Oh.
So I'm going to switch over now to creative non-fiction.
But as I said, I was born in Tijuana,
and we were pretty poor.
We were like many people.
We were a dirt street, outhouse family,
which was a little rough on my mom
because she was a socialite from Manhattan,
and I won't go into it--
it's in the book.
But she married my dad in San Francisco thinking, I guess,
that she was going to be on Zorro's hacienda or something.
And there're going to be charros riding around singing.
And he maneuvered her down there to Tijuana
and she woke up to her horror in my grandma's house in Tijuana.
And in those days in the '50s, I used to kid about it
but it, was kind of like buying a Cadillac.
My dad came home with the big gringa, you know.
Check it out, Americana.
[LAUGHTER]
But it was pretty rough on my mom.
And anyway, it was a time of a lot of disease, and trouble,
and I was really sick.
I had all kinds of diseases, including tuberculosis.
And when we made the great leap from Tijuana to the ghetto,
our big move up, nobody could-- nobody
would babysit me because they were afraid
that I would make their families ill with the tuberculosis.
And my father at the time was working in the tuna cannery.
My mom was working in a department store
and they were frantic to find somebody
to babysit me during the day.
And it so happens that there was this wonderful man from La Paz
and his wife, Abelino García and his wife Mamá Chayo.
Abelino was a mestizo, half native person,
half mixed blood.
And Mamá Chayo was a pure blood indigenous woman.
And they were healers.
They were herbalists and curanderos and so forth.
I didn't-- we didn't know anything about it
and of course, and I was just a baby.
And Abelino worked at the cannery with my dad.
And my dad started telling him the story about poor Luisito,
who's so sick.
So Abelino said we'll take him.
And unbeknownst to my dad I--
they started ministering to me with teas and who knows what.
And they cleaned me up.
And as our sort of ghetto life descended
into horror, and unhappiness, and stuff,
I always had this family to go to.
So I tried to write about this for years, and years,
and I could not write about this family.
And if any of you have read any of my other stuff
in my first book of poems, I wrote a couple of poems
about them.
And then in my novel In Search Of Snow,
I hid them by basing the last third of the novel on them.
And it took me about 20 years of trying
to finally write something nonfiction about them.
To try to tell their truth without betraying it.
So this is the piece and it just-- for whatever reason,
it's turned out to be people's emotional favorite
from the book.
And I like to read it.
So I thought I'd read it for you.
It's called Sanctuary, which is truly
what their home was for me.
Take a sip.
And I will skip around a little bit
just because it's too long to read it all.
But I'll try not to cheat you of anything juicy.
"Mamá Chayo saved my life.
She allowed her husband, the mighty Abelino
to believe he had saved me.
But that is the way powerful Mexican women
work their medicine.
They let their men play act, and strut,
and believe they run the world.
Healing though, that has a woman's face.
I had come out of Tijuana ragged,
and skinny, and fighting for life.
I was three years old.
I had already survived German measles, intestinal infections,
chronic bronchial infections, scarlatina.
By the time we crossed the line into the United
States I had a skin ailment and I had tuberculosis.
Our good neighbors in that poor barrio wanted to help,
but I, tucked into the corners of couches,
coughed like a tiny Doc Holliday.
They had children too and they became convinced
I would infect them all, and they reluctantly
banned me from their homes.
My parents both had to work.
They were desperate for some place to park me.
The situation was hopeless, which
of course, is when miracles are supposed to happen.
My father was working one of the many tiresome
and depressing menial jobs that would occupy his attention
for the rest of his American life,
bread truck driver, busboy, bowling alley attendant.
In 1958, he had a job canning tuna at the big cannery
on the edge of San Diego Harbor.
My aunts got him the job.
He stood in his spot on the line from 7:00 in the morning
till six at night.
Sometimes he'd move off the conveyor belts
and gut fish with steel blades on long pole handles.
Tuna the size of sheep swung toward him on hooks.
He zipped them open, pale blood dripped off his rubber apron,
and soaked into his cuffs, and his socks.
My father used to come home at night smelling of fish.
All through my childhood cannery workers
who radiated fish stink seem to lurk
in every third corner with their white nurse shoes stained pink.
Abelino worked in the spot beside my father.
Perhaps it was the smell that broke down
the barrier between them.
Perhaps it was the wearying racket of the machinery.
Maybe it was just the numbing boredom
of belts delivering an unending flow of shredded flesh to them.
