Don’t you believe it. She ran off with King Kong Cárdenas, a professional wrestler from Crystal City and a sweetie. I know her cousin Lerma, and we saw her just last week at the Floore Country Store in Helotes. Hell, she bought us a beer, two-stepped and twirled away to “Hey Baby Qué Pasó.”
Remember the Alamo
Gustavo Galindo, Ernie Sepúlveda, Jessie Robles, Jr., Ronnie DeHoyos, Christine Zamora …
When I was a kid and my ma added the rice to the hot oil, you know how it sizzles and spits, it sounds kind of like applause, right? Well, I’d always bow and say Gracias, mi querido público, thank you, and blow kisses to an imaginary crowd. I still do, kind of as a joke. When I make Spanish rice or something and add it to the oil. It roars, and I bow, just a little so no one would guess, but I bow, and I’m still blowing kisses, only inside.
Mary Alice Luján, Santiago Sanabria, Timoteo Herrera …
But I’m not Rudy when I perform. I mean, I’m not Rudy Cantú from Falfurrias anymore. I’m Tristán. Every Thursday night at the Travisty. Behind the Alamo, you can’t miss it. One-man show, girl. Flamenco, salsa, tango, fandango, merengue, cumbia, cha-cha-chá. Don’t forget. The Travisty. Remember the Alamo.
Lionel Ontiveros, Darlene Limón, Alex Vigil …
There are other performers, the mambo queens—don’t get me wrong, it’s not that they’re not good at what they do. But they’re not class acts. Daniela Romo impersonators. Lucha Villa look-alikes. Carmen Mirandas. Fruit department, if you ask me. But Tristán is very—how do I put it?—elegant. I mean, when he walks down the street, he turns heads like this. Passionate and stormy. And arrogant. Yes, arrogant a little. Sweetheart, in this business you have to be.
Blás G. Cortinas, Armando Salazar, Freddie Mendoza …
Tristán holds himself like a matador. His clothes magnificent. Absolutely perfect, like a second skin. The crowd throbbing—Tris-TAN, Tris-TAN, Tris-TAN!!! Tristán smiles, the room shivers. He raises his arms, the wings of a hawk. Spotlight clean as the moon of Andalucía. Audience breathless as water. And then … Boom! The heels like shotguns. A dance till death. I will love you hasta la muerte, mi vida. Do you hear? Until death.
Brenda Núñez, Jacinto Tovar, Henry Bautista, Nancy Rose Luna …
Because every Thursday night Tristán dances with La Calaca Flaca. Tristán takes the fag hag by the throat and throttles her senseless. Tristán’s not afraid of La Flaquita, Thin Death.
Arturo Domínguez, Porfiria Escalante, Gregory Gallegos Durán, Ralph G. Soliz …
Tristán leads Death across the floor. ¿Verdad que me quieres, mi cariñito, verdad que sí? Hasta la muerte. I’ll show you how to ache.
Paul Villareal Saucedo, Monica Riojas, Baltazar M. Lopez …
Say it. Say you want me. You want me. Te quiero. Look at me. I said look at me. Don’t take your eyes from mine, Death. Yesssss. My treasure. My precious. Mi pedacito de alma desnuda. You want me so bad it hurts. A tug-of-war, a tease and stroke. Smoke in the mouth. Hasta la muerte. Ha!
Dorotea Villalobos, Jorge H. Hull, Aurora Anguiano Román, Amado Tijerina, Bobby Mendiola …
Tristán’s family? They love him no matter what. His ma proud of his fame—That’s my m’ijo. His sisters jealous because he’s the pretty one. But they adore him, and he gives them tips on their makeup.
At first his father said What’s this? But then when the newspaper articles started pouring in, well, what could he do but send photocopies to the relatives in Mexico, right? And Tristán sends them all free backstage passes. They drive all the way from the Valley for the opening of the show. Even the snooty relatives from Monterrey. It’s unbelievable. Last time he invited his family they took the whole damn third floor of La Mansión del Rio. I’m not kidding.
He’s the greatest live act in San Anto. Doesn’t put up with bull. No way. Either loves you or hates you. Ferocious, I’m telling you. Muy hot-hot-hot or cold as a witch’s tough chichi. Isn’t tight with nobody but family and friends. Doesn’t need to be. Go on, say it. I want you to. I’ll school you. I’ll show you how it’s done.
