Basado en las vidas y el amor de personas reales.
1st draft completed on May 20th, 2022
Waiting
Due to a herniated disk, he sat in a packed metro area parking lot waiting for the only chiropractor open on a Sunday, watching two men carry flowers from a grocery store and wondering how they were going to fit the 6 foot helium filled potted rose in their car without clipping a tip of it and arriving at destination to present like a plucked and wilted flower, clutched in the hand a small boy looking up through a three years olds smile to a smile above him with the words, “See mommy, I pick it for you. Habby mudders bay, mommy!”
The Knock
But this Mother’s Day was precisely three months after a 7 pm knock on a door, opened to three Miami Vice Detectives standing in dark suits expressing condolences, followed by the ever unforgettable, heart piercing wail and collapse of a mother who has lost a child. For the safety of the shaking woman he pulled her into him as they crashed into the same chair where he sat 3 months prior looking to his left at the tall but slight and still elegant 28 year old daughter as she sneeringly recounted every sin, every error and every petal her mother had “...plucked from the gardenia of my life that has nothing to show for the last 10 years.…I could have had a career, a marriage a child. But you took that all from me.”
Still elegant, despite ten years of hard cocaine use and even harder the last two years of methamphetamine trips slipping in and out of cars in the proximity of Biscyne and NE 84th Avenue, she stood there in a long cotton, flower print dress, without any acknowledgement of a mothers screaming agony uttered only through the anguish on her face and brown eyes pouring tears that dripped from the sides of her face. Her mother was seated in an antique leather chair to his right and the child to his left as he asked the young woman, “...look at your mother. Look at her tears. What do you feel? Don’t you feel anything for her? “
“Good. She should feel this way. I feel nothing for her tears.”
He felt then and remarked later that in some 50 years of life he had never seen such a display of resentful contempt for a parent much less a mother. And he had witnessed mothers who walked the street, left their children for half dead, beat them with leather, beat them with whips fashioned from electrical cords, screamed every name imagined at the child but the one given to them at birth, or even handed them over to the soulless lusts of those whose worship demand ritualistic sexual sacrifices of the innocence of children. Yet their children, with understandable fear and trepidation of the mere presence of a repeated abuser would “respect” their own human civility and not lift a finger much less a hand or tongue to harm even one depicting the most horrifically imaginable “mommy dearest”.
As was said millennia ago, “...Lord forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD's anointed, or lift my hand against them; for they are the anointed of the LORD…”
An Anointed Appointment
Whether by force, subterfuge or a single moment of passion, motherhood is an anointed appointment by the divine for which, is there any more beautiful passion in all its forms of success, and no greater suffering than in the failure and early demise of its offspring? Look into the dying eyes of any woman and if those eyes are laid upon the good life of her child those eyes carry no fear or regret of what is to come. But to him, an all too familiar form of hell is the tormented soul of any mother wondering of and for, the security, stability and sanity of their child. In the parable of the prodigal son there is for good reason never a mention of any wife or mothering emotions tp badger a father to “cut a deal”, “not be so harsh”, “make a concession” so that the son would stay, malingering in the fathers house to be the wedge fracturing the fathers cognition of and resolution to provide what was actually in the child's best interest and from the mothers desire to bear and shield from her child's body, mind and heart, any touch of pain.
The best fathers are said to be those who can reach over from cognitive empathy and on occasion bear their child’s emotions. The best mothers may be those who can reach over from bearing every emotion felt by a child, to parental cognition that a child will learn to successfully self regulate their emotions if the mother that bore them regulates her instinct to bear, much less be subjected to all of the child's emotions and instead, requires for the benefit of the child that they honor the anointed appointment with a life of doing unto others and keeping themselves pure from a tarnished world….at least to some degree and at least for some moments of their lives.
Six months from the day he sat watching a daughter express no affection for her mothers tears, he sat in the same chair, the mother sat in the same chair, but in place of the daughter standing there, was a photograph of the same daughter and the daughter laying not as “if” but as “actual” ashes in a box beneath the photograph.
Happy fucking mothers day. Tears cloud his view of the photograph, the box and the mother, then and at this moment, and probably for time, each tearing at a heart torn for love of each of them and they could feel and speak of to him, when only in his and not each other's presence. Each of those times of expression it would first be a walk past a blasting furnace of anger for what each alleged the other had done to them. Singed but not roasted he would move with each through a field of thorns of resentment of what each had done or could have done for the other. Still cutting from the thorns he would crash with each of them into a well of choking tears. But this was only separately with them. When in each other's presence there was only one instance of tears, and they were the mothers alone, as she remained silent and he attempted to advocate for her while her daughter raged against her. And there lay his effort to advocate, at their feet, dust in a box, a life that could only find purity and rest, in a cremator’s furnace.
A mother receiving the anointed appointment carries a divine faith that ”... thou couldst not leave His soul in hell…” applies not only to a Messianic Christ, but also to their own begotten. He does not know. Who can? But he would like to hope he could believe that way. Especially this Mothers Day as he pauses and fails to recall any of 50 or more Mothers Days. Instead he recalls moments such as those already shared and those to be mentioned further.
Heads turned, eyes closed and without hearts
A moment recalled is a year earlier, walking in and seeing a mother laying the corner of a couch, tears flowing down her cheeks, sobs racking her body and looking across a room of less than two body lengths at the backs of her two daughters whose eyes were turned, ears closed and hearts without care for anyone as they stared a pixels of 16 million colors. This shall not stand was his only thought as he flipped the chair of the youngest, firmly removed the device from her hands, looked her in the eye pointing to her mother and stared inches from her face, “See that? What the fuck are you about? Get over there.” Taking the girl by the shoulders he practically threw her into her mothers waiting arms.
