The only thing I could figure out that he had done that no one else had done before was cut my hair to Marine Corps regulation, almost. So when I get to the trailer of the woman who would cut hair for five bucks over by the sandpit, I ask her to go short.
“Just short,” I say.
“Short?” she asks, kicking her toddler daughter away from the chair I’m in.
“Short,” I say.
“Shorter?” She asks, after she has cut it really short.
I look in the mirror. It doesn’t look right.
“Go shorter,” I say.
“Shorter?” she asks, after a couple minutes.
“Shorter,” I say, and barely wince when she switches to scissors and clips off a part of my ear.
“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I’ve never done that before!” she says as the blood runs down the back of my neck, crimson against the white cotton bedsheet she is using as a barber’s bib.
Over tears, she tells me she cannot accept payment for maiming my ear, which, I understand in some cultures means that I can’t marry again, but I’m perfectly all right with it because it gets me a free haircut. Though, again, something is not quite right with it.
“¿Que chingádos te paso con tu pinche pelo?” (“What the fuck happened to your fucking hair?”) Dad asks, as soon as I get home.
“She cut it,” I reply.
“Te miras pelon,” he says. (“You look like a convict,” or rather, “You look bald, like a convict.”)
The quinceañera event was awful, as to be expected. I still have some photos, and I look like a survivor from a Russian labor camp. That wasn’t the worst part, though.
That next Monday, at first-period football, I’m out on the field doing stretches and one of the smaller, tubbier mustachioed coaches with a sense of humor walks by me and says, “Martinez! Did they catch you stealing chickens? What the fuck happened to your hair? We used to shave people’s heads like that, when they were caught stealing chickens.”
And it stuck. What’s interesting is that it never quite got up to Dan’s sphere, and he never heard my nickname in football practice. In my own group I was known to be able to take a good hit. I’d grown up with Dan and Richard, after all, and these guys here were pikers, had plastic, and rules, and were not going to kill you, which were the rules I grew up with. So when they’d come at me, I’d stand my ground. Take my hits. But then suddenly my nickname was “Chicken-man,” and “Chicken,” in the same way that a huge guy is called “Tiny.” I’d like to think.
However, the first time I was called “Chicken-man” in front of Dan, he gave me a look, and I couldn’t explain it, so I just kind of sat there, saddled with it, in his eyes, and it hurt. I don’t think I ever explained that to him.
Anyhow, Albert and I had become fairly good friends. He liked my British Knights so much that one day he asked to borrow them. I said, Um, sure, and he gave me his leather boots, very ala Lando Calrissian, I thought. They were popular at the time, that style of boots (sort of Ugg Boots, for boys, a kind of farmer chav), but as the school day was ending, I realized I couldn’t go home with them, so I searched him out, found out his last period class, and tracked him there, found he wasn’t actually in there, and then got his home address from a mutual friend and had to skip the last period of school to find him at home, where he was outside on a patio, doing homework. He looked very happy, and not at all surprised to see me. He made shrimp from the freezer, and we hung out and talked about what was going on with him.
Albert had an eye for the cutesy Mexican girls of the area, and they certainly had one for him. In Brownsville, the drug dealers have a severe “madonna versus whore” issue, which is really quite dangerous. Mexican girls with angelic faces are revered as dainty princesses and auctioned off to the most virile and competent dealer, known by the flashiest truck and the bloodiest sinus, even at, say, fifteen years of age.
As a young man, if you had any sense of self-preservation, you would stay far away from these girls, because they were considered untouchable and reserved for the next available son of a drug dealer who would fall in desperate love upon laying eyes on her, and then beat them in public for talking to another boy, later. These were not people accustomed to rational resolution of grievances.
