by Myriam Gurba
“Dreamer, I got some weed. Wanna smoke some?”
She nodded. I fumbled around with a pair of pants that were wrinkled up on the floor until I found a bag and grabbed my pipe out from the shoebox I keep it in. I fixed us up a bowl and we took turns hitting it, getting stoned until our eyes were like pools of hot liquid, our faces turning red with tired anticipation.
I leaned back and she leaned back, too, breathing real slow. Dreamer turned and looked at me and breathed on me, real soft. Then she said, “Thanks for letting me stay here. Thanks for helping me.” She kissed me on the cheek and put her head on my shoulder. I kissed her back and felt her mouth open up and return my kiss. I could taste the flavor of smoke and resin on her tongue. She felt like wet velvet, and she looked like an Aztec princess from one of them velvet paintings they sell at the swap meet. I felt myself turning hot for her and I dug into her mouth and licked the insides with my tongue.
She started kissing me back harder, her teeth almost grinding into mine, moving on to chew my fat lower lip. She bit and tore at it until it felt like it was bleeding. It felt like my skin was turning to blood and mixing with her spit and skin and hair. I tugged at her long hair, curls dancing around her face and spilling around us as we went at each other’s faces, wanting more.
I felt her legs open and she got on top of me, her knees hugging my hips as she looked down at me with a stoned look in her eyes. Excitement was welling up from within her tiredness. She took my wife beater in her hands and pulled it up over my head. She dropped it beside me. She rubbed her hands down my flat chest, twisting and flicking my nipples with her purple nails until they were rock hard. She dug her nails into my chest and took turns working each of my nipples until I began to buck against her, wanting her to stick something inside me, wanting her to fill me up.
“Do you wanna touch me, Dreamer? Do you wanna fuck?”
She turned my nipple as I said that and stared down at me. “Yeah, I wanna fuck you. I wanna taste you.” She leaned over to kiss my cheeks, biting my neck and ears, dragging her tongue down my chest, licking to my belly button, stopping there. She slid down my body to pull off my shorts. She ran her fingers through the hair between my legs and looked at me down there. Then she put her face up to it and smelled. She put my legs over her shoulders and all I could see was her long hair and I felt her tongue press against me, starting to go back and forth. At first, she just kind of teased me with it, like she hadn’t decided if she was going to eat me out. Then she shot into a rhythm and started using longer licks, working her tongue against my clit until it swelled like a dick about to come. She started to suck on it, like she was giving me a blowjob, and I bucked against her face, speeding up the whole thing. I wanted to come.
Dreamer sucked at my pussy and stuck in a finger. I felt her spit on me and then stick in more fingers. She had three inside me, pumping me with them as her tongue stayed on my clit, flicking it. I grabbed my pillow and put it over my face and yelled into it.
Keeping her hand inside me, I felt her face pull away. Her fingers were tapping away hard at my spot and I heard her say, “Do you want more?” Dreamer’s voice was full of sinister hope.
I barely got, “Yes,” as I heard her rummaging through her jacket on the floor. Slow, I felt something cold pressed to my pussy. She held it there, against my clit while she started to pump me with four fingers, hard and fast like she wanted to rip me open. I was so stoned I didn’t realize at first it was the gun. I was so high and fucked into a state of coming that I didn’t care what she fucked me with. I felt the cold shaft nudging in and out of me while her fingers moved to my clit, pulling at it, preparing me. The metal inside me was now screwing me like a dick and I felt my muscles close around it, like they wanted to pull the trigger. Dreamer had my life in both her hands and I wanted to give it to her, to be a martyr to her pleasure. My whole body shook and I thought I was gonna die.
I’m not sure how long I was like that, frozen, outside my body, but when I came back, Dreamer was on top of me, looking into my eyes. I saw the gun on the floor, covered in wet stuff, shiny and reflecting the light of the TV. Dreamer stared hard at me and I understood the look in her eyes. She looked like danger, wisdom, and tragedy. And I wanted to be with her. Her look said she was leaving the projects, leaving Jordan Downs and I wanted to fly with her. I wasn’t afraid to follow her to some new and unknown place. I saw forests in her hazel eyes. She blinked and they became deserts. I leaned into her neck and whispered into her ear, “Yes.”
