by Obed Silva
After we dropped the woman off back at the club, my father and I went back into the night and let it swallow us. It was more cocaine and alcohol until the sun came up.
* * *
I woke up with shortness of breath and I felt really dizzy. My heart was racing. I thought I was overdosing again, but I hadn’t done any drugs. My sight was going black. Oh shit! Oh shit! I think I need to go to the hospital. I woke up my sister Samantha, told her what was wrong, and just as she had done before, she quickly drove me to the hospital, all the while reminding me of how I need to stop drinking and doing drugs, that I’m going to die one day if I don’t. And though I’m hearing her, I’m not really listening, because in that moment all I care about is getting to the hospital and making this terrible feeling go away.
“What’s bothering you?” the nurse asks.
“I’m having trouble breathing,” I tell her.
“Do you have any pain?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In my chest, but it’s more like tightness.”
“Do you have asthma?”
“No.”
“Do you smoke or drink?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do drugs?”
“Sometimes.”
“What kind?”
“The good kind.”
“Be specific.”
“Cocaine.”
“Not good.”
“I know.”
“When was the last time you smoke or drink or do drugs?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?”
“Yes. But I only smoke and drink. No cocaine.”
“No cocaine? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
I hadn’t been lying. I’d checked myself into the emergency room that day over what I thought was the world’s worst hangover. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe and every light including the sun was going dark on me. But my nurse was sweet and understanding. My breath smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and I was trying not to point it at anybody, especially my nurses. There were two of them working on me now, both loud Filipinas, but lovable. They checked my vitals and admitted me into the hospital. When the ER doctor finally came to check my breathing and my heart, he was unable to find anything wrong, so he requested that I stay until the pulmonary specialists did further tests on my lungs and my blood had been checked. But the doctor was just following a hospital protocol that in the end wasn’t going to bear any results. The nurses, on the other hand, had a better way of diagnosing my problem. When the doctor left, they continued to ask me questions about my drinking problem.
“So you drink last night,” one asked as the two hooked me up to an IV.
“Yes.”
“And what did you drink, and how much?”
“Tequila.”
“Tequila!?” the two let out simultaneously as they turned to look at each other. They had arrived to the base of the problem.
“That’s why,” said nurse number one, bending down to look me straight in my eyes.
“How much did you drink?” asked nurse number two.
“I don’t know. A lot.”
“Wow!” they both said. Then nurse number one said, “You drink too much.”
“Maybe,” I said, though I knew she was right.
“Was it good?” nurse number two asked, cracking a smile. But before I could answer her, nurse number one jumped in and added, “Yeah, if it was good then you should have brought us some so we can all have a party, no?”
The three of us laughed. It was a joke, and I was the butt of it, because here I was chatting about tequila with two Filipina nurses after having checked myself into the ER because of a false near-death experience that had been brought on by a hangover. The absurdity of the whole thing was beginning to dawn on me. And even though I now realized it and was already feeling better, I couldn’t just get up and say, “I feel better. Thank you. I will be leaving now.” Nope. I had to wait and just play the whole thing out until the doctor properly discharged me. In the meantime, I’d have my two nurses to keep me company and to lift my spirits and to let me know that I was going to live to drink another day.
A breathing treatment, an X-ray of my lungs, an ultrasound of my heart, and a blood test later, the doctor was able to conclude that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me.
“Well, just as I had thought,” he said as he walked into the room. “There is nothing wrong with you. You are too young to be having any heart problems or to have emphysema. I think that perhaps you just had a bad morning.” My original nurse, nurse number one, who was in the room, upon hearing this, looked straight at me with a devious smile, as if the two of us knew something that the doctor didn’t.
“I think you’re right, Doc,” I said, “because I feel much better. So what do you say I go home now?”
“Sure thing. We’ll have you out of here in a couple of hours. We just need to do some paperwork.”
“Please, do hurry. I have a date tonight. It would be terrible if I stood her up!”
“We’ll do our best.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
My mother, who’d come with my brother to pick me up after my sister had left while I was being checked in, stood at the side of my hospital bed with my brother and looked on me with chastising pity.
“Son, when are you going to learn, when are you going to realize that you need to stop drinking?”
“Today, Ma, today. That’s it. That’s it. I’m not going to do it anymore. So no more drinking and no more smoking either. None of that shit. I’m too crippled for it.” I said this with a sense of determination and authority, like I was really foreseeing my future and gaining full control of it. But my mother, being the shrewd woman that she is, reminded me of what I was apparently forgetting:
“That’s what every borracho says, son, but he never does. That is his dilemma. Must I remind you of the words of the borracho in El Principito?”
“Yes, Ma, remind me.”
“He says he drinks because he’s ashamed, and he’s ashamed because he drinks. It’s a cycle, son. You are trapped in a cycle that only you can break.”
Even so, I believed what I was telling myself and my mother. I’d had enough. These hospital visits for alcohol and drugs were getting old and I was tired. And this time it was different: I was dying. But I was always dying. And the Little Prince can’t always be right; there’s always an exception, isn’t there?