But my father, overcoming his natural sense
that Urreas were somehow superior to other Mexicans,
especially rustic Mexicans, began a friendship
with Abelino.
I believe it was Abelino's iron heart bearing that
won my father's respect.
His face looked like it was carved from oak.
To look at him you'd think his bones were older
than time, old enough to be rusty within him.
He had hands like great paddles, and when he spoke,
you were hearing 19th century Mexico.
This is how--" my dad asked him like I said.
That's what I skipped.
And he says yes.
"This is how the rescue operation worked.
Father would bundle me up at dawn
while my mother was still slowly rising.
He'd carry me out to his beloved 49 Ford,
and he'd sit behind the wheel, and tuck me
in behind the great barrel of his upper body.
There, upright and wrapped tight in my magic blanket,
I'd cough into his ribs as he drove.
Later I'd learn to stand there wedged in against him.
Once as we drove to my Mamá Chayo's house
we saw a waterspout unfurling up out of the South Bay,
as terrifying and crooked as the twister in The Wizard of Oz.
It was in black and white unlike the technicolor garden
that surrounded their house.
Abelino would be waiting on the steps of their porch surrounded
by geraniums.
Mamá had bred her own strains.
One of them had navy blue flowers with sky blue edges.
And when we'd pull up, the women would
rush and flow down the steps and steal me from dad's arms.
He and Abelino would drive off together
and I would be carried into the holy shadows of 420 West 20th
Street.
There I'd stay until nightfall when
my father would trade Abelino in for me and we'd go back home.
It became obvious I wanted to be there more than I cared
to be at home, so the daily routine
expanded into weekend visits.
I'd live with Mamá Chayo and her family from Friday til Sunday
night.
And after a couple of years, preschool, and kindergarten
consumed my days, and I always hated school
because it stole time from them.
How do you tell a story that cannot be told?
I tried to explain the simple story of Mamá Chayo's house
for 20 years.
Things still seem full of wonder in that house.
Perhaps it was because I was still so young,
though Mamá Chayo was already old,
and her capacity for wonder was not diminished.
Maybe it was the time.
Maybe the millennium is too late a date for small miracles.
But I can still remember when mundane things had
a glow about them as if they were
part of some process of revelation.
Like the day I first ate sliced bread.
I can't believe that I, tapping away at a laptop computer
while a CD changer cycles through Chemical Brothers
remixed disks, I can remember the first slices
of Wonder Bread I ever saw.
Mamá Chayo committed this particular miracle,
emerging from the pantry with this soft white stuff covered
with grape jelly and peanut butter, La peanut butter.
[LAUGHTER]
After a lifetime of tortillas I was flabbergasted.
They didn't call it Wonder Bread for nothing.
[LAUGHTER]
And I say the secret there was love.
By love I don't mean drippy sentiment.
Nobody at West 20th made goo goo eyes at anyone else.
Love in that house was a bedrock fact,
not discussed nor fretted over, never analyzed, and barely
recognized.
Love simply was.
There is a way in which a family rises
in the morning that says love.
There's a way in which a family shares
one bathroom that says love.
There's even a way in which a cup of coffee at 3 o'clock
on a rainy day says love.
Sure they got cranky.
They got fed up.
They hollered at me.
I was, after all, a boy.
And as a boy I was fully endowed with all
pertaining idiocies and manias.
Abelino cursed at me in florid and operatic recitatives,
but without fail they loved.
Mamá Chayo and Abelino had been married forever
and they still loved each other enough
that they could love everybody else.
True love seems to be a spiritual loaves and fishes,
it doesn't get used up but keeps regenerating
itself to feed all comers.
Maybe that is what religious books mean when they bandy
about such terms as living water,
I think it fills up your heart, then it starts to overflow,
and water everyone else's.
Sharing their home with them where
their twins, Quela and Fina, my first sweethearts, my older
women.
Quela, the sorrowful one, went out every day to clean houses.
Fina, the sunny one, stayed home every day
to clean the one house.
I pursued Fina relentlessly, fascinated
by the world of women.
Occasionally, a ranchera song came
on the radio that was so rabid in its accordions
that Fina threw her broom away and we danced like maniacs all
over the living room while Mamá Chayo cackled.
We were especially fond of the shark song "Tiburón, Tiburón."
"Tiburón a la vista."
That would get us booty shaking in a fashion
that Abelino would have never approved except he
was outside killing termites.
And Quela, so mysterious when she returned home
from those stranger's houses.
