ORANGE MESSIAHS

Scott Alixander Sonders

C O N T E N T S


I. PROLOGUE .............….......... 3

1. Natives ............…..…...…......9

2. Killing Lions ...….........…..….. 16

3. Juarez ................….....…... 29

4. The Parker Effect …....….....…….. 55

5. By The Skin Of A Whale …...….…... 79

6. Hyde And Sikh .........……..…..….. 102

7. Life After Drowning ............… 114

ii. Epilogue ........................... 136


© 2003 by SAS

PROLOGUE: Winter, 1992
(as told by Catherine Nicholas to Travis W.)


A

stranger’s face can make you feel a thousand things. It can remind you of an enjoyable dream or the perspiration from a nightmare. It can catapult you into a moment of rapture or park you on a memory lane that’s now dry, rutted and lost. A stranger’s face can cause you to shrink in terror and cross the street to get out of the way. Or, it can make you fall in love in less than a heartbeat.

When Travis W. sat next to me in class tonight, my thighs began shaking so hard that I thought the people around me would notice. Staring at his face, when I thought he wouldn’t notice, made me think about forbidden sex and having babies. It was scary. But I wanted to talk to him, to bring him into my fantasy, to let him know my entire history, to take him home and have him touch me where no one had ever touched me. But I just sat there. Mute.

I have an excuse. I’m diagnosed with more dysfunctions than Freud had detractors. Attention deficit, panic and sleep disorders. I believe that one of these mental malfunctions will eventually rupture, break down, someday kill me. Sleeping, a natural endowment for all vertebrates, is for me something illusive.

That’s why I hate cats. They sleep and nap and nap and sleep, while my insomnia is worse than ever. When others are in sandman land, my mind churns like a plutonium driven locomotive, like the dogs of Hell chasing the damned.

But there is an upside. Insomnia gives me a motive to write. No, that’s bullshit. It’s more than a “motive.” It’s an obligation. I cannot not write. That’s how Travis came to be sitting next to me tonight. It was the first meeting of our screenwriting workshop. But now it’s 4 A.M. and I hope to God I fall asleep before the sun comes up. That’s my deadline. I’m genetically part vampire. When I feel the light begin to bleed through my east window, I start to panic. My brain is like the one that Marty Feldman steals in Young Frankenstein: “Abby Normal.” And it’s that abnormal brain that causes a sunrise to rip through my dilated pupils like cataract surgery, the eyelids glued open by atropine. Panic engulfs me like quicksand. I can’t breathe. My heart pounds. Blood swells in my temples. It feels like I’m falling into a huge vortex, falling toward death. My overloaded thoughts become an open can of kerosene, kissed by a carelessly tossed cigarette.

Damn you, Travis. I’d forgotten for awhile how my crazy father would slap my mother for speaking her native tongue. What he did to my mother he did to me. And to Gabriella, the only sibling young enough to grow up with me. My oldest sister, Ramona, who is actually only my half-sister, was already twenty when I was born.

Gabriella, also my half-sister, was ten. She still has strap scars across her back. I’ve learned very few words in Spanish, but I think Gabriella has simply forgotten how to speak. The ability is caged, like a sleeping tiger in her memory. Once awakened, no one knows what the claws will catch.

“We’re in America now,” my Russian father would tell my mother. “In America, we speak American.” He always seemed to forget that he only got his green card because of mother.
She’d already been here twenty years. All of her children were born in America. If anyone didn’t speak “American,” it was my father. To this day, he speaks English like a cartoon character, like Boris Badenoff in Rocky And Bullwinkle.

My bet is that he suffers from a neurochemical imbalance. But with his paranoia, he also believes that all psychiatrists are nuts, so he’d never go to one for help. Whatever the reason, he idolized me until I was five, then he just stopped. Cold turkey. Like I was a bad habit he needed to quit. He claimed I was the bastard daughter of my mother’s blonde gynecologist. And later, he claimed that I was the reason my mother divorced him. It’s odd how the truth, even at its most obvious, manages to elude the deluded.

He never for a moment considered that he was less than the ideal husband. He imagined himself as the perfect father. It was outside of his consideration that my mother left him because she had become too full of fury. He was a fool. The fury had become compressed into a small knot in her bowels. It became a tumor. Misshapen, black. Sucking the life from her body. And finally, when the cancer transmuted from benign to malignant, she could no longer continue to forgive him.

As for my father, well, he was what my friends at Alanon call a “rage-aholic.” His own anger blinded him to the fact that my mother could no longer absolve herself for loving him, or letting him destroy her children.

It was her or him. She tried to fight back, once with a fire iron. It put him in the hospital overnight. Twenty-eight stitches across his left shoulder. If she hadn’t left him, one or the other would be dead now. Either way, Gabby still can’t speak.

And now I look like what my father made no secret of wanting, the ultimate WASP. I have the same face and figure of my mother at twenty combined with my father’s coloring. In small ways like this I’m lucky. My mother was a real knockout. I shouldn’t say “was.” At fifty-eight she’s still thin, strong, attractive and elegant looking. But I’ve seen the photographs she keeps stashed in an old hatbox. At twenty, she could have been a beauty queen.

As far as my appearances go, this conjunction of parents’ genetics makes most men trip over their tongues trying to get to me. But on the inside, on the inside I’m damaged goods, a Jekyll and Hyde, deformed and crippled, another ugly duckling waiting for the seasons to change, waiting to grow white feathers and fly away as a beautiful swan.

A swan. A lovely white swan dancing across the stage in Swan Lake. That’s what I’d like to be. Just like in the ballet. The only drawback to this daydream is that my father would like the same thing for me. It’s a Russian thing. A bias toward Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer. My father’s actual surname is “Podlubnyj,” but he fabricated an Anglicized designation.

That’s how I wound up with a label recycled from Russian czars and a Macedonian conqueror, Catherine Alexandra Nicholas. But my mother had a secret revenge, a moment of quiet rebellion. On my birth certificate, she wrote in an additional middle name: Mariella, in remembrance of her own Mexican mother, in remembrance of the heritage that my father had made taboo.

And I use that name everywhere and with everyone, except in front of my father. But one day I will wear my name like a medal, like a Purple Heart. I will thrust it in my father’s face like a badge of honor. I am going to write the story of my family. I know all their histories. I have listened to my mother’s chronicle. I know the credentials of every river she has crossed. And I have listened to my sister, Ramona. I trust her like I would trust the God who she and my mother worship.

“Travis” told me in class today that he believes “the sins of the fathers are washed on the souls of the children.” And I’ve often wondered if there is some kind of purpose and predetermination to what often feels like a facade of life but not life itself. It is as if we are players auditioning for parts in some cinema verité, as if history is merely an endless loop video, as if history and DNA are intertwined, a microscopic helix simulating the macrocosmic chain.

So the story I will tell is either from a plan beyond our reach and consciousness, or one of extraordinary coincidences. It is either a story of commonplace happenstance, or a story of spectacular warning.

It is only by writing it down, changing my clothes, wearing disguises, and then stepping back and reading it as if I were a stranger that I can gain any perspective. By writing it down I may find a glimpse of the really real.

I’m lucky in this task, I have more than my own untrustworthy memories. And memory is untrustworthy. It is a thin line that divides the madwoman from the saint.

The reader’s speculation about a text is often no more or less accurate than the writer’s intention. But as the writer, I am permitted some indiscretion. It is not only my job to record facts, but also my obligation to create reality.

In this creation of reality, and also as a writer, I’ve become familiar with many characters: those I’ve lived, those I’ve dreamed, and those that have emerged from my pen and ink. The “thin line” between living, writing, and dreaming often dissolves into a blur.

History and autobiography invariably reshape themselves into creative fictions, edited by unreliable witnesses with conscious and unconscious agendas. But as I’ve said, I’m more fortunate in this regard because I have evidence that reaches beyond the mere tricks of my own retrospection. With this evidence I will resurrect the bones of these stories from their otherwise eventual ash. The peculiar personalities that will inhabit these now blank pages will rise like the phoenix, spraying dust in the eyes of the reader. And it is only by recording all of these stories that any sense will be made of the strangeness.

I have collected the poetry and stories that my mother, Carla Maria Batista, has carefully typed, labeled and filed, along with assorted newspaper clippings and family photographs, into a series of shoeboxes. I will reconstruct her story and tell it as if I were there. Forgive me for that but it feels so very real to me.

Ramona has supplied me with her journals. She has advised me to read them and keep them safe. She has given me permission to do that what she would never do herself. She has given me permission to make her confessions public.

I have gone on what feels like a pilgrimage to meet Raymond Parker, the father of Ramona and Gabriella. He is the husband that my mother never forgot, even while she embraced my own father. I will tell what Ray Parker never told. I will let him testify on his own behalf, or condemn himself with his own narrative.

I will tell of the legends that have grown around Carlos, like ivy on a statue. I was too young to have known him but I have spoken to his lovers and friends, and even some of his enemies. I have listened to their praise and condemnation. I have read the letters that he wrote to his sister, Ramona, and his best friend, Jonah.

Jonah. Jonah of the Bible. Jonah of the Whale Story. There is no one I know better. I will let Jonah tell his own story. He is almost too cavalier about this undertaking. He is not bothered by the publicity. After all, he was never a member of the family. Unbeknownst to him, he was my first love. He is also the one who Ramona loves most in this world. And Ramona has always been the one I love most. So you see, it’s easy, just simple arithmetic. These stories are inevitable.

It is said that confession is good for the soul. I am herein confessing that I’ve secretly been in love with Jonah since I was three and he was twenty-three. I have been close to him. I know his version of this narrative that I am about to tell. This history will be told by an amateur detective, inquisitive by nature, a know-it-all by personality.

Just by beginning this chronicle, my soul feels slightly more cleansed. But the purification is incomplete. I will disinfect my insides with the continued telling of this story. These words will become my purgative. I will regurgitate the legend of my kin and hope that once again I will be able to sleep.

I have taken their statements. I am filing my reports. I am writing this for my soul and my sanity. I am writing this for Travis W. And I will speak for those who cannot speak. I will speak for my mute sister and for those who have been silenced. I will speak for those who dwell on the outside of the inner circle and for the ones who live on their knees. I will write and speak: in my voice, in their voice, in the voice of Carla and Ray and Ramona and Jonah. I will speak for those who can not or will not—and because this is their story.

* * * * * * * * *

This story is about roads and where they take us. There were roads in America long before you and I and our parents and grandparents can remember. There were roads even before Hernan Cortez came looking for gold. Even then there were already men and women and roads and those who searched for gold.

In the time just after the great pre-Columbian gods Quetzlquatl and Culculcan had lived in the land but before Cortez had come to conquer, there was a comely Aztec princess named Iztachuatl, “the sleeping lady,” and her handsome consort, Popocatepetl, who was a mighty warrior. Together, they resolved to search for the fabled, seven lost cities of gold.

They went out on their quest and, after a time, came to a small hut by a fork in the road. A crone lived there, blind in both eyes but famed for the ability to see with her heart what others could not see with their eyes. The handsome Popocatepetl asked the philosopher crone if she knew the way to the golden cities, to which she replied, “Yes. There are two journeys that will take you to your destiny. One is the road that is long but short and the other is the road that is short but long. Choose one.”

Being in a great hurry for success, the warrior unhesitantly chose the “short” road. But the princess thought for awhile, about the seeming paradox posed by the crone, and chose the “long” road.

Popocatepetl set off ambitiously on the “short but long road.” Soon, though, he discovered that it was almost entirely uphill. Indeed, the road was strewn with thorns and sharp stones that tore at his feet. And the glare of the hot, unshielded sun blazed down on his back and burned the skin of his face.

Desperately, Popocatepetl searched for a shaded place to rest. There was none. He searched for a cool spring to quench his awful thirst. There was none. And, after not much more than a day on the “short” road, the warrior, with the last remnants of his strength, crawled into the golden city and collapsed.

The princess, Iztachuatl, set off carefully down the “long but short road.” The path was perfectly flat and carpeted in soft, green moss. It was shaded in its entirety by opulent trees that were adorned with fragrant tropical flowers and rich ripe fruit. And the entire way was paralleled by a meandering, babbling brook. The journey took the princess several days. But it was with such ease, that she arrived in the golden city refreshed.
And it was there she found her Aztec lover, who she thought to be dying. In grief, she lay down and fell asleep. After sleeping for a very long while, her body became a hill and then a mountain.

When at last Popocatepetl revived, he saw that the sleeping body of Iztachuatl had been transformed into a mountain, so he too lay down in sorrow, waiting for her to awake, until he also became a mountain. The smoke, that then poured out of him, was his tears.

So this is a story of roads. And it is the story of the choices we make at the twists and turns. Sometimes we are wise and careful and sometimes we are headstrong and careless. Sometimes the road is good and sometimes it is not. But the road itself is indifferent. ••


Story III

BEYOND JUAREZ
(as written in Ramona Batista’s journal)


December 11th, 1971:

This is my first official entry. I’ve never kept a journal before. In fact, I’ve never considered it. J-O-U-R-N-A-L. It sounds like a fashionable way of saying “diary.” And I’ve always thought that girls that kept diaries were a little too close to living in Barbie City, if you know what I mean. Oh, no. I can’t believe it. I just wrote, “If you know what I mean.” As if I was talking to someone. As if I’d ever let someone read what I’d write here. Besides, I’m only starting this journal because my new therapist says it’ll be “a good exercise for me.” She says that it’ll help me, and I’m quoting her here, “to work through my crisis.” – Oh yeah, when I say “new therapist,” I actually mean first therapist. That’s also something different for me. Pretty scary, too.

