Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing

by Lazaro Lima

  Clutching the stem of her wine glass tight, Mom hiccupped and said, “I’m not joking. They really cut them in half. At least Cuevas. He was in two pieces. Bullets got his spinal cord.”

  “Did they catch the people who shot them?”

  Mom laughed. “No. Nobody saw anything!”

  “But you said it was afternoon!” I squealed like a silly gringa.

  “In Mexico,” Mom reminded me bluntly, “nobody sees anything. Nobody hears anything. Nobody says anything. Remember? The December that you were ten? What you saw at the statue of Christopher Columbus?”

  I went back to the winter that I was ten. The statue in the middle of the roundabout. Guadalajara at night. Two women. Six men. Mom could see my thoughts as she looked into my eyes.

  “You understand me?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  When Rex became a narco, I went to the botánica by the Masonic Temple and bought an icon of Malverde. Malverde is a guardian angel who hasn’t been officially recognized by the Catholic Church yet. He looks suspiciously like Pedro Infante, Mexico’s answer to Frank Sinatra, and I’ve never visited his shrine. It’s located near some railroad tracks in Culiacán, Sinaloa, the state where my Tía Carmen lives now.

  Who prays to Malverde? Narcos and the people who love them. You could call him our patron saint. It’s rumored that in life he was an outlaw, a bandido, and he protects fellow fugitives, answering their prayers. He’s not much different from Saint Ambrose, who blesses beekeepers, or Saint Dismas, whose scapulars are worn by undertakers, and if brewers and prostitutes have intercessors to appeal to, it makes perfect sense that those in the drug trade should have their own, too. I think it’s just a matter of time before the Vatican recognizes this mustached hero. Malverde merchandising is already a cottage industry in my neck of the woods.

  My Malverde icon is small. It’s nestled among other trinkets and doodads that fill the altar above my stuffed animal collection. This altar is actually a plain, wood box, painted pistachio green, that’s got three shelves in it. It’s rather rustic looking and it’s filled with stuff that’s symbolic to me and probably makes me look, to the untrained eye, like a Santería practitioner. There are handmade dolls sewn by Abuelita.

  Miniature foods—tamales, tortas, panes—purchased from stalls at El Mercado de San Juan de Dios. Ephemera from my first communion. Ephemera from funerals: Casimir’s (stillborn), Pretty Boy’s (murder), Aunt Angelica’s and Uncle Steve’s (double suicide). Souvenirs, like rosaries, from Catholic articles, stores, and mission gift shops. Some of my childhood teeth. A statue of the Angel Gabriel. Copper milagros shaped like sports cars and Sacred Hearts. Skeletons made of clay and string. Dried roses and carnations. A rattlesnake tail.

  I felt like a mafia wife the first night I prayed to Malverde to ask him to watch over Rex. It was a totally over-the-top move, and I confess, Rex isn’t really a narco; she’s a low-level drug dealer who looks like an adolescent skater boy with boobs. Having sex with the princess of cocaine didn’t ensnare her and make her a trafficker, a pink Post-it note did. For some reason, this seems so American to me, that my girlfriend’s destiny was ordained by a time-saving device that comes in both pastels and neons.

  Rex is in graduate school at Cal State Long Beach; she started this year, and she’s studying rhetoric. On a lark, she took a women’s studies seminar that came highly recommended and got along well with the handsome butch who taught the course. One day, the woman returned a paper to her without a grade on it. Attached was a sticky memo with this cryptic message: Please see me during my office hours today.

  Like any conscientious dork, Rex showed up sweating. Was the woman going to accuse her of plagiarizing? Threaten to fail her because her phone went off during discussion and the ring tone was Flavor Flav professing his own name? Blackmail her for butch-on-butch sexual favors?

  “Shut the door,” the professor told her. “Don’t worry. You got an A.” She smiled sheepishly, all crow’s feet and straight teeth, maintaining the expression for an awkward couple of seconds. “I know this is rather unorthodox,” she continued, “but could you score me some pot?” (Nervous laughter.) “You seem like you know where to get some. It’s for my girlfriend. She’s new to the area and doesn’t have a connection yet.”

  Rex hadn’t smoked out in years, not since the time she got high and acted like she was on sherm. That was scary. She ran around the neighborhood barefoot and braless, doing embarrassing things, frightening children. The experience made her swear off pot forever.

