So we just left him there. In a kind of peace. Next to his own shit.
Vagabundo.
The last week of my period of service we had to pull weeds along this giant paved road that led up to some fancy ass facility of some sort up on the hill. In a wealthy neighborhood filled with white people with Mexican and Filipino house cleaners. The “trees” that lined the grand lane were tiny, so the only shade you could get was on part of your face and maybe a shoulder. We went through the giant yellow plastic vat of water in the first two hours — I think it was something like 98 degrees that day. Goddamn those little paper cone cups.
By the last week my body had become used to the labor. I didn’t get blisters and my wrists didn’t ache and I’d stocked up on Vicodin so my back felt like anyone’s. I didn’t get dizzy in the sun and I brought enough food in my sack lunch and I smoked Jimarcus’ cigarettes and Ernesto and I took our breaks together to practice English. I was not unhappy. I had a pretty great tan.
But really, I was going home, to my plush little bouge life. Half of them were going to jail. Ernesto disappeared partway through the ninth week. So that “we” I’m using? Well. It’s just language.
At the top of the hill we got to rest. The shade of an enormous Torrey Pine tree umbrellad out and held us so we could feel the coolness of breeze. We drank water. We ate our pathetic little brown sack lunches. I thought about Ernesto playing guitar, but my guess is he wasn’t.
That day though what I also felt was it’s over. This small thing I did with these men I’ll never see again. Something about that made me feel irrecoverably sad. But I was of course also thrilled to be “done” with my punishment. I closed my eyes and drank a Coke from a glass bottle. So simple. I wished Ernesto were there. Drinking a Coke. When I opened my eyes, I stared at my hands and how not Mexican they looked. My hands, they just looked … dumb.
Then I looked up the hill and saw the giant concrete and wood sign of the facility we had just carved our way up to.
The Cerritos Olympic Swim Center.
I’d competed there when I was 14. I’d won the 100-meter breaststroke. Sometimes I think I’ve been everywhere before.
Conversion
I’VE BEEN THINKING. MAYBE RECOVERING CATHOLICS turn to movies for salvation. I mean, in an informal poll that I took recently, a whole lot of ex-catholics seem unusually moved by film. The bigger and more epic the better. And we still really like sitting in the dark- if they ever get rid of movie theaters you are going to see a bunch of lapsed catholics wandering around in the street looking for a dark box to go sit inside so we can experience catharsis …
Enter the Mingo, stage left.
Andy Mingo in a shitty ass Isuzu Trooper. After my head-on collision, an M FA thesis student of mine at San Diego State University walked into my life like a movie star, offering to loan me one of his cars. By the time I met him in San Diego, I was a woman who had to crash her car.
The first time I really saw Andy was at my SDSU job interview. He very nearly fucked my shit up — sitting there looking a little like Marlon Brando. I’m up there trying like crazy to sound cogent and smart, jawing it around postmodernism like someone a university should hire and he’s zinging me with puffy lips and intense stares and is that a flattened spot just above his nose like in On the Waterfront? I swear to god the line “I coulda been a contendah” crept into my frontal lobe. I distinctly remember thinking, whoa. That guy is trouble.
When it came time for the question answer portion of the presentation, Andy Mingo raised his hand and asked, “What is your teaching philosophy with regard to what graduate students in creative writing should be reading?” All the grad students leaned forward at me.
I said, “Everything. They should read everything they can get their hands on. What they love, what they hate, all of it. You wouldn’t jump into an empty pool, would you? Literature is the medium. You have to swim in it.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. He glared at me. Pissed. It was not the answer he was apparently hoping for.
What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo. How many books have you written, big sexy looking guy? You’ve got a problem with reading? You can kiss my ass.
Miraculously, I got the job.
Every day I saw him in the graduate writing workshop Andy stared so hard at me I thought my skull might fracture. Or something in me, anyway.
After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into my office and brought me a novel manuscript. A good one. And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars. Mine, was totaled. Like my life.
I borrowed the car.
When I drove his car around I could smell him and feel him. In the seat and on the steering wheel. In the holder thing between seats where I found cassette tapes he listened to. Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublime. In the glove compartment where I found a lighter and rolling papers. On the car floor he’d so obviously worked hard to vacuum. The engine ran hot.
The kind of teacher I was, I’d meet the grad students to go over their writing anyplace but my office. I’ve never believed in institutional authority. So I’d let the grad student choose where we’d meet — let them name a place where they felt like themselves — and I would go there to talk with them about writing. With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blossoms and spoke of writing.
That sentence cracked me up. Immediately it was not about writing. Man-lust fucks a girl up.
We both wore sunglasses. Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw. We both threw out a few mock barbs. Neither flinched. We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos. Dead even. And when I asked him about the references to Italy in his novel, he began to narrate his lifestory — so I came back at him with a bit of mine.
Andy grew up in Reno. And what was coming out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory.
“My mother was a single mother. She taught math. I’ve always hated math. I grew up with a series of father stand-ins… guys with names like ‘Pidge.’ ”
I countered with “My mother was an alcoholic pathological liar. On the other hand, she was a great storyteller.”
“I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere’s ‘Kicks’ nightclub when I was 19.”
“Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about how when I was 19 I was in Monte’s basement.
“The same,” he said.
“I’ve been swimming with Kathy Acker,” I said, trying quite hard to impress him.
“Who is Kathy Acker?”
Goose egg. Why had I said that?
“My father was in the C.I.A. He died of a heart attack when I was three. Well at least that’s the official story. He was 33, so who knows.”
That was a good one. I had to pause and pretend to drink my latte. “33. That was jesus’ age.” I have no idea why I said that. Why in the world did I bring up jesus? Idiot. Then I said, “My father … my father …”
“Your father what?” he asked.