Chapter 5

Vulgaria

El Jardin was the happiest I’d ever been, as a child. Every memory surrounding that school was like an afternoon spent in an idyllic garden of innocence, like the name suggests, if you know Spanish.

I even remember coming down with a terrible fever once and being picked up at school by my father and mother, who brought me home and showed me the sort of attention no single child in our family ever dared ask for, with soup and compresses and blankets arranged on a couch. My older brother Dan came and quietly attempted to play tic-tac-toe with me and showed me his new Dallas Cowboys picture book. My sisters brought Blackie to me and sat him in my lap. But the dog would always fuck off in less than a minute, and I would lapse, awake later on my back, looking up at my mother’s face. She’d have a look of sadness, a smile pressed into her face like she was looking at . . . I’m not sure. I wasn’t sure, then. It couldn’t be me, was one of the first things I thought when I woke up and saw the look on her face. It was almost a look of loss, of letting go. The sadness of a mother worried for her sick child, a display of tenderness. I was unfamiliar with it.

I quickly became accustomed to school and the long days, though I have a clear memory of one morning, in kindergarten, of looking out the window and watching the cars slip by with muted sound on the road parallel to El Jardin. It’s the very heart of the morning, the dew is about to be singed off the ground by the South Texas sun, and I remember feeling like something was dying, something was changing, and the day, how it carried on with us indoors as we learned numbers and the alphabet and recited the dates (I still remember the first day of 1980, in the immersion English program, trying to get my mouth around that number). I remember the sadness that I felt that day, some type of dread tugging at my heart, looking out in that morning, like I wasn’t sure I was where I was supposed to be. I still have that feeling every few years and it has lost nothing of its dread intensity after all these years, like it’s dug a trench back to that very first time I noticed it.

What I could never adjust to at that time was CCD, the “church” school. These classes were on Saturdays, and I didn’t see why I had to go to church school after having been to elementary school all week long. Catechism was spent in a dirty room in the Christ the King Church complex, and I was mingled with city kids that I wasn’t comfortable around, and I answered every question asked like Hermione Granger until the church leader wouldn’t pick on me anymore. I was annoyed for having to be there, because it annoyed my mother to have to drive me there, too. Christ the King Church was a clear fifteen miles or so from our house on Oklahoma Avenue, way in the bad part of Brownsville, but Dad had a reverence for the reverend, Father Juan Nicolau, because Father Nicolau would let the congregation go early on the Sundays the Dallas Cowboys were playing. The shepherd knew how to play to his sheep; you had to hand it to him.

CCD for me ended one Saturday evening, when it began to grow dark and I had spent over twelve hours waiting for my mother to pick me up.

After dropping me off at 8:30 that morning, the family had gone about their business and Mom had completely forgotten the youngest of her brood, as I was not numbered among the muster for dinner, haphazard as dinner might be. I didn’t show up, no one had seen me all day, and I’m sure Mom must have had one hell of a shock when she realized she had forgotten to pick me up at ten that morning.

The first part of that day, immediately after class, I spent reassuring the people there that my mother would show. She was usually late, I said, but I was used to it. Not to worry.

When they left, though, they were worried.

I sat and went where I usually did, into my head, and imagined all sorts of ways to get myself ingratiated into the story lines of popular movies I’d seen. “How to fix it so that an eight-year-old can wield a gun and fly an X-wing in Star Wars” was my usual pastime, and I liked to be alone to do it. This lasted a few hours. But by two that afternoon, I was starving, bored with the goddamned Wookies, and throwing rocks at cans. The next car will be mom, I thought. Next car. OK, next car. Next one. Stupid fuckin’ church school. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that they’d forgotten about me; I thought that they were just late, so it didn’t occur to me to call. I just had faith they would show. They were just busy with other things at the moment.

The afternoon grew very hot, and soon I was sweating, delirious with hunger, and cursing my family in a way I don’t think many children are capable of cursing. I lay on my side on the concrete steps and watched the entrance to the deserted church compound and cried, my resentment growing with each passing car that was not the family Bonneville.

