Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Page 15

  “Cheat the government, but never cheat your hunger,” he used to say. Another one of his mottos was: “The biggest sin to the body is denying it good food.”

  My grandparents never gave me a personal allowance, but I didn't miss it; I had become a recluse, preferring to hide inside my books. Each weekend I went with my grandmother to Goodwill, where she would buy our second-hand clothes and my twenty-five-cent paper-backs with titles like Death in the Nile, Jaws, The Last Unicorn, Coma, Flowers in the Attic, and Valley of the Dolls. My aunt had shown us how to replace the price tags using a nail clipper so that we bought the used clothing at even cheaper prices. Afterward we'd go into the discount warehouse to stock up on Dolly Madison pies and cakes for my grandmother, who had an incurable sweet tooth that annoyed my grandfather because her blood sugar level remained normal.

  “Indigenous blood,” he used to say with envy.

  The top of the refrigerator always had three boxes of cereal: Corn Flakes for me, Coco Puffs and Fruity Pebbles for my grandmother.

  Alone and bored with my grandparents, I concentrated on school-work, which wasn't difficult without distractions. My grandparents spent their afternoons cultivating an impressive herb garden, and spent the evenings watching novelas on the Spanish station. We ate our meals in silence. Every once in a while my grandfather mentioned some uninteresting piece of gossip about the neighbors or about one of our relatives. The mood over dinner was usually passive, our faces turned toward the fish tank my grandmother kept in the center of the table. During summers she placed aspirin tablets in the cats' water dish because she was positive they too suffered from heat-wave headaches, and she dropped ice cubes into the tank so that the fish wouldn't overheat in the warm water. There was one fish in particular she was fond of, a goldfish that had grown so fat for the tank that it couldn't turn around and only floated back and forth, facing my grandfather's side of the table. My grandmother named it Chiquito.

  “One of these days, you,” my grandfather would threaten, “I'm going to fry Chiquito and put him on a bed of rice.”

  “We'll see about that,” my grandmother snapped, overprotective of her pet fish.

  I was caught in the middle of the occasional banter, my eyes sleepy over the plate as the food was overwhelmed by the aromas of the herb garden. I had been doing exactly that the day my grandfather announced, “I guess Chiquito found himself a girlfriend, you.”

  We all looked into the tank to find a drowned rat drifting in the water with its snout pointing toward the surface.

  Seizing the opportunity for a comeback, my grandmother said, “Why don't you have that on your bed of rice.”

  Riding the bus to school from “el campo” was an exercise in survival. The farmworker kids kicked, slapped, and shoved their way in to be the first to occupy the back seats. From the back a kid could defend himself more successfully from flying objects thrown around at random to strike any target. Plus, sitting in the back meant getting off last, securing protection from getting hit by the kids who spat out the windows as the first bodies walked down the sidewalk parallel to the parked bus. The bus driver had long since given up trying to in-still order, somehow drowning out the noise as she drove a crowded vehicle with kids cussing and flipping the bird to every passing car.

  I only remember the bus getting quiet once. Since “el campo” was located in the middle of farming territory, the bus had to pass the grape fields, the lettuce fields, the carrot fields, and the orange groves en route to the school. During the lettuce season, the farm-workers concentrated on their tasks, backs bent and asses up in the air. No one on the bus pointed them out, distracted by all the commotion, or so I believed. Then one morning as the bus passed the same scene, one of the lettuce pickers stood upright, turned his body toward our direction, and waved from side to side until the bus turned the corner. The noise simmered down, surprising even the bus driver. The noise picked up again, but somehow I sensed that others were feeling exactly as I was at that moment, saddened by that gesture of recognition by an anonymous figure in the field—somebody's father or uncle or brother or friend.

  By the time I was a senior in high school, the other “el campo” kids acknowledged me as the smart one. “Schoolboy,” they named me. I was the oldest of the bunch. Most of the kids of “el campo” dropped out of school by their sophomore year, or were removed from school by their parents who needed an extra body generating an income in the fields. At fourteen this was legal, as long as the former student pursued an independent course of study. As the silent and docile Schoolboy, I gained a level of respect and I wasn't harassed on the bus. I kept to myself, a book opened in front of me to give myself space and distance from the ruckus.

  At the high school I attended all students were tracked according to academic achievement. I was enrolled in most of the college prep courses; “el campo” kids were mainly taking basic ed, taught by the men who also coached the soccer, swimming, and football teams. Still, many of them struggled with the work, and a few even came to me for help. That is how I met my first lover.

  Gerardo had also lived in Thermal at one time, attending the same elementary school I did, which is how I first knew him. He was a self-labeled cholo, a tough kid who wore khaki pants and a white T-shirt all year long. My only exchange with him in Thermal was in the boys' bathroom. I was walking in just as he was walking out, zipping his pants, when he leaned his head over to spit in my ear, then yelled out, “Whore!”

  I had been too intrigued by the word to dwell on the saliva oozing out of my ear. I had wanted to turn around just then to ask for the spelling of the word because I wanted to look up the definition in the dictionary.

