Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing

by Lazaro Lima

  No one is home, just Ana and fucking Zeppelin. Her rocker horns are superchido and sexy as she stands there practicing looking sensitive although she’s just horny and forlorn as fuck. That’s how you hook a loca, man. No, not a loca in that mi vida loca kind of way, but a loca all up in that I-never-promised-you-a-rose-garden type of shit. The kind of girl with a serious case of the crazies who pours Elmer’s glue all over her hands to let it dry and peel all throughout first period, who puts glittery flower and heart stickers all over her switchblades and Zippo lighters. The kind that cuts deep. The kind that shows off cigarette scars all sweet and alluring like they were dainty hands waiting to be christened with a hundred baby kisses. The kind that Ana always falls in love with. Ana— just a harmless puppy with a hard cock.

  The rusty boom box hisses Ana out of her head with the speaker’s static vibrating on the toilet seat lid. The music indulges Ana with a feeling of invincibility. She wants to holler in slow motion like a wolf. Ana walks around in a circle, but it’s not a circle, it’s the mosh pit in her head. She aches to get beat on hard. La Bex hooked up a badass mix— Bikini Kill, L7, Screaming Trees, Iron Maiden, and Metallica.

  Bex has her older brother’s little records from when he used to go to punk shows at the Anti-Club on Melrose and Fender’s in Long Beach, back when there were no Hot Topics in the mall. When it was pure. Thunder bass claps in rapid succession and off-time signatures; it’s the rhythm of the beast that beats like a drum, monster beats, a late-night siren scream, a mom too tired to dream. Ghetto birds flapping their wings in between staccato bursts of Living, loving, she’s just a woman.

  Empty room and no one will be home for at least another hour. Johnny Rocket leads Ana, compelling her to pace back and forth throwing reckless punches in the air. She walks in a semicircle in the living room where she sleeps with her two older brothers. No one worried even though they should have about the proximity Ana had to Pancho and Nestor. She certainly looked like a more beautiful, softer version of her brothers, which enabled most people to think that her brothers could never bother in harming such a tough girl when there are so many other fragile little girls in the building for them to victimize. Her big hands, wide hips, flat chest, and strong legs made you believe that she could take care of herself.

  Her wiry arms deliver a right hook at the papal plate that sits on the end table; an uppercut for the Jesus Christ of El Salvador, the creepy little-kid version of Jesus on the ugly calendar from the cheap furniture spot around the corner on Sixth Street. She did not consent to share space with these religious surrogate fathers and little brothers. But, Mamá gets the bedroom, and traces of men diminish with each inhale and exhale. Ana never shared the bed with her mother. There was never any room before Mamá gave up all that romantic-tragedy-for-a-man type of shit with Nelson. He constantly spoke of seeing the devil’s arm around Ana’s shoulders and said she should get baptized in his church. He certainly wasn’t her father, but that wasn’t Ana’s problem. She was used to enduring men like Nelson—men who assaulted her with unwelcome opinions as soon as she ventured outside the apartment. Mamá could only do so much, but to cope with Nelson’s limp dick was not an option, especially since all he does is talk about God. Mamá couldn’t love God enough for this man or his useless member—todos tenemos vicio.

  It was nice to revel in Mamá’s absence. Ana was growing cagey the older she got and more so because of Mamá’s constant reminders that she preferred the children of strangers over her own brood. Those kids west of La Cienega never got into trouble. None of the sweet blond children Mamá looked after ever grew up to gangbang, run game in the park, be dykes, or sniff glue out of brown paper bags. Mamá’s job was her fantasy life away from the home she inadvertently built with her first life’s children. It was always difficult to escape one’s first life when you are the type of mother who doesn’t kill her children by the side of river. All that tragic Llorona mythology is for Mexicans anyway.

  Ana successfully conceals her skater spikes and rocker horns from her mother’s disapproving tirades. Mamá is never so exhausted that she can’t deliver a few devastating critiques on Ana’s clothes and masculine mannerisms. Manflora is Mamá’s favorite dis, though to Ana’s ears it sounds praising. Tough and tender, sweet and salty, penis and vagina— who doesn’t want to be a man-flower?

