From the top of this hill all of San Francisco sweeps into cascades of mist, strands of clouds and fog that fall through the sky and over the Bay like Iris Chacon’s legs at the San Juan TV station. And those clouds came to dance with me over here, to mambo, to rhumba in a starlit wet night, but Puerto Rico is so far away. I walk the Mission lookin’ every which way for a PR, any PR like me. Yeah, well, compadre, I hadta get back here before Lili censored herself into the company of devotées of La Virgen de Guadalupe. I mean, I’m not lettin’ go of her one little bit, mi corazón, but she’s gettin’ headstrong, wants a limited relationship, equal responsibilities. And I cannot attempt to explain this drivel with any order or passion like the way she does.
Mira, the problem as I see it and know in my heart, which makes it a fact, is that my Lili has crossed over.
Now. I do not mean to say that mi querida dulce has in any way ever deserted her people or my people. I’m just meaning to suggest that this ridiculous affair she’s havin’ with this touchy-feely-lemme-talk-this-thru-witchu white boy is the reason I’m thinkin’ bout layin’ clouds steada layin’ Lili. I mean, hacer de amor con mi Liliane.
Cuidadate, I say to her. When was the last time you heard about a “New White Man,” con los Neanderthals, some Cro-Magnon guys roamin’ Europe stark naked in snow. Hey, tu sabe, negra, that in the future, the future New White Man is still very white, muy muy blanco en el universo sin los negros. Now, whatchu think that portends, corazón?
But does she listen to me? Does she listen to me, the man whose heart beats to the ritmo of her breath, her stride, her, oh. Naw. She looks at me. Rolls my eyes, her eyes, my way. I don’t understand. Oh, baby. The New White Man. The Old White Man. And a woman like you is the history of Puerto Rico. Damn. It’s the history of the New World.
But she don’t listen to me. She’s not gonna run up here and tell you all about it, either. Her daddy would die. Ha, the New White Man. Her mother, no te preocupe con ella; she’s on the other side, gracias a Dios. Oigame. I’m gonna tell you everything I know bout this romance with the Visigoths that Lili, awright, Liliane can’t bring herself to reveal. Of course, she confided in me, cause, hey, I gotta way about me. I’m Victor-Jésus María.
I love her. I love her enough to tell you the truth no matter how much it hurts.
We know that notions come over women with the full moon or their periods or pregnancy. Women get cravings for good dick, or ice cream ’n pickles seems like in the natural course of the universe. But it never occurred to me, not ever, that Lili would getta yen for a biker. Now, don’t you think that I woulda gone and found a motorcycle if I’d known my Lili was about to straddle a Harley that came with its own all-knowing white boy. Of course, I woulda. You know that. But see, I didn’t get a chance. I didn’t even know what I was up against.
Here we are working on Lili’s new project: being the living tissue of lost ancestors in graves she digs along the Coast Highway where passing automobiles are flagged down to come to our funeral services which Lili officiates. We’ve got these feathers and cowries tied round our necks, faces painted, sometimes teeth, too. We are wrapped like mummies or simply in loincloths. Lili is sometimes naked with one flower over her navel. Anyway people get out of their cars and come to our funeral. Our spirits are nourished by their visits and the ghosts of the New World get up and dance with the gringo enthusiasts: That is until we reveal ourselves as the not-so-well-off folks of color from the Mission that we are. Tu m’entiende that dead Aztecs are so less threatening than a live cholo. Plus we gotta watch for the CHP, who don’t take kindly to us digging up public property for graves of live niggahs.
Mira, I remember feeling like I don’t want to die so young and handsome, plus, Lili had us singing Leadbelly’s chain gang blues songs, while somebody else, Rosa I believe, went around chanting the rosary as a Franciscan friar in drag. It was, to say the least, very dirty work, the digging, getting ready to get in the holes we dug and then waiting for the visitors from this world. But whenever the sun leapt over the treetops like a golden jaguar’s tongue licking fog off our skins and eyes and the cars would stop and follow Lili speaking Nauhlt directions, then I got off on the whole ceremony. Dead we ain’t. Due ceremony and reverence, we are. I could get to that. Estu bien, sus sueños de nuestra vida.
