by John Rechy
“A fake?” I stood up, ending our lunch.
As the ritual of the high school senior prom approached, I felt I had to go, to assert my place as a “popular” if still remote student. I wished that Isabel were back. Perhaps because she wasn’t, I was certain I would have recovered enough arrogance to ask her out.
10
On the day we were to be measured for the caps and gowns we would wear during graduation, I ran into a pretty girl I had often said hello to in the hallways; a few times, I’d stopped to talk to her, briefly, a fact she seemed to welcome. She even seemed to seek the accidental contact by slowing down when she saw me approaching, as she did today. She was a sophomore. Her name was Virginia Taylor. Like the movie star her name evoked, she had black hair and a very fair complexion, and she had violet eyes, yes, violet, and she was Anglo.
“Will you? To the prom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
We lingered for a few minutes. When recess between classes ended, she gave me her telephone number.
I had asked an Anglo girl to go out with me! That wouldn’t have happened if Isabel had been around, I told myself, blaming her for my feeling uncertain about what I had done when I learned that all the other Mexican students in the school were going to the prom—if they were going—with Mexican girls.
My brother Robert was delighted that—after wavering—I had decided to go to the prom. He helped me polish the old car. Did I have enough money for the essential corsage? I didn’t. He gave me two dollars to add to mine.
With my sister Olga’s help, I ordered the corsage by phone on the afternoon of the prom. “It has to be delivered,” my sister had instructed, “so she’ll be wearing it when you pick her up. Carnations, that’s always the best for a girl.” She was enjoying the activity, although I could tell she was piqued. “Is she pretty?”
“Very.”
“Prettier than me, little brother?”
“Much prettier,” I said jokingly, causing her to elbow my ribs.
“The address to deliver it?” the voice on the telephone asked, after I had agreed to go by and pay for it.
Oh, God, I had the telephone number but not the address. I kept scrutinizing the paper Virginia had written on as if the address would magically appear.
I called the telephone number to get the address from her.
A woman answered. Immediately I was tense.
“Is Virginia there?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Me. I’m John Rechy. I have a date with her, we’re going to the senior prom. I want to send her a corsage.”
“Oh?”
The woman’s voice was odd. She was extending the silence that followed as I waited for her to call the girl.
“I’ll be picking her up later.”
“You will?”
Now the voice was sarcastic, taunting.
“Yes.”
“Virginia told me you asked her out.”
“I did.” I wanted to hang up the telephone before something horrible could happen, what I knew was about to happen.
Her voice harsh, the woman rushed words, stuffing them into the telephone before I would be able to stop them:
“I know who you are, boy. Over my dead body my daughter will go out with a Mexican,” she spat into the telephone and into my ears, and the telephone clicked off.
After I had paid for it, I gave the corsage to my mother, who accepted it with her usual gracious smile, the way she had once accepted a kiss from a handsome transient, long ago. She did not question what had occurred concerning the corsage.
I did not go to the prom.
Much later, after anger replaced pain, I wondered:
How the hell did that bitch know that I’m Mexican?
At school, I saw Virginia Taylor. I forced myself to walk over to her, certain that she would apologize for her mother. She pointedly turned away.
I was glad to be about to graduate from high school, to leave behind its cruelties, not only Virginia’s harsh rejection of me but what had began to seem to me the determined viciousness of “popular” students against those not in their circle, the desire to thrust them far away to preclude any attempt at entry. From my undefined vantage, I saw it all.
There was a pretty girl named Wilma whose body had matured beyond her age, sixteen. Her voluptuous breasts, which she was clearly proud of—wearing blouses that exhibited them as much as possible—had made her popular among male students, all Anglos, including several athletes. But she was popular only after school, when she was picked up by one or another of the boys, who later claimed that she was an “easy fuck.” When, during lunch break, she tried to insinuate herself into the company of the boys who bragged about having sex with her, they would turn away as if they did not know her. They would sidle over to their safe girlfriends of supposed good reputation, girls among whom a football queen and princesses would soon be announced.
I was in a math class with Wilma, my last year at school, when a student monitor, one of the popular girls who disdained her most, arrived breathlessly with a message for Wilma which was important enough—from the principal’s office—that the teacher allowed her to receive it. The messenger said in a loud whisper: “Congratulations, Wilma!” Wilma tore the envelope open, read the message, stood up and shouted ecstatically: “I’ve been elected football queen; the principal wants to see me now.”
Without waiting for the teacher’s permission, she ran out of the classroom. Trembling, she returned a few minutes later, her makeup stained with tears. The note had been a prank initiated by the boys who “dated” her after school, and by the girls. For days Wilma did not attend school.
I felt for her, for her crushed feelings; but also because I saw a similarity in her situation—perhaps that’s why we had never talked. My own popularity was compromised, too, ending when I rushed home to a secret address. That had not protected me from Virginia and her mother’s rejection of me. If I went to college—a consideration clouded by the fact of our limited means—I would not care whether or not I was popular.
Although I had still hoped that, at the last moment, she would come back, Isabel Franklin did not turn up for the graduation ceremony.
