Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Writing in Latinidad) Read online

  For me, the courage to step out into the world as an obese kid came by making believe I didn't notice I was fat, that my corpulent body somehow became invisible. Yet that fantasy was a delicate one, easily shattered when a cruel kid on the street yelled out “Hey, fatso!”

  Reality had hit hard during a Christmas pageant in the fifth grade. Our homeroom was designated to complement a Santa Claus skit with the singing of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” As soon as our teacher walked in with a box of green and red elf outfits—a hat and a matching vest—I knew there'd be trouble. The hat wasn't a problem but when I was handed the vest I became dizzy with embarrassment.

  “Why don't you just wear a green shirt instead,” my teacher suggested.

  When the day of the pageant arrived the following week I begged my mother to let me stay home from school.

  “What's wrong with you? Are you sick? You're not sick!”

  “I'm fat!” I responded.

  I showed up to school with a green shirt. Throughout the entire pageant and especially through the singing of the Christmas carol, the stage lights heavy on my face, I knew everyone in the audience understood why I was the only elf without a vest of my own. The yearbook photographer even requested that I be moved to the back of the squatting chorus, or to the side at least.

  After that incident being fat was the perfect scapegoat for all my other misfortunes. If I fell off my bike, I fell because I was fat; if I scored low on my spelling test, I scored low because I was fat. I was determined more than ever to slim down, to be as skinny as my large-ankled, knobby-kneed brother whose neck was so narrow it looked like his head floated above his shoulders. The ambition was there. The question was: how would I lose the extra weight?

  For my grandparents, fat meant healthy; obesity was a status symbol. In México if you're fat, you have plenty to eat, and the money to buy it with. Liberace—fat, famous, wealthy. In the United States even the poor can be fat, because bad diets and junk food are cheap. When my brother and I first came to the United States we were diagnosed as anemic and were prescribed vitamins—big red pills my grandmother shoved down our throats with a jab of her index finger. Every morning before school: the pill, the finger, the gagging. We would laugh at each other getting subjected to this daily routine.

  “I want you plump and beautiful,” my grandmother would always say.

  My mother and my uncle's wife, both big women, used to wrap their bellies with plastic to make themselves sweat when they did their stretches on the floor. Every morning I heard their swish-swishing all the way from the steps. But nothing seemed to change. They looked the same as their photographs in the brown stack of family albums. I imagined the disappointment on their faces as each picture became a testament to their failed attempts at weight loss. Eventually the swishing ceased, but my ingenious aunt found a way to compromise for the lack of exercise: a tomato diet. She'd skip breakfast and instead eat one juicy red tomato with a dash of salt. Later she substituted the tomato with a grapefruit sprinkled with a spoonful of sugar. When she tired of that she switched to chopped cauliflower with sour cream dressing. Then came the avocado with chives stage, followed quickly by the refried bean burrito with melted cheese week. And diet soda of course.

  Instead of diets I was subjected to the infamous fat-burning cream my mother ordered for herself through an ad on television. Thick and yellow, it smelled like some kind of rusty metal—battery copper or a dirty butter knife. As soon as my mother applied it to my stomach it stung like acid. I jumped up and down, crying out, “I'm burning! I'm burning!” She pushed me into the shower then rubbed cold butter on my skin.

  “Don't tell your father,” she warned me as she treated my burns. “And don't take your shirt off.” No problem.

  I never took my shirt off in front of anyone because I was ashamed of my llantas, my stack of tires. I couldn't watch a Michelin tire commercial with my cousins around because they'd point out that I resembled the Michelin Man. The Pillsbury Doughboy and the cherubic Campbell's kids also sent me running out of the television room.

  My mother's little yellow diet pills were another craze of mine for a while. But all they did was make my heartbeat race and make me crave food. They also made me lose sleep, and when I couldn't sleep I got hungry. I snuck into the dark kitchen late at night while everyone slept. I had memorized the location of the bread, the jelly, and the utensil drawer. I recognized the spoon through touch. If my mother heard me stirring she'd call out my name and demand that I put back whatever it was I had taken. I simply froze in my tracks, shut my eyes and pretended I was floating back to my bed. But the weight of the jelly sandwich anchored me firmly to the kitchen linoleum.

  Soon my father got into the act. He suggested eating onions and garlic so that my mouth numbed its craving for sweets and sugars. My mother said no. My father had heard about this guy who had his teeth wired shut to lose weight and avoid getting kicked out of the Coast Guard. “Definitely not,” said my mother.

  “How about going out for a run around the block in the mornings?” my father suggested.

  “And miss breakfast?” I asked in alarm.

  My father became increasingly concerned about my weight. My mother's own obesity was contributing to her ailing health, and those extra pounds were dangerous to her weak heart. Besides, all that baby fat on my body made me look girlish. It was painful enough for him that by nature I was effeminate. I didn't dare tell my father about the kid who had asked me during school recess whether I was a boy or a girl. I actually answered his question, giddy with the excitement of being the object of his attention. I suspected my father hoped as much as I did that those diet pills would shrink me down to the gangly boy-shape my brother had.