He then turned to the older, still with her back to them and caused her to flip around in the chair with a cuff to the top of her head. To her startled look he simply pointed at her sister and mother with his right hand, took the device with his left hand and growled, “Get your ass over there.”
She did.
She wanted to live another day and post more photos on instagram. Many of the mothers tears that day were related consternation over her daughters instagram postings which would include suggestive photos of the daughters 12 year old ass and breasts. A Mother or Fathers day card from such a daughter could only read, “Roses are red, violets are blue, I posted these photos, just to say FUCK BOTH OF YOU!”
He pauses to wonder. Had he cuffed the 28 year old in her mouth, what would have been the effect? Would for the first time in her life, a righteous challenge to her foulness would she, like the 10 and 12 year old, have had a turning point and developed a degree of civil respect for their mother and a civil respect for their role in society and not ended up as a photograph sitting on a glass coffee table above an alabaster box.
Mi madre lo es todo para mi
A schizophrenia of Latin culture troubles him. In the Catholic Latin culture, “...mi madre lo es todo para mi…” But he observes the same that claim to revere their mother as everything, will turn and treat a woman as less than nothing but an object of desire and seduction and upon serving such purpose to be Machistaistically discarded with no objection to her soul being left in hell. Is this particularly Latin? Or is this an observation geographically colored when one sits in a parking lot 20 miles north of Miami? The young men carrying the 6 foot helium rose - are they that, or are they different? In his mind he can see them entering a suburban kitchen and a Cuban mother, who purses lips and mutters “...hay una madre mexicana en Homestead a la que le falta su adorno de jardín de 6 pies…” lamenting that her sons have all of the taste of the chusma in Hialeah their parents slaved to escape. Reality - her friends are envious that she has not one, but two sons who bought the biggest rose they could find and they, as does he, hope and imagine that they are as good to most women in some ways as they are to their mother.
He can’t recall ever giving his mother a flower or wanting to. He can’t recall her having the feminine gentleness or kindness he has observed in most women and that would beget them an offering of roses on Mothers Day, a Valentine's Day or a Just Because Day. One would think he could recall a mothers day for the mother of his three children, but sitting there and recalling the wailing of the mother he knew who lost a child and the sobs of a mother thinking she was going to lose hers, all he can recall of the mother of his child is her sitting on the floor, knees to her face, back to the wall and wails and sobbing as he prepared to leave her for Miami and for whomever other than her that he would find there.
Never loved back
There was no animus towards her. The mere observation of her pain was in a way the climax of his purgatory of 20 some years of miserably hoping he had accepted the fact that she did not and had not, ever loved him in that way. Largely feeling guilt for putting her through the pain of being loved and trying to love back, someone that you couldn’t really like and now the shame of them, being the one to leave when it should have been the other way.
She should have openly rejected him and left him with the simple public explanation that he was simply not good enough for her. Everyone that knew them would have understood that. But doing this to her without the decency of waiting until after Christmas. It still sickens him to this day to think of that month of time, since then, but then he thinks of the 20 years before and tries to accept the unacceptable loss of years and heart with the rationalization that while there will be no Valentines Day, or Anniversary to celebrate, she will have and he will have played a part in giving her three children who do love her and give her that love as he hoped he did on every day including Mothers Day. And maybe she finds comfort in knowing that she was loved even if by someone so imperfect for and imperfect to her.
Mimosas and Moments
While he sat in the parking lot with an aching back the same woman with whom he shared a knock on the door three months before was with her son, being driven to a gilded bistro in a seaside Miami suburb where over Mothers Day Mimosas they would recall time after time moments with the daughter and sister, not from her last decade where she mixed SSRI’s with cocaine and methamphetamines, and the last year where her in her lostness, her mother and the man sitting in the car stood waiting to catch her in her last fall, but unlike the song, she never looked for and never found more than another set of headlights that flicked, then slowed and then then dimmed into the alleys off Biscayne Avenue.
Still waiting, his mind wanders through love in photographs recorded in the gigabytes of a phone in the pocket of his jeans. His first daughters, minutes old, cradled in her mothers arms, the look of nothing more than pure innocence and love. 17 years later he looks at a photograph of the daughter still reflecting that pureness and love and who in her total physical disability still needs the daily cradling of her mother who never left her despite her mitochondrial disorder and painful seizures predicated by wailing and followed with calming stupor. But he did. He left her. He left both of them in all of their pain filled sobs and painful wailing. For Mother’s Day they can celebrate together. But for whom do they celebrate for Fathers Day ? Him ?
Less than 90 days after leaving that mother and two daughters, he left another wailing mother and her two daughters. The moment he recalls is a moon lit plea of two little girls (10 and 12) over the noise of a gurgling fountain, “Please don’t leave our mom. You are the only man that ever loved her and did not use her for sex.” Their words haunt him as the most horrible and wonderful statement ever made to him. But the reality faced is that despite desire, hope and love for the three of them, he was not the one to get them to the place they wanted, needed and deserved to be, any more than he was able tack the the futility of his daughters condition which for which a decade or more search for a cure now appears to be what kept him in a daily communication with her mother.
