The Death of My Father the Pope

by Obed Silva

  “¡Qué?” Víctor-Manuel says. “¡Como que no! Toma un chingo. Siempre ha tomado. ¡Toda su pinche vida!”

  And when I tell him that the reason I didn’t think he drank was because, at my father’s funeral, I’d thought he looked well and sober, he tells me that that was because, at the time, he had been sober. “For some time he had stopped drinking, but it didn’t last. In fact, he stopped a few times, but it never lasted very long. Siempre volvía a lo mismo.” Made sense to me.

  My tío Victorio goes on to introduce me to his children and wife. At first I think my tía María is his wife because the two introduce themselves to me at the same time. But when I ask my tía if this is the case, she laughs and tells me that I’m crazy, that she’s my father’s sister and that my tío Victorio, too, is her brother. “They’re my brothers, hijo, and I’m your tía,” she says, smiling and kissing me nonstop on the cheeks the same way my tía Lupe had done. “¡Que chulo muchacho!” she also says. After giving her a closer look, I’m able to see the Silva in her bulging cheekbones, protruding forehead, and deep dark eyes. And although I’m struck by her penciled-in chola eyebrows, I’m happy to see that she, like my tío Victorio, also has all of her teeth. Yes! Yes! How delightful it is to meet you, too, tía! You are beautiful in a Madame Thénardier sort of way, and I love you already.

  Lastly, there’s my tío Mundo, whom I’ve already met once seven or eight years before, but whom I hardly recognize when he steps forward to greet me. He doesn’t look like the same tío Mundo who’d blessed me with one of the strangest experiences of my life the day I met him, which was a good thing because on that day he looked like a man who was on the verge of destruction, similar to how my father looked the last time I’d seen him alive.

  “Soy tu tío Mundo. Do you remember me?” he says excitedly, as he leans in to embrace me.

  “Oh, sí,” I remark, slowly and with a curious smile.

  “You don’t, do you?” he says, noticing my memory fail me, and he provides the following clue: “You came to visit me in San Diego.”

  I laugh as the memory surges back, and pull him in to give him a big abrazo. How can I forget San Diego and my crazy-ass tío Mundo! I can’t. He’s the same man playing a trick on me, for the change is unbelievable.

  * * *

  My tío Mundo called me out of the blue those years ago, introduced himself and told me that he was my father’s brother, news that wasn’t quick to strike me as exciting. I mean, here was this person I’d never met, and had only heard briefly about from my father, calling me after some twenty-odd years of me being alive telling me that he was my father’s brother, my uncle, and I was supposed to be excited or even slightly interested in the news? Not me. But my tío Mundo, unlike me, indifferent about my indifference and uninterested in my uninterestedness, was exhilarated over the idea.

  “I’ve always wanted to meet you!” he said to me. “But I’ve never been able to because you’ve always lived so far. But I’m here in San Diego now, so I asked your dad to give me your phone number so that maybe I can drive down to see you, or you can drive over here where I am. How far are you from San Diego?”

  Shit, I immediately started to think, this motherfucker’s gonna want to hang out and try to bond with me. So I paused for a moment and estimated the time, which was unnecessary because I knew that San Diego was only an hour and a half to two hours away from where I lived; but I thought that pausing before giving him the answer would somehow make the distance stretch longer to the point where I’d be able to tell him, without feeling any guilt, that I was so far away from San Diego that it would be too difficult for either of us to drive anywhere.

  It’s not that I didn’t like my tío Mundo—hell, I didn’t even know the guy. But I knew that meeting him was not going to be anything special or life-changing for either of us. If we met, all that would be exchanged between us was a lot of small talk to fill in time, and I wasn’t looking forward to that. He was my uncle, so what? What were we going to do once we saw each other—hug, kiss, maybe tell each other how much we loved one another? Fuck that. I already had uncles, from my mother’s side, whom I’d grown up with all my life and whom I already loved, and I wasn’t looking for another one. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to turn him away; it just wasn’t in my Silva heart to do so. After all, he sounded so excited. “About two hours,” I told him.

  “¿Dos horas? That’s not too far,” he said. “You think you can come over here?”

  “Where, to San Diego?” I said in my most unexcited voice, hoping he’d get the hint. But he didn’t. He only became more energized and continued with his plan to have me come out there, which, of course, had been his goal all along. His intention had never been for him to come and see me, as he had initially stated. He’d turn out to be much like my father in this way.

