Muchacho (14 page)

Keeping my word of honor about not sending e-mails turned out real good because yesterday Tío said I could e-mail Lupe because I been doing so good in school that my new English teacher called up my parents and told them I’m an excellent student and a good example for the other kids, which is what you would call irony if it was in your literature book. When Papi called me up and said he got a call from one of my teachers, I started to feel like I was going to throw up all that brown rice that Tío’s been feeding me. But then he said, “Your mother is so proud of you, son,” and I knew he meant he was, too, except he isn’t too good at saying that kind of stuff. I’m not, neither. Like I never thanked him for being a good dad who cares about his kids. So I told him thanks for sending me to stay with Tío where I could get rehabilitated and not turn into a incorrigible juvenile delinquent who is a shame to the whole family.

Living with Tío is interesting even if it isn’t too normal. Like on this one weekend, he took me to this bathhouse in T or C, downtown in a real old kind of crumbly place where the bath part looked like those real old showers they have at the
gym, where they look dirty even if you scrub them every day, but Tío said don’t worry; there’s no germs because the water is 115 degrees right out of the ground. That water is supposed to have some kind of miracle minerals that heal you if you got achy bones or some kind of sickness that the doctors don’t know. The whole downtown of T or C has way-hot water under it, so if you live down there, you can go out in your backyard and dig a well and have your own personal hot tub.

Inside the bathhouse, we went to the men’s section where there were five bathtubs made all out of tile with real big faucets. You could close a long curtain in front of your bathtub so you could take off all your clothes and nobody could see you unless they drilled a little hole in the wall to peek through like they do in those creepy motels. There was a little hole in the wall between my bathtub and the next bathtub, so I hung my towel over the hole. It’s a good thing they had a cold-water faucet on that bathtub because that water was H-O-T
caliente.
It shriveled me up and turned me red and wrinkled like a little baby, but after a couple minutes I started to like it. I laid back in the water and floated like an old stick and pretty soon I felt my brain start floating, too. I got the same feeling I get when Lupe kisses me real soft like a feather.

After ten minutes, Tío knocked on my curtain and said I had to get out of the water because it was my first time. Besides, we had to take a shower and get dressed because Tío was going to drop me off at the Black Cat so I could hear the poetry reading while he went grocery shopping and changed
the oil in his truck. I would of chickened out from going to the poetry reading except when I told Tío I might go there sometime, he offered to drop me off and I didn’t want to look like a little kid afraid to do something just because he never did it before.

There was a sign on the door of the bookstore that said
WELCOME TO COFFEE AND CONFUSION: OPEN MIKE
. At first, I was kind of nervous to go in there because there weren’t any other kids, just old people and most of them pretty white. But then I saw that a bunch of the old men had ponytails and a couple people looked like they could even be Mexican. So I went and stood inside the door and I heard this one old hippie-looking dude in a black baseball cap talking to this lady with white hair who looked like a grandmother, except the dude said, “The lemmings don’t give a shit because they don’t know shit and then they get in your shit and talk shit about you,” and the lady didn’t scream or tell him to clean up his language. She just laughed. Then the owner of the bookstore with the long yellow hair saw me and waved at me and pointed to a chair in the corner. So I sat down and waited.

Pretty soon this real skinny old dude with a little white goatee got up and started reading a poem about some black dude beating him up when he was in school and after that they got to be friends. Then another old guy with purple hair got up and read a poem about doesn’t it break your heart to live in a country that is a country apart from the rest of the world because of the war in Iraq, and everybody clapped a lot.
Then this lady with pink glasses and wearing a long skirt but a man’s shirt got up and played her guitar and made everybody sing “I wanna go home” every couple seconds. After that, a real short lady from Iran read this poem about how home isn’t where you live, it’s where you love. She first read the poem in her own language and even though I couldn’t understand it, I could tell it sounded better before she turned it into English. Just like when you have a song in Spanish where the words say, “I’m a sincere man from the land of the palm trees and before I die, I want to share the poetry in my soul. My poetry is clear green and burning red, my poetry is a wounded deer that you seek in the forest,” when they translate it to English they say, “I write my songs with no learning and yet with truth they are burning,” just to make a rhyme out of it.

