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

  I will not fight with my father.

  I will not long for my lover.

  I will forgive my father.

  I will forget my lover.

  Never have simple sentences seemed so complicated. As my eyes water I can't make up my mind about what's making me cry: the possibility that I will indeed never go back to my lover, or the possibility that my father and I will finally reconcile. I'm grateful I decided weeks ago to entertain my father's offer. His second wife and their children have gone to Michoacán ahead of him, and since I had been planning a visit to my maternal grandparents, wouldn't it make sense for my father and me to be traveling companions?

  “Are you sure you know what you're getting into?” my brother, Alex, warned me on the phone when I told him about my plans.

  “I think I'm ready,” I replied. “And don't forget,” I quickly added, “I need to pick up that photograph I let you guys borrow.”

  “Let's talk about that when you get here,” Alex said.

  “What? What happened?” I asked, panic in my voice.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  Minutes from the center of town I begin to get nervous. How frightening to expect that things will be different when the flat town of Indio itself looks unchanged year after year. There's a fancy new gas station near the first major off-ramp, but the vehicles are the same beat-up trucks and cars with dented doors that the farmworkers drive to and from the agricultural fields. The long lines at the pumps can only mean that the crews have stopped working for the day. Any of these people scrambling about for water to quench their thirst could be someone I'm related to. Any of these bodies wincing at the trappings of their hot clothing could have been me. I feel lucky that this was not my fate.

  I shut my eyes to look past this scene, this town, and even this country, reaching back to the place where I keep my early memories. Sentimentalizing is my only recourse, especially since I know that within the hour I will have to face my father. What gives me courage is remembering the man he used to be. What disheartens me is knowing the man he has become. I imagine my mother in moments like these. She was always staring out the windows of our many residences over the years, waiting for my father to get home. Had my father known she was not going to live a long life, he might have gotten home sooner instead of staying out drinking. I particularly remember her hair, shoulder-length and wavy, because on so many evenings of her sadness and patience, I stood behind her, unnoticed.

  Later, as my cab pulls into the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp off Van Buren Avenue, my mind switches completely to Spanish and the stress begins to build inside me. This is my grandparents' apartment, but my father stays here through the grape harvest. He spends the rest of the year with his new family in Mexicali, just south of the California border. My younger brother, Alex, who dropped out of high school, is now living that same cycle: México, United States, México, United States, work and rest, work and rest. When I enter the door to the cinderblock building, my grandfather greets me. He has just dyed his hair pitch black. I expect to find the stained toothbrush he uses on his mustache in the bathroom sink.

  “You're here?” he asks. “You need a haircut, you?” No one but my grandfather ever cuts my hair, which is why my visits to Indio usually coincide with my need for a trim.

  “Later,” I say. “No one's back from work?”

  “I'm surprised,” my grandfather says, already serving me a plate of chicken in rice noodles without asking if I'm hungry. And although I'm not hungry I'll still eat. It's all part of the ceremony of my homecoming. The long tattoo of a colorful peacock that he carries on the inside of his forearm glares out at me from the kitchen.

  “It's nearing the end of the season, so they're usually finished early these days,” he adds.

  As soon as I sit down at the table, my father's 1974 blue Mustang pulls into the driveway. My brother is behind the wheel. My grand-mother sits in the front passenger seat. She's the only one still wearing the dusty bandanna over her hair. After all these years she continues to color coordinate to pick grapes; the purple bandanna matches her sweatshirt. My father is the first to step out of the car. When they enter they respond to my presence without surprise. In our family we have never been good at expressing affection when we're sober, and there's never any physical contact—not a handshake, not a hug—and I have never seen anyone offer a kiss, except for my mother, who's been dead for over eight years. So my father, my grandmother, and my brother walk awkwardly into the apartment, smelling of sulfur and radiating body heat, and simply nod toward me to acknowledge a welcome.

  Only my grandmother speaks up. “You're here?” she says. “You need a haircut, you?”

  When my father passes by, my body stiffens. I tell myself to relax. I shove a spoonful of food into my mouth. The swamp cooler has kept the room temperature down but beads of sweat still collect at my hairline. Through the curtains I see other vehicles pulling into parking spots and dusty bodies slowly exiting the cramped cars.

  My grandmother sits down on the couch to drink a beer and my grandfather starts to tinker with the pots over the stove. I have slipped inside the daily routine of the farmworkers and it makes me feel I'm in the way. I don't belong here anymore. The familiar claustrophobia begins to take hold of me; I used to suffer from it for years before I finally got out. The crowded walls are no help. For as long as I can remember my grandmother has been nailing every piece of gaudy memorabilia into the concrete, from family photographs to meat market calendars to the cheap Mother's Day presents my brother and I have given her over the years.

  “So you're going to Zacapu, you?” my grandmother asks before she lets out a small belch. When she says the name of our hometown her eyes light up.

