Tortillas Duras

2007-03-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

Teatro Tears

Last night, I feel my eyes glaze over and attentions fly away in the midst of the post-reading buzz of feedback, compliments, and exchanges. Not because I don’t appreciate such exchanges, just because I am really hungry. And worked all day, and picked up children from after school activities and rushed home and gave them dinner, and dressed, and grabbed my books and papers, and left them when they didn’t want to come saying ‘ok, but don’t call after 7pm, just send a text message,’ and felt guilty, and sat in traffic on the Bay Bridge for 40 minutes while listening to one song on repeat the whole time and working out choreography and pacing in my head because this piece, for the tour, is a thing I’ve slacked on. And then looked for parking for 15 minutes. And then showed up a half hour late (but it was all good, cuz it hadn’t started anyway).

I refused to be stressed out about any of these things. Everything happens in good time, so I will sure take mine. What else am I gonna do? Yes, I will always take the time to pull over my head a clingy black dress, to fasten strings of red beads around my neck, to honey my collarbone and nipples before tucking them into cups of coral lace. I think of the Darkside Astrology book which says of Leos something to the effect of: you don’t worry about being late because you know that nothing would ever dare begin without you. Perhaps, perhaps. But I do reason that I am moving quick as I can and doing what I need to in order to be well.

In the post-reading buzz, there are the people who tell me I have touched them. There are the people who want to touch me. There are people who have only known me through words on a page and are intrigued by the physicality of me and sound of my voice, as can happen when you meet writers in the flesh. And then a sweet chicana butch comes up to me and introduces herself and tells me I made her cry. I guess that would be two of us.

Yes, this would be the second gig in a row at which I have cried. This time it was in a dark corner, while another writer was reading and after my jotito friend had left. I felt a little ridiculous. I was glad nobody noticed. I figured it was the rawness of the stuff I read. I wondered if this is what it’s gonna be like til this season is over.

While I sinffle, I take comfort in the fact that it’s rumored that M cries at every engagement, play opening and lecture she has. And that the other Fur/Pelo actress cried right after the play was done while M and I held her. See. It’s ok, I tell myself. I remember that before the stage lights went up and the house ones down, I looked up to M for reassurance, only to see her sobbing into her lap in the very back row. Shit, I am on my own, I thought, and gathered my fuerza, despite the pre-show shots of tequila swimming through me. That show was also some rawness.

The story goes like this. Michael is an odd collector and character who inherits a pet shop after the previous owner dies of AIDS (read as from loving strange animals too much). Michael loves Citrona, the hairy butch monster girl he finds and buys from a circus sideshow after her mother sold her to the circus. Michael exoticizes Citrona and is in love with, and lusts for her, particularly her desires and wildness. And Michael keeps her caged. Citrona falls in love with Nena, the straight, sassy, femme fatale animal trapper who Michael hires to care for Citrona. Nena is in love with Michael yet intrigued and disgusted by Citrona all at once.

It’s a piece full of sexual tensions, rawness, lust, violence, power and control, and un-love, in the sense of unrequited love and desire, the unloveables, and love and lust that is not acknowledged, accepted, or respected. And in the end? Well, there are a lot of ways to imagine the ending because the play stops mid-scene before you know the fate of all the characters. It is most often read as Citrona killing and eating Nena, and then killing Michael, who finally unlocks the cage. Heavy stuff, right?

It’s not that I have a problem crying, I just don’t usually at engagements. It’s just that (vainly) I can’t stand to have tear streaks on my face, or to walk around so vulnerable-like and opened in the midst of strangers who have instant intimacy with me because of the things I share through my work. This doesn't have to necessarily be negative. It's just complicated right now. Yes, it’s time for a break. But in the meanwhile, I need to figure out a strategy for self care and being alright through the coming months’ gigs.

Thoughts?

2007-03-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

Other Moments

From other lives. 2 gems from the archives.

Adventures with powertools

I had a crush on somebody who wore a Fraggle Rock shirt

2007-03-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Pre-Caffeine Confessions

I don’t (usually) like parks. It’s how the grass itches. It’s the bugs. It’s the way one’s shoes sink into the ground. It’s how there is nowhere to comfortably be. These things make me frown.

The last time I had an outdoor reading was on a beautiful crispy fall day in Dolores Park. I was exhausted, a tiny bit hungover, and freezing the whole time. My stilettos kept getting stuck in the ground which left me in danger of tipping over and toppling down the hills. The wind kept blowing my skirt over my nalgas. My arms were full of books and papers so there wasn’t very much I could do to counteract the skirt blowing or tipping over. So one friend walked in front of me and would push me back upright when I started to tip, and another walked behind me to pull the skirt back down over my ass.

