At sixteen my sex life was all wish and fantasy. That’s why that Saturday evening was so important. I had some solid evidence that my solitariness would change that very night. I had met this girl at one of the speech tournaments. Her name was Patricia, but she asked everyone to call her Pita and not Patty. I thought she was attractive in her own way even though Louie said I was just desperate. What I liked about her was the suggestive way she spoke. There was always a hidden promise in her words. Not her words, exactly, but the way she said them. At the last speech tournament, she’d proceeded to tell me how her church was having a fair and how there was going to be a booth where you could get married to someone for an hour. They gave you a little plastic ring and an official-looking certificate, and you vowed to spend sixty minutes with each other, for better or for worse, in health or in sickness. I remember her pausing here for a moment to see if I had picked up on the implications of this. But I didn’t. I’m sorry to say I was clueless. So she filled me in: “In back of the church there’s a parking lot where the newlyweds go honeymoon.”
The whole following week I was pretty much useless at school. I had to find a way to make it to that fair. It took some convincing, but I got Louie to give me a ride to the fair and to be my best man at the ceremony. I called Pita and she, as I’d hoped, was delighted with the idea of making the wedding even more realistic. She would get Louie a bridesmaid, no problem, and we were all set to roll.
But that Saturday evening, as I looked out the window, my meticulously imagined honeymoon suddenly felt in serious doubt. The guy sitting in the front seat with Louie did not seem like the marriage-booth type. Was he going to ruin this for me?
Louie honked again, so I closed the curtains and went to say goodbye to my mother. She made the sign of the cross on my forehead and said what she always said to me when I went out with Louie: “No hagas nada malo.” I knew what she meant by “malo,” and, sadly, it was beginning to look as if, in fact, I would not be doing anything malo on that particular night.
As I approached the car, I saw that the man in the passenger seat had rolled down his window and was smoking a cigarette. He did not turn to look at me in the back seat when Louie introduced us. His eyes were fixed on the group of kids sitting on lawn chairs, smoking pot and drinking beer on the playground across the street.
“Who are those guys?” Filiberto asked. “Some kind of gang?”
It took me a moment to realize the question was directed at me. “Oh. Um, they call themselves the Carnales,” I said. “A gang, yeah. This housing project is their territory.”
Filiberto turned around to look at me then. “You’re afraid of them.”
I wasn’t sure whether this was a question or whether he was simply describing the obvious. What I knew for sure was that I was afraid of him at that very moment. I did my best to look him briefly in the eye and said, “I try to stay out of their way.”
“How’s that going?”
“All right. So far,” I answered, ignoring what sounded like a tinge of disdain in Filiberto’s voice.
“He poops in his pants every time he sees them,” Louie said, trying unsuccessfully to be funny. Louie was not far from the truth, however. Those vatos were an ulcer-causing, stomach-churning pain in my day-to-day existence. Not only did I live in fear of them and of the way they looked at my mother, I also lived with the nauseating knowledge that I was a coward who peeked through closed curtains and looked around corners to make sure no Carnale was there. And when they whistled and shouted catcalls at my mother, I walked on by as if I didn’t hear them.
After a few moments of sizing me up in silence, Filiberto smiled. It was a smile and not a sneer, for which I was grateful. Then Louie started the car. Filiberto flicked his cigarette in the direction of the Carnales, not caring when a group of them stood and yelled as we sped away; I sunk deeper in my seat. I was suddenly filled with anger. Angry at Louie for ruining my evening and angry at this stranger who had just made my miserable life in the projects even worse than it was before. Filiberto’s disrespectful gesture would come back to haunt me, of that I was certain.
I don’t think I said a single word for the next twenty minutes. My anger subsided a little when I realized that we were still heading to the fair and there was still a possibility that the evening could be salvaged. I half listened to Louie asking Filiberto about his experience in Vietnam, where he had just returned from, and to Filiberto’s monosyllabic answers.
“Did you ever engage in actual battle with the Vietcong?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“Hell.”
“Did you kill anyone?”
“Yes.”
“How . . .”
“Ya. No más.”
I was glad Filiberto didn’t want to say more. I certainly didn’t need to hear anything else.
When we got to the fair, Filiberto spotted the beer patio and headed there. The beer patio consisted of a dozen metallic tables inside a roped area. There was a sign near a tub of ice and a keg that said 21 OR OLDER. Next to the beer patio was a wooden stand where kids from a high school’s mariachi band were blowing on their trumpets and tuning their guitars, getting ready to play. The whole front parking lot of the church was filled with booths for games and for selling every kind of food imaginable. Menudo, gorditas, tamales, tacos, and also corn dogs and pizza slices. There was even a booth called MexDonald’s for those who preferred hamburgers with a touch of salsa. Kids were running around with cotton candy on their faces and teeth stuck to caramel apples. The whole scene was an instant mood lift. Even Filiberto seemed to have recovered from Louie’s depressing interrogation. He bought five tickets from the man at the beer patio, pointed at a table, and said he would wait for us.
“Who’s he?” I asked Louie as we searched for the much-anticipated marriage booth.
