Chapter 9

Christmas with Gramma

Having grown up destitute on a dead Mexican farm during the Great Depression, Gramma had developed the survivor’s ability to draw profit from circumstances other people would find debilitating. If there had been a “Great Depression” in the 1930s, she hadn’t noticed it. She was depressed, sure; but what can you or anyone else do about it? You’re a starving twelve-year-old Mexican girl on a dying farm; you deal with it, find a way to cope. You don’t have a choice.

This is how Gramma learned to live during her entire adolescence and into her first marriage: coping with circumstances others would find crushing, terminal.

She was like a labor boss in this regard, able to secretly earn a fairly good living while presumably doing nothing, and maintaining a status in the barrio as the chief moneylender. She always dressed like a normal, widowed Mexican peasant woman, holding on for dear life to a bulging black imitation leather purse and she kept her gold Catholic idolatry to a minimum. She wouldn’t wear the cheap floral perfume popular in the barrio at that time that covered the garlic and cumin spice smells of a recently cooked, meat-heavy dish. And she would never wash away the blood red stains of a freshly slaughtered animal on her hands that truly—in Gramma’s cosmology—defined wealth.

Jewelry, electronics, perfume, real estate, travel—none of this mattered to Gramma. It was hollow wealth. You can’t eat a diamond ring. You can’t eat a Ford. You can’t eat a trip to San Antonio. Gramma knew where she was going to keep her money: under her mattress, and in guns.

Guns never depreciate on the border, in Texas.

Everyone in the barrio owed her money, even me, since I was about twelve years old and wanted that Indiana Jones action figure Mom wouldn’t buy for me.

It also helped that Gramma had the reprehensible habit of putting sub-rosa life insurance policies on all the males of the barrio, betting the odds that at some point, some bit of malfeasance would befall us and she’d be able to tuck away a nice bit of change, maybe kicking in a couple thousand to the grieving family for the funeral. By the mid-1980s, she’d cashed in on Grampa’s policy, after having “accidentally” dispatched him when he came home from that three-day binge he’d blindly spent at the home of his mistress. (In his defense—and knowing my Grampa—he probably thought he was actually at home with Gramma, since both women looked and screeched identically in pidgin Spanish; it was not outside the realm of possibility that he had, mistakenly, spent the three drunken days with the wrong woman and then, when he realized his mistake, wandered home to the appropriate house for his diabetes medicine, which Gramma is rumored to have switched on him, as punishment.)

I should mention here that this was a conclusion most of the barrio had reached, and that after Grampa’s death, Gramma and Mom had taken what was left of Grampa’s diabetes medication back to his Mexican pharmacy and were told by the pharmacist that it wasn’t, in fact, diabetes medication, but some sort of vitamin. Mom swears Gramma’s reaction was honest when she yelled and cried and threatened to kill everyone in the pharmacy, anyone responsible for the error.

Dan and I did not know what to believe, so we believed the worst. It was safer that way.

Writing this, it’s actually kind of funny, in a twisted sort of way, to think that Grampa survived the retreat at the Chosin Reservoir, in Korea, but he didn’t survive Gramma. She did what the Chinese Army could not do, in killing him, either accidentally or intentionally. That’s how tough Gramma was.

Anyhow, the rest of the family, we weren’t doing so well in the early 1980s, after losing Grampa.

Belts that had long gone out of fashion were tightened, gas-guzzling luxury cars had long lost any sense of luxury and were just guzzling gas, and we kids, well, we didn’t really know much about any of this because we were just kids involved with our own kid stuff, going to school and humiliating each other as best we could.

