said my drunk Tio but there was pedo, his face was red and everybody was looking down and away into their whiskey and seltzers, their whiskey and cokes, their whiskey and whatever they drank at weddings in Nuevo Laredo. Tia wore a pained smile. She fiddled with gold leaf ear-rings that dangled like small swings.
As he leaned in Tio collared me with his beefy arm. He smelled of booze and cologne. His eyes were yolky but they held an unmistakable message, man to man:
No one should begrudge him this harmless night of happiness. So what if he was drunk? Whose business? A man worked hard so he could enjoy himself. Especially at the wedding of his nephew, whom he had known since he was in Pampers. This now young man, whom he’d sat on his knee and taken to Tecolotes baseball games.
“Nos entendemos?”
We were forehead to forehead. His breaths came short and hot. The buttons on his guayabera shirt strained.
“Como no, Tio.”
“Andale!” he laughed, slapping my cheek. He settled back into his upholstered chair.
We looked out again at the dance floor. The young people dark-eyed and handsome and vaguely resembling my mother. I had driven the three and a half hours down from Austin to represent my immediate family, who now lived in Upstate New York.
As usual, it felt like walking into ‘The Godfather’ but without a good understanding of who my character was.
She was trying to uproot something. That much Big Boy could tell. With her floral bottom to the road, his grandmother yanked with one hand. It looked like she was trying to start a lawn mower. She held a cigarette high in the other. Since moving to back to Texas a month ago, Big Boy had never seen her garden. It just went to show you, he guessed: old people could learn new tricks.
Pulling up his tube socks, Big Boy stepped off the railroad tracks and crossed the road. Mingo came out barking from under the battered pickup next door. It was already hot. Slowly, Nema straightened up and turned around.
“Ay Hijito. You scared me.” The morning sun blanked out her horn rimmed lenses. She was grasping a long weed by the neck.
“They want to kill my grass. What do you think? Should I let them live?”
Big Boy hiked the Wings album under his arm.
“No. I guess not.”
“That’s my boy.”
She dropped the weed into the H.E.B.sack. Wiping the dirt from her hands, she sighed.
“Ay, como me quiere matar este calor.”
The heat was serious here. From the minute he woke up it lay across his face like a mask. Back at Andrews he would have cooled off at the BX, or bicycled down to the Airmens’ Pool. Here all there was nothing but fields and sky.
His grandmother handed him the sack.
“Throw it away, will you hijito?”
Big Boy walked over and dropped it into the rusted trash drum. When he turned back, Nema was walking back across the crab crass, up to the porch. Mingo had returned to licking his balls by the old pickup, whose hood was open. Like some extracted heart, the blocky motor hung in chains.
is where the health care workers smoke. They stand in blue scrubs on the sidewalk outside the Saint David’s emergency room, or down by the parking garage, blowing plumes after having seen what they’ve seen, rehabilitated who they’ve rehabilitated, or filled out whatever numbing paperwork required by the hospital.
Like all smokers on break, they look both vacant and intent. It is time to space out, to not give a shit about anyone’s charts or believe in what the wellness posters have to say. That kind of alertness is for when they are on the clock. Sometimes the law enforcement officials who are following up on whatever trauma they’ve escorted hang out with the hospital people, though the police and firemen never light up.
There must be some kind of regulation that keeps cops from sharing in the ritual. Up the street the I-35 overpass rushes with traffic, ready to make fresh accidents.
The San Francisco Armory. At the corner of 14th and Mission, in San Francisco.
We were being given a ride back from the perfume dinner Alyssa helped coordinate at Woodward’s Garden, up the street. On my walk to the restaurant I’d noticed the building’s monolithic grandeur, its rainbow flags and bricked turrets. A stretch limo had pulled up to one side.
It was dark and the turrets were lit up like Bastille Day.
“The building is known for two things, our driver cheerfully said. One, it’s a server farm. Second, the building is a porn studio. It houses Avid Adult Entertainment.”
That may have explained the limosine.
A server farm and a porn studio. Both of them in a 200,000 square foot replica of a Moorish castle built in 1914 . Oh, and George Lucas filmed part of ‘Star Wars’ there.
There was something very San Francisco about the lives of that building, a mix of tech and the no holds Barbary Coast. Very efficient, too. When I was in night school for systems programming (12 years ago) we were told that the porn industry drove web innovation. Here, in one place, the fantasy industry had its means of creation and distribution.
Her name was Elizabeth, or La Liz, as her classmates called her.
Liz was one of the students whom I tutored in English at the College Assistance for Migrants (CAMP) Program, back in 1993.
Liz was a power house. Small, and stout. In my mom’s Laredo Spanish you would say “chapparita.” It connotes a pony, powerful and squat.
But that word isn’t equal to the blast of her laugh. you heard it for a good twenty seconds before she arrived
“Ok, Sir,” she would say, setting her books down on the table. Meaning it was time to get down to business.
What ‘Business’ meant was ‘Cultural Foundation.’ It was the class every freshman from the Valley had to take. The kids had nicknamed it ‘Foundations of Chupa,’ (In English, ‘Foundations of Suck’)
The discussion sections were separate, but for lecture the Brothers of the Holy Cross mixed in the rich and middle class kids. Everyone sat together in the auditorium, parsing Martin Luther King’s speeches and The Rosenberg Trial. Everyone looked miserable, as if they would rather go to the electric chair.
On a day not long after this lecture Liz and I were looking at her paper on poverty. The assignment had been to write a personal essay on what it meant to want. That way the rich kids and the Valley kids would be forced to grapple with the definition of a necessity.
Liz wrote about a Barbie. Her brown Barbie, which she had darkened with Kiwi shoe polish, and whose blond hair she had stained in Lipton tea. Brown Barbie meant the world to Liz. She took it everywhere. To Church, to the H.E.B. In a house where she shared a room with six siblings.
She even took the doll to the beet fields in Michigan where she and her family did seasonal work thinning and hoeing. Liz had made a small baby sling for the Barbie out of the bandana she wore in the hot sun. She would rather have the sun beat down on her head than for Barbie to suffer the heat.
‘Wow Liz,’ I said. ‘This is really moving.’
‘Read on, Sir.’
I did. One day, after Liz and her family had finished with their work, they stood around the pickup, laughing and shooting the breeze. A relaxed feeling settled in. The soft suss of Lite beer cans being opened
That was when Liz realized that her Barbie had fallen out of its sling. “What’s wrong, Mija?” her mother asked. But Liz had torn off across the gravel parking lot by then, back toward the field. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ she heard her brother Celso ask behind.
Liz ran to the edge of the beet field, where the tractor and loader were already rumbling through. The field was half naked. It almost certainly meant that Barbie had been harvested, or was about to be. For the first and only time in her life, Liz cried.
Her Brown Barbie would remain buried in the beet piles into the winter, when they were processed into sugar. From that day on, Liz nicknamed the Brown Barbie ‘Mi Dulce Angel’, or ‘My Sweet Angel.’ She could never walk by anything with sugar in it, be it a Hershey bar or a box of Lucky Charms, without an emotion she had to tamp down.
That, in conclusion her paper read, is what it meant for Elizabeth to want.
‘Well..,’ I let out a deep sigh.
‘Did you like it?’ she asked.
‘Liz,’ I said slowly. ‘This is one of the most moving things I’ve read.’
Liz beamed with her entire face. She patty pat patted her hands.
