Nacho’s strangest kick is the one about his dead friend Jesse. Mexicans love the dead. Saints everywhere you look, especially kids who die young and pure, still innocent. Jesse was killed the year before I got to Sunnydale. He’d been changing a tire on his mom’s Buick on the side of the highway, and trying to be careful, he lit a flare. When the dude bent to the pavement to put it down, a pickup crushed his upper body. He was DOP, dead on pavement.
When we get high, Nacho always gets around to telling us how when he went to the mortuary, Jesse looked like Frankenstein. “His face was all fucked up, just scars and stitches where’d they’d tried to make him look like he did when he was alive.” He cries for him sometimes when he gets drunk.
I have my own ghosts to worry about.
* * *
When I get home from school today, I see my pops’s Thunderbird sitting in Grams’s driveway. It’s clean, shiny, tinted windows, blood-red, sweet. He got it last year. I still haven’t ridden in the damned thing. I’m not excited to see the car. My stomach starts to rumble and feel all tight in the middle, the tiny prisoner inside trying to file his way out slow and steady. I walk into the house like nothing, but I’m fronting for no reason because my pops is in the bedroom knocked out. Grams is in the kitchen making something to eat.
“Tu papa está aquí.” She’s talking quiet so as not to wake him up. She’s in a weird spot because she loves him, but she knows she shouldn’t for all the shit he’s done.
“Yeah,” I say, not wanting to get into Spanish with her. It makes me mad that just because he’s come here for a day or two that all of a sudden the rules change. He’s The Man, and we all gotta be quiet and talk in a respectful tone, which for Grams means Spanish. For all her toughness, he can always turn her to jelly. He does that to everyone except me.
“Ve y dale un abrazo si está despierto.” She’s tripping if she thinks I’m going to tiptoe to the bedroom and give him a hug if he’s awake. “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m gonna watch TV.” I just want to get the fuck out before he wakes up. I turn on the tube and pick up the phone.
“Nacho,” I say when he answers. “Yo man, come pick me up. Let’s burn a couple up at your house.”
“Fucker. Didn’t you get enough buzz last night? Shit, I can hardly concentrate today.” But I can tell that he’s game. Then he says what I want to hear, “I’ll pick you up in about twenty.”
“Cool, but pick me up at the EZ. My old man’s around, and I don’t wanta be here.” Nacho’s good about that shit.
“Yo, whatever. I’ll see you in twenty.”
When I get home late that night, my pops is still watching TV. He’s still in his dress clothes, black suit pants and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up Latin-lover style. As late as it is, his hair is still combed, slicked black, his mustache sitting above his mouth ready to punctuate whatever bullshit he has in store for me. He’s quiet and I can tell he’s going to try and play the father.
“You come in this late all the time?” He mutes the set. “You had me and your grandmother worried. I came all the way down here from Houston to see you and you leave without waking me up.” He’s gotta be kidding. There’s so much shit I’d like to spill right now, but I just say, “Sorry.”
“Give me a hug,” he says, still sitting down. I go over and he hugs me tight. “You’re getting too skinny.” Everything he says makes me want to punch him or puke. “What’s going on?” I say. “Why are you here?” I don’t look at him directly. I look at the muted TV. A Lucy rerun is on, the one where she’s stuffed cheese in all of Ricky’s band instruments.
“I told you, I’m playing in Houston this weekend and I thought it’d be good to drop in on you and your grandmother and make sure everything is going alright.” He’s been on the road for a couple of months now and this is as close to S.A. as he’s been.
“It’s all going alright,” I say. I walk out to the fridge and grab a Coke just so I can get out of the room for a few seconds.
When I come back, my pops has the TV volume back on, but he’s flipped it to a documentary on some South American country. I watch that, pretending to give a damn. “Grams tells me you’re in school again. A Christian one. Do you like it?”
“It’s fine.”
“She’s good, your grandmother, watching after you while I work.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m staying out of this whole goddamned conversation if possible. My stomach is starting in on me again. The pot had killed the churning, but Pops is doing his best to get it going again.
I watch the kids on TV, poor and tattered. Some on crutches. There’s been a disaster, a flood or something, and there’s nowhere for those kids to go. Fucked up.
“You made friends?”
“A couple.”
“Your grandmother says you have one in particular that seems strange.”
