(Some graphic content: adult supervision advised)
From Chapter One:
HAUNT “There will be strong memories,
my brother,” said Bonifacio.
He held his arm around me and hovered there in the room like
an archangel. Still dressed as he was while waiting tables at
the local bistro, his white waiter’s uniform had big round
buttons that dotted a double-breasted waistcoat. His arm was
a seraphim wing that held me securely, while his wide, down-turned
face, as kind as it ever was, hung close to mine. Thick shiny
black hair, normally bushy and unkempt, had been trimmed short
and wavy against his head. His full lips, measured with reassurance,
moved to part a little but said nothing more. Dark and olive-skinned,
Bonifacio stood next to me, a strangely Arabian-looking Chicano
with deep brown small-set eyes, and strong square features.
He smiled handsomely even though he had added a few pounds since
I last saw him wandering drunk on downtown Bakersfield’s
bar alley streets.
It was late April. We had both seen my mother lying in her funeral
casket just the day before. Her eyes had sunk as if two black
coals had been placed over them, then lit and burned away to
reveal the deep pit of death that hangs above the face of the
dead. Her skeleton no longer danced beneath her skin with movement
and life, but was held still by an unseen hand, hung silent,
and no longer brooded over the passing of things. She had begun
death’s dance in the spirit underworld, perhaps even smiled
again. But then, could there be smiles where spirit-skeletons
move beneath the fiery sparks that shoot from the living? Could
there be joy-filled ghosts who sanctify the under-realm of mankind
and flood the spirit darkness, where bright waterfalls of red-lit
Roman candle rain fall into infinity?
Later in Bonifacio’s house on Elm Street we ate jalapeños
with beef smothered in cabbage, green onions, and green salsa,
all wrapped in hot flour tortillas while we contemplated life
and the past.
“Those memories,” I returned. “They will haunt
me.”
“Your father, I understand. But your mother; she will
be no ghost.”
“No? You can’t be sure of that. Like all writers’
dreams—they will haunt like a curse. I am surrounded by
visions, Bonifacio.”
“Eat. The food is good, right? It’s OK for you,
isn’t it? Fill yourself up before your crying soul takes
too much of you.” Bonifacio was as good of a cook as he
was at waiting tables of wealthy businesswomen, advertising
jocks, and the local farming elite. His delightful method of
cooking—as he explained his every move in the kitchen,
politely, with fondness for those he served—made him very
much like his migrant mother who had recently fallen ill. Her
polite smile and command over a kitchen was more than the enduring
love of a migrant over a pinto bean properly taken from its
sorrowful field and cooked to perfection. It was pure Mexican
culture driven into the heart of the Southern San Joaquin; the
slow transformation of a people, to see, through a meal, through
a mountain of refried beans, cooked and mashed from a long night’s
soaking, to become washed clean with the love of a long-lasting
mother of migrant children turned into an educated generation
of cultural wanderers. Those were Bonifacio’s hands and
eyes in the flip of a tortilla and the drop of corn oil, splashed
into a pan, and then beans mashed upon the heated oil in a kitchen
that smelled of an old generation’s ways.
Months later at the University I saw visions of both my mother
and father. These visions began with the young me sitting isolated,
pale, staring at the walls in the ghetto-house I used to live
in—its rolling green carpet full of folds beneath my cold
feet, as if it too huddled to keep warm in our unheated house.
I could see myself on a torn leather couch where I contemplated
my young dreams of growing up to be an artist, a writer, and
not a truck driver like my father who often drove to the ends
of the Earth and back. I swore he did. His truck rattled as
he drove it and kicked dust up into the god-eye when it was
awake, and pressed muck further into the god-eye while it slept.
I knew father would drive to the tips of the starry universe
where high above the clouds was a large platform, and in my
mind, he would gaze over its edge where dust dropped like stars
from his boots into infinity. I could see visions of my mother
stretch her white arms into the room. She grew like a giant,
and her arms, still raised, seemed to go through the ceiling,
and up toward the white and blue of the sky that fell upon the
roof of our home in South Bakersfield. White and cloud-like
her pale arms reached and reached; and as she yawned and then
smiled, she stretched even higher until there was a final creak
of her elbows and her smooth arms came downward, back from the
infinite sky to grip around me tightly.
“Such a little boy. Let me pick you up,” she would
say as her eyes shined down toward me. I always noticed her
eyes—always that same look beneath her fragile hair, the
same golden that filled my little head with amazement. I was
like a kitten, purring, staring at her eyes as if they were
great balls of bright string turned into stars; I was fixated,
entranced, in love. She was there—her open-eyed suns washing
me, never dissipating, and never the Tule fog of the Southern
San Joaquin’s cold mystical mist.
