[APPLAUSE]
I think she'll be happier, maybe, with the novel
because she gets to be a war hero, which she was,
which makes me very happy.
So it's a-coming.
This is a chapter, then, from The House of Broken Angels.
And I mentioned to you The House of Broken Angels
is based on real stuff.
If you haven't read it, it's OK because we sold it to Hulu,
so watch it.
Yeah.
That means-- yeah, thanks-- but Cindy can tell you,
it means nothing.
But they might make it.
You don't know.
But it was based on my brother's funeral.
I know several of you've heard this chapter before.
I apologize.
Like I said, I'm probably going to retire it.
But it was a crazy thing.
It was the Mexican Finnegans Wake.
My brother's mom-- not my mother, but his mom--
died on a weekend, like on a Friday,
and he was dying of cancer.
And he was going to have his--
the family decided to give him a living
wake, a farewell party for his birthday,
the following weekend.
And my brother was so mad at his mom.
He was like, mom, you ruined everything.
You died before my birthday.
So they had the funeral for her on Saturday
and then his good-bye wake on Sunday.
And we were there for all of this.
And there is stuff in the book--
I'll just throw you out just an example of the ridiculousness
in families.
I'm sure you have crazy families, too, on some level.
One of my brothers has a son who's in a rock band,
and he was at grandma's funeral.
And he caught my brother, called him.
He said, oye, ven, ven pa' ca.
Carlos, ven.
So Carlos came up, and he had hair sprayed sticking up.
And I said, hey, Carlos.
And my brother says--
and remember, this is grandma's funeral.
The organs.
[IMITATES ORGAN MUSIC]
And my brother says, hey, Luis, Carlos tiene un conjunto de
Rock and Roll.
I said, you do?
You got a-- yeah, tío, yeah.
And I said, what kind of music do you guys play?
And he says, Norwegian death metal, tío.
[LAUGHTER]
Border culture, right?
I said, wait a minute, a bunch of Mexicans
playing Norwegian death metal?
He said, yeah, man.
Yeah.
And I said to him, what do you play?
He says, I'm the lead singer, man.
And I stupidly said, you're the lead singer?
Do you do that Norwegian demon voice they do?
And he goes, extreme!
Like this.
In the middle of the funeral.
And my poor brother's like, ay, mijo, shhh, it's OK.
It was like that.
I knew we were in for a heck of a weekend.
And so the whole novel came from my brother,
who was not demonstrative, asking
me to come get in bed with him because he was very ill.
He died that next week.
And I did, and we spent this day together.
And we were remembering past things.
And back in the day, I was always on tour.
I used to joke with Cindy--
I felt like the literary Bachman-Turner Overdrive
going from bowling alley to bowling alley.
And I had to leave.
And I got to Dallas, and he had died.
And I had to go home and bury him.
But anyway, we were remembering this little story
about my grandma.
And so I turned it into a chapter
that came just when you needed some laughs.
I'm going to do a little shorter version because I don't
want to go over time because I'll
get in trouble with the staff.
¿Oh, no?
Let me take my jacket off then.
So it's a chapter called Parrots and--
I see, people have heard it.
I'm sorry, I'm an idiot.
And it's based on some misbehavior
of my grandmother's which will come clear during the story.
And it's a story about the two brothers named Angel.
There's Big Angel and Little Angel, half-brothers.
And they have the same name because their dad
forgot he'd used it once, which is actually true.
My older brother's name is Luis, and I'm Luis,
and he had to go by his-- so he's known as Octavio
because I was Luis.
Player dads.
So this is the story.
So Little Angel is in his new house,
Big Angel has the family in Tijuana.
He's just gotten his green card.
He's come to the United States thinking he's on easy street
and realizes that y'all gringos work way too hard.
He's exhausted and cranky all the time.
There's no rest for him.
And he has a car, an old Rambler.
And every week, papa sends him to go pick up his mother
in Tijuana and bring him back.
And he sends Little Angel with his brother
so he can become more Mexican.
Give him a little dose of Mexicano, come on.
So Big Angel doesn't appreciate that.
