The Accidental Native (31 page)

“Fuck you,” I mouthed at him.

“We were worried to death you might be in the park,” my mother said. “How come you didn't return our calls?”

Even before the summer had begun, my parents had pushed me to march in the parade. They had insisted I join Aspira, the Latino youth organization so I could meet other Latino teens—maybe even a nice Boricua girl, my father chimed in—and absorb culture, perhaps even improve my Spanish. I hated the idea. I could care less about Hispanic, Puerto Rican or whatever culture for that matter. I was seventeen, summer was coming, and all I wanted to
do was party before entering my senior year of high school, when I knew I had to bear down and get into a good college.

I conceded because Mami said they had scholarships for college. She filled out the application, and then both urged me to march with the Aspira contingent in the Puerto Rican day parade. To me that had to be the lamest waste of a Sunday I could possibly imagine, worse than going to church. People walking down an avenue on a hot, summer day, among crowds who were loud and tacky flaunting Puerto Rican flags on the most discrete parts of their body or flapping them in your face, playing tedious and repetitive music, and wearing big-ass buttons proclaiming, “Kiss me, I'm Puerto Rican.” And marching for what? To be seen waving stupid flags all over the place? It was the one time of year I was most embarrassed to be Puerto Rican.

“Show your Puerto Rican pride,” my mother said. And I was thinking, pride in what?

“It's a great experience, your mother and I did it a couple of times,” my father added. Then they rattled off all the wonderful memories, the friends they made, the little inside jokes, while I stood there embarrassed and shocked, about to puke that they would push this crap on me.

Of course, they couldn't make me, and I was not going to do it, no matter how much they harangued about cultural pride, knowing one's history, and all that nationalistic bullshit. But then my bud Kyle scored KISS tickets for the Farewell Tour. The band was playing at the Jones Beach Amphitheater. I was not a huge KISS fan. My tastes gravitated back then to grunge and alternative rock, and of course, to heavy metal and classic rock. Kyle and his cousin, Jordan, were all KISS Army, plus she had a driver's license and a car. I wanted to party and rock all summer long and KISS, though not a fav, still rocked. Suddenly, the Puerto Rican day parade sounded doable, at least as an alibi.

My parents were overprotective, I thought. Never would they have let me go to a concert like that. Everything was about “wait'til you're eighteen,” the magical age for parents to release responsibility. I think it was just a convenient excuse to pull on the leash. I felt so good that summer. I had done well in school, got honors, had
made varsity on the swim team, was beginning to get popular with some of the girls in my class. I was growing into my adult body, losing that awkward geekiness, and I wanted to have fun rockin' and cruisin' with chicks. My parents' main concern was keeping their son from not getting any more gringofied than he was.

I lied to them about the parade. Told them I would go, but they would have to let me stay at my friend's cousin's house that Saturday, the day of the concert, so that I could get into Manhattan Sunday early enough to meet the 11 a.m. start of the parade. They let me go because they knew Kyle and his parents and trusted them. His cousin Jordan lived in a house in Astoria, Queens, a few minutes to Manhattan on the subway. That also saved them a trip driving me into the city. They wanted me to participate, but of course they had other plans for their Sunday. “Been there, done that,” my mother said.

It seemed like a perfect plan. Go to the concert, party, and Kyle and I would return on Sunday night, and I'd have all these priceless stories about my experience with my fellow Boricuas. And everybody's happy.

Jordan was twenty-one, so she could buy beer, which was another great thing. Her parents had taken off to somewhere in the Caribbean for vacation and had entrusted her the house, dog and plants. Which was great, too.

She had also captivated my young sexual imagination. She was my ideal rocker babe: sassy, in your face, smart and sexy. She wore tight jeans that looked like she had been poured into, a tee slung over one shoulder, showing off an athletic bra strap, wore platform heels, her hair and face made up as her favorite KISS band member, Gene Simmons. You had to love a girl who could imitate and get away with the Demon's style, including the wagging tongue.

