Boy Kings of Texas (9 page)

And there was one ceremonial moment, every Christmas during this stage of our lives, that made Dan and me feel very special and singled out, though it might—retelling it here—seem totally twisted. There's this particular cut of pork—and I have no idea where it is on the anatomy of a hog, except that it is close to the heart—that was considered the finest and most delicate cut of meat on a pig, and early in the reduction, that part was cut out, put on wooden stakes cut from tree branches and cooked right there in the fire, and then handed to me and Dan and Dad and Gramma, which was horribly conflicting, because we raised this pig, and the salt of our tears made the meat even that much more delicious.

Kidding. Anyhow, they called it
lomo,
and I have never tasted anything like it ever in General America. The closest thing I can compare it to, in mouth feel, is foie gras (again: with apologies to the vegans). It was barbarically rich, crisped on the outside and delicately soft, melting with blood on the inside. It's almost like a childhood dream. I've never had anything resembling it in my travels since.

OK, so that was the worst part of the story.

What followed next can only be described as Gramma's own little tribute to Henry Ford, and I don't mean that she was anti-Semitic, because, well, we never knew what Jews were when we were growing up in Texas, except that they were some sort of people in the Bible, like the Canaanites, which is a great word. (World War II? Dan and I didn't figure that one out until
Band of Brothers
. I couldn't understand the distinction the Nazis were drawing. To me, everyone in Europe—which I still couldn't distinguish from America back then—was “white.” They certainly weren't Mexican, or Texans.)

Gramma had everyone in the barrio working for her on Christmas, and conned them all into thinking it was a holiday. Her people would show up at six in the morning for the preparations of the slaughter, and then they'd
really
get to work, reducing the animal into parcels and negotiable goods. People would arrive in our driveway all day long and buy fresh cuts of pork for their Christmas dinner. It was tradition.

Gramma must have cleared one thousand dollars that day, from her ten dollar piglet, which is a phenomenal amount, when you consider the income for an average family at the time in Brownsville was roughly fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Our own family—and I should mention here that my mother, who wasn't a native of the barrio and found all this
very
disturbing, well, she kept her daughters from it. Her sons were a different story. Me and Dan: We were Dad's property, so we could go as
injun
as necessary. But for Christmas? We went all out, after the slaughter was done. We were all under Gramma's dominion.

By midafternoon, it would have taken a forensics team to determine that there had been a complete pig in Gramma's garage earlier that morning. The skin and adipose tissue had been boiled in oil to make
chicharonnes
, the head baked whole in tinfoil and dismantled to make
barbacoa
, the hooves thrown to the hounds, the blood boiled down into a fantastic gravy, the better cuts of proper meat auctioned off, the globular organs made into sweetmeats and the intestines boiled down into
trípas.
Total reduction.

By three in the afternoon, the drunk cousins and uncles had all made off with hefty portions of the meat for their own families' dinners, and the women who had helped as much as they could would either stick around to help make the sauces and meats and beans for the tamales, or they would fuck off to their own families for the afternoon, and this is when the real work would begin for the rest of us.

In preparation for the slaughter, Gramma had already purchased a huge vat of
masa
, or corn dough, from the
tortillerias
that she'd been in cahoots with all year long to fatten up
coche,
and she'd also bought plenty of the corn husks that were used to bake the tamales and were freely available anywhere in the endless geometry of farms that surrounded us, but Gramma—who had a status to uphold in the barrio—had them store-bought, because that's how she rolled. Actually, I think they were simply more hygienic, being store-bought. If Gramma could have collected the free-range corn husks for free—or had us do it—I'm sure she would have.

Anyhow, we kids did the actual rolling. We were set up in the backyard next to the now-vacant pigsty in the open yard and were set to the task: One kid would grab a good handful of dough, roll it into a ball, and put it down. Repeat, ad nauseam, to eventual nausea.

The next kid would pick up that ball of dough, plop it into the center of a store-bought corn husk he held in his left hand, and then smooth out the dough onto the corn husk with the rounded back part of a spoon, and lay it on the table for the next kid. Repeat, ad nauseam.

The kid next to him or her would then pick up the corn husk with the dough already spread on it, and then add whatever ingredient was next, or was plentiful. We normally had two to choose from: refried beans, or a fantastic meat catastrophe with raisins that had been made from the minced brains, eyes, lips, and cheeks of the pig. Delicious. My favorite part was when the knife of the person dicing the brain would suddenly “clink” on the lead bullet, and we'd yell out, fascinated. Good times.

So this was how Christmas afternoon went: an endless procession of dough, ball, smooth, beans or meat, fold, and then pile.

