Me and Nacho get along because he hates his pops but looks up to him at the same time. That, and Nacho loves to get high. A couple of nights ago, Nacho, Pito, and me drove to La Parranda to get some money from his old man. But Nacho didn’t ask him right out. He asked his pops to let him use his apartment to play some poker with me and a couple of other guys. His old man gave him the keys to his hotel room, one of those pay-by-the-week joints. Nacho didn’t waste any time ransacking the place looking for money and dope. Inside the closet, in a boot, wrapped up in a blue bandana, we found about a thousand white tablets. The pills had EVANS.DBS written on them and when Nacho read that, he smiled big. “Dexedrine!” There was a gun, too, but we didn’t mess with it because we knew the old man would miss it. But we took about fifty tabs apiece of the speed. We could use them at the school and around the neighborhood to trade for pot and cash. I need to get my hands on enough of both, pot to tolerate all this bullshit, money to get to California.
One thing I can say for Nacho is that he’s got a good set of girls to hang out with. Some of them go to Sunnydale and some are from the neighborhood. They are always available when we want to ride around. We pick up some weed, buy beer and cheap wine, roll to where they live, and wait. They show up and we head off for the park. Sometimes we go to the Chinese Graveyard, sometimes we go to the haunted railroad tracks. These girls are different from the ones I couldn’t get next to at Crockett or Edgewood. These girls are accessible. I don’t mean they like to screw, but they don’t mind messing around a little and just chilling. They don’t scare easy, and they tell you quick when you’re acting a fool.
Tonight we pick up Rachel and Elena from some dead party in a part of town I don’t recognize. I thought I knew all of San Antonio, but Nacho is taking me into some new territory. We drank a lot last night and the last thing I want to do tonight is repeat that performance. My stomach won’t stand for it. But right off the girls give me heat. “I don’t care what you say, I’m not drinking,” I tell them. They laugh and Rachel says, “Well, you can’t just watch us have a good time.” From in front, Elena pulls a joint out of her purse. “We got some good pot from my uncle. Me and Rachel smoked some this morning and just sat on the floor and laughed for an hour.”
I figure that smoking up is my only out. “I’ll smoke some weed, yeah, sure. But I’m not drinking.” She passes me the joint and I take a big hit. I hold it in until my lungs are burning hard. I cough up the smoke in a fit, tears rolling down around my nose. “Are you alright?” Elena asks with a laugh, slapping me on the back. I collapse into the backseat, choking to death, my eyes itching. “I can’t catch my breath.”
“Damn, it isn’t crack. Drink some of this, you wimp.” Nacho is holding out a can of beer, but as much as my throat and lungs ache, my stomach is even rawer and I shake my head. “I’d rather choke.” They think that’s real funny.
In less than a minute, my legs loosen, the weight melting away, no mass below my knees. It creeps up to my waist and I feel my stomach relax. “Are you alright?” Nacho asks with a grin that spreads across my entire field of vision. He looks like the Joker, the Latino one, what was his name? Cesar Romero.
I snap back as a smile of sheer insanity floats just inches from my face. I’m wrecked and I have a decision to make here, one I gotta make within seconds, that’s gonna determine whether I’m psychotically frightened over the next hour or whether I’m amused and delighted. The sight of Nacho’s bared, horse-sized teeth has put a lot of pot-addled motherfuckers on the road to a paralyzing freak-out. I decide to relax, to lose the Joker image and go instead with a softer, more soothing Jester. Nacho isn’t a frightening, demon-possessed sociopath and the girls are not his witches. Yes, his head is big, maybe even gigantic … is it … is it … growing? No, it’s not. He’s harmless. I’ll concentrate on his eyes. His kind eyes, filled with a gleam, which, although just on the other side of demented, are somehow calculated to please. Yeah. That’s it. I can see him clearly for the first time since I met him. I laugh because Nacho’s harmless. He’s my friend, and he wants to be laughed at. But not like he’s the joke. This happens to me when I get high sometimes. It’s a good thing, because I see what lies below the surface. Sometimes it’s spooky, sometimes it’s amusing and entertaining, but most often it’s just sad.
“Nacho.” I laugh, but I’m laughing a little too much and tears are running down my cheeks because I see my friend’s inside on his outside.
“He’s fucked up good,” Elena says. “Get back in the car, you’re making too much noise.”
“I’m trying to take a piss,” I yell. I’ve lied to make them stop the car so that I can stand outside for just a minute.