By nightfall, I was done crying and was in a sort of stoic trance, sitting up against the door of the classroom, watching the sulfur lights of the parking lot come on one at a time. Mosquitoes were swarming and I put my arms inside my thin T-shirt, using my shoulders to squish them from my face. My heart started to grow firm here, my resentment metastasizing into a cold jelly around it, and I went into a sort of fugue. I don’t even remember being picked up by my mother, or what she said. I have a dim image of the car finally turning into the parking lot, with its lights on and two people in the car, I think Mom and Dan. There was no tug at my heart to see them.

The summer before the third grade, a new school starts to go up in a field about two miles away, near my friend/enemy Charlie’s house. In a matter of a few months, the new school starts to take shape. It’s flat, laid out in straight geometrics and smells of fumes. I see it out the window of the dump trucks when we drive by, new landscaping and wire fences and concrete pillars holding up a concrete veranda.

I dread the idea of leaving El Jardin, think it couldn’t possibly happen. El Jardin is old, tactile, made of red brick, and built in the 1940s with a large auditorium and wooden hallways. It’s one of the very rare things in Brownsville that is old, has history. My father went to elementary school there, it’s so old. It’s our area’s own little Oxford. There are trees all around it, paths and hidden trails, with a snack bar run by an old woman from her house next door.

At El Jardin, I was one of the top students. Kids from all aspects of suburban Texas life mingled there—the farmers’ kids and the field hands’ kids and the kids from families who didn’t live off the land, whatever it was they did. It was like Sesame Street there. We coexisted happily, and every three days there was something called “bilingual education” and the kids who had trouble with English would be taken into a different class and helped along while the rest of us—all the white kids and me—would work on different projects, usually a book we’d all read together or a fun word problem. It was blissful learning like that. Every few months, the Mexican kids would take a reading test from a counselor to determine their ability in English comprehension and whether they could be relieved from the “bilingual” status, as it had an air of dishonor to it. I was never “bilingual.” I did my best to forget Spanish from the start.

That was because my brother and sisters had already made the conversion to speaking English and I was bringing up the rear, humiliated constantly because I couldn’t distinguish the “ch” sound from the “sh,” and it became very competitive in our house, learning as much of Our Master’s language as we could. English in that area was the language of money, domination. Six-foot Mexicans would wither when its sounds were spoken by a five-foot-tall white man, make them hunch their shoulders, lower their heads, and move in the direction opposite of the English. Even my father, who understood its themes and suggestions, spoke it reasonably well for the area­—even he would send me to collect payment from white people because he was frightened to get into conversations. English was power. And I was doing very well with it at El Jardin.

I was really confused growing up in Brownsville; I didn’t identify with the Mexican culture. We were Americans, we were light skinned, and we spoke English: I thought we were white. I was sure of this. So much so that, when I am around ten years old and Dan and I are watching Eddie Murphy doing stand up, and Murphy lapses into the tried-but-true “black people dance like this / white people dance like this” schtick, I laugh loudly and say to Dan, “He’s right! He’s so funny! We really do dance like that!” Meaning us white people.

Dan doesn’t miss a beat, says, “You stupid motherfucker; we’re not white.”

Here, my world collapses. “We’re … not?”

The new school is finished at the end of summer. It’s called “Vermillion,” named after an unpaved side street that runs parallel to it. No one knows what vermillion is. I look it up in the dictionary and find it’s a color, coppery red like mildly coagulated blood. I don’t want to go there. Just have a bad feeling about it.

But then comes the notice to our home about bus-scheduling changes and redistricting. My parents cower from anything written in form letters and in English so it’s decided: I go to Vermillion for the third grade and on. I can’t believe it. I know no one else who’s going there except a cousin or two. I might as well be moving to a new city at ten years old.

The first day of school at Vermillion is confusing, like an internment camp for foreigners. I had been redistricted into the city’s new school for poor, immigrant families. These kids have been told by their parents to be appreciative of the chance they’re getting, to listen to their teachers and administrators, so the kids are solemn, like they’re in church, frightened of the opportunity just given them.

Hardly anyone here speaks English but the principal. The teachers can hardly carry on the day’s curriculum without lapsing into the pidgin Spanish spoken in border towns so that the kids can understand.