When Christmas would swing around, it was always unexpected, like a relative getting out of prison. There was only one season in South Texas, and that was Hot, the Hot season, with a capital “H.” Christmas landed in the Hot season, as did Easter (boy, did Easter ever), as did Thanksgiving, my birthday, the Victory at the Alamo, summer, Charro Days, winter, and . . . come to think of it, so did my siblings’ birthdays, and well, most of the rest of the year. Every now and again it would rain, and the rain would be a bit cooler than usual, and then we knew it was winter. Winter, when it made an appearance, was usually just a succession of rainy mornings, which was a shame, really, because we had an odd tendency to overspend money on sweaters and fancy clothes meant for the cold, though it was cold in Brownsville for maybe one week out of every year.

On these days, Dan and I were allowed to sleep in, and I would lie in bed and watch the water make shapes on the screened window by my bed, and it would sometimes sprinkle through and land on my face, or on the book I was reading. These quiet mornings were the best moments I had growing up, and eventually, would become the reason I moved to Seattle, to follow the rain, and find more of those moments.

Moving away was also the reason I was convinced people in Texas didn’t age: There are no seasons there, so there’s no time to measure. Also, when I would go back to visit, everyone remained exactly the same, while I grew older. I aged about five years the first summer I spent in Seattle.

But, in return, I finally understood all the hubbub around the death of fall and the rebirth in spring, and what all those heathen, Devil-worshiping vegan wiccans go on and on about, but I had yet to identify autumn.

“Is this autumn?” I would ask people with whom I worked, in Seattle. How they loved educating the ex-pat Texan.

“No,” they’d say. “It’s late summer. If it goes on too long, then it’ll be an Indian summer, and then it’ll be autumn. After that, it’ll be fall.”

“Ah,” I’d say, pretending to understand. “But I thought there are only four seasons?”

“There are only four seasons,” they’d said. “Fall, winter, spring, summer, but autumn kinda falls in between summer and fall.”

“Hunh,” I said. “Like sometimes ‘y’ for the vowels.”

Then they would look at me funny.

Another reason I was seasonally deficient was because of the trucking business Dad owned while I was growing up, where he worked primarily for the Loop Farms, hauling cotton, grain, corn, oranges, grapefruit, sunflower seeds, and other things, and so our business—his business—had a different calendar, a different set of moons and suns, and we set our clocks by those, like Hindus and Hebrews. We never celebrated Halloween because we were busy hauling onions that day. We never celebrated Independence Day because, well, we were in Texas; that’s America’s Independence Day, not ours. And there was sorghum to haul on that day.

But come Christmas, well, you can’t keep the promise of Christmas from anyone. Even Dan and I— forced labor that we were—had been allowed to look forward to Christmas, like all good Catholic boys should, even the ones with the really good 1970s porn hidden in Gramma’s bathroom, under the loose plywood in the towel drawer. No; not that one; the next one up. That one. Oh, yeah: That’s hot stuff.

Gramma, though, Gramma had her own rules around Christmas, made it pay out like a slot machine on tilt.

See, Gramma had a yearlong con involving that pig she bought in January, which culminated on Christmas Day.

It was an easy con, made even more sinister because of how transparent and on the level she went about it.

At the beginning of every year, she’d buy a piglet—cute as a bug’s ear, those piglets were. She’d bring one home after paying about ten dollars for the healthiest of the litter from her brother Felípe, and she’d make a big noise about how damnably cute the thing was, and Dan and I would get suckered into playing with it, feeding it with a bottle of milk, and holding it like it was a baby, and we’d take care of it while Gramma made a theatrical attempt at building a pigsty from the dried up and bacterially infested pen that had only recently been vacated from the dead pig before. She’d make a pathetic show of throwing plywood and rotten two-by-fours around for a few minutes, and then she’d stop, pant breathily, and clutch at her chest, at a spot where her heart would have been, if she had one, and that was our cue to step in and take over. Gramma had a crowbar made out of passive aggression that she would bring down on our heads if she couldn’t get it under our hearts, for leverage.

You see, Dan and I were dumb; we had no sense of history, not even our own. We fell for this trick for fourteen, maybe sixteen years in a row. Somehow we never put it together: It was up we go and off we went whenever she’d do this, finishing any project Gramma had only to pretend to start. And it worked every single time, on anything Gramma wanted done.