I was grooving as the remains of a black Cherokee dressed as a buffalo soldier when this white boy who reminded me of flicks I’ve seen of General Custer, this white boy jumps off this Harley, leather jacket and all, to pay homage to the spirits of the New World. Now I only hear Lili’s laughter and brisk deliberate steps, a “man’s man” walking, when suddenly I am covered with sheet music, pages and pages of blank sheet music. Then, I hear Lili chanting some Yoruba elegy to a very out of tune Charlie Parker solo, circa 1948. Qué pasa? You know as well as I. The New White Man has put himself inside our piece, carved or seduced by an educated sleight-of-hand a role for himself. My Lili doesn’t even move these papers off my face so I can get another glimpse at this interloper. She’s laughing. A pale “April in Paris” stumbles from an archaic soprano sax in the hands of this Anglo, hair lying like black wings. From this position as a dead buffalo soldier, blank sheet music fluttering, a pair of old Doc Marten’s by my graveside and a doomed melody sitting on the wind, I think to myself: This is too close to real life to be art.
And I was right, tu sabe, because Lili rode off on that bike with that white boy and what had been territory as yet undiscovered by European “explorers” was swept away on the wheels of a 750 Harley-Davidson. Now, I am not quick to anger, yo say que yo tengo razón, but I felt absolutely out of step, time, and my usual prowess this particular evening. After all I’m clad in nineteenth-century garb of a guy who terrorized Native Americans for a living on a hillside by the Pacific in the company of the son of Quetzal played by Winnie with blond dreads, Sequoyah represented by Itami Kawakiya with orange braids, and Oya, the courtesan of Shango, in the person of Rosa when she is not a priest. Virtually beatified, we looked at one another in disbelief. Then Rosa became a priest again, said a blessing, and dismissed us to our real-life selves.
You have to admit what commitment I showed that day. Not leaving the site of the performance as this stranger rode off with mi corazón. I trust her. That’s muy facil, sí. Oh, but even though I had warned Lili continually of the infinite paths to cultural compromise, I obviously had been duped.
By the time our truck was coming up the road from Guerneville with crackers reluctantly filling the tank of painted colored folks, Lili was nestled on the sands of Bolinas, a town without a sign so undesirables like us can’t find it less we know somebody. Now, Lili knew somebody whose name was “Zoom.” I kid you not. This was a white boy challenging the speed of light and sound, outdistancing those of us mired in primitive relics or nostalgia. Zoom went straight to Lili’s heart. Who could resist a devotee to a process one is just inventing. El proceso es la revolutión. El proceso es todo.
Lili likes to gloss over this part: the seduction by a white boy of una negra no white boy had touched, but how can we do that? This is of paramount significance, a departure from our realities that must be examined in detail, if we are to prevent its reoccurrence. Entonces we begin with this town that white people don’t want us to know where it is: Bolinas. Clear uninterrupted waters, trees bosom branches sucking skies, Lili’s ass caressing the surf with Zoom tween her legs. Oh, dios mio, I can hardly stand this, but I promised I’d tell the truth. She thought since she had never been with a white boy that it should accomplish some task, like she was in a fairy tale or something.
This is not my doing, I swear. Lili had this Zoom guy swimming tween her legs tryin’ to kiss her clit in the water in the dark. Of course they both almost drowned. “But Victor, he tried,” she squealed. Far as I’m concerned he lacks goddamned common sense or he would have told Lili that he could not and would not kiss her pussy floating in the water cause that seriously imperiled his life, but being the reformed and eager-to-please white boy that he is, he complied. Now, you see, the integrity of the fairy tale with Lili and Zoom defying the laws of physics allows them to skirt our cultural mores.
