Listen to A. J. Rodriguez read this excerpt.
Abuelo opened the door to his mobile home wearing a corny-ass T-shirt that must’ve come from the commissary at Kirtland Air Force Base. On the front a graphic of three missile-toting fighter jets, flying in V formation, soared over a tagline written in some blockish font meant to look like sheets of bolted metal. It read, Air Supremacy Ensures Victory! But the letters wrinkled like stepped-on soda cans, and the shirt sagged off my grandfather’s shoulders the way deflated balloons from birthday parties or graduations droop over the branches of trees in our varrio’s park.
You’re late, Abuelo said, standing in the doorway, a four-pronged cane shivering in his hand.
Before that day I’d only seen the vato once. It was way back, right around the age when your brain starts turning images into half-solid memories. The way I remembered it, Abuelo had shown up unannounced to a family get-together in some relative’s backyard. His presence had caused the world to stop, cutting people’s voices off one by one. But my recollection of him stops there, before the situation gets resolved, before anybody does anything about his arrival. So all I had to hold on to about Abuelo was that figure in my mind, that silent man with a stern expression and posture as rigid as a flagpole, the kind I’d come to associate with all armed service members. Over the years, some of my tíos had told me the more in control he appeared, the more wasted and violent Abuelo really was. Others called it differently, said being sober was what made him a real asshole.
But now the vato didn’t look capable of shit, let alone the terror I’d heard about through borracho anecdotes and offhand remarks from that entire branch of my family. Now each inch of my grandfather’s frame slumped as if there was a boulder on his back. I apologized for my timing, feeling an anxious brand of let-down, stupidly hoping this was the wrong house.
I didn’t have a key to the security gate or nothing, I explained. So I found some dude—but he wasn’t buying that I was your grandkid—so then, I had to—
The hell are you saying? Abuelo asked, a sound like boiling water gurgling in his throat.
The morning sun had climbed to a point just above our heads, sitting at an angle that dyed a harsh light onto my grandfather, stressing how white his flesh had become. Apparently cabrón had always been fairer than the rest of the family, which was why they told me, whenever they wanted me to get all insulted and self-conscious, that I resembled him. But as far as I could tell, this vampire skin tone was a different kind of white, like there was barely any blood left in Abuelo’s veins.
The man, I said, readjusting myself to block some of the rays from blasting his cheeks, I think his name’s Candi or something.
I know who goddamn Candido is! He ain’t got nothing to do with your lateness. Now stop wasting time n’ get your ass in here.
I blinked fast, as if doing so would fan away my shock at how quick this viejo had snapped at me, how he still managed to marinate his words with so much anger despite looking like his lungs could barely put together a whisper.
Most of what I’d told Abuelo was true. Pops had made sure I left on time, push- ing me out the door with reminders that I’d brought this upon myself, that I was the one who’d been expelled from my Catholic high school. But when I’d walked up to Arboleda Mobile Home Park, a leathery vato wearing a tank top and smok- ing a frajo had been standing behind the rusty automatic gate. Dude wouldn’t let me inside, said these bars were meant to keep out the tweakers and gangbangers, to which I’d responded, Do I fucken look like one of those? I would’ve been nicer, displayed the manners Pops raised me on, but I was real pissed off that my sum- mer had come to this—waking up early for a chore that wouldn’t earn me any skina, with some geezer who’d been called the bloody shit-stain of our family by more than one of my relatives. The vato had let me through the gate once I named all my tíos, primos, and their ’ijos. He’d said with a mouth like that I must be one of Abuelo’s nietos. He’d said to tell my grandfather that Candi Pacheco says hello, that he’s still waiting on a dominoes rematch with that old cheating fart.
Shoes off! Abuelo barked, shuffling into his mobile home right as I took one step forward in my two-and-a-half-year-old And1’s, which used to be white but had been kissed beige by Albuquerque’s dust. I wasn’t paying attention enough to tell whether he’d actually seen me try to enter or just assumed I was the type of mamón to disrespect the rules of someone’s casa. While slipping off my kicks, I told myself that every second of this situation was jodido—that Pops was taking advantage of my fuck-ups in order to avoid dealing with the existence of his own father.
Once I gathered myself enough to absorb the decay seeping from each wall of Abuelo’s mobile home, I wondered why I deserved this. What about me belonged in this place—in the company of this plastic bag of a man? There couldn’t be a connection between me and the motherfucker. Not a chance in hell.
Don’t get it twisted. I understood getting booted from Our Lady of Guadalupe was cien por-ciento on me. But it wasn’t like I was ditching to get all pedo like some cabrones in the varrio. Those eses—dudes I’d grown up around and besides and under—had states of mind marked in brown paper bags, always tryna forget about the quicksand in their world. That wasn’t me pa’ nada—all thanks to Pops. Year after year he’d whipped into me this idea that working hard towards some goal was the best way to stay disciplined, away from the gangs’ reach. The vato didn’t do it physically (like Abuelo had done to him before Abuelita left his borracho ass) but rather through this cold, disapproving method that had somehow dug so deep under my skin that doing anything against his wishes boiled the marrow in my bones.
