by Lazaro Lima
“Derek,” I say into Derek’s ear, not bothering to whisper.
“Huh, what?” Derek utters, half asleep.
“I can’t sleep with all this noise,” I say. Derek rolls his eyes around as if searching to zero in on the culprit.
“I don’t hear anything,” he says. He turns around and presses his body against mine. I can feel his penis growing against my leg.
“That’s not why I woke you up,” I say. “You’re snoring too loud.”
“Sorry,” Derek says. He yawns, showing me his set of perfect white teeth. “Relájate, José. Tenemos clase mañana.”
One thing I detest is when non-native speakers address me in Spanish, especially if they’re white. And I don’t care if Derek is black and as fluent as I am; it still bothers me. I nudge his arm off me and go sit on the chaise. Above it hangs that Alfredo Arreguín poster my mother gave me for my twenty-fourth birthday. She says Arreguín is from Michoacán, just like our family, and that he’s exiled out here in Seattle, just as we are. Exile. Is that what this is?
Exile. The dictionary defines it as: 1. Banishment; also: voluntary absence from one’s country or home; 2. A person driven from his or her native place.
I toss the dictionary back on the coffee table. Derek has started snoring. And the sounds are here again, coming from inside the walls. Maybe the walls are not inhabited by physical beings at all. I’m not claiming ghosts; I’m claiming something else, something that’s not as simplistic, or sensationalistic. Then suddenly there’s a crack and I jump. I look behind me, expecting to find a fracture, deep and jagged, running down from the ceiling, but find nothing. I’m scaring myself with my own nonsense. Still, I climb back into bed and into the comfort of Derek’s body heat. That and my body blanket of tattoos is all I need to keep me warm. I place my hand along the curve of his hip and eventually, miraculously, I fall asleep.
My eyes open. I believe I’ve slept a few hours, but when I check the clock across the room I’m dismayed that I’ve been tricked by a two-minute submersion into the deep unconsciousness. And now I’m wide awake.
Maybe I’ll read poetry. That’s always boring. But the thought of turning on the light at this hour makes my face hurt, so I opt to leave my old Norton Anthology alone and collecting dust at the base of the bookshelf. Instead I go back to the chaise, to the Arreguín poster of salmon leaping in and out of visibility through the ocean waves.
This time I’m not as jittery when I hear the sounds coming from inside the walls. It’s as if I’m getting used to them. When my grandfather talks about his ghosts, he speaks of them so casually, as if they’re old friends dropping in to visit. Unlike my mother’s visitors, grandfather’s ghosts are spirits unknown to him, complete strangers with whom he had no earthly connection. It’s as if all those years that he worked in Baja as the entrance attendant at a parking garage, opening and closing the heavy aluminum doors for tourists and locals alike, has earned him the trust of every citizen at the gates of the Otherworld. Random ghosts walk through, and many of them take a pause in their journey to exchange pleasantries with my grandfather.
“Had a fellow here last night,” my grandfather will confess without warning. “A poor soul from Oaxaca, who lost his life in a factory. He’s going back to his homeland to ask his relatives to ship his body back. Give him a proper burial among his people.”
And then just as abruptly my grandfather will scratch his chin and reach across the table for a helping of tortillas.
My mother, on the other hand, claims it’s all our dead relatives who get in touch with her, my father included. Old Tía Mariquita came once to reveal where she had hidden her cache of jewelry. My mother sent word to our cousins back in Michoacán and we never heard back from them. My mother says it’s because they found the gold and are afraid she’ll want to collect her share for relaying the message. I think it’s because they dug through half the courtyard by the time it dawned on them what fools they were, following instructions from their crazy aunt up north.
Cousin Braulio came to pay her a visit also. He was our lay-about relative who drowned in a bucket of water. The story is that he came home late one night and was too drunk to bother going into the kitchen to pour a glass out of the cooler. So he knelt down to lap it up from the bucket that had been collecting rain all evening. It was a deep bucket, and a heavy Braulio. He passed out with his head in the water and that was the end of that. We all accepted that explanation, and so did the authorities, who had had their run-ins with this town drunk before. But the version his ghost came to tell my mother made everyone in Braulio’s household nervous, enough to have them shut out our branch of the family tree from theirs.