But then they started to drink wine and I was kinda left on my own. And didn’t get very much wine, consequently. By the time I went on I was freezing and couldn’t feel my toes or my ass cheeks. My hair had blown everywhere. My nose and cheeks were red. I was sniffling. All I wanted was a long draw of warming tequila and a blanket.

I have a reading in a park this weekend. I just don’t like the park. I just don’t enjoy having to brave and trample across acres of nature to get to the stage. And I refuse to wear sneakers and earmuffs. But other than the nature and the elements, it should be a good time.

So I made the announcement recently that I’m taking a break after my spring season is done (June 2nd, yay!) from booking readings, spoken word or theater stuff. I said that it was much-needed, which it is. I am really tired. I’ve spent increasing amounts of time over the last few years traveling to perform. Over the last year at home, it meant a three hour drive to the airport and then the trip and then a three hour drive back from the airport. That is a lot. I also think I just need a minute to recuperate from moving and rearranging my life here. These are the practical pieces of it.

At the heart of it, I realize I have not been having fun. That word sharing in public, and theater have started to feel like a chore to me recently. I am tired of my work. “I know what you mean,” a writer friend says to me when I tell her of my struggles “ I hate my whole fucking book.” Well, it’s not that we really, really hate the stuff we’ve created, published, produced, written. It’s just that if this is the way I am feeling, I need a break and need to do some soul searching. This is not the space I want to be in with my work. This is not the space I ever envisioned being in when I was a young writer.

The first time I took a stage was six years ago. I need time to reflect on the paths and directions my work has taken since then. I am trying to remember my early experiences of the rush and joy I get (yes despite everything, I still get it) at sharing my work with people. I am trying to remember what this sensation was like when it was new to me. I am trying to remember how a blank page to me, as a little girl in rural migrant Washington state, was an open road. And how a blank page to me as a young femme far from home gave me room to remember, and how a blank page as a grown up femme holds so much possibility, so many open doors. Very Ellegua.

Because of life circumstances, I have not had the space or capacity to grow my work the way I need to over the last year. Because of this I am displeased with myself. In a writing retreat for writers of color last year, the first thing a writing mentor had us do was an exercise on how we have learned criticism. Who is your critical self? Who are you as a critic? This was and still is deep to think about. The ways we are criticized and receive criticism are so deeply embedded in us.

I struggled not to cry in workshop as I talked about this. For me criticism has meant shame and never being good enough. I had a long list of things that started with my mother’s and female relatives self-criticism around their bodies, aging, and preservation and the ways this meant survival to them that went on to early experiences around class and race and ended somewhere around the ways that queer poc bodies are displaced, policed and controlled. In between was stuff around surviving sexual assault, fearing I was never really smart enough throughout college, and a bunch of other shit too. These are some of the ways and experiences through which I have learned and experienced criticism in its different manifestations.

The ways in which I have been critical of my self are rooted in the ways I have been hated and violated. I have to struggle to be conscious of this, to make the distinction and work actively to undo the ways in which I have internalized these experiences. This has everything to do with my work.

But in being critical of myself I also need to not be. I need to recognize my accomplishments and that it’s not been a bad year for me. I cranked out hundreds of pages of new work, won a cool award that was very meaningful to me in a personal way, and had the honor of sharing my stuff with beautiful audiences all over the place. This is good.

So what am I excited about right now?

I am excited for Mangos with Chili (more news coming). I am excited right now in this moment about new paths I’m taking in developing qpoc dance theater. I need to establish what this means for me, what it will look like, and how it connects to my earlier work, before I can shape it and share it with others. I am excited about the written page. The solitude and quiet of it, and worlds created in my head coming to life. I am excited about collaborative work that’s gonna be in development over the coming year. None of this is bad right?

I also said I was taking sabbatical because I wanted to finish my book. I realize this terrifies me. I fear I can’t do it. I fear I will and then hate it. I know I will finish it. Maybe not in the timeframe I am hoping for it to be completed by, but it will get done one day. And you know, if it doesn’t, it’s gonna be ok. If there is one way I have grown artistically over the years, it’s that my ego is no longer attached to the work I produce, and this makes worlds of difference.

Of course I did say that it was still ok to approach me about potentially doing stuff. Because sometimes despite one’s best intentions, it’s just impossible to say no. And because there are some places I wouldn’t mind going. Like more time in New York. And anywhere (warm) by a beach. But overall, I am feeling happy about my decision and excited to see the ways I might grow in the coming years.

In other news, I was quite flattered to be described recently as being “a dirty hot smart best thing good stuffs right here ladycake.” Awwwww, thanks friend! For reminding me.

2007-03-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

Night Sounds

I.
I sleep nowhere like I do in the desert. Maybe it’s the way the empty is so familiar. How in the empty there is so much room for my dreaming and the places this will take me. Maybe it’s the still of the air on hot nights, pressed against my mouth like a kiss, a remembering of touch I feel for a long time after. Or it could be the smell of the desert, sun on skin, the perfume left after the wind has wound its way into my walls, under my sheets, and into my sleeping.

