Was I really going insane? Had prison gotten to me? Had the spray they used to kill cell cockroaches murdered my mosquito brain?
Underneath it all, there was still that presence scuttling about the air, weighing upon my heart. It created a sort of vacuum that could make me choke as if from lack of oxygen. My spirit face could be kind to me, but it could also use its omniscient power to injure and obstruct.
As my airy face appeared, so went my flesh face. It lifted off my shoulders and disintegrated into tiny shiny slivers of bright metal thorns. It melted through the steel doors, concrete walls, and iron bars of my cell, and escaped as I could not. Like a rogue kite, my face snipped off its string and whisked off loftily into the blue realms of azure, where it could look down and see the entire prison complex below, with all those little tiny men in prison uniforms walking about in lines. Flakes of my face scattered across the air and over the sunny distance beyond the prison compound. I could feel the sand on which the particles landed, the heat of the prairie grass blade, the soft smooth firmness of cactus skin, the chafe of stone. Through my disembodied and dissolved face, I drowned in sensory life.
Today, too, this face grants me access to another realm. Let me state it so you get the picture clear as wind chimes in a soft breeze on a somnolent noon. Underlying my existence is a deeper intelligence that speaks to me when I am writing. My artist friends say I am an anomaly—no education, no family grounding, no proper socialization. My writing gifts seem to have come from nowhere. So maybe the deities pitied me for my lack of human support and sent the face to grant me relief. Maybe it comes to me as compensation for the constant invasion of privacy by the Orwellian judicial bureaucracy, a reaction to a life of stop-and-frisk and security screenings. I don’t know. I am certain, however, that this deeper intelligence has a face, and when I write, that face perches above my right shoulder and watches me.
As it does now.
Oh yes, what a face, what a face.
Once I left the bowels of hell, I rejoined the depraved hordes of masqueraders. I saw every person’s flimsy facial coverings as teatime coverlets hiding their true visages. In their presence, I disowned my criminal behavior and returned to the bawdy licentiousness of marathon fucking and indulging in immeasurable amounts of drugs and liquor. Like the rest, I donned a mask of “Everything is fine.” I was the perfect portrait of Buddhist peacefulness and Christian piety. I allowed no one to look deep enough into my eyes to detect the fraud or pluck my conceit. No one knew about my deception—except the second face.
Parisian whores and Victorian ghouls kissed me in countless motel rooms, in sultry, bacchanalian orgy. The depressing cycle of addiction has sorrowed my eyes, and the sublime grace of wilderness has blinded them. All the while, I’ve felt my flesh face a puppet’s mask.
I’m not one of those scoundrels who claim several egos and identities and faces. I mean, we live in an age when it’s fashionable to be one person today and another tomorrow. I’ve shaken the hand of a man one day and opened the door to the same body the next, a body wearing a dress and panties and bra. I’ve greeted a person heartily one day and after listening to his gibberish the following, locked all the doors and windows. I’m not sure why this trend toward open-mindedness entails gender exchange and mind-costuming, but people’s suspicious divisiveness today is due to this one-person-one-day-another-person-another-day pastime.
Do you know how many fucking Frida Kahlos I have met on stage, professing to be channeling her spirit, who dress and talk and do their faces up just like Frida? What the fuck! My brain can scarcely deal with this one reality, much less an army of clones!
I don’t quite understand those who love their own faces so much. Look at what monstrous medieval attention we must heap on them to keep up their appearance and all the money spent to keep them looking like an Avon soap face. There’s the makeup and mascara and lipstick and eyeliner and cheek rouge and lotion and operations and face-lifts and such to help maintain the illusion that they are not aging. And think of this: half of all Americans, if not more, are on some kind of mind-altering or mood-changing drug. When people gaze into the mirror with those prescribed eyes, where, I ask, where do they muster the courage to forgive themselves for what they do to their faces?
❖
But back to back?