We'd make a raw pyramid of a dozen tamales, then the kid at the end would be charged with packaging them in aluminum foil, and they would be carted off by one of the old crones who would be in charge of the fire and the tin washtub and the steaming. These were Gramma's female cousins or neighbors. All day long they would huddle around a tin washtub, burned to charcoal by an open fire, and they'd leave a small level of water readily at the boil on the bottom quarter of the washtub, and a sort of grill would be set above the waterline, and the tamales would then be placed there in dozens and left to steam for an hour. If the Catholic Church could have seen this, they would have burned us all at the stake, because it looked like textbook witchcraft.

This was the tamale-manufacturing business. I made such a big deal about describing that bit only because when I told this story to my friend, Andy, he wanted to know everything about making tamales and found each stage absolutely interesting. He loves native cuisine. I, personally, do not, and was surprised, in fact, to find out that I was, indeed, “native.” What Andy found the funniest was that I had finally seen through Gramma's scheme and realized the weak point in her operation: She had only a limited amount of
masa
, the dough. That had been her dearest investment in this. When I realized this, I developed a cunning plan of my own to get this operation in arrears by six o'clock that night, because there were some
Star Wars
action figures and play sets that needed tending to, even if I did owe Gramma another fifty bucks with a three-point vig due by the following Saturday or she would have someone break my knees.

So, when no one was looking, I started throwing every second dough ball over my shoulder onto the roof of her house. Every fifth or so dough ball would go to the dogs, already happily stuffed with the viscera that happened to spill off the autopsy table but more than happy to eat until they purged.

No one would notice as I'd roll another clump and then just toss it high over my shoulder, where it would land on the blistering tarred roof, because the sun was out in full force as it was—you know—Christmas Day. It kind of made her whole house into one giant tamale. (Hmm. Maybe that's why the roof over her bathroom rotted. Gee; now I feel kind of bad. . . . )

See, we couldn't
possibly
eat a third of the tamales that day would generate, even if we froze them. We would have been eating tamales until June. The rest would be sold at about seven to ten dollars a dozen, and it would be
Gramma
who kept the money. So we kids couldn't care less: The dough had to go. Eventually, when my brother and sisters realized what I was doing, they started laughing and participating.

So up the roof they went, and it was all going according to plan until the crows came and started swarming around her roof. But by then we were very nearly done, and she would yell, “
¡Yunior! Traeme la veintedos
!
”

A true border widow, she was calling out for a rifle, Grampa's old .22 single shot. And as a Texan, I love the sound of gunplay, so I dropped what I was doing and brought her Grampa's rifle, and she shot at the crows until they left, swarmed, and returned unharmed, because Gramma was kinda drunk by this time, and so I shot and killed a few of them, to make her feel better, and she never found out that I had been the one to bring the crows in the first place, so we could finish early.

And besides, it was always safest to be on her good side, while she was drunk and armed.

Chapter 10

The Mimis

Before they started junior high, my sisters Mare and Margie had preemptively developed the fantasy of “the Mimis” between themselves as a means to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise experienced by moving into the sinister world of teenage fashionistas, which, in Brownsville, was always tinged with border-town racism.

First, they dyed their brown-black hair blonde until it turned the color and brittleness of hay, then they began dressing in Sergio Valente and Gloria Vanderbilt fashions, and then finally, in further escalation, decided to call each other, simply, Mimi. They had secretly reinvented themselves for the adolescent phase of their lives, and then decided to let the rest of us in on the secret on an “as-needed” basis.

At the time, the rest of the family had not consciously realized that our job, as new Americans—and worse yet, as Texans—was to be as white as possible, and we honestly didn't see their delusion as anything other than another bewildering strata to our sisters' quest for a higher level of superior fashion, as teenage girls do.

A typical conversation between them went like this:

“Mimi, do you like my new Jordache jeans?”

“Yes, Mimi, I do. Do I look rich in my new Nikes, Mimi?”

“Mimi, you look like a tennis player, Mimi.”

“I know, Mimi. Maybe I should make Mom buy me a racquet.”

To help reinforce this pathological delusion, Marge had enlisted the help of Rex, a small gray terrier mix she had found rummaging in an overturned garbage can on a street near the Matamoros Bridge. She cornered the poor beast in an alley and caught it, lifting the matted, dreadlocked mutt by the armpits and deciding, right there, that the dog was a poodle and that it needed saving, naming it Rex. No one disagreed, or questioned why.