If it had not been required because I was one of the top ten students, I would not have attended either. I was assigned to read a rosy patriotic speech by someone named Benjamin de Casseres. It was about the bright future that awaited us all; it ended—and although I could not see her, I knew that in the audience my sister Olga would be giggling:
“I am democracy in action, I am the United States.”
It garnered loud applause, most spiritedly from my mother, wearing a new hat and dress my brother Robert had saved up to buy for her. My father was there, sitting beside her and my sister and her husband, along with my sister Blanca. My father’s presence surprised me.
I had never mentioned around him that I was writing stories. But soon after the graduation ceremony, there appeared, on the table that I had converted into a desk, a secondhand portable Royal typewriter.
My father had placed it there.
I turned toward the open door, where he stood watching me.
“Thank you.” I broke the silence of long days.
He nodded and turned away.
But his outbursts of anger continued as ferociously as before. He lived now in an angry trance of remembered crushed dreams of musical glory.
Wherever she was, wherever she had gone, wherever she had fled to, Isabel Franklin—I thought of her only by the name she had chosen over the name she had abandoned—had left El Paso, as I longed to do. In my young life I had been away only as far as Chihuahua, on a brief early visit with my parents and Olga. The fact that Isabel had fled intensified my own feeling of wanting to flee this city, despite the crystalline skies and blue mountains that I loved.
There was an immediate situation that I wanted to flee, get out of. My rich uncle’s wife, Carmen, the boozy lady who held court with a gun over her poker se
ssions, was preparing a quince-áñera for her pretty daughter. That meant a celebration of her fifteenth birthday, a coming out. In the upper echelons of that society, there would have been an orchestra, a gleaming hall, gentlemen in tuxedos, ladies in long dresses, the honored girl in a dress that resembled a wedding gown, her escort in a fitted tuxedo. A few rungs down, the whole became an attempt to imitate and at times gaudily surpass its precursor: The orchestra became a popular band, the setting a vast rented patio, gentlemen wore their slick dark suits, several of the ladies displayed flashy dresses, the quinceáñera often wore an exaggerated version of the usual gown, and her escort—
That was me, in a suit borrowed from my brother and temporarily fitted to my body by my mother.
Why I was chosen for the affair, which would take place in Juárez, was a puzzle to me. I had seen the girl only once; we had said hello. That was it.
“I don’t understand why they want me to be the escort,” I told my mother as she was altering the suit.
As if it were merely to be taken for granted—nothing exceptional—my mother said, “Because you look like an American.”
Adults in attendance after the church ceremonies were my proud mother and my uncle and his wife, whose cronies, draped in loud jewelry, were already tipsy. I wondered whether any of them had a secret gun, to deal with whatever affront might occur.
I went through the determinedly elegant affair, stiffly, danced the first dance with the slender girl—in a surprisingly subdued and pretty gown—who looked like a white tulip. Then I led her to her actual boyfriend, a dark young man, and I left.
11
I was seventeen.
One of the two local newspapers, the El Paso Times, gave me a scholarship, fifty dollars for tuition to attend the small college that adjoined the vast desert surrounding the city. It was called Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. Although it had a few liberal arts departments, it specialized in courses for engineers. Its rugged campus—we had to climb stony hills to get to the classrooms—appeared at times to be taken over by lanky cowboys from the interior of Texas, and by their blond girlfriends, who, it seemed to me, had come only to join one of the several sororities there.
Still, there were some good professors, most of whom had chosen the warm climate because of lingering illnesses; a few came here to die.
Dr. Sonnichsen, the head of the English department, was a graduate of Harvard. I never found out what had brought him here to this cowboyish college; perhaps it was his lusty Mexican wife. In his strict classes, I was introduced to a gallery of classical writers who would influence me in various ways: Milton, Pope, Dryden, Donne, Swift, and, eventually, James Joyce. Those led me by circuitous routes to others: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Djuna Barnes, Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein. Concurrently I punctuated my literary explorations by reading, and enormously enjoying, famous best sellers: Kings Row, Gone with the Wind, The Strange Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Foxes of Harrow—those books, with their splashes of Technicolor prose, also influenced me.
For Dr. Sonnichsen, I wrote a paper upholding that Milton was on the side of the rebellious angels. I received, reputedly, the only A he had ever awarded. Eventually he would encourage me to take, long before it was ordinarily expected, just before the granting of a degree, the comprehensive English literature examination he had established as a requirement. I passed it easily when I was a sophomore.
I did not, however, fare as well with Dr. Ponsford, a woman with a face like a mask framed in dyed black hair; she was unbelievably white, and her one expression, etched disdain, seemed never to change. She forbade me to write a term paper about Marie Antoinette—“too vast a topic.” In an earlier lecture she had informed us that we could narrow a subject by introducing it with “On.” I wrote the paper about Marie Antoinette and titled it: “On Marie Antoinette.” With her usual sneer, Dr. Ponsford surprised me by granting me an A.