A day later on arriving at my mountain home
the rain gushed down. The creek flowed over, the Canones river brimmed
over the sides, the Chihuahuense river smacked its sides and smashed to
smithereens
logs, pine trees, they were bobbing like floaters on the raging waves
and I stood at my window and watched with joy
as the water rose and flooded the roads,
threw gigantic boulders up and over like they were soccer balls,
I skipped down the steps, grabbed my rain slicker and camera,
slogged down to the creek that had now widened by two feet,
and I crouched on my hams and clicked away at the roiling water
ravishing all in its path—
it was like the odometer
had lost its mind, and spun and spun
the water racing faster in volume and momentum,
forty feet log trees like toothpicks swept past colliding into bridges
taking all three bridges down, carrying with it five feet of sludge that barred the creek crossing
no longer there, and rain roared with such hunger
and an element so connected to nature in me
hummed with creek water,
and when I turned to see a wave of water engulfing the road
and consuming all man-made structures in its way,
I could feel my face smiling, content, at home
with this force so negligibly joyous strumming the violin swing o my soul
with the deepest sorrow and sadness
that more an expression of happiness,
my face creased not a hundred lines of love
unfolding itself with the water and floating with the branches and trees and boulders,
attentively part of all the orgy.
❖
Oh, I’ve seen those drugged faces, and, believe me, there’s nothing quite so gut wrenching as a drug-hangover face. If you, like me, have woken up in bed to a woman who has spent most of the night before ingesting illicit chemicals, well, you know that the face does not lie. Rodin’s Gates of Hell are easier to gaze upon and kiss than these gruesome pits of gore. (Lest I sound overly cruel, let me add that I have been perhaps the forerunner at gulping whatever chemical I could to escape reality—that is, until the authorities had enough sense to constrain me in a cell.)
I never wanted to wear a human face in the first place. I would have much preferred to be born either invisible or wearing another mask, one that allowed me a choice in what I looked like and who I wanted to be. At the moment, I smile as I imagine myself wearing an elephant face with a long trunk that would allow me to suckle at life’s breasts. I want to change my face not to pretend as these other people do but to more accurately demonstrate my happiness, my sorrow —to have my face express my interiority. It should be the medium with which I elucidate a spiritually designed existence.
Still, there was a time when I’d have given anything to replace my face with another face for more vain reasons. Through twenty-one years of alternating joy and squalor, I was never comfortable with my face. I always mimicked the faces of matinee stars from black and white movies—Cagney, James Dean, Brando, Zapata, Villa.
When I was seven years old, I ran up to Allen Flood, the only black kid in the orphanage, and pulled my pants down to show my butt, purple from my one-millionth spanking. “Look,” I yelled with excitement, “I’m gonna be like you!” I was sure that with time the darkness would reach my face.
If I couldn’t be black, then I wanted to change my face into a butterfly’s, a horny toad’s, a young girl’s—anything but my own face. The reason? I thought I wa
s the person causing so much havoc and misery. Maybe if I changed faces, I could change fates. Well, if the heart is an ancient city, you can either make it your cave from which to wage war as you seek survival or a grave where you accept the unchanging body count of your dreams. oppression.
I would love to take every picture of my face from childhood into my fifties and alter my appearance. Mold the living flesh to achieve a new face. Chop the photos, manipulate my genes, mix my face in a blender. Give myself artificial cartilage, joints, bones, nose and ear tissue, trachea, and cheeks. Print my face out with blue eyes, blond hair, white skin. The ink would be pink, the configuration more attuned to the faces of our founding fathers, ugly white politicians, bankers.
But is that how it’s done? Rebuild myself to free myself of my own brown face? Thank god I couldn’t engineer a new face, because the whole time that the impulse to change my appearance obsessed me, I couldn’t know the beauty and depth and breadth of my Chicano culture.
At various points in my career, PR departments have wanted to commoditize me as a sweet, harmless Indian or Mexican assimilated in Silicon Valley, whose writing could be read by little suburban boys and girls. But I never wanted to loan my face to dictatorial white culture.
When given an opportunity to speak before thousands of attorneys general in America, I was warned not to present my views as too radical, to be more Iberian than Chicano, to temper my talk for a more mainstream audience. Of course, I went out of my way to present a radical lecture: I protested the war on Chicano culture—portrayals of us as criminals in the media if we are proud of our history, unfair sentences imposed by the very justice department that had asked me to speak, censorship of our writers and poets in schools. I added that I didn’t want my culture to become an endangered species; that I didn’t want to have to take my daughters to a museum to see my poetry and songs and literature.