See this ring? A gift from an art admirer and dance aficionado. Sent $500 worth of red roses the night of his opening. You should’ve seen the dressing room. Roses, roses, roses. Honey! Then he sent the ring, little diamonds set in the shape of Texas. Just because he was fond of art. That’s how it is. Say it. Te quiero. Say you want me. You want me.
The bitch and Tristán are like this. La Flaca crazy about him. Lots of people love Tristán like that. Because Tristán dares to be different. To stand out in a crowd. To have style and grace. And elegancia. Tristán has that kind of appeal.
He’s not scared of the low-rider types who come up at the Esquire Bar, that beer-stinking, piss-soaked hole, jukebox screaming Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry.” ¿Eres maricón? You a fag? Gives them a look like the edge of a razor across lip.
Dresses all in white in the summer, all in black in the winter. No in-between except for the show. That’s how he is. Tristán. But he’s never going to be anything but honest. Carry his heart in his hand. You know it.
And when he loves, gives himself body and soul. None of this fooling around. A love so complete you have to be ready for it. Courageous. Put on your seat belt, sweets. A ride to the finish. So bad it aches.
A dance until death. Every Thursday night when he glides with La Flaca. Wraps his arms around her. La Muertita with her shit-eating, bless-her-heart grin. Doesn’t faze him. La Death with her dress up the crack of her ass. The girl’s pathetic.
What a pair! The two like Ginger and Fred tangoing across the floor. Two angels, heavenly bodies floating cheek to cheek. Or nalga to nalga. Ay, girl, I’m telling you. Wáchale, muchacha. With those maracas and the cha-cha-chá of those bones-bones-bones, she’s a natural. ¿Verdad que me quieres, mi cariñito? ¿Verdad que sí?
Tristán? Never feels better than on Thursday nights when he’s working her. When he’s living those moments, the audience breathing, sighing out there, roaring when the curtains go up and the lights and music begin. That’s when Tristán’s life starts. Without ulcers or gas stations or hospital bills or bloody sheets or pubic hairs in the sink. Lovers in your arms pulling farther and farther away from you. Dried husks, hulls, coffee cups. Letters home sent back unopened.
Tristán’s got nothing to do with the ugly, the ordinary. With screen doors with broken screens or peeling paint or raw hallways. The dirty backyards, the muddy spittle in the toilet you don’t want to remember. Sweating, pressing himself against you, pink pink peepee blind and seamless as an eye, pink as a baby rat, your hand small and rubbing it, yes, like this, like so, and your skull being crushed by that sour smell and the taste like tears inside your sore mouth.
No. Tristán doesn’t have memories like that. Only amor del corazón, that you can’t buy, right? That is never used to hurt anybody. Never ashamed. Love like a body that wants to give and give of itself, that wants to create a universe where nothing is dirty, no one is hurting, no one sick, that’s what Tristán thinks of when he dances.
Mario Pacheco, Ricky Estrada, Lillian Alvarado …
Say it. Say you want me. Te quiero. Like I want you. Say you love me. Like I love you. I love you. Te quiero, mi querido público. Te adoro. With all my heart. With my heart and with my body.
Ray Agustín Huerta, Elsa González, Frank Castro, Abelardo Romo, Rochell M. Garza, Nacianceno Cavazos, Nelda Therese Flores, Roland Guillermo Pedraza, Renato Villa, Filemón Guzmán, Suzie A. Ybañez, David Mondragón …
This body.
Never Marry a Mexican
Never marry a Mexican, my ma said once and always. She said this because of my father. She said this though she was Mexican too. But she was born here in the U.S., and he was born there, and it’s not the same, you know.
I’ll never marry. Not any man. I’ve known men too intimately. I’ve witnessed their infidelities, and I’ve helped them to it. Unzipped and unhooked and agreed to clandestine maneuvers. I’ve been accompl
ice, committed premeditated crimes. I’m guilty of having caused deliberate pain to other women. I’m vindictive and cruel, and I’m capable of anything.