Because, even if you listened to the cries for help from atop the pedestals where these girls were kept, and even if your motives were pure—and, let’s be honest, they never were—the lionized male children of drug dealers were totally incapable of understanding how to treat their women with the respect of an equal, that they might have something of interest to share, (and in full disclosure, they very likely didn’t, beyond what they saw in fashion magazines and on Univision) so these pretty girls were left lonely, isolated in their dangerous native beauty. No, they were the image of the holy mother, and the drug-dealing boys couldn’t wait to fuck them, and any man talking to their objects of affection was someone who challenged their virility, someone to be shot. Which is what is widely speculated to have happened to my friend, Albert.
Albert was said to have a girlfriend in her early twenties, and when you’re seventeen, that’s a considerable bragging commodity. The trick was, she was married to one of those import/export people in Matamoros, the sister city to Brownsville. The woman was unhappy, and she sought out Albert.
After a few weeks of this, her husband sought him out as well.
Albert was at a friend’s house down the street from his own when he noticed four men in suits, sitting in a Mercedes on their street. The neighborhood was terribly working class and rapidly going downhill, so a Mercedes really stood out. According to gossip, he knew they meant business, and Albert would not leave his friend’s house. Finally, after nightfall, he summoned the courage to sneak out the back, barefoot and in shorts, making his way to his house when the car lit up and roared into his family’s driveway.
The four men rushed out of the car brandishing Uzis, and his mother was in the doorway yelling, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?!” They flashed her some bunk badges, saying they were with the FBI and that Albert was being taken in for questioning and they stuffed him in the trunk and drove away. Cops were called, Albert’s father’s past iniquities were researched, and the legal interpretation was that because Albert’s father was caught smuggling marijuana some ten years before, he had something else to hide, and it cost him his son’s life.
Albert’s father swore it wasn’t the case, that his shrimping business was now legitimate, and having shared lunch with Albert a few times, visited his home, I can agree. His house was modest, and Albert had no more money than any other of us kids. He was diddling the wrong Mexican princess, and he paid with his life. He just disappeared that night.
His case was on America’s Most Wanted. It was made national, very public, but it left a big hole in a lot of people’s lives. That poor kid. My friend, Albert. Just gone.
He wasn’t the only one.
Another kid from football, Arnold, was shot in the chest by a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun, in a case of mistaken identity. He had been sitting on the trunk of his car, an old Mustang LX that he was rebuilding, late one Saturday night while watching the drag races on Billy Mitchell, which were impromptu and haphazard, and these two Mexican guys drove up and shot him in the chest, point blank, out of the passenger window. The people scattered, left Arnold on the ground asking for help.
The next day, the kid who pulled the trigger turned himself in, said it had been a mistake; they had been looking for a rival gang member.
Arnold’s locker was cleaned out over the weekend, and no one ever talked about him again. He just disappeared, too.
And another: Alvaro, the first kid to get pubes, two lockers down. He was the first guy to have the courage to take a shower, because his pubes had come in early—what had he to hide now? He was killed during spring break, on the highway from South Padre Island. There was an image of the car wreck on the news that evening, and I saw his sneakers, covered in b
lood, still on his feet.
His locker was never cleaned out, like everyone had forgotten he had been in football, and I would look at it every day, remember those bloodied tennis shoes on the news.
It was hard not to think you were going to be next.
Chapter 16
THE ARTLESS DODGER
I played hooky for the very first time at fourteen, from Central Junior High, and it would be a constant, recurring theme in my life, and happens often, even now. It’s what I want to do.
I was in the eighth grade then, and Carl was in the seventh and Anthony had been hovering somewhere in between for two years. We needed to see a BB gun at the Montgomery Ward in Amigoland Mall about two miles from the junior high and we skipped the second half of school to do it, after lunch. Something about a camping trip the next day and guns were necessary. We paid for it though, frightened as we were to return that subsequent Monday. But we got away with it.
Carl and Anthony lived out on the undeveloped developments in the eastern fringe of Brownsville near me, about a mile in either direction from my own house. They were my only friends because of their own dislocation.