Yes, I realize I was not there with them at the time, in the moment to document their distortion of my sense of reality. Pero, I have photographed the location, the earthbound interstices of every single episode in Lili’s chiaroscuro adventure; Zoom don’t know what zoom is. I’m the reality test here. I take pictures in black and white that don’t lie. Besides it’s Lili who leaves traces of light wherever she’s stepped or lain. She manifests as silver flashes on a two-dimensional plane. Still she talks to me:
“We spent the night on the beach by a small fire and wrapped in each other. I was a bit timid, kept imagining he thought me fast or loose like my grandma said all white men thought about us. I worried would he explore me like virgin timberland, Lewis and Clark of the avant-garde, or was I a performance piece of his. An unwitnessed happening. I checked to see if his neck was red. It wasn’t. I sleep soundly.”
That’s not all they experienced together, a common dream, a common sweat raspy with inarticulate spurious desire. Zoom turns out to have a name, Joel, given him by his white parents who always told him to be nice to everybody, especially the “Negroes,” whose life was so hard.
“I don’t need you to be nice to me, goddamn you. We’ve never needed white people to do anything for us, let alone be nice to us. And just what was your poor white trash ass gonna do for me anyway? Huh? Teach me about what? Lincoln and Bix whatever his name is? This isn’t going to work. It’s not even a sane activity. Why didn’t you just play your little tune, get on your bike and go wherever white men go after they’ve been somewhere they don’t belong?”
“Listen to yourself, Liliane,” Zoom firmly but softly utters the first words of his pattern of seduction that keeps my Lili constantly reevaluating the immediate effects of racism on her and her loved ones. “Listen to yourself, Lili,” like that was going to absolve him of any association with the bloody limits of our expectations and hopes dashed on barbed wire and ropes. With the charm of Dave Brubeck and the guts of Stan Getz he wound his way through Lili’s perceptions, changing lenses constantly, reframing her instincts, her sense of touch. If she held him tentatively, with caution, that was her own racism keeping her from him. When she heard nothing in Steve Lacy’s escapades, she had closed herself off. If Paul Whiteman was not the King of Jazz, she didn’t know that music has no boundaries, is a gift, is universal. Humph, just a ball of confusion, my Lili, mi corazón.
“Victor-Jésus, do you know there are some of us who have gone off with some of them and we never see each other?” I didn’t understand.
“No, really, Victor, we went to a cove where this barn had been done over for performances and a gallery. It was so pristine and free of clutter, not like alternative spaces in the city. All these other white people, artists, Zoom claims, owned this place and lived out there. I said, ‘Well, okay.’ I chatted with some women who run a shelter and some others who make chap-books, and it was like grade school. A bunch of white people who are not necessarily dangerous, but still alien, whose faces I wouldn’t remember, or names. I was getting fidgety, wanting to go somewhere I mattered, when this black guy with dreadlocks appeared from nowhere, like an extraterrestrial. But, and this is the weird thing, he looked at me like I had done something to him. He’s the only other one of us there. He was colder than the white people whose names I don’t remember.”
Me, of course, I say nothing, nada. Who am I to judge? Yet I was not alone having a hard time watching Lili cavort thru the Fillmore, even the Point, on the back of this Harley holding on to a till-the-death cracker. This is when her extraterrestrial aspects loomed, but she didn’t notice. A couple of brothers at the corner of Divisadero near Scott threatened to pour oil on the road, if they came back that way. All they really had to do was wash out the Jerri-Curl. But their instincts were on the mark, compadre. Right on the mark.
Lili took to wearing a beret when she and Zoom were about town. She even invited him to a few more ceremonies and parties that our little group had now and again. Zoom mingled well, like he’d been waiting all his life to not be so white, to be comfortable when he was the only one of them around in a way that Lili could not. I assume this is a privilege of race, but don’t let me sway you. From Tower of Power to Larry Graham, even Tito Puente’s ritmo couldn’t contain Zoom’s exuberance when he was dancing. The whole world was at risk with his gangly out-of-control I-am-a-white-boy contortions. After he knocked over a lamp and a few glasses of wine and stepped on Kim Sheang’s toes two times, Lili indignantly led him away. He didn’t want to leave, poor thing, having such a good time cavortin’ with the natives.