‘I made it up, Sir.’
‘You what?’
‘It’s a lie!’ she said cheerfully. ‘I made it up! We did the oranges but we never did the beets. My Tio Smiley and his family did, but we never had to.’
I didn’t know what to say to her. For the next half hour I half-heartedly tried to explain the difference between fiction and essay, and how the reader had to trust the writer. But in my own way I knew that was the greater lie.
I left it up to Liz whether or not to hand in the assignment.
i’m kind of digging this album, “The Silver Beatles: at Home.” i found it on Spotify this morning while looking for later John Lennon acoustic pieces. the Cherrywood Coffeehouse was playing a stripped down version of “Watching the Wheels go Round” and i thought, “oh. i’ll go find that.”
sadly, Spotify doesn’t carry everything. but it did have “the Silver Beatles.” crude, echoing, muscular, chiming rockabilly guitar back from when John, Paul, Stuart Sutcliffe, George, and maybe Ringo were learning their chops. this is two years before the fame, the pop polish and Pierre Cardin suits that made them look like lawyers from the future. it’s still raw.
what it sound like is, a working band. a working band of working class lads learning to pound out rhythm for British schoolgirls, a repressed manager, and drunken rough trade German sailors out for a night in Hamburg. it’s got the gut bucket drive of early rock n roll and the blunt attack of a bar band needing to drown out noise during a fight on the dance floor.
the reality? these are home recordings made in the early summer of 1960 at the McCartney home, 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool. that’s right, gutbucket rock and roll made in a tea and cozy brick row house. is there anything more punk than having to thrash at your parents’ place? delightful.
knives out, everybody. keep your switchblades clean. combs out, peg your jeans, and mind your duck’s ass. everybody needs release.
As I wind up to revise the book, I am immersing myself in family photographs again. This one is of my grandmother, Dolores Field Lozano. The story I remember about this one is that she is standing on her family’s old house foundation on North Beach after the great storm of 1919 blew it away. She is 13 years old here.
think the Beach Boys were the worst thing that ever happened, at least since having to return from the Pacific World War 2 beaches where they learned the sport.
one of them is my friend Anders Kroger. He founded the ad agency that made a splash with an ad for California wine coolers in the late 1980s. it’s one of those work places where the flush of new money commissions crappy art work in the democratic atrium, and everyone keeps vintage toys on their desks.
Anders is a quiet guy. casual. the Hawaiian shirts are not an affectation. his cigarettes and puka shell bracelet are the relaxed despair of someone who saw things in Guadacanal. Five of his wives never figured it out. ”I hate wine coolers,” he laughs, before breaking into a cough. “Give me a Tom Collins any fucking day.”
the day i was with him at Redondo, he stared out at waves with bloodshot eyes. the Porsche idled behind us, parked on the shoulder as we looked down from the cliffs. “man, we used to pull abalone and lobster fresh from the sea. everybody ate.”
2. Who above is male, who is female, and who is transgender?
3. In their spare time, who above enjoys the movies of Werner Herzog?
4.Who above in their youth dabbled with pot?
5. “I wouldn’t describe it as a spiritual crisis,” said this being above, “I was just 18 and impressionable. Scientology was at the right place, at the right time.”
6. “You know,” one of these gentle beings confessed after their third drink, “I’ve always wanted to take up knitting. Oh my God, does that make me human?”
That is what I think about when I think about Alexander McQueen. Of a woman, in a white dress, who runs across the hills as flames stream from her skirts. Breath steams the air and blood runs down her leg. The Scottish countryside filled with the smell of peat smoke, sheep dung, and burnt meringue.
*
It’s an image that would have read well on my iPod classic. But I lost it on a flight to Vermont. This was a couple of years ago, right after Apple introduced the iPod touch. So I couldn’t replace it. The Touch is cool, but the iPod Classic was better. Its click wheel was mysterious, the crop circle of interface. Plus, I liked the small screen. The miracle lay in how Apple had managed to shrink Bono to a three inch screen.
*
I fell in love with McQueen after watching the Kate Moss hologram, on YouTube. Kate Moss has never impressed me. There is a reason why Johnny Depp wrecked hotel rooms when they were dating. But there she was, the foul-mouthed, cocaine-addicted model turning in blillowing circles like an angel captured in a glass pyramid. I had never seen anything so beautiful. In the video you can watch the audience gasp; they seem surprised to be reminded of their innocence. In that moment everyone, even that front row Lizard of Couture Karl Lagerfeld, had a soul again.
*
I was sad about losing the iPod. But Vermont in May was a shocking green. I had come from Austin, where the lushness had already tipped into prickly heat. In Burlington yellow tulips peeked from snow, and the apple trees were just starting to blossom. The day we pulled into the residency branches bobbed in a late snow squall. Compared to the technicolor freshness of a new season, losing an iPod seemed no big thing.
*
The most striking thing about the exhibition catalogue for “Savage Beauty”, McQueen’s recent show at the Met, is the cover. It shows McQueen’s shaven head, looking straight on. Angle it and the designer’s face becomes a skull. There is something creepily forensic about the effect. Also something very fairy tale. Lee McQueen, working class boy from x, is transformed into The Evil Queen in ‘Snow White’, standing before her mirror and asking who is the fairest of them all.
*
That May in Vermont my writing studio overlooked The Gihon River. Flush with rain, it ran swollen and brown. There was no woman in flames who ran through the hills. But a Japanese sculptor, a fellow resident, staged a performance in the river after the current died down. He recruited a staff member, whose naked back curved out of the river like the large clay eggs he placed around her. Slow as Kabuki, she surfaced downstream from the large spoked wheels he propped up with river stones. The performance was liturgical; like the McQueen hologram it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
*
Death is the fairest of them all. So says the mirror. In medieval painting there was the tradition of momento mori, Latin for “Remember your mortality.” Skulls were placed in portraits, alongside pictures of youth, and on monk’s tables. Here, on the McQuen exhibition cover, before you enter his Underworld of Romance, he burns through the leather and tulle, a death’s head reminding you that the grave lies at the heart of all of that useless beauty. So much coronal splendor outlining the blotting of the sun.
*
My writer friend Al and I took a dip while the sculptor rehearsed his river piece. Painter friends helped raise the giant iron wheel while a photographer friend worked the bridge, taking photos of the work in progress. We could only swim against the current only so far before being swept back in a wide half circle. It was liberating to surrender to the chaos of bubbles, and be carried past the trees arched along the banks. And to feel connected to liturgical art being made upstream with those same barely contained forces .
*
Several months back from Vermont, I received an e-mail. It was August and our lawn had died. I didn’t know the person sending the message and almost deleted it. The subject heading read “Lost Item.” I clicked it open.
Hello,
I am Donna, and I found an item belonging to a ‘Vicente Lozano’and this email was found on the device under ‘Vicente Lozano’ in the contacts area.
I would like to return the device to it’s rightful owner. But first I would like to verify that this is the correct email.
Please respond back, I would like to give this item to the correct owner.
(:
I smiled. Of course, I wrote her back right away:
Hi Donna,
Thanks for writing. Yes, I am Vince. Wondering if you found my old ipod?
*
Not only was the river cold and clear, or the hills an unbelievable green. The Cymbalta had also kicked in. For the year before Vermont I had been terribly depressed. My mind felt squeezed in vice, it could no longer process the knot of its contradictions, pulled taut at my forehead like a tourniquet. No mattter where I went, I was ventriloquist and dummy, carrying my body in an airless trunk.