“No, Ma, I’m serious!” I pleaded with her. “You have to believe me!”
But no, my mother didn’t believe me. She trusted in the words of El Principito more than in those of her own son. And rightfully so because later on, when I was on my date, I ordered myself a Modelo Especial to go with my dinner. My date didn’t want to drink alone. “Come on,” she insisted after ordering her drink, “we have to toast together!”
I remembered the hospital, the nurses, my mother and her words, but then I saw across from me a face I couldn’t say no to.
“One then, and only because you’re so fucking beautiful!”
“Great!”
We toasted, we drank, and we both got wasted that night, and after that I never saw her again. And so goes the dilemma of el borracho. My mother, I’ve come to learn throughout my many years of life, is always right.
24
When you’re writing a book, everyone wants to know two things: what the book’s about, and the title. I give them both in the title: My Father the Pope. But it’s never enough. They always want details. I understand why. I mean, why the pope?
My father was no pope, in any religious, moral, or idealistic sense. He was far from it. He did, however, consider himself a Jehovah’s Witness, but that was only because my grandma, his mother, had been one, and a good one, too, very devout and holy, everything that my father was not. Only thing he was devout about was the bottle. The bottle was his higher power.
In Spanish pope translate
s to papa, which is the same word used for dad, which is less formal than padre, which in English translates to father. I never called my dad padre, and neither did any of my brothers or sisters. Most Spanish-speaking children don’t call their fathers padre. Sounds too formal—a phrase reserved for a priest. And I never called him papá either, which is the most commonly used term in Spanish to refer to one’s father; it’s somewhat informal, but still carries reverence and respect. This is what my brothers and Axcel called our father: papá. I, however, simply called him pa’—that is, before I started calling him güey.
I felt weird calling him papá; didn’t feel natural. There was a great chasm between us that had to be acknowledged, and the way I acknowledged it was by not giving myself completely over to him as a son. In a way, it was a defense mechanism, how I kept myself from being completely sucked into his world. It helped that I didn’t live with him like my brothers and sister, but it was also a conscious decision that I’d made from an early age.
Maybe I’d called him papá when I was a child, early on in my life, but as far as I can recall, I always called him pa’, even at seven and eight years of age. Pa’ this, pa’ that, and even that felt weird at times, and for both reasons: because I didn’t feel that it was enough and because I felt that it was too much.
* * *
On the way to Cokis’s house toward the airport, on the right side of the main road, painted upon a white stucco wall, is the image of Pope John Paul II, a favorite among the Mexican people. Only his head and upper body are painted; he’s waving at the passersby on the road, as if wishing them a farewell on their way to the airport. We were never on our way to the airport unless it was my time to fly back to the United States; instead, we were on our way to Cokis’s house, which we visited once or twice or three times a week, and every time on our way there, we came across the pope and his waving hand.
Usually I’d just say to myself, as we passed the pope, “Hi, Pope”; but on one particular occasion, as my father drove and I sat shotgun and Cokis and both of my brothers sat in the back, as we passed the pope, I said, out loud, “Pinche papa.” Maybe I was angry because my father and I had been fighting the night before and I resented everything having to do with fathers, even the fucking pope, who, with his arm waving and his cynical smile mocked the collective misery riding inside our car.
Neither Cokis nor my brothers had been saying much during the drive since we’d left El Cerro de la Cruz. Everyone was on edge since the previous night’s fight. It felt easier today to just stay quiet. It took too much effort to speak, and we were all completely drained of emotion. We were all, even my father, damaged souls taking this time to convalesce.
But when I said “Pinche papa” out loud, everyone turned to look at me, wondering what I was going to say, especially my father who thought I’d been talking to him. He looked at me and squinted, probably thinking I was about to curse at him, but I just looked at him and said, “What? I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the fucking pope! Are you the fucking pope?” Then, in a serious tone, he said to me, “Sí, I am El Papa, your papá,” and then he turned to my brothers and said that he was their papá as well, so that made him El Papa: The Pope.
Shit was funny, and we all laughed quietly. El Papa kept driving with a sense of accomplishment, happy to have let us all know quite frankly that he was “our father the pope.”
It was official: From then on our father was no longer just our pa’ or papá; he was “El Papa.” We all had elevated him, turned him into what he had always wanted to be: something grander than what he actually was. He loved it. Hearing us call him El Papa was like taking a drink through his ears; he became intoxicated by it. From that day on, he’d smile and put a bounce in his step every time he’d walk through the door into the house and I’d announce, “Ya llego El Papa.” It was as if I’d led a line of trumpet players to mark his arrival. He’d turn to me and give me a look of approval, encouraging me to keep it coming.
“El Papa!” someone else would say, and applaud and cheer. And then laughter would follow, which at first my father wouldn’t mind; but quickly the laughter would become too much and he would come to resent it. He would resent all of us. The joke was made evident, and he was the butt of it. He saw that we were laughing at him and not with him. El Papa was not something to cheer but something to laugh at. Because he was no El Papa. He was, instead, a caricature of El Papa, a caricature of a father, a caricature of a sick and dying alcoholic who just happened to be a father.