As part of my journalism scholarship, I would be employed at the city newspaper as copyboy after school, sometimes on the late shift, until midnight, alternating with another college student. That allowed me to leave the laundry call office and avoid Mr. and Mrs. David Kippan, who had continued to lurk around me.
My father hardly ever worked now, having secured some kind of meager “pension.” He continued to drum his fingers on his desk to unheard music, still venting his anger in curses, muttered and shouted, against me and my mother.
Neither the scholarship nor what I would earn at the newspaper, fifteen dollars a week, was enough to pay for all the college requirements, or even for the used textbooks I intended to buy. Although by now he had a wife and son to support, my brother Robert, was determined that I, as “the smart one,” must attend college; he would pay whatever I could not afford.
Even with what I earned and what my brother Robert continued to contribute, we could not afford the monthly rent for the run-down house just barely on the “good” side of El Paso. There was nothing to do but apply for a unit in the government projects on the South Side of the city. Because in El Paso many Mexican families were just making do, all the units were occupied. It was through my popular brother’s contacts that we were able to move in.
Now I lived in the Second Ward, the section of the city identified as the “poor Mexican section.”
The units were identical, boxlike, glued to each other. In front of each there was a concrete block, a mockery of a tiny porch. Grass had died from a lack of expensive water; weeds patched the dirt. Even in summer, trees there bore few leaves; their trunks and branches were grayish-brown. Garbage spilled out of inadequate cans that were quickly filled, secured with chains to a wire enclosure.
The few pieces of furniture we owned were lugged in by me and my brothers. My father’s large, once grand desk did not fit in our unit. My brother took it with him to “store” … somewhere.
When we were moved into a “family unit” of two floors, I stood in the room upstairs that would be mine and I looked outside through the window, studying the desolation of the doggedly identical units. Instead of coming closer to the house on Montana Street that I had sat in front of, pretending to be rich, we had moved downward. The only next step would have been the tenements just blocks away, flimsy, sweaty structures propped on stilts, tired walls pasted over with tattered posters of movies that played at the Teatro Colón, the only Mexican movie house.
With intact dignity, my mother settled into the projects. She continued to dress impeccably, altering her clothes as they became old, adding something here, taking something off there as she pumped at the pedal of her ancient sewing machine. Even just to go to the corner store that specialized in Mexican goods, she wore a hat and gloves, which she kept immaculate, drying them flat on a shelf. She became a beloved figure among the neighbors, all Mexicans, like a benevolent queen, always smiling. The neighbors never addressed her in the familiar form, tu; it was always usted—and it was always as Señora Rechy, never by a first name, as they addressed each other.
Knowing how deeply the move into the government projects, a defeat, had affected me, my mother tried to cheer me up. She pointed out that the government units were equipped with a washing machine, hot water, and other improvements we could otherwise not afford. She decorated the rooms as best as she could—with curtains she made, a tablecloth she had embroidered—making them a grand setting for a poor queen. Young “gangy” Mexicans—whose older forebears had been called pachucos—looked at me skeptically, as if wondering what I was doing in their territory. They, as well as the other residents of the projects, assumed that I was Anglo, like my father, and that he and I were the only “Americans” in the whole neighborhood.
Especially now, I told no one from my “other life”—at work, at school—where I lived. I now gave as my own the address of my older sister, Blanca, who lived with her husband in an attractive white house near Grandview Park. A pretty vine flowered over the front porch, which was edged by grass, trimmed.
I didn’t want to take the bus
to college; that seemed like a further decline. Whether my brother Robert understood this or not, he offered me his car. He would come by early in the morning and I would drive him to work at the lens-grinding factory and then drive on to college. Sometimes I would pick him up later; most of the time he drove home with a coworker. When he couldn’t come by for me, I would run across town, across the railroad tracks that separated the city, into the section we had moved from. Halfway up the hill that I had walked to go to high school, I would hitchhike to the college, getting a ride easily from other students.
At night I lay in bed, hot from the intense heat of the airless day, and I knew I had to move my mother out of the projects. I would buy her a house of her own, out of the neighborhood that branded us as poor Mexicans.
Today my brother needed his car.
After classes, I hitchhiked from the college to the center of the city, running across the tracks, to the projects. It was not a particularly hot day, but when I reached our unit—always an assault, the brick cracker box we now lived in, in line with all the others, blocks and blocks of them—I was perspiring and hot, my shirt open and moist.
I walked in. There they were, the malicious aunts. I considered walking out. But my mother had already greeted me and the aunts were leaning expectantly toward me, smiles slashed across their haggard faces. No doubt about it, one was just as ugly as the other. How the same parents who had produced them had produced my lovely mother was a mystery to me.
“Hijo! Son!” they addressed me. I winced; it annoyed me that they were related to me even as aunts.
“Hi.” I started to walk up to the second level, to take a bath—there were no showers, just a clean bathtub.
“We were just remarking to Lupe,” one of them said in a tone steeped in artificial caring, “how wonderful it is of El Paso to provide such nice shelter for the poor.”
I inhaled, all that I was capable of doing at that moment.