After that, about fifteen more people read their poems and stories. It was sort of weird but it was nice to be sitting in a place where everybody was laughing and feeling happy about listening to each other read and nobody making fun of each other even if the stuff they wrote wasn’t too good or they had a squeaking voice or made a mistake and had to read something over twice.

Right at the end, the skinny guy with the goatee got up and said, “We have a new reader this week. Her name is Ramona and she just moved here from North Carolina. Let’s give her a warm welcome.” Everybody clapped real polite and this lady went up to the front. She had short brown hair, not
flat and shiny but sticking up all over the place like little chocolate curls. She said, “I have never read in front of an audience before, so please excuse me if I blush.” You could tell she was nervous because her face looked like she just ate a habanero chile but the rest of her was the same color as a peach. She talked with a big Southern accent like I never heard except in the movies. And she read this story she wrote about how books changed her life. I even remember part of it. She said, “I just love books. I love everything about them, the way they look and smell and feel. And sometimes, when I’m fixin’ to start reading a new book, I sit and hold it in my hands awhile and think about it, the way some folks sit and ponder their travel brochures. And when I open a new book, I always hope that the words will capture me and carry me off to some new place and that when I get there, I will be far, far away from me.”

I knew exactly what she meant which was weird because there she was, this kind of old Anglo lady from thousands of miles away with a whole different kind of life from me, but she told a story that could have came out of my own mouth.

L
AST
S
UNDAY, THERE WAS ANOTHER POETRY READING AT THE
Black Cat and Tío didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go. He just said what time does it start and was I going to read any of my poems. Tío is the only person except Lupe who ever read my poems. He said he doesn’t know diddly-squat about poetry but he thought they were pretty good.
Diddly-squat
is the kind of thing Tío gets from working around too many Anglos and he thinks it’s real funny to copy their accent. He’s always saying things like “Get ’er done” and “Well, I’ll be danged.”

I don’t even get nervous going to the Black Cat anymore because I went there a couple of times just to look around, and one day when there wasn’t anybody else in there, that lady with the yellow hair told me her name was Rhonda and
she asked me did I want some coffee because it was on the house since she was going to empty out the coffeepot pretty soon. I took the coffee because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings after she told me her name and everything, but I had to dump it out in the bathroom because it tasted so bad. I never drank coffee before. It smells kind of good but it’s one of those things like vanilla or whisky that if you drink it straight, you’ll be sorry.

I took one of my poems to the reading, but I didn’t sign up my name to read. I couldn’t stand there in front of all those people and read something so personal. I been thinking maybe I would write something about the river or that blue heron or something that wasn’t about me so maybe I could read it. That North Carolina lady, Ramona, was there again and I sat in the chair next to her except I didn’t say anything, just sat there and smelled her perfume which smelled exactly like Lupe so I felt happy and sad both at the same time. Ramona read another story about this girl who was seventeen and went to visit her brother who was in the Navy. The girl decided she was tired of being a virgin, so she spent the whole night with a sailor who thought she was beautiful. When her brother found out he said he would kill that guy and he choked his sister and then he started crying. Even though it was a pretty sad story, Ramona told it real funny and everybody laughed so loud.

The next weekend after that, Tío and me drove over to Rosablanca to visit my family. Even though it’s only a couple
months since I saw them, they looked different, especially my parents. They didn’t used to have wrinkles or gray hairs. Letty and Juanito kept hanging on my arms and legs and asking me did I want to play a game or they showed me all the junky stuff they made in art class in school. I told them to stop because they gave me a pain in the ass but they probably knew I was just saying that stuff so I wouldn’t feel like crying because they just laughed and didn’t let go.