So they've driven to Tijuana, and I'll just
pick up where they pull up to the house.
It's based on my grandma's house where
I spent my boyhood, on Rampa Independencia in Tijuana.
They pulled up the Rambler to the yellow house
on the side of the hill.
Big Angel was exhausted, chain smoking, he got out,
he was in no mood for anything.
Little Angel was in the backseat with his MAD magazines,
and he climbed out.
The big yellow wall was in front of the house.
And stuck in the top of the cement wall, Mexican style,
were shattered Pepsi-Cola and beer bottles embedded
in the cement so that if any bad guy snuck in to try to steal
mamá's underwear, they would be lacerated.
The boys opened the gate, went to the front door,
let themselves in.
They were in the living room of the house.
There was no sign of mamá.
They knew she was probably packing in her bedroom,
and they stood there.
In a corner, in a wrought iron cage,
sat the famous parrot of the De La Cruz family.
He was named Periquito De La Cruz.
It was a green parrot who sat in the cage all day, bored out
of his mind, though they had put in a mirror,
and he had discovered the invading parrot in the mirror.
And all day he would look at it, and then he'd sidle over to it,
and he'd say, periquito, periquito, periquito De La
Cruz!
And he'd strut back to his normal spot
till he'd see it again.
And he'd go back and lay the smack down on it.
Periquito, periquito, periquito De La Cruz!
Mamá heard this ruckus, came out, ahh, the parrot, she said.
She was dressed in her finest clothes.
She had her little red pocketbook
and her little shoulder bag with her clothes.
Came out, and she said, yes, mijo--
speaking to Big Angel--
I told you once before, we could make a great negocio.
We could have a business selling periquitos verdes in San Diego.
Those poor Mexicans don't have green parrots,
and you can't be mexicanos sin un perico.
He was like, a-má, I've told you a million times you can't take
a parrot across the border.
It's illegal.
OK?
Dame la bolsa.
He took her bag.
He walked out.
Little Angel looked back and forth, followed him out.
They should have listened when mamá adjusted her little jacket
and said, we'll see.
They got in the car and they started down the hill.
It was a rocky, dirt-filled street.
He had to drive very carefully.
Little Angel in the back, mamá in the front, and she said,
mijito, I want you to take me to the fruit market before we go
to the border.
He said, ay, a-má, we're short on time, no? ¿Vamos a ir?
A-má, you can't take fruit across the border.
No me importa si puedes o si no.
Yo soy tu mamá.
Vas a hacer lo que te digo.
OK, OK.
We'll go.
So he, instead of turning left and going to the border,
he turned right and he went to the great fruit
market of Tijuana.
It's an ancient spot surrounded by old buildings.
In the middle is an opening with a parking lot full of beaten up
trucks, men carrying cebollas, sugar cane, watermelons,
mangos, the blacktop is shellacked, shiny,
with decades of pulp and juice squeezed into the blacktop
by the trucks.
Mamá got out, took her little purse, and headed off.
The boys got out of the cars and they looked,
and they were horrified to see she was going to a far corner
with a sign that said bird salesman.
Little Angel said, dude, are we in trouble?
And Big Angel said, I don't know.
Let's go see what's going on.
They followed her.
And she got to the workbench and knocked on the wood.
And a nice young man came out of the back.
Sí, señora, sí.
Joven, ¿tiene usted perico verde?
He said, oh, yes, of course.
Yes, but do you have tamed perico verde?
Hand-tamed?
I need the most friendly, delicate, friendly, nice,
cuddly.
He said, sí, no problem.
I raised him myself.
Let me go get you el más mansito.
And he disappeared inside.
The two boys were standing beside her looking
at each other like, oh, great.
He came out with a little green parrot on his finger.
And it did look quite tame.
It was looking around at everything.
How interesting everything was.
And he said, would you like to hold?
Oh, yes, please.
And she put her finger, tapped against his belly
like you do with a green parrot, and he stepped up
on her finger.
And then she went into that bizarre granny babble
that Mexican grandmothers do with babies and puppies.
Ay, mira que bonito el periquito.
