Bulletproof Vest (21 page)

After reading through
Cowboy Mouth
once, I fell in love with Cavale, the female character. According to the foreword, Sam Shepard had written the play with Patti Smith by pushing a typewriter back and forth between them—he wrote the lines for Slim, the male character, and she wrote the lines for Cavale. I was drawn to Cavale: She was at once vulnerable and tough, and she was in search of her own religion—in search of a savior who would be like “a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth.”

I called Samuel French in New York to find out the legalities behind producing one of their plays. I would need a production company, they said, so I created one—De-Jah-Vous Productions. Within two weeks, I had found a space, a director, and an actor to play Slim, and Martin, who was living a few blocks from me, had a cameo as the Lobster Man.

I try the lighter again, to no avail. The opening sequence is simple enough. Light the candle. Set it on the nightstand, and this will cue the lighting person to fade the lights up. I try one more time, and nothing but a feeble spark shoots from it and vanishes. I whip the candle clear across the stage. It soars through the darkness and hits against the brick wall with a thud and, as it rolls out of sight, the lights fade up.

We end up getting a great review. The critic writes how he was skeptical going in, as the image of Patti Smith in the role of Cavale is a hard one to shake. He writes: “Venegas puts her own urban Latina spin on the role, taking it over completely: Two minutes into the play, all thoughts of Patti Smith disappear.” I read the review several times until I have committed it to memory, until it practically becomes my mantra—I love the idea of taking over something so completely that any trace of what came before disappears. It feels like an affirmation that I'm on the right path.

It's around that time that my father makes the newspapers as well. He's been out of prison just over a year when one night, while driving back to La Peña from a tavern in town, just as he slows near the only curve on the road between town and his home, his truck is lit up in a hail of bullets. The newspapers in Valparaíso the next day state that he was calmly making his way home when he was ambushed. He's quoted in the paper as saying he had no idea who would do such a thing, but that he intends to find out.

Had it not been for the woman he's living with, he probably would have bled to death in his courtyard, with no one but his dogs to keep him company. But when his body hit against the blue metal door, it awoke her. She ignored him at first, thinking, he's been drinking again, but then she heard him moan, and it was the trace of anguish in that moan that sent her rushing out of bed. She pulled the door open, and the weight of his body slumped into the house. He was covered in blood, and before she knew it, she was shouting orders at her daughter, telling her to run to Don Enrique's, say they needed help. Her daughter took off barefoot down the dirt road, running past his gray truck that was pressed up against the cinder-block wall, and within minutes she was back with Don Enrique, his truck idling outside. They wrapped him up in a wool blanket, loaded him onto the truck, and drove to the nearest hospital, two hours away.

When I hear he's been ambushed, I'm indifferent to whether he lives or dies. It's as though I've become immune to any news pertaining to him. I'm certain that it's only a matter of time before his past catches up with him, before he turns up dead, and I've decided that when that call comes, I will not shed a single tear. Yesenia obviously doesn't feel the same way, because not long after he's ambushed, she goes to visit him.

“He asked about you,” she says, when she returns. To know that he had asked about me stirs a feeling of ambivalence. I'm happy to hear that he thought of me, but I'm also sad for him, since I have no intention of ever going to see him. My three older sisters had already been to see him at some point, so I was the only one of his daughters that had yet to go back. Yesenia had told him that I was acting and working as a bartender, because by then, I had quit my day job and was working in a martini lounge in Wicker Park. “He said that maybe he'll get up to Chicago sometime and that if he does, he'll go have a drink where you work.”

“Yeah, right,” I say, trying not to think of what a nightmare that would be. To look up from pouring a martini one day and see him standing in the doorway, like a person who's come back from the dead—my past colliding with my present, and then having to explain to the staff that the gun-wielding lunatic in the cowboy hat is my father.

Not long after he's ambushed, he's back in prison. After a night of drinking, he had been shooting his gun off in the house and a stray bullet hit the woman who is living with him.

“That poor woman,” my mother says, when she tells me what happened. The authorities had arrested him and the woman herself had gone and testified on his behalf, saying that it had been an accident, that he hadn't meant to shoot her. Had the woman breathed a word of the baby she lost, the judge might have locked him away for life, but she didn't say anything and the judge ordered his release—under the condition that he would provide for the woman and her daughter until his dying day, as the bullet had left the woman bound to a wheelchair. “Imagine?” my mother says. “That could have been any one of us.”

*   *   *

There are a handful of Latina actresses in Chicago who I keep running into at the same auditions. We share similar frustrations over the limited roles available to us, so we form our own theater troupe, meet twice a week, and begin brainstorming, writing scenes based on our personal experiences growing up in a dual culture. We perform at various theaters around the city and, within two years, we have a full-length show. We submit the script to INTAR, an off-Broadway theater company in New York City, and a few months later, we hear back. They want to workshop the play as part of their New Works Lab. We tell them fine, but if they're going to workshop our script, we want to be the actresses in it.

They agree.

On the night before I leave for New York, Martin has a going-away party for me. He makes sangria, guacamole, and beer-marinated skirt steaks on the grill—all the things I've taught him to make.

“How long are you going for?” one of his friends yells over the music.

“Just the summer,” I say.

Martin puts his arm around me.

“You're never coming back,” he says.

“That's not true,” I say, though I've decided that if I can find a job and an affordable living situation, I'll stay longer. Especially since Josh, one of the guys from Chico, just moved there, and Abigail is moving there within a month as well. She had gotten married two years before, and Martin and I had gone to the wedding. Then after she'd been married for about a year and a half, she called me one day to tell me that she had fallen in love. He was the owner of the gallery where she was working, and he felt the same way. Abigail filed for divorce and she and her husband split everything down the middle—he got the sailboat, which had been a wedding gift from her grandfather, and she got their savings. She had decided to take that money, go live in New York for a year, take classes at the Art Students League, and give the gallery owner space while he finalized his divorce.