Tío let me borrow his truck and Mr. G let me drive Lupe over to Caliche’s for a frozen custard. At first, I felt kind of shy but as soon as we got around the corner from her house, Lupe hollered, “Pull over. Quick!” so I hit the brakes. As soon as we pulled to the curb, Lupe jumped in my lap and kissed me all over my face and neck and ears. I told her she scared me and I thought it was a real emergency and she said, “You don’t think this is an emergency?” and kissed me some more until it was a real emergency and we had to go get that custard to cool us down.

After we ate our custard, Lupe wiped her mouth real careful with a napkin and then she leaned over and put her hands on my face and I thought she was going to kiss me except she said, “Eddie, I have to tell you something and it’s real bad.” For a second, my brain started yelling, “Pregnant!” but that couldn’t happen unless Lupe was messing around on me and I knew she wasn’t, so then I started thinking maybe she got a new boyfriend while I was gone, but she said, “Primo got busted.”

“Which Primo?” I said, except I knew she would say Enrique because I already heard my parents whispering about it and Mami said, “Don’t tell him. He’s doing so well in school.” Enrique got busted for stealing car stereos and selling them which isn’t like a major crime, but he already got busted twice before for some other stuff and once when he got caught shoplifting, he had a gun stuck in his sock. He was a little kid back then so he didn’t do any time, but once you got a weapon on your record, the cops watch out for you to grow up and then they get you if you keep on engaging in criminal activities. I told Primo he should go to TVI like Miguel did and get a job in electronics like they show on the commercials but he said he already wasted too much of his life in school and why would anybody go to school if they didn’t have to, especially if they had to pay money to go.

“Sorry, Eddie,” Lupe said. And I thought she would say something like she usually says, like Primo has the same options as everybody else, but he always takes the easy way, the shortcuts, because he’s in too big of a hurry to stop and think about what he’s doing and he thinks he’s so slick that he’ll never get busted even after he just got busted. But Lupe didn’t say anything. She didn’t start crying or try to cheer me up or try to pretend like it was no big deal. She just sat there and let things be quiet, which is one of the best things about her. She knows when to shut up and she can shut up for a real long time, too, and not get mad about it after.

When I dropped Lupe off at her house, she kissed me on
the nose and said,
“Ay te watcho
” and jumped out of the truck. She always tells me,
“Ay te watcho,
” which means “Watch yourself,” instead of saying something romantic like “I’ll miss you” or “I can’t wait until I see you again.”

I hollered out the window that most girls would probably cry if their boyfriend got sent way over the mountains where she couldn’t see him. Lupe came around to the driver’s side and stuck her head inside the window and said even if she couldn’t see me, she could hear my heart beating at night when she put her head on her pillow. “Besides,” she said, “how could I be sad when every time I see you, you’re like a new version of my old boyfriend except you get better every time?” Then she walked into her house and didn’t even turn around, just swished her
nalgas
back and forth to say
hasta luego.

When I was over in Rosablanca, I took my journal to the library, too. I walked right in the front door and up to the desk and said could I please speak to Miss Beecher and when she came out, I handed my journal to her just like I planned in my intention. I didn’t have to remind her my name, though, because as soon as Beecher saw me, she said, “Hello, Eddie.” She started to open my journal but I asked her would she please read it later when I wasn’t standing there feeling so nervous. She closed it right away and sort of wrapped her arms around it like a hug. Then I told her how she was the best teacher and I was thinking on going to college but I would need a good recommendation, so could she please
consider writing one for me. Then I started thinking maybe she would think I said she was the best teacher I ever had just so she would write me a recommendation.

“Even if you don’t want to recommend me, I still meant what I said about you being the best teacher,” I told her.

“I know you aren’t a manipulative person, Eddie,” Beecher said. “And I would be delighted to write you a recommendation. I hope you go to college and earn your PhD in English so you can be a literature professor someday. Unless you’d rather be a high school teacher because you like high school so much.” Then she laughed out loud for a minute until she remembered we were at the library, so she put her hand over her mouth and kept on laughing so her hair shook all around her face with little shivers like it was laughing, too.