Of course it’s the sounds. The roaring of vehicles on the highway, hurrying to move past this place that is my home, this place not easy to leave. It’s the music of crickets and other creatures moving through the night. The clamors of grief, rancheras crackling over old radios, the crush of beer cans under boots, the screeching of novelas viewed by the tired hearted, and prayers whispered to lit altars through the breaking lips of those who believe in salvation.

These are the sounds I am used to sleeping under. The first few nights in new places I stay awake through all the hours just to listen. To learn all the new noises.

There is typically an absence of clocks in the spaces I live in. Many people notice this when visiting me. Many people are driven crazy by this and can’t handle it. And in the rooms I walk through there is usually an abundance of mirrors. People notice this too, and often can’t handle it either. I have loved the mirrors I have owned for the truths of myself they have shown me, for holding the images of the people I have loved, and for reflecting moments of my life back at me. My very favorite mirror was a copper Mexican mirror I found in a stack of discounted mirrors. I was drawn to it because I could feel the sadness of the maker in it. I could tell the maker was a man. I could tell he had cried when making it. I didn’t know why. Just that this made me love the mirror, with much of my heart. It hung at the end of my bed in my last home. It held me naked, every day.

I don’t have the mirror anymore. It hangs on the walls of someone else’s rooms. I don’t know if they ever noticed me in it. I don’t know what the mirror sees or hold now.

(I’ve prolly told this story of my beloved mirror on this blog before, and am most likely starting to repeat myself already in this third decade of my life. But if I did tell the story of this mirror it would have been at least a few years ago, in the warm months, and I would have told it differently).

During my sleepless nights in my new rooms, there are no mirrors up yet to remember or look forward in. And no clocks. I think of the seconds I have passed up til now. I remember my body small, terrified of swaying water when walking over bridges in my mother’s shadow. I think of my body now, in the seconds unfolding before me, giving themselves to me. I dream my body an old woman. What will I look like? Where will I walk? Who are the people that will walk near me?

The world is never really quiet. Not in the desert. Not in the woods. Not in the city. Not in my pink bed now. Even the stars have their moments of screaming. They know life and dying just like any other creature.

2007-03-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

Seis Palabras

I fucking love words. And I like fucking words and fucking with words and words that make me want to fuck. So here are my six word love stories, like Fabi and others have done. Of course each sentence in itself tells a story, but sequenced together they tell more story. So here we go. Three sequences, three stories.

One.
Dirty stolen kisses, a bathroom stall
Pull my skirt down, walk out
This is how you remember me
Twisting under drumbeats and your hands

Two.
Tonight I could ride you forever
Black satin glove in your mouth
My teeth grip your belt buckle
Push me over, pin me, strike
Yes, deeper, make me say please
(please please si yes ayyyyyyy por favor)

Three.
Brought our ghosts with us here
Home, a pupa blooming between us
Sweet is this memory of s/kin
The secrets of me you hold
This hunger lingers, against my will

2007-03-04T01:08:00.000-08:00

Moving Day

I am woken at 9:15am by a text from the reina pirata that says: Happy Moving Day Mamita! It is ok that I am awake. Today is moving day. I am glad she thought to remind me. And anyways, I have to be up early for my Brazilian class. This would be the grueling two hour class that can tear the skin from the bottom of my feet and make every muscle in my body ache for two days after. Even my crotch muscles (I can now flex and isolate them). It would also be the class that I just can’t bear to miss, because it is one hell of a class and because it feeds me spiritually. Also because the community of dancers and musicians in it is slowly becoming family to me, and because the live music makes me remember the music and musicians I grew up with. And in this way I am daughter there, and know some home there, and it is a good bridge between many pieces of my life, and in being so is a space where things are both realized and exorcized.

So at the beginning of my day this is what I imagined my schedule would be like:
11:15 - 1:30: Dance
1:30: Drive home, bathe and dress
2:30: Meet up with friend to pick paint colors for my new place
3:30 - 6:30: Move
7:00 - ? Painting Party

Ok, I know that maybe it’s not wise to start a moving project at 3:30. But really, because of the flood, I don’t have that many things to move. I have clothes, products, files, books. One dresser. My pink bed linens. Small items recently acquired. That’s all. So I figured three hours would be fine. Everything til 1:30 went as planned. On the way back from dance I start to call everybody to tell them to come over for a painting party. (Even though I hadn’t bought paint yet). And then I reached the friend who I was supposed to pick paint with who says let’s all go to the flea market! Let’s all play in the sun. And because I haven’t been to this particular flea market in forever, and because it is really sunny and warm, I agree.