  At the high school in Indio, Gerardo had not changed in appearance though he was taller. He insisted on combing his hair back even though the cholo look wasn't as popular at that school as it had been back in Thermal.

  I was shocked when I saw him enter my social studies class for the first time. Gerardo still looked like a bully. But to my surprise, he was quiet, respectful, and when he sat in the desk next to mine, he looked over and gave me a heads-up gesture of recognition. I returned the gesture, timidly.

  After a week, I suspected Gerardo's days in that upper-level class were numbered. He spent most of the time sketching lowriders in the pages of his notebook. The teacher, somehow intimidated by this odd-looking tough guy in the back, ignored him. For the most part I ignored him as well, until he threw a note on my desk asking if he could copy my homework. I thought then, here it is, the reason he was being nice to me, nodding to me each morning as we sat down in the back of the class. To keep him at bay I let him copy that and any other assignment he needed as well.

  Gerardo must have survived that first month because I supplied him with answers, even during quizzes and tests. But then came the challenge: an essay. I didn't react to the announcement, knowing he would be exposed suddenly, and if I was lucky, removed from the class. But Gerardo did react, and he came up to me during lunch break to request some tutoring.

  “I'll pay you,” he said when I declined.

  I interpreted the offer as a sign of desperation, and I agreed to it, only because this former bully was now at my mercy.

  Gerardo lived in Penn West, a neighborhood that was located behind “el campo” and was known as a more severe high-crime area. We agreed to meet at my home because his was overcrowded and he didn't want his brothers to see he was actually hitting the books for a change. I also learned that he had been put in an upper-level social studies class because the basic and general classes were already over-flowing with students. He said the administration was waiting for someone to drop out and make room, but I suspected the dropout they were waiting for was Gerardo.

  Gerardo was full of surprises. On our first session, as we sat on my bed with the books opened, notebooks and pens also spread out on the comforter, he leaned over suddenly and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Did you like that?” he asked.

  I thought it was a tr
ick, an attempt to make me provoke him into some violent outburst. He then pulled out a small vial from his pocket. Cocaine. I was stunned.

  I was no stranger to what cocaine looked like. Some of the more troubled “el campo” kids were frequent users, so bold as to snort in the back of classrooms. They'd boast about it on the bus, and as proof of their bravado they would pull out empty vials from their pockets, or dare others to snort the rest of the powder on the bumpy ride home. But most of the time the tough guys puffed on pot, rolling the joints on their thighs as we waited for the bus.

  Kissing Gerardo back was a risk, but I took it, expecting this would have to be a secret affair, like all the others. He unzipped his pants, pulled out his erection, and then guided my head toward it. He unzipped my pants to reciprocate. Soon we had the weekly routine down: We snorted the cocaine. We worked on our reports. We had sex.

  I was no stranger to sex with men, but Gerardo was the first who was my age. Up to that point I had been experimenting with closeted older men I met working in the fields. They spotted me and latched on to me after work when they saw me walking down “el campo” streets, courting me as they would a girl, with low-voiced sweet talk and coy eyebrows, all of it performed clandestinely since they might have girlfriends or wives. I didn't mind the falseness of the arrangement—the ersatz affection and the discreet rendezvous that took me to the privacies of beds, shoddy couches, or even the backseats of cars. I was young, sexually driven, and hungering for attention in ways I never felt before.

  During my first sexual experience with a grown man, I never felt any sense of shame. He was one of the foremen at the grape fields, his hair shoulder length and his shirt neatly tucked into his khaki pants. When he inspected the workers, he lingered with our group, chatting up my father or my uncle, who was our designated packer. I suspected he stalled at the end of the row to wait for me to walk up with a box of freshly packed grapes. I knew he desired me by the way he stared. I was fourteen at the time; he must have been in his thirties. I have since learned to differentiate the stubble on a face: the coarser the hair, the older the man. When he pulled me out of the group, nobody questioned his intent. It was not out of the ordinary for foremen to single out workers for one reason or another. He made me stamp the company identification number on every packed box along the edge of a field. As I worked my way down I was actually moving opposite the flow of the crew, so that when I reached the end I could barely make out the moving bodies. What I did see clearly was the foreman driving up the dusty avenue to pick me up as he had promised. But he didn't let me climb into the truck before embracing me first. Not a single word was spoken as he undid my shirt and my pants. I didn't object to his mouth running down my chest and biting down on my nipples. I ejaculated as soon as he entered me, both of us pressed against the seat of the truck. The smell of layers of sulfur and sweat that had permeated the seat covering made me nauseous, so I held my breath until he came. We got into the truck and drove back to the crew. The stickiness between my ass cheeks and the scent of my own shit bothered me and excited me for the rest of the afternoon. And though I wanted this encounter to happen again, the grape harvest came to a close without him coming around to even look at me again.

  Sex with another man seemed so natural to me, the contact so necessary. Certainly the pleasure was rewarding, but so was the transgression—the only time I felt in control, even as I let the men do with me what they wanted, with whatever force. Even Gerardo was not a gentle lover, locking his teeth on my neck at the moment of his drug-heightened orgasm. And I accepted this momentary lapse into violence as our journey away from ourselves and into fantasy. I looked forward to losing myself in the fury of sex, in the struggle of it, in its bruise of a kiss. Stripping myself of clothes was like stripping myself of problems, so I readily sought those sessions of escape.