I admit, there was a time when all I wanted was to belong to a man. To wear that gold band on my left hand and be worn on his arm like an expensive jewel brilliant in the light of day. Not the sneaking around I did in different bars that all looked the same, red carpets with a black grillwork design, flocked wallpaper, wooden wagon-wheel light fixtures with hurricane lampshades a sick amber color like the drinking glasses you get for free at gas stations.
Dark bars, dark restaurants then. And if not—my apartment, with his toothbrush firmly planted in the toothbrush holder like a flag on the North Pole. The bed so big because he never stayed the whole night. Of course not.
Borrowed. That’s how I’ve had my men. Just the cream skimmed off the top. Just the sweetest part of the fruit, without the bitter skin that daily living with a spouse can rend. They’ve come to me when they wanted the sweet meat then.
So, no. I’ve never married and never will. Not because I couldn’t, but because I’m too romantic for marriage. Marriage has failed me, you could say. Not a man exists who hasn’t disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I’ve loved. It’s because I believe too much in marriage that I don’t. Better to not marry than live a lie.
Mexican men, forget it. For a long time the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I rode to school every day, those weren’t men. Not men I considered as potential lovers. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chilean, Colombian, Panamanian, Salvadorean, Bolivian, Honduran, Argentine, Dominican, Venezuelan, Guatemalan, Ecuadorean, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, Costa Rican, Paraguayan, Uruguayan, I don’t care. I never saw them. My mother did this to me.
I guess she did it to spare me and Ximena the pain she went through. Having married a Mexican man at seventeen. Having had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor. But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish, who didn’t know enough to set a separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the silverware.
In my ma’s house the plates were always stacked in the center of the table, the knives and forks and spoons standing in a jar, help yourself. All the dishes chipped or cracked and nothing matched. And no tablecloth, ever. And newspapers set on the table whenever my grandpa sliced watermelons, and how embarrassed she would be when her boyfriend, my father, would come over and there were newspapers all over the kitchen floor and table. And my grandpa, big hardworking Mexican man, saying Come, come and eat, and slicing a big wedge of those dark green watermelons, a big slice, he wasn’t stingy with food. Never, even during the Depression. Come, come and eat, to whoever came knocking on the back door. Hobos sitting at the dinner table and the children staring and staring. Because my grandfather always made sure they never went without. Flour and rice, by the barrel and by the sack. Potatoes. Big bags of pinto beans. And watermelons, bought three or four at a time, rolled under his bed and brought out when you least expected. My grandpa had survived three wars, one Mexican, two American, and he knew what living without meant. He knew.
My father, on the other hand, did not. True, when he first came to this country he had worked shelling clams, washing dishes, planting hedges, sat on the back of the bus in Little Rock and had the bus driver shout, You—sit up here, and my father had shrugged sheepishly and said, No speak English.
But he was no economic refugee, no immigrant fleeing a war. My father ran away from home because he was afraid of facing his father after his first-year grades at the university proved he’d spent more time fooling around than studying. He left behind a house in Mexico City that was neither poor nor rich, but thought itself better than both. A boy who would get off a bus when he saw a girl he knew board if he didn’t have the money to pay her fare. That was the world my father left behind.
I imagine my father in his fanfarrón clothes, because that’s what he was, a fanfarrón. That’s what my mother thought the moment she turned around to the voice that was asking her to dance. A big show-off, she’d say years later. Nothing but a big show-off. But she never said why she married him. My father in his shark-blue suits with the starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, his felt fedora, his tweed topcoat with the big shoulders, and heavy British wing tips with the pin-hole design on the heel and toe. Clothes that cost a lot. Expensive. That’s what my father’s things said. Calidad. Quality.
My father must’ve found the U.S. Mexicans very strange, so foreign from what he knew at home in Mexico City where the servant served watermelon on a plate with silverware and a cloth napkin, or mangos with their own special prongs. Not like this, eating with your legs wide open in the yard, or in the kitchen hunkered over newspapers. Come, come and eat. No, never like this.
How I make my living depends. Sometimes I work as a translator. Sometimes I get paid by the word and sometimes by the hour, depending on the job. I do this in the day, and at night I paint. I’d do anything in the day just so I can keep on painting.
I work as a substitute teacher, too, for the San Antonio Independent School District. And that’s worse than translating those travel brochures with their tiny print, believe me. I can’t stand kids. Not any age. But it pays the rent.