Rex was introduced to our family as the Mimis' fugue was buzzing at its fever pitch, intoxicating everyone who came near and caught a whiff of the Mimis'
Anais Anais
perfume. (We had all seen the commercials on network television while watching
Dallas
or
Knots Landing
, and it was a forbidden fragrance for rain-depressed English women with secret muscular boyfriends who drove Jaguars dangerously through one-lane unpaved Scottish roads, so the Mimis had to have it, and so they found it at the local JC Penney, and had Mom pay for it.) Dan and Syl and me, we just kind of stank from the heat and dealt with it.

Anyhow, Rex's right hind leg had a malformed kneecap that made his leg jut stiffly at a forty-five-degree angle, so it looked as if Rex was in a constant state of micturation, even when he was walking or sprinting forward, like he had been distracted by some urgent event that demanded immediate investigation while he'd been peeing and had forgotten to lower his leg in charging forward.

The older Mimi, my sister formerly known as Marge, just overlooked this because she wasn't deathly allergic to furry animals like the younger Mimi, my sister formerly known as Mare. The older Mimi convinced our mother to adopt the dog and have his hair carved into poodle fashion, had even bought it colorful striped sweaters that made the near toothless dog pant wetly in the year-round South Texas heat.

With his fancy haircut and new powdery smell, Rex found himself terrifically misplaced on our property, about five miles outside of the Brownsville city limits. The other feral dogs that happened to be kept around didn't know what to make of him when he'd limp up to them and start barking, with his odd jutting leg, but thankfully they didn't kill him, just kind of got this look of annoyance on their dog faces and decided to avoid this new poofter that might be competing for the late afternoon dog swill Gramma would reluctantly put out at sundown.

Out there, among the outhouse and Gramma's pigsty, Rex looked as tragically displaced as his kneecap. But, in full appreciation and retrospect, perhaps that was the sort of companionship the older Mimi (Marge) had really been seeking out there, subconsciously, and had found in Rex someone as confused and dislocated as the Mimis felt in their designer jeans and trendy tennis shoes, but lacking access to an indoor toilet.

The shift to junior high had exposed the Mimis to new ideas of glamour and status, and for the first time they were really experiencing the sub- and superconscious derision that exists when cultures and races collide against one another in geopolitical reassignment, like you find in border towns, and they were smart enough to understand that which was never spoken about: None of this was ever,
ever,
pointed out. You created a polite fiction, and encouraged everyone to participate. Which is what the Mimis did.

And so the rest of us followed.

Marge and Mare, as the Mimis, had decided to align themselves with their more American—more European—genetics, even if it was through bad hair dyes and pretending not to understand Spanish.

Dad's genetic line was mostly of the Spaniard conquistador: He, like them, was tall, light skinned, and prone to fits of pork. Mom was light skinned, reddish in tint, and spoke English, so she was considered “white.” We were—genetically—predominantly European. Gramma was the Indian; Gramma was the Aztec in the family. And since she had the balls in the family, we identified—culturally—as Mexican. Gramma had been made an American by Grampa, and Dad had been “naturalized” as an American when he was six years old. Mom, we would later come to understand, had a secret and very old American history.

And yet we all felt so terribly
untermensch
that Marge and Mare had to have a psychotic episode in which we all participated to help them through junior high. We all helped in creating the Mimis.

It was really that simple: Fed up and humiliated with their circumstances, the Mimis decided to change them, retroactively.

They made a conscious decision and agreement that they would be—and act—rich and white, even if their family wasn't.

Grampa's death had plunged the barrio into a rivalry between his next younger brothers and Dad, who was seen as the illegitimate inheritor of the trucking business. They clearly felt that Gramma and Dad did not belong in the barrio and were certainly unworthy of inheriting the only viable business in that barrio, the trucking business Grampa built after he returned home from Korea. They wouldn't come right out and say it or do anything overt to draw business away from Dad, but after Grampa died the regular and paying customers who had been Grampa's were no longer Dad's and were now suspiciously doing business three houses to our west, with Grampa's brothers.

The trucking business began to disintegrate around Dad within the first few years, and he was started on his slow road toward desperation and religion.

Meanwhile, the Mimis had made their decision to be two blue-blooded, trust-funded tennis bunnies from Connecticut, accidentally living in Brownsville, Texas, with us, a poor Mexican family they had somehow befriended while undergoing some Dickensian series of misfortunes.

For those of us watching, the whole “Mimi” thing took on a momentum of its own, though we seriously didn't think it would last. But at some point it took hold, and by then no one thought it peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English or could not understand the Mimis when they showed up at family gatherings.

“
Yo no puedo-o hablar-o Españal-o,
” one of the Mimis would say to an uncle or cousin, who more often than not would linger lasciviously around them, at first conflicted by the idea of being turned on by so young a relative and then mentally calculating just how distantly related they were and tabulating his odds at scoring with this new white chick who just happened to show up at this barrio party.