I’ve only known one other person in my life who went to a head shrinker. Linda Cifuentes. She stuttered and had really bad B.O. I guess I shouldn’t say anything about speech impediments because, Carlos, that’s my brother, he stutters too, but that’s only when he gets really unglued about anything hidden deep inside of him that he thinks is on the verge of coming out and embarrassing him.

He hates being embarrassed, or humiliated, more than anything. Maybe even more than death. I think he’d do anything, and I really mean ANYTHING to avoid humiliation. But I’m not going to get into that right now, because it’s a huge story. And it’s sort of part of the story that’s got me going to this therapist in the first place.

Okay, my therapist says that I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say it out loud. I have to be able to write the words down. I have to be able to do that until I can say the words and remain calm. I have to start this now so later I can think about the situation with perfect “equanimity.”

Cool word, equanimity. I like people that can use language well.

Okay, so I’m going to end my first journal entry with “the words” that I’m supposed to repeat out loud. Then, I’ve got to hit the sack. Tomorrow’s a workday at the Broadway. And they like their employees bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. So here goes, it’s no big deal – I WAS RAPED. IT WASN’T MY FAULT. I’M STILL A GOOD PERSON. – Good night.

December 15th:

Dear Diary… No, skip that. Saying “Dear Diary” feels like just another way of my making a parody out of something in an attempt to make it less real. I’ve got to try and stop being so sarcastic. And my sarcasm annoys people who don’t understand my true intentions. I’m really a very nice person. But I grew up in a sarcastic family that attracts other sarcastic people as our friends.

Anyway, my therapist told me today that I shouldn’t expect people to be “mind-readers” and know what’s really going on inside of me. Oh, never mind. I’ve just started keeping a journal and already I’ve skipped three days. Not really much of a diary, I guess. And probably not very responsible of me, either.
I realized, after re-reading my last, first, and only journal entry that I didn’t formally introduce myself to my non-existent audience here on these blank pages. Not very proper of me. Not the way Mama has trained me. So, my full name, and I guess it’s a mouthful, is Ramona Elena Maria Batista. I’ll be nineteen years old, next Wednesday on the 22, the same day as the winter solstice.

I’m taller than most of my friends, 5’8” at last count, and weigh around 120 pounds, depending on my “time of the month.” I was always kind of tall and scrawny and geeked out when I was growing up. I think older guys are the ones most attracted to me. Maybe because I’m not taller than them anymore.

I’d like to have a narrower waist to give me more of a voluptuous appearance. Mama says I have a great figure and the proof is that “the guys are always lining up at my door,” which I guess is something of an exaggeration, The thing I like about me best is I have really manageable hair. This saves me tons of time getting ready for work or school or parties or whatever.

For just under a year, I’ve also been living on my own in a studio apartment the size of a shoebox. It’s in a great area, though, on Beverly Glen in Westwood. I moved out of my mother’s house because we lived too far from where I work in Century City. Now I can take my 10-speed to the Broadway. I still commute, though, three times a week to Valley State College in Northridge, where I’m majoring in Psychology.

Mama feels like I’d been her best friend and that now I’ve betrayed her by moving away. I don’t understand how she thinks I can be her friend and her little girl. I tell her she’s got enough with Gabby. But I know I’ve always been Mama’s favorite.
And boy is she dramatic. All of us kids have inherited this from her. Rosalia, her next door neighbor, confessed to me that Mama has been saying, “Que lástima, mi hija buena ella rompa nuestra amistad. - What a pity, my good daughter has torn apart our friendship.”

Mama says that this is history’s way of repeating itself. She says that my leaving her is her punishment for her leaving her own mother alone in Ciudad Juarez. She says that it’s just like that thing about the sins of the fathers being washed on the souls of the children, only in reverse.

But this is nineteen years after Juarez, and it sounds a little beyond mere drama to me. It sounds like melodrama, and I tell her so. She makes it seem like my going from the Eastside to the Westside of L.A. is the same thing as her swimming across the Rio Grande river. Please! Give me a break!

Then of course she adds her typical political commentary by saying, “I’m not so sure she would’ve abandoned me if it weren’t for that new Amendment. Letting people vote at only eighteen. Rosalia, you know me, I signed the petitions because it’s the democratic way. But now look. It’s backfired. I’ve lost my baby.”

I’ve a brother, and a little sister whose nickname is Gabby for Gabriella. I had another brother, Manny, but he was killed near the same time that I was raped. He’d been named for my mother’s brother, Manuel, who everybody has called Gordo since forever. Sometimes I think it’s my fault that I got raped and that little Manny died. And I definitely know it’s my fault that my Mama has had a pretty hard life. I was born here, well, in Texas anyway, but I still know what it’s like to be called a wetback.
Mama’s had to work so hard to raise us. If it wasn’t for me, she might have been able to go to college like my Uncle Gordo. He went to Chicago Northwestern and became a big-time architect.

My uncle, who I absolutely adore, has come to visit us almost every Christmas. Even though he practically worships my mother – she’s his older sister – he still gets annoyed that neither me or Carlos or Gabby speak much Spanish. Well, okay, “fluent” isn’t even close. He says, “If the kids don’t respect their language, they won’t respect themselves.” He says it’s a matter of la raza, taking pride in our Mexican heritage.”

But Mama is adamant. She’s not one to be bullied in an argument when she thinks she’s right. And usually, if she thinks she’s right, she is. She reminds him that our father is an Anglo and that “Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Qué vale toda sus educacion sí todavía hablas ingles sí con un acento? 2

I wanted to make Uncle Gordo happy. I tried to read “Cien Aňos de Soledad,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in the original Spanish. I failed horribly. I felt that reading through it, word by word with a dictionary, was like my own “hundred years of solitude.”

So, about my therapist. Her name is Dr. Diane Rosen and she’s trying to help me stop thinking such guilty and “destructive thoughts.” I really wish I could be just like her. She’s around thirty-five with a little girl named Becky Sarah. What a beautiful name!
Anyway, Becky is extremely smart and beautiful, just like her mother. And her name reminds me of a book I once read, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nearly half the girls I know have the same middle name as me, “Maria.” I think it’s a rule for being Catholic. If you’re a girl then you have to be named after “Mary,” or, at least, after her mother, “Anne or Anna.” And if you’re a guy then you have to be named after Mary’s husband, “Joseph or Jose.”

Of course, I know a lot of guys whose first name is “Jesus,” which in Spanish is pronounced “Hay-soos.” But they pretty much say it’s something else because it’s not considered a cool name anymore. Hey, I’m Mexican, well, half of me anyway. Most of my friends are Mexican. Around here “Jesus” is a common name. But the white kids laugh when they hear it – they pretend the name is “Hey Zeus.”

I’m straying again. What I wanted to write about tonight was a discussion that I had with my mother, last night when I went over there for dinner. I’m really thankful for my mama, by the way, because she’s an extremely hip person, not like most other mothers. In fact, I think if it weren’t for us she’d probably have been a beatnik when she was my age. Maybe she’d even be a hippie now and live in San Francisco on Telegraph Avenue and teach political science at Berkeley. She is very political. She’s been on, at least three that I know of, anti-Vietnam peace marches. Last year she campaigned in our neighborhood to get the 26th Amendment passed to lower the voting age to eighteen. She says that if her boy is old enough to die for his country, he’s old enough to vote.

2 “How will they find decent employment without knowing perfect English? What is all their education worth if they still speak English with a Mexican accent?”

But anyway, Mama had read the “Ann Landers” column in this morning’s Herald Examiner which talked about a kid who’d been given up for adoption and now that he was eighteen was “poking around and looking for his real mother.”
This is a sore spot with my mama. Outside of our immediate family, no one knows that I’m technically illegitimate. This information would be considered very shameful if it got around.

My father is an Anglo who I’ve only met a few times when he has randomly appeared for a few short visits. When I was between about ten and twelve, there was even a period that he lived with us, but that’s the last time I saw him. The way mama tells it (and of course this is the Readers Digest condensed version), my father was called off to fight in the Korean War just before he and my mama were going to get married and just before he even knew that she was pregnant. It’s my father who gave my brother and me the parking lot. Carlos runs the place and gives me a small allowance every month from the proceeds.

The lot still carries our visiting father’s name, PARKER’S SELF-PARK. Kind of clever that Ray Parker, giving a catchy name to an otherwise drab business. But I must admit, that legacy of his does treat us well.

The other reason Mama was annoyed by that news column, and this is more complicated, is because of something that happened which hits a little closer to home. Almost four years ago, not much before I was raped, my best friend, Donna, got pregnant. She refused to say who the baby’s father was, so her father beat the hell out of her for not telling. There was no way she could get an abortion. She had the child, a little boy, at Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, the one on Sunset and Edgemont. I was there when she went into labor. She signed a statement saying her son should be given up for adoption. A few hours later she locked herself in the hospital bathroom and slashed the back of her leg at the knee, diagonally, opening a major artery the length of several inches.

I was the first to find her. It was 7 A.M. The first light of day was shimmering in a hazy mix of fog and smog and illuminating the edges around the letters of the Hollywood Sign, in luminous pinks and golds. The sign looked as if it were announcing the entrance to Peter’s Pearly Gates. Or maybe it was Dante’s Inferno; to this day I can’t be sure. Those muscular brown hills cradling the Cahuenga Pass always felt masculine to me. Earthy. Like damp mesquite, strong and sexual.

After staring out the window, my rapture broke just long enough to realize that Donna had been in the bathroom for awhile without speaking. I shook the door handle. It wouldn’t budge, so I ran to find a nurse. I was scared. Donna had been a good student in Biology Class. She knew her way around anatomy. When the door had been forced open, I saw Donna sitting still upright on the shower floor. She looked like one of those patriotic statues in a park fountain. Her only birds and trees were those that watched from the bathroom’s vinyl wallpaper as she’d taken a stolen scalpel and managed to bleed her own body of its liquid mortality within the space of a few heartbeats, and within the space of elation and sorrow. Her porcelain skin was ghostly. Fifteen years of history had gushed out and collected in red pools on the cold blue tiles. Donna had chosen the tiles so the mess would be easy to clean. She died the way she’d lived, not one to cry for help or make a burden of herself. Overly considerate.

The hospital delivered her boychild to a private adoption agency, where his surrogate parents claimed him. Before that, though, I saw the newborn in the delivery room. He was very alert and perfectly formed, with eyes of delft blue. I am now the only one who knows who the father is.

Against the will of the Church but to avoid a permanent symbol of disgrace, Donna’s parents then had her body cremated. For added insurance, they moved to a different neighborhood where nobody would be able to remind them of what had been done.

I remember standing on the end of Santa Monica pier, where the continent becomes buried by the Pacific Ocean, and I watched as Donna’s ashes were received by the long, gray arms of God.

The Ann Landers letter and these two incidents combined to create the until-one-in-the-morning discussion between me and my mama, a discussion which lasted until it was too late for me to make a journal entry last night. I’d gone for dinner and a visit. I said hi to Gabby who was sitting in the den, watching All In The Family on the tube. Then, I returned to talking with Mama, which became more a monologue on her part.

“Mi hija, you’ve asked me many times about how things were before you were born, before I came here from Mexico.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, “but what does that have to do with why this Ann Landers thing has you so all in a tiff?”

“You’re so impatient,” said my mother, “you really must learn more patience. I’m going to tell you a story, one that is very close to me, one that is part of what makes me, me. But you will need an open ear, a comfortable chair, and some patience.”

“Yes, Mama. Just get on with it. ”Mama sighed, “Well, I guess you’re not so unlike me when I was your age. I was also very impatient with my mother. I think it’s true what the psychologists say about the competitiveness of young women with...

“Mama,” I cut in, “I said a wanted to hear the story, not a lecture, okay?”

“Oh never mind.” she said, “ Anyway, before I met your father and long before having any experience like the kind with Donna’s murder (she preferred this word over the less accusatory term “death”), and when I was only about fifteen myself, I had a best friend, Elisa Mariella Maria Sanchez. She’d been...”

“Elisa,” I cut in again, “is that why you like that name so much?”

“Yes, do you mind if I continue?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“So, as I was saying, Elisa had been adopted by her aunt and uncle. She’d been told that her blood parents had drowned when the car they’d been driving got a blowout, lost control, and flipped off the bridge going from our hometown of Ciudad Juarez and across the river into El Paso.”

“That’s where me and Carlos were born, right? El Paso?”

“Well, yes,” she said. I mean, no. That is, not exactly. You were born outside the city limits, upriver several miles. That’s where the current was the slowest. It was easier for me to make the swim in the shallower part of the river.
But anyway, sometimes it is so difficult to get one point across to you. Will you just sit for a minute or two?”

I nodded.

“So, for one reason or another, Elisa never wanted to believe that story. She always seemed distant, like she was never 100% there when we talked. I think Elisa spent a lot of hours lost in a sort of waking reverie. She was searching the sky and her dream for that legendary pot of gold that they say is at the end of rainbows. But for Elisa, it was not just another tall tale, for her there was an actual and physical end to the rainbow. It could be reached. The legend was possible. For her the fantasy crossed out of the shadows and into the light of reality. For her, just over the horizon, a real father and mother waited. For her, there was second set of parents and a second chance at life that the rest of us would never get.”

