Muchacho (8 page)

I believed Lupe liked my poem better, though, because she never lies to me even though
mi primo
Enrique says you can never trust a woman. Plus, I read T.J.’s poem and it wasn’t that good even though it was better than some of the poems in our literature book.

Everybody acted all surprised when they found out T.J.
wrote a real poem because T.J. makes a big deal out of not living up to his potential and being disruptive and antisocial. But he’s a secret reader, just like me, except he’s even more secret than I am. If somebody asks me do I like to read, I say, “Yeah,” and then I give them a look that tells them they better not ask me what I like to read because this ain’t Oprah’s book club. But T.J. pretends he doesn’t even know how to read. If a teacher tries to make him read out loud in class, T.J. will either read like he’s in kindergarten, pushing his big dirty finger across the page and reading one word at a time or else he’ll say, “Reading sucks,” and he’ll say
suck
real dirty so it sounds like the other
uck
word, so the teacher will send him to the office for using inappropriate language.

T.J. reads real books when nobody is looking, though. I caught him myself. Once, I saw him reading a book behind the bleachers when we were both cutting first-period math. When I walked past, T.J. dropped the book on the ground and put his foot on it like he didn’t know it was there and he asked me did I have a cigarette. I said sorry, I just smoked my last one, even though I don’t smoke because I’m not stupid enough to think lung cancer is cool just because they put a camel or a cowboy on the commercial. Right then, one of the security guards slammed open the gym door and then let it slam shut real loud to let us know that if we didn’t get back to class we’d get busted. So T.J. left that book laying right in the dirt. I got a bathroom pass the next period and took a little detour behind the bleachers on my way and that book was
still there. It wasn’t porn or a comic book, like I expected. It was a real book—
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
I read the first page or two just to see what kind of a book would have a title like that and it turned out to be about this kid who everybody thought was stupid, except he was really smart in some ways. Like he couldn’t have a conversation with anybody but he could multiply real big numbers in his head like that guy in
Rain Man.
He reminded me of a lot of the kids in special ed who aren’t as stupid as the teachers think they are.

The next thing I knew I read the whole book, so I must of sat out there for a couple of hours. I got detention for cutting but I didn’t care because I wanted some quiet time to think about that book. I had never read anything like it before. That weekend, I went to the bookstore and asked the lady did she have any more books by the guy who wrote that one. She said no but she asked me if I wanted to try another book with an unusual title and she gave me
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by the same Indian guy who wrote the story that Beecher read us. After I read those two books, I realized there are two kinds of books in the world—the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won’t let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn’t then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them. They make us read the boring books so the
teachers just have to talk about safe stuff like amoebas and tsetse flies and the hypotenuse of a triangle and all those things which nobody cares about in real life.

The warning bell rang to let everybody know it was time to stop eating lunch and enjoying themselves and get back to earning an education, so Lupe gathered up all her stuff and shoved it in her backpack. I was so busy watching her move because she is so graceful, like a flamenco dancer with hands that can become a flying dove or a flower opening up its petals, so I didn’t realize Lupe also put my notebook with the poems into her backpack until she said, “I have your poems and I’m going to show them to Mr. McElroy unless you get down on your knees and beg me to give them back to you.”

I would do anything for Lupe. I would kill for her. But there is no way I get on my knees for anything—except to ask Lupe to marry me, which I’m going to do someday but not until I have a good job so I can take care of her. I told Lupe go ahead because I didn’t care if she showed my poems to McElroy but don’t tell him I wrote them. I don’t want him reading them out loud in front of everybody and saying I wrote them because I have a reputation to maintain. Lupe laughed and gave me back my notebook.

“I wasn’t really going to show them to anybody,” she said. “They’re too personal. I just wanted to see how brave you really are.” She squeezed my bicep and pretended to be surprised at how buff I am in spite of being so skinny. “Ooh. He’s
smart and sensitive and strong
and
fearless,” she said. She ran her fingers up my arm and touched my lips with her finger. Then she put the finger on her own lips and kissed it which made me dizzy. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting in McElroy’s class where we had to write a five-paragraph essay.

“Tell me what you’re going to tell me,” he said. “Then, tell me. Then tell me what you told me. It’s simple.”

It’s simple, all right. And boring. And stupid. And pointless. But you have to write the essay to pass the exam so you can graduate and the teacher won’t get fired. I was going to write about music and how it can make you smart, which is something that Beecher taught us. She said if you listen to certain music, you get smarter. And some music makes plants grow better. I looked it up on the Internet to see if she was just playing us, but she was telling the truth. There was all kinds of articles and scientific reports about how classical music makes you smart but heavy metal and rap can screw up your head. I stopped listening to rap after that. I never liked it much anyway, but I liked driving around with my homies with the windows down, playing rap music loud enough to break your head, wearing shades, and staring down all the old people who would roll up their car windows real fast like they were scared we were going to carjack them right in front of TacoTime. I believe those articles because if you listen to metal or rap really loud, like in a car that has sixteen batteries in the trunk to juice the speakers, after a while you get a feeling like you just won a fight or kissed a girl or something,
except you didn’t do anything. You get this rush, like chemicals in your blood, and you feel like you had some real feelings except you didn’t have to feel them.

That’s what I was going to write about but McElroy said we had to write about his topic, which was politics. I used to didn’t care about politics because it doesn’t make any difference to me if the president wears a red necktie or a blue one. Then I heard the president giving a speech on television and he said he doesn’t listen to his father because his father doesn’t tell him what to do. So I figured he might be all right because I don’t listen to Papi, neither. But then the president said he talks to God and God tells him what to do. I kept expecting somebody to jump up and scream, “It’s
Saturday Night Live!
” but it was for real. So I wondered how come they don’t make him stop being president. Because if the president of some other country went on TV and said he gets messages from Allah or some kind of foreign god who doesn’t speak English, Americans would freak out and think he was a lunatic and assassinate him or put economic sanctions on him. So, I looked the president up on the Internet and that’s when I found this Web site called Common Dreams, and that’s where I read that one of the new political plans is to get rid of all the Mexicans.