When I get home I do not shower. I decide that because I will be in nature (kind of) and because I will be moving, I will only get dirty again, and I will shower after all of that. So I change. I am feeling a brown and gold motif with either red or hot pink accents. So it’s out of my dance gear and into a hot pink bra and panties, a geniusly cut and adorable brown and cream striped tank top (stripes are horizontal on the cups, vert on the body) which the bra sticks out of, brown skirt, stacked brown suede platforms with gold trim, gold earrings, and a hot pink bag.

The time spent at the flea market is lengthy and ridiculous. We have too many visions and concepts and ideas and outfit schemes and decorating schemes amongst us which makes an event like the flea market potential chaos, tantrums, disaster and exhaustion for everyone involved. Before I know it three hours have passed. I have purchased an utterly beautiful yet questionably useful red glass heart shaped dish held in a golden metal labyrinth of twistiness with a stand sticking out of it off of which hangs a miniature spoon. It shall live near my bed perhaps. It shall be perfect for having future lovers feed me things out of perhaps. And I have purchased books, which I have carried with me all over the place.

I bring myself home. I realize that after stomping around in heels for hours and frolicking in the sun and carrying heavy books while doing so, I am just exhausted. I also realize that I still have to move. And that I must cancel the painting party because I have no paint. I proceed to make calls.

I basically tell friends: “Ay friend. I am overwhelmed. I am not having a painting party because I forgot to get the paint. I must move now. Which means I must put on sneakers. Which means I am sad.” Except I say it longer and I think I cry.

So I go ahead and put on my moving outfit. It consists of really tight dark wash jeans, a sheerish black scoop neck shirt, a really tight blue hoodie with gathers flaring out from the zipper, glittery thick black hoops, and red glitter sneakers.

I am ready to move! Except there is one problem. I am so fucking hungry I really might tip over. I realize that it is 6 pm and all I have eaten all day is a banana and an apple and coffee. I should go grocery shopping, I think. But I realize this creates another dilemma. I don’t know which house to take the groceries to. If I take them to my new house, they will be with me as they should be. Except I won’t have anything to cook them in or eat them off of. But if I bring the groceries to the ex’s where there are things to cook them in and eat them off of, then I will have to move them. Have you ever moved food? That’s just no fun. It’s usually the last thing you move, and it pisses you off. And it can get sloppy. Mayonnaise jars can break and juice can spill because someone didn’t put the lid on properly.

My solution is to change of course.

I decide to not go get groceries because of the above dilemma. I decide to go get take out. Meaning I can’t go out in my moving outfit. I mean, either way I would have had to change. But before this can happen, Roommate comes in the door. Thank the stars. I need company and support in these pre-move moments. And to be driven around. Want to go to dinner? I ask. Yes she says, but first I have to go the art supply store because I need a new sketch book. Ok, I say. And we are off. “You look different Cherry,” she says glancing at my get up as she drives. I realize I have forgotten to change. I almost make her turn around, but then realize that by the time we turn around, I change, we come back, go to the art store and find food, I will be ready to eat my arm. Or her.

We go to the art store and get the sketch book. When we are back in the car, Roommate asks if I mind if we go clothes shopping for a minute. If you have been around me when I am physically drained and have not eaten for a very long time, you know that I can’t recall things, finish thoughts or sentences, and become very still and quiet. At this point I am too weak to respond audibly and she deciphers the moan I do manage to bellow, which really means ‘I need to eat now,’ for a ‘No, Roommate, I don’t mind at all.’

I mean, not that I do, really. It is not in my nature to refuse any excursion involving looking at, trying on, or taking home clothes, accessories or shoes. And despite my near fainting state, I am eager because I have been denying myself clothes so as not to dip into my furniture and relocation fund. So what do I find myself drawn towards in the store? Fucking jeans. If you know me, you also know that I don’t like to wear jeans very much, that I feel out of my element in them, and tend to limit my wearing of them to things involving nature. Like parks, or to the ocean when it is cold, or in the terrible desert outpost I just came from. If you know me well, you also know that I have been wearing jeans a whole lot since getting here and that this grieves me terribly. Part of it is that most of my clothes are in storage, part of it is that the weather is weird, and part of it I just can’t account for.

I don’t know why I am looking at jeans, I say to Roommate.

Well try the skirt section over there, she says. But I did, and found them unattractive. So I find myself uttering in response something that shocks me: Well. You can never have too many jeans. This is not a thing I believe in for myself. Roommate responds: Yeah at one point I got down to two pair and it was insane. Two pair is all I recently had, til I got two more a few weeks ago. I enter the dressing room and as I try the jeans on, I start to wonder if this place I have relocated to will cause my fashion deterioration. Because none of the jeans suit me, I go over to the lingerie. I do not need any lingerie. I have more than is reasonable now. This is what I am thinking when I see it. It is red satin, fishnet over the cups, black rosettes where cup meets strap. It’s size 36D. It should be mine. As usual when it comes to potential lingerie purchases I reason with myself ‘but it will be so good for the stage’ and in the span of 45 seconds I’ve constructed a whole concept, set and lighting scheme, and chosen music, props and the rest of the outfit. All while holding this one underthing in my hand.