  Mamá will come back soon to the one bedroom, corner of 8th and Bonnie Brae, after a marathon shift in Cheviot Hills on the west side. One neighborhood in twenty years, three sons and seven families later—convenient to keep the same bus route, clockwork, except every couple of years she comes home about twenty minutes later than the year before. There’s just too many people in L.A. There’s just too much of this and not enough of that. Siempre, so that’s what this story is about. Excess and lack thereof.

  The term they use is “being referred by,” though Ana could really only imagine seven families passing her mother around like an orphan. It was she who was there to take care of their children, though once they hit ten they didn’t need her housebreaking services anymore. How great it will be for Simon and Caitlin to learn Spanish and ass-wiping at such an early age; it will certainly give them an edge in admission at Harvard Westlake hands down. Folks in Cheviot Hills are rich, but not as rich as they are in New York City. In New York they don’t hire Salvadoran ladies to watch their kids; they get semipedigreed white college girls to walk their brats. Now that’s money.

  Ana hears the familiar hum then cough of a car double-parked outside her building.

  “Ey! Johnny Rocket!” Bex calls out in a throaty tone. “Let’s go, man!”

  Ana, who pokes her head out the window and sees Bex behind the wheel with similar spikes busting out of her scalp, tosses her chin up in the salutatory way. She walks back to the bathroom to slurp a quick mouthful of Listerine, winces as it stings her gums, and spits the fiery liquid into the sink. Ana gives her hair another once-over and runs her fingertips along the line of peaks stiffened by her mother’s can of hair-spray. She straightens her long shorts around her hips and makes sure that the right amount of boxer short is poking above her beltline, careful not to push Johnny Rocket out of the makeshift harness Ana fashioned out of thick rubber bands, an old tube sock, and a small metal belt buckle. She gives her reflection a rascally smirk. It’s on, motherfucker, she tells herself. Ana hears Bex growing impatient as she blasts the horn, jolting Ana out of her momentary lapse into vanity.

  Bex looks at the digital clock on the dashboard, anxious to get through downtown traffic and then all of East L.A. to Montebello. She hates the freeway, making it easier for her brother to loan her his jalopy Civic. Bex exhales deeply and sits back, looking into the rearview mirror as she smoothes down her thickly arched eyebrows. She notices a familiar female body coming into focus, causing her eyes to widen and her mouth to mutter obscenities. The older woman with a salt-and-pepper bob carries two plastic grocery bags in each hand as she walks toward Ana’s building from the bus stop. Bex tries to slump down in her seat but knows the woman will suspiciously recognize the car covered in faded punk band and KROQ-FM stickers. Ana is coming down the hall and will be busting through the metal gate shortly. The woman is waddling closer, only footsteps away from the building’s decaying entrance. Bex, in an attempt to restrain her nervous energy, unwittingly hits the horn, producing a toot so loud it startles both driver and pedestrian. Ana hears the second honk, smiles huge, and sprints down the hall like a husky boy about to score his first goal. She charges the door and whacks it open. Her grin quickly fades—busted—as she sees her mother whipping her neck away from Bex’s honking. As she notices the scandalized expression on Ana’s mother’s face, Bex peels out, making a sharp right turn up the street.

  “Were you going somewhere?” Mamá asks sharply as she scrutinizes Ana’s alien uniform. “¿Por qué te miras así?” Mamá hissed her last query and moved toward Ana’s torso, feeling the T-shirt. “Ra-mo-nezz.” Mamá pronounces each syllable mockingly.

 
; “It’s Ramones, Mom,” Ana retorts, turning her head to look for Bex.

  “Look at your hair… . ¿En qué andas, muchachita?” Mamá says as she drops two of the grocery bags and brusquely grabs her daughter’s arm. Ana jolts back and her heel gets caught on a pebble, making her lose her balance and narrowly avoid a fall. In trying to regain her composure, Ana’s do-it-yourself harness shifts in her pants, creating a noticeable bulge in her crotch. Mamá gasps as Ana tries to smooth the disobedient dildo back down to its dormant state.