To deploy my experience like a lottery ball into the screened hopper from which a bureaucrat picks one lucky person to win Caucasian acceptability—no thank you. I’ll never be a carbon copycat, self-banging patriot parading around with a drum in red, white, and blue. No, I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth and the Mayan galaxy. All the mountain cures and healing waters and winds and junipers run deep in my bloodstream.
While my face was brocaded into society’s pink, smooth fabric as a stereotypical menace, an image you must fear, I’ve been told in many cantinas and motel beds that it reminds Mexican women of their cinematic idols, especially Vicente Fernandez, since my features—dark eyebrows, brown eyes, fleshy lips—are the epitome of pre-Columbian beauty. Sometimes I wonder if my face were lighter or darker in pigment, whether I could still call myself Chicano. Does a face as deeply indigenous as mine make one a part of the culture? No, being part of a group carries its membership more in the soul and heart than it does in the face.
❖
And what more can I say
except
the next day I took a walk up the mountain and discovered
a bear cub trapped under a fallen log and lifted it, freed the cub
that scrambled up a tree, its claws digging deep into the bark.
I broke my shoulder when the log slipped and cracked my bone,
my bicep muscle ripped and now is black,
and yet, I refused to go to the hospital, I stayed in my cabin writing with broken collar bone,
showing my black bicep to my kids as they awed and oohed,
and I wore the biggest smile on my face
I knew I was alive, I knew I was vividly alive,
I knew nothing could compare to this heady abundance of love
for an earth spirit I am wearing a face for the moment
until I too join the rains one day
and don my real face again.
❖
When I read or write, when I drench myself in rain or lay on a boulder and warm my chest and arms in the sun, my eyebrows, lips, nose, and ears can become shrouded in shadows, enveloped in a kind of lunar eclipse. My nose, eyes, and mouth rotate randomly above my shoulders. Why this disembodiment? Why this airy, invisible part of my body monitoring me? It’s ridiculous! If only I could understand it. I mean, I hardly believe in God or witches or ghosts, and yet I feel my spirit face takes on aspects of each of these. Gravity may hold my legs, but my face orbits beyond my reach in the cosmos. It can make me want to yell, “Stop! Enough already! God damn it!“ Even angels can irritate us. Even the rosiest rose can annoy the romantic.
Sometimes when I view a photograph, I want to enter the moment it was taken and yell, “Stop! Don’t you know that in two weeks he’ll be dead, she’ll run off with another man, that your happy faces will mourn deeply? Don’t you know he’s lying, she’ll betray you?”
But I can’t, my friends, because we stay in our own time, connected to our own present lives. The wheel of time crashes down under the daily shelling of disappointments. Life was so joyful when it began, but the burning gets hotter and hotter with each day, and it can be hell. The faces I wore through the earlier phases of my life were disguises that made me immune to flammable moments.
In the end, I am many faces, a fluid stream of smiles and worries and addictive eyes, searching and enjoying, loving and fearful, morphing and merging like the strumming of a Flamenco guitar player’s fingers flurrying across the strings in heated passion or a peasant’s callused hand that grips a pulque or tequila shot to ease despair.
I am a face in a trance, evoking duende. My face imbues breath and stuns you with star-spirit. I am grove-face, story-teller face, and dawn-bringer face. A face as common as carrots and celery, called upon as a father to be cook, waiter, servant, and maid. The face of the traveler who stands in front of hundreds each month and lectures on the poetic spirit, the poetic purpose.
Well, ultimately the flesh withers, and the face encounters itself tired and muggish and in need of a siesta. But not the spirit face.
About the Author
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA was born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent. He was raised by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry.
He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir A Place to Stand the prestigious International Award.
Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.
In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives.
Colophon
Copyright © 2013 Jimmy Santiago Baca
Published by Restless Books, 2013
Ellison, Stavans, and Hochstein LP
232 3rd Street, Suite A111
Brooklyn, NY 11215
restlessbooks.com
[email protected]
ISBN: 978-0-9899832-1-1
Cover design by Jeremy Sadler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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The Face Page 2