Everybody knows the Anglos are nervous about Mexicans having so many kids and taking over the country. But they didn’t really think it could happen until one day they counted up the people and California was half Hispanic. New Mexico
is probably more than half Hispanic, too, but New Mexicans aren’t stupid enough to stand still and let people count us. And we know how to get along in New Mexico. If you want to rub elbows with mostly Anglos and speak English, move down to Cruces. If you want to speak Spanish, move over to Deming or up to Española. If you like to mix it up a little, then you got a bunch of little towns in the middle to pick from, like Tularosa, Socorro, and Truth or Consequences.

I don’t blame the Anglos for being worried about so many Mexicans because they know payback is a bitch and we got a lot of payback coming. And if us Mexicans ever joined up with our Indian and black brothers, the Anglos would have to circle those wagon trains for real. But we wouldn’t kill the Anglos which is what they think. We wouldn’t torture them, neither, or make them slaves or make them speak a different language because we know how much that kind of stuff sucks. We wouldn’t rape all the white women, either. We wouldn’t have to. A lot of white women like dark men. They know we like sports, just like the
güeros
, but the brown brothers won’t pass up a hot woman to watch a game on TV. We know how to hit the
RECORD
button and watch the game later.

So, we won’t kill the
güeros.
We’ll just put them to work. We’ll make them be the cooks and the janitors and the car washers and the lawn mowers and the sewer diggers. We’ll pay them two dollars an hour and fire them if they take a day off to take their kid to the hospital. We’ll talk to them in Spanish and if they don’t understand us, we’ll say it louder
and slower, and shake our heads because how stupid can you be not to be able to speak such a simple language. In Spanish, you say the letters in all the words just like they look.
A
is always
ah
, and
E
is always
ay
, and
I
is always
eee.
We don’t have six different ways to say the same letters, like
dough
and
thought
and
through
and
tough
which all have
o-u
but different pronunciations, so that when you’re trying to learn English you sound stupid no matter how smart you are.

We’ll make the Anglos live in falling-down trailers and work in the fields picking chiles fourteen hours a day even when it’s a hundred and ten degrees. We’ll feel real sorry for them and maybe even appreciate them. We’ll say, “I don’t know how you can stand the heat. You people are so strong,” and we’ll pretend we believe they have a choice. We’ll pretend we like them, too. We’ll make statues of cute little round, fat Anglos and put them on our front doorsteps for decorations.

But we won’t let the Anglos take care of our kids. We don’t need day care and nannies because Mexicans haven’t forgotten their families like Anglos have. We take care of each other’s kids and we take care of each other.
Como mi primo
Enrique always says, “In Mexico, family is still family. If one person has a job, everybody eats. And everybody takes care of the little ones—
tías y tíos, primas y primos, abuelas y abuelos. Todos aman a los niños.
”

I wrote all that in my essay so I might get an F. It depends on whether McElroy grades it on how well I wrote it, like capital
letters and punctuation and good spelling and grammar, or if he grades it on whether he doesn’t like my opinion. You never know about teachers. Sometimes they fool you. Like Beecher. She fooled me a lot until I finally figured out that she was smart on a higher level than most people.

I don’t care if McElroy gives me a bad grade on my essay. I have to go to summer school anyway because I cut too much before I met Lupe and turned over my new leaf. Even if McElroy flunks my essay, it doesn’t matter because I know it’s a good essay and I’m glad I wrote it.

M
C
E
LROY MUST HAVE EITHER GOT A GIRLFRIEND, OR MAYBE A
boyfriend, I’m not sure which. But somebody must have got ahold of him because a couple weeks ago he showed up at school looking like one of those loser straight guys from that show where the gay guys teach the loser guy how to dress cool and act right and fix up his house so a girl would want to spend more than two minutes visiting him. McElroy had a buzz cut and an earring and he must have got contacts, too, because the pink glasses were gone. Instead of khaki pants and a polo shirt, he had on a black shirt and some Wranglers and a pair of black snakeskin Tony Lamas, which aren’t cheap.

McElroy must have been reading some of the same books
that Beecher read, too, because he didn’t teach his normal way where everybody took a nap while he talked and then we did some stupid pointless assignment. He handed out some blank contracts and told us we had to fill them out. There was a space to put your name and the date and then spaces to describe your project and list the names of your partners, if you didn’t want to work by yourself. And at the bottom it said that you had to sign the contract to show that you knew when the assignment was due because if you didn’t do it, you would flunk English for the semester.

“This is your opportunity to demonstrate your intelligence,” McElroy said. “You are going to design a project to demonstrate the skills that are not normally appreciated in school. There are many forms of intelligence that enable you to be successful in your professional and personal lives, but they cannot be taught or evaluated in a school setting.”

Everybody was looking at McElroy for a change, partly because he looked so different and partly because nobody knew what he was talking about.

“There is emotional intelligence, spatial intelligence, physical intelligence,” McElroy said. “For example, you may be very good at negotiating deals, writing songs, creating complex recipes, or singing or dancing. This project will allow you to earn credit for your unique set of skills.”

Teeny White raised her hand. “Can we write a book report?”

McElroy nodded. “That’s an option. But I would prefer
that you create a project that transcends the traditional research-and-regurgitate method.”