Dahlia Season
(1)
Florecita Negra16
I used to pride myself on being a freak magnet. Yes, los weirdoes de este mundo17 had a sweet tooth for me. Walking home from school, flashers would show me their nuts, and later on, during cartoons, I’d get up to go answer the knocks at the front door only to find a wet behind the ears Mormon missionary wiping his feet on our doormat. It was the ‘80s, and Nancy Reagan had taught me well. I knew to just say no because this kid was ready to get me hooked on drugs.
I think my Freak Magnet Hall of Fame moment had to have been the time that this fugitive who’d busted out of holding from the municipal courthouse picked my window to climb through. I was kneeling on my bedroom carpet, sniffing my Strawberry Shortcake doll’s hair, its candy smell was like kiddie crack, and the male prisoner crouched just a few feet away from me, looking really feline. He expertly lifted a long, thin finger to his mouth, maybe he was a thief or a pickpocket or something.
“Shhhhhh,” he breathed.
“Desiree!” the police chief out on our driveway screamed through a megaphone. He read from a prepared script, designed to calm me. “Don’t be scared! He’s only a plumber! He’s only a plumber!”
Hah! I was only in second grade but not in the remedial class. Plumbers didn’t wear orange jumpsuits with numbers stenciled on them. Not busted shackles on their wrists either. I looked the guy in the eye. I lifted my doll back up to my nose real deliberately and sniffed. The convict grinned wide: we were cool. He winked, rubbed his palms together, and dove beneath my canopy bed as a massive dragnet finished closing in around our house.
Since that moment, my pull’s been tried and true; I am gifted with a strong flies-to-shit thing. Like does attract like and the loonies have a sixth sense that we’re of the same ilk and all. To put it even more bluntly, if I were a scratch and sniff sticker, I’d smell like bananas because that’s what I am. Totally bananas.
My parents made two major attempts to de-weirdoize me. One was putting me in Catholic School. The other was shipping me off to Mexico when I turned fifteen. See, what happened was, right before I started high school, my petals unfurled, and as it turned out, they were dark. I was a dahlia, an artist, a goth chick, what boys who dug females like me termed “death bunnies.” It’s funny, I work as an ESL teacher now, it’s all about comfy shoes and loose pants, but at the height of my Elvira reign, I wore dog collars. Torn black fishnets. Mini-kilts. Christian Death t-shirts. Blood smeared across my mouth, my forearms sliced by ladies’ Gillette razors. My scars, I’m a little ashamed to admit, my most prized accessories.
To Mom and Dad, a pair of uptight intellectuals, my undead caca was a painful disappointment. They were raised the Mexican way, with dignity, respect for your elders, and the Virgin Mary and godammit, they hadn’t immigrated to California just so I could become a Yankee misfit. A little change of scenery, they figured, was what I needed to knock some Hispanic sense into me, knock the American nuts out. Mom and Dad especially wanted to give me a hiatus from the white girls–this pair of death rock sisters, Blaze and Malice–who I’d befriended freshman year. That spring, both bitches had convinced me it would be genius to spraypaint my walls, my bed frame, and my brand new blonde bedroom set shiny black acrylic.
So, summer before tenth grade, Mom and Dad drove me to LA International Airport. They waved bye from the terminal and I gulped, turned, and walked by myself down the gray-carpeted cuff, into the belly of an Aero-Azteca plane. Fou
r hours later, the beast spat me out in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mom’s hometown and the city where she started her love affair with Dad.
To me, Guadalajara seemed like a ginormously scary Third World circus. When I’d visited before, when I was really little, I’d seen a kidnapping and a carjacking and lots of homeless kids with flies on their faces selling mangoes in the streets. Holding Mom’s hand, this other time, I’d seen an Indian woman breastfeeding her baby on the steps of a cathedral get kicked by a policeman who yelled, “Guarda tu pinche pecho, cabrona18!” On my way to the airport the very last time I’d visited, I’d watched a fire eater’s face blow up as he spat lighter fluid into a flame in the middle of a busy intersection. This poor lady, a midget with gigantic feet that made her look like a hobbit, ran out into traffic to cradle his burnt body. He probably died, but I’ll never know for sure. My aunt just kept on driving. She was in a hurry to get us to the airport so we wouldn’t miss our flight home.