2 daughters - 2 fathers
He could not stop their mothers monthly bleeding and needed hospitalization which she refused. He could not force the hospitals to remove the fibroid that caused the monthly pint or more loss of blood. He could not prohibit the miserable machisto-cism of a father that would have a 10 year old waiting for his arrival Friday afternoon, still waiting Saturday morning and finally arriving Sunday night whereupon he would take her to McDonalds and then drop her off at school on Monday morning. A particular cruelty of it all was that 10 year olds father could not have forgotten the story of the mother he was divorcing being a 10 year old waiting in a Valencia apartment for her father to return from Caracas, but by Saturday morning at 10 am he was still not there and the little girl began calling and leaving messages until her fathers voicemail was full. Sunday morning she was awakened by her mother and advised that the father for whom she waited, was dead in a car accident. The 10 year old staring at the screen full of pixels who had to be thrown into her mothers sobbing arms, knew the full story of how her mother waited and how her grandfather died. She explained to the man later, that it actually comforted her to know that while her mother waited for her grandfather who had died at the hands of a Chavista hit squad on the highway into Caracas and not in a car accident, she knew her father was just off in Doral with a girlfriend and would actually show up Sunday afternoon despite telling her it would be Friday night.
Then there was the other father in Mexico blowing up every time someone would send him the latest photos his 12 year old was posting on instagram The 12 year old was refusing to answer dads calls so dad would call and text the bleeding mother, while she worked, leaving her in a state of agitated disconsolation and inevitable conflict with both daughters later that evening. Anxiety was their consciousness. Sleep was their only respite.
Knock on the door
He recalls the night of the knock at the door and looking up at the ceiling with the dim hue of a man’s failure. In little more than a year he had failed not one but three of the most decent committed examples of motherhood. The first was still slavishly caring for or preparing the care of a completely disabled daughter. The second was now without daily contact with either of her daughters, both of whom were with their fathers. And the third, was waiting for the answer as to her daughter's cause of death - which was presumed to be overdose or as it turned out, strangulation on a night that was several years since her brother had seen her, several months since her mother had seen her and exactly 3 weeks since he had seen her, at the Wendy’s, down the street from one of the rent by hour hotels on Calle Ocho, where he had given her a phone and 100 dollars and with tears begged her to let him take her to Jackson Hospital where she would be given the change to detox a body which could not stop an amphetamine induced twitching.
She again refused treatment, thanking him for the money and the phone and the last he saw of her was the slender figure hunched in a dark wool coat against an early evening January rain and then past a doorway and around the drive through and to wherever something other than food could be obtained to slow the twitching. In his pocket is a phone with the photo of an hour earlier of her at a lunch counter where he had tried to take her to eat, but she could not bear to sit still and order from a menu on account of her left hand which kept twitching as she would lay first on its back and than back on its palm. It had the eerie effect of reminding him of his 17 year old daughter’s autistic, pre- convulsive twitching.
Lost Children
As he thought about what he could have said, or might have done, he recalled sitting on the bed in the middle bedroom of his grandmother's house in East Dallas, listening to his sister recount the days leading up to her first abortion at the age of 15. Would it have made any difference if that holiday he had been there to listen and say something rather than off in the Marine Corps and only able to hear of her first experience of motherhood a year later. Nonetheless he regretted knowing nothing, and doing nothing but listening and 30 years later knowing that she would have been just as wonderful and committed a mother as the three he had failed so recently. The second mother he failed that year had also experienced an abortion at the age of 15 and his mind wandered to that conversation in a car, in an alley in North Miami Beach and her recounting the horror of being dragged to some sort of family therapist where as her mother told it to him, “...they all agreed…” that she would not have a child at 16 as her mother had had her and then as she told it him, she “...did not agree…” but was physically dragged by the same mother who pointed a gun at her own head a few years earlier, to a local clinic where she as a pregnant 15 year old was physically hoisted onto a medical bench, ankles slammed into metal stirrups and then having ‘...her first child…” scraped from her womb.
In college she sought therapy. Therapy was successful on a number of issues but then the session that touched on the abortion. The therapist gasped and sat in stunned silence. Finally he opens his mouth to say that he does not know where to go with that. She leaves his office and through two marriages, two children and two divorces she never again mentions the lost children until 15 years later sitting in a car in North Miami Beach. But for all that time, at any moment where she would see a child that appeared to date an age of the ones she lost, she would pause to look in their eyes and wonder if their look and the expression on their faces is not but a reflection of the ones she lost. And sitting in the parking lot he recalls her story and recalls himself looking in the eyes of children whose ages date the ones from his family and imagines their faces to look as might the faces of those family members upon whom he has never laid eyes, but thinks about every day.
The deceased daughter also charged the loss of her unborn to her mothers conscience despite the doctors contention that the fetus was not normally developing due to the daughter's continued drug abuse and lack of participation in any form of nutrition. To the daughter that made no difference. Every memory of these traumas includes upon him a stamp of time and place to remind him of the first time he shared their horror and sorrow. This loss is stamped with a late Saturday afternoon drive East on the Dolphin taking the single lane exit North on I95 listening to a tearful plea how she should have been given a chance to at least love and lose the un-developing child on her own terms rather than being dragged to the doctor by her mother and then being inserted with an IUD.
Three years earlier on a Saturday evening he stood in the hall outside the women's restroom of a church in suburban Detroit waiting for the mother of his three children to partially miscarry what she claimed was their fourth and last child together. A few hours later what remained of that child was scraped and later discarded in a fetal remains plot near the Catholic Hospital. If he thinks about it for more than a moment it still leaves him numb.
Maria
The numbness carried longest is for a mother for whom he never lifted a finger of resistance to her suffering. Even if there was simply nothing he could do to help her predicament has haunted his dreams and filtered each view of motherhood with the color of pain.