All the kids wear their one new shirt or pair of pants bought for their third-grade year. They look like tiny replicas of their parents, tiny old men in guayabera shirts and women in loose cotton dresses. I’m at my desk in the front, lightheaded from the fumes of the new paint and the adhesives on the linoleum floor. The morning sun is a violent, yellow thing that floods the room undeterred because the fucking school is in the middle of a field and there are no natural obstructions to keep the sun in check, so the windows, when shut, glow like they’re about to blow. The whole thing just made for a migraine.

I’m there for an hour, and I can’t help but start crying from exasperation. It’s like starting all over again. I don’t know anyone and my Spanish is really, really bad now because I was told that it was wrong to speak it in America, and we are in Texas. I just put my head down and sniffle. After all that work I put into it, I would regress back into speaking Spanish and be humiliated, left behind by my family, I felt.

After a few days, though, things turn routine and I take a look around. These are tough kids, the sort of ten-year-olds even adults are afraid to correct, and classes are quickly divvied into the kids near the front who are willing to learn and listen, and the kids who don’t see a reason to be here and are waiting to get home to get back to work, in the back. Or they’re here for the two free meals. There’s one white girl from the trailer park and I immediately align myself next to her. “Shannon.” I like Shannon—she’s kind of trashy though she’s just a kid, but we get along fine. We share pencils and paper and write notes to one another and the other kids immediately start calling us “the gringos.” Not an optimistic launch.

Eventually things settled down and I made friends with some of the boys, but mostly my immediate peers were the upwardly mobile girls who lived near me, out in the sticks. It was still a tough school; don’t get me wrong—but I learned how to swim in it quickly. Kids got stabbed there, with that little nail-cleaning tool in the rear part of the nail clipper or a stubby pencil. But for the most part, we were kids, doing kid things. We developed a very high-stakes and competitive game of marbles before classes. We played basketball and volleyball in a very organized fashion (I did the organizing). We became ingenious at manufacturing flexible but indestructible pens and pencils, as the game of the day was a sort of “pen smashing” competition, where you’d flick your opponent’s pen with your own, over and over again, until one of them splintered. So we engineered things like pens filled with glue, pens filled with buckshot, pens from Mexico, pens filled with dirt, pens wrapped in rubber bands or tape, and even pens that could write. I was never really good at that game.

The other thing we did was competitive cursing. This I was good at. Cursing in English, I’ve come to find, is fairly unimaginative and usually indicates a loss for a retort, a failure of description or command of language, so instead the curser resorts to the general and unspecific, to the emptiness of phrases like, “Fuck you, you cock-sucking motherfucker.” Et cetera.

In Spanish, however, the art form, when it is done well, comes from painting the rudest word picture using anything but vulgar words. Say, for instance, someone is being unreasonably proud of him- or herself. In English, one might say this person’s “full of shit,” or, “up himself.” In Spanish, the phrase would be something like, “… no le cabilla un arroz de punta,” (“… you couldn’t fit a grain of rice up his ass point first, puckered as it was.”)

Conversely, if a person is out of luck, in English he’s “shit out of luck,” or “screwed,” or maybe “up shit creek.” But in Spanish, the popular colloquialism is that the person “ … tíene la madre en rasta,” (“ … has to drag his mother around”), the suggestion being that the person is so poor, he’s got his family in tow, no vehicle. (I learned about the second part to this phrase when I called my father when I was out of work in Seattle, had to admit to being very nearly broken down, very much out of luck and out of work, and said, “Tengo la madre en rasta.” He surprised me by chuckling, and finishing the sentence, “ ... y la tía en la manó.” (…and my aunt in hand.)