Que bonito.
Ay, mira la boquita que tiene.
If the parrot was carried away, he
was like, yes, I'm very handsome, it's true.
Watching her finger, fluffed up a little bit.
She says, sí, sí.
[TONGUE CLICKING]
[INAUDIBLE]
It answered her.
[TONGUE CLICKING]
Ay, que lindo el periquito.
While she was doing this, she reached down to her pocketbook,
opened it, dug around in it and came up with a little bottle
with an eyedropper on top.
And she put it down and she unscrewed it.
The bird salesman and the two boys
were like, what the hell is she--
she took it out and she squeezed up an eyedropper-load of fluid
and she tapped it on his beak.
Ándale, abre el piquito.
Ándale, abre.
Abre el piquito.
He opened his mouth, and she quickly
put three drops in his mouth.
Put the thing back on the bottle,
put the bottle in the bag and looked at the boys, and said,
it's tequila.
And soon the bird started to sway
and started to kind of rock a little bit.
She's watching.
And then suddenly, it fell over backwards.
She caught him in her hand.
She laid him down on the workbench.
His little feet in the air, and he
was making little parrot snores.
[HIGH-PITCHED SNORING]
She got her pocketbook and she took out
a sheet of newspaper, set it out on the bench
and then picked up the sleeping parrot and she laid it
on the newspaper and she rolled him up.
It was a cone, tail down in the cone,
the head up in the wide part.
He looked like a parrot-flavored snow cone.
And then, the nightmare moment happened.
She embarrassed all the boys because she pulled open
the top of her dress and, inserting the narrow part,
put him deep inside and then tamped him down,
and then she adjusted herself, and she said,
OK, let's go to San Diego.
So Big Angel, he was sure he was going to prison.
And he drove very carefully.
In those days, it wasn't a high-tech border.
It was a little plywood shed with a barstool and a phone.
That was it.
And the US Customs agents would look at license plates
and check a typed list of bad guys
to see if it was a bad guy.
And there was a ritual--
it was almost religious that happened at this crossing.
Big Angel pulled up very slowly, put it in park,
sat looking straight ahead.
Mamá, next to him, looking straight ahead.
Little Angel in the back, I don't know what's going on.
And the agent stepped out, shook out his leg.
¡Amigo!
He said.
¡Tiene usted papeles!
Green card.
All right, buddy, good.
He bent down.
¡Señora!
¡Tiene usted papeles!
Visa.
All right, ma'am.
Looked at Little Angel back, hey, buddy, you have papers?
I'm a US citizen, man.
Great, man.
He stepped back.
And then the other part of the ritual was, amigos,
¿tienen ustedes licores en el tronco del carro?
And every driver said, no, even though they
had a load of booze.
And they pulled it off.
They had pulled it off.
The agent was convinced, and he began to turn away from them.
He was going to signal the next car to come forward.
All Little Angel could see was his belly
turning in the window.
And it got-- maybe 3/4 of the way away from their car,
and the hand was rising when the parrot awoke.
The hand was rising, and there came this cry of, ahhhh!
Everything stopped.
The border agent's hand went down,
the belly rotated back to the window.
Ahhhh!
He looked in.
He couldn't tell what was going on,
but suddenly a horrifying thing happened.
It tried to escape.
And mamá's bust line started moving by itself.
And she looked down, and she said to him,
I don't even know what's happening.
Now, 10 years after this event, Little Angel
went to the movies, and he saw a film
that reminded him for the rest of his life
of his wonderful grandmother.
It was a movie called Alien.
So as the federal agent watched, suddenly it came forth out
of her dress, screaming, ahhh!
Biting everything.
She was watching.
She said, isn't this interesting?
And then it burst out.
Poof.
Little green feathers.
And it began flying around the inside of the car.
Everybody watching it, the agent watching it.
Everybody freaking out, except for mamá, who, very calmly,
reached down and opened the passenger side window.
And in that moment, all of them in unity,
border forgotten, Mexican nationals, US citizen,
US federal agent, watched that parrot enter the United States
illegally.
That's it.
[APPLAUSE]