What We Are (12 page)

He lost everything with us. He'd come from a
matai
family of generational royalty, eight hundred underlings in the clan. When my grandfather, his father, died, five thousand people paid their respects over the course of a week. His obituary was in
USA Today
. My father landed in your average American suburb, the swallower of indigenous tales.

But this is not his story, or even the story of my mother. How could it be? They had their shot. No, this is my reluctant story, and I could give a fuck about my empty palms and pockets. What worries me is this empty heart, panicky muscle that's asphyxiating me softly.

T
HE CELL POPS,
but before I step out the door I drop a flattened cardboard from a leftover box lunch on the chest of my KO'd crankster cellie. I hope he has the smarts to investigate. His upcoming time in jail depends on it. To see the one word I've written and retraced across the cardboard over and over, right there in waxy lead. I want him to feel the connection to life that I never quite feel when someone tells me they're sorry. I want him to wake up and feel like he's lucked into contrition for the weak, suspect, fucked-up condition we're all in, jail or not, addict or not, truly sorry or not.

I get processed out by a Japanese cop whose badge reads I. Kai and there she is: Beatrice La Dulce Shaliqua Schneck. She shakes her head and I smile. She's embarrassed and won't talk to me. It's a rather nice continuation of the silence that won't last.

“Now what's this shit,” she finally says, as we hit the road, “'bout you not digging Mexicaners?”

I yawn right through it, lesson number one and one million from my last nine-hour gift of an anonymous cellie: Be a z-catcher in the face of the senseless.

“I said,” she says, “what is this funky shit about you having racial attitudes towards my brown brothers?”

“Just what you said.” I lean the seat back to partial recline. “Shit.”

Suddenly she goes soft, takes my hand. “You don't like the little Mexicaners, baby?”

“Who cares if I do or don't? Are you a Mexicaner? I mean, what the fuck is a Mexicaner, anyway?”

“You the one charged with the hate crime, not me!”

“I mean, what are you, a Haitian hick? What the fuck kind of politic is that, girl?”

“We never liked them back home!”

“And what about now?”

“Now? Oh. Well. We tolerate 'em.”

“Hah. Don't preach to me, bitch.”

“Who you calling bitch? I just paid five g's to get your hate-criming ass out of jail! You better recognize!”

“Oh, I recognize all right. I hear Mr. Don King himself.”

“Oooooh. I don't care for that electroshock-looking nigga.”

“Only in America—that's his line—only in America will you find two-time second-degree murderer-Republican promo men like his black ass, white suburban crips raised in two-story houses with black-bottomed pools, Christian Jews, mainstream porn stars who wage in on politics, capitalistic Buddhists, a Haitian refugee bigot. Mexicaner? Sounds like a fucking combo meal at Taco Bell.”

“Oooooh, baby! He back! My wild Samoan pony is back! Gimme some sugar! Some ten-dollar magic! Some dynamo!”

“What the fuck is dynamo?”

“Gimme some of that LeRoi Jones Fellowship, baby!”

“You lionizing me?” I say in my most ebonicized voice. “Okay. Hear me roar:

Life is but a walking shadow,
a po' playah who struts and frets
his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no mo'.
It is a tale told by Beatrice La Dulce
Sh-Sh-Sh-Shaliqua Schneck,
full of sound and fury,
signifying nada.”

“That's deep, love.”

“I'm sure Sir Willie Shakes would appreciate the compliment.”

“He a rapper?”

“Or the idiot would.”

“Got a new place, baby.”

“'Bout time you left that shit city.”

“What's wrong with Milpitas?”

“Where you live now?”

“Not in Motel City, honey.”

“Ouch. If I cared about what you said, little girl, I'm sure it would sting.” We're approaching the border of Eastside San Jo, where La Dulce first lived when she moved from Miami. She never talks about Florida. It's like her life as an American started on the West Coast. “We going to the Eastside?”

“Please,” she says. “I only climb, honey.”

“What do you climb on?”

“You lucky, sucker, I'm even gonna let your dirty ass set foot in the estate.”

“Estate?”

“So you wanna move in, baby?”

“With the esteemed lady of the house?”

“Who the fuck else, nigga?”

“Do I have an option, nigga?”

“Hell no you don't. You know that.”

“Then absolutely.”