In the end I don’t get it. I exercise incredible self control and do not dip into my furniture fund. I tell myself that there will always be pretty clothes waiting to be found in the world. Instead I wait in line with Roommate and look at accessories. I am unable to converse at this point. I have a 3 foot necklace tangled up around my neck which I can’t remove, stacks of bracelets on both wrists and keep bursting into uncontrollable giggles randomly and inappropriately because I doubt I have the energy to disentangle myself from all of this. People begin to look at me. Did something funny happen Cherry? No, no, I say. I can’t even tell you what Roommate and I talked about at this point because I don’t remember.

I have no recollection of walking to the car either or of the ride to our favorite Hawaiian barbecue place. I do remember ordering chicken with an extra scoop of potato salad and spam musubi though. And I do remember eating the fuck out of it.

When we are eating I am like a new woman, with boundless energy, believing that anything is possible. And moving is the farthest thing from my mind. Let’s go to the bath house! Let’s go to the beach and look at the moon! Let’s -! I am full of let’s.

And by the time we are done with eating, night has fallen, and my muscles have started to ache, and all I want to do is soak in the tub, sip a bit of tequila, and be chill.

Moving day can be tomorrow. And the paint getting and party another day too.

2007-03-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

Things Left Unsaid

Part I
I lied.

For shallow reasons, like Leo pride and not wanting you to know you were capable of hurting me again. And I lied for some not shallow reasons like I did not allow myself to feel hurt for a few days, and it feels better to me to choose to just not engage with you anymore. It would not be productive. And I sense that you don’t really care. That is alright.

But I do hurt. It’s not devastation. It’s not heartbreak. It’s not shattering. It’s just sadness. And disappointment. It’s an ache I imagine to glow the color of sea glass through my core and over places your mouth has known. It’s a sting like a scrape, stunning and sudden, like blood you have drawn from me.

It’s just that I am still, as ever, puzzled by whatever motivations, intentions, and desires you had for me. None of it makes very much sense to me. I don’t understand why you chose to pursue me and involve me in your life multiple times when you didn’t have the capacity to. Why? How was this fair to me? It was not. I don’t understand why you chose to bring me unknowingly into the middle of the ongoing strife and unfinished-ness between you and your ex. Again, why? How was this fair to me? Had I had clarity about these things it would have affected the ways in which I chose to interact and be involved with you from the beginning.

You withheld information from me and in doing so were dishonest with me.

Your actions and behaviors have repeatedly caused me to feel unwanted, unimportant and unappreciated.

Your actions and behaviors have caused me to feel manipulated and used by you, and really quite disposable.

You were not responsible with my heart.

And in not being upfront and straightforward about the status of your previous relationship, you were not responsible with the trust I placed in you.

All of these things hurt. But I don’t hold any ill will towards you. I wish you healing. I wish you self-determination. I wish you strength. I wish you future loves in which there lives truth and trust. I wish you future loves in which your needs and desires are met, and in which you feel valued. This is what you deserve, and then some.

Part II.
When relationships transition, shift, dissolve, fall apart, blow away, blow up, or cease to exist as they once did, there are things I tell my lovers and things I don’t. The things I choose to tell I try to keep simple, clear and brief. I am not always successful at this.

The things I don’t tell are things that are for me to work out, things like the note above. These things are not meant for my lovers’ eyes or ears. Why? They are my feelings, and they are not the responsibility of my lovers to bear. While things experienced in a given relationship might have caused them, the reasons they surfaced, their significance to past trauma and experience, and what they mean to me are my responsibility to decipher and process. Not anyone else’s. It’s not fair to burden lovers with these things. They are not able, and it’s not their responsibility, to decipher these things for me.

For me to consider are things like this, for example: What does feeling unwanted, unimportant and unappreciated mean to you? What are the things that have made you feel unwanted and unappreciated in the past? What exactly is it about this current situation that has caused you to feel like this? And where else (outside of this person or relationship) do you find that validation or have that need met? And with this information, clarity and knowledge I grow and become more solid.

I’ve been reflecting on endings a lot lately, and how as we culturally celebrate death, all endings can be celebrated as well.

I celebrate the end of my relationships and honor them for what they are and were, for the moments and energy exchanged, for the things I learned from my lovers, and for the feelings generated during and after which have pushed me closer to knowledge and to life.