It was like any other dry, hot August 1989 Saturday afternoon outside a Camp Pendleton barracks. Where a 20 year old Private First Class with a car and an urge to drink legally off base offered a trip to Tijuana that night to any of the others unlisted with no better place to go for the cost of $5.00 of gas. Four hours later they were parked on cobblestone street in Tijuana and walking a couple of blocks to the modern, neon lit entertainment district. The music filtering into the street was no different than that of the clubs on Mission Beach or downtown San Diego but the cover charges and drinks were less. So the other 4 drank, standing at the bar and watching crowded dance floors. Knowing the probability of none of the other four being fit to drive back he did not but just watched the dance floor and watched the other four.
One of the four was approached by a thin, local looking young man and the one then had all 4 in conversation. The short of it was that they were being assisted to attend another club with a more favorable male to female ratio. So to the blaring techno rendition of Bizzare Love Triangle he and the four left the club, following their “coyote” through the techno district, north down a cobblestone street which shortly turned to gravel as the buildings aged and then to just a dirt street with tin shacks and finally a windowless, single story, rectangular, cinder block building with a lightbulb hanging from a light post, a steel door and a bear sign signifying it as a business establishment.
The coyote led the five across the board bridging the gutter between the dirt road and the building. 5 feet from the doorstep in the dirt sat 2 children, a boy and girl maybe 3 to 5 years of age, in front of them a flat cardboard box, upon which were arrayed an assortment of candy and cigarettes. The little girl lifted a box of Chicklettes toward them revealing 3 fingers that were little more than pale stumps. The other 5 did not appear to notice or hear her whimper “Senor ?”
He reached in his pocket and poured loose change in the coffee can sitting in front of the box and waved away the hand containing the gum as they both looked up at him and whispered “Gracias Senor”, barely heard as the coyote opened the steel door to the sound of perhaps La Martina on the Mariachi juke box. Compared to the street the inside was well lit with a long bar to the North at his right with a large dance floor in front of him that went at least 60 feet to the south end of the building. Behind the west wall of the dancefloor were several open arches into a hallway lined with at least several doors. Behind the bar was an older bartender and leaned against it were 2 large middle aged men with drinks but with more of the appearance of security as they eyeballed the five Marines being separated by the coyote, at round tables that surrounded the dance floor.
Suddenly, from the open arches appeared one, then two, then four women crossing the dance floor and seating themselves in one of the two chairs at each of the round tables where the other four Marines were seated. At least three of the women were dressed in Jaliscan dance costumes but the fourth wore a blue cocktail dress. Each spoke to the Marine at their table and before each could pull cash from their wallet, the coyote was placing a longneck beer in front of each of them along with a mixed drink topped with the umbrella stir for each woman. He sat alone watching each couple as the first two each took a parting gulp of beer and sip of cocktail, rose from their seats, crossed the dance floor, through the arches and through a door to the rooms on the other side of the dance floor.
He didn’t notice the last two couples as from across the north side of the dance floor where he sat closest to the bar a dark haired woman, in a red cocktail dress and pumps was walking toward him, paused to ask to be seated and then sat in the chair across the round table.
“Will you buy me a drink?”
Her English was thickly accented like the coyote. He’d never had a woman ask him to buy her a drink. He looked over at the coyote and around the bar as he saw the other two Marines and women entering different rooms across the dance floor. The bartender was staring him down as were the old men.
“Uh, okay.”
The coyote was there with a mixed drink, placing it on the table along with a longneck beer that he waved off saying “Pepsi please.”
The coyote gave a look but pulled the beer back from the table and returned with a glass of Pepsi while the bartender and bouncers continued the stare down. Nervous, he asked the woman her name.
“Maria”
“Where are you from?”
“Acapulco.”
“My aunt went there on vacation once.” Her English was not sufficient to know the word vacation the first time he said it but with a moment of thought she could put it together.
He continued asking questions about her age, family, and details of how she came to Tijuana from Alcapolco while she glanced nervously at the coyote, bartender and two men at the bar. Her English was sufficient and he finally asked her where she got the silver crucifix around her neck. With that question the pleasant, but nervous look on her face turned to strained sadness, and with her right hand she reached across the table and patted his left arm saying, “I have to go make some money.”
Eyes on the bartender she got up from her seat, and leaving her drink behind she walked to the bar and stood next to one of the bouncers, arms folded across her chest, with a look of uncomfortable concern. He glanced at them. They continued to stare him down while the jukebox played. He looked to the rooms across the hall. He looked back at the bar. Over and over again. Everyone just stood there and looked back at him. Finally a door across the hall opened and one of the Marines marched across the dance floor, sat at his table and began finishing his drink. Then the 2nd. He had a strange look about him as he glanced at the Marine at the other table but said nothing. Then the 3rd and 4th appeared with similar glances, quickly gulping what remained of their beers and then standing with the coyote on cue walking to the steel door and followed by the five Marines.
As the coyote led them back up the dirt street the 4 Marines discussed what was behind the doors on the other side of the dance floor.
“Never fucked a woman on piece of plywood sitting on 4 cinderblocks.”
“Mine had a mattress.”
“Stained?”
“Blood or shit?”
“Her blood now?
“Where’d you fuck her?”
“In the fucking ass man. How am I going to turn that down for 10 dollars?”
“Fuckin A. Mine got me for 20.”
“In the ass? Hell yeah!”
“Make her bleed?”
“No.”
“Mine. Made her bleed. Uuuurahhh!!!”
“What did she say? Did she fucking moan? Mine was saying something like ‘dos me’ over and over again.”