Carl’s dad was an ex–border patrol officer who hurt his back sometime in the early 1980s chasing after Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande and now exacted a pension and wouldn’t allow himself to speak to either Anthony or me, avoided us when we were over at Carl’s place. They were one of about five non-farming white families who lived that far out of town, in an enclave three miles from the nearest paved road. Still, they had central air-conditioning and indoor plumbing, clearly civilized, so they were the envy of the rest of us, who drove by and leched equally at Carl’s sexy twin sisters, who were both very sweet and very kind, and their comfy indoor toilets.
Anthony was mostly Vietnamese, generated from that spate of dislocated Viet fishermen who were moved to South Texas in the 1960s and then moved elsewhere in Texas under nefarious circumstances. However, Anthony’s father seemed more like a smuggler than a fisherman. His mother was Mexican, and the mix somehow made Anthony tall, but slender and darkly wolfish. He had teeth like a young Martin Amis and hardly spoke as a result of it, even kept his upper lip hung tersely over the lower in order to keep his teeth from showing when he laughed. He had long, thin, muscular arms and legs that come with hard hours of labor, the sort of build I came to fear later because of the quiet resentment that produces it. He had a sister the same age as my sister Mare, named Janie. Janie had perfect, bouncy tits and Dan and I would go very quiet when she was around.
Anyhow, Anthony and his family lived in the other direction from Carl’s house, farther away it seemed, in a classically Mexican overdeveloped hacienda made of pink, very tactile stone that, when first built, knew no financial limits, but was quickly left to ruin. It had a swimming pool—complete with winding slide—and that was the source of a lot of envy, until it, too, was abandoned a year after it was built. Anthony’s father was a drug dealer, we all decided.
Carl, on the other hand, was a perfectly white suburban kid. Baptist, nappy headed, member of the 4-H club, and used the phrase fixinta. Once, while camping in the bed of one of my father’s trailers, for privacy, I produced some pornography from my uncle’s collection and Carl jacked off in front of me and Anthony, making us really uncomfortable. “I’m fixinta come,” he said, motivated by a bland Playboy centerfold, and then he did as promised.
Carl and Anthony were better friends between themselves than I was with either of them. They liked being the same kind of stupid, and I raced to develop further. Games of “pinch-a-buggy” and punching one another in the upper arm for sport didn’t appeal to me so much. Plus, I also saw the looks Carl’s mother would give Anthony when Anthony wasn’t looking, the same looks I was certain were aimed at me when I wasn’t looking.
So it wasn’t with too much sentimentality that I left Carl behind for a whole new set of friends in high school, and he started hanging out with more FFA types, passionately discussing things like butter and animal husbands. Husbandry. Whatever.
Anthony I sorta missed, but mostly because he quit school and drifted farther and farther into obscurity and drug dealing with his father. I’d see him occasionally as I drove by his house, and I would honk and wave and he’d wave back. I suppose that was as much as I could ask.
High school did not offer anything more promising in the way of socializing.
In the mornings before school, kids congregated around the low stone benches that lined the front of the high school like birds at a feeder. The kids who drove their own vehicles would assemble in the student parking lot, but it was much more social in the front, away from the classic rock and stolen cigarettes. During the fall and winter, the temperature would dip into the mid-seventies in the mornings before the sun could recover and bake the planet brown around noon, and these cool mornings are among the few things I remember about high school, shivering in my over-sized shirts. I’d bus the seven or so miles and get to school an hour before classes started and socialize as I could not at any other time, living way out in the middle of nothing. School had become my only available means of socializing and I began to dislike the interference of classes and teachers and bells.
After school it was the same thing. I hated that people had to leave because I liked them hanging around. I couldn’t understand why they would want to go home, to leave such an enjoyable atmosphere. I wanted them all to participate in my John Hughes fantasies, godammit.