She picked me up and carried me to the patio where she brushed
dried mud from my pants. I had been outside with my brother.
She knew we had been digging tunnels through the dirt, using
water to soften the ground so our hands could easily claw into
the earth beneath the backyard weeds. We had dug and dug. Our
heads pushed right next to the ground; mud stuck under our eyes
like shadows; we spit as our mouths filled with the muck of
rich topsoil as we reached deeper into the ground to pull out
worms and rocks.
The dead of the valley danced into our eyes back then. Here
was our city yard of dust, our sandy dirt yard, our foxtails
yellowed by the summer sun. If you dug deep enough back then,
you could find the thick dark soil that cakes the valley’s
soul. And deeper still, through the thick white crust of skeleton
bones, possibly to the hard eye of the spirit itself, to scratch
the surface of the cornea upon which our valley rests: on the
eye of the dead sea spirit whose bearded head sometimes shifted
side-to-side to see the oil pipes penetrating toward its spirit
mind, where with the slight turn of its head could shake the
curve of the valley and cause dust and disease to rise into
the smoggy Southern San Joaquin air. That was the giant beneath
us, beneath Bakersfield, beneath the skeleton bones. We were
close to its god-eye surface every time we dug. We just knew.
And so mother picked me up after dusting me off, and held me
close.
This was our home in a ghetto off South Chester Avenue, near
Union Avenue, near old highway 99; ours was a house built into
the ground like our own dreams of tunnels and mud; dried like
a foxtail—yellowed paint on the exterior walls—brown
stains, including aged egg yolk that once dripped down into
brick-walled marigold flowerbeds, and then deeper into the earth,
toward the giant eye buried beneath us. The house was supposed
to be in browns, not yellows, and had been painted years before,
in the Seventies. But years bring stains of course.
Mother alone brought it all to life—though she endured
her hardships. She had married a Chicano man in the early 1960s
who wanted to be a cop as much as he wanted to party and get
laid by the local girls of the San Jose College he attended;
not to mention the girls of his apartment housing complex whose
doors he slunk past late at night. I heard he met mother out
by the pool, on a glistening blue California summer day. He
had flashed his white teeth, had shown his muscles hardened
from training. Since he had been a lifeguard, he could swim
endless laps in the pool and still blow water like a spouting
whale while floating on his back, and sing sweet Beatles tunes
to my mother who sat and smoked in the shade near the poolside.
Later, he quit his passion of being a cop, and told mother he
couldn’t handle the death of his cop friends. The truth
of it was he couldn’t pass his exams. He wanted to join
the war effort, he claimed, but couldn’t because of us
children; the truth of that was he somehow escaped the Vietnam
draft through ROTC and police work. He had always been afraid
of dying.
When I was such a little boy that man was kind. He never drank
beer like my alcoholic grandmother who downed cervezas like
they were lemonade as she sat out on the patio. Unlike her stench,
his was a sweet breath that kissed my forehead every night when
he arrived from where he worked driving an oil-filled Chevron
truck across the Santa Clara Valley. When his arms went around
me, he wrapped me in an aura of machismo that gave me security
that the world was safe, far from anything I could ever watch
on television—including the news, the Vietnam War, the
Israelis killed at the Olympics, the demon movie exorcisms that
father took us to the drive-in to watch—those would all
haunt me until father’s arms found me shivering with visions
of the god-eye staring up at me from the ground, from where
skeletons danced in the sparkler rain and then held each other
close as they whispered dark bodings. But even those were only
scattered moments. At night I would sneak into bed and lie next
to father. I remember that. And I remember his distaste for
it, the initial groan that would go up, and my eyes—they
squeezed tight as I tried to be invisible and not displease
him, until minutes passed like hours and I lay in half-slumber,
and he lay groaning again in what I thought was displeasure.
After I grew up he had become a ghost. He would float on the
wind in the mountains above Las Vegas. He gambled himself to
death. And so we buried his ashes there in the mountains near
the vista lookout to the old 1950s atomic explosions in the
desert. Toward his end, he passed out coffee and donuts at the
local Catholic Church of Our Mother of Guadalupe, and then afterwards,
in those same afternoons, he passed out coins to his God of
the Gold Spike Casino in downtown Las Vegas. I had passed by
there many times and would wander inside to see him beckon to
the video-gods of computerized chance—those pre-programmed
sinners, those heartless artificial non-intelligent beings that
outsmarted him. I saw the waitresses he lusted for with his
aged machismo reeking like his dime store cologne. I saw the
cowboy hat pressed hard over the crease on his brow, pulled
down toward his deep chocolate eyes. He had lived in the east
of the city, under the morning shadow of Sunrise Mountain, deep
in the gloom of materialism, of sin-capitalism run rampant—where
dark America lurks; that city of wealth and stench—where
the Native American bums parade down Fremont Street under the
grand light show canopy. There, the metallic sky of the Earth
blocks out the stars as animated light shows of Sinatra and
Sammy sing, jets roar, and the heartbeat of a planet thumps
to the drinkers who still congregate by the trash cans, and
near the liquor markets across from the Harley Davidson store
near Fourth Street.