  “Go upstairs and take that thing off,” Mamá says through gritted teeth. Her hand turns into a fist as her body begins to shake. “No sos hombre, ¿qué te pasa?” Ana winced as her mother’s hurtful words left their burning mark on her heart, sketching the blueprint for a future deposit of keloid numbness. There was no use in fabricating an elaborate storyline as Mamá emanated such a quiet fury, interminably concerned with retaining her poise in public. Ana stood facing her mother, knowing that she had a better chance delaying physical punishment by remaining in public view then by confronting her mother in their lone apartment. Ana does not budge.

  “I don’t need to be a man, Mamá,” Ana says coolly. “I’m me and other things al mismo tiempo.” Ana was tired. The regurgitation of shame was becoming unbearable. Mamá’s eyes flashed with rage as she pursed her lips tight, shock and incredulity coursing through vein and artery. Ana crossed her arms and rolled her eyes at her mother’s silence, aggravating the woman to respond with an open-handed slap. Before Ana registers the sting on her cheek, a car in the invisible distance is vrooming loudly, a skidding interruption to the showdown on the curb. Ana touches her cheek though her eyes follow the steely blue Honda maneuvering along her street. Fear and relief overwhelm her as she bolts toward Bex and the passenger seat that would transport her to a temporary paradise. Ana lifts the handle, gets inside, and turns to sneer in her mother’s direction, defiant and desperate to be seen.

  “Wassup, man?” Bex asks. She has seen the wrath of Ana’s mother many times in the decade they have been friends. “You know you can crash with me, right?”

  “It’s all good, man,” Ana said, quietly wiping a renegade tear from the corner of her eye. “She’s not going to get in my head this time.”

  The two homegirls drove in silence down Third Street, passing through Little Tokyo and the Toy District with nothing but the pullout tape deck playing X-Ray Spex through a busted speaker.

  “For what it’s worth, Johnny,” Bex says with her usual optimistic smile, “I’m glad we’re going out.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Ana replied, digesting the familiar bittersweet tang between her real and perceived lives. “I just want to meet a girl tonight, ya know.”

  Haunting José

  RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

  Don’t ask if I believe in ghosts. I refuse to, even as I lie here listening to the strange sounds coming from inside the walls. If this were my old apartment I’d dismiss the noises as the everyday chatter of an old kitchen: the overworked wires in the stove, the pipes beneath the sink, shrinking or expanding in response to the season, the refrigerator creaking with the burden of its own weight. No ghosts there. Only the echoes of the living.

  My family, on the other hand, can’t get enough of ghosts. They’ll sit for hours in the evenings, spinning tales of spectral visitations and paranormal activity—memories of moving objects, hearsay of haunted houses, postpartum possessions, demon dwellings, et cetera. Each time I hear the stories they come with a little more flourish and flair than the earlier versions. That’s why it took me so long to lose my fear of the dark, and why, before I became a grown-up and an atheist, I recited every memorized prayer in the catechism—the Ave Maria, the Credo, the Lord’s Prayer, et cetera—before I could sleep. Those prayers were like a nice Catholic shield against my grandfather’s hoof-footed, chicken-legged, goat-homed, pitchfork-carrying dwarf devils that wandered the shadows after sundown, searching for errant children.

  All through my college years I’ve never taken home a friend or a lover, afraid that my grandfather would come over and commence to entertain his captive audience with his long-winded, implausible, unbelievable stories. I’d be embarrassed to place a friend in a situation like that. Or worse yet, what if my guest witnessed one of my mother’s many superstitions—odd, unrecognizable ones like her habit of crossing herself whenever the clock chimes to the hour, or lighting the candle on top of the television whenever the pope appears on the screen? Even other Mexicans don’t behave this way.