When I was forced to get home, I had to deal with Dad or Gramma. I’d be met with verbal assaults and demands that I change into my mechanic’s clothes and get to doing something, anything, outside on the trucks or in the yard. “I didn’t spend all day in the air-conditioning looking at women’s asses like you!” Gramma would yell at me, in Spanish. While there was daylight left, I’d have to crawl under the dump trucks and check fluid levels, grease the joints, change flat tires, do some sort of maintenance, or maybe help whatever mechanic du jour was attempting to revive our decrepit equipment. Other days, I’d have to drive the backhoe someplace. Or the trucks. No concern or mention ever of homework. Not that I would argue; I just knew it was a lost cause.
Gramma had these horrific manias, these extensive manic bouts about working, about making oneself as useful as possible. It stemmed from her years picking crops and priding herself from picking the most crates of tomatoes, bales of cotton, or whatever vegetable she happened to be working, but now, when she couldn’t be producing, she would explode in psychotic episodes for others to do MORE! and MORE! and MORE! There was always a panic, always a reason to burn white hot with deadline: You just needed to figure out what it was, so DO EVERYTHING, DO IT ALL, AND NOW!
This is how we grew up with her, and Dad, too. “Ándale!” she or he screamed when I’d walk up the drive after the bus would drop me off. “Come on!” she’d yell at me in Spanish. “Felípe is already waiting at the field in the truck and we need you to fill him up! We’ve been waiting for you since three!” Felípe, her younger brother, would eventually set himself aflame and nearly die from some sort of private guilt that demanded self-immolation, in his mind. (It had been big news in the barrio, and Gramma failed at finding someone to sue for it.) Living with Gramma was making me wish I had done the same thing, and succeeded.
I absolutely hated coming home.
Weekends were the worst. Saturday mornings Gramma would start mowing her lawn around six thirty, when the sun was good and hot, and she would eventually find a reason to mow the same patch of earth beneath my bedroom window over and over again until I was up and demanding to take over the lawnmower, just to get her on her way.
This happened a lot.
When Tony found me hanging out at the front of the high school, I was ripe for the picking, quite the low-hanging fruit.
“Hey, you’re Domingo, right? Dan’s little brother? Yeah, I partied with your brother a few times,” he lied. “Hey, come with me to buy a joint at the Wall.”
I had a b
ad feeling about this. The Wall was not for the uninitiated. It was the barrier between the tennis courts and the neighborhood immediately to the school’s north, creating an alley that was largely obfuscated from all angles. Bad people hung out there. Bad people who could not under any circumstances complete full sentences, verbal or written. In English or Spanish.
“Uh, I dunno, man,” I protested. “I don’t think those people would like me.”
“Arr, that’s not true, man,” he insisted, kinda jittery. “Jaíme and those guys are cool. We’re just gonna buy a joint.”
“What if they think I’m a narc?” I didn’t dress like them, in camouflage and jackets with Pink Floyd buttons on the lapels. And I didn’t have that lesbian haircut, the spiky thing with the long tails in the back.
“Look, don’t worry about it, man. Just come with me. I’ll talk to these guys. How much money you got?”
This was actually the reason I was recruited, I came to realize later: I was an addition to his stable of boy-whores, able to conjure a dollar or two more toward the purchase of beer and marijuana.
He fancied himself a con artist, but he wasn’t very good at it. I felt sorry for him, mostly, transparent as he was. I could always see what he was doing, how he was trying to manipulate me, and so could everyone else. We all saw right through the cajolery, the logisticizing, the pleading, but he was oddly charming, if a bit hairy, like a seductress from the Bible.
Personally, I think I played along out of sheer boredom, but more likely because nothing else had come along.
“I got three bucks for lunch,” I said. “It’s supposed to last me for today and tomorrow.” We had started on our way to the tennis courts, and the looming challenge of the Wall.
“Arr, a dollar-fifty a day? That’s pathetic,” he said, embarrassing me. “Here, let me have two dollars.”
Boy Kings of Texas Page 14