“Josefina,” my grandfather asked her. “Are you sure that’s what he said?” Even he understood the ramifications of that disclosure.
“Positive,” my mother answered. But that wasn’t enough for the authorities to reopen the case, and the death of Braulio remained an accidental drowning, not a murder.
These two visits were enough to instill confidence in my mother that she was not out of her mind and that she needed to pay close attention, and even heed those communiqués from the great beyond. So when she claimed that my father had come to tell her that she must let me guide her way through the rest of her life, she made it her mission to move to the same city shortly after I do. We started out in the Caliente Valley, where I was born, then made our way to San Diego, and then Tucson, and now Seattle. What allows her to pick up and leave, dragging my retired grandfather with her, is the money we got after the doctors fucked up my father’s kidney surgery and put him in a coma, a state he died in weeks later. All I remember from that time, besides my poor father’s frozen body, is my mother sitting at his side, praying, hoping, frightened about staying behind in the country he had brought her to, where I had been born.
Now they follow me, Mami and Gramps—my father’s father. As per my father’s instructions, they need to be near me, or near enough. I’m the last of the bloodline. I’m precious and the last thread weaving them to this physical world.
If I pursue a PhD, perhaps I’ll spare my family another move and simply do it here at the University of Washington. Although it’s a peculiar arrangement, this keeping up with my every move, I don’t dare defy it. My mother has been through enough. She has certainly given me the space to be who I am. Not only does she overlook the whole gay thing, she’s also never objected to my tattoos. I have six, but only two are visible to her—the orchid on my nape and the Guadalupe Posada skeleton on my left forearm. Derek here has made love to the other four: the butterfly on my shoulder blade, the hummingbird on my hipbone, the crown of stars around my pierced nipple, and the swallow on my lower back. So it was with slight trepidation that I informed her I was leaving Capitol Hill.
“You’re moving?” my mother said in alarm, her face shriveled up so quickly she was on the verge of tears.
“Just across town,” I said. “No further than before.” I could see her shaking. I could see her crumbling at the thought of being at the mercy of my capricious, nomadic lifestyle.
“This is a big town,” she said, her body deflating with resignation.
Despite myself I reveled in a perverse pleasure. But guilt quickly set in, and I hugged my mother to comfort her, to reassure her that I would never leave her behind. And then I went outside to break the news to my grandfather, and to watch him go through the same state of distress.
Derek stirs in his sleep. He has bent his legs and pushed them up toward his belly. I won’t be able to fit my body into his. I suppose I can climb into the other side and spoon him, but that’s not why I let a man spend the night. I try to imagine my parents in bed all those years before my father died. I try to imagine how my mother, a widow for almost a decade, has managed the emptiness of her bed without him. Is it any wonder she resorts to these fantasies about the spirit world? It makes her own world that much less vacant.
My mother will always live in fear, I hate to admit.
The only change I see in her is in her aging: every year she’s grayer and the frown lines on her forehead and around her mouth become deeper with worry. I’m not sure that she was built to survive in any place, but she’s doing it some-how, stubbornly sticking to life like a parasite. It’s disheartening, but the more time passes, the less I love her. I can feel this loss in my blood. I can feel it thinning out. One day I’ll bleed and the fluid will be colorless, transparent as a ghost’s.
After this much angst, it’ll be disappointing to find out that it’s only mice inside the walls, or some infestation of termites—a whole colony of them clustered into one large, pulsing presence. I’m beginning to understand the need for imagination—the need to believe that perhaps it’s a restless being trapped behind the wall, like in an Edgar Allan Poe story. He’s trying to tell me something, this ghost. They insist on doing that to humans because unlike other ghosts, we the living still have mouths and we can savor a secret or a revelation.
Have I inherited my father’s side of the sensitivity to the spirit world, and is it a stranger come to say hello? Or am I more like my mother, attuned to the souls of our departed loved ones, and has my grandmother or even my father come to warn me to knock it off, to stop playing mind games with my poor, living family?
I rise from the chaise and am guided to a spot on the wall where the sounds seem to emanate the loudest. In my weariness I believe I see the wall bubble out like a belly at the moment of exhale. I press my ear and two hands against the cool surface, and then I flatten the rest of my body on it. There’s indeed a heartbeat. To get the full effect, I strip off my boxer briefs; my penis sinks into the cushion of my groin. I remain fixed against the wall for a while longer and let my own beating heart communicate with whatever’s behind that barrier.