Near there, in a casino, he died. He died after a fire gutted
a few rooms upstairs. He died after being told that he might
not get a payout when all the lights were flashing “Royal
Flush” on the penny machines. I wasn’t there to
see it, but when the smoke filled the casino, and people jumped
from the hotel rooms to the scorched roofs below, he had stayed
behind, hid behind a machine, hoping the fire would be put out
soon, yet terrified, and breathed the black smoke air, and then
died after choking on it, thinking he was about to win big any
second. The city had killed him. “He wouldn’t leave
his ******* machines.” That’s what I told everyone,
that father thought the machine was his, and so wouldn’t
leave it behind to burn alone, especially when he thought a
royal flush was headed his way. And so, yes, I buried him high
above his city—in the mountains overlooking the Mojave
Desert wasteland. There he flies, in the mountains, near the
plaques dedicating the conservationists who built a lookout
over the September mountain, where wildflowers in reds and yellows
paint a descent into the Nuclear desert, where the mushrooms
of our sacred American past once exploded into great fiery orange
spirits to loathe and to marvel at.
Years before mother died, her long brown hair had turned grey.
She wound it above her head, and never let it flow; never let
it fall like it had during my childhood, when it had always
brushed against my face. Then suddenly one day she cut it short,
clipped it herself into grey-brown waves above her blushing
cheeks. Toward her end, her big bright eyes became filled with
cataracts, covering her lenses just like the thick white crust
of skeleton bones over the god-eye. Yet just before she died
they again shown with the light of the sun. Only they glittered
with the dusk sun—and no longer the glory of morning brightness.
I hadn’t been there for her death. She was in pain—she
hurt for a full day. She knew she was dying. She said it in
the hospital the way you expect angels to release their trumpet
sounds that call for armies to waste the hordes of Philistines
and Mongerers: “This is it—I am going to die today.
There will be no tomorrow for me ever again. I will be the past;
remembered and then soon forgotten.” Instead of taking
her quickly, the aneurysm worked slowly on her throughout a
very long day. It wrung her abdominal artery with great pain—and
throbbed its way slowly into a death woe that contorted her
face as she plummeted into full arrest: the ballooning arterial
wall reached its twilight, and so the bursting had occurred.
In the coffin with her eyes no longer open, she had become a
shadow. No longer starry-eyed, there under sunken moon closed
lids somewhere once lurked the planet of her soul.
What had she done in this town? This Central California town?
She had made her existence, borne from the machismo of a long
dreadful marriage. It gave birth to her in 1986. Father felt
the labor pains of mother moving through his groin. He had grown
despondent, angry. He loved another woman. His machismo meant
that his other woman could be flaunted, and so she was paraded
around the family like an elephant in make-up. It was the circus
of my youth. But mother rebelled. She began by not removing
the stains from his petroleum soaked work shirts. I could see
visions of this in the University library, among the sea of
books pushing their tide toward me.
“What is this?” father yelled. “There are
stains on my shirt! How can I even go to work?”
“I can’t remove them,” mother would say with
a sullen look. Her lips quivered, but she held her ground. My
brother and I watched from under the kitchen table. The family
dog was there with us. It was a little female black-and-white
sheltie. She lay with her head on her paws and let out a moan
the way sad dogs do just before a storm.
“This is not what should happen in a family. I will have
to buy new shirts!” father declared. The dog barked and
father looked toward the direction of the table. He saw brother
and I staring—our big eyes wide and wet. Father’s
face was red—he fumed, and then stormed from the house
where his other woman waited in her big white car that sat like
a circus tent, with her seated in her ring of tricks, decorated,
and not reminding me of anything lovely because as a young boy
I detested circuses because I detested the smell of peanuts,
and would never go to the circus simply because there were scattered
peanuts there.
But that was just part of the birthing of mother; the labor
pains. Not long afterward many of father’s shirts were
full of stains—and he went to work in them, not really
caring as he grew more despondent over the rebellion of mother,
and her birth—which I am certain to this day—he
was full aware that she was of his making. He, the Creator.
I think that his role eventually even pleased him—except
for the pain of pushing her through his oily womb. Because when
she finally left—her symbolic beginning—the child-like
maturity she had been driven into would grow into full bloom
with the penetration of mother into air from the pulsating and
laborious womb he had created within himself. And then after
the turmoil of her birth, she grew and grew, until her new life
killed her...