  “¡Sí!” he said. “I’d go out there to see you, but I don’t have a car right now. Mi vieja takes it to work every day.”

  I paused again and thought about the benefits of meeting him. Will it be worth it? I had to go deep to find the answer, which, when found, still didn’t seem like the right one.

  “All right, then,” I finally said to him, already regretting my decision. “I’ll come out there.”

  Two days later, I was on my way to San Diego, not knowing what to expect. I wondered if he looked and was anything like my father, and if I’d get along with him. And what would we talk about? I also thought about what we’d do besides talk.

  I pulled up to a seemingly new apartment complex in a lower-middle-class neighborhood away from downtown. It was quiet. Not what I’d been expecting. I’d been expecting him to be staying in a run-down apartment in a barrio with raza all over the place and crying babies in dirty diapers running around unattended. Instead, I found myself driving up to an apartment complex with manicured lawns, trimmed trees, clean walkways, and residents who preferred to socialize inside of their homes rather than outside. Not bad, I thought, shit just might go all right and this dude might actually turn out to be pretty cool. Maybe I’ll accept him as my tío after all.

  When I reached his apartment, I knocked on the door. My tío Mundo answered quickly. What the fuck! My tío’s a fucking tweaker, I mentally noted when I saw him appear from behind the door in black dusty jeans and a dirty white tank top. What I saw was a short and skinny man with a buzzed head wearing clunky black prescription glasses, who looked like he’d been up for one too many days. My tío, scraggly, greeted me with the same crooked smile as my father’s, revealing a black hole where teeth eight and nine should have been. Bells started to go off in my head. Surprise! Surprise! The world is a stage and life a clown show: everyone’s a fool. But of course, how could he be any different; after all, he was my father’s brother—a Silva! It just wouldn’t have been right had he been healthy looking and dressed in Dockers and a cardigan sweater pulled over a checkered wool vest—¡chale! God doesn’t joke like that, and I’m glad, because as he was he was perfect: my tío Mundo. Mundo: world—¡vaya!

  “Soy tu tío Mundo,” were the first words out of his mouth. He leaned in to hug me. I tried not to breathe lest I inhale his odor. After, he took a step back and scrutinized me from top to bottom. For a second he paused on my wheelchair and offered a sympathetic smile. Tears began to form in his eyes. “Ah que Obed,” he let out like a last breath; then, after raising his glasses and wiping the tears away before they could slip down his rough cheeks, he hugged me again. I welcomed this second hug more than the first, and I pulled him in close to me, and I breathed. It felt right, and he didn’t smell bad. The blood in our veins had made the connection even before our minds, at least mine. “So qué—what do you want to do?” he proceeded to ask excitedly. I hadn’t said a word yet and he was already moving into the future.

  “Whatever, tío.”

  I called him tío without hesitation. Felt natural rolling off my tongue, and I believe it felt natural to him as it slid into his ears, because he seemed not to make any note of it; he just
went on talking, something I’d soon discover he loved to do.

  “How was the drive, good? Come in, come in. I’m all alone. There’s nobody here.” He walked in and I followed. “Can you make it? Do you need help?” he asked, looking back at me cautiously. But before I could answer he saw that I was moving with him and said proudly: “You don’t need any help. You got it. ¡Eres chingón!”

  The inside of the apartment was nothing impressive. The furniture was from your average discount Garden Grove, Korean, going-out-of-business-sale furniture store and the walls were bare of any picture frames or artwork. “This is my girlfriend’s apartment,” he said, moving about the place with ease. “Es Americana, una gabacha.” He picked up a spotty silver-framed picture from one of the two lamp tables that stood on opposite ends of the living room couch and handed it to me. “This is her. She’s a little fat, but she’s nice. She’s been letting me stay here.” She was more than a little fat, but I didn’t say anything. I also noticed a few toys scattered on the floor and asked if he had kids with her. “No,” he said. “It’s her son. He’s little. He likes me a lot, too, just like his mom. He’s at her mom’s house—con su abuela. She picks him up after work. They’ll be back later tonight. Are you going to stay till tonight? You can meet them if you do.”

  Nope. I had no intentions of staying. “Wish I could,” I told him, “but I gotta go in a couple hours. There’re some things I have to do. Plus, my girl’s gonna be home in a couple hours, too, and she’ll be waiting for me.”

  “Oh, you have a girl?” he asked curiously, and nodded his head approvingly. “I bet she’s pretty, eh?”

