, only a few of them puffing on cigarettes. I was thrilled by the novelty of my company and glad to put away my book in exchange for idle chat. That's what all the others had been doing all along and now I felt strangely comforted by the act of belonging.
But this feeling was short-lived because when the utility truck passed by, the janitor took up his old habit of waving at me, perhaps encouraged by the fact that I was beaming with happiness. My joy quickly waned. And to add to the crisis, my new buddy actually waved back.
I had to address this immediately. I had to explain to my friend here that things were different in the honors classes where we talked about movies and called each other on the phone, where we discussed Chaucer and Shakespeare, and where we used the same textbooks in geometry and calculus that the intermediate classes used except that we were always a few chapters ahead. Here in “Honorsland” we were united by our intellect, not by our class upbringing, which meant that those of us who climbed up from the bottom had to be discreet and quiet about our humble beginnings. And we certainly, under any circumstance, did not wave to the janitor. I would regale my friend with what I had learned. I would inspire admiration at my knowledge in survival.
But as soon as I prepared to open my mouth, he looked me straight in the eye and said with an uncontrollable smile: “That's my father.”
Stunned and dizzy, I thought about my own poor father toiling away at his backbreaking job in the grape fields or the asparagus fields or wherever else he finds himself during the different harvesting seasons. Where was my father at that moment? I had no idea. If anyone were to ask me that now, I'd give the same answer: I have no idea. My father moved so far from me I wouldn't know where to look. But likewise I have moved so far from him that I can never find my way back.
How wonderful it must feel to love a father so much that when he passes by it's like the sweetest reminder that you are not lost, and that if you should ever find yourself in trouble, all you have to do is wave him over.
Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 21