“He’s a cousin. He’s the son of the brother of my uncle’s wife. Does that make him a cousin? He showed up at our house an hour before I had to pick you up. I didn’t think he’d say yes when I asked him if he wanted to come.” Then, after a pause: “Something’s not right with him.”
“As in the head?”
“He’ll be normal and then poof, he’s gone somewhere else. Or he’ll flare up over nothing. Like in the car. I was just trying to have a conversation and then . . .”
“You were asking stupid questions.”
“They weren’t stupid. They were incisive questions.”
“Incisive? Man, you don’t have to be in lawyer mode all the time. You want to know what’s incisive? Those guys he flipped his cigarette at. They’ll incise me for sure when I get back.”
“But at least you won’t be a . . . virgin . . . when . . . you . . .”
I followed Louie’s gaze and understood why Mr. Corporate Lawyer had stammered and was at a loss for words perhaps for the first time in his life. There, next to Pita, in front of the marriage booth, stood the young woman who was to be Pita’s bridesmaid and Louie’s partner. She was blonde, so blonde you almost had to shade your eyes. She was our age, yet she seemed like she had fully grown, while the rest of us were stuck as kids.
It amazes me now how much of what happened next I remember. I had seven dollars in my wallet, my mother’s hard-earned money that I had taken earlier that day from her rent envelope. Those seven dollars, I learned quickly, were not nearly enough to pay for both the marriage ceremony and the customary post-wedding celebrations. The wedding was a dollar per participant, and I paid for Pita, of course. Then there was the Polaroid picture that would cement the occasion forever . . . and the heart-shaped frame—for a total of two dollars. I had just three dollars left by the time I saw Louie walk hand in hand with the bridesmaid in the direction of the Mustang. Pita wanted a celebratory dinner, and so off we went to the tamales tent. We had three tamales each: two dollars. I spent my last dollar trying to win a stuffed anim
al for Pita that she could “cuddle with” as she thought of me.
“Do you want to honeymoon?” I asked shyly as Pita hugged the red-and-blue stuffed parrot I had miraculously won for her.
“I need more time.”
“But back at the speech tournament you said . . .”
“I didn’t expect to fall for you. If I hadn’t fallen for you, we could do it. But I fell for you.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know what to think. The way she said it and the way she looked at me, I knew she was telling the truth. Pita was feeling something serious and beautiful and I was stunned and baffled that someone could actually feel that way for me.
Pita grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the carousel, but I was broke and too embarrassed to tell her that I could not support her like a good husband should. I told her I had an older friend waiting for me at the beer patio, someone just back from Vietnam who was not well, mentally speaking, and I felt bad leaving him alone. She understood and urged me to go to my friend. I was instructed to call her that very night when I got home. Then she kissed me softly on the cheek. And so we parted ways. A temporary absence, in Pita’s mind, and in mine, too, although I didn’t realize it just then.
When I got close to the beer patio, I stopped and watched Filiberto. He seemed almost happy to be alone, smoking his Camels and sipping beer from a plastic cup. He hadn’t gone “somewhere else” like Louie said. It was clear that he was very much here, engulfed by the blast of the mariachi trumpets and the smell of elotes roasting on a nearby grill. I stood there, not knowing where to go, until I saw him motion to me to come over and sit with him. He had a beer waiting for me when I got to his table. I glanced over at the old man working the keg, expecting him to come over and ask for my ID.
“Don’t worry,” Filiberto said. Then he looked at the old man and winked at him.
It was still a few years before I would acquire a taste for beer or alcohol. But I did not want to be disrespectful of Filiberto’s offer, so I took a big gulp.
“The way to drink beer is to sip it. Make it last. That way you can enjoy it without getting drunk.”
Just then a balloon popped next to us and Filiberto jerked his head nervously in the direction of the sound. I leaned over and tried to read the words tattooed on the side of his head.
Whom shall I fear?
“It’s from the Bible,” Filiberto said. He was looking at the little boy holding the limp string of the popped balloon, but somehow he knew I was reading his tattoo. He turned and faced me. “ ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?’ ”
“Psalm twenty-seven,” I said. One of the Scriptures I often read at Mt. Carmel.
Filiberto nodded, smiled, and went silent. And just then, it did seem as if he had gone “somewhere else.” What came to me while we were both quiet was that the only reason someone would tattoo the opening words of Psalm 27 on their skull was because they were facing a terrible opponent. The inner enemies that Filiberto was fighting had to be worse than even the Carnales, and yet, unlike me, he was not hiding from what he feared.
“It may be a while before we see Louie,” I finally said. Then, mostly to myself, “Some guys have all the luck.”
But Filiberto heard me. He looked at me with eyes that were either full of kindness or full of pity. “How did it go for you?” I knew he was referring to my recent experience with matrimony.
I thought of cracking a joke, but there was something about the way he asked that invited honesty. “She said she had fallen for me, so she couldn’t do it.”
“Did she mean it?”
I thought for a few moments. “Yes.”
Filiberto nodded. “So it was you who got lucky tonight.”
“Me? Louie’s out there . . .”