  “Yes. And I can stay there all summer if I want,” I tell her. My tone is intentionally malicious, a way to remind her that I'm now free to travel wherever I want to go and she's not because my grandfather still keeps her like a prisoner. She knows this. She sinks back into a tired silence. It's much easier for her to turn the television on and stare empty-eyed into the screen than to deal with my usual antics, so she leans over to reach for the knob.

  Ashamed, I clear my plate and walk across the living room to do the first thing I said I'd do once I arrived: reclaim that photograph.

  The photograph is an old black-and-white one I inherited from my mother. The shot was taken back in 1969 when my parents were newlyweds. It shows my father, age twenty-three, in his slimmer, healthier youth, and my mother, age nineteen, in her youthful beauty, her face round and graceful. Their skin tones contrast nicely. My father's dark, my mother's light. I kept the photo tucked safely inside a book over the years, afraid it would be damaged by the sticky backings of our flimsy photo albums. Even when my father asked for it repeatedly, saying he wanted to have it blown up, I refused to let it go. But then he had the excuse that I was no longer living at home and that I might lose it, moving around the way I did. So I agreed with much trepidation to let him borrow it back in December.

  While my father showers, my brother breaks the bad news: it's been ruined. Since it was a 5 x 7, the photograph could not fit inside any regular envelope, so we had settled on a red one made specifically for a Christmas card. The match was perfect and the color gave it a level of conspicuousness that ensured it wouldn't be lost so easily. But the logic backfired: somehow the envelope had made an inviting coaster and someone had placed a wet glass of water on top of it. The ink had run through and my parents' faces look bloodied and wounded.

  “I don't understand,” I tell Alex as he hands me the picture. “What the fuck was he going to do with it after he blew it up?” My brother and I are the only ones who communicate in English, which we only speak when we're alone. We're the same height and wear the same shoe size, but we resemble each other in no other way.

  “I don't know,” my brother says. “Put it up on his wall, I guess.”

  We both know my father's second wife would never let that happen.

  Wh
en my father, shirtless and dripping water from the strands of his hair, comes into the room, he looks up and down at me before he concludes, “You lost weight, you.” Each time I see him bare like this I'm surprised anew by the presence of tattoos on his body, the greenish tint of the clover on his shoulder barely visible on his dark skin.

  “This is how you fucking take care of things? Who the fuck did this?” I yell, waving the picture at him. From the corner of my eye I can tell my brother is amazed at how I waste no time. At five-foot-five, I'm much taller than my father, and this gives me a false sense of power and authority over him in moments like these.

  “It was an accident,” he says. “It was nobody's fault.”

  “Yes, it was my fault,” I say. “For letting you have the picture!”

  “I said it was nobody's fault,” he insists. “Why don't you just leave things alone for once?”

  “And what? Ignore that this picture is damaged? What do you want me to do from now on, pretend it always looked this way?”

  “You're making a big deal out of this,” he says.

  “It's a huge deal to me!” I say, my voice shaky, my hand trembling. I'm upset that my father isn't. “I can't believe you let this happen! I can't believe—”

  “Why don't you shut up?” he interrupts, his voice low and firm. “What happened to this photograph hurts me much more than it does you.”

  And with that retort I feel as if he's kicked me in the stomach because I know it's true, so I throw the photograph at him and it bounces off his beer belly. In the living room my grandparents are sitting close to each other like a pair of plump hens. When they see me storming out in anger they both say at once, “Already?”

  “Already?” they ask, because this is also a part of the homecoming ceremony, though the fighting with my father has never happened so quickly. As soon as I walk out into the desert heat I feel like a fool. I have nowhere else to run and the sun is blazing. In fact, didn't I just flee somewhere else to get to here? I'm like a child in a tantrum, and for a fleeting second I think about how my lover put up with this kind of behavior all year. Is this why I get my ass kicked in Riverside? I shake that thought out of my head. I need to stop thinking like that. And then I keep thinking like that. My lover hits me, though my father has never dared to. My grandfather was the one who used to lay his hands on me, on all of us. Why don't I feel that level of rage for him? Why am I so cruel to everyone else?

  My head continues to spin so I drop down on my knees in a dramatic display of grief. And how silly my theater is, I conclude, because behind me the apartment is all windows and clear curtains, and full of the faces of people who have never learned after all these years how to rush over to a person in distress in a noble attempt at rescue.

  In the hot silence a radio forces out the sound waves of a song that reminds me of the times I picked grapes alongside my family. I was never good at it, my hands so small and clumsy. I have my mother's hands. I heard she was never good at picking either. One of my hands can disappear inside my lover's fist. I want to press my hands to my ears. How I hate that song with its jovial accordion and a singer whose falsetto tears down the distance between the work fields I never wanted to come back to and me.