Suddenly, all of that was gone. The leaden fish hooks snagged in my mouth, removed. Climbing past the Vermont barns, it was as if gravity had taken a holiday; my arms wanted to lift of their own accord. I was prince of the Apple Towns. Everything around me, blessed. The air was bracing, the foot hills rolled at the horizon like a caridogram. I touched my forehead and cheek. So that is what it was like to have a face.
*
Donna replied
Yep!
It’s a black 80GB ipod classic,
I’m 14 years old and found this on a plane, I don’t know much about Ipods and it’s been sitting around here for the last few months and I started to look around it and found the ‘About’ section, and the contacts and stuff. Hence the email I sent you. Sorry it took so long.
:S
It says you live in Texas? Well, I’m up in Alaska, and I haven’t gone to the post office to see how much it would cost to ship it back…
*
The armor. The feathers. The leather. The steel and the tulle. Everything in the McQueen catalogue is riveting. I was most blown away by the fully feathered dress and the steel corset in the form of a reptilian spine. These are not clothes, they are more like skins left molted after an unsettling dream. You stare at them, trying to remember what country, what lost language and time. They come from somewhere fiercer than Fashion Week, where fables and the women in them still hold a dark and radiant power.
*
For a while I didn’t hear from Donna. I thought she had changed her mind and decided to keep the iPod. Which was fine. I had gone without it already for that long. Back in Texas we had entered the infernal season. Though the weather was oppressive my relief from the depression held. For the first time since I was 13, summer didn’t mean bunkering deep inside myself.
Back then I would hide out with my Walkman, down at the town cemetery. We were freshly arrived in South Texas from Washington D.C. How the air could be that heavy, how it could weigh across one’s nostrils like a pudding skin, was beyond me.
A 14 year old girl is distracted enough, learning how to survive the treacherous cross-currents of love and friendship. If the iPod provided a soundtrack for hiding out in a room of her own, well then good. I would want as much for a daughter.
*
Sometime on February 11, 2010, Alexander McQueen hung himself. A friend discovered the body in his Mayfair flat. He had been distraught about the death of his mother, was distressed by his Austrailian boyfriend having left him. McQueen left several notes, but only one detail from them was released. “Take care of the dogs,” he wrote, “I am sorry. Lee.”
Those poor dogs. How they must have barked and barked. Their animal alarm as futile as what had just happened. Ignorant, the mailman continued to make his rounds and the lorry passed. Someone stopped in front of the Georgian townhouse, checked her heel for gum. Everyday Life. Everyday things.
*
A while later I was surprised to hear from Donna.
Hi!
Sorry I have not been in touch, my mom and dad got divorced.
I will be sure to go to the post office tomorrow and see how much it costs. The ipod is in the same condition that I found it in except for the back bottom left corner, where my Mom engraved her initials, when I first found it, she took it and engraved her initials on it,
thinking that SHE was going to keep it. -.- I just found it in her stuff the other day and sent you an email.
I’m really sorry about that,
Wow. What could be the story there? I wondered. A daughter going through her mother’s stuff and deciding to intervene. She seemed faintly disappointed or angry with her mom for the opportunistic behavior. Maybe they’d fought that day, or Donna blamed her for the end of the marriage.
Maybe. Three days later, the iPod was back in my hand. Sure enough, the initials were there.
You never know with totems that come into your life from out of the blue. The iPod could have been lucky, until it wasn’t. A 45 year old man, released from depression, doesn’t ask a 14 year old girl these things. Being fourteen is hard enough. I hoped she wasn’t taking the divorce too hard. He simply thanks her, and I did.
*
When he was growing up, Lee McQueen would make dresses for his sisters. Wikipedia says he did this “at an early age.” It must have been before he left school at sixteeen, to apprentice himself to tailoring on Saville Row.
What a mutually good thing. Lee McQueen learning he could clothe the female form, and become himself. And his sisters learning they could wear his fantasies of femininity, and like Joan of Arc, to be transformed.
Shouldn’t everyone have that opportunity? To know themselves transcended through art or fashion, or a dip in the river? Especially in that first wash of hormones, when the weight of the world seems so final, and against it one seems so unmooored. If I had a fourteen year old daughter, I would give her the Alexander McQueen exhibition catalogue. For that matter, I would also give it to my son.
There is something equal in McQueen’s to the swoony adolescent height of beauty and the depths of despair. The ‘Twilight’ series can’t hope to approach it. His vision is romantic and dramatic, but with a full grip on adult identity darkening the psyche like an eclipse at noon.
Look at them. The tartan dress from “Widows of Colluden.” Or the lilac leather and horsehair piece from “It’s Only a Game.” Here, parading through runway snow and fire, are the shifts of light and cowls of darkness that first hijack the teenage everyday. The rest of life will mean swimming against this current. What better place to begin comprehending survival than McQueen’s fairy tales? In one place lies catalogued all of the costumes and armor a changeling will need to get through the World.
This piece is dedicated to Alyssa Harad, who introduced me to McQueen.
Five years ago I made a comic book of sorts out of my mother’s life. I did it for a workshop on documentary. As is my habit, I geeked out on software and immersed myself in learning ‘Comic Life’ for the Mac. For better or worse, this was the result. It was interesting to experiment with visual composition. If I had to do it all over again, there would be far fewer words. My complaints about the heavy subject matter I was working with seem old. They remind me of how long I made myself out to be a martyr.
If I had to do it over again, there would also be far less of me.
Still, I’m glad this toe dip in multimedia stands. It honors my mother’s life; like anyone who chooses to cross the Border, it is a remarkable one. Her Nuevo Laredo was a more innocent one, from before the drug cartels turned Mexico into a violent, low grade war.
Recently, my mother suffered a stroke. She’s recovered like a champ. This one is for you, Mami. Eres la autora de mis días.
The video was originally meant to be shot in Lebanon. But Miles Copland, Sting’s manager, insisted that Jaguar pay the insurance costs for filming and the car company balked. They had already given Sting and company an S-2 model for the shoot. When he heard the news, Copland slammed down the phone on Jaguar. The junior account executive on the other end was left with nothing but a ring tone. “Ro-o-o-x-anne,” he crooned to himself. Outside his tinted window the sun was setting over Santa Monica Boulevard. “You don’t have to put up the full costs…”
Gaddafi’s recent death reminded me of this video. It was his son, Saadi, who financed the shoot through Natural Selection, LLC, the production company he founded with partner Marty Beckerman. ‘Pecker Man’ was Miles Copland’s derogatory nickname for Beckerman. They knew of and had circled each other for years in Los Angeles. Copland thought Beckerman was the lowest form of slime, but then again, Copland reasoned, so was he. It was a matter of which slime you could do business with. Besides, Sting had a vision.
Algeria had moved the famous musician, its vast desert sweeps and Algiers’ aqua marine bay. What a freeing holiday it had been, just he and Trudy wandering the narrow, mazy streets. Donkey carts competed with Mercedes for road space, and children kicked plastic soccer balls made in China. What he loved about the country was what he loved about ‘Dune’: a world that felt ancient and futuristic at once. The world had begun here, in dust and honey and myrrh. Roseate skies and the wailing of the muezzin mixed in with Shakira’s latest blaring from a tinny speaker next to a fading Coca Cola poster.