  Sensing Rex’s hesitation, the butch promised, “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks for a dime if you can get it to me by tonight.”

  Rex reached behind her ear and grabbed the ballpoint pen she keeps tucked there. “What’s your address?” she asked, poised to jot it on the back of her grimy hand.

  Since that afternoon, Rex has become the Pablo Escobar of the Women’s Studies Department, with several middlepeople (this term seems more apropos than middlemen) comprising her supply chain. Rex delivers the goods, I procure them from Heather, my tattoo artist, and she procures them from a fourth party named Santo. That’s all I know about the guy. That his name’s Santo. I don’t really care to know any more about him. His name scares me.

  Around Halloween, I needed to cop from Heather. I also had cash Grandma Luz had surprised me with and given me for my birthday, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I scheduled an appointment for weed and work. At high noon, Heather showed up at our building, the goods in her purse and her equipment in her arms. I buzzed her upstairs, let her in, and she followed me to the living room. Heather prepped inks, ointments, and cleansers on a freshly scrubbed TV tray while I watched her from the couch, my exposed wrist waiting on the ratty towel I’d draped over one of its big velvet arms. I looked down at my bluish veins and took a mental picture of them while Heather snapped her gum before spitting it into the trash. Looking up, I saw her kneeling on her twiggy legs beside the coffee table. She’d begun rolling a joint and as she meticulously fashioned it, Heather updated me on her divorce from an Icelandic no-goodnik who’d used her for a green card.

  “Wait,” I interrupted her diatribe, “does Arnie know Björk?” I giggled.

  “Deirdre,” began Heather, “that was funny the first three times. It’s not anymore.”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “I’ll stop.”

  I enjoy listening to Heather shit-talk Arnie and describe her childhood, which she spent working in her father’s funeral home. Heather’s stories soothe me and make getting tattooed by her feel like getting my hair done: therapeutic, entertaining. Like most women, I’ve got a high pain threshold and me and Heather gossip the whole time her needle bites into my skin, marking me with things some people think are silly, things that make assholes ask why. Why would you get that on your body?

  Because. Because it’s fucking fun. And yes, before you ask, it hurts.

  Heather gets high on our balcony before working and I’ve got no apprehension about letting her draw indelibly on me with what others might consider impaired judgment. She’s like one of those people who’re telling the truth when they claim: I know it sounds weird but I swear I drive better when I’m drunk. Smoking out does not adversely affect her skills. In fact, I think it might enhance them.

  Once Heather finished tattooing the inside of my wrist, she smeared goo on my new piece and sheathed my forearm in protective Saran Wrap. She collected her stuff, got ready to go, and then we took the elevator downstairs together. As we parted ways, I felt a pang of guilt. I’m employed at a “last chance” school, a place where kids get sent after they’ve been expelled from every school in town or have just been released from juvie. I got the job when Rex had freshly gotten her AA degree from city college, and in my time teaching there, I’ve only had three white students, who I’ve enjoyed watching learn what it feels like to be a minority. Some days, the vibe on campus does get a little Dangerous Minds. Like I’ve got kids who wear electronic ankle bracelets so
their probation officers can monitor their movements, and I’ve confiscated weapons including a knife longer than my foot. Things are fairly harmonious most of the time, though.

  I work a split shift at the school, mornings from 8 to 12, afternoons from 3 to 5. I like this schedule because it leaves a huge chunk of daylight to do as I please. I can run to the post office, work out at the gym, or shop for the weekly groceries without any rush hour hassles. I can get tattooed, gossip with friends, and have baggies of marijuana delivered to my front door.

  Sigh.

  Eddie Chasco. He was one of my pupils. Smart but not that smart. He’d just been remanded to the California Youth Authority for failing a drug test, and there I was, a role model, walking up the street with hands dirtied by drugs that needed smuggling across town.

  Oh well. Ni modo, as Mom says. Eddie should’ve drunk bleach before his exam.