I want La Dulce to stop the car so I can give the ungracious ho the old heave-ho: back to the ghetto you go with all your Mexicaner brothers and sisters! It's not that I'd celebrate her misfortune, if it in fact would be misfortune (she'd still be alive, she'd still have a strong and bouncy and well-fed booty, she'd have access at every streetlight to cutting-edge hip-hop shimmering out the windows of tricked-out lowriders and mini-trucks); it's just that this tapping of her bank account might behoove La Dulce in the spiritual realm: a return to the immigrant American pseudo-squalor from which she came could resuscitate some latent muscle memory of humility. She treats every human being that crosses her radar as if s/he's applied on a résumé to be a bootlicker, of her boots, and that the farthest you can climb up the tier of promotion is the midsection, her midsection, where you'd be tonguing the same task, king/queen of her sweet and sour mound of love.

I guess she's obsessed with me because I'm neither. She doesn't want to admit it, but if it came down to categorization she's
my
bootlicker—or slipper licker—as well as my midsection licker, not because I've asked for it or even sought it out (though it is nice at times, her warm wet tongue and plump Haitian lips working instead of talking), but because she's volunteered it, almost forced it into play. She's like a red light turning green: you walk across the street. Who knows where it stems from at her end? Some strange tendency of the slave owner to sympathize with the slave so much she hands over the whip for a day. I could do with or without La Dulce, and it destroys her.

We get off 101 at Santa Clara Street, right next to Five Wounds, the old golden, magisterial, Portuguese cathedral. They're all out there—about a hundred parishioners or so—with the maroon flags of Portugal snapping in the wind, dressed in Adidas slippers, Adidas shorts, Adidas windbreakers, maroon soccer jerseys with the names
Ronaldo, Deco, and Figo in yellow letters across the back, obviously not on their way to mass. And they're chanting. And seem to be drunk. It's only nine in the morning, you can still hear the birds.

Some firecrackers pop off in the lot across the street at the Prasad Island Market, where sometimes my pops would buy Samoan food—
fa'i, taro, ulu, povi
—from a little bearded Lebanese hustler drowning in an
ie lavalava
, who'd always yell out
Talofa!
when we'd walk in. I hunch, thinking,
Gunshots
. Cheers go up. We're at the stoplight to cross the bridge over the freeway. La Dulce doesn't seem to notice the festivities: she unzips my jeans, bends down, and licks my boot.

“Hey, hey, hey.”

Now she's really going at it, but I can't respond. We're in the middle of a fucking Portuguese Pride Parade, for chrissake. A few soccer balls are being kicked around, and now I remember: World Cup, 2006. Portugal just beat someone on the other side of the world. Advanced to the next round.

I say, “It's a green light.”

“They turn you queer in eight hours?”

“Yeah. Let me out. I gotta go find my street corner.”

“You nasty,” she says, sitting up.

“I'm nasty? It's fucking green. Just do your job and drive.”

La Dulce rolls the window down and shouts, “This ain't Lisbon, you dumb Portugees!”

We zoom off over the bridge and down Alum Rock, its ruined lanes unreadable, and there are paisas at every street corner, on bikes, on scooters, at bus stops, taquerias with
futbol
posters of Mexico vs. Argentina over the door, signs diverting traffic around mounds of gravel that have been uprooted and left in the sun,
pho
houses stuffed with Vietnamese hunched over their steaming bowls of noodles and rice, and straggler whites using forks and talking (you can tell even from outside) way too loud, and beauty salons proprietored by
women named Tiffany Le and Michelle Nguyen, their names in English and Vietnamese detailed in flowery pink paint on the windows, a Dunkin' Donuts with no one in it, a triangular eyesore still called Wienerschnitzel, Walgreen's, 76, 7-Eleven, the bright yellow foothills in the nearing horizon rising slower than the sun.

We get to Capitol Expressway and go right. We're heading out toward South San Jo, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, middle-and upper-middleclass suburbs. So much for my fancy of Shaliqua in the chains of poverty. I should have known better, this one's more than a survivor, she's a straight rodent. I kind of respect that about her: Whenever the big bomb hits, if you're still around, look and listen for Beatrice La Dulce Shaliqua Schneck and get fast on her hard-shelled heels. She'll find you water and shade and maybe even love before you've uttered a single word of complaint.