  I get up and dust my knees. Yet another déjà vu: I'm in the fields, beneath the grapevines. To reach the low bunches, I have to get down and sink into the hot soil. Even with the thick denim the heat comes through and my joints become as numb as my head. How I wished for the days to be old enough to go away and never have to suffer pain like this. As I walk into the living room again I know I haven't ventured very far because I'm back. And I keep going back.

  Ghost Whisper to My Lover

  Maybe this will explain, querido, why I keep returning to my father.

  It's 1975 and my father is the bass player for Dinastía, a band that plays throughout the state of Michoacán, but which is mainly in demand locally in our hometown of Zacapu. They perform for weddings, baptisms, graduations, quinceañeras, and anniversary parties. On occasion my mother, who stays home to care for my younger brother, lets me tag along to the band's engagements, on the condition that I not wander off and that I stay within my father's line of sight. At five years old, I'm curious but cautious about straying far from the stage, where I know my father keeps a watchful eye.

  After much fine-tuning and fuss over the lighting, electrical plugs, and wiring, the band starts their performance. The speakers blare out into the crowds now stirred into quick motion. Some people take a partner, others gyrate without one, but then the bodies converge on the dance space into a single moving mass, heads bobbing and elbows swinging as if tossing around in water. I make a feeble attempt at dancing cumbia, slightly bending my knees to the rhythm. But by the middle of the show, I grow weary; staring at so much vigorous activity absorbs my energy. I find a place to nap close to the stage, and then I roll my body beneath the wooden platform, where the vibrations lull me and assure me that my father is close by, hovering above me, in fact, like a moth, or the moon.

  I fall asleep.

  The dream: I'm completely naked. The band members have reached the pinnacle of their enthusiasm and so has the audience, responding wildly to the riffs of the music. I'm possessed by the excitement and jump into the middle of the stage, my baby penis exposed and my dimpled hand waving a two-finger V. The crowd cheers and greets me with a parade of peace symbols. I continue to negotiate the maze of wires and cords as I prance around barefoot, further motivated by the crowd's reaction to my presence. Suddenly, the song comes to an end, the speakers let go of the final note like the string to a kite, and the crowd shrinks into silence. A lonely feminine voice soars through the haze of lighting and demands: “Let him speak!” A burst of whistling and applause follows.

  I become paralyzed. I feel my father come up from the back of the stage. He has pulled a microphone from its stand and taps it twice to confirm it's functioning. He kneels behind me and pushes the micro-phone to my face. With the guitar still strapped to his torso, he moves in closer, and the strings stinging my backbone edge me forward.

  “Say something,” my father whispers, simply a voice now, permeable and elusive as smoke.

  The faces in the crowd grow like balloons. The widening eyes mock me. There I stand, naked, scared, with my father hiding behind me, leaving me vulnerable to these strangers. I succumb to the urge to urinate and release a stream—a weak arc of yellow that glitters with the stage lights.

  I wake up to the sound of applause. The band has just finished playing another number. My crotch is damp and warm. I scurry out from under the stage to find my father and I'm surprised that he isn't looking for me. An anxious gaze distorts my face as I consider waving my arm to get my father's attention, but I know this won't work because he's too distracted at the moment. My father keeps his smile fixed on his audience—his mouth, all teeth, all satisfaction, all bliss. Is that my father? I ask myself. And the answer fills me with a wonder I have never experienced before.

  Now Leaving Mexicali, Baja California, Norte

  The Mexicali bus station is bustling with people, some dragging their luggage across the floor by a strap like a pet on a leash, others sitting as they fan themselves to cool off, their suitcases prone like coffins at their feet. The grainy voice over the speakers announces gate numbers, schedule changes, arrivals, and departures in a flat, disinterested tone that seems to ridicule the level of anxiety in the lobby. Armed policemen walk about with a sense of purpose though visibly bored, and the taxi drivers accost anyone with a packed bag.

  “Taxi, amigos?” a man in a yellow guayabera asks us as we stand at the entrance of the station, trying to figure out where to go.

  My father waves him away.

  “Where are you headed?” the taxi driver insists. “I'll make you a good deal.”

  “Michoacán,” my father says.

  The driver quickly turns to a couple with a child in tow passing by. “Taxi, amigos?” he asks them.

  “F
irst class is in the other lobby,” I point out. My shirt is sticky on my skin. For some reason I decided to wear white and I'm dismayed I've already collected grime on the brief car ride to the station. The blue Mustang will stay parked at my aunt's old house, though I doubt it will remain unused. I can already picture my cousins joy-riding into the sleepiest hours of the night. When they dropped us off at the bus station I detected that mischievous glint in their eyes.

  “I don't have enough money for first class, you,” my father informs me. My body spasms, giving me a clear signal that this is the start to another bad ending.

  “Well, I don't want to take a bus that's going to break down half-way to Michoacán,” I say.

  “But first class is a waste,” he argues. “What are you paying for, a can of soda? Some stale peanuts?”

  “No, I'm paying for a working toilet and air-conditioning.”

  “But I can't afford first class,” he says.