“Where are you going?” Zoom inquired.
“Home. I’m going home.”
“Hop on, then.” He straddled his other black sweetheart and revved up. “Get on, I said.”
Now Zoom didn’t look so friendly, eager to please.
“Victor-Jésus, how can I tell you? He looked mean like any other mean white man, but it passed really quickly. We went over to La Rondallo for some quesadillas and sangria. The Mariachis sang ‘Guadalajara’ for me. He pulled out his clarinet and we romped through the Mission for hours. When we’re alone, I think, this guy is great. He’s so free and gentle, most of the time, anyway.”
I am considering the various cleansing rituals to which Lili must submit before I can take her back from this latest conquistador, but the intrigue has not yet peaked. Lili thinks I’m quaint. A remnant of precultural diversity socialization, like her father, maybe.
“I decided to tell Daddy that Zoom, I mean, Joel, is just a very, very light, light black man.”
I laughed so hard I had to pee and get a cerveza. A light light black man. Not to upset Daddy’s life spectrum, to leave the family image intact, to make believe it doesn’t matter, to lie. Lili. Lili, to lie to a good white lay. Querida, you can do better than that, I say.
“You shouldn’t laugh at me, Victor-Jésus.”
“Tu queres que yo lioro para ti, you want me to weep, mija?”
“You almost had to. Victor-Jésus, it was so scary. He was so scary.”
What’s scary about clumsy white men is beyond me but I listen.
“I was lying on the water bed at my house. It was dark and light at once cause of the fog. We were just about inside clouds, close to heaven. I felt so cherishd. Zoom had licked me all over, I was shivering and warm, and moist.”
“Yes, Lili…”
“Well, I told Zoom that I’d sent my father some photos of us together, that I’d painted over his face and arms so they would look darker. I didn’t want any trouble with Daddy, you know. I thought he’d understand. We don’t have and have never had, since slavery, any white folks in the family…. Well. He changed. Victor, he stomped around my house like some interrogator from a grade B movie. He screamed at me. ‘Nobody has the right to be ashamed of me. You have no right to make me dark or light or less white. Who do you think you are, you bitch.’
“Then, I don’t know how I got there. I was in the kitchen with a butcher knife. I was looking at my Zoom, saying, ‘You get out of my house now. Get out right now.’ He looked bewildered. I said, ‘Zoom, get out now before I try to hurt you. Get out.’ I screamed. I started to cry but my hand didn’t waver. I held the knife in front of me toward the door til I heard him start up the bike. Then I knew how primitive I am. Victor, I couldn’t have a white man, not even Zoom, raise his voice to me in my house. I just couldn’t.”
Ha. And you thought she wasn’t my girl.
“Every single word, every step he took toward me, became somewhere else, somebody else, another white man, out of his place, any white man putting himself in my life where he didn’t belong, had no rights. I looked at Zoom, my Zoom, the black curls dancin’ over his eyes, but he wasn’t there. Only a snarlin’ mouth with white trash beard crowdin’ his lips kept circlin’ me. I had to do somethin’. This is my house. This isn’t the Highway Five or Alabama, or Chambersburg. I’m the one who makes the rules in my house. White people just can’t walk in and turn everything upside down, make me not belong to me again. He was just everywhere. Oh, he’s shouting for me to listen to what he’s sayin’. I don’t haveta listen to shit. I’ve heard every goddamned idea any white man ever had. I’ve heard it all awready. He musta lost his mind. Well, I showed his stupid white ass. If a niggah bitch is what he was after, a niggah bitch gone fuckin’ crazy is what he muthafuckin’ got. Jesus, my grandma must be rollin’ in her grave. Lord, what am I gonna do? What can I do now to be rid of this mess? Shit. How could this happen? How could this happen to me? How did I do this? I’ve gotta take responsibility for myself, I know. How am I gonna get that fuckin’ cracker voice outta my house? How am I gonna get him off me? His hands and tongue, his arms. He usedta lift me til my head touched the ceilin’. ‘We were goin’ to reach the foothills of Heaven,’ he said. ‘We were. That nothin’ and nobody was going to stop us.’”