My grandfather contends that there are two types of ghosts: the good ones who will haunt you until you chase them off by asking politely or with obscenities, if the first method doesn’t work; and evil ones who come to exercise their last bit of harm before descending into their hell. Those can only be dispelled through a Catholic cleansing.
I believe my guest is a good ghost. But I won’t ask him to leave. For a change, I want to be haunted by the dead, and not the living.
“José,” Derek calls out to me from the bed. I can see the accent above the e of my name float above his body like a feather from the pillow gone free. “What are you doing?”
I don’t answer. I pretend not to hear him, even when he repeats the question. I don’t want to explain why I’m standing here in exile with nothing on except my body blanket of tattoos that makes me look like a decoration affixed to the wall.
Imitation of Selena
RAMÓN GARCÍA
The radio transmitted live updates from Corpus Christi, Texas, that warm March day in 1995: Selena, Tex-Mex singing star, had been shot. The Spanish-language TV channels interrupted regular programming to broadcast the standoff between Corpus Christi police and Yolanda Saldívar, Selena’s killer, the manager of the official Selena fan club, who was holed up inside her butch four-wheeler with a gun pointed to her crazed, homely face. Hours later Yolanda Saldívar surrendered and Selena was dead, but that was just the beginning.
Selena immediately assumed a new existence, the commercial exploitation of her afterlife: she graced the cover of the Spanish-language edition of People; posters of her proliferated at record stores of all sorts; she became the heroine of murals in the barrios and the revered saint of countless altars. Then came the Selena Barbie doll and the cheesy Hollywood movie that transformed Selena into a perfectly nice all-American girl of the Tex-Mex variety. Who could have predicted the unfortunate girl’s posthumous powers? Selena sang Americanized Tejano music while dressed in vaquero versions of Versace getups. She seemed destined for oblivion, but the gods, or whatever mysterious powers confer immortality on the mediocre, had another destiny in store. Mexican girls through-out the Southwest, from desolate towns bordering the Rio Grande, to the barrios of East Los Angeles, to every suburb in California and Arizona, shed inexhaustible tears for their murdered idol, their grieving hearts vowing to love her forever.
In Modesto, a semirural suburb in the Central Valley of California, Selena’s entrance into the afterlife inspired an unrelenting, contagious carnival of mourning. The Selena myth was so faithfully imitated there that it ended in murder, multiple murders of multiple Selenas.
Here is what happened: The only gay bar in town, the Gold Rush, became the spotlight for a series of killings in the spring of 1996. The Gold Rush is a marginal bar on the outskirts of Modesto; even the gay boys of good standing won’t go there because it is a hangout for the town’s worst outcasts: the drag queens, the drug dealers and drug addicts, the hustlers, the hardcore cholos, the prostitutes and the prostituted.
The Gold Rush was the kingdom or queendom of Pesticida, a big, fat ex-seventies chola drag queen who was benefactress to a stable of about twenty Modesto drag queens. There were lurid, cruel rumors about the origins of Pesticida’s unique name. Some of her young queen entourage claimed that she was deformed by pesticide contamination, but others disagreed. “She has three tits,” they joked. “It’s because of her Tijuana hormones. They gave her the wrong shots in the wrong places.” But only her old guard, the older drag queens, knew that Pesticida had acquired her name when, one monotonous 105-degree summer day in 1979, she single-handedly shot down four pesticide-spraying airplanes with a machine gun she claimed was a gift from a white leftist radical who had smuggled guns to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. No one was killed, but the ranchers had gotten the message; that year the fields were free of pesticides. “I did it out of a deep revolutionary conviction. Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Si se puede,” the old queens remembered her saying, as she raised her right fist in defiance, Chicano Power style. “But that little number is not going to be repeated. Nothing is worth mascara sweating off your face! Wigs and rifles just don’t mix.”
For a suburb surrounded by fields, Modesto has an unusually large population of drag queens. And their extravagantly scandalous lives are sanctioned by the Mexicano community, who see in them a grave but necessary aberration of the normal, which they find illustrious in the same way they believe exemplary the abject life of San Martín de Porres, who was not just black, abused, and scorned but also a saint endowed with miracles.
