To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him
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Authors: Gwendolyn Zepeda
To the Last
Man I Slept with
and All the Jerks Just Like Him
To the Last
Man I Slept with
and All the Jerks Just Like Him
By
Gwendolyn Zepeda
Arte Público Press
Houston, Texas
This volume is made possible through the City of Houston through The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, Harris County.
Recovering the past, creating the future
Arte Público Press
University of Houston
452 Cullen Performance Hall
Houston, Texas 77204-2004
Cover design by Giovanni Mora.
Cover art by John M. Valadez, “Adam and Eva, The Guest is
Leaving,” 1986.
Zepeda, Gwendolyn
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him / by
Gwendolyn Zepeda
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55885-406-1 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)
I. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3626.E46T6 2004
813’.6—dc22
2004048531
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
© 2004 by Gwendolyn Zepeda
Imprinted in the United States of America
4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Half-White Child of Hippies, Born in Houston in 1971
A Big-Breasted Woman Is a Hard Thing to Be
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (Revised)
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (For Real this Time)
To the Last Man I Slept with, and to Everybody Else
How to Be a Trailer Trash Housewife
Fiction Is Good Because It Lets You Pretend You’re Lying
For Aunt Sylvia.
Half-White Child of Hippies, Born in Houston in 1971
I Hate Clowns
E
very time I tell this story, it’s different. I’ve told it so many times, by now it’s probably a lie. But it lives in me like a fungus, and I have to vomit out as much of it as I can, whenever I get the chance.
When I was little, my parents got divorced and my mother went to live in a hospital. My brothers and I lived with my father. I love my dad very much, but he didn’t know how to dress us right. We dressed ourselves and our clothes never matched. My dad sometimes forgot to cut our nails or to make sure that we used the shampoo and not the conditioner when we were taking a bath. But it was okay. He loved us, he taught us many important things, and he took us to the mall.
One day there was a clown making balloon animals in one of the mall’s hallways. The mallway. Whatever. The clown was just like every other clown I’ve ever seen in Texas—an older white guy dressed in polka dots and big shoes. He had black stubble showing under his red nose and white makeup. All around him there were little blond children laughing and screaming for balloon animals. Their thin blond mothers waited impatiently around them. My brothers told my dad they wanted balloon animals. I wanted a balloon animal, too, but I already knew, even though I was only eight, that this was going to be a bad scene.
My dad went to sit on a bench, where he pulled a science fiction paperback out of his back pocket and began to read. We waited around the clown for our turn. I tried not to stare at the little blond children and their thin blond mothers. I remember reflexively making my hands into fists so that no one would see my nails. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was wearing boy’s corduroys with a hole in the knee, or that my hair was tangled around cheap plastic barrettes from Fiesta instead of barrettes with beads and ribbons made by a thin blond mother, but I could hide my dirty nails. I remember looking at my little brothers’ hands and wishing they would make them into fists, too. But they were too far away for me to whisper it to them.
As the clown made each balloon animal, he would crack jokes. After a while, even though I was only seven or eight at the most, I realized that most of his jokes were of a personal nature. He would say to a little boy, “Hey, pardner, I like your boots. You gonna be roping some cattle today?” All the other kids would laugh.
The clown would say to a little shampoo-commerciallooking girl, “Boy, you sure are pretty. Who are you, Marilyn Monroe?” And the kids would laugh some more, as if they knew who in the hell Marilyn Monroe was. While we waited, I became more and more nervous. I knew the clown was going to say something about me, and I didn’t think it was going to be that I was pretty.
When my brother got to the front of the line, he started excitedly telling the clown what kind of animal he wanted. But the clown had to crack his joke, first. He looked right down at my brother’s hands—it was like he had read my mind—and said, “Boy, you sure gotta lotta dirt in those nails. Whaddaya do, grow potatoes in ‘em?”
Everyone laughed. At first my brother did too, but as the bratty little bastards laughed harder, pointing at his fingernails and screaming “Ha, ha—ha, ha, ha!” he realized what was going on and put on his blank face.
My brothers and I all had our blank faces. They were the ones we wore when sincere white women asked, “Where is your mother?” and we, sincerely, couldn’t tell them where our thin white mother was. They were the ones we wore when the bright blond people with their shiny clean nails looked at my father and whispered, “Is he one of those
Iranians?”
“No . . . I think he’s a
wetback”
. Although I was only seven or eight, I had already learned to use my blank face all the time. I tried to set the example for my brothers, but they were still too young to understand the way life was.