  “You look like you have girl tits,” my brother pointed out. “Can I suck on them?”

  “You fag,” I said, then caught myself. How many times had I been accused of being a fag because I was this chubby, soft-spoken sissy too slow and passive in phys ed? Move, you fag! We're going to lose the game because of you! I'd come home, fat and frustrated, to bite into my own fleshy arms, admiring the tooth marks afterward with an air of revenge and accomplishment. I became resentful of the one boy in school who was fatter than I was. Alfonso never wore a belt, so his underwear and butt crack kept showing; he had a crow's nest for hair that attracted chalk; and once during class he sneezed so hard he splattered himself with mucous, earning the nickname Alfonso Mocoso. Yet it was me who was feminine fat. Fag fat. Even Alfonso recognized it. One time he threw his arm around me from behind and squeezed my nipple so tightly it bruised. Yet it was that violent grip that made me realize something about myself, because for nights I touched my wound, hoping to recreate that sensation of pain and pleasure—that gift given to me by another boy.

  I kept my sexual desires secret all through middle school and up until high school. Meanwhile my obsession with my own over-weight body had intensified. I had mastered sucking in my stomach and pinching my fat until I lost my appetite. Obese people made me sick. Fat meant disease. Fat was fatal. I had known people hurt by their own large bodies. Like my mother. I always wondered if her death could have been avoided if she had slimmed down in time. Yet there they were, the fat people, taking up more space than the average person, complacent in their vulnerable big bodies.

  I had shed plenty of my baby fat, but my weight fluctuated dramatically. I went through periods of overeating and even longer periods denying my body nourishment. I had no control. Other high school kids began to wonder. There were only two ways a teenager lost that much weight in my high school: through eating disorders or drugs. But only girls were anorexic so everyone assumed I was doing coke, crystal, or angel dust. My grandparents didn't know about the times I took my plate of food into my room and emptied it into plastic bags with sheets of newspaper, or the times I forced myself to vomit into the toilet while the shower was running.

  My rapid weight gains and losses persisted throughout my adolescence. My grandmother had a numb
er of explanations: it was latent puberty, it was that stomach virus going around, or it was depression. According to my grandmother I was still mourning the death of my mother.

  My high school days worsened when I started struggling with my sexuality. I took refuge in books to avoid contact with the people around me. I read Greek mythology, first drawn to it by the erotic depictions of the Olympic gods on the covers. I absorbed E. M. Forster's Maurice, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and Jack London's The Sea Wolf—all literature that taught me about disguised courtships and same-sex attractions, the pain and the pleasure of it. I sought out clandestine affairs of my own, which wasn't hard in a Mexican community, where it's possible to be a fag and not a fag. Men satisfy their urges secretly, confident that their public sexuality displaces any suspicion or speculation about their private one. Only men are allowed to use the degrading terms and callous words in the power play of machismo; women are expected to be polite, and not to even imagine the possibility that there is a homosexual locked inside a man they know. I had flings with married men or men with girlfriends, with men who had children, sometimes as old as I was. They went to church on Sunday, drank beer, and eyed the teenage girls in gym shorts. They appreciated a good woman-on-woman porno. They showed me photographs of their fiancées and sent me wedding invitations. They were strong and loved to fuck big-breasted women. They were macho. I was their own personal Liberace who whispered tunes in their ears they could never admit to have heard. It didn't matter that I was fat or thin, just available. They desired me just the same.

  “I wish you could stay with me forever,” one of the men once said to me in bed, right before the phone rang. He picked up the receiver. “Cariño! How I miss you. How are the kids?” I never felt more invisible than on that mattress, under those heavy sheets that smelled of someone else's nights.

  I snuck back home and made a ham sandwich, spreading the mayonnaise on the bread nice and thick. I savored it to punish myself. I ate it and made one more.

  Everything I had learned to be and not to be, to accept and to deny, was finally derailed in the mid-1980s when Liberace began to attract suspicious attention. To me, Liberace had it all. His personality drew attention away from his obesity and sexuality. He was my hero, the master of disguise and deceit, the man who successfully showed this so that no one could see that. He was all things big: big name, big smile, big hair, and big shoes. One big secret. One big lie.

  That lie slowly revealed itself as Liberace began to shrink out of public view—literally. He was losing all that weight, a feat he attributed to a watermelon diet. I remember my high school health teacher saying, “That's a terrible diet! Watermelon is ninety-nine percent water; Liberace's going to starve to death.”

  At first I thought I understood Liberace even more, that I was more like him than I imagined. I pictured him gnawing into the white part beneath the red meat or even into the hull of the watermelon, convincing himself that this was working—the pounds were coming off! I believed we had both fantasized about being one of those weight-loss product's spokespeople on television, the before and after images of their bodies liberated from the nasty cycles of weight gains and losses. He had created a new level of happiness I had always wanted: Liberace happiness—maybe fat, maybe thin, but always a sissy and always smiling. I wanted to own the secret to his success.