So Dan and I finished building the confinement with whatever rotted lumber was at our disposal, and we let the pig loose inside, and then it became our pig, and we imitated Gramma imitating the pig and called it, “Coche! Coche! Coche!” I’m still not sure if that was an affectionate name for the pig—every pig—or if Gramma actually spoke “pig,” the language somehow kept intact from her Aztecan bloodline. But, miraculously, the damned pig would respond every time she called it, like it understood her, and she’d pour out a five-gallon bucket of swill, never really bothering to hit the trough that Dan and I had built for it.

The swill Gramma would bring home was made out of leftovers she purchased from a local tortilleria, effluvium from the tortilla-making business, made up of dough and grease and lard and other sundry proteinaceous crap that she bought on a weekly arrangement, and when she poured it over the side of the sty—never bothering to aim for the trough, and how this would vex me!—the swill would spill out, spill over and blend into the pig’s own filth and mud, and the Coche! Coche! would stick its snout into the pour and suck and chew and bite and . . . well, it was actually very charming and cute. Pigs are really damned cute, even when they’re wallowing in their own filth. There’s something almost enviable about that absolute lack of self-consciousness, which is something I probably need to discuss with my therapist. But don’t be fooled: They’ll take your hand right off and eat it calmly while looking at you with that dead shark eye stare of theirs.

This is why I have no compunction in eating a ham sandwich.

Anyhow, so that was our pet.

And Gramma would con us into taking care of it all year-round, going to the tortilleria, bringing back the swill in an open five-gallon bucket that would slop and spill in her car, and the pig would turn into a hog that would just explode in size, like a scale-model thermonuclear mushroom cloud made out of mud and shit and fat with all that it would eat, all year long, so that come December, our little two-pound piglet was nightmarishly big, big enough to eat an average person in a few minutes. In short, we’d grow a monster in Gramma’s backyard and consider it a pet, lovingly calling it coche.

Then Christmas would come, and Gramma would kill it, right in front of us, as we all stood watching.

Back then, in the 1980s, she would do it herself—take the single shot .22 caliber rifle my Grampa left behind and just put a small bullet dead center in the pig’s forehead, as soon as it kept its enormous skull still. It got to where I could tell when she was going to do it, from a very early age. The pig would be led into a garage with a rope by two or three strong Mexican men, cousins and uncles, and it would be made to stand next to a fire that had been going all morning, with a blackened tin tub set upon it with water boiling, very appropriately looking like a witch’s cauldron. The pig would just somehow know its ticket was up, and it would not enjoy this moment, knew at some animal level that the assembly—the fire, the water, the burning washtub—was all meant for death, and if you’ve ever had elective surgery, you might know this particular reaction, when you enter the operating theater, and see the table, and the lights, and the people standing there . . . and you very nearly chicken out. That’s what the pig knew, at this point: That this is all for him or her, and so it pulls this way and that way, its eyes alive like they’ve never been before, and then Gramma says, “Coche! Coche! Coche!” in a way that says, “Look here! Look here! Over here!” and when the pig looks, that’s when I would say to myself, Now, and that’s when Gramma would pull the trigger, sometimes not even looking down the sights, holding the rifle off in a straight line that ended at the pig’s forehead, and the rifle would jump, and the pig’s weight would first fall straight down, vertically, onto its haunches, all electrical impulse generated from its brain at that very second stopped, and it would fall securely into its legs, and then over, heavily onto its side, and then everyone would be still, for just a moment.

Then it was time to party. The pig, in that second, had made the quick transition from animal to food, and was treated as such.