“Hurry up, Robert,” Elena says, dragging me back to the LTD. I back up against the opening of the car, resisting her push. I want to tell her that she is funny, too, and also that I love her very, very much. But I can’t talk. Nacho comes around and pushes me inside. I know I’m making an ass out of myself, but even though I’m trying not to, I can’t help it. I lie on the backseat laughing until the car goes into motion. Nacho puts on some music and I put my head on Elena’s lap and she strokes my hair. My head cradled, her breasts inches from my face, the music washing over me, her long fingernails playing on my scalp. Normally, this would make me think about sex, but right now I’m just feeling happy. I smile, wanting to talk, but I can’t be heard over the music, so I shut up, close my eyes, and just live inside the motion of the car. It takes me back to when I was a kid and my pops would tell my moms to get in the car and we’d go on a night drive for no reason, just to take a sweet, long ride. He’d roll down the windows and the air would blow mad-hard back where I was, cool but not cold, exhilarating, and me just a kid with the wind blowing over my body, naked except for my underwear, happy like a little dog as I watched my parents in the front, my pops in control, my moms content, until I got tired and drifted into black, purifying sleep.
I know now that hanging with Nacho is giving me the chance to do shit I’ve been told is evil ever since I was old enough to understand my uncle preaching in church. My grams and company have always drilled it inside of me that those on the outside of church are sinners, are damned, are dirty—cochinos. But she’s wrong, not so much about the sinning or the damnation, or even so much about being dirty—but she’s wrong because it’s a kind of dirtiness she’s got no knowledge of. Rolling with Nacho is like being a tourist in some foreign country I’ve read all kinds of books on. Only when I get there, the place turns out to be totally different from the picture I’d put together from the books. These people, fucked up as they are, are real. I don’t want to be bullshitted anymore, by anybody. I’m past that now. That’s part of why I like getting high. It peels back the layers of things, like stripping the old paint off a wall, so that I can see it with all its flaws and scratches. It’s like having a good, clarifying heatstroke like the one I had a few years ago. I was sitting outside during Field Day where I was supposed to run the hundred-yard dash even though I’m slow as hell. I was on the bleacher, bored, when I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out. By the time I got home, my head was so fried I thought the fucking TV set was talking specifically to me. I was delirious, I know, but Peter Jennings had given me permission to enter his world, the real world that I’d only been looking at. Riding with Nacho is like that. It’s doing, not watching. Night after night of laughing, screaming, dancing, running. Drifting.
* * *
My grams works. She works at everything she does. She cleans wealthy white women’s houses and takes care of their complaints, but she’s never been one to take nonsense. She gives as good as she gets, even now after she broke her hip. She limps along with mad authority on a cherry-wood cane that’s all knotted up. She uses it to punctuate her slow dignity in case some sucker ever doubts it. She speaks English, but uses only Spanish in our barrio, especially when returning something to a store or making a complaint to a white clerk or manager who is used to pushing meek Mexicans around on our side of town. You should see her, standing there with her cane in hand, her proud, dark Indian face, iron-gray hair pulled back severely in a traditional Mexican bun, and demanding that her terms be met. When I was a kid, I’d stand behind her and watch cocky Anglos melt before my grams’s Mexican indomitability. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to leave or even speak in English, they’d begin to stammer in broken Spanish until they could no longer talk out their argument and they realized that it was just easier to give in. My grams is smart. She learned this trick from bolillos who intimidate Mejicanos because they can’t debate anything if they don’t speak English. Grams flipped the script early on and showed me what you can get done if you don’t back down.
She drives a big muted-yellow Buick that Gramps left her when he died. I never knew him. She drives herself everywhere even though she’s getting old. She’s gotta be near seventy. But even when her back hurts so much it keeps her up all night pretending like she wants to finish knitting something, she gets up tough the next day to go work.
I told her the other day to go see the doctor.
“I don’t need no doctor,” she said. “Those doctors, their whole job is finding something wrong with you so they can make their money. I don’t got nothing wrong with my back that Doan’s pills don’t cure.”
She tells me all the time about growing up a migrant worker. That was a tough gig, let me tell you. Her mom was dead by the time she was eight, and she had five brothers and sisters younger than her who she had to learn to take care of. Imagine that. Eight and already a mom. She never did get to go to school, only picked up a little here and there in the migrant camps once in a while. She always has to ask me to come help her with adding up things, or she’ll look up in the middle of paying her bills and say, “Roberto, how do you spell ‘thirteen’?”
She’s always trying to teach me how to be tough because she knows I need to be.
“You don’t ever feel sorry for yourself. Nothing ever been easy for Mexicans. You don’t got a choice, boy. The best you hope for is that God lets you see the problems coming so you can get ready.”
She’s old school. She went through the Depression Mexican-style. That means poor, sick, and getting chased off like a dog by cheating-assed farmers and the like. So I gotta believe her, especially now. I mean about trouble. It comes and it comes. I’m trying to learn how to see it better.