Pesticida was the adoptive mother of young queens who had made the Gold Rush the center of their infamous existence. The town queens, when they reached the age of teenage unreason, ran away from home because their campesino- and cannery-working parents could not understand their untamable greed for female glamour. While other barrio boys played football, got girls pregnant, or joined gangs, the niños reina, as they were called, were primarily preoccupied with the latest Madonna fashions, the most glamorous singers and movie stars, the shades of lipstick, and how to fit into the dresses that they secretly traded with each other. If no one was home, they would gather to simulate beauty contests in which the most realistically pretty one would win. By the time they entered high school and began to have problems at home and at school, they would have established contact with one of Pesticida’s drag queens, who mentored them in their transformation from niños reina to young divas.
There would be tears from the mothers of the niños reina (for what they viewed as the ruin of their children), who, consulting the family priest, would be advised to love their strange children despite their shameful behavior; the fathers would turn a blind eye in confusion and repulsion; the grandmothers would say their rosaries and pray to the Virgen that little Joselito be cured of his bad habits, but everyone knew that Joselito would end up at the Gold Rush, a member of Pesticida’s distorted familia. That’s exactly what happened to a certain José Martínez, who was the first drag queen at the Gold Rush to be killed. He was found in the parking lot of the Gold Rush, five gunshot wounds riddling his purple sequined bell-bottomed pantsuit, an outfit designed by Selena herself, that José Mar
tinez, who went by the name of Ava (after Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa), had made in accordance with the pattern illustrated in the book published by Selena’s father, Selena’s Dresses: You Too Can Make Your Own.
Pesticida’s girls lived under certain house rules that applied equally to all. The most fundamental law was that one drag queen could not perform the songs of a singing star that another drag queen in the house had previous claims to. If there were disagreements, Pesticida was the absolute arbiter, and her judgment was final. Pesticida held absolute ownership of Selena’s stardom. Thus, Ava’s imitation of Selena had been a serious subversion of the law.
The second murder claimed the life of Irma, the most beautiful chicken of the house. The youngest queens were called chickens because they were still learning their trade—the personal and public intricacies of being locas, in accordance with their most notorious physical and psychological, God-given attributes. The queens were, in essence, classic actresses. Pesticida ran the Gold Rush like her own personal celebrity studio. She was very fond of Irma because she was creative and, in Pesticida’s words, “artistic and very talented.” Irma was born Oscar Salazar, in Turlock in 1970 to farm workers from Michoacán. Oscar Salazar had adopted the name and celebrity traits of Irma Serrano, “La Tigresa,” the sexually outrageous Mexican movie star, a notorious exploiter of controversy and scandal. Irma had performed “Si una vez” in full Selena attire—black leather bustier and hot pants. She was shot inside the front seat of her baby-blue Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of the Gold Rush, as she was getting ready to go home at 2:30 in the morning. Her forehead collapsed on the steering wheel, the car horn blaring into the empty Modesto night.
The third murder was of a twenty-year-old transsexual named Bianca, who modeled her 1970s disco queen self-image on Bianca Jagger during her Studio 54 days. His real name was Gabriel Montoya. His parents had emigrated from a small town in Jalisco when he was seven years old. Like the rest of the niños reina, he had dropped out of high school and made a living performing at the Gold Rush. He hooked once in a while and sold a bit of weed or cocaine when money was tight. Pesticida kept a close watch on her subjects’ livelihoods, which meant that they had to keep their drinking and drug use to a strict, non-messy minimum. It was understood that love problems or good fortune with men had to be reported to Pesticida, out of respect for her status as supreme mentor, mother, and employer. Pesticida never suspected that individuals with less generous views of her role simply viewed her as a glorified pimp, whose glories were quite cheap. Pesticida, with equal concern for the health of her family and the business she ran, did not allow the girls to have pimps or abusive boyfriends. “I won’t have any fucked-up junkie putas in my show,” Pesticida said if rumors that certain girls were turning too many tricks reached her ears, or if she saw one of her girls twitching nervously from too much coke. By “show,” Pesticida didn’t just mean the nightly performances, but the Gold Rush, her own low-budget entertainment kingdom.