Any way you look at it, what I do to make a living is a form of prostitution. People say, “A painter? How nice,” and want to invite me to their parties, have me decorate the lawn like an exotic orchid for hire. But do they buy art?
I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any class. The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy that. The poor don’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if my education and the way I dress keeps us worlds apart. I don’t belong to any class. Not to the poor, whose neighborhood I share. Not to the rich, who come to my exhibitions and buy my work. Not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled.
When I was young, when I first left home and rented that apartment with my sister and her kids right after her husband left, I thought it would be glamorous to be an artist. I wanted to be like Frida or Tina. I was ready to suffer with my camera and my paint brushes in that awful apartment we rented for $150 each because it had high ceilings and those wonderful glass skylights that convinced us we had to have it. Never mind there was no sink in the bathroom, and a tub that looked like a sarcophagus, and floorboards that didn’t meet, and a hallway to scare away the dead. But fourteen-foot ceilings was enough for us to write a check for the deposit right then and there. We thought it all romantic. You know the place, the one on Zarzamora on top of the barber shop with the Casasola prints of the Mexican Revolution. Neon BIRRIA TEPATITLÁN sign round the corner, two goats knocking their heads together, and all those Mexican bakeries, Las Brisas for huevos rancheros and carnitas and barbacoa on Sundays, and fresh fruit milk shakes, and mango paletas, and more signs in Spanish than in English. We thought it was great, great. The barrio looked cute in the daytime, like Sesame Street. Kids hopscotching on the sidewalk, blessed little boogers. And hardware stores that still sold ostrich-feather dusters, and whole families marching out of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Sundays, girls in their swirly-whirly dresses and patent-leather shoes, boys in their dress Stacys and shiny shirts.
But nights, that was nothing like what we knew up on the north side. Pistols going off like the wild, wild West, and me and Ximena and the kids huddled in one bed with the lights off listening to it all, saying, Go to sleep, babies, it’s just firecrackers. But we knew better. Ximena would say, Clemencia, maybe we should go home. And I’d say, Shit! Because she knew as well as I di
d there was no home to go home to. Not with our mother. Not with that man she married. After Daddy died, it was like we didn’t matter. Like Ma was so busy feeling sorry for herself, I don’t know. I’m not like Ximena. I still haven’t worked it out after all this time, even though our mother’s dead now. My half brothers living in that house that should’ve been ours, me and Ximena’s. But that’s—how do you say it?—water under the damn? I can’t ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country. We didn’t say shit like that in our house.
Once Daddy was gone, it was like my ma didn’t exist, like if she died, too. I used to have a little finch, twisted one of its tiny red legs between the bars of the cage once, who knows how. The leg just dried up and fell off. My bird lived a long time without it, just a little red stump of a leg. He was fine, really. My mother’s memory is like that, like if something already dead dried up and fell off, and I stopped missing where she used to be. Like if I never had a mother. And I’m not ashamed to say it either. When she married that white man, and he and his boys moved into my father’s house, it was as if she stopped being my mother. Like I never even had one.
Ma always sick and too busy worrying about her own life, she would’ve sold us to the Devil if she could. “Because I married so young, mi’ja,” she’d say. “Because your father, he was so much older than me, and I never had a chance to be young. Honey, try to understand …” Then I’d stop listening.
That man she met at work, Owen Lambert, the foreman at the photo-finishing plant, who she was seeing even while my father was sick. Even then. That’s what I can’t forgive.
When my father was coughing up blood and phlegm in the hospital, half his face frozen, and his tongue so fat he couldn’t talk, he looked so small with all those tubes and plastic sacks dangling around him. But what I remember most is the smell, like death was already sitting on his chest. And I remember the doctor scraping the phlegm out of my father’s mouth with a white washcloth, and my daddy gagging and I wanted to yell, Stop, you stop that, he’s my daddy. Goddamn you. Make him live. Daddy, don’t. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And how I couldn’t hold myself up, I couldn’t hold myself up. Like if they’d beaten me, or pulled my insides out through my nostrils, like if they’d stuffed me with cinnamon and cloves, and I just stood there dry-eyed next to Ximena and my mother, Ximena between us because I wouldn’t let her stand next to me. Everyone repeating over and over the Ave Marías and Padre Nuestros. The priest sprinkling holy water, mundo sin fin, amén.