Miles Copland met Sting at his sixteenth century estate up in Wiltshire. “I hate to break it to you, Buddy,” Copland said to his client, who was idly picking at an oud barefoot. All Sting did was shrug. Of course. Of course the suits considered Algeria ’high risk.’ As if Compton, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and whole swaths of Detroit didn’t count. He sighed.
“What next, Miles?”
“Why not film it in the Mojave?” Trudy said later, over wine on the terrace. Sting made a face. “Dear, no one iis asking you to be ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’” Perhaps she was right.Groundedness is why Sting loved Trudy Styler so much. In a day, hegrew excited at the thought of filming the video in the Mojave. Not only would it cut down on the hundred things that went wrong with a foreign shoot, but it would also allow for the contrast of the ancient, arid desert and the Christmas tree artifice of Las Vegas.
“Il est comme Miami, non?” Cheb Mami said when Sting called him to collaborate on the song and the shoot.
“Oui,” Sting laughed. “Vous avez un don pour la vérité, mon ami.”
All told, the two musicians had a wonderful time filming the concert at The Sands, which appears at the end of the video . Cheb brought Sting the gift of a bottle of Anisette Phenix, which they sipped between takes in a gentlemanly way. It loosened the atmosphere, which made the director happy. Pretty girls never hurt. And these dark beauties looked like they had stepped out of the ‘Song of Solomon’, bearing plates of figs and pomegranates. When Trudy saw the rushes, she clapped her hands. Sting blushed.
“Don’t make fun of me, Tru.”
She elbowed her husband. “Why look at you. A regular James Brown. You have hips.”
It was no weirder than any other workplace. Retired state troopers sat out in wide brimmed Resistols, letting their balls hang and guarding the parking places of legislators. This was 1984, before the Capitol had been turned into an underground compound that rivals the Maginot line. The zamboni waxing the Sunday marbled floors echoed through the tall rotunda of State. I fixed my tie, usually at the last minute: maroon, and patterned with macaroni sized outlines of Texas.
The Sergeant at Arms office sat just off the House floor, lined with rows of empty statesman desks. It was much busier during the Session, and weird with all kinds of special interest testimony. Representative Bill Cevehra once introduced Chief Dan Mobutu, a South African Chieftain who explained why Apartheid was good for his people.
We took turns sitting out there, feeling small under thirty foot velvet curtains and telling Japanese tourists to not mount the Speakers’ dais. You went gaga with boredom during the long afternoon; at moments like that you looked at the ceiling to see the Texas shaped chandeliers hanging like small mother ships.
Surrounded by paintings of frontiersmen, I imagined them talking to each other, just their mouths moving, the rest of them stiffened in shellac. They talked about statesmanship and hunting, and how great it was to be from Texas. I even had them trading recipes for chili. Earlier we’d had to place cans of Husband Pleasin’ brand beans on each legislator’s desk, a lobbyist’s gift. The legislators were always getting gifts. Their old wooden desks often looked like a Hank Williams Jr. Christmas. Festooned with tiny bottles of liquor and promotional jack knives.
Every so often the politicians were there. They came bustling out of the back cloak room conferring in groups of two or three. Once it was the Speaker himself, Gib Lewis, striding forward manfully with some lieutenants in tow. Gib Lewis had a disturbingly large and chiseled head: think Mount Rushmore on legs. He bit his nails as the lieutenants peppered him from behind with a briefing. Passing my corner desk, he looked down and saw that I was reading Plato’s ‘Republic’, for a philosophy class. He paused long enough to flash an electric smile and tapped the desk with a ringed finger. ”Son,” he said in his big bass voice, “Three words. It won’t work.”
Mostly, though, weekends at the Capitol were uneventful. We were on call for a legislature that would much rather be working out the details over margaritas and fajitas at The Hyatt. It meant a giant hush blanketed the place. History, in all of its mundane and monumental back stage quiet. The other person I was assigned weekends with could only take so much of watching the small portable TV. By afternoon they would be chattering like prison bitches who had never been locked up in the can.
Tony couldn’t stop talking about Terence, the boy on our dorm room floor on whom he clearly had a crush. Tony was going to bring Terence an honorary Speakers’ gavel, which Terence was going to love. We kept the oak gavels stocked in a back closet. Sharon of the frosted hair couldn’t stop whining about her boyfriend in San Marcos, who never visited anymore. She clipped coupons along the dotted line as if wishing her hapless lover would follow the straight and narrow.
Even Valentyn Bonger, my staid MBA Dutch supervisor, would be reduced to fulminating about how American banks didn’t have sensible capital lending policies like the Dutch did. It was hard not to notice that his attention wandered whenever Tony entered the room. I imagine that Valentyn now works for Credit Suisse, and takes his family on holiday to bell ringing festivals and passion plays dating to the Middle Ages.
There was only one place to get away, really. On my breaks I went to the attic. You entered by the same floor that housed the small non-denominational chapel. The women pages were always joking among themselves, telling each other to put on the knee pads and go pray up in the Chapel with Representative so-and-so. It was a mystery why more people didn’t go to the attic. Perhaps it was because you had to balance among the girders that created the ceiling and buttressed the overhang. It was hot up there, but honest. The Bride of State stripped down to the structural engineering of her antebellum bustle. The whole attic seemed long as a football field, and ribbed with steel. Like being in a large nineteenth century schooner, or the hold of the Hindenburg. In places you could look down onto the House floor.
From that height the desks, the flags and gallery seating appeared to be dollhouse furniture. Some stage miniature for a play in which Lincoln gets shot.
Today I started the work of scanning all of my journals. Beginning with this one, from the fall of 1974. I was nine years old, and we were about to move to Kansas. My Air Force father had been assigned to Iceland, and we were to stay behind in Salina, with other father-less, working class military wives and children. Predictably, the base was a petri dish of juvenile delinquency and desperate housewives. Next door Sweetening and Ernie’s mother suffered drug seizures so violent that her corn rows shook. Frank and Terry Kolanda smoked pot in the wheat fields, over which we could see the drive-in playing “Death Race 2000″, and the melting face of Ernest Borgnine in “The Devil’s Rain.”
The standard joke is that I had a Norwegian boyhood. First through fourth grade were done in a public school that could have come from the pages of “Lake Woebegone.” We sledded with Jimmy Storebo, went to Barbara Boger’s farm to pick out a beagle puppy, and the girls chased the boys on May Day. Emil Pritz, a retired sailor, would call us over from where he sat in clam patterned chair and offer marshmallows that smelled like pipe tobacco. He was proud of having helped build the Panama Canal.
These few remaining pages are from my last week in small town North Dakota. I knew that I was leaving that world behind. What strikes me now are the pages’ relentless linearity. What I call the childhood “and then, and then, and then…” Along the daily time line no detail, name, or bit of dialogue was too small, or too trivial. Nearly 40 years later, I can confirm that we had toast and chocolate milk for breakfast. The world could be described, I was discovering. Especially a world that was disappearing. And I could pack myself like folded underwear with my name written in magic marker into a lined notebook to be carried from place to place.
…the one that sticks is about Ronny. It’s a cautionary tale. About ambition. The moral: be careful of what you ask for. You might get it, end up happy. I still have the micro-cassette, had to fish it out of the glove compartment. All sorts of crap in there. It really is time for me to clean it out.