Mama stopped for a moment, looked at the watch she always wore on her right wrist even though she was right-handed. She looked at her watch a lot, but I don’t think it was less to check the time then to verify that life was still in order.

Mama continued, “Elisa poked around endlessly. Intruding into other people’s lives like she was on a divinely inspired mission. Like she had special dispensation from the Pope. It was strange and beautiful to be in her company, to be her friend, for as long as she never reached the truth, she was driven by a hope that was not to be fully fathomed by me until after I met Raymond (Mama always referred to my estranged father as Raymond, not Ray). It was her hope that someday she would find the treasure, a family rich and beautiful, a family eager to open their heart and home.”

“That’s a beautiful story, but where does Donna come into this?” I said.

“Well, that’s just it. Elisa was a deeply beautiful and deeply misunderstood girl. In the short time that I knew your friend, Donna, it seems to me that she and Elisa are cut from the same cloth. They could be the same person. I miss Elisa, and now I miss Donna.”

Somehow, Mama managed to segue from her recital on adoption to explaining that a major cause for people being so deluded is television and that she thinks that Gabby is watching too much TV, and that maybe I should talk to her because I’m the only one she’ll listen to, etc. etc. I’ve been told by more than one person that I’m a lot like my mama, that I’m too opinionated and tend to preach from soapboxes. My next appointment to see my therapist is this Wednesday. I think I’ll ask her what she thinks.


December 17th:

I’d be ashamed to admit this to my friends, but I think I’m beginning to like keeping a journal. It feels so... important, as if I’m participating in history. There’s this silly fantasy of mine that a long time after I’m dead, someone will find this and publish it and make me famous. I’m usually pretty skeptical of things, but I’m never a pessimist. I think some people from the future reading this would be really great. After all, they won’t be around to put me down or anything.

Of course my journal has started out to be more like a dissertation than a diary. Which is what my brother might have sarcastically predicted. He’s such the opposite of me. He always thinks that his glass his half empty rather than half full. He also thinks keeping a journal is “a total waste of time.” But maybe that’s because I think I’m going somewhere better after this life is over, and Carlos thinks he’s going nowhere at all.

Anyway, I missed making yet another entry last night because I went to a really far-out party with Vicki Fuller, this girl from work. At the Broadway, I’m in Women’s Casual wear and she’s in Cosmetics, but our registers are only about twenty feet apart. From her counter she can actually see me, as large as life, when I’m ringing up a sale. If she catches my eye, she’ll usually crack me up by making faces or flipping the bird at some customer when they’re not looking. She’s such a cut-up. If I ever get pink-slipped, it’ll be one of the floor managers who has caught me laughing at one of Vicki’s crazy antics.

Carlos thinks “Victoria” is, as he puts it, “the kind of woman (yeah, she’s about two years older than me, his girl sister) who has the looks and style that gets both sexes’ attention, the kind so sexually mesmerizing that she makes hetero chicks think about becoming dykes and makes fags think about going straight.” He’s such a typical guy in this respect. He can’t see past a girl’s boobs if she’s wearing a tight sweater.

But I think Vicki is brilliant and probably a very old soul. On one hand she’ll be saying something really clever and funny, and on the other hand she’ll come out of left field and say something deep and profound. She says, not too bashfully, that she likes me because looking at me is like looking in the mirror for her. She says she sees “the face of a pagan goddess, the smarts of Madame Curie, and the passion of Joan of Arc. And like Joan of Arc, we’re both just as misunderstood.”

I drove over to her place a little before 7 P.M. to have dinner with her and her parents before getting ready to go to the party. She lives in a detached one-bedroom guest quarters on the grounds of a huge estate on Bellagio Way in the best part of Bel Air. It’s only about a mile north of my apartment, though. According to Vicki, her mother’s father had invented NO-DOZ and had made a fortune.

He first built the guesthouse with his own hands, then after making an even bigger fortune in the booze business, he had Frank Lloyd Wright design the main house. It’s this sort of gorgeous but weird combination of an old Southern plantation house and a Southwestern adobe rancho. Something you’d see in Gone With The Wind Meets Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. Just inside the front door, there’s a huge spiral staircase in an entry hall bigger than my whole apartment, where you could just dream of seeing Clark Gable or Paul Newman sweeping you into their arms and... well, I guess anyone would love the place. All the windows are French-paned and double-covered with white Irish lace curtains and blue velvet brocade drapes.

Her parents, could anyone believe their names are actually George and Martha, are the most genteel people. Vicki, lucky girl, is an only child and could have anything she ever desires for the rest of her life, but still wants to be “independent,” so she works at the Broadway with me for $1.75 an hour. Maybe I’ll get lucky soon. There’s been talk that the Local 770 branch of the Retail Clerks Union is going to start organizing the department store cashiers. Then we’d get a pay hike to about $2.25 an hour. That wouldn’t mean diddly to Vicki, but it could help me get a better car. Carlos already makes enough from the self-park to drive an almost new BMW, but I drive 44 miles for my round-trip school commute, and with no 8-track or radio in my old Microbus, it gets pretty boring. Just last week ago I had to get a new clutch for Casper, that’s what I call my VW because it was once flawlessly white. Thank God V-Dubs are cheap and easy to fix; but I’d still like to be able to afford some new curtains for the windows, a sound system, and maybe even four new tires that all match and aren’t retreads.

Oh yeah, the party with Vicki. After dinner with her parents – the food was all vegetarian, which I think is so cool, especially for rich people – we went back to her “own little house,” took a few tokes off some Panama Red and listened to the Beatles White Album. The music hummed in my head as the reefer smoke rolled deep into my lungs. I could hear John Lennon singing, I am you/ as you are me/ and we are all together/ Sitting on a cornflake/ waiting for the band to come.

I looked at Vicki and asked, “Didn’t you say something today at lunch about that “waiting for the band to come” had more than one meaning?”

“Of course, silly goose. It’s so obvious. Besides, it says so in the latest edition of Rolling Stone.” She waved with her hand to a slightly crumpled copy that had been carelessly tossed into one corner of the room by her desk. “The point is that the Beatles are very heavy and practically never say anything that doesn’t have a message. So, in this case, it’s about s-e-x. So when they say to c-o-m-e, they really mean to c-u-m, like in having an orgasm. They don’t mean to come as in to arrive.

I nodded in a way that was meant for her to understand that this new insight was really an old story. I hated feeling stupid. I know Vicki didn’t mean to make me feel that way.
It’s just a part of me that feels like I’ve betrayed myself, somehow, by not seeing the simple truth, the obvious facts, the easy method.

Vicki continued without a break. “So, get it? It’s about the groupies that follow famous rock stars from place to place and throw things on-stage like panties, bras, and room keys. And I’ve heard that sometimes those groupies will give every member of the group a blow job – or fuck someone in the band – just to say they did it, just…”

“You mean,” I interrupted, “as if the band’s fame would rub off on them? Wow, so that’s how cheap sex can make you feel important!”

Vicki ignored my sarcasm. She squealed, “Exactly! And can you just see it? There you are, laying on your back with your lover. And just when you’re about to cum, you yell, Oh my God, I’m arriving, I’m arriving.”

When I finally caught my breath from laughing too hard, I asked Vicki where she got such mighty fine weed. She told me she has a really great connection but that she can’t tell me about the guy because his father publicly works for the Bank of America in Beverly Hills but privately is a honcho with the West Coast Mafia. He sells her a clean lid of Red for the righteous price of only ten bucks, which is what everyone else pays for an ounce of the regular shit that’s filled with seeds and stems. And Vicki says that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is really about tripping on acid because the initials of the song are LSD.

I don’t tell my brother about getting loaded because he was a big stoner a few years ago, but after he got sent to the Youth Authority he put down. He says that all the guys doing time were high while they were committing the crimes they got busted for. He doesn’t distinguish the difference between any drugs anymore. But I think smoking a little weed now and then is okay.

Vicki has a humongous bong that her parents, thinking “it was for Arab tobacco,” brought back from Morocco. They take a yearly vacation abroad and thought this memento would have “ornamental value.” It clashed with the furniture, though, and Vicki snookered it out of storage from the attic, and now has it as “ornamental value” in her own living room.

It took us about two hours to finally leave for the party. Vicki has really straight, naturally blonde hair. But she hates it because it won’t hold a perm. So while we were smoking and talking and listening to the Beatles, she spent about half of those two hours just with her curling iron. Maybe I’m just a teensy bit jealous but I don’t know why she bothers with any of it. I mean she is just as gorgeous from the moment she wakes up and from the moment she steps out of the shower.

So, Vicki borrowed her mother’s station wagon, which is very luxurious and comfortable, and we took off for the party. It was in West Hollywood on Sunset Plaza Drive. We made bunches of wrong turns, got lost for another hour, and didn’t make it to the party until after 10 P.M. Great view from the living room but you could barely see it. The place was jammed elbow to elbow with people.

It was such a groovy evening. But it’s already after two in the morning and I have yet to crack my books for the Psych mid-term tomorrow. So I’ll save the juicy stuff for my next journal entry. So, “say good night, Gracie.”


December 18th:

I could hardly wait to get home from work. With only three hours of sleep last night, I’ve been one sorry puppy all day. But I’m itching to write my new journal entry. I think it’s almost addictive. Probably because everyone in my family is a closet intellectual of one form or another. My mother, Carla Maria, since I was old enough to remember, has spent every minute of her spare time reading. And I don’t mean dime novels or true confession magazines, but heavy stuff.

She was the best student in her high school back in Juarez. She showed me her report cards, “not to brag but to show (me) that it’s part of the Batista heritage.” She never got less than an “A” in any subject except Home Ec, and that wasn’t because she can’t cook – because she can, really well – but because she and the teacher had what Mama politely calls “personality differences.” What I think that really means was that the teacher was a major asshole.

Anyhow we only got a television when Gabby, my little sister, was about three years old. I was already thirteen. Mother definitely has a thing about TV being a negative influence, anti-intellectual... blah, blah, blah. So when she finally caved in to our protests, the television she gets has a crummy little fifteen inch, black and white screen. I’m not even sure where my mother found such an antique, probably in a garage sale or something.

I’ve felt like such a total dork most of my life because everyone would be watching their huge color TV’s and be all excited about the latest Soupy Sales antics – like when he flipped the bird to the producer of his show – and I’d just have to pretend to be part of the in crowd.

But the good part is that because my mother knows more about history and politics (her favorite subjects) than half of my college professors, some of it has rubbed off on me and Carlos and Gabby. It rubbed off on Manny, too, but I don’t like to think about that since he was killed. It still hurts too much.

Since Carlos got out of Nelles last year, he spends most of his time at work. But when he was a younger teenager he wasted a lot of his time just hangin’ with his pachuco friends. He was always trying to prove how bad-assed he was. He wanted to cover up the fact his big “secret.” When he wasn’t being cool, he was reading books – just like his mother and sister. That’s one way Carlos and me are really alike.

Oops, I just wrote “Carlos and me” when I really should have written “Carlos and I.” Mother would freak about that, she’s a Mexican nut for English syntax.

So, Carlos and “I” both love to read. We’d pass novels back and forth. I think in one summer we read everything we could find by Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, and, of course, Jack Kerouac. Carlos has these alternating fixations that he is the “Steppenwolf” and that he is the “Stranger”.

Maybe two summers before that, we’d read every novel that John Steinbeck (he’s Mama’s favorite) ever wrote. Our biggest difference, though, is that I also have a secret life, kind of like Walter Mitty, but it’s as a poet. Maybe this journal thing fits right. I have a shoebox filled with my poems – just like Emily Dickinson. And I suspect that I’m gonna die with them still in the shoebox. I’d never show them to anyone. Again, I’m like my brother. We don’t do well with burla, which is Spanish for “ridicule.” I really need to practice my espaňol. Like Uncle Gordo says, “it’s the vernacular of at least one half of our heritage.”

Carlos and I both like to think of ourselves as pretty tragic figures, and we both have what Mama calls, “rampant imaginations.” In fact, I happen to know that he spent the better part of seventh grade saying to everyone about me and him, “somos los recién llegados y huéfanos,” that we were orphans who had just recently sneaked in from Mexico and that we lived by ourselves in an abandoned shed on a parking lot. Carlos was good, he practiced those words until he got them just right.

Anyway, he is clever! He even showed one friend the “shed,” which of course is on the same not-so-abandoned parking lot that we both now happen to own. Even though Carlos and I speak hardly any Spanish, Carlos enjoys using as many Chicano words and phrases as possible so he can “blend in with the barrio and intimidate the yokels.”

When he’s around his friends or in school, he adopts this masquerade: he walks like a pachuco and speaks like a cholo. This is pretty amusing to me because, at home and at work, he speaks English like a surfer who was born and raised in the Valley. He used to dress like the other homeboys, too. Baggy chinos with sharp creases, a starched white tee shirt and a Pendleton buttoned only at the neck. But after he got out of Y.A., he lets me pick his clothes with my 20% employee discount.

Now he wears stovepipe Levi’s that we distress and fade ourselves by washing them with lots of bleach after rubbing them for an hour with sand. He’s also going for his bachelor’s degree, at night after work, at Cal State, L.A. He wants to be the first Mexican film director in L.A.