  It takes me less than five minutes to get to work. An old bank building two blocks from my apartment houses my school, and the place still looks and feels like what it used to be despite the sign “Oasis: An Alternative Learning Center” mounted out front. Years ago, robbers staged a heist there, leaving two people bullet-riddled, so the nonprofit Oasis acquired the structure hella cheap. Apparently, the urban legend is true; landlords will practically beg you to rent the scene of a violent homicide. Today, the former vault where they executed the two tellers functions as a brain trust, the teacher’s lounge/office. The former boardroom, on the third floor, is where I teach history, government, and econ.

  Arriving at work, I trudged up the stairs leading to the school’s front door. “Virus” was scratched into every glass panel composing the lobby’s fish tank face. I shook my head. Virus was Junior Camarena’s tag. He doodled it all over the homework he occasionally did and the class work he was pretty good at and on the desk he sat at and he’d be expelled by day’s end. His mom would show up tomorrow, screaming about how her son didn’t do it, he was framed because he was Mexican with a shaved head, and what’s this bill for window replacement about?

  I opened the door and saw the principal talking to a guy wearing a suit only a lawyer would wear. They were huddled where the ATM used to be, speaking in hushed tones, commiserating. Things like that’d been happening a lot lately. Auditors arriving unannounced. Frightened board members climbing off the elevator and running to their Mercedes parked in the Jack in the Box lot. All of us peons—teachers, aides, secretaries—could sense unemployment on the horizon.

  The principal gave me a stay-away look, so I took the stairs to the third floor. I passed the library, a joke; it’d been created in a day so that the school could qualify for a grant us teachers hadn’t seen a penny of. Our principal was driving a new convertible, though. I hurried past the vice principal’s closed door and the special programs office and then turned left, entering the refuge of my room. I’d decorated it with posters of revolutionary women. Sojourner Truth knitting, the question “Ain’t I A Woman?” scrolling across the top. Patty Hearst wielding her machine gun in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s blurry hydra. Dolores Huerta, like a brown Norma Rae, at the helm of a strike. Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, her rifle ready to blow balls off of rapists.

  The kids started trickling in. I had about fifteen, and that day they were going to read a little about third parties, learn about one in particular, and create a poster about it. After they read, I split them into groups, assigned them their parties, and managed them as they got to work. Amazing depictions of the United States Marijuana Party, the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the American Independent Party took shape. I don’t think the kids working on the Libertarian Party got it. Instead of images demonstrating the party’s commitment to free enterprise, I got a drawing of a Second Amendment–loving hooker riding a moped to the abortion clinic. This was my fault for spending way too much time hanging out at the Green kids’ table, going on and on about the mixed feelings I have toward Ralph Nader, explaining the difference between Lebanese (Nader) and lesbian (me).

  The groups took the final half hour of class to share their posters with everyone, and then five o’clock rolled around. The kids tidied up and I excused them. I went down to the vault to take care of some odds and ends before leaving, and the janitor locked the lobby doors behind me as I left Oasis, the last one to do so. Slowly, I descended the tiled steps leading to the city sidewalk. I inhaled. The moon was unusually bright, the air was unusually warm, and the night smelled like lilac. I crossed the boulevard, hustling past the small house with the Israeli flag waving on its porch. A busted mattress and guts-spilling-out TV set littered its alley. A little red shack and a big aqua house and then the Lutheran church that’s our polling precinct. I turned right, headed down my street, its stoic palm trees making me feel safe. A man was walking his pit bull.

  Somewhere, an engine backfired.

  All three of us gave a start.

  Then I laughed and got my keys out, letting myself in.

  As I took the stairwell up to my apartment, I could smell tortillas being fried in vegetable oil. The aroma made me hungry, my mouth watered, and I hurried down the hall, to my door. As I stepped inside, Rex hesitantly called out, “Dee?” and ran to greet me.

  She never does that.

  She stood under the hall light, adjusting her glasses, and I took note of a very specific look she was wearing, one kids wear when they’ve already done something they were supposed to get permission to do so ex post facto they ask permission while twisting their legs in a pee-pee dance. As Rex performed this move, she blocked my passage.

  “Dee, this afternoon, I went to Cris’s to deliver a bag and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “She found a rabbit!”

  “Mhmm.”