David was a sweet heart, by the way. The word ‘mensch’–invented for him. He wore a Nice Guy’s uniform: ratty jeans and Shakespeare Festival t shirts. His winged hair reminded me of a ‘Teen Beat’ idol gone to seed.
Here, let me press play. I’ll pray to God the thing still works.
Turn it up louder? Sure:
“…came to us five, six years ago. Ronald Haecker. Basically some kid from Clear Lake. He’d read everything Cormac McCarthy had ever written. Wanted to know if we carried ‘Blood Meridian’.”
****
“The 1985 Random House edition.”
****
“What did I say?, well I said good luck.”
***
“Ronny practically began living here. He was like those guys down at ‘Record Exchange’ , the ones who camp out in the vinyl section. Jim joked that we had gotten ourselves a mascot.”
***
“Um, he did. But Ronny hated engineering. He came in bitching and complaining, the Old Man wanted him to work for NASA as well. Got straight A’s but couldn’t stand the T.A.s, because naturally he knew more than they did.”
***
“No, see, I believed him. Ronny had that air: you know, of the D & D kid who’s burned through every Advanced Placement class; he would rather be down at Radio Shack talking about Tolkien or dwarves.”
****
“We let him begin working here,” David went on. “For book credit mostly. Honestly? It shut him up. We could say, ‘Hey Ronny. Go look this up on OCLC and we wouldn’t hear a word for the next couple of hours. I could stop answering his questions and focus for once.”
****
“Half a year? Not that long. But by the end of it he was driving us crazy. We were running the place all wrong, according to Ronny. What we needed was more Texana, more maps and diaries–all of that Sam Houston/Daughters of the Alamo stuff.”
****
“As a matter of fact, one day in walks Ronny and announces that he’s gotten a job at the Ransom Center.”
****
“Yeah, no kidding. You should have seen our jaws. We know the head conservator over there, run into him at estate sales all of the time. Silver hair, blazer, the whole works. The guy looks like he walked out of ‘Falcon Crest.’”
****
“I mean, what could we say? ‘Well done?’ In a weird way it was like watching your kid graduate.” He paused. “If your kid had read every A.B.A.A. newsletter out there. He did promise to keep us informed of anything the H.R.C. was looking for.”
****
“Do you mean Ronny, or Ronald? ‘Ronald, yes.’ ‘Ronald’ took to wearing bowties, just like his ‘Falcon Crest’ boss. Also, the accent. God knows where he got that from. It sounded like his vowels were being strained through a martini shaker.”
****
“Well,” David said, “The guy wasn’t an idiot. He knows something. It’s not like he’s dumb. Ronny is basically one of those people who knows how to comport himself and act like he knows more than you do.”
****
“Let me take that back. Ronny was one of those people who believes it when they becomesomebody different. That’s the difference.” David blew out his cheek, and shook his head in woebegone wonder. “Wow. It was actually kind of scary.”
****
“No. It was just…creepy. One day we were having Ruby’s barbecue and he waltzed in, started lecturing us on the differences between wet and dry barbecue. And in that ‘Brideshead Revisited’ voice. I remember sitting there chowing down on a rib and thinking ‘Man, all I want to do is eat. But I was also kind of amazed, you know. ‘This guy believes his own shit.’ I remember thinking ’He really and truly believes.’”
****
“Well, I couldn’t take it any longer. I wiped my mouth and said ‘Hey Ronny. Have you seen ‘Chariots of Fire’ recently?”
****
“No, not for a year after that. The next thing I heard he was working for Rosedale’s, in Highland Park.”
****
“Books for rich Dallas people,” Dave explained. “Exxon money. Or EDS.”
****
“I personally wouldn’t want to. But hey, that’s me.”
****
“Because. Those people don’t know what they want. What those people want is the library at the beginning of ‘Masterpiece Theater.’ I’m sorry but here to give that to them. What I want? Is people who truly love books.”
****
“I guess he loves books. I don’t know. He’d better. He’s now being interviewed to be the head of books at Christie’s…”
****
“No. I’m not joking.”
****
There’s some awkward silence after that. His bookstore sat upstairs from Quackenbushes. You can hear coffee shop murmur, and the downstairs hiss of milk being steamed. It’s been ages since I listened to this. What a trip. I’m going to go clean out my glove compartment now.
…was called Hansel & Gretel’s. It was owned by a sleazy German from Argentina. David Ray and Jim worked there as cooks, before they got into books. Hansel & Gretel’s advertised themselves as authentic German food but got the sauerkraut right out of the can. Today you can see the faintest traces of that gingerbread architecture in the mock Tudor woodwork.
This was 35 years before Trudy’s became the place where frats and sororities brought their parents for game day margaritas and bloated queso treats.
The owner of Hansel & Gretel’s claimed that all records of his Phd had been destroyed in the fire bombing of Dresden. He was married to a Latina, who left him when she found xeroxed copies of his love letters to waitresses.
The story was, he had been a Nazi but Fernando Lamas, a one time roommate, had intervened. There were also pictures, autographed all in the same hand, of the owner and Nixon.
Later, the guy re-surfaced in a half page ad in The Chronicle. He advertised himself as a Dr. Mier, a specialist in Vitruvian vitamins that could unleash the human potential.
David Ray was a friend of mine who sold books. In the early 90s he and his business partner Jim had a little shop above Quackenbushes, on the Drag.
Fast Eddie Cavazos, a friend of David and Jim’s, had just taken on consignment a journal of a Captain in the Mexican Army, written in 1836, some of which but not all had been published. The journal detailed Davy Crockett and six others who survived the Alamo being bayonetted, even after an officer asked for clemency.
The friend drove them down to San Antonio to collect the manuscript, which for insurance purposes was locked at The Four Seasons Hotel in a vault. It had to be transferred in a special suitcase with a lock. The Daughters of the Texas Revolution had offered $100,000.00 to suppress the history. But Fast Eddie knew the document would fetch $500,000.00.
Which is why he was in high spirits. That and they had stopped at The Liberty Bar for drinks. “Baby I’m a rich man,” their friend enthused. It was the kind of thing Fast Eddie said. On the way back they rolled down the windows of the Chrysler LeBaron and began singing. All the way down I-35 wind buffeted their voices but they sang it all the more loudly. The book business was a funny thing.
Growing up in the 1970s, there were two action figures I had, and neither was G.I. Joe. Cornelius, from ‘Planet of the Apes,’ was the first. Dominic Chapa broke him. Dominic was Arnold’s pain-in-the-ass younger brother who was always following us around base. Mrs. Chapa did her best to re-thread the elastic that ran through the figure’s joints, but pulled too tightly. Cornelius was stiff. He could no longer hold the reins of his action stallion; from then on he stood in the ‘Apes’ tree house with both arms locked out at 45 degrees, in a paralytic semaphore. It depressed me to look at him.
What a joy Jay J. Armes was, then. Not only did that action figure have bendable arms,
suitcase of prosthetic goodies
he also came with a small red suitcase full of prosthetic devices you could exchange for the hooks for his hands. That is because Armes (born Julian Armas) is a real-life amputee from El Paso. He blew off his hands at 14 by hitting a railway torpedo with an ice pick. Armes recuperated and learned how to do everything with his steel prostheses that normal hands could do. And then he mastered many other bad-ass things besides. From his Facebook Profile:
“Amazingly, Jay can now do more with the fantastic steel claws that have replaced his hands than people with their own hands can do. He can reach into fire, smash through doors, fire bullets with unerring accuracy, cut through metal, fly utilizing a jet pack, scuba dive, pilot a jet — and he is the master of the deadliest karate chop.