“He’s cool.” Now I’m actually trying to follow the program. I want to know if someone is going to step in and do something.
“I don’t want to argue with you here. You’re getting old enough to know what’s right and wrong.”
The guy on TV says that someone is “misdirecting the aid” that these kids are supposed to have been getting. Flat out stealing the shit. Someone should be strung up by the balls.
“Did you hear me, Robert?” my pops says.
“Yeah,” is all I can manage. This stuff about the kids in South America is fucking tragic.
“You heard from your mother?”
“Don’t ask me about her,” I say, snapping back into the conversation. I want to get up and leave the room because I really feel like I’m gonna puke, but my legs don’t feel like going. He changes the subject just like he’s changing stations on the tube. “You want to go to Houston with me tomorrow, come listen to me play?”
This throws me, mostly because deep down, I’m actually excited to hear him bring it up. “You want me to go?” I say like a little punk. I catch myself, though, and tone down. “Beats going to school.” That’s how my old man gets me. I remember him playing music back in the day when we were still together. Three memories stick with me.
One in the morning and the men in his band are packing up their instruments. A shabby pink house on Laredo Street, darkest block on the westside. Big living room with wood floors where my pops and the two other men in the band have been rehearsing all night. Starting and stopping, trying to get it right. My pops learned to play by ear at his pops’s church, where his old man would lead the congregation in rousing choruses while signaling his ten-year-old kid when to change chords with a hand behind the pulpit. I dig watching them rehearse because I get to stay up late. They’re trying to get it right, “Three Kings.” My pops is young then, maybe twenty-three, making up songs, trying different harmonies, different arrangements, exploring, hoping to get the music right. They’re supposed to bring people to God. They play loud, sound reverberating wildly, bouncing off the walls, rebounding off the floor, crashing off the ceiling, with me and my young moms enjoying it together. She understands music, sings, and plays piano herself. Started playing in church as a young girl. I’m in awe of the way the band’s individual voices meld into one three-pitched voice, a musical trinity, holy almost, enthralling. Night after night they practice until the early morning, time becoming irrelevant after the music starts. No one thinks to make me go to bed.
* * *
In the next one, I’m struggling. Two steps in a chord are easy, but the third is too spread out for my small fingers to press. I practice the guitar, going to get as good as my old man. He’s taught me a basic chord and told me, “With this chord, you can sing almost any song.” I practice, getting blisters on my fingers. It doesn’t sound right and I call him into my room. “It doesn’t sound right. When will I get to play like you?” My pops loses patience. “You have to practice years and years and years. If you don’t want to do that, forget it.” I forget it.
* * *
In the third, there’s three men, my pops, and me. I sit at the drum set that belongs to the church. My father talks to the bassist, an old family friend, about a song he has written and whether they can have it ready for their first performance. This band is called Wall of Jericho. The drummer has a huge trap set, four or five cymbals, two bass drums, wood blocks, two kettle drums, a couple of toms, and a snare. He beats on those things loud. The musicians talk and talk before they launch into a first run of my father’s new song. I sit at the church drums and discover that the drumsticks are sitting on top of the snare. Quietly I begin to tap a basic beat. No one pays any mind to me. They continue practicing, starting and stopping, my father giving directions and listening to suggestions from the other guitarist. I become bolder in my drumming, though I’m too slow and don’t know basic rhythms or even how to hold the drumsticks. But I beat out my exuberance. I feel a connection with my pops. I’m playing with him. I don’t know it, but this will be the last time because my moms and him will split up real soon. I hit that snare and pound out an inappropriate beat on the bass drum, hitting the cymbals, which resound with my joy at being here today. The practice ends and my pops takes me by the side and says, “Don’t play the drums next time, you distract me.”
* * *
The drive down to Houston is not as tough as I thought it was going to be. This morning I was pissed at myself for agreeing to go. I spend a lot of time making damned sure I don’t give him any thought, and now here I go and get myself in a situation where I gotta talk to him. Shit like that always happens to me. I’m always the one stuck with the chatty chick when I’m gloomy and don’t want to talk. I’m too polite for my own good sometimes. I don’t want to break anyone down, not even him. All the way there, my pops keeps the radio on and I lean back in the seat and try to sleep. He’s a speed-fiend, passing up people, taking chances, getting into close shaves, all the time muttering stuff like, “Son of a bitch needs some fucking driving lessons,” or “I hope you flip that fucker over and die,” while behind him some traumatized old lady’s heart is beating like hell because some madman in a red flash almost ran her off the road.