“Dos me! You are an ignorant cunt. Fucking dumb ass. She was saying ‘Dios Mio’ “
“What the fuck does that mean? Dios mio.?”
From the front, without turning his head, from the coyote came without emotion, “My God. She was saying ``My God.”
The four discussing had transpired in the rooms were all drunk, but not that drunk. That was to follow. One in particular was a short, freckled red hair Marine who read his bible religiously. Hungover, the next day back at the chow hall he asked, “What did you do with yours?”
“Just talked?
“Really?”
“Yeah. She has a four year old son Jose back in Acapulco. With her parents.”
“She was fucking hot. They were all hot. Can’t wait to do that again. Crazy shit. You can do anything down there for practically nothing.”
“Yeah. I heard.”
“You didn’t do anything with her? Really?!”
“Never left the table. She was wearing a crucifix.”
“Oh.”
“I see you reading that Bible every day.”
“Yeah.”
“How do you………. How do you do that? “
“How do I do what?”
“How do you read that and do that?”
“Huh”
“I know what’s in there. How do you read what’s in there and then do that like last night?”
“Shit………. Well man. I just always wanted to do that. Maybe I’m going to hell.”
Silence. They finished the meal in silence, got up from the table and he never mentioned that night or that conversation for more than 30 years. But the name Maria has haunted him. What Catholic church is without a figure of Mary or Maria? The dark hair evenly framing each side of a gentle olive toned face with full lips and brown eyes, haunts him. The combination of a sleeveless, red cocktail dress, wrapping around curved hips looking down at clear coated manicured toes strapped by red laced pumps with a 4 inch stiletto heel is still recalled in full any time he sees a woman with even one fleeting image of that night. These recollections are always followed with the horror of the thought of what happened to each of the 4 women that night and what was happening to them and Marina on each and every night for an unknown period of nights and an unknown line of men.
Over the years he would understand that Maria, like millions of mothers over thousands of years, have left behind little ones and entered into the dark to have done to them what is done behind doors across a hallway, done in cars in alleys and most often done in the dark.
But Maria was 26 years old, a mother of 4 year old Jose, back in Acapulco with her parents, and she wore a silver crucifix around her neck. She wasn’t unknown, she was real and what was happening to her was nothing like he had ever imagined. He knew the right thing to do was to go back for her. But how? He would not even know how to find the place. When ? He was contracted to the US Marine Corps. What? And do what? Go in and shoot the place up? Burn it down? Quietly slip her a name and phone number to call? A place to meet up in Tijuana and slip her across the border. All of this took place in his mind the hours, days, weeks and months after that one encounter. Over the years he would encounter more of these types of places and more mothers trapped in the same sort of misery as Maria. As Maria was his first experience, they were all a version of Maria, feminine, vulnerable to their surroundings, he with a desire to stop her suffering, even while he was there to pay for a drink to the bar that trafficked her and ensure the safe return of his fellow Marines after a late night debauching of other browned eyed, Spanish speaking mothers from a third world circumstances.
He only recalls the face and name of one of the four Marines - the one with whom he had breakfast with the next morning. He wonders what that Marine does for Mothers Day. Does he buy his mother a six foot helium rose? Does he have a wife? Maybe he’s had several. Does he have daughters? Does he ever think of the women with Maria and consider what he did with them and think about his daughters, sisters and mother.
Marias
Sitting in the parking lot recalling the face of Maria he cannot forget on Mothers day, he recalls other faces that remind him of the night he met Maria. The first was a deep brown eyes, round face, round head and round body on a six year old that sat in a Charter School entrance office.
“Hey boss,” his small voice was a bit gravely and just a slight central american accent.
“Si senorita.”
The brown face chuckled, “I’m not a senorita.”
“Ah. Señora. Los siento.”
“You funny man. What’s your name coach?”
“What’s yours? Brown bear? You look like a little brown bear.”
“You look like a coach.”
His son and daughter attended the same school. His daughter was in the same class as the six year old who had an 8 year old sister. The sister was the one to register them at school as their mother from Guatemala who had been in the country for about 15 years, could still not read or speak English. But she could clean, and every day she cleaned houses and sent most of the money back to Tegucigalpa, where her father suffered a debilitating kidney disease. The money went for his dialysis and the rest was drunk by her brothers.
Perhaps their mother had a head injury from one of the undocumented, heavy drinking roofers with whom she would drink, one of whom battered her face and put her in the hospital. But rarely could she recall the correct time to pick up the two children who were left over after the school, so, he and his children would take them home and his children's mother would feed them dinner and wait until as late as 9:00 pm for their mother to arrive, while he wondered if their mother was fit to drive having taken advantage of someone dinnering her children to work a little later and spend the extra cash at the Cantina a mile away. But despite their mothers dysfunction, abusive boyfriends and fathers they had barely seen who had fled back to Central America due to outstanding warrants, the boy and his sister were the most loving children he had ever met. The sister was brilliant, an artist and already teaching herself French in addition to English and Spanish fluency. Her little brother who looked and acted as a small version of Gabriel Iglesias (comedian Fluffy) could not read and really didn’t care for class where he was picked on by other boys who had fathers and whose mothers could speak English, do more than clean other people's houses, and who were not less than 5 ft tall, and not less than 300 lbs of a diabetic woman waiting for a heart attack.
But the boy was funny, energetic and loving. He would ask you what time it was and when you checked your watch stating the time, he would shout, “No! It’s huggie time!!!” and he would throw his arms around you.