It was hoisted onto a wobbly handmade table of used and scrounged-up two-by-fours and plywood, mostly from its own sty and usually constructed that very morning, and the boiling water was poured over the carcass by the women, like they were dressing a body for ritualized burial. The boiling water would make the hair and outer skin easier to shave, and they’d take to it with sharpened knives, and the hair from our year’s coche would come easy, in a weird, satisfying scrape, and then they’d move the pig to the end of the table so that its head would dangle lifelessly off the end, and then they’d cut the pig’s throat so that a huge bowl would catch as much blood as possible, and they’d let it drain at length, then remove the head altogether with a large butcher knife, while kicking at the dogs who’d sneak underfoot, attempting to lick up any blood spills in the dirt. The morning would then be spent in reducing the pig to its more profitable resources.

And there was one ceremonial moment, every Christmas during this stage of our lives, that made Dan and me feel very special and singled out, though it might—retelling it here—seem totally twisted. There’s this particular cut of pork—and I have no idea where it is on the anatomy of a hog, except that it is close to the heart—that was considered the finest and most delicate cut of meat on a pig, and early in the reduction, that part was cut out, put on wooden stakes cut from tree branches and cooked right there in the fire, and then handed to me and Dan and Dad and Gramma, which was horribly conflicting, because we raised this pig, and the salt of our tears made the meat even that much more delicious.

Kidding. Anyhow, they called it lomo, and I have never tasted anything like it ever in General America. The closest thing I can compare it to, in mouth feel, is foie gras (again: with apologies to the vegans). It was barbarically rich, crisped on the outside and delicately soft, melting with blood on the inside. It’s almost like a childhood dream. I’ve never had anything resembling it in my travels since.

OK, so that was the worst part of the story.

What followed next can only be described as Gramma’s own little tribute to Henry Ford, and I don’t mean that she was anti-Semitic, because, well, we never knew what Jews were when we were growing up in Texas, except that they were some sort of people in the Bible, like the Canaanites, which is a great word. (World War II? Dan and I didn’t figure that one out until Band of Brothers. I couldn’t understand the distinction the Nazis were drawing. To me, everyone in Europe—which I still couldn’t distinguish from America back then—was “white.” They certainly weren’t Mexican, or Texans.)

Gramma had everyone in the barrio working for her on Christmas, and conned them all into thinking it was a holiday. Her people would show up at six in the morning for the preparations of the slaughter, and then they’d really get to work, reducing the animal into parcels and negotiable goods. People would arrive in our driveway all day long and buy fresh cuts of pork for their Christmas dinner. It was tradition.

Gramma must have cleared one thousand dollars that day, from her ten dollar piglet, which is a phenomenal amount, when you consider the income for an average family at the time in Brownsville was roughly fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Our own family—and I should mention here that my mother, who wasn’t a native of the barrio and found all this very disturbing, well, she kept her daughters from it. Her sons were a different story. Me and Dan: We were Dad’s property, so we could go as injun as necessary. But for Christmas? We went all out, after the slaughter was done. We were all under Gramma’s dominion.

By midafternoon, it would have taken a forensics team to determine that there had been a complete pig in Gramma’s garage earlier that morning. The skin and adipose tissue had been boiled in oil to make chicharonnes, the head baked whole in tinfoil and dismantled to make barbacoa, the hooves thrown to the hounds, the blood boiled down into a fantastic gravy, the better cuts of proper meat auctioned off, the globular organs made into sweetmeats and the intestines boiled down into trípas. Total reduction.

By three in the afternoon, the drunk cousins and uncles had all made off with hefty portions of the meat for their own families’ dinners, and the women who had helped as much as they could would either stick around to help make the sauces and meats and beans for the tamales, or they would fuck off to their own families for the afternoon, and this is when the real work would begin for the rest of us.

In preparation for the slaughter, Gramma had already purchased a huge vat of masa, or corn dough, from the tortillerias that she’d been in cahoots with all year long to fatten up coche, and she’d also bought plenty of the corn husks that were used to bake the tamales and were freely available anywhere in the endless geometry of farms that surrounded us, but Gramma—who had a status to uphold in the barrio—had them store-bought, because that’s how she rolled. Actually, I think they were simply more hygienic, being store-bought. If Gramma could have collected the free-range corn husks for free—or had us do it—I’m sure she would have.