Standing on the airport curb, waiting for the chauffeured VW Mom had said was being sent to pick me up, I took a big whiff. The hot Guadalajara air had a raw familiarity. Its odor hadn’t changed at all, a stink like a yummy smog and charbroiled meat combo I’d never confess to anyone I actually liked. To me, the smell was tasty the same way that spilt gasoline and permanent marker tips are.
I caught a whiff of something else and winced. It was myself. My own fear to be exact. Sweat soaking through the pits of my black wool dress. My black and white striped pirate tights stuck to my crotch, moisture sticking them to my toes. My right foot started to tap. Furiously.
I’d never stood on foreign soil alone before.
A clattering VW Bug pulled up in front of me, and a man with thick black hair and ’70s-looking aviator shades hopped out.
“Desiree?”
I nodded.
“I am Adolfo.” He ran around and opened the passenger side door for me. “I work for your Tia Fe19. I will be driving you to her house.”
“Thanks.” I started to climb into the passenger seat.
He waved both of his hands. “No, no, Desiree. You,” he motioned at me, “sit in the back.” He pointed at the seat. “I’m the chauffeur; you are the client. Please, sit here.”
I grudgingly obliged as Adolfo loaded my bags under the hood, slammed it shut, and climbed back into the cockpit. He stepped on the gas, juicing up the jalopy, and he drove it out of the airport, out onto the bumpy beltway. We whizzed past cars and I cringed, shrinking, a thirsty daisy. I may not have been riding in anything as gross as a limo, but I still didn’t like the being chauffeured effect. I wondered if the people in the cars around me could tell what I was, some kind of green-eyed American brat who didn’t deserve to be shuttled around. I glanced at Adolfo’s reflection in the rearview mirror. He piloted the bug stone-faced, and his sunglasses and strong jaw made him look more like a virile terrorist or rapist than a lackey.
After about forty minutes, we arrived at the two-story house where Mom’s baby sister, my Tia Fe, lived. Her middle class neighborhood had a funny English name, Mount Olympus Forest, and even though Tia’s house really wasn’t all that, it had a tall, Great Wall of China-looking gate surrounding it. The height protected her family, kept robbers and kidnappers out. Since Tia’s hubby, my Tio Eusebio20, was in the jewelry business, he and his brood were moving targets.
Adolfo opened the gate and pulled the car into the driveway. He came around and opened my door and walked me to the front door. He knocked.
“Aren’t you excited?” he asked. “You have your three little cousins to visit here, and you’ve got your grandmother nearby and all your aunts and uncles, and maybe your aunt will take you to stay at the summerhouse by Lake Chapala. What a nice vacation!”
I nodded but an ugly hollowness gnawed at my ribcage and I could feel anxious waves swelling and tingling inside me. My chin jerked up, my eyes rolled back in my head, and my chest thrust out, both of my shoulders flinching, blades arching back violently. I knew my shakes probably looked like I was seizing, but I felt embarrassed relief afterwards, the same kind of feeling you get out of a rich sneeze.
From the corner of my eye, I looked at Adolfo. He was staring at me, but when he saw I was looking at him, too, he looked away. I hated when shit like that happened. People seeing my shakes was about as bad as them seeing my cooch not shaved.
Eeyore. Pooh’s friend who’s dogged by that stupid rain cloud. That’s who I became my first two weeks in exile. That bitchy burro21. Except my rain cloud was tropical. Monsoonish.
Lying on my cousin’s twin bed, my feet dangling over the edge, I thought to myself, “God, I wish my parents were British. If I were only Anglo-Saxon, my punishment would’ve been to send me to England. At least there I wouldn’t feel like I was wilting.” I lifted my arm to my forehead and held it there, like I was swooning.
By noon everyday, the Mexican heat melted me limp as the wicked witch being doused by water. My raccoon makeup ran, my dark hair frizzed and sweat droplets pooled in the creases between my calves and hamstrings. Guadalajara destroyed the nocturnal look I tried so hard to cultivate and the cockroaches that flew through Tia’s house conspired with my loneliness to make me a miserable creature.