These are timid examples, though. We could get very dirty, very biological, very Aristocrats in our verbal assaults. For me, somehow, because it was in Spanish it didn’t seem wrong, and I got very good at it—especially in Spanish, but also in English. This is what these kids understood at this new school, this is what I was good at among them, and I had developed a reputation as the “put-down” champion, so much so that I could make kids cry or attack in just a few seconds. Normally I’d have an audience, so the attacks were usually thwarted by my friend Arthur, or Agripino and his bunch, led by a kid nicknamed El Chicloso (“gummy asshole”), because he always smelled like poo. (I remember once feeling really, really terrible when this one kid, Teodóro, challenged the position of champion and I annihilated him in one or two rounds during P.E. He was inconsolable when we got back into the classroom, putting his head down and sobbing loudly. The teacher finally attempted consolation, asking, “What happened? What’s wrong? What’s wrong, Teodóro?” He wouldn’t speak, so she finally asked the class what had happened, and my cousin Dora raised her hand and said, “Domingo said his mother’s anus looks like cauliflower,” which was something I’d heard my Gramma say to a police officer a few weeks before. A few years later, I was driving around with Dad and he had some sort of business with a man who turned out to be Teodóro’s father, and as I was sitting in the passenger seat the whole time my father was calling Teodóro’s dad Panocha, which was apparently his accepted nickname, which means “twat.” His dad’s name was “Twat,” and he cried when I said his mother’s anus looked like a cauliflower? I just don’t understand people sometimes.)

This continued for many months, and I had established myself among these kids in a way that I had not considered myself capable when I first got to Vermillion. I had changed, certainly, but I was able to turn off the vulgarian side of me with an easy, very smart switch, and the minute I stepped off the school bus and entered the house, another switch was flipped and I was clean-mouthed, pissed off and quiet. The minute I got on the bus in the morning, it was showtime: I would be there all week. I still managed my academia to the extent I could—I was the top student, a good athlete, and well-liked by teachers, students, and administrators—but I was also well-respected by the farm kids, who didn’t buy into this American “upward mobility” thing, this “education,” who might have otherwise picked on me, thought me soft. I spoke their language, after all.

This created a duality in me that left me feeling soiled and conflicted. I remember one lunch I was sitting with Agripino and Arthur, two of my closest friends at the time, and we were trading marbles while eating our lunch when this scraggly curly haired problem white kid named Billy sat directly across from me. Knowing now what we do about learning disabilities, I think it’s likely that Billy was dyslexic and was acting out from his frustration, because there was nothing else really wrong with him except he couldn’t write and couldn’t read. But he had nothing else so he had decided to be tough.

He sat there and stared at me. The table got quiet. Billy squinted his eyes in the theatrical way that children do when they’re pretending to be tough, like they’ve seen on TV, and he dramatically stabbed his plastic spork into his Salisbury steak, splashing the gravy on the table.

It was on. But I had this one won before it started. Instead of a verbal assault, I diversified by kicking him square on the knee under the table and then tucking back my legs and opening them astride the chair, pulling them back without moving my upper torso so Billy didn’t see what I’d done, and he tried to kick me back, and hard, but instead his kick went high and he kicked the underside of the table, scraped his shin hard on an under-support. Dyslexic he may have been, but gullible he certainly was.

The blow was clearly quite painful, and he began yelling loudly. The new female principal came up and grabbed him by the arm, said, “Now what are you yelling about, Billy?”

Billy pointed at me and said, “He kicked me under the table!” That was partially true. Mostly true.

The female principal, whose name is lost to history, pointed to me and said, “This is the nicest and smartest boy at this school. This boy would not have kicked you.” She pulled him out of his chair and he began screaming. As he was being led away, he managed to pull back his jeans and reveal a huge scarlet scrape, bleeding from where the skin on his shin had been peeled back from kicking the underside of the table.

I felt the weight of the world there, the cross-over consequence of my dual personality, and I wanted to chase the kid down, apologize, and tell the principal the truth, but instead, Arthur said, “Damn, Dom; you got rid of him quick.” But I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for Billy, as my own rue was already in the cosmic mail.

Dan and Mare were also at Vermillion for their sixth-grade year, but it was as if they were already in junior high, at another school. We never overlapped, never saw one another. My reputation as a gutter-mouthed vulgarian would inevitably show up on their radar, I understood. It was too small a school, and kids, they liked to talk. For the record, I wasn’t comfortable being a hoodlum-in-training. I preferred to be the Nancy-boy academic, but the suction of appealing to the neglected element, of having their respect and keeping them quieted, keeping them from looking at me like a target, like someone they’d like to have a go at, that sense of . . . well, survival . . . that was more powerful, and I felt I could walk that line like Johnny Cash. This was a question of survival: I was a soft kid, thin for my age, and fairer and smarter than the rest of them. They felt I was not one of them, not one of the Mexican kids, nor was I one of the others, the white kids, and so I adapted. This was adaptation for the border town.