Wow, I’m rambling again. I get so carried away. I wanted to talk about “The Big Party,” so here goes. When we finally found the right address and went inside, the place was SRO, so packed to the rafters that you could hardly take a deep breath, as Vicki would say, without giving some guy a cheap thrill. Well, that may apply to Vicki because she’s got this fantastic-Playboy-Bunny-figure. I’m not exactly flat-chested but Vicki is a guy magnet. She’s what anyone would define as “really stacked.” Plus, she’s gorgeous and funny and has a personality that could light up a New York City blackout.

Also, though, she is already twenty-one and a Libra, so she knows her way around. I mean, she’s very... overt! Just as an example, about two minutes after we get to the party, this guy, who looks like he stepped out of a poster of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, sort of accidentally-on-purpose bumps into Vicki’s bosoms, and makes this fake-type apology which was just a big come-on line.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but if your heart is as warm and lovely as your breasts, I’m sure you’ll forgive me.”

But Vicki, without so much as batting an eye, says to him, “Well, if your cock is as hard as your elbow, my phone number is 555-6969.”

I could’ve died right there. She is so fresh. I would have guessed that the guy would just turn to stone. But instead, just as cool as a cucumber, he says right back at her, “That’s cute but, in some cases,” and he points his finger from his elbow to his wrist, “it’s also this long.”

Qué‚ cojones – I’ve never seen such balls! But Vicki doesn’t get flustered either. She gets this demure look on her face and says, “Hey, you’d better get a letter of recommendation, if you want me to believe the unbelievable.”

So he says, “I’ve got more than one. I really do. I’ve got signed affidavits from at least ten ex-lovers, back at my place. You wanna come read them over?”

Then Vicki takes my arm in hers, and as she turns her back to walk away she retorts, “Well, if you were really all that good, at least one of them would have taken you as her hostage, not as her lover.”

So James Dean starts getting desperate and even more aggressive. He pushes though the crowd and plants himself, ahem, firmly in front of us.
He reaches out, puts his hand on Vicki’s shoulder and says, “Look, I’m really attracted to you. If you ladies would like to get high – uh, you do get high don’t you? – well, why not come over for a toke of some super fine shit I just scored last night. Hey, I even took a shower about an hour before coming to this party. So I’m really clean, if you catch my drift.”

I could feel Vicki was getting impatient. You could hear by her voice that her throat was tightening up a little. She looked away from James Dean and at me and said, “Well, Ramona, do you think he could’ve made his sales pitch a little more rudely?” There was a heartbeat or two before it seemed like they both regained a little composure.

The guy looked at me this time and said, “The lack of tact does not deny the fact.”

I’d been invisible until that moment. I felt a surge of adrenaline, like I’d gained some kind of power by having Vicki’s arm in mine. There was an alkaline taste on my tongue, like her electricity was charging my batteries. I opened my mouth but the words that came out were Vicki’s, not mine. I looked at James Dean hard and icy and said, “So what you mean by “clean” is really that you don’t have crabs or clap or anything, right?”

He says, “Yeah, I’ve been working on the Pipeline for the past twelve months in some pretty remote parts of Alaska. Lots of Eskimos, but no TV and no sex. I’ve been as pure as a newly driven snow.”

I could feel Vicki looking at me, letting me take control. I retorted, “How chaste of you. With Mother Theresa as your only competition, you should petition the Church. Keeping such a big thing as yours in your pants for a year should make you a cinch for sainthood.”

James Dean looked chagrined but came back with, “Yeah, but I still need and want sex in unmentionable ways and in unmentionable quantities.”

I looked at Vicki. She looked back at me like an approving, proud parent. I grabbed her arm more tightly and with my free arm pushed James Dean’s hand off from Vicki’s shoulder. While steering us both in the other direction, I called over my shoulder and said to him, “Well, why don’t you try the queer bar on Santa Monica and Fairfax. They love assholes like you.”

I had a great time with Vicki at the party, even with the all the jerks, the huge crowd was... wait, here’s my new word for the day... galvanizing. James Dean was actually a positive experience. I’m learning to be more like Vicki. Or maybe I’m just learning to be myself. Vicki is, after all, an odd duck. A real mix of opposites. One minute she can be as cold and sharp as a new tack, and the next minute she’ll be as warm and poignant as an old mariachi love song.

I slept at her place after the party. We were both zonked out and she has a bed as big as my old bedroom. But before falling asleep, Vicki just sort of started talking, under her breath, into the darkness, as if to no one in particular. The oddness of her words surprised me. So it’s with those words that I’ll end tonight’s pages.
Vicki said, “I sort of hope you’re asleep because I’ve never told anyone this and I probably never should, but when I was a little girl I used to get really angry at my mother. She seems really terrific to people that don’t really know her. She’s elegant, beautiful and refined. But she’s not very nice as a mother. She once told me that if she’d never given birth to me, she’d have left my father and become a stewardess. She’d wanted to be a bird. She’d wanted to fly. Airplanes were as close to that as she could get. She said that her parents had expected her to get married and have a family. And she’d always done what was expected. I was what was expected. And I think she’s secretly hated me for it.”

Vicki sighed. I didn’t move. She said, “And I hated her back. I hated her for making my father miserable, for her taking any of the love that she didn’t deserve, love that should have rightfully been given to me. My mother never hit me. She never even raised her voice to me. Harsh words are beneath her. But it’s the silence between words that inflicts the most damage. Silence makes pain invisible. You cannot answer silence.”

Vicki sighed again. I imagined that her heavy breasts were making it difficult for her to inhale. Her voice slipped into a whisper. “I tried to answer her. I couldn’t. I became constipated from holding everything in. Sometimes I couldn’t go to the bathroom for days at a time. Then, once, when I did have to go, I crept upstairs to my parents bedroom and, when I was certain that no one was looking, I crawled into my mother’s closet, took down my panties and made a really huge poop inside her favorite shoes.”

I still didn’t answer.

Vicki said, “I wonder if it’s this weird for everyone? You know, look around. Just this year alone. First it was Charles Manson. Then a 6.6 earthquake in San Fernando. And now we’ve got Mariner going around Mars. Mars,” she sighed again, “I’d like to go to Mars. I’d like to go for a long cool swim in a Martian canal. I bet it’s beautiful on Mars.”

There was a long emptiness before she spoke again. I had heard her breath even out. And just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, I heard her turn her head on her pillow. From the sound of it, I knew she was facing me. I felt her reach her arm out and rest it in the curve of my waist where it flows into my hip. In that moment, I knew that I really knew her. She was like a Mallomar, a tough cookie exterior shielding a soft and sweet marshmallow interior.


In a whisper she started singing a few bars from the Led Zeppelin album. It was a song that I was well familiar with. It had been the theme of my high school graduating class. The school band played it, along with Pomp and Circumstance, at our commencement ceremony. And those words were scrawled on the jacket of our yearbook: “...and she’s buy-ing a stair-way to hea-ven.” Then she broke off, sighed deeply and said, “You know Ramona, I’m so tired of being surrounded by hopelessness on one side and by arrogance on the other.”


December 19th:

Thank God it’s Friday. Going to a party on Humpday and staying out until two A.M. took a lot out of me. I’m not going to write much tonight because I’m doing this just after coming from therapy after work. Carlos is coming over at 7:30. We’re going to get something at the Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood then shoot over to the Bruin on Gayley Avenue for the ten o’clock movie. He wants to see the new Stanley Kubrick film, “A Clockwork Orange.” Carlos thinks Kubrick is in the divinity category somewhere between John Lennon and Bob Dylan.

It’s been three years since we went with some friends to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to see “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That’s the coolest movie theater, plush seats and a huge screen. We’d each dropped half a tab of Purple Owsley before the flick. Owsley is the purest LSD made, not cut with speed or anything. One of my friends, in fact, it was Donna’s little sister, Elvia, got so blitzed on the acid that she ran up to the movie screen with about five or six other people and started caressing it, moaning, “It’s God. It’s God.”

Anyway, I’ve only got an hour before he gets here, so I’m just going to transcribe something that Diane Rosen, my therapist, told me to do. She said it was important for me to ask my mother for something that she’s written down. Something she’s never shared with me or anyone. Then I’m supposed to read it and record it. In this way, I can connect my mother with myself.

I went out of my way after the session to stop at Mama’s and ask her for that “something.” She usually tries to be a bit stoic but I think she was touched. She gave me some things she’d written only for herself, just after Donna committed suicide.

I never knew that my mother ever wrote anything, yet alone poetry. It makes me feel even closer to her, if that’s possible. So, if my Emily Dickinson fantasy ever comes true and my journal gets published posthumously, my mother’s work will also be recorded for posterity. I think it’s good stuff, so with no more chat from me, here’s it is:


1. Untitled

I can still hear the ashes speak of Donna and how she burned, her eyes circled by darkness, her thighs clenching the life that she gave in death. She had yearned for love and a daddy to hold in her room filled with broken dolls and torn dresses.

And from the smoke the ashes speak again, confessing how they
worshipped the taste of fire that came to claim the smell of Donna’s skin.

Smoke cannot be contained. It can only speak the truth, lest we forget that the smell of fire comes only from what it burns.

2. Untitled

In the fall, when the leaves had prepared a soft bed for the blanket of coming rain, I quietly shed my 33 years like the trees their leaves and a lizard her skin. I’d felt the change coming. I’d transformed into a recorder of events, an historian, a person in process.

My 30th year had been the spring when I’d flowered again, four children had left me still strong yet graceful and lushly colored. The next few years were my summer, and my words fell onto paper like hidden Indian spice.

But now a chill crawls beneath my skin. After all, are not the seasons inevitable? I contemplate the eventual winter, still and heavy, like frozen typewriter keys. I button the collar of my denim jacket. I tie my red scarf more tightly and try to think about the Resurrection. I sit in our backyard on a low stone wall circling a now empty fountain. Images of water lilies that once floated here. Images of fish in a frozen lake.

The history of Donna is only a quarter turn from my own. Her death has eroded me. I feel I cannot write anything anymore.
I feel I have become ordinary.


3. Untitled

A little girl would sometimes lie in her darkened bedroom and imagine a spacecraft hovering outside her window. Waiting. Watching.

She imagined she would be abducted. Not for something unspeakable like the things that often lurked beneath the floorboards, but for something special. She was afraid but hopeful. Greatness was near.

But the years brought constant trial. Perhaps she was to be chosen Only after having been proven. She was consumed by curiosity.

She found refuge and solace in libraries, at church, at school,
in the plaza of the city. She also found excitement on the edge
of things, in imagination, in the faces of handsome men.

She crossed many rivers. She had a child. She lost a child. She fought with polio. She defeated polio. She had a boy. He was taken to prison.

She prayed. He was returned.

She listened as the voice of a kindred soul,
just fifteen, died in despair. The magic began to lose its color.
The paint of surprise began to peel. The plaster of adventure
began to shrink and crumble into predictability. The closed curtains began to yellow and sag.
She had been a swimmer. A potential medalist. Her small frame had been a sharp knife in soft water. But even swimming had become a lesson in pain.

She began to dog-paddle. To tread water. She needed to keep her nose dry. She thought, now and again, about the spacecraft.
The friendly aliens. She thought about the Book of Daniel.
She listened for the sisters of mercy. She prayed every day
for Salvation. For Resurrection. None of them came.


4. HEROINE

I was captured by Gypsies and lived
in many places before the age of five. I could perform
wonders with sleight of hand and was skilled
in magic while yet eleven.

I was savvy in song and a political prisoner when a friend
committed suicide to celebrate seventeen.

I was a cabalist and a guru, a perfect
master and a metaphysical
wizard before I drew twenty-two.

And then I broke the chains of sin
and crime and escaped
the slavery of space and time and found
God again at twenty-nine.

I am thirty-three now and dangerous.
Jesus became Christ at thirty-three.
Follow me and you risk becoming a burning apostle.

If you were meant to be / a Gypsy or a Lord
you would have known / long ago.•

December 20th

It’s Sunday night. I went to an arts & crafts fair at the Pan Pacific auditorium with Mama and Gabby this afternoon. Pretty boring, but I didn’t have anything else to do. Vicki’s been in bed since Friday with some god-awful flu bug that she thinks she got from “one of those two-bit Romeos that was breathing all over us as the party.”

Well, she may be half right. Or a quarter right. Even though I’m used to her sarcasm, I still thought some of those guys were really hunky. And, besides, not nearly as many of them were “breathing all over me” as were breathing all over Vicki. I’m sorry Vicki isn’t feeling well, but I have to confess that I’m feeling just as sorry for myself, now that I’ve got nothing to do. Vicki is such a blast. I love being with her, just hanging out, even when there are no guys around. Sometimes, even, I think I like it especially when there are no guys around. When it’s just me and her. We make a good pair.

I finished my homework on Saturday day, but on Saturday night, I had no date. There’s a Psych final paper due this Wednesday which I’ve finished twice over. It was such a cinch. The class is geared for morons – or to people who’ve never read anything, yet alone psychology. Prof. Wernicke assigned us a measly four page paper, a book report on a really skinny, maybe 70-page book by Sigmund Freud called, “On Dreams.”

He gave us three weeks to read the book and write the paper. I read the book in about three hours and wrote the paper in another five. And that’s from first to final, edited draft. I’d better not tempt fate, though, by even talking about this, otherwise I’ll incur the evil eye and all my classes next semester will be something like one hundred times harder than this one.
So now you know, dear diary, that I, Ramona Batista, had NO DATE on a Saturday night! I’m not exactly a sex-fiend like Vicki, who, from the way she talks sounds like she wants it all the time, and gets it all the time. But I am getting horny. I haven’t had a date in six weeks, and only four guys have asked me out at school since the beginning of the semester in September. Two of those were brave but reaching, so I had to turn them down gently with something like, “I think I’m taking my dog to get spayed that evening.”