The girl was kind, brilliant and loving. The color of their faces and the texture of their hair was that of the two he had seen offering Chicklettes from the dirt in Tijuana, and both loved their mother more than any children he had ever seen love a parent. Every time he stopped by before the end of school to set up the chess club, he would stop at the boys class and ask to see him and chat there in the doorway for several minutes. Back in his seat the other boys would ask who that was and he would say, “That’s the chess coach. He’s my dad. If you mess with me he will beat you up.”
They knew the chess coach part was true. They would see the boy hanging out with the chess coaches son and daughter. They would also see him and his sister get into the chess coaches SUV on occasion. So the bullying stopped, the boy learned to read and his grades improved. And when he learned from the little girl that another undocumented roofer had fought with her mother, moved out and left her to pay the full months rent for which she had received an eviction notice, he advised the school guidance counselor of the situation, handing her an envelope of cash marked “Anonymous”.
Birthdays and Christmas he and his children would shop for gifts for the two and Mothers Day was always preceded by a cash gift to the girl specifically for the purpose of including flowers and gifts with the affection they would give their mother on that day.
Christmas presents are best delivered being driven through a fresh blanket of snow. The boy answered the door with his usual affection but his typical exuberance accent was curtailed. Something was wrong. He and his sister sat on the couch and opened the gifts while he and his son and daughter watched. But the second bedroom door never opened and the mother never appeared. He could see champagne bottles on the dining room table. And the nervousness of the little girl. It was obvious that the mother had been out drinking and that she was with someone behind the bedroom door.
Later that evening after Christmas dinner, the two explained that their mother felt bad for the undocumented roofer who had previously battered her face, so she met him at the cantina and accompanied him to various Xmas eve parties with the boy and girl in the back of the car while she and the undocumented roofer drank. Upon returning at about 2 am mom and the Guatemalan roofer stumbled into bed as they had done over the last several years and the 13 year old and her 11 year old brother quietly went to the bedroom they shared and the 11 year old pushed his bed against the door so that no one could enter in the middle of the night.
The look on the 13 year olds face was troubled but clear. He had to ask and the 11 year old brother responded how he wasn’t going to let the mothers boyfriend touch his sister. He looked to the sister. asked if the man had done something and she looked down and nodded in full view of his wide eyed 9 year old daughter and 16 year old son.
Merry Xmas.
The law requires reporting of abuse. As he had met the two in the context of being a background checked volunteer at their school he was a person required to report or be considered complicit. He confirmed this obligation the next day with a retired school administrator and then called the abuse hotline to report the molestation. He was advised as a witness that he could not have any contact with the children during the investigation. They could not tell him when that would be.
Since he dropped them off that Xmas evening more than 2 years ago, he’s not seen their sweet smiles, asked the time or had shouted at him “It’s huggie time!” Small comfort is the thought that there was some sort of investigation confronting the mother with the prospect of losing her children if she continued to associate with an undocumented, drunken, sexual predator.
But he knew the cantina where the roofer would go and so he made the plan. From thrift stores on the other side of town he would buy a plain overcoat, pants and hat of the kind he never wore. Pair of boots, gloves and glasses too. He also bought a fifth of Jose Quervo.
He grew facial hair for a week and stashed chewed gum in the car console. In the dark and blowing snow he rechewed the gum and in the cantina parking lot placed it in between his teeth and gums to distort his profile. In the deep left breast pocket of the overcoat he dropped the bottle of Jose as he walked into the cantina. The Guatemalan was leaning into the far end of the bar, with several beers and shot glasses in front of him. “Oye hombre, Jenny quiere verte.”
That got the drunk's head to turn. And opening the overcoat to expose the upper half of the fifth of Cuervo along with, “Ella me dijo que te llevara el suyo y que te llevara,” returned a smile and, “Vamosssss!”
He helped the drunk into the truck's leaned back passenger seat, belted him in, uncapped the fifth and handed it to him with a “Beber, hombre”.
The hombre was so drunk that the driver's slight pat on his left shoulder was enough to cause him to lean his right shoulder against the passenger door as he tipped a large gulp of Jose. Slowly the truck pulled onto the road and within minutes was on the Interstate headed toward Detroit metro airport and out of the county where the hombre lived and was known. The man knew the highway well and that the time of nights was when the linehaul trucks would be leaving the terminals between the airport and the west side of Detroit so as the hombre passed from consciousness holding a bottle of Cuervo in his lap, the driver exited the Eastbound interstate and in two left turns was back on the interstate heading West toward Chicago.
But for the linehaul trucks there was little traffic that night as the man carefully pulled a wallet and keys from the hombre’s jacket pockets and then steered into the passing lane. Semi trucks are limited to 65 miles per hour and the right hand lane. In a darker part of the interstate he slowed to 65 to be far enough ahead of the trucks behind him to only see the reflection of their headlights. Then with a quick movement of a gloved left hand on a switch he unlocked the truck's four doors and partially opened his driver's window. With a right hand he unclicked the hombres seat belt. With the same right hand he reached over and pulled the passenger door handle and with a brush of his elbow in the hombre's chest and the air pressure flowing from the driver's window through the open door the hombre was gone into the night.
He knew the hombre was too drunk to do more than land in the right lane and that within a few seconds a semi driver would feel a bump under his wheels and imagine a he had clipped part of a dear or other unfortunate beast. Back in the next county, the driver exited the interstate and from a bridge tossed the hombre’s keys and the fake eyeglasses into the icy water. At three different donation boxes he deposited the pants, boots and overcoat. And the next day at the warehouse with the help of a little gasoline, he burned the wallet and contents and deposited the ashes in a neighbors dumpster.
The hombre was never heard from again. The Detroit, Wayne County morgue had another unknown corpse and a little girl would only and forever again see the hombre’s face in a memory.