I had to admit, despite my grunge tendencies to criticize anything resembling glam rock, the concert was awesome. Everything seemed magical that night. The bigger than life, iconic band members, dressed in their costumes and outrageous high heel shoes and make-up, playing hard rock the way it should be played: ruthless, unforgiving, relentless. Didn't even mind all the pyrotechnic stuff:
the rotating sparklers and smoke as they plowed through their repertoire of “Black Diamond,” “Heaven's on Fire,” “Strutter,” until they ended with their signature “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

At one point, after giving me a shotgun, Jordan grabbed my head and tongue kissed me with such ferocity I almost lost my breath. She slipped both her hands under my jeans and gripped my ass. I think she would have unzipped me right there, and I would have let her if the band hadn't started on a number that had everyone firing up their lighters. Etiquette requires that you, too, light up for the somber occasion of the song. We were all high and happy, young and horny, and it was all good. Then, I was not a Puerto Rican, but just another American teen having fun on a June Saturday night, amid the stirring sounds of bass, drum and Ace's wicked guitar riffs. A regular guy who turned on an “older” hot rocker chick.

After the concert, we went out to eat some burgers, and later we drove to the beach, sat on Jordan's car, listening to tunes on the radio and looking up at the stars. Jordan told Kyle to take a walk and we made out for what seemed like hours. We crashed when we got to Jordan's, and I slept through most of the parade. When we finally got up, half deaf from the blasting speakers, and hungry, we slipped out for some chow. At a diner, Jordan ran her fingertips up my thigh. It was one of the best weekends of my life.

All that good feeling crashed with that call. I was deported back to Puerto Rican Land with my mother's sobbing, worrying lectures about what could have happened to you, a young man of color, among all those “savages.”

“'Cause they never arrest the real culprits,” she said. “They see a bobo like you, hanging around there gawking, and an hour later we have to go down to the station to bail your ass.”

I felt like laughing, but it was actually sad. Years later, when I cared about those issues, I found out that two innocent men were arrested and convicted in what would become known as the “Puerto Rican day parade attacks,” although they happened in Central Park after the parade had finished. None of the men shown groping the women on the forty or so videos collected were arrested.

“You have to be constantly watching your step when you're Puerto Rican in America, Rennie,” my father informed me. “You need to do twice as much as any gringo to get a crumb of respect, but one little misstep and you're screwed for life.”

So many years later, and his words now weigh down on me from his grave.

Perhaps the clowns were a mistake, in hindsight. But how could I, or anybody, know they would have such rabid militancy, especially Miki Tavárez, their leader. Because of his demure stature—and here I risk being political incorrect—I never imagined he possessed such viciousness and hate. At the moment, we were willing to do anything to keep the crowds subdued, and there was the issue of the children. They needed something to keep them entertained. Miki came along, a little odd, for sure, with his long hair pinned up with what looked like a chopstick, his tats and leather pants, and he volunteered to do the clowning with his buddies, also clowns. “All professionals,” he said. He was down with the cause, he said, in his accented but excellent English, which had a southern tinge, his having lived in Georgia for some time.

Everyone was down with the cause, at that time. No short supply of commitment and political resolve. Or, so I thought. It started with a simple plan: conduct a series of protests at the college to draw attention to the contamination, with the hope that the media would pick it up and run with it for a while. My mother supported it, because as she put it, “There's nothing better than good publicity for your case.” Well, they ran with it, all right, but not for the reasons we had anticipated nor with the results we wanted.

I thought I was doing something tech savvy, bringing in Face-book, Twitter and all the new communication and social networking facilities to political activism in Puerto Rico, right? We set up a Facebook page and announced the first protest. Thousands of people signed up immediately, which surprised me. Then
the stream of tweets began. I started to get messages on my cell from all over the island for information. We set up a web page with all the vital links.