That’s right. A jet pack. The man became 007. Armes has enjoyed a fabled life as
The man has led an amazing life.
a private investigator and a celebrity. He returned Marlon Brando’s kidnapped son, appeared on the 70s tv series ‘Hawaii Five-O’, and did sleuthing for Elvis Presley, Howard Hughes, and Elizabeth Taylor. At 79 Armes still runs his agency, ‘The Investigators,’ which offers a smorgasbord of services including homicide investigation, hostage negotiation, and–because the man has to make a living in this post NAFTA world–maquiladora security. There is also a training academy, where you can learn to be a bona fide mercenary jack of all spies.
How can you make up someone like Armes? The short answer: you can’t. But the Border can. Because the Border bends reality according to the pop and Imperial desires that are projected (and manufactured) there. The U.S.-Mexico Border is where Phillips manufactures flat screen televisions (Juarez), is where 1930s movie stars fucked each other senseless after horse races (Tijuana), and is where the U.S. Government has ushered in the dystopian future with Predator drones monitoring the 2,000 mile frontier between
A Baja worker, posed in front of a 3/4 model of the Titanic used during filming. His heart will go on.
nations. In the cotton fields of the Texas Valley a gin soaked William Burroughs stripped down to underwear to climb inside a orgone machine. (His rich family owned land near McCallen). James Cameron built a 775 foot replica of The Titanic to film his Anglophilic epic in,of all places, a water tank on a Tijuana film set.
Forget 'The Six Million Dollar Man!'
The Border has long been a place of short-cuts, economic, legal, and political. What pools around those loopholes, like escaped groundwater, is not the sleepy or the quaint. It is the phantasmagorical. The menacing undercurrent of power not wanting state or industrial secrets spilled. Heads without bodies, issued as narco warnings. Or babies born without a brain because of pesticide leaching. Everybody knows, and nobody saw anything. The sparse desert and isolated agricultural flats abet a closed loop where news struggles to get out. At least that’s how it’s been for the past 150 years: wealthy families and a white-shoed Chamber of Commerce putting a sunshine sticker and Strawberry Queen tiara on every image that emerges from the Frontera.
What I hold onto from my junior high/high school years in South Texas is a sense of reality that was becalmed and, just under the surface, lurid. Walking along Ocean Drive on a return trip to Corpus Christi some years back, I found a picture on the ground, near a mansion’s hedge. The day was bright and hot, the palm trees along Cole Park stirred. I picked up the picture. It was a Polaroid of a penis. That is the pulpy, almost noir-ish vibe I still get from the Border. Maybe that is why Jay J. Armes still appeals to me. His self-invention as a proto cyborg/ bad-ass gumshoe, which would have been ridiculous anywhere else, somehow fits with the twilight world of the Frontera. He still does, after 35 years. Check out this recent YouTube video of the Mexican news detailing Armes interactions with narco traffickers.
For an 11-year-old growing up on Cold War Air Force bases, all I knew is that Jay J. Armes was the closest you could get to being bionic. Forget ‘The Six Million Dollar Man.’ I read his biography four times. At a crucial age Armes forever blurred the line between what was real and what was pop imagination.
And that is why Jay J. Armes is my Hero of the Border.
Lately I’ve been digitizing old dharma talks by Charlotte Joko Beck, the late American Zen master whose books “Everyday Zen” and “Nothing Special” are ritual breakfast reading. My friend, co-worker, and Joko’s student Peg Syverson introduced me to Joko’s teachings. I was thrilled when Peg brought in a box of old cassettes, jumbled in their cases. Once a librarian, always a librarian.
Joko's Voice Print: Is she there, or not?
It’s a curious process, converting this media. I stick 15-year-old cassettes into a serviceable Sony player, click ‘play’, and watch Joko’s seismic voice print march across the iMac screen. In that moment Joko Beck is present and not. There is the immediacy of her plainspoken voice, and the disembodied fact of it after, coming from inside the machine. Somehow, the process is a fitting analogue for someone who taught the vividness of our minds’ simulations, and the constant disappearing Now.
I began to read Beck a few years ago, when I was climbing out of a depression. I’d had enough of feeling gutted; like many people during the Bush Administration, I went on Cymbalta. With that medicated relief came the possibility of a lightness outside of heavy family stories I had pledged to tell. As the (self-appointed job) of writing mental illness in Mexican South Texas lightened, losing the hair shirt was strange. The historical suffering I wanted to fictionalize was still there, but I couldn’t go back to a kind of intense identification with the material that compelled me to spend 6months on fellowship alone at a 250 acre ranch, my own personal ‘Shining’, trying to write a unified field theory of racial anxiety.
Where did that leave me? I’m still not sure. Losing my sense of epic romanticism about this project has been weird. Some days it’s as if I am left holding a radial nerve I traced from my great abuelo’s generation to my own. I regard its nervy tangle like a cable contractor who has gotten in over his head, and who wants nothing more than to go to lunch. The melodrama of the larger family story is still real, but time has faded the urge to get to the bottom of anything. My family is no longer the most unusual experience of Suffering in the history of Suffering with a capital ‘S. There is no comparative index for generational hurt, of course, but any glance at the headlines will tell you there is plenty of competition.
As far as I can tell, creative effort now seems to center on not throwing out the baby of a good tale with the bath water of the histrionic, because that dramatic approach to telling family stories no longer feels true. Context, I think, is what would probably be nice: a metaphysical crowbar around the edges of everything that used to seem so terribly central. In its place, I would accept a clearer point of view: some ratio of terribleness to humor, maybe with a dose of that older, earnest witness making a cameo.
No matter what resolution settles in, I will take the Number 22 bus down to work later. The dog will wake us at 6 tomorrow, and one of us will need to pick up more dishwashing liquid. Against that background the cabaret piano chords start up and Peggy Lee strolls in, hand on hip, asking her immortal question, “Is that all there is?”
Joko Beck says yes. The mundane, the everyday, is indeed all there is. There is no revelation, no transcendent elsewhere, no Big Reveal. The tart clarity of Joko’s writing is like biting into the apple of no-nonsense. Her spiritual prose as bleached as the ribs of a skeletal whale. As I convert her teachings into mp3s, the rise and fall of her voice print reads like an unsentimental cardiogram of the radical present.
All we can do is become aware of the melodramas spinning through our head, she says. Those personal telenovelas we love to star in. We can watch ourselves repeat the same mistakes and say, “Huh. There I go again.” Over time, something shifts. Something opens up, like finding yourself in an empty parking lot at 3 a.m
I have no idea what that something is. But it’s peaceful.
For a while now, the current drought has edged into the sleepy edges of awareness. How could it not? Temperatures in Austin have gotten above 100 for 73 days in a row. We have reached a point where every activity feels like a listless prison hobby. Sure, I’ll run, but I’ll do it as half-heartedly as sitting through that ‘Green Mile’ movie they keep making us watch.
A kind of amnesia sets in when it is this hot every summer, but lately there have been signs that this is an extraordinary year. In July The New York Times reported this bit of science fiction:
In Texas, some cities are experiencing blackouts because airborne deposits of salt and chemicals are building up on power lines, triggering surges that shut down the system. In normal weather, rain usually washes away the environmental buildup. Instead, power company crews in cities like Houston are being dispatched to spray electrical lines.