Watching Tia’s help, especially her maid America, who was only like three years older than me, didn’t help either. In Mexico, you don’t have to be that rich to have servants, even plain old middle class people can have a brigade of them, and Tia Fe was no exception. I hated watching America, whom Tia called “mi niña22,” slaving. She dusted, swept, and mopped tile floors all day and I couldn’t bear the thought of adding to her load so I hid my clothes from America so she wouldn’t have to wash them or dry them or iron them and I resigned myself to wearing dirty panties turned inside out, crust flaking off, down my legs and onto the ground for a good cause: I would not exploit teen labor.
Also compounding things, I had a bad case of the doubting disease, the Howard Hughes disease, the Saint Thomas syndrome: obsessive-compulsive disorder. It was undiagnosed so Tia and Tio just thought that it was vanity, shyness, or amoebic dysentery that kept me locked in their john up to two hours a day. In there, I was really performing these esoteric rituals meant to ward off catastrophes only I had the power to prevent. I washed, checked, and counted, and if I wasn’t doing my magic, I moped and dreamt about California, fantasized about being bitten by a vampire, reread my dog-eared, mold-spackled copy of Dracula.
I was on a slow part where Lucy was getting a transfusion to replenish some of the blood the Count had drained her of when a brainstorm swept through my gray matter. There was no reason for me to suffer any more undue sadness; I could orchestrate my own ghoulish fun here in Jalisco! I set my book facedown on the nightstand and went to find my cousins, Lourdes, Chata, and Diego. I discovered the three of them playing Nintendo in the master bedroom, and they screamed as I unplugged their game.
“Listen!” I told them. “Calm down. I have an idea.”
I forced them to sit quietly on their parents’ bed and listen to my short spiel about how cool it’d be to have a little adventure. We could have a séance to conjure dead relatives. Lourdes and Diego agreed that this sounded like a good idea. Of course, Chata, the middle child, remained dubious.
“Por qué23?” she asked, “Por qué?”
“Uh, to ask them questions about the future,” I bullshitted. “Don’t you want to know when you’re going to get married and how old you’re going to be when you die and how it’ll happen?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged.
Ignoring her lack of enthusiasm, I shouted, “Come on!”
I led the way downstairs with Lourdes and Diego marching behind me, eager ducklings. Chata trudged, a dark skinned lamb to the slaughter.
Arriving in the dining room, I commanded, “Sit!”
I turned and began to pull the heavy drapes shut and heard chair legs scraping the floor. Shadow bathed the room, and I spun around. I could
make out my trio of acolytes seated around the circular table, a big, empty armchair awaiting me.
I pulled out my Zippo, sparked it, and lit three white candles that were wedged into a candelabrum. I pushed the prop to the middle of the table and took my seat between Lourdes and Diego, clasping their hands in mine. I was officially a medium. My eyelids slowly descended and my head rolled back.
“Abuelitooooo24?” I beseeched in my best baritone. “Are you with us?”
My combat boot’s steel toe thumped against the wood. The candelabrum leapt. Its three flames flickered like Gila Monsters’ tongues.
Chata shrieked, “Aaaaaa!” Teardrops erupted and spilled down her plum cheeks. “Los muertos! Los muertos25!”
“Dammit!” I cursed to myself. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted a middle child with an operation like this.
Tio came barreling in. He took one look at the scene and immediately knew what we were up to. Me and Lourdes glanced at him guiltily. His nostrils flared.
“Go to your rooms!” he yelled. “No more séances!” He turned to look me square in the eye. “And you… Don’t even think about taking out that Ouija board your aunt saw in your suitcase! Oh…she saw it. And it’s staying in there!”
To keep a closer eye on me, Fe took off work the last two weeks of my stay. “At last,” I thought “I have someone mature to hang out with,” and Tia did plenty of cultural things with me, like take me shopping at the mall, La Plaza Del Sol. She also took me to El Mercado de San Juan de Dios, this labyrinthine marketplace where you could buy live chickens, voodoo dolls, and saddles, and later on, we went to the Museo Regional de Guadalajara, this dim museum where you could see dinosaur bones in one room and tools that monks used to self-flagellate in another.
One muggy afternoon, Tia led me on a tour of the crumbling, colonial part of town where she and Mom had lived as little girls.