Just kidding! Sort of. Of the other two, one had less than zero chemistry with me, and the other had enough chemistry to at least sleep with, if... But he was such a pea-brain that I couldn’t talk to him long enough to get excited enough to take him home and do the deed.

So, I haven’t had my feathers ruffled in quite awhile. Sometimes I think I must be a real loser. I’ve only had three boyfriends since I lost my virginity at sixteen. Well, I don’t count getting raped as losing my virginity. When I say “losing my virginity,” I mean with my choice and consent.

The first guy I ever slept with was inept. I think he lied about being “older” to impress me, but was probably a few months younger than me. Probably just got his driver’s license. Borrowed his older brother’s ‘66 Dodge Charger. The kind of car that guys think is a “babe magnet” because it’s monstrously fast and has a fastback design that lets you fold down the rear seats and poke your legs through to the trunk. Well, it’s not a babe magnet; but that is what we did — fold the back seat down, that is.

We went to this high school dance of his, Chaminade, a ritzy Catholic school in the Valley. We got high on some ridiculously fine weed, then parked on Mulholland Drive on this secluded spot just past the bend of Woodrow Wilson that has a fantastic view of the city lights. We downed a mickey of Southern Comfort, smoked some more reefer, listened to Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, and petted for awhile.

I wanted him to do it to me. I wanted to get even with the guy that raped me. To feel desirable. It went by pretty quickly. He felt me up for maybe thirty minutes, under my bra and panties. Then we lay down, in the back of the Dodge, covered from our waists down by the trunk of the car, and he just sort of spread-eagled me and pushed his dick into me without even taking my panties off. He’d being feeling how wet I was so I guess he just pulled the crotch of my panties aside and did it.

I remember what album was playing on the eight-track because he penetrated me about halfway through the cut, Parachute Woman. I think guys like to listen to that kind of sexual sounding music when they make love so they can grind their hips to the rhythm of the music. I think they think that that’s sexy. That it will turn us on. I remember Mick Jagger singing, “Parachute woman, won’t you land on me tonight...” and the bass guitar going bump-a-dump-a-dump-a-dump. And the deed was over before the song was over.

I hardly felt it. He was up and down in less than a minute. He called me afterwards to say his family was “moving” to San Francisco. I know he lied. I know now that he just wanted some girl that would make him feel like a god. One that would scream his name, and come, and tell him that he was the best. Guys want to think they’re the best even if they’re the first. It’s not logical. It just is.

Mama says that guys marry the first woman who makes them feel the most special. It’s not about how we look, or how we think, or even how we are. It’s just about how they think we think, whether we’re actually thinking that or not. I’m not too sure about this because then it seems that really good actresses would have really good marriages with really good guys. And everyone knows that’s about the opposite of what’s really so.

My second boyfriend was better. Actually he was my first real boyfriend. The first guy was someone who got his rocks off with me and never called back. This guy called back. His name was Frank, and he was... frank, that is. He was what I imagine most of us would think of as characteristic of this Age of Aquarius. Very hip. Very hippie. He was ultra-intelligent and into sensitivity and “connecting with our inner feelings.”

He was already thirty-five years old when I was seventeen. Funny, I never thought of him as being my mother’s peer, being her age and all. But Frank was okay. And he used to make me feel okay about being naked with him. He’d do it to me even when I had my period. Even though I think that’s a pretty gross thing, he never made me feel dirty or ashamed. He was very patient. It lasted about four months. He was in love with me. The first one, I think. Maybe some other guys have been in love from afar, but I don’t think that counts. I only think it counts if some of the feeling is reciprocal. If it’s in a relationship.

Frank wanted to marry me. Mama thought he was really a great guy, but reasoned that I was too young to know better and he was too old not to. I didn’t think I was too young. I just didn’t think I loved him in return. He was, well, just Frank. He didn’t feel like my idea of what a M-A-N is supposed to feel like. He did all the right things but that wasn’t enough. He would lick my vagina like he was professionally trained, if there is such a thing, but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t get me really hot. He didn’t make me crazy. He didn’t make me unable to think about anyone or anything but him.

I’m probably too selfish. Maybe I should’ve responded to Frank better. He gave me a huge diamond engagement ring that probably cost him three months salary and that would make other girls faint. Even though I’m certain that this gift was in every way well-intentioned, it still felt somehow like a bribe to me. Like it would make me obligated. I gave it back. I want nice things. But not in that way.

I think I broke Frank’s heart. Later, Frank told me that he had joined one of those lonely hearts dating clubs where white guys meet Filipina girls that want to get their greencards. He even brought her around once for me to meet her, to get my approval. She was cute and petite and intelligent, but something was definitely missing. Frank told me that she made a lot of noise when he fucked her. He liked that. It made him feel special. Like I said, Frank was always very frank with me. He told me everything, including things that I’d rather not have known. He invited me to their wedding. I felt embarrassed for her. I didn’t go.

The third guy I made it became my second boyfriend. He was the best so far. His name was Ernesto. Maybe I’m starting a pattern. Ernesto en español sounds like it would mean “earnest,” even though it doesn’t. And of course “earnest” is what “frank” means. Okay, it’s a dumb “flight of ideas” as my therapist calls these thoughts of mine. Anyway, Ernesto was the first Mexican guy I’ve ever been on a date with.

My brother thinks I’m a bigot, “a pretentious white-chick wannabe.” He teases me a lot about a lot of things, but that’s just his way. I know he doesn’t really believe it. I’d just never dated a Mexican guy simply as a matter of coincidence. None of the guys in my neighborhood really ever appealed to me. None of the guys in school, either. And our high school was about 50/50. About half white kids, who lived west of Vermont Avenue, and about half Mexican kids who lived in our area. So I had my pick but never picked any. And it’s just a coincidence that the guy who raped me was a Mexican guy. Had I been west of Vermont it could’ve been a white guy, and if I’d been south of Manchester, it could’ve been a black guy.

But Ernesto was definitely muy suave y muy guapo. He had the looks, all right. And he was smooth. That boy talked like a natural born politician. Well, he was, actually. His father was on the L.A. City Council and Ernesto was already student body vice-president at Valley College. Damn, but that boy could walk as good as he could talk.

Now he made me crazy. I really can’t say it was because he was a great lover. He wasn’t. Sappy old Frank knew techniques that Ernesto never heard of. I can’t really say that it was because he was so smart, either. Because he was.

Ernesto had one of those IQs that put him in the 99.9th percentile of our planet’s civilization. His smarts helped. I’m v-e-r-y attracted to smart men. They feel so in control. But his smarts and his looks and his bedroom acrobatics still weren’t the only things that made me totally crazy for the guy. It was a combination of those and other things that I simply can’t put a handle on. It was just, as Vicki says, his “je ne sais quoi.”

But Ernesto was a bigot. He wanted to “marry right.” And not just “some half-Mexican parking lot owner.” He had what he called “big plans.” We had a very good time while it lasted. Almost every day for three months. That ended last June. Ernesto got a scholarship for graduate school at Columbia. A political science major. I’m sure he’ll parley his own assets and his father’s connections into something serious someday.

This brings my love life almost up to date. I recently had what turned out to be a “three day one-night-stand.” On my part, it was an accident. I’m still learning. It felt like love for about forty-eight hours. He was a district supervisor for the department store I work for. He told me he’d been relocated from back East, permanently. He told me his name was Robby Carlson. He told me was single. He lied three out of four times.

Vicki’s manager knows Robby in the same way that I do, only from a year ago. He tells every woman that he wants to sleep with the exact same story. It works. He really is a district sales supervisor, but his real last name is Carlucci and he lives, “permanently,” in New Jersey with his wife and two kids.

But, he comes to L.A. every six months for the sales training seminars that he gives for the company on a rotational basis, in six of their biggest locations. I guess this was one of those “live and learn” situations that everyone seems so fond of talking about.


December 21st:

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be nineteen. But I’m still going to work. I won’t get paid, days-off for birthdays until I get seniority, and I’m still technically part-time.
I’ve been skipping some days between my journal entries. Most of the time there isn’t that much to write about. I like it, though. I enjoy writing. But I’m not so certain it has the “therapeutic value” that my shrink claims it has. She says to give it time, that I’m too impatient. – I don’t know. Maybe.

I’ve been having a hard time focusing my thoughts. I get distracted. I always have, ever since I can remember. Sometimes it’s worse than others. Lately, it’s been the worst ever. I’ll think about something I’m supposed to be thinking about, like at work or especially at school. But then I’ll start thinking about something else. And that something else gets me thinking about another something else. Pretty quickly my mind is racing. My pulse picks up. My breathing gets tight. Then I start to think that I won’t be able to stop thinking. I get scared. My heart starts beating faster. My head swims.
Sometimes it feels like everything inside will just move faster and faster until I burst. It feels like I’m going to die. My therapist says that writing in my journal is a physical acting out of emotional catharsis. That these are just bouts of anxiety induced attention deficit disorder. That I’m going to be okay.

I don’t feel okay. I called Carlos. After all, it’s his birthday too. He’s also going to be nineteen. But his thoughts don’t race. In fact they move methodically. Well, most of the time. It doesn’t seem like you could kill someone and still have your thoughts move methodically unless you were a sociopath.

Carlos isn’t a sociopath. I doubt he so much as moves his finger without somehow thinking about every possibility first. Even when he knows what he will do will turn out wrong, he’s still thought about it, in minute methodical detail.

When he killed the guy that raped me, Carlos thought it out carefully. He can do that. He can think carefully but at lightning speed. He killed that guy knowing the possible consequences. But he didn’t care about consequences. He cared more about what the act would symbolize to everyone. He cared about what it would symbolize to himself.

He lied at his parole hearing. He told them that he hadn’t considered the consequences because he was young and rash and stupid, and that now he saw things more clearly.
He said that he had learned from his mistakes. He told the parole board what they wanted to hear. He had to.

Carlos is a butterfly. If you put a butterfly in a cage, the metal bars will break its fragile wings. Cages destroy butterflies. I’m glad that Carlos thinks too methodically. That he told the Parole Board what they needed to hear. I’m glad that he is free again. In spite of the other “stuff” that we sometimes have between us, I love Carlos more than anything on this earth. He’s a good man.

I don’t believe in the death sentence but there are exceptions for every rule. This was one of them. Carlos did what he had to do. He had to kill that guy. Raping me was the same as raping Carlos. What my brother did was an act of self-defense.

Carlos told me that he has followed up on the “blind date” that he’s been working on for me since Friday night. Now when he does things like that, against my express wishes not to, that’s when I hate him. Anyway, he’s apparently become good buddies, in the last few months, with some guy who parks his car on our lot. This guy, this friend of Carlos, works downtown as “a paid intern” across the street from Carlos, at an architectural firm. He’s graduating from UCLA in a few weeks so I guess that makes him about twenty-two.

Carlos says that they’ve “had a few beers together, learned a lot about each other, gotten pretty close.” He says the guy has been telling him about some “fuckin’ funny ideas about how to beat the Draft.” Carlos didn’t take enough classes last semester to be considered full-time, so now his student deferment is about to be rescinded. He has no interest in having a free tour of Vietnam, compliments of Uncle Sam.

Carlos thinks because he likes this new best friend of his that I’ll like this new best friend of his. He’s told this guy, Jonah, about me, but has never shown him a photograph or described me physically. He’s done this so as not to influence the guy one way or the other. That way, if he likes me after he meets me, it’ll be because of his own feelings and not because of a picture. This sounds a little hare-brained to me because if the guy knows that Carlos and I are twins, even if it’s only fraternal, then we must look at least somewhat alike. At least, I hope this guy is intelligent enough to know that a brother and sister can’t be identical twins and isn’t slyly expecting that I’m a raving beauty because Carlos is so damned handsome. If he thinks that, then he’s sure going to be disappointed.

I also don’t get why this guy would trust what is obviously a very biased opinion of my character and personality. I mean, a guy’s sister? What’s Carlos supposed to say, “Hey friend, to tell you the truth, my sister is fat and ugly, has major zits, no brains and a wet blanket personality – but hey, I know you’re gonna like her?” Give me a break!

Carlos knows I absolutely detest the concept of blind dating. So he’s come up with a scheme. The guy is presumed to come to the store at a time that I’m not supposed to know in advance. He’ll know only that I work there. It’s assumed he should be able to pick me out of the crowd merely because “it’s meant to be.” And I’m supposed to like him without knowing he’s been sent by Carlos. I’m not perfectly certain, but no matter how well thought out, this sounds like another one of those fantasies that my brother actually seems to believe in. Anyway, I promised I’d go along with the plan. It’s been all been worked out so no one has anything to lose. If I don’t like him or he doesn’t pick me out of the line-up, so to speak, no one gets hurt. No expectations. No disappointments. No problem.


December 23rd:

It’s 5 A.M. I can’t sleep. But I’ve got to be showered, looking good and at work in only four hours. I missed a major journal entry for my birthday yesterday because it’s the second night in a row that I’ve been with Jonah. He’s asleep in the bed and I’m sitting at the kitchen bar writing this under a reading lamp so I don’t disturb him. It’s probably still too early to rate this relationship, but maybe “three times is the charm.” It feels really real. All I can say is my brother called this one right on. I’d have never believed Carlos could be so in tune with what I like. I’ll never doubt him again, not for a minute.