The damage had been done and there was no going back. Juan Jesús Silva Sánchez had gone from being Father, to being Dad, to being güey, to finally being El Papa—that cartoonish image of the pope on the side of a highway eternally waving, like a fool, at passersby. Making matters worse, a few days after christening him with this name, somebody wrote Pecador across the pope’s image, perhaps in protest of his cover-up of the hundreds of child abuse cases that were coming out around this time. Only my father and I were in the truck that day, and though we both turned to the pope and clearly saw the word graffitied over him, neither of us said anything.
I almost felt sad for him, like I wanted to turn to him and tell him that I was sorry for making fun of him, like I wanted to tell him that he was a good dad and that he was better than the fucking pope and that the motherfucker who’d written that over the pope was a piece of shit. But wanting to do something and actually doing it are two different things, and I went with the former. I was too proud, too angry still. This man, after all, had threatened violence against me and my brothers. He had requested the assistance of other grown men, drug addicts, to help him beat us, and I’d firmly held a six-inch knife in preparation to stab anyone who attacked me or my brothers, even my own father. I would have stabbed him over and over, and I probably would have killed him, too. And the saddest part of all is that I probably wouldn’t have felt any remorse afterward.
The person responsible for the graffiti over the pope’s image was right; the pope, El Papa, was a sinner, responsible for countless crimes against humanity, from genocide to sexual abuse against children, guilty of every crime in history committed by the Catholic Church. And my father was guilty, too. He was a sinner; he was a terrible man, guilty of murdering dreams and terrorizing a family. But always, just like the pope, he was still papá, el papá, our papá. There was no undoing this reality. He would be our father until the day he died.
* * *
The fight had started as soon as he’d come home, drunk. Earlier in the day he’d asked to borrow my uncle Chuy’s truck; said he’d be back in a few minutes, that he was only going to go inquire about a job. He returned seven hours later, drunk. There had been no job. He had used the truck to go drink and get high somewhere, but he wouldn’t say where. Every time I asked him where he’d gone he’d say that it didn’t matter, that he was back now, and that that was all that mattered. Angry and hurt, I went outside to calm myself down. My brothers followed. Outside they tried to console me, telling me to forget about everything, that the solution was to just never let him borrow the truck again. But to me it was more than that; it was just another betrayal by the man who was supposed to never betray you.
While my brothers kept trying to calm me down, an old white station wagon rolled up in front of the driveway, and inside of it were four grown men. My brothers and I were quiet and waited for them to say something. They talked to one another for a few seconds and then the one in the back closer to us popped his head out of the window and said, “¿Está Juan?”
“Yes,” Aarón replied. “He’s inside. I’ll go get him.” But before he could go inside our father came out. Instantly I sensed that something bad was going to happen, so I whispered to Aarón to go inside anyway and get a couple of big kitchen knives. He did. And as he walked in, our father walked up to the station wagon and greeted the men. “¿Qué onda, Juan?” they said to him, and he responded with the same phrase. At this point Aarón came out and handed me one of the knives, which was
about eight inches long. I placed it on my lap and extended my shirt over it. I could see Aarón concealing his at his side. “What are you up to, Juan?” one of the men asked him, and he said to them, “Well, I’m here fighting with these three little fuckers. They like to gang up on me.” As he said this, he looked back and pointed at us, and then he snickered as he moved out of their way so they could see us. Then the one in the back who had first asked for him said, “Do you need help? We’ll help you take care of them right now.” It was then that I reached beneath my shirt and clutched the knife’s handle. “Órale,” my father said, “let’s do it.” My brothers and I looked at each other for a second and then back at them, telling one another that we were ready for whatever was going to happen next. But as the man in the back was about to open his door, our father kept him from opening it all the way and told them that he had only been kidding. “Son mis hijos,” he told them, “and I love them more than they know, and even though they don’t love me.” Again, he was the victim. Then he turned to us and said, “Órale, hijos, you want me gone, then I’m leaving.” We didn’t say anything. We were too angry and disappointed in him to even tell him to fuck off. We watched him get in that station wagon with those men who were just like him and drive away. He wouldn’t return until the following morning, and he would act as if nothing had ever happened.
25
Leaning against the car on one elbow and holding a caguama, she’s between tears and laughter. I can’t make sense of her. I want to know how she feels and what she plans on doing with the rest of her life. Will she move on, remarry, learn to love again, and put her years with my father behind, or will she trade her “tomorrows to remain in yesterday” and remain in mourning forever? I hope she will love again, find her life again. My father had taken so much from her and caused her so much pain. Mourning him forever will only keep her in the shadow of his death, chained to a ghost, and she will die miserable. I don’t want that for her. I want her to find a new path: to be free and see the world as a blank canvas waiting to be covered in colors, in images without lines; I want her to see the world as limitless, as a place where she can dream and make those dreams come true, something my father had always kept her from doing.