  “Hermosa,” I told him, and he repeated the word after me, slowly, pausing for a moment after it had left his tongue, as if in contemplation, as if creating his own mental image of her. And then, without notice, as if unfrozen by a snap of the fingers, he got back into character and snatched the frame from my hand.

  “Bueno, está bien,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed. “The important thing is that you came. I’m glad to finally see you again. You were still a baby the last time. You don’t remember that, eh? Claro que no. You were just a baby. You can’t remember.”

  * * *

  What my tío Mundo and I ended up doing for the next couple of hours was drive around the outskirts of a suburban part of the city in his little red pickup truck. I didn’t say anything to him about him having told me over the phone that he didn’t have a car to drive because his girlfriend took it to work every day. I just let it be. After all, he wouldn’t have been my father’s brother if he hadn’t also been a liar.

  I didn’t know where we were headed. He just asked me if I wanted to go for a drive and I said, “Yeah, sure, what the heck.” What else were we going to do to kill time, bond over crackers and tea? Sheee-it! Silvas don’t work that way. No Cleavers here. No black-and-white American-dream family. So after only a few minutes of being at his apartment and me having a cup of water, we were off on a mission to seemingly nowhere. Our first stop was a liquor store, where my tío Mundo got off to buy a six-pack of beer. From outside the truck, he asked me if I wanted any kind in particular, and I, respectfully, informed him that he could get any kind he liked because I wouldn’t be drinking any. By this, the man was stunned. He immediately leaned in through the truck’s window with his eyebrows crunched over his eyes and stared at me like I was some kind of strange being, an aberration, a freak of nature even, a Silva like no other he’d ever encountered before.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, hanging his head through the window and tapping his hands on the door.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said to him, feeling a little disappointed in myself. For it was not that I didn’t want to drink a beer with my tío Mundo in celebration of our nephew-and-uncle reunion, but rather that I knew if I started drinking with him I’d most likely end up really drinking and eventually be really drunk, at which point I’d be forced into having to decide between whether to stay at his apartment overnight or drive home completely cara-de-mierda, and I didn’t want to do either. And though my tío Mundo had initially shown surprise at my declining of his offer, he didn’t press me to reconsider.

  “Va pues,” he said, stepping away from the truck. “I’ll just have to drink them all myself. But how about a soda, you want a soda?”

  “Yeah,” I said, accepting his compromise. “I’ll take a soda.”

  “A Coke?”

  “Yeah, a Coke’s good.”

  I stared at him as he walked away from the truck toward the store and lost myself in the idea that he was my uncle. I let it seep in. I thought I liked it. Didn’t mind that he might be a tweaker or that he was an alcoholic, nor that, like many other Mexican illegals, he was living off a homely fat white woman. If anything, the whole thing made me laugh, and I indulged in the moment. I was already thinking of how I had to tell my girl and family back home in the County of Oranges about my crazy-cool tío Mundo, and of how he’d turned out to be nothing short of the ideal human being—a prince in my book, a soul without apologies.

  * * *

  He was all too happy drinking his six-pack of Budweiser beers alone as he drove me around, showing me the different luxury homes where he said he worked as a gardener. He was also happy to be the one doing all the talking. Between sips, he’d point to different houses and tell me about how he worked on them and about the people who owned them. “They’re all güeros,” he said, “and they all have lots of money. And they all like me, too. And the wives are all a bunch of horny viejas! Some of them walk around the house wearing almost nothing—and I like that.” He was in love with his words, and after a while, I began to fall in love with them, too, the way they flowed so rapidly from his lips like a fountain. I enjoyed watching him, the way he drove with one hand on the wheel and the other atop the beer can resting between his legs, constantly pulling and turning the pull-tab, and often turning to me to give me a great big toothless smile.