What I just don’t get is that this guy is technically not even my type. I’m partial to handsome men. Vicki, probably just being nice, says she thinks Jonah looks “dreamy.” But I don’t think he’s even close to handsome. His head is too big for his body, and his body is too short for his legs. He’s all legs, maybe six feet plus an inch or two. I like men that are built strong. Jonah seems thin and ungainly, even compared to me. He looks, I don’t know, frail or lanky. And I like men with black hair and blue or green eyes, the perfect combination. Most girls wouldn’t admit this kind of thing, maybe it’s weird or something, but I like guys who look like my brother. He has almost black hair and blue eyes, and is very muscular—all the girls, all my life, have been totally infatuated with Carlos.
Jonah has dishwater blonde hair, kind of straight and stringy. His nicest features are his eyes, which are brown but beautiful with thick long eyelashes, and his hugely oversized mouth with very kissable lips set around poster-perfect teeth that look like they were used in toothpaste commercials. And he is sooo kissable!

Aside from that, which I know should be enough for any girl, I don’t know why I’m so completely attracted by him. Okay, I admit we have “chemistry” that tastes better than a box of See’s chocolates. When he approached me for the first time, and I didn’t even know who he was yet, I became embarrassed after just a minute of standing next to him, because I suddenly became uncomfortably aware that I was wet. And on the very day of my birthday. What a gift!

He made some clever small-talk with me after coming into the store. He admitted having looked all over but, as soon as he spotted me. He just knew I was the sister that Carlos had talked about so nicely – and “deservedly.” I remember every word he first said to me. Some of it, if I wrote it down and read it to a stranger out of context, might sound silly, but to me it all came out just perfect.

He seemed so well-bred, in a unique sort of way. He seemed sensitive, like Frank was, yet hugely sexy, somehow, like Ernesto was. And boy is this guy well-read. And that’s with about the best sense of humor I’ve ever heard. If nothing else, I can see why Carlos adores this guy. They must have already had some terrific conversations. And I’m sure that now, they’ll have even more to talk about.

It makes me more than just a teensy bit uncomfortable. I don’t like my brother being good buddies with a guy that’s seen me naked, and has been inside of me in the physical and emotional sense of the word.

I have a confession. We had unbelievably great sex. I had the first multiple orgasm I’ve ever had in my life. I’m sure of four and maybe five times in less than a few hours. But that’s not what my confession is about.

My mother, whose religious views are more intense than mine, would think sex was something for Confession. But this has been bothering me on a huge scale. It’s something I’d better explain to my therapist, only I’m not sure how to go about it without sounding like a horrible bitch. Without sounding like the kind of girl who I usually dislike – because she did exactly what I did.

I told Jonah that this had been the first time I’d slept with a guy on the first date. I lied. Maybe it’s because every time I do this, I intend it to become a relationship. I almost never intend it to be a one-night-stand. What I intend has only worked out about half the time, but nevertheless it is what I intend.

Each time I fail, I try even harder. So this time I was trying to communicate how special he felt to me – and how special this time was. If I’d admitted that I’d also slept with others on the first date, maybe Jonah would have felt less than unique. Maybe it would have cheapened the experience in his eyes. Maybe it would have cheapened me. I detest feeling cheap.

And so, I lied. Even before we did it, I lied. And after we did it, I felt even cheaper than what I’d been trying to prevent. I cried. I said a Hail Mary and asked the Virgin to forgive me for lying. I asked her to forgive me for being so cheap.

Now, I’m looking across at Jonah’s sleeping face. He looks so real and vulnerable. He feels like someone I could love forever. He looks like the one that’s “meant to be.” •

Story V:

BY THE SKIN OF A WHALE
(as told by Jonah Cain to Catherine Nicholas)


It was the start of a warm winter day. It was the kind of morning in L.A. that some working stiff in Cleveland sees on the morning news as his own sun up is falling down on him in a paralyzing snow storm. It was the kind of morning that the same working stiff thinks about just after watching helplessly while he’s stopped at a traffic light on an icy uphill street, and his ten year old Ford Fairlane slides into the bumper of the brand new Cadillac behind him.

This city and I were a lot alike. We were too young, too wild, too erratic, and too unaware of own mortality. We’d been clinging to an era in transition, an era that had invisibly declined. We were old souls in new bodies. We were still growing, awkward. We had edges that needed smoothing.

Los Angeles. The City of the Angels. La-La-Land. The Big Orange where Hollywood Boulevard is paved in gold and everyone wants to be a movie star.

Except me. I just wanted a girlfriend and some W.A.M. Some walkin’ around money so that I could afford to take a girl to the Hamburger Hamlet on a full tank of gas, with a year’s worth of auto insurance paid up front.

I should’ve been afraid of trouble. The seasons had been filled with promise, but it was after the fall. The soft green leaves of “make love not war” had begun to mutate. What had always been was coming around again. “Love” was often no more than another commodity traded in the same market as hard drugs, and “war” had been laid bare as the international Monopoly game played with hard cash. Three-piece suits marched where Birkenstocks had meandered. Mercenaries with PhD’s had taken the place of undergrads and free love.

It took a measure of 20/20 hindsight for me to realize any of that, but on this particular L.A. day I was simply trying to pull my neck out of some of the hot water that I’d gotten into. It was 10 A.M., and I was already hustling through the alcoves of the Century City Mall, intent on getting a much needed cash refund for the gift of an ugly jacket that I’d never wear.

Of course, the word “gift” is somewhat a euphemism. Actually, I’d “permanently borrowed” the jacket from a former roommate who’d resisted paying me his overdue poker debt. I’d justified this indiscretion with what I termed as a Marxist belief that I was merely “liberating” the jacket into the hands of the proletariat, or more exactly, my hands.

Somehow, I’d expected that it would be easier to get forgiveness than permission for this act of compensation. However, Mr. Roommate had proved small in forgiveness but large in muscle and meanness. I was on the tall side, but when things boiled down to mortal combat I was probably much closer to the color pink than black in a karate belt.

So, wanting to live another day without the need for corrective cosmetic surgery, I’d opted for the short move rather than the long explanation. For this reason, I was in dire need of a deposit on the first and last month’s move-in for my new digs in Silverlake.
Although ugly, the jacket was an Armani. A big cash refund would easily buy me two month’s rent with enough left over for a couple of concert tickets to see Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Shrine Auditorium that coming week-end.


* * * * * * * * *

It was the first morning of winter, day 22 in December, an ostensibly meaningful number. Numerologists say multiples of “11” symbolize mastery. Builders of things are “22’s.” Mystics say the name Los Angeles equals an “11.” But I hadn’t yet built or mastered anything. When I walked into the Broadway department store at that point in time, I was still singing Good Day Sunshine by the Beatles, and expecting “all good things would come to those who wait.” I’d no receipt for the sweater. But still, it was new with a crisp department store label. I felt confident.

“Confidence,” though, soon became but a vague memory. When I saw her, my steel knees de-solidified, and normally hard bone became the consistency of tapioca pudding. I walked slowly, trying to look casual, through a tangle of female fashion. I was the figure of a man on an Etch-A-Sketch. Iron filings were drawn or erased with the swipe of a magnetic female hand. Feigning a cool veneer and as much aplomb as I could muster, I dragged my unwilling legs across the quiet carpeting to the ark of the goddess. Meeting her and getting a refund on the jacket had been the twofold goal of today’s mission.

And it was just as Carlos had predicted. I knew it was her. I don’t know how, but I knew it. She was the sister that Carlos had been pitching to me. She was the sister that he’d refused to show me a photo of or describe in any detail how she looked. That Carlos was a crafty one. He’d realized that a photograph or description would have clinched the sale well beforehand.

She was about the same height as her brother, maybe five feet and seven or eight inches. But where Carlos had a thick, muscular build, she was lanky with a narrow waist. Her black hair was cropped short, almost butch. It was oddly fascinating, sexually appealing, added to by huge, coffee kiss eyes that would send Bambi into a fit of jealousy. I glanced at her nametag “RAMONA,” a name that appealed to my imagination, that painted pictures in my wannabe architect’s soul. I’d no intention of buying any clothing, but I did see a window of opportunity.

“Excuse me miss,” I ventured, “but could you help me avert a fashion accident waiting to happen.” I swallowed hard at the subterfuge about to be invented, but forged ahead. “I’m trying to find one of those babydoll dresses for my, uh, sister. You look about her height and weight — could you tell me what size you wear?”

“About a 4. Can I help you?” Her voice harmonized with natural good looks. It seemed she had no clue as to who I was. Carlos’ plan was going smoothly.
“Oh yeah, if you’ve got a minute,” I faltered trying for the right words but could only manage, “that’d be cool.”

She nodded in tacit agreement and motioned with her hand for me to follow. I would have shadowed her through Death Valley, at the hottest part of the day. As was, my weak knees only had to trail her for about a dozen yards, until we reached a rack of short gauzy items. Her long fingers deftly thumbed through the mini-dresses, stopped at one, lifted it out and held it up for approval.
“Yes!” She announced the single word triumphantly, through two expansive rows of flawless teeth that were as white as the dots on dominoes. “Come take a look at this. We just got it in stock this week. Your sister is gonna love it.” She stroked the fabric, lovingly. “Isn’t this totally fine?”

She was standing close now. Her face was maybe two feet from mine. Her smell was fresh scrubbed with hint of Jean Naté. I was wishing the fabric of the dress in her hands was the bareness of my own skin. But I didn’t bat an eye or miss a beat; adrenaline had taken over. “Absolutely! It looks totally fine...on the hanger.”

I hesitated. “You know, I’d really need to see it on my sister. But I also want it to be a surprise. – I think you’re both about the same build. She’s not as pretty as you, though, but, well, maybe you could do me a huge favor – that is, if you’ve got a spare moment—and try it on. That way, I could see what it really looks like.” I was praying that she wouldn’t refuse; the store was nearly deserted.

She hesitated at first demurely, continuing with a suggestion of business in her voice, “Okay, but it’s not store policy. Usually, if the purchase isn’t satisfactory, you can just return it within thirty days for a full refund.”

She paused for a heartbeat, lowered her voice somewhat huskily and continued with what seemed to be a detectable flirtation, “Well, you do look honest. And just as long as you wait outside the dressing room.” She hesitated again, coyly, then added, “You’re not some pervo, are you. I mean, you’re not a Peeping Tom, or anything?”

“Well, I can’t swear that I won’t be tempted. But you’ve got my word as a former Boy Scout. No peeking!”
She disappeared for some brief but anxious moments amid the sounds of shuffling and silk sliding over smooth skin. When she returned, she looked glorious and triumphant. “Well, tell the truth now,” she commanded. “It’s terrific, isn’t it?” Then she added, with perfect sales timing, “Will that be cash or charge?”

Again, I hesitated just long enough to carefully look her up and down. Then trying not to sound like a cad, but as suavely as possible I offered, “You do look good enough to give sight to the blind, as if the dress was made for you. I’d even bet you modeled for the designer.”

I paused and put on my most innocent face. “Damn, you’re not gonna believe this, but I’m usually pretty shy. And I sure hope you don’t think this sounds like some sleaze-city come on – but I can’t help myself. You really look fabulous. You make what might be an ordinary dress look extremely sexy. In fact, it might be just too much for my sister. Like I said, she isn’t nearly as pretty as you are.”

As one may have guessed, I walked out of the department store that day with a very precious phone number and a hundred dollar babydoll dress for my imaginary sister. And that was all for the cost of a purloined Armani. Anyway, the dress would later prove a superb gift for the person it looked best on. Especially at the Bob Marley concert. I could find a second month’s rent another time.

I imagine that’s how things got started between men and women back then. Before watching too many B-movies, maybe they could still muster their own, if not clumsy but spontaneous, dialogues. Perhaps all it really took was a not too artful ploy and a mutual willingness to let each other think they’d won something. Maybe the world was more naive then. Or maybe it was a whole lot smarter.

* * * * * * * * *

Time would prove that Ramona’s mother initially felt at odds about her daughter’s new boyfriend being non-Mexican. After all, hadn’t Carla’s husband, an Anglo, deserted his family? And when she finally did meet me, she was further taken aback by my being Jewish. Anglo and Jewish, not a great combination as far as she’d been told.

She was good natured, though, and ultimately open-minded, wise enough to live and learn. She got used to me quickly. After the death of a child and all the crap she’d been through, she could probably have gotten used to almost anything. That woman was strong with a capital “S.”

Ramona and Carlos had only brief recollections of their wandering Anglo father. He had breezed in and out of their lives like a Santa Anna wind, disappearing again while they were in their mid-teens. But certainly the two sisters, mother and brother had become like real family to me. They were the home I’d searched for but never owned..

I’d never had a mother or a father, at least not ones that I knew. I’d grown up since before I could remember in foster homes, as “a ward of the state,” which in this instance was actually the County of Los Angeles. I was crazy about Ramona, but I’d always wished for a brother like Carlos.

I liked in him what I liked in me. Even early on, when he discovered my clandestine relationship with his sister, he’d cursed me, called me bastard, vowed to kill me. But then I reminded Carlos that it was he who introduced us in the first place. His eyes lit up with the iridescent sparks of warmth that gave his feelings away, confessed that I was as favored to him as the brother he’d once lost.

It was a mutual admiration society. As Ramona once quoted from her college chemistry book, “a covalent bond occurs when atoms share pairs of electrons.” There had always been a missing part of me, and at times I imagined that Carlos was that missing, covalent twin.