  “She was taking out the trash and she saw something dart under a car out in the alley and she checked behind the rear tire and there it was. A poor, little rabbit.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Cris caught it and she’s been keeping it in her garage, but her and Melissa can’t keep it for good because they’ve got dogs that’re assholes.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Well, I’ve wanted to get a dog forever but ’cause of where we’ve lived I can’t have one so I’ve never said anything, but now I’m thinking a rabbit would be perfect because they’re so little and they don’t make any noise.”

  “Rex, is there a rabbit in this house?”

  In a small voice, she responded, “Yes.”

  “Rex!” I stormed past her blockade and into the living room. On our coffee table rested a small cage. A rabbit cowered in the corner. He looked up at me. And glared.

  Aquí viene Johnny

  RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ

  Ana Roque got her Johnny Rocket, homey.”

  Ana says this into the mirror, shooting her finger gun toward her chocolate-red reflection as she inspects the small skate-or-die volcanoes erupting hair gel on her scalp. The cool skater guys she envied wore mile-high spikes held up by the gel-hairspray-blow-dryer formula. Depending on the situation, the neighborhood, the disproportionate ratio of truth to reputation, and how much ass she was or wasn’t going to pull in that night, Ana would decorate her sideburns with curly-Qs. Other times she would sculpt her own sideburns long and thick like a stray cat. After today’s locker-room high school showdown with them nasty cha-chas over a pair of cheap boxers, tonight Ana just wants to meet a girl. Careful not to spill any product on her T-shirt, she parts her hair with a pink jelly glob and a ton of hairspray from that ten-year-old can of Aqua Net stored under the sink, the same pink and silver can her mom used back in the Nelson years.

  Ana laughs a gran puta when she remembers this shit. Mamá never goes out anymore, thank God. No more of that cumbia twisting, late-night slurring, freestyle fucking. Mamá and Nelson. Ana and her brother Pancho stayed behind when they went off to church—this was before Nestor came from El Salvador to live with them. Nelson forced them to sit in front of the tele and watc
h Benny Hinn throw his white-suited televangelist self over the limp legs of some obese black lady in a wheelchair.

  Who cares, she tells herself, with Johnny Rocket in my pants. With her funky jellied dildo, some luck, and the punch tonight’s cheap keg will pack, she just might use it on some fine young light thing from Montebello. Puta vos, I’m Johnny Rocket. Ana never Salvi cusses, that is, curses out loud like her Salvadoran uncles would. She wouldn’t dare do so at school because she doesn’t want any of them to hear how she turns the last syllable up with a sudden lilt in her accent only to get called a chuntara for doing so. That’s why she begs Mamá for some money to hit up the allies every week as she and Becky conduct a very successful ten-point anti-chunt program also known as CA—Chuntaros Anonymous. A very painful assimilation process unbeknownst to them as such because it’s one thing for your parents to be chuntaros, but you don’t have to follow in their faded acid-wash footsteps. Consuming as a way to counter the way of their chuntaro elders. Come Monday morning, she walks in all big and bad in some new Dickies, brown like 31 flavors, snug yet never pronouncing her curves.

  Asco! This bathroom fuckin’ stinks! Dirty, sweaty huevos and that shitty ring in the toilet forces a quick gag reflex as her skin starts to crawl. She is reminded of the awful junkie shitholes in MacArthur Park. Pancho lives here too, Ana thinks to herself. It is fucked up how he acts toward Mamá. Puro gangster pelon but this fuckhead knows dick about slanging or whatever he and his homeboys do, stupid Tupac going to get middle brother killed one of these days. Ana is not going to clean it, seeing that it’s not her turn nor is she a little bitch trying to kiss maternal ass. And Pancho can be so stupid on the cusp of cruel with Ana, when he grabs his member menacingly. He taunts Ana with what he thinks she is envious of.

  Bex is running on time but too late for Ana’s anxious ass. Tonight they cruise east to catch the T-party off the pager number Ana called earlier in the day. She was in charge of finding the party and Bex was going to hook up the ride to get them there. Ana has a friend who knows some girl from Schurr High who throws a Wednesday after-school party with the occasional keg. All these chicks kick it after some support group where they all bitch and moan about liking girls and how their mother’s come after them with Bibles and unmarried thirty-yearold men. Montebello girls are notoriously sexy and freaky-liberated, though it is rare to find one who digs butches or Salvadoran dark skin. Still, there is nothing else going on in Pico-Union and Ana is not above femming it up for play.