Chapter 30

Mom’s Story

Here’s what we knew of Mom:

Her mother, who was, in some cosmic joke, actually named Dominga—a fact that I would keep desperately hidden all during elementary school, especially when I was accidently given her personalized pencils as school supplies, which had her name printed on them from back when she briefly sold real estate, and so I had to spend a panicked hour at the pencil sharpener grinding each pencil down to where they read Doming—lived in the city, Brownsville proper, behind the KFC. As my grandmother, she wasn’t much of a presence in our lives. It was tradition that we would visit her house on Sundays, after church and lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria, and Mamí, as we called her, would always be home because she was a degenerate gambling bingo-loving heathen and her third husband, Arturo, or Deddy, as we knew him, could be relied upon to be working on a car in his driveway, as a mechanic, with some or all or one of his recently bailed boys helping.

These were the guys who I had accidentally bought pot from way back when I was teenager, with Tony driving us to his new “secret biker hook-up.” I’d been going there all my life; it wasn’t too secret for me.

Mamí drank Tecate and would pour salt on the lip of the can, and she’d drink and smoke with the same hand. She was actually pretty great, as a person, but not much as a grandmother, some might say. I never felt too close to her, felt like she was more of a distant neighbor we’d visit, who had cable, and I don’t think any other of the kids felt differently.

She was also very light of complexion and hair, of European origins, it was immediately apparent, though it looked like she had fallen very far and very hard from grace. Her pale eye color corresponded well with the way she dyed her hair in the strumpet shades of red and corn-husk yellow.

Mom had Ricky as a twin, and Diana, an older sister, who were from Mami’s first marriage, we thought.

At some later point her mother remarried, to the man who was now her stepfather, Arturo, and bore him four fairly useless male children. Great, likeable guys when they were sober, which wasn’t often, but trouble when they’d been up to no good, and they got up to no good regularly. Actually, this is unfair; the youngest of the four, Eric, is about as successful as you’re going to get, in Brownsville. He’s an optician, though I think he still lives at home, with his mother, and he’s just a year older than I am, which is creepy. But Derek has some interesting stories about spending time with his Dear Uncle Eric. Some very interesting stories involving a tremendous amount of cocaine, and Satanism.

Anyhow, there was also this girl, Julie, who had been raised in that last brood of children, and none of us ever really gave much thought to Julie, because we took it as a matter of fact that she was also Mom’s sister, but Mom would go quiet when Julie came up in conversation, and Dad would make crass veiled suggestions at Julie’s source of origin, and then would make a point of humiliating Mom’s rather loose family moral code. It wasn’t until we were older that we found out that Julie was the illegitimate product of a quick and unseemly union between Mom’s older sister, Diana, and—hold the applause—Freddy Fender, or Baldemar Huerta, as he was known in Los Fresnos, before he hit the big time.

Freddy had knocked up Mom’s older sister, Aunt Diana, at a concert in the late 1960s.

“No shit; the Freddy Fender?” I asked Dan, when he told me, when we were kids.

“No, retard: A Freddy Fender. Of course, Freddy Fucking Fender. She was sixteen and was pretty hot, so they let her backstage after a concert, and he knocked her up,” he said. Suddenly, Julie’s Afro took on a greater significance.

“Does he . . . does he know about her?” I asked, trying to get my mind around it.

“Of course he does,” Dan said. “Now, if he kicks anything her way, that’s another story. That’s between him and Diana and her current husband, I guess.”

(He did, Freddy Fender. He did the nearly right thing and acknowledged Julie and would eventually help put her through nursing school, as an adult, to help her find her own way, when he got out of la pinta. If you remember your 1960s pop history, Freddy had served a stint in Louisiana for marijuana possession and theft after he had Wasted Days and Wasted Nights on the charts. Or maybe my chronology is off. Anyhow, he’d been caught stealing tires and had pot in the truck, was the story I was told by Dan, and it was a story I loved: Freddy had a record on the charts, and he couldn’t help but steal a set of tires. I loved that about him. That’s so barrio-credible. I still do things that . . . well, I better not mention here. Except that I was drunk, officer. One word: lawn mowers. Can’t get enough of them.)

Anyhow, getting back to Mom: That was the extent of my understanding of my mother and her family. That was what we were allowed to know, by our father, who would proclaim Mamí a filthy whore whenever Mom’s family would surface in conversation.

Instead of a curiosity with my mother’s history, I had a vague association to those Sundays spent at Mamí’s house, especially when I smell KFC gravy. But beyond that, I can’t really say I explored any healthy interest in finding out more, of who we were. Of who Mom was. None of us did.

Dad and Gramma did a yeoman’s job of beating that sense of curiosity right out of us. And Gramma had actually gotten drunk at a party once and squared off with Mamí and took a few swings at her. We still have pictures of that party. I was four, standing by a keg of beer.

Anyway, Mom, at the time, was too subdued to press more than that about her own family origins, and she—even she—didn’t trust her own mother, it seemed like. Besides, what the fuck should we care? Dad said so, matter of fact. Her mother’s a whore. Simple as that. Mom’s family began and ended right there, behind the KFC, where Dad found her.