But only after two or three beers.

“
Mimi, how did you like my Spanish?”

“Oh, Mimi, it's getting really good.”

“Mimi, do you think they understood me?”

“Oh, Mimi, who cares?”

Mom developed a fascination with the Mimis, too, like she couldn't believe her luck, now that she was related to royalty. Feeding into their fantasy gave her one of her own, so she was always ready for an air-conditioned trip to the mall.

She took the little clothes budget reserved for us boys, my brother and me, and patched it into the Mimis' wardrobe, because it was a sign of status for the family that the Mimis look their best; it is important for families of little wealth to have their daughters be as attractive as possible for means of social elevation.

In this way, it became acceptable for the Mimis to take the lion's share of the children's clothing budget, and none of the rest of us could question it, even though at the time, we didn't exactly know why.

But it still felt wrong.

Clothes would come in and out of fashion so quickly that I was often left with the Mimis' recently stylish hand-me-downs. No one else in my grade school was remotely label conscious, or capable of reading in English, really, so it passed unnoticed that most of my clothes were made for glamorous junior high school girls. Almost every child at my school came from recently immigrated families—kids so poor they'd save half their free lunch to share with their younger siblings at home, their heads shaved to rid them of lice.

My best friend, Arthur, he noticed, though. He was part black and part Mexican and had just moved to Brownsville from some big city slum in Michigan, where his mother's boyfriend had been employed at a GM factory, and he read labels.

“Hey, Dom,” he said in that lilting, sort of inner-urban street funk, “Yo, man; you're wearing a girl's shirt. Or is Esprit making baggy boy's shirts now, too?”

I loved Arthur dearly and was totally embarrassed. So to change the subject I slugged him high in the chest and ran away crying, him in his bald head chasing me down to punch me back in my girl's blouse.

If she had any guilt, I imagine the justification my mother probably used was that my older brother and I would just ruin our clothes, working with Dad in the sandpit and under the greasy trucks. It made better sense for the Mimis to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to ruin their clothes.

“
Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance.
You should join the dance team at school.”

“I know, Mimi, I think so, too.”

“Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color, ‘Ash.'”

“I know, Mimi, I'm trying.”

“Mimi, is your dog OK? He just spit out another tooth.”

During this time, Dan's eyesight was so poor, people thought he was Asian, so often did he squint. He couldn't read the blackboard in school and constantly ran into corners or short, skinny people. In every photo he took in junior high, he looked like he was trying to see into the photographer's eyes, through the camera's lens. This, of course, went entirely unnoticed, and it was the younger Mimi (Mare), with 20/20 vision, who got vanity glasses with her name etched in gold script in the corner. Dan wouldn't get glasses until he was in the military, when he was seventeen, some four years later.

“
Mimi, you don't need those glasses, Mimi.”

“Mimi, I do need them, Mimi. They make me look rich. They say my name in the corner, ‘Mary' Mimi.”

“Mimi, I think there's something wrong with Rex.”

“Yes, Mimi, your dog doesn't have any teeth.”

“No, Mimi, it's not that. He smells like pee all the time now.”

Always a bit incontinent, Rex would not mind if, when he was attempting to pee, he'd just spray the underside of his own twisted leg during the larger part of the activity, because he could hardly lift it out of the way of the hot stream anyhow. Now, he didn't even attempt to move his bad leg out of the way, he just kind of let it have it where he stood, looking around like a confused Alzheimer's patient, panting breathily all the while. Our indoor plant pots, usually a collected oasis of old stinky dog urine, were now suspiciously micturation free. This had to mean he was pissing elsewhere, and freely.

Rex was definitely circling the dog drain.

After a few months of studying the toothless, stinky gray dog, I finally checked out a book on dogs from the school library. I read that people who have allergies to dogs are not allergic to poodles because poodle hair is almost identical to human hair. The younger Mimi (Mare) still could not get within a few feet of Rex without lapsing into violent sneezing fits, fits we were afraid could trigger asthma attacks. For me this clearly illustrated that the dog was not a poodle, but the older Mimi (Marge) would not hear of it. “You're just jealous of Rex,” she said. And she was right.

Eventually, Dad's failure at navigating the business left to him—and usurped by Gramma—crept into the Mimis' fantasy. Dad made a decision that would make his family as Mexican as his mother. He decided that as soon as school ended, Mom would take the Mimis and Syl and drive them to California to participate in the seasonal grape harvest with the migrant workers, to meet up with Dad's cousins who did this periodically, since the Mimis were now fourteen and fifteen and Syl was sixteen, and they could all, with Mom, collect a full salary. They would be treated like adults there, paid the same as everyone else.