  Also enamored with the people he worked for, he told me about all the gifts they’d given him throughout his career as their gardener, even showed me some as proof. There was the gold-rope chain around his neck and the silver college graduation ring with a black stone he proudly sported on the middle finger of his right hand (he didn’t look like a college graduate, or even a high school one for that matter), and then there was the autographed hardcover book of a certain San Diego Padre he pulled out from beneath his seat. I couldn’t believe it. “Mira,” he said with a grin, “I work for this guy. He plays for the Padres. Open it. It’s signed and everything!” It was signed, and dedicated, too. It just wasn’t signed by the player and it wasn’t dedicated to my tío Mundo either. The book, as I’d come to learn through close examination, had been a first print and had been given to the player by his manager. The short dedication written in black ink on its title page were a few endearing words from the manager to the player. And from what I was able to discern from the penmanship, they mainly expressed the manager’s wish for the player to have the first copy of the book. So of course the signature was the manager’s and not the player’s. My tío Mundo was evidently unaware of this. Probably unable to read English, he’d had no clue of what the dedication said and only assumed it’d been written and also signed by the player. “¡Mira! ¡Mira!” he said as he pointed to the signature. “That’s him, he signed it!” All I could do was smile and chuckle inside, though I wanted to burst with laughter; I mean, here was God being more than a jester, he was being downright malicious, cruel to this unenlightened crook who spun tales to exalt himself. As I stared at the oblivious man sitting next to me and listened to his boasts, I couldn’t help but think about how much he reminded me of my father, of the way he, too, was full of himself and his lies and thought it all great. And just like with my father, I wanted to call my tío Mundo on every lie he was telling me. Bullshit! Nobody gave you these things. You stole them and you know it—everything, you stole; from the necklace to this book, you stole it! But I didn’t say a word. Ins
tead, I looked away from him and out the window and let his words turn to mush in my ears. I let him ramble on without paying him any mind. I wasn’t delighted to hear him anymore. I didn’t love his words. The whole fucking thing was now beginning to stink. I was realizing that he was as empty as the crushed beer cans at my dead feet. There was nothing intriguing there, only lies and crazy talk, shit I’d heard a million times before from a million other fucked-up junkies who loved to give meaning to their lives by spitting bullshit accounts of their fruitful exploits. This shit’s fucking amazing, I thought to myself as I began to zone out. This motherfucker’s crazy; he really believes this shit, and what am I doing here again? I’m feeling thrown off now, confused, totally fucked with, like my tío Mundo’s turning out to be exactly what I’d expected, a man too similar to my father. Alas, the romance has disappeared and the mush is making me twitch; it’s tickling my eardrums like a spider creeping into my brain. I want to be home now, with my girl, loving her, kissing her, sucking on her white breasts and brown nipples, telling her how she means the world to me, and not in this fucked-up gardener’s truck driving on this San Diego back road scoping out rich people’s homes like a crook while listening to this madman hemorrhage from the mouth. No! Not here. And so my mind runs away, to look toward a better day: for some fucking dream made up of another fabric to wrap myself in. My father’s face comes to me and escapes me, laughing and screaming that I’m a sucker with a soft heart. It rolls down richly green hillsides and bumps into bountiful tree trunks. It takes me home and back on a fragrant wind that reminds me of childhood. It turns into many faces, into many memories, and then to more mush. I love you, Mamá, my heart is screaming now. You, my queen. You, the birth point of my every thought. And I love me this dirty white bitch. Lo! How pleasing is whiteness to the shitty eye! She’s driving the car next to us at a stop waiting for the light to turn green. I envy her face, her car, and everything she represents. She’s beautiful. Like she’s easy to talk to. With skin the color of candles and hair the color of Ponyboy from The Outsiders. She doesn’t have much makeup on, and she doesn’t need it. Her fingers with fake French-tipped nails on the steering wheel are long and lustful, like ones I’d love to have in my mouth circling my tongue. She’s doing that tapping thing on top of her steering wheel that women do when they have long nails and are anxiously awaiting something. I’m taking in every wave in slow motion. First her pinkie nails drop and then the rest follow, like a human wave at a professional baseball game. Shit’s turning me on. I imagine them working their way down my pants, and then her lovely Marilyn Monroe lips making the same trip. I want her to see me. I want her to turn my way and connect her eyes with mine. Because I don’t get it. I don’t understand. How the fuck is it so? How is it that the ugly and the beautiful can meet at a street signal and have the union go unnoticed, unmarked by history, untold by any hand? It must happen all the time and everywhere the higher class have the poor clean their shit. So what gives? Should someone not tell the world about it? And what the fuck am I doing in this shitty truck that smells like a Mexican cantina listening to this crazy tío of mine whom I just met not even an hour ago rant on about opportune robberies and fleeting glory when I should be sitting shotgun in this rich bitch’s silver E-Class taking in her Chanel all the way to her home atop the hill where satin sheets are the norm, and all the while holding her hand in mine on my lap, softly feeling the tips of her fake-ass crazy-glued-by-a-non-English-speaking-Korean fingernails? “You’re great, God, real swell,” I quietly utter to the Man in the sky after the light turns green and she hits the gas, leaving me behind. I’m crushed because she never turned my way, because she will never know I exist.