  I would never think to tell my mother about the sounds in my new studio apartment in Seattle. She’d either want to rush over to bless every comer with one of her crazy concoctions of oil and cactus extract or she’d bring it up at the next gathering of ghost telling I happen to stumble upon. “José’s new apartment is haunted. Isn’t it, José?” she’d say, and then my grandfather would pounce on it, never letting up until I fabricated some acceptable narrative around the whole thing.

  There isn’t really anything worth talking about anyway. I’m simply unfamiliar with the new place and its noises. All living spaces have them, I’ve discovered. My old apartment channeled those sounds through the appliances because I spent many an evening preparing an exquisite meal that would earn me an exquisite roll in the hay. That’s why I don’t date vegetarians. I’ve also discovered that the best aphrodisiac is meat—steak, preferably, but in moderation. It must trigger something primal in a man when combining the two acts, eating and fucking, so close together. They always come back for seconds.

  They also tend to sleep quite soundly when all is said and done. Derek here is snoring like a bull and keeping me up. I could light a firecracker in his ear and he wouldn’t budge. It’s a miracle I can still hear the sounds inside the walls. Outside, the wind is blowing. But the glass must be bulletproof or something because I can barely detect the rustling of the leaves. I’m not sure yet if this is better, the silence of the outside world. In my old apartment the window was a thin glass and I could hear the passersby stumbling home late at night, arguing all along the side-walk, or jabbering on their cells to friends in later time zones. This random eavesdropping was like an urban lullaby that eased me into dream. Not that Seattle needs another lullaby: the traffic and the rain are good enough. Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble sleeping tonight—I can hear no street noise, and it hasn’t rained in a week, and Derek here snores like he dances, without rhythm.

  There it is again.

  The sounds are coming from inside the walls, not through them. I know the difference. Through plaster and brick the noises that carry are the neighbors’. In the old apartment, I was wedged between Mrs. Hiller-man and a Seattle cliché, a musician. Mrs. H always fell asleep with the television at high volume, apparently never forgetting to pop off her hearing aid—the same powerful little amplifier that pressed her to bang on my wall when she could hear my stereo playing. On a bad day, the old lady would be yelling into the phone to one doctor or another, or to the nurse who came over to administer some injection, and the guitar player would be composing insufferable tunes that I’ve only heard in mediocre musicals played at the local coffee shops. At times like that, I fled my tiny Capital Hill haven and found myself on my mother’s couch in that old house across the lake. Why my mother chose Queen Anne I’ll never know. There are plenty more inexpensive neighborhoods. Certainly, more inexpensive towns. But no, Mami and Gramps had to follow me here to Seattle and blow the settlement money again on an old fixer-upper that doesn’t have a single glimpse of a body of water.

  But I digress. My point is that I can tell when it’s a human-made sound and when it’s something more independent of our obnoxious species. The studio must be made of a thicker material, because I can only hear my neighbors murmuring, even when their voices are loud. No wonder I had such trouble hammering in the nails. I came this close to purchasing a drill. My neighbors here are much quieter—a reflection of their class status, no doubt. But the lack of noise also makes
the place feel isolated, empty, and lonely.

  Technically I now live in Madrona, where the homes are as big as palaces, but tucked away demurely behind extravagant foliage, as if apologetic about their size. I can still climb on the Number 2 bus to Queen Anne, but it’s a much longer trip. It’s also a longer drive to the university, where I hope to earn my master’s in English in a year or two. However long it takes, my family will be patient, just as they were when I was completing my bachelor’s—two years in San Diego and two more years in Tucson. But they follow my tracks from city to city, afraid they’ll lose sight of me.

  There it is again. It’s as if the walls are inhabited. Maybe by those tiny aberrations I’ve seen in old horror flicks—little green bug-eyed monsters that worm out through the vents to antagonize the new inhabitants of their domain. They’re beating on the wall to keep me up, to exhaust me into leaving and giving this place back to them. Or maybe it’s muttering I hear, the leadership counsel plotting my overthrow. Maybe they’re further along in the plan by now and are giving last-minute instructions to the minions—the miniature henchmen who will have miniature statues erected in honor of the successful coup. Am I listening to myself ? I sound just like my grandfather.