  The more Gerardo and I saw of each other in private, the less we communicated in public. Even in class I stopped looking at him, afraid that my glance might betray the desire I had for him, and which he fulfilled. My grandparents didn't approve much of Gerardo coming into the apartment, but accepted that he was there to do homework. He in turn was polite, charming even, tapping into my grandfather's social skills with conversation about the weather, the latest world events, and car maintenance.

  But I never fantasized that our relationship would go on forever. Nothing ever did, not in “el campo,” not in my life. Besides, romantic relationships between men were an impossibility if you weren't really a homosexual. Gerardo never said he was gay, and neither did any of the men I had been sleeping with. And for the longest time I doubted that I was gay myself because this identity was never talked about by any of us or even recognized in the secrecy of the dark bedrooms.

  “I'm leaving school,” Gerardo announced one afternoon. We were lying on the floor in our underwear. We never had sex on the bed because I was afraid my grandmother might spot us twisting around on the sheets as she worked in the garden.

  “Are you going away?” I asked. Gerardo had smooth skin with dimples above his ass cheeks that I enjoyed inserting my tongue into.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But either way I won't need any more tutoring.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “I'm going to help my family out. You know how it is.”

  “I'll see you in the grape?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “I'm dealing this.” He waved the empty vial in the air.

  “Oh,” I said softly. He moved closer to me and we had sex again before he left for the last time.

  I accepted Gerardo's good-bye without much of a struggle. Over the years I had been saying good-bye to the people I loved. Gerardo left school and left me. I made no effort to seek him out or to call him. I went back to school the next day knowing there would be an empty desk next to mine at social studies class, and that these other students, most of them white and in college prep classes, would have no clue about what had transpired between these two brown kids who sat in the back of the classroom.

  I saw Gerardo only one other time after we parted ways. A few years after graduating from high school I was visiting my grandparents. I drove my grandmother to the swap meet and I saw him there, directing traffic with a red flag at the parking lot. Gerardo stood tall, seemed chunkier, and sported a goatee. I knew he had recognized me as well. I parked the car. He moved on to the next available space and flagged down another vehicle.

  For some odd reason, my parents had never talked to me about puberty and all its complications and had simply let me stumble in the dark with my discoveries. The closest they ever got to communicating any form of sex education was when they left a pair of pornographic magazines on their bed back in our little home on top of the garage. Without any explanation the explicit pages waited for my brother and me. Clearly it was an invitation, but once we exhausted our eyesight with these images, there was no follow-up discussion, so the act remained a dirty secret among us.

  The year I turned eleven my father was still working for the construction crews because many of them hired labor off the streets and paid non-taxable wages in the form of cold cash. Occasionally the crew was hired for a project in Palm Springs. Palm Springs was a haven for retired actors and well-meaning debutantes who championed such causes as wildlife sanctuaries and who organized golf tournaments for charity. The Coachella Valley got to hear all about the rich folks through the evening news and Gloria Greer's “Stars of the Desert.” Featured in her segment were costume balls, barbecue fundraisers, and the rare interview with the likes of Florence “Mrs. Brady” Henderson.

  At one time or another everyone in the Valley knew of someone who crossed paths with a famous name, especially if that someone worked at the plush hotels or on the luxury links. Or in construction, like my father.

  “My father did some renovating for Bob Hope,” I bragged to a friend.

  Not to be outdone he proudly replied, “My father fixed a drive-way for Kirk Douglas.”

  Among the countless
celebrities who inhabited the Palm Springs area was Liberace, the flamboyant entertainer with the trademark candelabra and outlandish outfits. He was easy to imitate. I simply threw a comforter or an unzipped sleeping bag over my shoulders and let it drag like a train, Lady Di wedding dress style. I never mastered the walk across the carpet in a pair of my mother's high heels, so I wobbled all over my pretend stage.

  What attracted me to Liberace was the way he got away with the whole theater of his presentation: mink, rings, makeup, and a hairdo that saluted the heavens.

  “Pinche joto,” my father declared each time Liberace stepped out into the stage on those rare television appearances we all looked forward to. Damn fag. My family was devoted to watching him because he was, after all, a great musician. An added bonus was that we could poke fun at Liberace's antics. I watched in admiration, envisioning myself swallowed in fur, thrusting my diamond-heavy fingers at the studio audience: Thank you, daaaarlings! Batting my eyelashes at the camera seemed so much safer than batting them at the bathroom mirror. Liberace could bat, pucker, wink, strut, and blow kisses with the wave of his hand. All that and Liberace was fat.

  Aware that I had become an overweight child, I developed an intense insecurity about my size. My younger brother recognized it as a weakness of mine to be called fat names, so he called me a whale, sow, or pregnant hippo as a desperate tactic when losing a verbal fight. My father had started throwing in a fat name or two during scoldings but I quickly put a stop to that by threatening to run away if he kept doing so.