I celebrate the endings of my relationships for the possibilities that endings and transitions offer. In an ending there is possibility of newness. Possibilities waiting to be found in the self, in the way I approach my life, in future interactions with my once lovers. Possibilities in a world that is full of moments waiting to happen.

The actions and choices of other people will always be out of my control. What is under my control are the choices I make based on the things I need and desire. What is under my control is remaining clear about what I need and want and being up front about it with others. What is under my control is not tripping when others are, and respecting and not judging the choices of others. What is under my control is my beautiful and very full life, and all the possibility it holds right now.

Time to let things begin.

2007-03-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

Slaying the Demons of Self-Doubt

I occasionally have moments when I feel as if I am so impossibly messy (or lacking or selfish or vain or un-smart or inarticulate or moody or disorganized or not experienced enough or good enough at any number of other things) that nobody can learn anything from me, and that I am not equipped to share or impart knowledge, thoughts, or things learned from lived experience on others. When this happens it is usually before I’m supposed to be teaching things to people. Not every time. Not all the time. Just sometimes.

This happened yesterday afternoon, before a reading and workshop at one of the UCs. I found myself earlier in the week in the unfortunate position of not being able to access any of my writings. My jump drive stopped working. My print copies of work and publications are in boxes I can’t get to right now. Because I am not supposed to move into my new place til this weekend. Because I am still placeless (in its many connotations) and staying with an ex. Because I fled my homophobic and conservative small town as soon as I could after living there for the past year. Because my house on the East Coast flooded. Because I didn’t have enough resources to start over again there. Because I had fled my homophobic and conservative small town numerous times before finally finding a permanent way out via academia a decade ago. Because my homophobic and conservative small town was not safe for me to be in. And because fleeing, migrating, movement has always been the way of my peoples. For safety, for survival, through sex trade, through slavery. These things are in my blood.

But I am getting ahead of myself. My solution was to read excerpts of my journal entries, as in the stuff you encounter here. I thought that perhaps it wouldn’t be my finest moment, but that I could make it be ok. I printed out a bunch of stuff. I stuck them in a purple folder. I put them in my bag. Maybe it was the fact that this was the first time I’d been away from the noise of the city since getting here, because it’s easier to ignore the noise of your own heart and mind in the bustle of so much noise, in the circus of so many hearts and minds exploding and colliding and jumping against each other every day, covering every surface inch of space here. Maybe because it’s so many of the little towns on the way to the University, and the rolling hills, the orchards reminded me of my own heart left behind in the swell of river that has cradled me, in the silent sad green of orchard trees that saw me grow to be solid-hipped and furious with fists rising to the sunset.

Maybe because of all of those things, I found myself pre-reading in the green room in an unusually raw and vulnerable place when I looked at the journal excerpts I was intending to read for strangers. Many had to do with home, and I realized that I have not had adequate time to process my leaving, that home was too raw for me to deal with publicly. I realized that this reading felt too impossibly scary to do, that there was a good chance I would cry in front of my audience of strangers and that I really didn’t want to. I said I am not doing this and proceeded to cry right there. I missed my family. I missed rice and beans. I missed the desert. I was feeling helpless and lost against feelings of mourning and loss and dislocation.

I felt myself unravel through the spiral of becauses outlined above, and then some. I felt I had failed. That I couldn’t even do a simple reading. That the traumas I had lived through and the challenges of my current life had immobilized me. I spiraled down further, and started to doubt the core of me. I thought look at what a mess I am. I should not be entrusted to share my stuff or teach anybody anything right now.

And then?

I felt the strength and spirit of a certain messy (perhaps messier than me) writing mentor beside me. He said: Nah, you ain’t a mess, you’ve just been through a few things. Come on. You’re gonna do this!

I remember the two things that writing mentor has told me. The first is to calm the fuck down, and stop saying fuck and fucking so much. That I don’t have to be so hard to survive here, on these pages, in my voice. The second is that my writing would save somebody’s life one day. There are storytellers and writers who have saved me, made me, and helped me live through hard days. I genuinely love them and credit them with helping me grow and become. But I feel hesitant about my stuff being this for other people. I don’t like to dwell on this. Despite my Leo-ness, I sincerely don’t have any illusions of being grand or being the impetus for someone’s salvation. I just do what I do, and if hearing or reading my stuff or experiencing my work does help somebody contextualize their own experience, if it challenges somebody, or encourages thought for somebody, cool.

I sit up. I pull myself together. I dry my eyes. I figure that maybe today my words will find the ears of somebody who needs to hear my stories. For whatever reason. I don’t know. But I do know that I can let these words and stories go. Let them out. That in doing so I live, I survive, despite the will of those who would have me dead or broken. Maybe it sounds clichéd. But you know, I’ve been through a few things. So I go do it. And there were lots of people from small towns there. And lots of people engaged, thinking and challenged. And some demons slain for one more day.