“Andromeda Strain,” anyone? I am waiting for the water riots . It all has to be put into perspective, of course. The Lower Colorado River Authority is confident it has enough water to outlast the current situation and reminds everyone that the ten-year drought of the 1940s-50s was worse. When Grandpa Simpson complains that things in his day were worse he is kind of right. Though earlier this summer the Western half the State was on fire. While the Biblical mounts I have been interested in the little ways a crisis manifests in everyday life. The pyramids of 100 SPF sunblock at the grocery store. Crows and coyotes, black bears and ocelot drawn into the city, looking for water. Here are a few other examples that have come to mind.
The Little Tree That Could
Go, Little Tree!
Earlier this summer, I returned from the Bay Area, where it was fifty degrees cooler than in Texas. My cell phone told me it was one hundred and six in Austin as I stood on College Avenue in Berkeley, watching undergrads in North Face jackets and memorizing the feel of fifty-six degree air on my skin. It has been above one hundred degrees in our little acre of heaven now for 73 days in a row.
Home the next morning, I stepped out into our crisped front yard and took in the sweet hay smell of dried grass. Eager to check out damage, I checked our volunteer oak by the driveway. It still had its one leaf. Back in June it dropped all of them, except for this one. Since, I have been fortifying the little tree with Hasta Gro and liquid seaweed. Looking at it, I was filled with gratefulness. I am going to keep feeding the tree. If I have to rub ice cubes along the serrated edge of its leaf, or play it cool West Coast jazz, I will.
Inverse Christmas
Yesterday afternoon I had to get out of the house. It happens when you live indoors for three straight months in canned, refrigerated air. Our house hums like a space station, or a biodome that recycles farts. It was 107 degrees, and that was without the heat index.
I stopped in at Home Depot for two lengths of soaker hose, then dropped into Best Buy for an Xbox game and by Old Navy for pajama bottoms. The plan was to return home, hole up in discount Hugh Hefner attire, and get lost in an alternate universe.
As it turned out, the stores were filled. The cashiers were manic, the shoppers happy, and children buzzed the aisles on a sugar high. It was anything but sleepy. There was bustle, and a distinctly excited chatter. At Bed, Bath and Beyond a man had plopped himself into a display chair, as if attending a tail gate party. The man patted the arm rests.
“Think I’m just going to sit myself right here,” he said.
“I don’t blame you,” I replied.
“Well, there ain’t anywhere else to go.” We laughed. Folksy as Mayberry, the two of us.
It was understood we were talking about the heat. It had created a squirrelly retail holiday. Everyone was losing it together, escaping homes to compare cell phone plans and two for one tankinis. The only cool public space was retail space.
It seemed to make the Flexi-Compras people downright jolly as they trolled the HDTV aisles of Best Buy in yellow shirts, looking for Latinos to sign up for heat-addled, predatory loans.
A dramatic re-creation
We Only Want to Help
“Perhaps you are not aware we are in a drought,” the piece of paper read. Someone had left it in our mailbox overnight. “Luckily, in our neighborhood, we have designated watering days! They are Wednesdays and Saturdays. We must all do our part.”
We must all do our part? What in the hell is this? I thought when Alyssa told me, England during World War II? It is true, I have been watering the yard on non-designated days. I move the sprinkler head around the yard and pride myself on such consistent lawn care. Apparently, Neighborhood Moisture Watch thinks otherwise.
To be fair, whoever wrote the note is right. Water has become limited and no one should claim more than their share. On another level, however, the note is interesting. When suburban vigilantism springs up, you know shit is serious. The wolf of deprivation has entered the gated community, and individual property rights has given way to anxiety over shared resources. No one should hog.
In a (relatively) liberal town like Austin, holistic virtue enters the fray. My friend Susan coined the term ‘angry hippie talk.’ Angry hippie talk is a tonality, at once supremely passive-aggressive and supremely didactic, like a Montessori teacher trying to teach a child about sustainable agriculture while shaming him into eating brown rice.
In any case, it worked. I’ve now ringed the trees in soaker hose. When the Revolution comes I will fashion a giant sling shot out of the stuff and catapult myself back to Berkeley. With any luck I’ll splash into the cool Pacific. And I will learn to live among the Sea Lions, and be their King.
I had just come off of a crappy summer, temping on Wall Street. My New York girlfriend had (sensibly) dumped me. And the recovering alcoholic to whom I sublet my South Austin garage apartment had skipped town, leaving it smelling of patchouli and cat piss. There had been a 36 hour ride home on Greyhound. It was ungodly hot and the AC window unit rattled like death. There was nothing to do but take refuge in industrial strength air conditioning. So I rode the Number 13 bus down to campus and hid out in the basement of the Perry Castaneda Library.
It was in those stacks that I happened on the article. In ‘People’. On him:
Lord British
This is Lord British ( née Richard Garriott ). In the early 1990s Lord British made a King’s ransom on the D & D computer game ‘Ultima.’ This was back when computer games came on floppy disks, and the people in them were often pixellated munchkins.
I knew of him; in Austin he was famous for his Halloween house, staged in a tricked out crib in the West hills. Milord’s house featured secret passages, a rotating roof, and a pool beneath the dining room. What I didn’t know was that Lord British also kept a pet Mexican. The magazine filled in that breezy detail:
(The house) also boasts a … collection of esoterica that includes a gorilla skull, a stuffed cobra and a human skeleton. The latter, which Garriott has dubbed Pedro, once belonged to migrant Mexican farm worker, explains Garriott. Holding up one of Pedro’s bony hands, Garriott says, “See? He had arthritis!”
I remember having to re-read that last sentence several times. A gorilla skull. A stuffed cobra. And the remains of a Mexican migrant? Were they fucking kidding? I blinked down at the magazine, and kept on blinking. The outrage entered before my defenses could deflect the stupidity. It was as if someone had turned off my brain circuitry.
Looking both ways, I tore out the article. Then left before the Library Police could catch me. For surely I was that important: they had the brown boy with an ear ring and Astor Place razor cut in their sights. I stalked off in thrift store combat boots, jittery with wrath. Be casual, I told myself. So I slipped on my FM Walkman. The plaza stood empty and heat shimmered off orange and white shuttle buses parked at the curb.
As it happened, K.U.T was playing Joe Ely: a plaintive, cowboy-open-road-old-Mexico-señorita kind of song complete with ersatz ‘Spanish guitar’ flourishes. Great, I thought. First, this Renaissance Fair idiot, and now one more white guy pining for the Border. Throwing a tattered postal bag over my shoulder, I marched up to the Student Union. It was cool and dark and smelled–as it still does–like laminated funk. I picked up the pay phone with a shaking hand.
“Hello?”
“Why don’t you ever play a song by Mexicans, about gringos?”
My voice had spilled out in a rush; even I wasn’t sure what I had said. There was a confused pause, during which I could hear radio station noises. My heart beat like a rabbit’s.
“Whatever, Buddy.”
Click.
My adrenaline surged. I may as well have asked Paul Ray, the DJ if his refrigerator was running. But no matter. I was filled with mighty righteousness. Soon, I would head straight to the State Capitol, lurk in the back of a tour group, and dispute every Lone Star fact that the perky tour guide would tell about the Alamo, the founding of the Republic, and the surrender of Santa Ana.
That would show them.