But I didn’t think anyone was capable of understanding, so instead I parceled it out, compartmentalized, and I dreaded the day my family would find me out.

It was Mare who got the word first. One of the girls in my grade found out Mare was my sister, and I must have pissed off that girl at some point because she told Mare everything, in great delicious detail.

I remember that afternoon. I am sent on an errand with this kid named Juan. Juan is scary. He must have been fourteen or so, but was passing off as a ten-year-old. He wore thin cotton shirts that were hardly ever buttoned, a black comb in his back pocket, didn’t speak a word of English. You could very easily see Juan having lived in some ramshackle hut out in the Mexican frontiers, a horseman, cattleman, something, and already having been fully realized. There was something elegant about him, something sinister and beautiful, like he was already a man very clearly defined. He scared me and most of the teachers, too. So this afternoon, we’re asked to get the projector from the library, and as we’re walking down the exposed hallway, we’re alone and we’re having an easy exchange—this guy that speaks to no one—and he says through a smile, “Esté vato,” which really can’t be translated, more of a Get a load of this guy, man sort of mock shoulder punch, very blokish, and well, I felt that I had done my work. Like I’d arrived, like I was safe.

When I get home, Mom yells to me from her bedroom. The door is shut, because it’s the only air-conditioned room in the house. I put my books down and am changing into my afternoon clothes. I’m not expecting anything when I walk into her bedroom and almost recognize the look on my sister’s face, one of delight at reporting gossip, tattletaling, and I certainly do not recognize the look on my mother’s face before her blow catches me on the jaw. It was the look of divorce. It was the look of hatred only a mother could give her child.

She hits me again, when I recover. She slaps me on the ear, leaving it ringing. She slaps me again, high on the cheek. She backhands me on the lower jaw, nearly chipping my tooth. She slaps me on the eye. She slaps me so many times I lose count, lose a sort of consciousness as I slip back into that cold around my heart, confused, now that I got the beating at home—in this room, it wouldn’t be the last time—that I thought I had avoided at school. And the tug from my heart, this time it did snap, snapped like a winter that has never really gone away. This is finally where I went cold.

My father gave my brother and me spankings about three, maybe four times a week. They were painful at first, but eventually you got used to the routines, the motions, you cried loudly so he’d stop and sometimes they’d bruise but mostly they just made your legs rosy—he’d use a belt, sometimes a stripped branch from a tree, if it was available.

A few of those stories really got into my brain, got into my psychology. As I grew older, it became a power play: How long could you take it before you cried? He’d hit you repeatedly, then you’d cry, then you’d get one or two more: That was where the lesson was. That was how I learned justice. And I eventually understood it to be a regular Catholic exercise: You did bad, you got your licks, you did your mea culpa for a while, then things settled down. This pattern was repeated until you understood the thing about Jesus: You do it, He pays for it. That’s why you should feel guilty. He took your licks for you. Awfully good of him.

But Mom’s beating, that I don’t think I ever recovered from. I felt that if she only could hear about it, if she knew what that school was like, I was certain she would have understood—Mom was the only bastion of reason and safety and to an extent, love, in that household. Mom was supposed to be the opposite of Dad, but then: this. It was betrayal from a place I had never expected.

The look on Mare’s face as I left, I don’t think even she was prepared for what Mom’s reaction would be. Mare went to the kitchen, got a wet towel and came back, and put it to my face as I cried quietly into it. A little later, Mom came out of the room. She sat next to me on the couch, lifted the cold wet towel from my face like she did when I was younger and had the fever, and looked at me, looked at what she had done to my face. The look on her face, it was a cluster of things, like she was forgiving herself and forcing herself to forgive me, and it was the complete opposite of the look she had given me when I was badly fevered. I couldn’t look at her again for ten years.