It is commonly said truth is stranger than fiction. And it was a quirk of reality that the tangible sibling of Carlos was quite unlike him in at least one especially devout and Catholic aspect. But before this is revealed, it may be noted that on a scale of “1” to “10,” Ramona was an “11.” She had breasts the shape and volume of grapefruit halves, with light brown areola and nipples the size of young grapes, that would grow big and hard when kissed. Her legs were long, tapered with a three-finger wide gap where her thighs and genitals met. Her waist was narrow. The skin of her entire face and body was smoothly colored, textured like a bar of fine milled soap.

And quite unlike most other Mexican-American females, she styled her sable hair short, blunt, almost boyish, a fashion that would later prove many years ahead of its time. All in all, Ramona, who described herself as “kind of attractive but no great shakes,”
looked to me like the second coming of Helen of Troy. If the need would have existed, I’d have waged war for Ramona.

But now I will return as promised and reveal that quirky aspect of Ramona’s subconscious. – There was an odd ingredient in our sexual recipe. And it surfaced the first time we made love, involving what I thought might be some fetish-like act of religious devotion that she, otherwise, took pains to hide. I discovered it shortly after I’d begun to caress her naked body. She reflexively and unconsciously made the sign of the Cross in front of her face. After some time had elapsed and at the height of her physical passion, she moaned, “No, no. No, no.” Then she bucked her hips, muffled a profanity, and orgasmed – hard and long. Finally, and as if this wouldn’t take some getting used to, she briefly turned away, whispered a Hail Mary, soto voce, cried briefly, then crossed herself again.

It wasn’t until long after the first of these loveplay incidents and many deep and intimate discussions with Ramona, that we both realized that she had inadvertently been raised by her mother to feel a great deal of guilt about not only the sex act itself, but the enjoying of the sex act, in or out of marriage. Oddly though, it was the forbidden feeling that she got from having a man inside of her that made making love all the more desirable and enjoyable. A much older friend later confided that once a mental connection is made, linking sex with forbidden fruit, the fascination for its flavor rarely fades.

And maybe it was because of her birthright of ancient Aztec blood, but Ramona’s entire body, even to the most hidden and wettest crevice, smelled like sweet incense and fine musk. But maybe this is only how she smelled to me, because I was so much in love. And maybe yet, this is only a weakness of humankind, whether fifteen or fifty-five, to easily confuse what is called “chemistry” with what is called “love.”

* * * * * * * * * *

At Jones, Jones, Jones and Schlumberger, I’d get what they referred to as “the opportunity” to visit one of their many construction sites and help out with whatever job the foreman would suggest. It was on one of those occasions that I learned I could load a dozen eighty pound sacks of Redi-Mix concrete onto a wooden shipping pallet without so much as a groan. I lacked the grace for gymnastics or basketball, but I had a very strong back. So when Ramona needed to replace the flat tire on her ‘66 VW Microbus, I was elected.


It was March 7th, 1972; an anniversary of the passing of Paramahansa Yogananda, spiritual founder of the Self Realization Fellowship. It was also the day Ramona’s VeeDub got a flat tire going around a curve on Sunset Boulevard, just a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean and immediately in front of the Fellowship sanctuary. She waited two hours for me to get off work and bring a new tire. Why she didn’t call her brother who worked right across the street from me, I’ll probably never know.

Never one to waste precious moments, Ramona had wandered around the grounds of the Self Realization shrine. It was a beautiful place crowned by a swan-filled lake, old green trees, and fully steeped in an aura of tranquility. There she met Sri Dayamata, who was bedecked in a saffron sari. That pale complected and regal woman, the current doyen of the Fellowship, wound up speaking with Ramona for several hours. Ramona was awed by the place, the talk and the woman. Afterward, Dayamata gifted Ramona with a paperback copy of “Biography of a Yogi.”

Even as Ramona was reading that book, it proved life affirming, and soon after, it proved life changing. Ramona became one of the few chicanas from East L.A. who transformed into a vegetarian and a hippie. And it was then she decided that Carlos and I should join her on a “pilgrimage” to visit her favorite uncle in San Felipé, Mexico.
Ramona had known her “favorite” and only uncle for what seemed to her to be “forever.” He had often visited L.A. and stayed with her family for weeks on end. But during his absence she missed his company and she would “stay close from afar” through her chance letters and frequent phone calls.

The book on the yogi had deeply influenced Ramona. It had confirmed and heightened her love and respect for all living things. It had become the turning point in her decision to finally become a vegetarian. In her words, “it helped to evolve (her) consciousness to a higher level.”

In a way, though, it also caused her to become more resolute about other things, and more resolute was not a welcome addition to her already stubborn character. Where she had previously been somewhat headstrong, she was now, more than often, downright imperious. And now she wanted to share this new found “consciousness” with her “Uncle Gordo.”

* * * * * * * * *

Spring break began on a chilly April morning. We had eight days of no school and I was given the time off from my internship at Jones, Jones and Jones. Ramona was packing a sack lunch to tide us over for the long day’s drive ahead. There were alfalfa sprout sandwiches with mounds of tehina, tomato and avocado on home-made, whole grain bread.

Also selected were oranges, bananas and red Rome apples, carefully inspected for bruises and ripeness, then stowed within the safe darkness of a large, brown paper shopping bag.

Great undertakings always begin on the week-end. Or so it seems, accustomed as we are to weekdays filled with drudgery and work we rarely enjoy. So with the sack lunches prepared to, as Ramona said, “nourish our bodies and souls in an appropriately vegetarian fashion,” the three of us piled into Ramona’s decal covered VW and headed south for a border that would soon and forever divide our destinies.

The Microbus strained its way down Interstate-5 toward San Diego. About an hour and a half into the journey we were cruising through Dana Point when Carlos said, “Hey guys, Richard Nixon’s house is in San Clemente. We’ll be there in about ten minutes. Whaddaya say we go egg the place and teepee the lawn?”

“Is that a political statement?” I asked, half believing that he meant it.

“No,” Ramona interjected, “that’s his idea of making his ass grass. And I don’t mean the smokeable kind.”

“Yeah,” Carlos said, “she’s right. I’d probably wind up getting my probation lifted and my ass thrown back in the can.”

I smiled. “Yes, but then, at least, you’d be a famous convict.”

“No thanks. I’m not interested in being any kind of a convict, from now on.” He paused and smiled impishly. “Well, at least I’m not fuckin’ my sister. Some people are motherfuckers, but not you Jonah. You’re a dyed-in-the-wool, genuine, grade-A, top-of-the-charts sister-fucker.”

Carlos chuckled at the humor he imagined was to be found in his wordplay. He was, however, the only one that laughed. Much of the time he was his own best audience for what Ramona called “his very dark attempts at stand-up comedy.”

We passed through San Clemente without President Nixon or his Secret Service ever being the wiser. There was no toilet paper left on anyone’s lawn and there were no arrests made.

No one talked for a long time. Most of the journey went like that. A hundred miles of silence and soaking in the view, then a dozen or so miles of breezy conversation, then each of us again lost in our private reverie.

Outside of San Diego, we veered east on the I-8. Ramona did the driving, I did the navigating, and Carlos was happy just being chauffeured, with the back of the microbus all to him self. Ramona had decided who would do what. She didn’t like the driving technique of either of her passengers. “Too hell bent for leather and very unconcerned with your own mortalities” was how she put it. She did trust me to read a map, though. She figured that, “Anybody studying to be an architect should at least be able to read a map.”

In another hour that felt longer, we reached the ramshackle town of Calexico and crossed the border into Mexicali. Again, there were no arrests. The highway from there descended the dry mountains and bee-lined through an even drier desert. The sky, sand and sea blurred into a bright white blue. It was so dry it hurt to inhale. The taste of the air was acrid. The road became a long black snake about to shed its old hoary skin, severely blemished with ruts and potholes.

After enduring another three hours, some small dark dots on the tedious horizon grew into the outline of a scattering of crusty, timeworn buildings. Before these, and on the outskirts of town, loomed a dilapidated billboard. Its surface was scarred and blistered but the neatly chiseled, whitewashed letters were still clear in their candid proclamation of “THE CLAM MAN.”

In another hundred yards, a lively array of crooked, palm thatched huts and an old adobe house sprouted from a jumble of desert sand, craggy rock and broken promises called highway. In front of some frond-covered trellises were several large steel barrels, filled with steaming clams, as announced by that proud but derelict sign. Closer to the cafe was another, smaller banner with assorted menu prices. Cold beer was listed, but the word “cold” had long since been crossed out.

As we approached that motley but going concern, Ramona broke the silence with an inspired bellow. “There he is! My favorite uncle. Tio Gordo. He’s the one I’ve told you about. He’s the Clam Man!”

Carlos stirred from his road weary reverie. He also had fond memories of his corpulent Uncle Manuel, who’d been affectionately nicknamed Gordo for his unmistakable girth. And as an almost mechanical but tired challenge to his sister’s one-sided claim of kinship, Carlos responded with some obvious annoyance in his voice, “Oh, I forgot you’re an only child and our sainted mother’s brother has only one niece and no nephew.”

Ramona hastily interrupted, “Oh Lord, what bug is up your butt now?”

“It’s just so typical Ramona. Always tripping over your ego. Why don’t you practice a little more of the consciousness that you’ve supposedly achieved through that stupid yoga book? In case you’ve forgotten, he’s my uncle too.” Carlos was hot, tired and spoiling with contention.

Ramona was impervious to his sarcasm, like pure gold to most acids. She maneuvered her flower-powered bus off the asphalt, across a shallow roadside ditch and onto the flat pebbled parking area near the shanties. She shrieked again, “Oh my dear God, he’s even fatter than I remember. I wonder if all those kids are his.”

Pausing for a reflective moment she added mischievously, “How could he make babies with all that fat around him. He doesn’t seem able to get close enough to his wife to make her pregnant.”

She giggled this last observation and winked at me. Then, she averted her eyes for a moment—shy and vulnerable; even though I already knew most of her private thoughts, and all of her private anatomy.

Ten or eleven offspring of the Clam Man, in various shapes and sizes, came scrambling to greet our Microbus. It was pandemonium in a foreign language. As it was, in my best Spanish, I could barely muster asking for a room or food or a drink, or how much anything might cost.

The children were dressed gender specific. Boys wore plain white shirts and khaki trousers, sullied throughout by a medley of scuffs and stains. Girls were adorned in mistakenly festive dresses with bright satin ruffles and taffeta swirls. By comparison, Sunday mornings in Los Angeles found the local senioritis dressed for church in much cleaner and far less flamboyant fashions.

The oldest of the crowd greeted us first. She was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, on the tall side, thin, almost frail. In contrast, she wore faded blue jeans, a checkered flannel shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. Her voice was the texture of clover honey and burgundy wine. From timbre to inflection, she could have easily been mistaken for an even more willowy Ramona.

The introduction was courteous, absurdly formal. Curiously, she addressed me first, in an English barely spiced with an extremely mild salsa accent. “Hello, my name is Marisa Maria Carla de Santiago-Batista. I’d like to welcome you and my cousins to our town of San Felipé. To enjoy your visit, I’d be pleased to help with anything you might need or wish to ask.”

Damn, but when her speech ended, she averted her eyes as if embarrassed, almost seductively, just as Ramona had done only moments ago in the van. It was easy to see they were related. But in mannerisms? I’d often witnessed the influence of genetics, but this was the most impressive.

Two things occurred to me from this meeting. One: a strong hereditary factor was obvious in the genes of this family. Two: since Marisa spoke English like a cabin attendant for Mexicana Airlines, I surmised that she had learned the language either though her employment or through some private and English speaking school that wasn’t locally available.

I was only partly mistaken. Carlos was soon to tell me that his cousin Marisa had always been her father’s darling. It seems that Gordo had left Ciudad Juarez shortly after his older sister, the mother of Carlos and Ramona whom he idolized, had effected her celebrated swirl across the Rio Grande. He had then worked his way to Chicago and beguiled himself into Northwestern University.

With everyone involved in having lunch and making extended greetings, Carlos took me aside and over a beer, two oranges and a fried clam sandwich, told me the rest of the story.
Soon after graduation, his uncle Gordo had succeeded in a succession of rapid-fire promotions to the top of a prestigious – and this was a real kicker for me – architectural firm. But the material trappings of El Norte, and what he’d sought from the promise that was America, had simply let him down. He was not happy. He’d found the end of the rainbow. But the pot of gold was already gone, and the rainbow itself had faded to black and white.

Abandoned by his American wife, he took his six year old daughter and fled the cold winds of Lake Michigan for the balmy breezes of the California Gulf. He remarried, had nine more children and took to the eccentric occupation of selling steamed clams by the roadside.

Hence, Marisa was not an international airline attendant. Instead, she’d been born and briefly raised in America. Her excellent command of the English language, inflected by a subtle but unambiguous accent, stemmed from living the longer portion of her years in a sleepy Baja California village.

Publicly, Gordo was The Clam Man, a simple but quirky leviathan. I soon learned, however, that he’d once plied my own desired profession as an architect, and had moreover abandoned it. Much as I’d imagined myself, he was the daddy Steppenwolf, a get-back-Jack Kerouac archetype. Protest personified. The definition of dissident. And back then, I fancied myself dissident and dangerous with capital “D’s.”