2007-02-23T02:16:00.000-08:00

(Early) Friday Confessions
1:36 am

I.
I am currently sad, right now at 1:36 am because I’ve wanted nothing more than to come, multiple times, for 2 days straight (ovulating). Yet. Between working hard long hours on day job projects, art job projects, dance, and socializing and the fact that I just got done painting my nails, I have not found adequate time, space, energy, or ability to jack off.

I would grab fistfuls of my hair and scream out of frustration ‘cept I’d fuck up the nails.

But it’s the rituals you see, things like painted curvy nails and arched brows that keep the body remembered in strange places. And maybe orgasms too.

II.
Last weekend.

I keep trying to make my way to the ocean cuz it’s been calling me hard, since I got here. Wrecking through my dreams and leaving damp at the edges of my sheets, fingertips in sleep, memory, bent tongue.

There are things I’ve carried with me for a year, that were supposed to be the ocean’s. Last year, when I drove through here and slept through cold nights on my Cuban friend’s couch, I stuck around to avoid going home and kept on forgetting to go to the ocean. I had a back seat full of things that were hers, that I knew she wanted and was burning for despite her seawater ways.

What were they? My shell collection, from every beach I’ve walked on. A collection of other raw, broken and breaking, bittersweet female things; mine, my mother’s, and other ladies’ currently or once important to me.

The cubana and I shivered through these cold nights, and gray rainy hours, bodies not made for climates or days like this. She knew I was coming here to live and showed me around and remembered to open my car door for me which made me smile.

The ocean called me then, with an urgency. But I didn’t go. I found other things to do, to make me busy, anything to avoid dealing with the parting, breaking and recognition it would mean. The day I left I really, really meant to go. But there was a snowstorm in Portland, it was already 2:30 pm after we finished dancing in the Cubana’s kitchen and I really really had to be on my way north.

The thing was that I knew that wherever I deposited my offering would be home for a while. I knew this instinctually then, as I know this now, as I know I fear permanence and stability in things.

III.

The time before last when I felt my heart crumble was a humid Boston summer night. A night of, or maybe before a show and a reception I wore a tight black dress, stacked red heels and two gardenias behind my ear to. I let strange Boston butches look at me and talk to me and tell me I must have the eyes of my mother and feed me cake with their bare fingers as long as they wanted and I laughed hard at them, with a mouth full of sugar because nobody knew me or my story.

And later thick stage makeup leaked off my cheekbones in inky drops into my lover’s lap before she left me devastated in my best friend’s room. This was the last time I saw her. Yeah, this was all for the best and how this was supposed to happen. I see that now. But right then, it was me abandoned in my crumpled party dress and mascara, tugging flowers from my hair to throw against the walls and thinking I could not continue.

When my friend gets home it’s pink champagne and chambord under street sounds, more tears and toasts all around to the loveless life, keeping cold hearts, bondage, femme girls and flowers in your hair.

Hours later when my tears have calmed I say let’s go to the ocean, mamita, sleepily, in the air conditioned dark. What would we bring the ocean, she asks. And all I can think to give Yemaya besides forgotten molasses from the dusty cupboard are my panties I'm still wearing. The striking blue and turquoise sheer and lacy thong with the rhinestone clasp on the right hip that causes everyone to gasp, from every angle.

All I can think to give her is this, with sea water rushing around my ankles. My sex bunched up and floating away, disappearing and resurfacing in the black water, waves carrying them away from me, and yeah I know I don’t have all the things she wants with me right now, right here. They are in my small town, on the other side of the world, still waiting in the back seat of my car. In my other life. All I can do is think of them now and know I will give them to her when I am able to. And yeah, I want to chase them, dive headfirst after them into the dark swells of things I can’t see or know, feel my limbs stretch and twist and forget about breath. Instead I stay rooted, feel the naked crown of my pussy suspended, tingling, splitting above her, this movement, moment, water, and under my dress held with clenched fists to my thighs, a silent, swollen throated prayer to move me on to other, better, newer places

yes

2007-02-11T22:24:00.000-08:00

The Second Coming of Cherry
The Infamous and Mamilicious Returns

Nevermind, my beloved publico, that I have been gone well over a year, that there are many, pero so, so many cuentitas I owe to you queridos, so many tales of adventures, elation, and catastrohpe, hard times, heart breaks, and betrayals I could tell you of that have transpired in the year I have been gone. I could talk about all the changes my life has taken, that I am happily single, that I have moved, that so, so many things have happened. But never mind. All that will have to wait.