So by the time Mom and Derek came to visit Karis and me in Seattle, Mom had already developed a strategy to divorce Dad, who had by this time fully embraced his new job as a long-haul driver, and all the freedoms it posed for him. I wasn’t keeping track of Dad’s movements, and I gathered then that neither was Mom.

Things had been on a steady downward trajectory since the first round of kids—ending with me—had moved out, and Mom felt her maternal duties at keeping the nest intact were mostly over, and Derek as the “Oops!” baby wasn’t enough to singularly shoulder the burden of the dead marriage.

Mom had been getting faint tastes of freedom, first with her own job, and her own paycheck, and then with school, which she had started on the sly. And now with Dad gone for so much of the time, and even more so with a new group of friends who were well beyond the reach of Gramma and the Oklahoma Barrio, well, Mom’s wings were spreading.

The trip to Seattle was a life-changing event for Mom, as if she had been waiting all this time to surface and tell her story to someone—anyone who would care, and Karis was as close to family as she felt comfortable at this time, and so she told Karis everything, from the beginning. They’d gone to Pike Place Market, on a very long walk, and Mom downloaded her story to Karis.

When she was just a toddler, Mom said, her mother had regifted her to an aunt, whom Mom called Tía Hila, who raised Mom as her own daughter until Mom was around six. This was the early 1950s, in Brownsville, Texas, when Dominga couldn’t support the children she’d had. Another victim of childhood regifting.

Though the country had been at war in the 1940s, Mom’s mother and her sisters had been living up a fantastic reinterpretation of the American Dream. Her sisters and she had moved to Southern California and gotten great jobs in the war effort and had more than enough gentlemen callers hanging about, by the looks of the photographs Mom eventually shared. They looked like movie stars, and dressed the part.

Their father, my great-grandfather, had been a French pharmacist, who had somehow ended up in Brownsville, Texas, after leaving France in a hurry with his family. He’d opened a pharmacy in Brownsville but still hated the United States with such French fervor that he tiled his floor in American silver dollars and was then told by the Treasury Department to cease and desist. They have an old portrait of him, with a bushy mustache, a stern look, and my mother’s sad squinty eyes. This revelation explained a considerable amount about our origins and peculiarities, like my fondness for absinthe and pharmaceuticals, and paté.

But back to Mom. Or rather, her mother.

Mamí had come back from her time in California and was being courted by a well-to-do young man from Mexico with good prospects. His family owned a shoe factory in central Mexico, and he was very much in love with her, had asked for her hand and she’d accepted. She was quite the looker, and he had good reason to be jealously protective of her. He was forced away at some point, either militarily or for business, and asked his younger brother to look after his betrothed. Younger brother had agreed and off went her fiancé for an extended absence. Of course, in the stylized manner of these kind of stories, Dominga and the younger brother became involved during this time, and she came down with child.

When the older brother returned, there was a row, and the younger brother, scorned, wandered off ashamed and dishonored and jumped into the path of an oncoming train.

Dominga was vilified and blamed for the catastrophe, for destroying the family, and she was sent back to Brownsville, where she had her daughter in quiet illegitimacy, at her father’s home. (This was Diane, my mother’s older sister, who would, in turn, get knocked up by Freddy Fender in the mid-1960s.)

Dominga, at this point an unwed mother in the late 1950s, met up with a man who would marry her, named Frederico Garcia, who fathered a set of twins, which included my mother and her brother, Ricky, and was gone by the time Mom and Ricky turned three. Dominga just couldn’t keep it together.

This is why my father would call her a whore and dismiss any further discussion of my mother’s origins; he’d finally found someone he could feel superior to—since his own origin story wasn’t exactly an uplifting or successful one with a happy ending—and he could intimidate and humiliate Mom whenever the topic came up. “She was a whore,” he’d say of my mother’s mother, and felt like he won.

But Dominga wasn’t a whore, just a child who’d made some poor choices in what probably wasn’t the most hospitable area for a good-looking single white mother. People can be far more punitive to the good-looking, if they have the opportunity, as a sort of punishment for being born with the luck of good looks. And an attractive unwed white woman would draw a lot of attention in a town like Brownsville, in 1958.

All that, I learned much later on; what Mom shared with Karis was this:

Dominga felt she couldn’t take care of both Ricky and little Velva Jean and felt she had to give up one of the kids, as was acceptable practice in Brownsville at the time, as discussed previously. Dominga’s sister Hila was the only one of the four sisters who remained childless, and unmanned, and so she gladly, willingly, appreciatively took on the responsibility of caring for one-year-old Velva Jean, as Dominga summoned all her womanly charm and ensnared yet another, and final, man to help her through those wretched Brownsville mornings.

Little Velva Jean was suddenly in heaven, cared for and mothered and encouraged in a healthy, matronly environment. The difference was dramatic; though Hila lived just a few blocks from Dominga and her new husband Arturo, it was a much more wholesome house, quiet and full of love.

Mom was eight years old when Dominga decided she needed more help around the house and figured it was time to call Velva Jean back to her house, where she belonged, so she could clean after her four new stepbrothers, who ran the place.