So tired and beautiful in her sleepiness,
wearing the strange magic of el lipisticky.
[LAUGHTER]
I'd watch her etch in the lines around her eyes
and I'd watch her hit herself in the face with her powder puff.
She even let me watch her snap her girdle once.
I thought I'd faint.
On Saturdays, her day off, Quela would
sit at the work table in the kitchen and sort the beans.
This sounds far less enchanting than it was.
Her graceful hands with their slightly long nails
moved like a dance over the surface of the table.
The pinto beans, hard and clacking like dominoes,
swirled and skipped beneath her fingers.
Without looking, Quela could spread and scatter
hundreds of beans, all the while flicking out broken ones,
sliding aside twigs, getting out pebbles, and at the same time
as if she'd grown a third hand, she
was swooshing the good beans into a cooking pot
she held in her lap.
Both sisters made flour tortillas every day.
I attended the tortilla making as if it
were a religious ceremony.
It was clearly an ancient ritual.
Every morning from the days of the Aztecs making tláxcaltin,
Mexican women made tortillas.
My father, an avid history buff, pointed this out to me.
Quela or Fina would assemble the materials, flour, water, lard,
rolling pins, the aluminum tub, clean cotton cloth.
They'd mix and knead and then make dough balls.
And the dough balls would be sprinkled
with the dust of white flour.
And then the rolling pin would hit
the dough going two ways in the shape of a cross.
And somehow that ball with two hard passes
would be transformed into a perfect droopy disk.
Whichever one was not creating the tortilla would transfer
this raw dough into a heated flat pan where she'd
use the wadded up cloth to gently pop the blisters that
rose in the dough.
Nina was usually asleep.
She was the fabulous old one who commanded the sewing room
at the side of the house.
It was on her old iron bed from the turn of the century,
tucked in behind her sewing machine, that I slept.
She had been taken in by Abelino many years before I was born
and she was the twins' godmother, their comadre.
And in turn they became my godparents,
officiating at my baptism, becoming my parents compadres.
We were all by this marvelous ritual made family.
Nina was ancient.
I'd sit at her feet toying with her huge blocky black old lady
shoes.
And she slowly wearied of sewing or crocheting,
and her hands would dip slowly, and she'd nod,
and her eyes would slowly close.
And the white whiskers on her chin
would start to tremble as she snored.
Nowadays, I suppose she would be recognized
as the crone, the storehouse of female wisdom.
To me she was the source of mystery, and in that home
mystery was a comfort.
Her hair was a nimbus of white cotton,
and her cane, which seemed like a forbidden thing of power,
was an object of awe.
It was dark wood.
It was her magic wand and her weapon.
She once battered a purse snatcher over the head with it
when she could still get around.
English troubled no one at West 20th Street.
Mamá Chayo engaged in long warm phone conversations
with my mother that consisted largely
of pidgin English, pidgin Spanish,
some sort of customized Swahili, and a lot of giggles.
Neither Mamá nor Nina could pronounce Phyllis, my mom's
name, so they happily mangled it into various permutations,
Doña Pillips, Señora Feliza, La Prips.
Abelino delighted in learning good English curse words,
otherwise what did he need English for?
God's name in vain in his mouth became
a cry in an alien tongue: Cheezakrytes!
Oh, Godammah!
And Quela and Fina who had reason
to deal with the outside world more than their elders
created soundscapes that reasonably
approximated English.
Kinds of songs that echoed messages
that the Americans spoke.
Hi, Fina would say.
Fau-va-ju?
And the American would say, I'm fine, thanks.
And Fina would laugh and nod at everything he said thereafter.
Nina and Mamá Chayo understanding not a lick
of what was said were driven out of their minds
by American soap operas that came on every afternoon.
Their favorite was The Edge Of Night,
though they had no idea what the title meant.
They didn't even bother trying to mispronounce it.
They identified the show by the name
of their favorite character, la Jessie.
[LAUGHTER]
It's time for la Jessie, comadre.
Nina would snort awake saying, Oh, la Jessie.
And she'd struggle out of her chair
and thump out to her personal corner of the living room.
She sat in a rocker beside the table
that held the Catholic saints, photographs of the relatives,
and a gold painted plaster bust of JFK.
Mamá sat on her couch eating oranges.
Well, she never really ate oranges.
She chewed oranges.
And after she chewed all the juice out of the orange slice
she'd spit the pulp into a bowl.
Later you'd find bright orange clots of her chewed pulp
in the chocolate dirt of the mulch pile.