All these years later, I still want to write a story that begins here. About a hapless twenty-something Brown Avenger–a college boy–who wanders Austin vowing to point out unconscious racism and whiteness. He would sputter like Daffy Duck. Benign confusion and Austin’s laid back niceness would foil him at every turn. I could laugh at him and with him. And wish I could have saved him a little time.
I still grieve a little for “Pedro.” A lifetime of back-breaking labor so that you end up a punchline in a geek mansion? It still doesn’t seem right. But at least I can see the dark humor. Over the years, I’ve mellowed. Occasionally, I still want to burn the house down. I’m over it, until I’m not.
As for Lord British, he now spends his millions trying to be an astronaut:
Lord British, About to Boldly Go...
A harmless enough way to spend a mid-life crisis. I do not wish that his rocket ship explode. Or that someone sneak nitrous oxide into his oxygen supply. Really. Lord British has to wake up every morning and be Lord British. Maybe it’s best to leave it there.
Last night, a journalist friend for a Spanish language weekly asked us to guess the Austin birth rate. It is currently 86 percent Latino. The figure shocked us all. Austin? Laid-back, tie-dyed, frisbee golf Austin? Well, somebody has certainly been doing something while fifty-somethings chuckle in the audience at Texas Monthly readings and the twenty-somethings are off at their wacky 1990s sing-alongs.
Is it he kind of future My Liege could envison?
Well, I can. Pedro, Dude. At least we can toast to that.
When I studied abroad in Seville, our professor told us there was a saying. About how, during the springtime Feria, everyone went out into the streets to be together. There was no direct translation for the sentiment, he said. But a rough approximation went something like: every night the people go out to “watch each others’ handsomeness.”
Freshly back from Macondo, the annual workshop I attend in San Antonio, I feel the same about the fellow writers I was with. We ate, drank, laughed, and talked our way through the week: at Our Lady of the Lake University, in the audience at The Twig bookstore. Outdoors under patio trees at The Friendly Spot and upstairs at The Liberty Bar. Had you satellite tracked us, our location would have been marked by a warm, sometimes sloshy, but always friendly spot on Google maps.
The week was a moveable feast of stories. It was a gas to hear people tell them and to watch writers perform themselves while doing so. It seems so obvious as to be redundant, but writers forget what amazing story tellers they are, especially in each others’ company. They toss off anecdotes, remarkable happenings from remarkable lives like jolly ranchers shaken loose from a barely cracked piñata. It is one of the best things writers do for each other, to drop our jaws and ask: What? You mean you haven’t written that yet?
Like what? Reflecting back over the week, these are only a few:
Poet/Painter/Performer Anel Flores, recounting over breakfast tacos how her grandmother’s Valley store burned down after an electrical line in the church next door shorted. One of the only things left was a receipts box, in which a lace sample survived. Anel has incorporated that surviving lace pattern into the silver jewelry she makes.
Novelist Manuel Muñoz speaking over lunch of a (white) friend, a bicyclist, who trains on back roads outside Tucson, up to a national forest and back. The Border Patrol rides these roads regularly, looking for illegals. They stopped this bicyclist, asking if he was an American citizen. Standing before him in all of their paramilitary glory–pine green uniforms, leather holsters and mirrored shades, the friend gave his best fuck-you smile. ”Claro que si!” he replied.
Novelist Sehba Sarwar, back from a July trip to see family in Pakistan, was out one afternoon visiting journalist friends at a large daily newspaper. Driving back, she noticed smoke spiraling up into the sky. Family called her cell phone, warning Sehba not to come home. There was fighting raging in other parts of Karachi. Sehba said would be like a civil war on the south side of San Antonio while life went on as normal on the West Side. 300 were killed. The skirmish went unreported in the Western media.
Playwright and critic Greg Barrios remembered being a paramedic in Vietnam. He held 18 and 19 year 0lds whose entrails were hanging out, administering morphine to help them die more quickly. When Greg returned to the States, he was assigned to the birth ward of a hospital. His job was to prep mothers who were in labor. In one year, Greg said, he went from having his hands stained with the blood of death to having them stained with the blood of birth. Being in the natal unit is what saved him, kept him grounded and sane.
Poet and novelist Erika Wurth , who grew up in in the mountains, can still hear the off-key music of the ice cream truck that got lost along serpentine roads and echoed all day through the hills. A delegation finally had to go rescue the poor wandering vendor. They tracked him by the tinkling of his truck. To this day, the opening chords of “Fur Elise” conjures mixed emotions.
What is there to say after stories like these? Nothing. You just shake your head in amazement, or laugh in delight. Which is what the best stories do. There are lots of others from the week I could have included: Julia Alvarez driving her sisters up the wall by reciting Walt Whitman, or Ellen Place Wadey hosting a courtly Eduardo Galleano, who laughed at Chicago seagulls. There was Sandra Cisneros, lounging on the roof of her study and remembering days of running around performing art with painter Franco Mondini Ruiz, Helena Maria Viramontes telling us about California migrants settling wherever their rattle trap cars broke down, or novelist and anthropologist Ruth Behar speaking of the haunting glitz and emptiness of a post-Communist Havana, and futurist John Phillip Santos hinting at time travel in his study of Mayan calendars.
On one of the final nights of Feria, I remember watching fireworks with a crowd. As a flare burst into a shower of long gold tendrils, the drunk man swaying in front of me threw back his head and shouted, “Que contento estoy!” ( O how happy and content I am!) I know how he feels.
Thanks, fellow Macondistas, for having shared your cuentos. Now please go write them. Especially if I screwed up the details. The world needs to recognize itself–in your everyday details– as a place more global and complex than it used to be.
Changes in location of mouth of Rio Grande, 1853-1974
Here, a map of the Rio Grande and how it has shifted course over the last 160 years. I discovered it while returning to research on a story, about my great-great-great grandmother surviving an 1880 hurricane that wiped her Border home off the map.
The Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas published this in Geologic Circular 75-2, “Shoreline Changes on Brazos Island and South Padre Island: An Analysis of Historical Changes of the Texas Gulf Shoreline.” (1975) I used to curate a collection of these county-by-county soil surveys, back when I worked as an engineering librarian. They sat in long rows with buff colored spines.
They are beautiful documents, the colonial poetry of technocrats helping the State locate mineral wealth. If on the second day God named all of the animals, cartographers and geologists soon followed, pointing their instruments to assess all of the names for extracting gold from the ore. Open these and the Land reveals its topography, its biologic assemblages, active processes, mineral resources and tidal patterns.
Along the way, the maps of Empire sometimes bear witness to something unexpected. Like its own borders refusing to stay put. I find that beautiful. Beautiful, too, that the federal government has spent 4 billion dollars on a 670 mile fence whose accuracy is likely to shift with the current. It makes the Texas-Mexico wall perhaps the world’s most expensive piece of geographic performance art. Come another 100 years, time will tell which side of the river these stanchions define.
Texas-Mexico Border fence at Brownsville (SARA INÉS CALDERÓN)
Have you seen the actual fence? It is strikingly minimalist, this thing dressed in rust: The National Endowment for the Arts could have commissioned sculptor Donald Judd to design it. Or it could have been the love child of Christo and Donald Judd. Or it might have been the punchline to the joke: ”What is long and dumb and runs for the Border?”
Anyhow, welcome. I will be posting weekly (‘weekly’ as defined by the Mayan calendar, my parole officer, and my bookie). Thanks for stopping by.