Up until that summer Pops’s approach had paid off. I’d walked the straight and narrow, placed myself in each of the right footprints, which led in a direction that echoed my father’s—a wrestling scholarship to that prestigious, set-you-up-for-life high school. I knew my achievements probably came easier ’cus I was his son, but the pinprick of inadequacy beat being strung-out or locked-up or buried in some overcrowded cemetery. At least it did before my junior year.
Shit was just too damn suffocating at Our Lady. None of the other kids came from my side of Albuquerque, most of them gabachos in the kind of tax bracket that could pay for ten or twenty of my reduced tuitions. It’s not like I wasn’t used to gabachos by that point (my own pinche mother was one). It was just that these dickheads spun around the sun on a different planet. Each day I felt myself bend- ing in directions that cut off circulation to parts of myself that were impossible to amputate.
And the whole Jesus-freak side of Our Lady didn’t vibe with me either. From where I was sitting—watching childhood friends slip into the same patterns of destruction—there’d been no evidence that any sort of merciful god or son or spirit was out here guiding us. Shit got me questioning what I’d done to be spared. The Bible, what little I’d read, didn’t give me a satisfying answer, especially since everything around my life appeared to be swamped in sin. Plus, with two divorces under my father’s belt and a grandfather notorious for throwing jodasos as fast as helicopter blades, my Catholic lineage was about as faithful as Pops was to Moms.
So here’s how it started: one day I had to turn in this essay for some theology class describing what truths I’d learned through the teachings of our Lord and Savior. My response came in the form of a single sentence. The one truth I’ve learned is that none of this god shit is real. Those fourteen words resulted in three meetings with the principal: one with just me, him, and the theology teacher, one with my mother added in, and another unnecessary one forced into existence by my father. Cabrón made Our Lady accommodate his stubbornness under the excuse that work obligations as Presbyterian Hospital’s IT manager wouldn’t allow him to be there when Moms was scheduled to pull up. My parents hadn’t been in a room together since my middle school graduation, which ended up in catastrophe since Pops armed himself with the whole pinche family, using the chaos of their personalities to swallow Moms’s presence. She didn’t even get the chance to congratulate me.
Beyond yes-sirs and no-sirs, I didn’t say nada during those meetings—just like I didn’t say shit to Pops about not wanting to attend that school anymore. Instead, I came up with a plan that involved only one step: not showing up. For almost two whole weeks near the school year’s end, I skipped out on class and weight training and Mass. I spent those hours wandering around the varrio, keeping my And1’s moving and hoodie pulled over my head so that none of the vecinos would chis- mear about my truant ass. Throughout our neighborhood, gossip burned like hun- dreds of little fuses, eating more and more ears until it blew up in someone’s face.
And here’s the thing: having no direction felt real good. For once I had time to be all flojo. I could retrace every route I’d run through as a chiquito, walk through them backwards or sideways or not at all. I was riding so damn high that I even decided to say wuddup to the carnales dicking around on the corner across from the public school (these were homies who used to be my classmates, who I hoped would be my classmates once again). Of course, they clowned my ass, asking one another who let the altar boy out, what this high-n’-mighty culero was doing out- side his gabacho castle. Packed underneath their shit-talk were real questions, ones I’d pushed back to the corners of my brain like useless family heirlooms. Whatchu thinking, joyo? they were asking. You wanna come back here? Here, here?
Even if I tried (or wanted to), I couldn’t come up with any sensible reason, not against the wall of luck in my favor. Homesickness was the word that kept floating around my thoughts, never clearer than steam, contradicted by the fact that I had a home, slept and ate there every night. Shit, I had two homes—one with Pops in the varrio and one with Moms out in the desert between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, though I rarely stayed there anymore. All I really understood was that when it came to Our Lady, I just couldn’t do it. I was done splitting myself in half.
It was right after my attempt to reestablish old connections that everything came back to bite me in the ass. Judgment and fury became the flavor of my life, days filled with authority figures yelling and finger-pointing and headshaking. Before I knew it, I’d been banished to looking after Abuelo. According to Pops, the viejo had reached out, said he needed someone to assist with sorting through the mountains of paperwork he’d acquired over the years. Since no one wanted to deal with him, and since I needed to learn whatever fucken lesson about re- sponsibility or commitment or gratitude, it had to be me. I’d reached such a level of disappointment that the one thing I was worthy of was what everybody in this family took pride in ignoring, in acting like it didn’t exist, even though he’d always been there, wasting away in a trailer park in the middle of our neighborhood, apparently asking for help . . .
To read the whole story, purchase 44.4 (2023) in print or as an e-book.