The first protest had a better than expected turn out. Felipe and Samuel were impressed at the hundreds who gathered there with signs, musical instruments and loud voices. Impressive when you think that it was early August and students were still on vacation. They could have gone to the beach, slept late, watched TV, played video games, plugged into their iPods. Yet, they came from the four corners of the island. They tweeted each other; it became the island's cyberspace chatting point of the week. Bored with all those things they normally did for fun, this event had become their new political fad.

Still, I can't overlook or underestimate the outrage. The overwhelming majority who gathered at the college to protest was steamed at the arrogance of the authorities, the sneaky methods for covering it up and the lack of concern for those hurt by their stupidity. Puerto Ricans harbored residual anger over Vieques, years after the mobilization to close Roosevelt Roads.

It was the height of arrogance to use Vieques, an island slightly bigger than Manhattan, for target practice, endangering the lives, livelihood and health of human beings. I understood why these protestors had come. Baná college had become another Vieques in their eyes. The hypocrisy of opening a school in the name of “turning swords into plowshares,” but secretly burying the ordnance under the feet of those working there was intolerable. The independentistas' outrage that a power like the United States could push Puerto Rico around like that was felt by all Boricuas across the political spectrum. But those of us on the Committee, those who were supposed to lead, including yours truly, should have sensed that singing and dancing, the general festive mood which developed, was not necessarily good political form or discipline.

The bands came much later, because they were down with the cause, but their political chops didn't prevent them from getting free publicity and selling T-shirts and CDs. That first day, and the week that followed, only a few young men and women played
congas, drums of all sorts, clapped and set up a drumming circle of resistance against the government and the powers that be. It was all well and good. I was a bit smug, thinking I, rather
we
, had any control over this.

I thought it was out of commitment and duty that the hardcore group remained after the event was officially over. One of the student leaders, with the standard sparse beard and scruffy hair, said, “Compañero, the official time for a movement to end is when the goals are achieved.” He had more political acumen than I did. And that made sense, of course, but dedication and resolve don't have to mean chaos and whatever goes.

So, they kept coming, by the hundreds. Contingents from as far as Fajardo, Yabucoa, Rincón and the largest from San Juan, mostly composed of firebrand, youthful independentistas, craving for this type of attention, looking for the next event that would give them an adrenaline high. Within a week, the highways leading to Baná were packed with traffic, vehicles lined up with sleeping bags and other camping paraphernalia tied to the top, slogans sprayed on their windows or doors. Cars parked anywhere space was available; then the buses starting dropping people off. The mayor of the town, a young politician from the minority party, opened the baseball stadium for parking, and soon had to secure other public spaces for the vehicles.

Mom informed me that the mayor lobbied and succeeded in getting the town of Baná to officially join the lawsuit against the present government, the University of Puerto Rico and the Defense Department, and thus the U.S. government. His participation, she said, ensured the basic requirements of a number of people and costs to pursue class-action litigation. Her firm had already started oiling the media machine in anticipation of filing the lawsuit, so she was very pleased with the media attention.

“I'm so proud of you, Rennie,” she said at the beginning, when everything was going our way.

Some unions participated at first, when it was still serious, although later the labor leaders removed their support. The leftist parties did the same. But in the beginning, the faithful stayed and grew. They set up camp within the confines of the college, something
we had not wanted them to do. They climbed over the fences and overran the main gate, which the poorly outnumbered university guards could not keep closed. Not wanting to create any further bad publicity or a situation which could lead to violence, the university consented to their staying, thinking within a few days they would leave. A week later, there were more tents, ranging from bed sheets to upscale models from Sears, dotting the wide open grounds of the college.

We had to deal with sanitary issues, potential health problems, security and keeping everyone focused on the political reason for gathering there. The last point was the most difficult to sustain. We managed to distribute donated bottles of water to people, a few doctors volunteered their time and set up a medical tent, and from the money the organizing committee had collected, we had to rent portable toilets.