“I know what Louie’s doing. I saw him walking to the car. What I’m telling you is that you got something tonight he didn’t get.”
“What?” I was truly interested in knowing because I had spent a lot of time thinking about all that Louie had, and all that I had in comparison, all that Louie was and all that I was, and I had always come out lacking.
Filiberto took a few deep breaths before he spoke again. “That girl who you were with, she had dignidad, man. Don’t you see?”
I shook my head.
“Dignidad. It’s something we Mexicans living here in the US need to have. We need to give value and worth to ourselves. Others won’t give it to us. That girl you were with acted with dignidad tonight. She valued who she was. She valued you. She didn’t want to cheapen what she felt. Not like those vatos back there where you live. They act all puffed like they’re big stuff, but deep down they don’t think they’re worth anything. People look at them and then they believe none of us have any worth.”
My memory of the rest of the night is very blurry after that. Despite Filiberto’s advice, I gulped down the rest of my beer and another one, too. I remember Filiberto taking me to the churros tent and buying me a giant cup of coffee. After that we walked around, and when Pita saw us, she beamed at me in a way that I could now appreciate. And, I have to say, I was proud to be seen with Filiberto.
I never saw Filiberto again, except one time about a year later, when Louie showed up at school with an obituary from the El Paso Times. Filiberto Mendoza, twenty-two years, of Socorro, Texas, died instantaneously when his truck was struck by an outgoing freight train at the intersection of North Loop and Zaragoza.
One day, shortly after that, Joey, the little brother of one of the Carnales, came up to me as I was walking home and asked me if it was true that the vato who protected me was dead.
“What?”
“The bald dude with the tattoo on his head. He came over one day and told my brother that if anything happened to you or your family, they’d have to deal with him.”
The catcalls and menacing stares had stopped a while back. I had been grateful without letting myself wonder why. Now I knew.
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked Joey.
“Nobody cares about you. You’re a piece of mierda.”
Except that by then I had been going out with Pita for a year and she had convinced me that I wasn’t. Filiberto was right. I had found my dignidad.
COCO CHAMOY Y CHANGO
by e.E. CHARLTON-TRUJILLO
Only when the bottle spins do I remember . . .
I had this dream of Frida Kahlo painting a picture of me naked with my heart on my sleeve and my stomach in my hands. Mama shouts to me from my sister’s kitchen, saying I need to take out the trash before my dad gets home. Only, in the dream, I know he’s not coming home because he never does. I also know that my sister doesn’t have a kitchen with Talavera tile floors and yellow plaster walls because she died in the womb with me, but my mind has made up the kitchen (and my sister) all the same.
I salivate from the smell of flour tortillas warming on the comal. The rolling, low boil of Mama’s spicy Spanish rice rumbles along the walls, shaking the floors. Frida doesn’t care. She keeps painting me naked even though I’m standing in her Casa Azul studio with my baggy boy jeans and a wrinkled blissful-blue button-down. Frida can see through my clothes. She can see through my tousled hair, dripping over the right side of my crooked face. She can see through everything I’m scared to say out loud because she’s Frida fucking Kahlo. And just before I wake up, I hear—
“Daniela.” Ruben nods toward the bottle. “Truth or dare?”
I hear the sound of crying and realize it’s me. It’s me that’s crying in the dream . . .
And I still hear it even in a basement booming with hip-hop—full of people I don’t really know at a party I didn’t want to come to. Sitting in a circle playing spin the bottle because everyone is horny or bored or some kind of both, I guess.
“¿Qué pasa?” Ruben says.
The laughter and music crac
kle—ache in my right ear. I don’t want a truth or a dare. I don’t want this circle of juniors and seniors and even people who graduated back in May to stare at my broken face.
Ruben leans in, whispers, “Just pick.”
I stare at the bottle of Mexican Coke, pointing its chipped glass lip at me from the shiny auburn concrete floor. I clear my throat, “Um. Dare, I guess,” because truth would be impossible.
“Órale,” Jorge shouts from across the circle. “Taco Bell Mexican is in for a dare.”
“Cut it out,” CoCo says to him.
“Ay, I was just messing with her.”
“Them,” she corrects.
Marisol “CoCo Chamoy” Hernández’s gaze falls loosely in my direction. The reflection of dangling Christmas lights glistens in her eyes—soft, insistent. There are at least seven hundred and seventy-seven poems waiting to be written in them. All about change and revolution. About the institution of injustice and oppression. She fears nothing. I fear everything.
“Seven minutes in heaven with CoCo Chamoy!” Ruben announces.
Howls boom! Clapping breaks out. I cover my right ear from all the noise.
“Wait—what?” I say.
I look at CoCo. The poems have vanished from her eyes. Replaced with the uncomfortable feeling of being locked in a—
“Closet! Closet! Closet!” roars out from a few.
“They can’t go in there,” Jorge says to Ruben.
“Ay, Mexican. You didn’t care when you stuck me and Pablo in there last summer.” Ruben stands up. “Rules are rules.”
“It’s fine.” CoCo steps over the bottle, pulling me up off the floor.
Living Beyond Borders Page 5