Anyhow, we kids did the actual rolling. We were set up in the backyard next to the now-vacant pigsty in the open yard and were set to the task: One kid would grab a good handful of dough, roll it into a ball, and put it down. Repeat, ad nauseam, to eventual nausea.

The next kid would pick up that ball of dough, plop it into the center of a store-bought corn husk he held in his left hand, and then smooth out the dough onto the corn husk with the rounded back part of a spoon, and lay it on the table for the next kid. Repeat, ad nauseam.

The kid next to him or her would then pick up the corn husk with the dough already spread on it, and then add whatever ingredient was next, or was plentiful. We normally had two to choose from: refried beans, or a fantastic meat catastrophe with raisins that had been made from the minced brains, eyes, lips, and cheeks of the pig. Delicious. My favorite part was when the knife of the person dicing the brain would suddenly “clink” on the lead bullet, and we’d yell out, fascinated. Good times.

So this was how Christmas afternoon went: an endless procession of dough, ball, smooth, beans or meat, fold, and then pile.

We’d make a raw pyramid of a dozen tamales, then the kid at the end would be charged with packaging them in aluminum foil, and they would be carted off by one of the old crones who would be in charge of the fire and the tin washtub and the steaming. These were Gramma’s female cousins or neighbors. All day long they would huddle around a tin washtub, burned to charcoal by an open fire, and they’d leave a small level of water readily at the boil on the bottom quarter of the washtub, and a sort of grill would be set above the waterline, and the tamales would then be placed there in dozens and left to steam for an hour. If the Catholic Church could have seen this, they would have burned us all at the stake, because it looked like textbook witchcraft.

This was the tamale-manufacturing business. I made such a big deal about describing that bit only because when I told this story to my friend, Andy, he wanted to know everything about making tamales and found each stage absolutely interesting. He loves native cuisine. I, personally, do not, and was surprised, in fact, to find out that I was, indeed, “native.” What Andy found the funniest was that I had finally seen through Gramma’s scheme and realized the weak point in her operation: She had only a limited amount of masa, the dough. That had been her dearest investment in this. When I realized this, I developed a cunning plan of my own to get this operation in arrears by six o’clock that night, because there were some Star Wars action figures and play sets that needed tending to, even if I did owe Gramma another fifty bucks with a three-point vig due by the following Saturday or she would have someone break my knees.

So, when no one was looking, I started throwing every second dough ball over my shoulder onto the roof of her house. Every fifth or so dough ball would go to the dogs, already happily stuffed with the viscera that happened to spill off the autopsy table but more than happy to eat until they purged.

No one would notice as I’d roll another clump and then just toss it high over my shoulder, where it would land on the blistering tarred roof, because the sun was out in full force as it was—you know—Christmas Day. It kind of made her whole house into one giant tamale. (Hmm. Maybe that’s why the roof over her bathroom rotted. Gee; now I feel kind of bad. . . . )

See, we couldn’t possibly eat a third of the tamales that day would generate, even if we froze them. We would have been eating tamales until June. The rest would be sold at about seven to ten dollars a dozen, and it would be Gramma who kept the money. So we kids couldn’t care less: The dough had to go. Eventually, when my brother and sisters realized what I was doing, they started laughing and participating.

So up the roof they went, and it was all going according to plan until the crows came and started swarming around her roof. But by then we were very nearly done, and she would yell, “¡Yunior! Traeme la veintedos!”

A true border widow, she was calling out for a rifle, Grampa’s old .22 single shot. And as a Texan, I love the sound of gunplay, so I dropped what I was doing and brought her Grampa’s rifle, and she shot at the crows until they left, swarmed, and returned unharmed, because Gramma was kinda drunk by this time, and so I shot and killed a few of them, to make her feel better, and she never found out that I had been the one to bring the crows in the first place, so we could finish early.

And besides, it was always safest to be on her good side, while she was drunk and armed.