Now we're climbing the dry, quiet, colorless San José foothills, and somehow La Dulce has been infected by the ambiance. It sounds silly to say but it's nice, the silence—peaceful—maybe because it's unexpected with the present company in the present age. Isn't a cell phone supposed to go off somewhere, or a thousand of them, beepers, horns, Slim Shady's croaking voice from an eight-year-old's iPod? You suck it all in knowing it won't last, not with the likes of the Haitian hurricane sitting next to you. La Dulce is the embodiment of the old admonition in Proverbs: she speaketh words without wisdom. If La Dulce were eight years old she'd be the ADHD poster child, you'd hear her mouth on a six-mile radius. I've learned that it's better not to contemplate the intricacies of her quietude, just to go with it, in the same way one accepts a week of free cable television.

I hope
....

I hope
....

I hope she stays shut
.

There are big two-story houses in grapevine rows on the apex of the nearest hill, all the same color, gray with dark brown trim, enclosed
by a mile of faux-concrete walls parallel to the road, eight feet tall, or eight feet short. You get the sense that they could be higher and, with eventual funding, will be. It's like these people are expecting barbarians for lunch. The alligator moat and the king's archers will be the next topic of discussion at the Tuesday meeting. We reach a left-turn signal and pull up under an iron placard: Silver Creek Estates. At the tollbooth, a Punjabi in a turban and a Goodwill security guard outfit stands. “Hello, Ms. Snake.”

It's Singh from the 7-Eleven where the big immigrant fight went down earlier this month. I lean across La Dulce's lap and say, “What's up, Singh?”

He doesn't recognize me. Why would he? I just bought Chewy Sweetarts two or three times a week from him for under a year. He nods anyway, clearly not remembering our little chats. I know what I was to him: our conversations about the Punjabi folk hero who'd held his own severed head like a lantern in the dark as he cut down a thousand invading Hindus were no more than an immigrant's manner of talking himself sane at the end of a sixteen-hour shift. And then, from my end, I hadn't thought about the guy's welfare in a month. There was a mutuality of nil at play. All I can really say is that his beard was a little thicker, a little longer, and it's nice to see him moving up in the world, as that's what he'd no doubt wanted, what he came here for.

“Hey, buddy,” he says.

“Way to go, Singh. Dig the threads. Nicely done, bro.”

La Dulce looks at me like she should be introduced and for just that reason I lean back to my side of the car and say nothing. Turning to Singh, she says, “The name's Schneck. You ain't saying it proper. You gotta get the
sh
in there, man.”

“
Sh
,” says Singh, nodding. “
Sh
.”

“
Neck
.”

“
Neck
.”

“Now say it: Schneck.”

He flexes his jaw muscles behind the beard. “Snake.”

“No. Listen, man: Schhhneck.”

“Ssssnake.”

“All right, nigga. You call me La Dulce.”

“La Doosh,” he says.

“Goddammit!”

“Just call her lady,” I say.

“Okay, my friend,” he says, happy with the compromise. The orange-striped gate rises, he calls out, “Good-bye, lady!” and we drive through.

“That A-rab never gets my shit right.”

“He ain't Arab,” I say.

“Do I give a fuck, Mr. Hate Crime? Do I look like I care?” I slap the side of her ass and she perks up. “Hmmm,” she hums, leaning toward her window and pushing it out at me.

We make our way down the vacant streets, each named after a local tree: Pine, Elm, Magnolia. Genius! Ours is the only vehicle on Pine, Elm, Magnolia, just as we are the only visible people. I know where all the neighbors are. The place is as hollow as a Hollywood set: you get out of the car, walk over to an “estate,” lean up against the wall, and fall right through the paper. The streets are wide, clean, unused. There are no kids tossing Nerf balls around or skipping rope, no youths on bikes or scooters, no parents on the porches in lawn chairs, no barbecues at the sides of the houses, no one shooting hoop in the driveways, no Wiffle ball games. In fact, all the driveways are empty, not just of people but of cars, of oilstains. And all the garages are closed, every one of them. The private community of Silver Creek isn't new, but it looks new—or rather: untouched. It's like the silence I'd praised ten minutes ago at the base of the hill is now showing how it, too, can be ugly. Yet the citizens here have retreated to private quarters of their own volition. Everyone's inside the airconditioned
“estate,” keeping the contract to stay away from one another for a fat mil each. I haven't been inside one Silver Creek estate, but I know this.