'"67 Impala Super Sport--
mayate green, a June bug dance--
that loco worked overtime, worked double time.
We're talking Christmas and Easter,
stocking the aisles by the pallet-load.
Got him a promotion and a paint job--
green and gold as the silken mayates
we'd catch on mesquite bark, when the summer clouds would
roil angry in the Rincons.
The three coats of paint cost a grand apiece, and the wheels--
olvídate.
He got a deal on those.
He went on dayshift and wears a tie--
assistant grocery manager.
He keeps those aisles as straight as that car.
Too bad, it's up for sale.
He went and knocked up his novia celebrating the promotion
with a case of Coors and that long backseat.
He keeps telling me about her black, black hair
and her breath on his ear, sweet as tequila.
She's a nice girl and all, pero man, to give up that car.
'69 Nova--"
[CLEARS THROAT]
"It belonged to my Nino Ramón originally--
a gift to him from my mother for his departure to college.
She was working then, making good money counting
money for the Capin's Department Store.
Ramón installed the dual exhaust,
that rattled the windows from the street, and the fat,
black sticker of an American flag.
He grew his hair long and didn't go to Vietnam.
That car, blue as lightning, crackling
across the black monsoon summer sky,
streaking from Nogales along the dark summer highway.
Years later, my father took the Nova back and forth
from the air base.
The blue light blanched-- blue lightning blanched and oxidized
by the jealous summer sun, so my father stripped the paint down
to silvered metal and primered her white as a sheet--
dull and matte as an old horse, a ghost horse.
I was 15, and Tom and I had our eyes and plans on that car.
But the three gears and two-- and eight cylinders
were deemed too much, though I suspect
my father lost the title to a full house
against his two-pair.
Mine and Tom's death mobile never carried us anywhere--
not to the cinema, or stale classrooms,
or to watch the Pantano fill and run,
flash-flooded lightning bluing our eyes.
'79 Monte Carlo--
That car was ugly--
a big steel box, but it looked good as a lowrider.
Almost anything looks good as a lowrider.
The Monte Carlo's one saving grace--
the front seats would swivel outward like an office chair.
There's an old joke that asks why
we drive so low to the ground.
It makes it easier to pick lettuce, ese.
Why else would we put a hydraulic suspension on a car?
Go pick your own fucking lettuce,
and we'll pick up the pretty girls, cruise the boulevard,
and celebrate this life, ripe with summer.
'82 El Camino-- it was Tio Cosme's last quixotic
wish that we load his coffin in the bed of the El Camino
to drive him to the grave, draped with the American flag
he'd served all his life.
That El Camino sliding tan and immaculate
through the streets of Nogales.
Everyone crossed themselves as Cosme motored by.
Renee in the driver's seat, taking his brother
for one last ride, the air--
so hot and heavy in May, and the seven guns flaring
their three-toned salute, and the flag to my tia--
a dark triangle of midnight, and I couldn't, for anything,
remember the last time it rained."