“That's okay,” Martin says. “I know you've always had one foot out the door.” He often teases me of having the “one-foot-out-the-door syndrome.” Though it's not so much having one foot out the door as an inherent attitude that I don't need anyone taking care of me. It's an inability to entrust my well-being to anyone, and years from now, when I go see a therapist, after several visits she concludes that perhaps my biggest shortcoming is that I'm self-reliant—almost to a fault.

Though I assume this self-reliance stems from my brother having left and never returned, and then my father having left without even having bothered to say goodbye, eventually it will be Tito who will point out exactly where my self-reliance stems from.

*   *   *

On June 1, 2001, I land at LaGuardia with nothing but a small backpack, my laptop, and my brother's guitar. Rehearsals start right away. Abigail arrives a few days before the show opens, and she and Josh come on opening night. After having a drink with the ensemble, we leave and flag down a cab. There is a party called Rubalaud back in Josh's neighborhood in Brooklyn that he wants to take us to.

“Where you go?” the cabbie asks, before we even get in. “Where you go? Where you go?”

“Williamsburg,” Josh says, and the cab takes off, practically running over our feet, and leaving us standing on the curb. Cabs don't like going to Brooklyn, especially not to Williamsburg, where back in the seventies, eighties, and even the nineties, crime was so rampant that even the police didn't like going there.

A few days later, Martin is in town, and we take the L train to Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. It's late afternoon, and when we emerge from the subway, the first thing I notice is the sky. It's vast compared to the sky in Manhattan.

“This is it,” I say to Martin, because even though I've been in New York for a few weeks, I haven't found a neighborhood where I could see myself living, certainly nowhere in Manhattan, with its nonstop traffic, crowded sidewalks, and skyscrapers. “This is my neighborhood,” I say. There is something about Williamsburg that is very reminiscent of Wicker Park, my neighborhood in Chicago. Most of the buildings are brick, three- to six-floor walk-ups. There are no high-rises, no elevator men, no tourists, and hardly any traffic. A Salvation Army sits on the corner near the subway stop, and there's a Polish restaurant down the street, across from a Mexican grocery store.

By the end of the week, I've found a room for rent in the neighborhood. It's in a two-bedroom apartment that I'll be sharing with a guy named Tundae. When I had first gone to look at the apartment, I had told Tundae that I would take the room, and he chuckled, told me he had other people coming to look at the place and he'd get back to me by the end of the week. When the end of the week was nearing and I still hadn't heard from him, I started to panic. I knew this room was my shot at staying in New York. The rent was cheap—so cheap that the $2,300 I had to my name would have been enough to cover the first six months of rent.

“You seem like a nice person,” he said. “But you just moved here, and you're an actress, and you don't have a job, you know what I'm sayin'? And you have that guitar, and when you play, it might be loud, and the apartment is not that big, you know what I'm sayin'? Besides, I already told this other girl that she could have the room.”

“Please, Tundae, please.” I swore I wouldn't play my guitar when he was home, and told him that I had so much money saved up that, if he wanted me to, I could pay the first six months up front—so paying rent would definitely not be an issue. We went back and forth a bit, until he finally relented, said the other girl was already on her way to pick up the key, but if I could get there with a deposit before she did, I could have the room.

I move in July 1, which happens to be a Sunday, and while I'm unpacking my clothes and arranging them in the closet, I hear a song that I haven't heard since I was a kid come thundering through the apartment. I go to the window, and across the street there is a Spanish-speaking Pentecostal church. Their door is wide open and the singing, clapping, and tambourine playing is spilling out onto the sidewalk. They start singing a different song, and then another, and though I haven't stepped foot in a church in years, I still know all the lyrics by heart. Whenever they introduced a new hymn at my mother's church, on the way home she would ask me to sing it, because she knew I was the one who always memorized the lyrics.

“Hallelujah,” a man yells into a microphone, and his voice comes booming through the apartment.

The singing subsides, the music stops, and then the man is going on and on about how the Second Coming is upon us. How Jesus will come like a thief in the night—in the blink of an eye. Fire will once again rain from the heavens like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Antichrist will reign on earth. I know all about the Antichrist and his reign of terror on earth after the Second Coming. When I was a kid, they had shown us a film at my mother's church that depicted what the Great Tribulation would be like. In the film, fires raged on every street corner and everyone seemed to be running for cover. A soldier grabbed a small boy and asked if he believed in Jesus, and since the boy said yes, the soldier had forced a metal rod through the boy's ears. The rod had gone in one ear and out the other, and the boy had begun to vomit instantly.

For days after, I couldn't shake the image of that boy. It had frightened me enough that every single night I prayed that Jesus would save me, my brothers and sisters, my mother, and my father—especially my father, whom we were all convinced was doomed to go to hell because he didn't believe in Jesus and he drank too much, and he called the people at my mother's church hypocrites—claimed that they were brainwashing us.

On weekday nights, while he sat in the living room watching Mexican soaps, my mother gathered us in her bedroom and read us Bible stories. There was the story of a man who had been swallowed by a giant fish and had lived inside the fish's stomach for a month before being regurgitated and had survived. Then there was the woman who had glanced back on her burning city and had thus been turned into a salt statue, and so she would remain, forever looking back on her past. And then there was Jesus—who had walked on water, turned water into wine, and had even brought a man back from the dead.

“Was Jesus Mexican or American?” we asked.

“Neither,” she said. “He was a Jew.”

“What's a Jew?”

My mother tried to clarify what a Jew was, told us about Israel and Egypt, about Moses and the Pharaoh, and for years I assumed these people and places no longer existed.