We get to Houston during rush hour. I’ve been pretending to be on the nod for four hours and I’m bored enough to start jacking around with the radio now that we aren’t moving. Even this is a problem for him. He had it on some corny-assed oldies station playing shit from the seventies. I’m trying to find something that won’t make me feel like I’m stuck in a time warp. “Leave it alone, Robert,” he says. “Dad, I can’t hang with that stuff,” but I stop fiddling with the dial, leaving it on a station that plays Top 40 bullshit as a compromise. He reaches over with a sigh of annoyance and tunes it to some straight-out redneck station. “Don’t it make my brown eyes blue,” some tired-assed lady is complaining.
The 610 is jammed with people trying to get home. In the middle of all this rotten hubbub, I miss Grams and being there instead of here. Pops buys me a Big Mac and he starts snooping around again like he’s got a right to be interested. “Your grandmother says that these new friends are worrying her.” The guy is crazy to be asking me anything. “I stay outta trouble,” I say. Not like you, I want to add, but when we’re talking, I can never say shit like that. I get tongue-tied.
“Well, don’t go causing her grief. You can’t stay with me, since I’m on the road all the time. And your mom doesn’t want—” and he stops. He wants to rephrase the sentence before he tells me flat out that my moms doesn’t want me. “I mean, she’s sick. So treat your grandmother well.” He’s trying to sound reasonable. I don’t answer him right away, like I can’t be bothered. It works because about thirty seconds later, he says, “Me oístes?” He’s asking me in Spanish, his language of discipline and obedience, if I heard him. I keep quiet. “Well?” he says forcefully, almost angry.
“Yeah,” I say, too chicken to say, “Fuck you, man. Why don’t you quit worrying her, with your bitches and your drinking and drugging and never coming around?”
Nobody ever tells him shit as far as I can see. Grams is scared of him, or on the flip, he manages to charm her out of her anger. He’s a real trip. Used to keep everybody in the house shut right the fuck up when he lived with us. My old man’s the type that when you disagree, he gives you this look sideways like he can’t believe how stupid you are and then he says, “Shut the hell up when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” But as long as you agree that he’s right and go for a swim in the river of his thought, he’s cool as a cucumber. Trouble is, that river is full of some crazy turns, and rapids that jump out at you when you least expect it. You take that ride, and you’re likely to drown. My moms found that out the hard way.
Pops always has known how to work it. Whenever my Aunt Naomi came to town to convince my moms to up and leave his ass, he’d come around, like he knew he had to put in some serious face-time. He never seemed as charming and concerned, repentant even, as then. He’d call a lot more often, trying to give my moms the line that this was all a phase and that he’d be coming back home soon. Of course, when Aunt Naomi went back to L.A., it was like my pops took off, too. He’d go back to the quick Saturday visit, coming in breathless as hell and always in a hurry, sometimes smelling like barbecue smoke, ready to give us a quick hug, toss my moms a few bucks, come up with some bullshit excuse, and then take off as fast as he’d driven up the driveway.
Moms took that shit hard. She didn’t know what to do. She’d tried so much, you know, playing nice, being understanding, hoping all of it was just a phase with him. She tried losing weight, buying new clothes, wearing a poor fakey wig over her thinning hair, all the time doing her best to put on a cheerful face when he was around, then crying all night and all day after he left. She’d go days without eating and sleeping, then she’d be like, “Okay, I’m not gonna let this get me down,” and she’d seem to be ready to pull it together.
We’d do things, me and her and Antony, go to a movie, wash the old car, but then just as sudden as it started, it’d be over and I’d come home to find her in bed crying, so sad she couldn’t say much more than to please leave her alone. That was the hardest because you’d just stand there in the doorway, just out of her sight, feeling small because you couldn’t do anything, anything at all, to help and your little brother’d be next to you, hanging on your leg maybe, completely unaware of what was going on because he was a baby and you’d look down at him and he’d be slobbering, a smile on his face like he wanted to play, and you’d just smile back even though you felt like crying, but you didn’t dare, and even if you did dare, had probably forgotten how to do it. So you’d pick him up and just stand there, listening for something, a break in the crying, that small silence giving you a little hope that maybe she’d dropped off to sleep and you could finally just move.