The clown, who was probably an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a better job, paused so that all the laughter could subside. Then he said, “You know, sometimes a little soap and water can be your best friend.” The brats and their mothers nodded solemnly, recalling the verse from their Middle-White-People Class Bibles.
As the clown finished up his inflated masterpiece, I ground my teeth and imagined how sweet life would be when I grew up and got rich. I would drive to the mall in my Stingray Corvette. I would walk inside, wearing my tall brown boots and flowing skirt like the ladies from Fleetwood Mac. I would point to the clown with a long, clean fingernail and say,
“You are stupid.”
He would immediately remember what he had done to my brother and, seeing how rich and beautiful I had become, would feel very, very sorry. Maybe he would even die.
The clown made my youngest brother a balloon without comment, and then I dragged both brothers away to the bench where my father was waiting. He looked up from his book and asked where my balloon was. I told him I was too old for those things, and then we went home.
I thought about becoming a professional clown killer after I graduated from high school. But then, instead, I went to college.
Blue Birds
I
went to Kindergarten at A small neighborhood school right near the center of Houston. Our class consisted of children of Mexican immigrants, children of Vietnamese immigrants, and me, a half-white child of hippies who had been plunged, through tragic circumstance, into the barrio of her Chicano father’s extended family.
Our school planned to put on a program for the parents. It would consist of musical performances and important information about new teachers, student accomplishments, and head lice epidemics. My class—the Kindergarten class—was to dance to a song about birds. The choreography rehearsals were intense. We formed a circle with our clasped hands and then, one by one, each student would play the part of the happy bird that flew around that circle, weaving in and out under the raised wings of its peers. Although we did this in time to a jaunty piano tune with optimistic lyrics, the only looks I remember on our faces were those of confusion, apathy, or grim five-year-old determination.
A week or so before the big event, our teacher Mrs. Miles mimeographed notes detailing what we were to wear on the day of the program, and pinned them to our shirts so that we could courier them to our families. My note was a page-length drawing of a girl in a long skirt and blouse. It very clearly said (in English, at least) that the skirt was to be blue and the blouse was to be red. The boys had only to wear white shirts and black pants, in keeping with American men’s formalwear customs of the last several hundred years.
My grandmother, the matriarch of our house, put on her glasses and studied the note, then conferred with my father and my aunt. Some time after that, a small red skirt and blue blouse were posted on a coat hanger, high on the closet door.
I knew that it was all wrong. I knew that it was supposed to be a
blue
skirt and a
red
blouse—it said so right there on the note. I didn’t dare to broach the subject with my grandmother, though, knowing from hard experience that her reply would be something like, “Go over there and look at the note.
Mira
—no, not there. There! Pick it up you think it’s gonna bite you? Get your hair out of your face. Look at what it says. How can you be so smart at school and so dumb at home?
Chinelas.
I told your daddy he should have baptized y’all.” It would end in me being, as usual, the one who had gotten things wrong.
Carrying out my tradition as class misfit, I walked to school on the day of the program with my hair uncombed and in the wrong clothes. All the other girls in our class had known each other since the day they were born or a couple of weeks before that, in the towns below the Texas border before their parents had risked crossing the Rio Grande in order to give their children the gift of performing in American public school programs. These girls’ mothers had all gone to Clothworld together and bought the same red fabric and the same blue fabric, and then gone to each other’s houses and sewn all weekend. These girls showed up on the morning of the program with exactly matching red blouses and blue skirts, and red lipstick and blue eye shadow. I was the odd little girl out, deeply ashamed.
Mrs. Miles looked at me pensively for a while and then went across the hall to consult with Mrs. Yee. They were often discussing me, poor motherless child that I was, or else taking turns trying to comb the tangles out of my hair.
It was decided that my fashion faux pas could be played off. I was supposed to read a little speech in the program, anyway, introducing the new music teacher. I had been taken out of class during naptime for two consecutive days in order to practice saying “round of applause” without a stutter. It would seem, it was decided, as if I were purposely dressed in colors exactly opposite from those of my classmates in honor of my two-sentence speech.
The hour of the program arrived. We danced our dance, and I said my speech. Everyone clapped. I felt a little better.
My dad didn’t see the program. He hadn’t wanted to miss a day of his job with the big typewriter manufacturer that would lay him off within the year and then go on to become a multi-billion-dollar computer corporation. My grandmother wasn’t able to attend the program, either— maybe because of important developments in her favored daytime television series.
I never told my family that they had put me in the wrong outfit, or that I’d been chosen to read a speech. But, for the next program, I did ask my aunt to give me some lipstick.