And here I’d met his daughter Marisa, the phantom epitome of rural girl, yet somehow holding the key to a secret safe-deposit box, filled with urban family roots and middle-class treasure. And here I was, responding to her lead, holding out my hand in greeting, a stranger in a strange land. My garden variety words couldn’t, by a long shot, match the thoughts that buzzed through my head.

It was my M.O., always trying to come off more cool than my awkward appearance allowed. I tried to think of something hip, something that would make me sound suave, something that would mask the hopeless freak that was inside my skin. I wanted to say something witty. I wanted to be charming. But all that stumbled from my mouth was, “Hello Marisa.”

I hyphenated the sound of “hello” as if it were two distinct words. But in a microseconds, I realized that saying “hell-low” instead of just “hello” probably came across as pathetically lame instead of urbane and cool. In those same microseconds I became embarrassed and hoped no one would notice.

It felt like an eternity before my dry mouth could offer some additional banter: “Not being a relative or anything, I guess I’m just sort of excess baggage. You know, just along for the ride.

Well,” I paused, “not exactly along for the ride, really. I mean, I wanted to come. I mean, there was no way I wanted to spend my week off school without my girlfriend and best buddy. So, did Ramona ever tell you about me?

Marisa nodded, but I didn’t wait for her answer. Instead, I tried my best to sound charming and said, “So, do you think it would be okay if I take you up on your offer to show us around?”

Again I felt my words had screwed up. I had never felt worthy of Ramona’s attention. I had remained perpetually insecure in her love for me. As a result, rationalization or otherwise, I was simultaneously committed to Ramona while remaining an unabashed flirt. I felt that what I’d just said to Marisa came across like I was moving in on her right in front of Ramona’s face. I couldn’t help myself.

I was afraid of how Ramona would react if she saw me flirting with her pretty cousin, but I could stop myself from digging my potential grave just a little deeper. Maybe I’m a sucker for punishment, but, even while comprehending what an asshole I was, I still couldn’t bring myself to let go of Marisa’s attention.

“I’ve been to Rosarita Beach on the Pacific Ocean side,” I said, “but it didn’t feel anything like this.” I paused for effect, “Have you ever been there?”

She seemed pleased by my interest, but somehow remained ostensibly unaware of my somewhat ulterior intentions. She smiled politely. “Yes, yes I have. But it’s a place for jokers. Too many smart college kids from San Diego acting stupid. You know, being very loud, drinking too much beer.” She paused for a barely perceptible snort of contempt then added, “Gringos locos, sí tal!”

Suddenly, a bluster erupted from one side of the compound. Uncle Gordo came charging like a bull into an arena. He was a Paul Bunyonesque creature, no less than six and a half feet in height, tall for a Mexican, and nearly as big around as the Volkswagen. He had long braided hair, oily, black as coal tar, with a full beard streaked badger gray. What soon become known to me as his trademark question bellowed from the billows of dust, “Are you ready to eat clams?”

I’d hear that question thunder in my ears a hundred times in five days. I came to fear deafness. Likewise, I came to fathom the ebb and flow of tides and the mystical nature of clams. But I also came to fear riding horses that didn’t speak English.

There is arguably a single cloth woven across the many pedigrees of this planet, holding them together even after individual fibers disentangle, die, or fade away. This uniqueness, that cloth, is simply spun from the common thread of what we know as “skeletons in the closet.” It is this secret backbone that supports what is otherwise and optimistically called family. Most have it. Some dread it. Few exist without it. The families of Ramona and Marisa were no exception. I was shown one of these “skeletons” on the first night in San Felipe‚ by Carlos, while we shared what felt like a TV situation comedy.

When we’d first arrived, Uncle Gordo the Clam Man had invited us to stay with his mini-tribe. Ramona thought this was a splendid suggestion, but Carlos and I had a different notion. There would be no moon that evening and very few electric lights to preclude what promised to be a dazzling, star-struck sky. Cars were rare enough on the Gulf peninsula, so there wouldn’t be even a suggestion of smog or anything else that would corrupt a nighttime heavenly view. Our plan, then, was to sleep on the beach and enjoy a rare celestial vision.

Marisa advised against this strategy (something about the tide being higher when the moon is new) and actually added a more extensive explanation. But Carlos and I didn’t hear it. We were too distracted by the clamor from an army of children, and ample luncheon servings of clams, beer and great golden oranges.

So, leaving Ramona and the Clam family behind, we hazarded our way down a dark path to an even darker beach. We spread our sleeping bags over the smooth, flat sand and made our simple camp at what appeared to be some forty yards from the water’s edge.
We weren’t disappointed by the stars. They were a mystical vision of Orion hunting across an island universe permeated by great gaseous nebulae. After four cans of beer each, our powwow began mixing the ridiculous and sublime. Carlos proved to be the prince of dark places when it came to mixing paradox with black humor and coming up with rhetorical dilemmas.

“Have you ever imagined,” he said, “how repulsive our already low state of humanity would be, if all bodily excretions stopped being water soluble? Then everything that dripped or oozed from your eyes, ears, nose, sweat glands, and genitals would form crusty accumulations. Tears and sweat and piss and snot would become like pieces of different colored shit, covering our eyelids and lips, dicks and cunts in a mass of ugly tumors that would break off in chunks as we blinked or kissed or had sex.”

“That’s pretty fuckin’ gross,” I answered, “and no, I’ve never imagined anything like that. It’s totally nauseating.” I hesitated then asked, “Where in the name of God do you come up with crap like that?”

His somber answer proved he’d been leading up to something. It was unanticipated but not surprising. “Hey Jonah, maybe you should spend some time in prison. All day long when I was there, even during all the hours I spent reading, I’d wonder if maybe somebody didn’t like me and if they were gonna try and cut me. I couldn’t stop thinking that somebody else’s homeboy was gonna try and stick me in the ass.”

“Then at night, after lights out, I’d lie on my bunk and stare at the empty ceiling and wish more than anything that I could just be on the outside and see the stars. And I’d try to keep a sense of humor so I wouldn’t go insane from the fear. But even my sense of humor got filtered through all the bullshit surrounding me. And then I’d start to think about things like what I just asked you. And about the fear and the sweat on the bodies that I could smell all around me. And then sometimes, I’d pray.”

He paused as if to catch his breath and collect his thoughts, then continued in the same monotone. “You remember that thing from the Bible, man? You know, For He gave the world His only begotten Son. Well, I’d think to myself, did you really give me to the world, Father, or did you just give me up and give me away?”

He sighed deeply. And as if to make his nightmare less distressing, he added, “I’m not tryin’ to be a downer, man, but do you get what I’m about?”

“Listen, Carlos,” I said. “Between these amazing stars and this not quite so amazing beer, I’ve copped a pretty decent buzz. So, what I’m about to say won’t necessarily make sense, and it might not even follow any logical order of thought, yet alone what we’ve been talking about. But I knew you’ll understand. I mean, we had that kind of synchronicity. Right?”

I looked at the dim outline of my best friend, and I thought I saw him shrug his shoulders and nod his head.

“Well,” I began, “you’re not exactly the Lone Ranger, here. I really do know what it means to be given up and given away. About eighty percent of my twenty years has been spent in a series of foster homes. I never told you that before. Did I?”
I heard Carlos swallow from his beer can, but he said nothing.

“Anyhow, most of those people playing Mom & Dad did have good intentions. But you know about the road to hell and how its paved.”
I stopped talking and tried to look at the face of my friend in the darkness, to see if he was listening, to see if he hadn’t lost himself in his own dark thoughts as I’d perceived him to do many times before. I could still only see a silhouette, but I could hear him breathing. When he was lost in thought his breathing would get a slightly more sonorous tone. The space between breaths and the breaths, themselves, would level and lengthen. His breaths now were shorter and more irregular. Without asking, I concluded that he was still listening, so I continued.

“And furthermore, I can tell you that some of those people lacked any intentions other than the meager four hundred and fifty bucks a month they would get for providing me with room and board. And that, well that’s putting it nicely. Room and board. Yeah. I remember this one time that that the house was more like a pig-sty with pig slop for dinner. Really. I’m not shitting you, either. This one couple, I swear, their family tree didn’t branch. They looked like those hillbillies from Deliverance. It made me feel like a young Jon Voight. They scared the crap out of me. They were missing half of their front teeth. They were usually drunk half the day and most of the night. They had a pet sheep in the back yard. You’re going to think I’m full of it, but I wear they were using that poor animal for something other than it’s wool. Imagine, keeping a pet sheep in the city.”

I thought I heard Carlos start to snore. I reached over poked him with a finger. “Hey, beaner, wake up.”

“Beaner my butt,” he said. “Call me that again and I’ll kick your white ass.”
“Okay,” I said. “I was just testing.”

“I’m awake. Okay? So where’s this leading?”
“Leading?” You get to talk about whatever you like and I have to be leading somewhere?”

“Uh-huh,” was all he said.

“Jesus. Who died and made you king of the Aztecs?”

“Jesus,” he mimicked. “Who died and made you king of the Jews?”

“Touché,” I said. “Well, maybe I haven’t done any hard time, Carlos, but that doesn’t give you a lock on understanding about how a jail conceptually constructed. You know, four walls don’t a prison...”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he cut in. “So don’t BS me, because you already know I know you know.”

I paused for reassurance. I didn’t get it. I asked, “Hey, you wanna hear a funny story that also happens to be true?”

Carlos sighed impatiently. “Why don’t you fire up that hemp you were bragging about?”

“Then, do you want to hear the story?’

“Fire up and fire away,” he said.

I rolled over to my side and reached for my backpack. I felt around inside and found what I was looking for. “Now, listen. I’ve only got three of these fatties and I promised Ramona that we’d get your cousin high for the first time. That means we can only smoke one, okay?”

I could hear the rustle of his shirt against his neck and recognized that sound plus a two syllable grunt as Carlos nodding his head in assent. I reached in my coin pocket where I always kept my Zippo stashed. I liked my silver Zippo better than the butane jobs. I liked the smell of the lighter fluid. I stuck the whole joint in my mouth and licked it as I drew it out. The weed smoked more evenly when the paper was wet. I took a long drag and handed it over to Carlos.

He toked, coughed a little, then took a bigger toke. Holding it in his lungs for about half a minute, he then exhaled and returned the joint. Two big tokes and it was already about a fourth gone. “So what the story?” he asked.

About three years ago,” I said, “I met this girl in Camarillo. I’d been trying to save up some college money, and for about six months had this putrid job that paid really well as an auto repossessor.”

“Hey,” I said, “do you remember that lock jimmy that you used to break into my car when I first met you? Well, that was exactly the same kind as we car-jack pros would use. They came in real handy. That’s why when I first saw you use one, well, it sort of opened a door for us to be friends, you know, like we had something in common.”

I continued, “Anyway, people would get too far behind on their payments and I’d have to sneak around and sort of legally steal their car back, either with a set of keys given to me by their loan company, or by using the jimmy and a handmade hot-wire. “

Morally, the job sucked. But I have to admit, it was really exciting, and it paid very well. Anyway, on this one particular gig, I’d started the paperwork so I could state out this new repo, and, well, I met this total babe.”

I scratched my head as if thinking. “Well, she was working as a dispatcher for the towing company. Her name was Carole. Carole with an “E” at the end.” That’s how she introduced herself. But cutting to the chase, Carole and I had some very serious chemistry going on for the next three months. Then, wouldn’t you know it, on Valentine’s Day she dumps me cold.”

I took another toke. Held it. Then continued, “She told me she had to because she’s a Christian Scientist, and wants to get married. But she could never have my kids because, well, are you ready for this, because I’m Jewish, and that would cause them all to go to Hell.”

I paused for effect, to see if Carlos was impressed. “Wow,” I said, “it’s not like I’d been making a down payment on an engagement ring. I mean, don’t you think she was jumping the gun? And because I might have been born Jewish. That’s pretty heavy. What a weird chick. What a weird rationalization. She couldn’t marry me, but she could have sex with me. Maybe she thought that sex would cause only certain parts of her anatomy to go to Hell – and that she probably wouldn’t need a vagina in heaven.”

Carlos took the reefer from my hand and chuckled, but the weed had made his chuckle sound more like a croak. And with a renewed buoyancy in his now raspy voice he added, “You know, it’s like Ramona always says, there is no habit quite so expensive as some women. I used to think she was only talking about money, but now I know that she was also talkin’ about emotions.”

All that I could see of him in the dark was still that vague silhouette, which now seemed encircled by a halo of gleaming stars. And with that image and another beer, the conversation again strayed.

It was then that Carlos unveiled, for motive or lack of one, two peculiar skeletons that were in his family closet... (continued)

VOTE FOR THIS BOOK - SO YOU CAN READ THE EXCITING CLOSING CHAPTERS!

Editor’s Notes:

When I asked Scott about his background, he opined darkly that he is “Native American,” born and raised in “The Valley” suburbs of Los Angeles, “when there were still more orange trees than people.”

He added that, “under the wry dictum of many are called but few are chosen,” that he was once nominated for a Pulitzer – and then went on to “acquire a major list of minor publications.”

However he calls those “publications,” they have included the notable Parnassus, Paris, Chiron, and Small Press Review(s); two poetry books of which “Litany” won the Masters Literary Award; a screenplay to which he’d “rather not admit;” and a story collection, “The Crow Wars,” which is currently optioned by Titan Press – and this novel, “Orange Messiahs,” exhibited herein by BookRix. ۩

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 02.12.2010

Alle Rechte vorbehalten