* * *
There are more than a thousand people at the civic center. Tejano and Conjunto music are big now that assholes like Ricky Martin and Marc Antony have made Latino music popular. Tejano doesn’t sound much like the Afro-Cuban and South American salsa that’s hot, but it’s close enough, and most white people can’t tell the difference between a cumbia and merengue anyway. Conjunto has always been big in cities with lots of Mexicans—Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Laredo, L.A., Tucson, Phoenix—but the gigs my pops plays at now are pretty big and getting bigger. Lots more people, especially girls. The real artists of their time, like Flaco Jimenez, Ramon Ayala, Los Tigres del Norte, have actually started getting some recognition.
It’s crazy in the hall. The people throng to hear them and I’m watching my father up on that stage, part of the band but clearly the standout, the blue, yellow, and red lights disguising the little flaws on his face and hands, his guitar crooning smooth solos. It’s a strange scene there, all these people dancing and drinking, smoke thick and noxious. Men are looking at the women, trying to get them on the floor so that they can get them in the sack. The women, all dressed up, hair fixed, high heels and black hose, play coy, looking around at their friends with a carnal gleam as they get up to dance at any half-decent boozy request. Smells like cigarettes and roses.
I wander around the huge hall, with hundreds of tables with little liquor bottles and the setups clubs are allowed to sell in Texas: soft drinks, plastic cups, and a bucket of ice. You provide your own rum or whiskey. I don’t really want to stick around. Too many bad memories for me, plus down deep inside I can’t get Grams’s warnings out of my head about the devil’s music and how it’s led my pops down the wrong road.
Pretty soon, though, I spot a cute girl and ask her to dance. She’s older, maybe five years. She’s alright, lively and tall, black curly hair with bloodred lipstick, smelling heavy with sweet perfume and fresh cigarette smoke. She’s got a bright smile to go with her white skin. I can feel her warmth over my chest as she pulls me closer, her rum-and-Coke breath washing over me as she leans in and puts her lips to my ear asking me my name.
“Robert,” I say.
“What?” she asks again.
“Robert!” I say louder.
She’s drunk and I decide I’m gonna fuck her. I pull her closer and grind her. She doesn’t seem to mind. We go on like that for a while, sitting down a couple of times in between songs so she can introduce me to her friends. I don’t even get their names, and after a few more dances, I ask her to go outside. She’s down. She doesn’t even bother to ask me why. No game, no blame.
I don’t come back into the hall until I see people splitting. I get rid of the girl. She told me her name is Claudia, but I bet it’s a lie. I don’t care. It got me out of the show and I didn’t have to deal with my old man up on the stage. I don’t want to see him playing music. I want to stay outside of it, beyond his reach. I don’t want to get infected with whatever spirit moves him, like those motherfuckers at the dance, just swaying along with the groove. It’s like smoke—gets in your hair and clothes and in your nostrils, and then you can’t find a way to get clean of it all.
By the time I get to the stage, the lights are on bright and the hall is a mess, a rank collage of spilt beer, food, napkins, and cigarette butts. My pops is putting his stuff away and others are breaking up the equipment and instruments. “What’d you think?” asks Efraim. He’s the bandleader. He’s fairly well known. Lots of people come out to listen to him and he’s happy because he just got the band a recording deal. They’re gonna go up to L.A. in a few weeks. He’s always talking to my pops about distribution and representation. He likes my old man a lot. “It was good,” I say. Efraim’s alright. My pops is out of earshot so I tell him, “You got me laid, man. You get these girls all hot and all a brother has to do is move in and blam. Hooked up.”
He laughs, “Man, you and your old man. You two are always in the bush.”
My father comes over. “M’ijo, give me a hand.” Efraim’s hip to the situation, though, and he doesn’t say anything. He goes on about his business. My pops wants to pull the father/son routine where I carry his guitar out to the bus. I don’t have much choice, so I carry it.
“Are we staying with the band?” I ask him, hoping that we’re not going to stay alone.
“No, I thought it’d be better to get some peace and quiet. We’re at the Ramada, damn close to Astroworld. Maybe we can go tomorrow.” He can’t fool me. He knows that those motherfuckers are going to be up all night partying and he thinks that he can hide that from me. Promising me Astroworld, like I’m some punk kid.