Dallas
His aunt was 51 when she was put on a plane to live with him after an attempted overdose of pills in an East Dallas hotel room. She had 4 children in her life but the eldest by the age of 30 was working on a Psychology thesis, the next struggling with substance abuse, the next newly married and the youngest at 20 expecting a son with a 39 year old nurse he met on one of his revolving doors between periods of powder, smack and 12 step rooms.
But the question this May was if the son would survive for the coming Mothers Day. He had been on a bender of his favorites, getting up with cocaine and coming down with injections of China White in the gay district of Dallas where older men would rent apartments for clean, good looking but strung out young men that lit their fancy. Of course they pretended to be benefactors and elder statesmen of the “community” but the reality was that they trafficked the young men, keeping them stupefied in their drug dens with just enough energy to call their benefactor for a little cash and maybe first a meal followed by an obliging or maybe even grateful act of sexual obeisance, sometimes when again high and other times while the dealer was still on his way.
This was how the 36 year old fiancé, nurse and mother of Girls aged 19 and 16 described the condition of his cousin who was AWOL a month before the finance was to give birth to his son. Yes, the ages are correct. He was 20, his fiancé with child was 36 and she had 19 and 16 year old daughters.
The last time he’d seen his nephew the kid was six years old and he was 20 taking him around the west end of Dallas. Sweet kid. Like the Huggie Time fellow. And the cousin thought of him as a dad as no other was present in his life. So with the thought of that sweet blond six year old, with a face covered in ice cream, he called the fiancé, then the two sisters in Dallas and got in his truck and was alone for the next 12 hours and 750 miles.
Arriving in Dallas about 1:30 in the morning he checked in with the sisters who knew the likely address and apartment number where their 20 year old brother had been the last 72 hours. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Maybe it was fearless masculinity left over from his time in the Marine Corps, but a bunch of gay junkies slouched in an apartment in the gay section of Highland Park, just didn’t cause him concern. So it only took another five minutes to get there and ring the bell calling out the young man’s name and telling it was his cousin and that he was needed at the hospital. Even junkies are usually empathic to someone at the hospital.
He could hear movement in the apartment and slowly a standing, stoned, slight and effeminate figure and voice, opened the door, “you want Eddie?”
“Yeah”, his fiance is in the hospital.
“Oh…that sucks…..Eddie….Gina’s in the hospital…..Eddie…”
The figure laying half on the couch and half on the floor moaned a little. “Here help me get him out of here.”
Stoned as hell but still trying to be helpful the apartments only other occupant helped Eddie sort of into his feet and they stagger walked him between them into the passenger seat. 20 minutes later Eddie moaned and his eyes slightly opened. “Where we goin cuz?”
“To see your mom.”
“Where she at?”
“You need some water. Here drink.” He handed Eddie water with nighttime alka seltzer to keep him knocked out. They were half way through Oklahoma by the time he woke up, again asking where they were asking to call his fiancé and her persuading him to go see his mother in Illinois and dry out before coming back to Dallas and the birth of his son. Eddie went back to dozing before being fed and dosed with 32 ounces of coffee south of St. Louis. The two then caught up.
Mom was a mess so by the time the kid was 12 he was living in Texas with his sisters. The older was in a masters program and working as a masseuse/escort and booking her younger sister who was still an undergrad. She was also booking her little brother to older gay men. This was the first his older cousin had heard of this, but there had been intimations and rumors going back to when he had left Dallas 14 years prior that nothing surprised him. Another reason to not be surprised was that mother was 17 when she joined the children of God and it was an open sex sort of place where children born to parents in the cult would have to pause and maybe years later check 23 & Me to confirm their paternity. So it really came as no surprise to hear the kid mention being molested by a drunk and high mother at some point between kindergarten and second grade.
For the next two weeks his cousin stayed with him in Illinois and attended AA meetings. His recollection of Mother’s Day assumes roses were provided to the mother of his child but the only real memory is his aunt and cousin sitting in the front parlor of the 3 story brick Victorian and the cousin asking mom if she even remembers molesting. She hung her dead in denial. Said she didn't recall anything like that. But half the kids with mothers in the Children of God recalled nights of multiple women, men, children, all naked in bed. One can only wonder what such people do for Mothers Day.
After a couple of weeks of drying out and being set up for outpatient, cousin was sent back to Dallas for the birth of his son. 18 years later the son has graduated from high school, his father is a commercial artist and his father has a new fiancé who is a nice lady and actually several years younger than he.
The middle sister is a cancer survivor and works for a law firm and the oldest sister who pimped her little brother to old men, has her PhD and is a geriatric psychologist.
But 18 years later, the seminal memory is of his cousin drying out, trying to clear the air and telling his mother that he didn’t care if she molested him, because he forgave her. If anyone ever deserved sobriety, it was that kid. He was a hero that day. He forgave. And he did as he was asked to do on the drive back from Dallas by his older cousin who pulled him from the drug den “Get sober to see the birth and life of your own son.” Yes, it makes for a really odd Mother’s Day recollection.
42 years earlier, a Mother’s Day came and went without a mention. For ten days they had camped in tents on the asphalt at the port. The women and girls used the bathrooms and showers at night to avoid the piercing lears of the men recently released from the prisons of Havana. There were no flowers in sight. There was no Mother’s Day dinner. The morning serving of eggs were still green with mold. Any afternoon and even servings were no better whether partially cooked, partially fermenting, or containing parts of what nibbling rodents left behind.