Little molds of her mouth feeding the vegetables.
One day Abelino and I heard a ruckus in the house.
Women who were shouting.
We rushed in to discover Nina and Fina
and Mamá waving their hands and bellowing at the television
set.
They were shouting, Jessie, whatever you do,
don't go in that elevator."
[LAUGHTER]
I'll talk a little bit about their garden now.
Skip a section but--
"Their garden was a kind of a miracle if only for this.
Although it occupied one plot of land,
it was two completely different places
depending on which of them led you to it.
For Abelino the garden was a place of endless productivity.
It was where he went to raise the food we ate.
He had filled it with sugar cane and quince
trees, lettuce and chillies, and nopales, and avocado trees.
He grew corn, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, squash, olives,
and grapes.
Mamá Chayo, when she took you by the hand
and led you out the back door took you
into a world of fluttering green.
You were suddenly in the midst of butterflies,
hummingbirds chittered in the vines,
morning doves cooed to you.
She grew carnations, geraniums, roses.
Her fences were covered in honeysuckle.
Abelino harvested peas, Mamá collected sweet pea blossoms.
One day she took me out to show me
how the sweet pea blossom is a dog face
and if you pinch the nose just right its tongue pops out.
The one place where there two gardens converged
was in the herb patches.
Things that looked like spindly weeds to me
suddenly revealed the flavor of licorice in their hands.
Weird little plants growing under the porch
were turned into teas that erased stomach pains,
poultices, horrendous drinks came from these herb patches.
Mamá used them to cure coughs, to cure broken bones,
and varicose veins.
Abelino was a master of forcing appalling lengths of tapeworm
out of people's guts.
He delighted in bringing giant mason jars out of the bathroom
and displaying them to the assembled guests.
[LAUGHTER]
Inside the jars, writhing, were tapeworms
and Abelino would shout, Godammah.
[LAUGHTER]
Though Mamá was capable of wonders with her tea
she was not in any way cosmic about it.
Her healing was something she could do
and sometimes she didn't even need herbs.
She could be alarmingly direct.
To cure an earache for example, she'd
pour a cup full of pee in your ear.
The rhythms of the garden defined our days.
The trees, and the birds, and the herbs
were ready to go by the time the sun was up and so were we.
Abelino was the first out of bed.
The sound of his side of their bed squeaking, his wide yawn,
the snap of his suspenders in the dark
served as a subtle alarm clock for the rest of us.
It was before 5 o'clock.
We'd luxuriate in our beds for a few minutes
as he slapped through the house in his wasted leather slippers.
He navigated by memory making his way up the hall,
around the dining room table into the kitchen.
There, the first light of the day
would snap on its gray glow, accusing us of being layabouts.
He wasn't thinking about us.
He was thinking about his morning constitutional,
his breakfast drink.
He pulled down a large tumbler and cracked two raw eggs
into it.
Then he topped off the glass with about 8 ounces
of fierce red wine he had made in his own backyard tool shed.
He named the wine after himself.
It was almost black and sweet as Mogen David,
and he'd guzzle it down in one gulping pull, slurping
the eggs out of the glass, and gasping,
and sighing, and belching, and slamming the glass down
on the counter.
Then he'd work his fedora onto his head, jacket around
on his skull until it was cocked at the perfect angle,
and he'd start to whistle.
It sounded like a stiff wind blowing
across the mouth of a small cave,
almost making music, but mostly making a whooshing sound.
To this whooshing Abelino added a vibrato
that made it sound like he had some melody in mind when
he really had his mind full of joy.
He was blowing the jazz of satisfaction.
I never saw him go to church, but I
did see him offer up holy rituals every day,
hammering, killing termites.
Best church I ever prayed in.
After Abelino's morning snort, the women rose.
I'd lie in bed and listen as every quadrant of the house
came alive with the ringing of chamber pots filling
with the day's first cascade.
Triiing, Mamá.
Then hrriiing, and prriiing.
Ah, Quela and Fina.
And then softly in the middle distance of the house
a muffled shhh, which was Nina.
A parade of women followed carrying
their musically sloshing pots to the bathroom.
Fina would collect Nina's for her, a ritual of respect.
The pots sang out as they walked.
Doish, they said.
Do-iish.
A round of flushing then, and the sound of murmurs,
and clothes being shaken out in the air
snapping crisply and silky sliding in the rubbery crack
of girdles and bras.
And the billowy sounds of aprons and the day had begun.