But her Tía Hila had other thoughts; Velva Jean was hers now. How could Dominga possibly think she’d just let her go like that? She had been her daughter for nearly eight years now, and she had nothing, no one else. Velva Jean was as much her daughter as Dominga’s. More so, even; she’d raised her in her own home. Tía Hila fought back, tried to go the formal route to secure Velva’s parentage. Started filing the paperwork.

Then one morning, in the middle of the conflict, while Tía Hila was still in the process of getting the slow-moving government to recognize her as the primary caregiver, she took little Velva Jean to the corner grocery store and was busy buying something, with her back turned. Dominga ran in and snatched little Velva Jean, put her in a car, and drove the few blocks to her house and locked her in. She wouldn’t answer the door when Hila pounded on it, pleading, crying her spinster eyes out, begging for her little girl to come home with her, but Dominga was relentless.

She wanted her daughter back, now that the hard work in raising her was over and the hard work in raising the next brood was just starting.

I didn’t know any of this. I’m not sure if any of my sisters knew this either. This is what Mom had told Karis that afternoon, while Karis listened, in the way that Mom didn’t trust that her own sons and daughters were capable of.

And it wasn’t over, the story.

Mom lived a Cinderella existence, at that house behind the KFC.

To say that she was beaten and treated terribly would be a terrible fiction; she wasn’t mistreated or left to starve or anything too Brothers Grimm, but she did have to earn a considerable keep and look after four rambunctious and giddy, unfocused, and oddly loveable boys, who were headed toward a very dreary adulthood because of the sheer lack of discipline and formality at home. They were good and happy kids, and looked like they were pathologically stoned from birth, in the photos I’ve seen, this last brood from Dominga’s overproductive womb. Her second husband, my stepgrandfather, was also a very easy going man who fixed cars for a living. He might even be called a mechanic; who knows. But Mom’s stepbrothers made for a lot of colorful stories and bad moments. They were huffers, uncontrollable potheads, and thieves.

Once, when I was about fourteen years old, I’d run an errand for Mom and Dad some cold wet morning and had left some change in cash on our dining room table, which was right by our front door, and was then taking an ahem quiet moment to myself in the bathroom, enjoying the solitude, when I heard the door open and her stepbrother Johnny call out.

I called back, from the bathroom, “No, neither Mom nor Dad are home. Come back in about an hour, and they’ll be back. You want me to tell them something?”

I heard him mumble something, and there was a tone in his voice that took me a moment to recognize as a sort of switch over to wile and subterfuge, and then I realized he could see the $35 I left on the table, and thought, No; Johnny wouldn’t steal that. . . . I put my pants back on and hid the porn magazine I was reading under the towels, and by the time I opened the bathroom door, he was gone, and so was the money I’d left on the table.

His stoned friends, though, weren’t so quick, and I caught Johnny trying to get back in the car, which didn’t have a reverse gear, and I said, “Johnny! Hey, Johnny! Did you happen to see what happened to the money on the table?”

And he said, smiling, “What? No, man; no way,” and then to the guy in the front seat, “Hey, get out of the way, man, come on, move!” By this time Gramma had noticed what was going on, and she saw the look on my face and had dropped what she was doing and ran back inside her house to get her .9 mm pistol, but by the time she came back out, chambering a round over her head very theatrically, they’d driven off through the U-shaped driveway.

For a second, I thought, Fuck. I could have kept that money and just framed Johnny. I’ll remember that for next time.

But again, that wouldn’t come until later. As I said, Mom’s stepbrothers were just likeable dumb kids, even before they got into drugs, and they didn’t really treat her so badly, and neither had Dominga or her new husband. But it was still against her will, and she had cried herself to sleep for years, wanting to be back with her Tía Hila, who lived just down the street, and she was slowly dwindling away from her broken heart.

Mom made a plan, at that point. When she turned eighteen years old, she would move back in with her Aunt Hila, and finish college, though she did want to get up to California and see what the fuss was all about with San Francisco. Meanwhile, Vietnam had begun to rage, and across America, the ghettos were being razed by draft cards.

Dad watched in terror as two of his cousins who were his own age had been called up and drafted, defenseless against the legality of the little white cards. He was graduating from high school this year and was lean and Mexican and 1A.

So Dad made a plan, at that point. He would get married and have ten kids at once. He would marry a woman with ten uteruses, and impregnate every one of them. He’d be 4F in a matter of six months, if he was lucky.

Out of nowhere, and without prior warning, Aunt Hila died when Mom was sixteen years old, from a broken heart, Mom was convinced. And I can see that. Mom was a sophomore in high school, and her aunt, the person she considered her real mother, was suddenly gone. All she had left was this life, behind the KFC.

Dad had known Mom from Brownsville High School. They hardly knew each other, had only really known each other from a social studies class. Dad proposed to Mom, without actually disclosing why he was asking her to marry him, and she didn’t exactly disclose to him why she had agreed, but she did, and they moved forward into this X-Factor of a marriage.

Mom took the opportunity to leave her family behind, and Dad took the opportunity to crank out children to keep himself safe, while he was still at Gramma’s feet.