Grams was cool from way back when my folks were still cohabiting. She’d roll up on Saturday mornings and pick me up. That meant Pizza Hut, going to the grocery store, and my one-dollar allowance.
“You save that up and you’ll have enough to buy what you want.”
She was like that. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. I had to work for that dollar. Every week I was in her big backyard, mowing, pulling weeds, helping her plant shit. Then she’d send me to the store to buy some ice cream. I’d take my bath, eat good, and watch Star Trek with my treat. Then in the morning, what she calls “early-early,” she’d wake me up to get ready for church.
Once when my pops went on tour with some salsa band he’d signed up with, my moms went with him feeling like she needed to be on the scene to make sure he’d come back when it was over. I lived with Grams for what felt like a year. That was the first time my parents left me, but back then at least I’d get a postcard or a phone call once in a while. Grams would always tell me, too, “They’ll be back, Roberto, very soon. They’ll be back to get you and take you to your house.” She has this huge, creaky, heavy gray metal fan on wheeled feet. We would roll it from the bedroom to the living room. It made a terrific noise when it was turned on, like the propellers of an old airplane. Back then, when I was homesick and missed my parents, I would listen to that fan and pretend I was on a plane to wherever they were. I know it’s a joke to pretend that anymore, but I still listen to that fan every night to help me get some sleep. I’m an insomniac.
The house is cool. It’s small, but it seems bigger on the inside than you’d think when you see it from the outside. It’s like a maze in there. Little halls go in different directions with lots of musty closets that are filled with old, mysterious stuff. Pictures of people who are dead but look like they might’ve been up to something interesting in those black-and-white days.
My grams keeps my gramps’s service revolver in one of those closets. I used to jack around with it when she wasn’t home. Even now, I find books all the time in those closets. When I was a kid, I found a set of old encyclopedias from just after World War II in a closet. It had this long-assed section on Hitler and the Nazis, big black-and-white portraits of these evil fuckers that kept me reading. I was freaked all day long when I read about Goebbels and how he had gone home and watched his wife give all their kids strychnine before they offed themselves when they knew they’d lost the war. Twisted. The best book I ever found, though, was this Time-Life book all about natural mysteries. It was divided into “Space,” “The Animal Kingdom,” “The Ocean,” and “The Earth.” I read about black holes, the Loch Ness Monster, vampire bats, and volcanoes. All the stories had color pics. That book smelled good with its heavy, oily print and thick, bitter, glossy paper.
There was a small public library in Las Palmas shopping center where Grams took me to get my first library card. I was about nine, and she watched as I picked out a book on World War II and another that gave you the lowdown on the lives of the presidents. It was cool to come home from the library with a stack of books and take a nap. I’d go to sleep looking at them sitting on her big desk and thinking, When I wake up, I can grab one of those and start reading. When I was younger than that even, and there was a book fair at school, Grams’d give me five bucks and I’d spend all weekend long figuring out how to get the most books for my money from the book sheet the teacher would give us on Friday. Man, it was torture waiting for Monday to roll around. It was better than Christmas.
Next door there live two little girls and they’re usually playing in their yard. They’re new to the neighborhood. I never see the mother around during the day. She works. The old man is always there but usually in the house. I think he’s an alky. The yard’s all fucked up, grass overgrown and choked with weeds. The house needs painting. It’s a raunchy-looking yellow, peeling and puckering all over. But the dad doesn’t do shit except yell all the fucking time. The little girls don’t seem to mind it, though. Or at least they do their best to ignore him when they can. But they do alright so long as he keeps inside and doesn’t bother them. They’re friendly. The older one is about eight. Her name is Tina. The other one is named Ruthie, but she’s only about five and she says her name “Roo-T.” Sometimes, for kicks, I have conversations with them. I like to watch them because they get along so well when they play. They never fight. I feel sorry for them because no one pays attention to anything they do. One day the older one knocked on my door and asked me if she could have some water. I thought it was strange and I asked her where her moms was. She told me she was at work and that her daddy wasn’t opening the door. It made me good and mad, that goddamn drunk not opening the door for those little girls. I gave them a glass of Kool-Aid to drink. My grams wasn’t home and so I let them sit in the house and watch cartoons for a while because it was so hot outside.
“How come you live here now?” the older one, Tina, asked me. “Who takes care of you?”
I thought it was a strange question because no one seemed to be taking care of them. Tina’s got these dark black eyes that stare at you. “I just moved here. My mom is sick.”
“Why don’t you take care of your mommy if she’s sick?” she asked like I was lying to her.
“She went home to be with her mommy,” I said. I felt weird talking to a little girl about my situation. She seemed to take the hint, though, and the two of them sat there and watched The Flintstones until my grams got home.