Quela and Fina went to the kitchen and the aromas of dawn
began to radiate.
Coffee, lard, on cold days the scent
of kerosene in the heater, tortillas.
Nina said her rosary.
Mamá hustled out the back door to make
sure Abelino wasn't massacring her pansy beds to put
in jalapenos."
I'll skip this.
OK.
This is the last passage.
"So it was all about love, starting
with love for each other.
Every night when Abelino had come in
from his pointlessly busy days, after their nightly feast,
he'd cruise over to the couch and recline.
He'd pull out his dentures, spit a load into the spittoon,
then settle in to enjoy a full evening of shouting insults
at the television.
Mamá Chayo, having supervised the cooking,
would relinquish the cleanup to the twins.
She'd collect her latest crocheting project
and take her traditional spot at the other end of the couch
where she'd chuckle at his outbursts.
Nina, if she was awake, would say from her corner,
oh boy, compadre.
You're really on tonight.
But mostly she'd snore.
And when she started to snore Abelino
would nudge Mamá and point to Nina and laugh.
I'd watch then for their special love gesture.
I almost quivered with anticipation.
Some nights it took forever and on other nights
it happened right away, but it always happened.
I wonder now if they each knew that the gesture was
going to happen.
And maybe, just maybe, they held back, sort of
stalled to build anticipation.
Like saving that toffee crunch in the chocolate box to last.
Maybe even though they were my godparents,
my elders, maybe this was a sensual delight for them.
They had a lot of kids.
They were sexy.
They were in their 60s and 70s, and they were sexy.
So maybe it was a sexually as well as emotionally satisfying
gesture.
Like when someone you love takes your elbow in a crowd.
Like when you hold hands.
Or when late in the night you reach out your hand
and catch the cup of the hip bone of your partner just
to feel the warmth, the life there.
Or when somebody absentmindedly runs her fingers through
your hair like a comb, like your fairy godmothers fingertips
were on your scalp, or your mom's.
It makes you want to cry, and it makes you want to go to sleep.
Or a palm against your cheek.
I'd watch for it.
And sooner or later, Abelino's battered old slippers
had come off and he'd ease his legs up on the couch
and his feet would start to creep.
His thin black socks would bunch around his rocky ankles
making a pouch at his toes.
And those feet, first one, then the other,
would move toward her like cats.
The feet wandered down the couch,
found her leg as if by accident then moved up into her lap.
His smelly toes would push the crochet needles aside
and she turned and put her work in a bowl with a small tinkle
then turn off the lamp and turn to watch TV.
The lenses of her glasses glowing blue
with reflected light, like she's shooting love
beams out of her eyes.
Then never looking at his feet, she'd put her hands on them.
She wouldn't massage them.
She'd touch them.
Hold them.
Cup them.
Feel his arches and toes, run her palms up and down them.
It was the most extraordinary thing, this foot fondling.
And you could see his delighted toes in there wiggling around.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, imagine the darkest day of our lives when she died.
It was sudden.
A stroke as she stood beside their bed, on the side
she'd slept on for 50 years.
The side she had risen on every morning
to follow him into the day.
She fell to the floor beside her chamber pot
where they found her.
And the funeral, which is where all this is heading.
I want you at the funeral.
Her children, her nieces, and nephews, her grandchildren,
her acolytes, and me, devastated.
And Abelino, this hard, old man, fierce, solitary, he
spent the whole funeral attending to the mourners.
Patting my mother on the back, holding up
the ones who went to the open coffin and collapsed.
He wore a suit that looked like he'd owned it since 1948.
At this funeral I saw Abelino's ultimate gesture of love.
It wasn't for me to see.
It was a secret I was lucky enough to glimpse.
And it has stayed with me all these years.
Abelino's mute poem, his mute symphony.
Right at the end, after the many mourners had passed.
After my father had gone out to his car.
Right before they closed the box forever
and carried it to the hearse.
Abelino stepped up to her.
He didn't weep.
He stood silently gazing down at his one love.
His one true destined love.
The companion of more than a lifetime,
and he studied her face.
Then with no emotion showing he reached into the coffin
and put his palm against her cheek.
His big iron calloused workers hand, it trembled slightly,
and it landed on her flesh as delicately as one
of her butterflies, just a second, no more.
But all the love in the world was there in his palm.
All the love in the universe, and all the tenderness,
and all the grief, and all the beauty
collected there in his hand and lay against her lovely cheek."
That's it.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[CHUCKLES]