* * *
My first real conversation with my dad involved blood. For a long time, I faked my stomach trouble so that I wouldn’t have to go to bed. After he left, my moms tried to keep the old system up, the one where I went to bed early. But without my pops there to enforce, trying to keep me in line wore her out. She just didn’t have the strength to enforce all that quiet and all those goddamned rules. She’d go to bed, Antony’d go to sleep, and I’d turn on the tube and my light. “What’s wrong, m’ijo?” She’d always get up. She’s a light sleeper. That’s where I get it. Her father, my abuelo, was an insomniac, too. “You have school tomorrow.” I’d tell her my stomach was upset and that I needed to sit up for a while. She’d give me permission and soon Antony started to get into the action. Him just a little baby, awake with me watching M*A*S*H until the wee hours. It was cool. Communal rule was better for me, but it messed my moms up.
The problem about my bellyaching was that my stomach started to believe me, too. Soon I really was nauseated all the time. I started throwing up. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with wrenching pain that doubled me over with cramps. After a few months, I graduated to throwing up blood and moaning in the bathroom at three o’clock in the morning. The first time my moms saw blood in the toilet, she nearly passed out. She took me to the hospital and called my pops to meet us there. It made me feel guilty to have everybody worrying so much, but it also made me feel safe to have my moms and pops there. In a way, I felt good that I was bringing them together for a while. I was a strong reminder. Maybe that’s why he always seemed a little pissed when he got there.
But one night, when the pain was really terrible, he came in without my moms and he sat next to me. I lay there, not sure of what to say. I never knew what to say to him. But back then, I liked listening to him better, whether it was him telling a joke in a funny voice or explaining how things worked. Your standard little-kid syndrome. But that night, he asked me a question. “What’s that book you’re reading?” I had a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in my hand. My eighth-grade teacher, a strange dude who wore thick black glasses and wore a whacked crew-cut, had used the opening quote in a handout he gave us and I’d found it funny. I explained the plot to my father, telling him this was the fourth time I was reading it. That shit embarrasses me now, but still, he listened to me read from the best parts, and that was something.
* * *
At the hotel, my pops is ready to go to bed. This whole thing really sucks. I’m thinking about waiting for him to go to sleep and then getting the hell out of there, maybe taking his T-bird out for a ride. He’s smarter than that, though. He’s got the keys on the nightstand right next to him.
“When are you going to L.A.?”
“Two weeks or so,” he says.
“You should take me there,” I say, but I know he won’t. I’d fuck up his game.
“I don’t know.” I can tell he doesn’t like the idea at all. “You have school. You can’t afford to get kicked out again. You really need to bear down on things.” I shut off. I’m going to have to get there on my own. When he’s drifting off, I say, “I’m gonna go get a Coke.” He’s too tired to argue. I go over and grab some change from the nightstand, taking the keys, too. He’s dead to the world when he’s like that, and he doesn’t even notice.
I walk out and take the stairs down to the parking lot. It’s dark as hell except for the headlights from the cars and trucks on the 610. It’s near four in the morning and all those people are driving God knows where. I open the car door and get in. I think about where I might drive, but I don’t really want to go anywhere by myself. If Nacho were here, or Enrique, or even Juan, we could cruise around. I turn the car on so I can get the air-condition going, get rid of that sticky humidity that always seems to be licking at you when you’re in Houston. How do you ever get used to feeling like you’re living in someone’s stomach?
The glove box is unlocked. There’s a tape in there, Chicago’s Greatest Hits, some snotrags, a map that’s torn to shit because it’s been folded wrong, a nail file, my pops’s shades, the kind Burt Reynolds wore in Sharky’s Machine. No pictures, no money. I sit back and turn on the radio, shift the seat back, and next thing I know, my pops is rapping on the window. It’s morning outside, the parking lot empty except for the red machine, and my pops standing in his dorky shorts with his sandals he bought in Mexico: woven leather, very gay.
He’s pissed, and after a quick breakfast at McDonald’s, we’re on our way back to S.A. He wants to get rid of me so he can catch up to the band in Laredo, their next gig. He wakes me up when we get to Grams’s. I’m glad to be back, and he’s glad to be back on the road.