But none of the six thought anything of it. The father, mother, two daughters, son and grandson only thought of getting off the tarmac and getting on the boat that had waited for them in the harbor for more than three weeks. Four days after Mother’s Day 1980 the six manifested passengers were ordered on to the boat brought down from Miami, along with 46 other Cubans, most like the six,, families that left everything including jobs, homes, friends and other family members to escape the dominion of the Castro regime but also a number of men of the leading type that had been released from Castro's dungeons to make room for any new dissident voices unwilling at the moment to check themselves into the Mariel Port concentration camp and be unwilling to be overcrowded onto a vessel crossing the less than predictable currents and weather of the straight between an island of dictatorship and an isthmus of freedom.
The engines roared as the boat slipped from the port but with a good thirty more passengers than its rated capacity, riding low between the waves that sloshed over the bow. Within 2 hours and 30 miles north of the port the water diluted fuel, sold to the captain while waiting at the port, was slipping through the fuel lines and into the engines. With only one engine running the boat slowed even as the size of the open water waves increased and the boat began to take on water. With concern the captain of the vessel observed a fishing vessel heading South toward Havana and tacked his craft toward them. Over the loudspeaker he asked if they could come alongside and take the women and children onto the larger fishing vessel so as to allow his smaller craft to rise in the water and with the remaining men on board he would try to make it back to Havana to repair the waterlogged engine and refuel.
Over the fishing vessel's loudspeaker came the reply, “you made your choice. Now live with it.” The fishermen on board waved middle fingers and jeered at the passengers on the sinking vessel, “shouting go die motherfuckers' '. As the fishing vessel headed over the horizon the 51 souls on deck including mothers and children considered their fate. The boat was sinking in the increasingly dark waves and below the offspring that which devoured the prize of Santiago as described in old man and the sea awaited the taste of not a single Marlin but the blood of 52 men, women and children.
Grimly, the captain opened the hold containing the life jackets that were not stolen while the boat sat for a month in Havana harbor. First to his mother and her husband, then his sister and her 4 year old son and then his younger half brother. The remaining were secured to the women and children but there were not enough for them all. Those without jackets looked at detachable parts of the craft that might bouy them, while knowing only minutes remained issued final mayday calls over the two way radio and set an emergency beacon that would remain on the water marking where the boat sank.
Below in the hold the captain's 16 year old sister, awakened at her brother's desperate request over the loudspeaker and the jeering reply of the fishing vessel and sailors mocking them. The lower part of the vessel had filled with water preventing her from opening the door to the hold. With elbows she broke the window glass and bleeding from fresh cuts she slogged up the steps to the deck where the children huddled against their mothers wailing their prayers to the saint of the sea. Seeing her, her father removed his life jacket and placed it on her minutes before the boat's stern slipped below the waves and by ones and twos and then threes, 52 souls slipped into the 10 to 15 foot waves that quickly separated families and mothers from children.
In the trough between two waves she could see a large dark figure splashing toward her. For the first moment she thought it good to be able to see someone, but as the figure paddled toward her she could see the desperation in his face and in the dusk he grabbed onto her and with only her single life vest attached to her slender frame, under the waves they went as she began to claw, punch and elbow to break his hold. From what seemed at least a body length beneath the waves she was able to break free from his grasp and in a second her vest popped her back above the waves where she could gasp for air which now contained the hot smolder of diesel that floated on the water. She could hear wails, screams and prayers to the saint of the seas but only at the top of the waves could she see others bobbing yards away.
She did not know that as the boat sank, her nephew slipped from his adult sized life vest and that her brother the captain dove deep below the waves to rerun him to the vest and his mother bobbing above him. She did not know if any were alive. For the next five hours she was alone in the dark, alone in the 20 foot waves, hearing her screams and the screaming of the other survivors too weak to paddle away from the pools of smoldering diesel that burned their arms and chests. As the waves grew to 20 ft they broke the pools of diesel, even as they salted the wounds of those still with enough breath to moan the searing pain.
In the darkness of the night, crashing of the waves, burning of her flesh and knowing the sharks below would surface for the wounded when the waves calmed she accepted death. Pain, age and sorrow do that. For the next several hours she screamed, she moaned and in and out of consciousness waited for death. But instead of a last sound came a light beaming on the water and pulsing percussion noise of chopper blades in the distance. Then the noise of US Coast guard cutters guiding the choppers and pulling alongside Survivors and calling out a tally as each were hoisted aboard.
The mayday must have contained the number on board and as the communications between the vessels announced the count as when survivors and bodies totaling 52 were announced and confirmed to be aboard the ach vessel the vessels charted a three hour course to port in key west even as the storm called and the sun arose as they pulled into port.
It was not until in the US Coast Guard Cutter hospital bay that the father (Dr Lopez) who strapped his life jacket to his only daughter, before the drug running vessel slipped into the depths, saw that his only daughter was alive. Bloodied, and badly burned, but she was alive.
42 years later, a man sits in a parking lot wondering how a woman can survive six years of a communist boarding school and five hours in burning waves with sharks circling below but the woman’s daughter cannot survive a childhood raised in Coral Gables attending the best Catholic schools and every effort her mother, therapists and others who loved them had to offer. But instead she risked her life with drugs and people that favored them, until one of those persons placed something around her neck and squeezed the life and light that still remained, from her soft brown eyes.
A mother can give a daughter life, everything in the world and make every attempt to save her. But maybe the will to live and to live a good life lies in a child knowing not what their mother would do for them, but that in life’s worst storm their father would give them his life jacket.
He sees a figure approaching the chiropractor office door and unlock it. His thoughts return to the pain in his back.