It’s not funny, but Lili was pale as a sheet como the Breck girl. As carefully as I could I swallowed my laughter, actual hoots, gritas en realidad. Somebody put an end to all her madness for sure. And those somebodies sure didn’t take no instructions from El Señor Zoom, either. “In the foothills of Heaven,” coño. The steppes of Hades is more like where he and his kind ended up with Malinche, holograms of the Venus Hottentot, multitudes of writhing Negress wenches leaping from mahogany bedsteads and barn rafters. “The foothills of Heaven.” I noticed that Lili was cryin’, not weeping, but having tears, quiet.
“Was it worth it?” I asked softly.
“What—what do you mean?” Lili stammered slowly, breathless like she’d escaped with her life.
“You don’t understand, Victor. Zoom was always so nice to me. He was so gentle and he made me feel…” Lili stopped, bit her lower lip with her two front teeth. I knew what that signaled. That was Lili’s physical gesture for visceral memories of orgasmic ecstacies which meant I didn’t haveta wear the kid gloves anymore. I mean, I have limits too.
Lili was randomly filling pages of newsprint with what I took to be those fuckin’ black ringlets of the former white boy lover, Zoom, at every angle, I guess. Her eyes reached for me and then dashed away into the charcoal swirls away from me.
“Liliane.” She didn’t look at me. “Liliane,” I said again more firmly. “Did he ever use the word ‘cunt’ in your presence?” I didn’t wanta ask if he ever called her that or if he pulled gently at her vulva and whispered how pretty her cunt was, what a beautiful cunt she had. She was, my Lili, mi querida.
“Well, did he ever use the word ‘cunt’?”
“Why? Why do you want to know that? What’s that for?”
Though philological and semantic intercourse had never fazed her before, now Lili was stumped. “What are you talkin’ about?” she repeated over and over.
His scalp, those goddamned curls, I wanted his scalp like Pontiac and Hatuey had demanded. The back of my mouth was viciously sour and clamped my breath back toward my heart pumping vengefully.
“I want to know the extent of the violation, Lili. That’s all. In a word, ‘cunt.’”
I could see each letter, c-u-n-t, rip through Lili’s bosom like the knife she’d wielded in her kitchen. I knew this hurt. I knew that, but Lili needed to know that what hurt wasn’t her emboldened stance to protect herself; her resort to force, to violence, wasn’t the sad revelation of the hour. It was Zoom’s ease within his whiteness, his presumptuous colonization of my Lili’s spirit, body. Lili succumbed, in the end, to too great an optimism, a naïveté fed by Zoom’s awkward attempts to move smoothly in the throng of our worlds, like the priests and union organizers; he wanted to get to know us. Ever gracious, Lili led the way. Now she was afraid. She knew she couldn’t always see the danger. She followed the wrong instincts. She’d lain still, smilin’, while some white boy explored her, droppin’ filthy lil words over her most sacred places.
“Mira, querida, Liliane. No te preocupe.” I sang to her. “Let’s go take a bath.” Lili’s eyes filled her cheeks, pulled her full lips to a grin. Her strange laughs tickled me behind my ears, crawled up my chin into my mouth where I nestle them, single giggles under my tongue.
We were whole again, were going to be soon at any rate. The thing that Lili said that assured me she had learned her lesson was watching her skip backward down Valencia, throwin’ kisses to me between quotes from Gylan Kain: “Shoulda cut the muthafuckah, made him bleed.”