  But then Liberace died on February 4, 1987, and that was just the beginning of his tragedy. The county coroner made the cause public: AIDS-RELATED DEATH.

  The end of my hero was one big disappointment. He should have exited big, not amid the tabloid gossip and public paranoia. Matters worsened when a fat blond boy came forward as Liberace's lover and sued the Liberace estate. I was devastated for my poor outed hero. He should have shown me it was possible to be buried in the closet. I felt betrayed. Where would I go from here? Fat or thin, closeted or not, Liberace made it clear that no one could escape the demons. The demons knew hunger and bit the hand that refused to feed them.

  Liberace sent me a postscript a few years after his death. During my first year of college I had lost seventy-five pounds. “They don't give you beans?” my grandmother exclaimed incredulously when I explained I was only fed hateful American foods like pot roast and vegetarian chili. There was much speculation in the college dormitory about my condition: it was rumored I had AIDS, and some students subsequently ostracized me. I became depressed. Thinned down, I had moved from one dark legacy to another.

  On one occasion my father showed up with a two-basin kitchen sink in the truck bed. He acquired it doing a job on a former Liberace residence he was helping demolish. It was going to be thrown out anyway, he explained.

  “Do you remember Liberace, you?” he asked me. I got goose bumps.

  “Yes, so?” I responded.

  “So it's his sink!” my father said.

  “What do you want it for anyway?” I asked, almost stuttering.

  “Are you kidding? This sink can get me maybe fifty bucks if I sell it across the border.”

  “Why? Because it's Liberace's?” I asked, looking for any distinguishing marks, for a candelabra or a music staff etched near the drain, maybe some telltale initial.

  “No, it's nothing special.” My father lightly tapped the side of the basin with a wrench. “It's just a sink. It's just a goddamn sturdy sink, that's all.”

  When the time came for me to apply to college, I kept everything a secret from my grandparents. I simply forged their signatures and sent the packet off, confident that I would get into that one college, the University of California at Riverside, ninety miles north of Indio. I hadn't bothered to apply to any other university because I didn't know where any of them were located in relation to the Coachella Valley. In my seventeen years I had only ventured south into México, and only once to the north, to Disneyland, on an ill-fated trip with my family seven years earlier. That time, the car kept breaking down and when we reached our destination, our stay was brief due to all the hours lost as my father tinkered with the engine on the side of the road.

  When I received the notification of acceptance, I clasped the letter to my chest, feeling my heart implode. Finally, I had my ticket out. I decided to keep this news to myself, going as far as hiding the letter in the closet, beneath a pile of my grandmother's clothes—a symbolic gesture since my grandparents wouldn't be able to read the letter even if they were to find it. My plan even as early as the spring was to gather all of my clothes and take the Greyhound to Riverside. I knew the Greyhound had a station in Riverside because I had seen the name in the schedule display at the Indio bus terminal the times I took the bus down to the border; Riverside was a stop en route to Los Angeles.

  In high school the approaching graduation was stirring up excitement among the seniors. I didn't care much for any of it since I couldn't afford any of the mementoes or activities offered for completing the four years. I had not attended the prom or the senior trip, had not purchased a class ring or letterman's jacket or the yearbook—had not even taken my senior portrait—and I wasn't about to attend the ceremony we had been rehearsing all week. But when the day came to buy the blue cap and gown, I got in line just like everybody else. All of a sudden I had this fantasy that my entire family would come to see me graduate. I was ranked among the top ten students in my class, which numbered well over six hundred, so they would be obligated to come.

  Since the grape harvest was well under way, my father and brother had come from Mexicali to stay with us in “el campo.” My grandfather profited by charging them room and board since he was not about to let them live in his home for free. He would continue to do this for many years to come, until they grew tired of his rules and conditions, after which they would find housing in an old couple's garage. But that year they still shared the room with me—my father, my brother and I, together again temporarily. I imagined them looking down from the stands at the high school stadium, waving when my name was announced.

  The day before graduation I decided to tell
my father. He had been puttering around beneath my grandfather's truck all afternoon, and was now rewarding himself with a cold beer. My grandfather must have thought my father deserved a reward as well, since he usually didn't allow beer drinking outside the apartment—one of the conditions that would later become a point of contention. The afternoon was humid; the heavy beads of sweat collected on my father's forehead.

  “Did you know I'm graduating tomorrow?” I asked him directly.

  “No, I didn't, you,” my father said. “Good.” He sounded annoyed, perhaps irritated by having spent too much time under a hot engine on a hot day. But I persisted.

  “Well, there's a ceremony tomorrow,” I said.

  “You should have told me earlier,” he said. “I'm busy with your grandfather's truck tomorrow.”

  “The truck is more important than your son?” I asked.

  “For getting to work it is,” he said.