Never mind I say, because right now I have to talk about Anna Nichole Smith. I begrudgingly left my office for a mere three hours Tuesday morning to participate in a colloquium on race, gender and globalization. I arrive late, disgruntled, wet (what do I know of rain? I just came from the desert). I stomp in, I disrupt the colloquium with my clicking heels, soaked black and white polka dot cami, and wet cleavage (everybody else was dry and more clothed than I was, in business casual and quiet shoes). I get in an awesome fight with Howard Winant (it was filmed), and when I come back to the office Anna Nichole Smith has died?

“GUUUUAAAAAAAT?!!” I scream from my computer.

I was fond of Anna Nichole. She was kind of dear to me. Aside from being one of the first ladies whose chest I wanted to bury my baby femme head in, I have always felt solidarity with her. How could I not? Like me, she was a thick and curvy dirty small town girl who loved fried chicken and whom everybody always had/has something to say about. But she kept on anyway, surviving and finding ways to make things happen, doing what made her happy, and outliving everybody around her. Except of course I am brown, and as my dear grandmother would say tan pobre, tan vieja y tan jodida. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel solidarity with outrageous small town sluts everywhere. She learned and wielded the tricks of survival in ways that many of us learn.

However, I am glad that she died as she wished to, young, suddenly, and under very mysterious circumstances. I recently had opportunity to talk about what I wanted when I died. This conversation occurred during my recent kidnapping. Yes, kidnapping. A very consensual, well thought out, and if I do say, well deserved kidnapping. How did this happen?

Well, the history and story en entero is too long to write right now and I can’t do it the justice it deserves in these little moments I have right now, and it will be better shared in about a decade, mas o menos, after which time there shall be a better sense of how the story turns. And perspective, which always helps. But in short, I have this very cute and sweet butch friend who always smells really good, and when we are in the same city, we really like to fuck each other, hard. But then we decided not to, and then a bit of time passed, and then a few weeks ago she says hey cherry, I’m gonna be in town, feel like hanging out?

So I think about it. And in the end I say “Ok. But I have to do something earlier that night so you can pick me up from the corner of Bryant and 24th at 9:30pm sharp. If this is amenable to you, then please have:…” I gave her a list of a few things to have, one of which was a plan about how she’d like to pass the hours with me, cuz she can be indecisive at times. And I can too.

So the sexy butch friend says ok, but be ready for anything, tal vez te robo para la noche. To which I jump up and down because I am wondering if this means I’ll get to be blindfolded, bound and gagged as well. I do not ask these things of the butch friend however, because I can’t quite determine what sort of hanging out this will be, and don’t want to make assumptions. Although we do talk about the fact that I am being kidnapped all week long.

I am not gonna disclose where I was taken to. Ms. Cherry never kisses and tells everything. Just a few things. So I’ll tell you just that the car pulls up, I get in, and as we pull onto the freeway she tell me that el robo has officially began. Are you worried, she asks. Yes, I say, especially because my phone is dead. She laughs wickedly. After we arrive to the undisclosed location some nice hours of Buffy viewing and champagne and tequila drinking commence. We are on a couch and I am determined to stick to the far right corner of it, even though my pussy’s tingling just from being near her.

I can feel between us rememberings, ghosts of body memories connecting us, crushing us. We talk with our bodies very far apart of things we like about Buffy like the chasing and biting and domination and submission and resurrection and Giles (Ok, it was just me who brought up Giles. I’m sure you remember my Giles fetish). That does hurt, says the butch friend. I notice that the lethally sharp heel of my dagger pointy toe boot is pressing into her thigh. I might have said yes, or hmmmm, or nothing. I don’t recall. I do recall jabbing it in harder as I shift back to my corner of the couch, and fold into myself.

Buffy is edging through a graveyard on the screen in front of us. “And what do you want when you die?” I ask her.

“I want a headstone, a big one,” she says. We giggle. We are both quite vain, and quite fond of pageantry.

“And what do you want it to say?” We are in bed now, still not too, too close to each other, and I have started to wiggle out of some of my clothes. I stop at my panties, thigh highs, and tube top with the red ribbon sash, so great for being bullied around in. She turns off the TV. And in this quiet pulses desire, a trillion tiny tangled golden strings between us, pushing every part of my body to hers.

“No se. Y tu?” I tell her I don’t want to bother with being buried and a headstone. That I want to be cremated and maybe the people who love me can share the ashes.

“Ay no!” I yell. “Cuz then there could be no wake, and nobody could look at me!” We laugh again. Of course she sympathizes.

“No, no, no, have the wake first, Cherry, and then be cremated.”

“Ok.” I say. And then? “I think we should play vampire and slayer,” I say. We discuss who should be the vampire and who should be the slayer, and why.

“We must finish this,” the sexy butch friend says, pouring more champagne for me.

“No you finish it.”

“No you.” I decide to obey, kinda. I drink two swallows. She moves to flip off the light. I take the third sip in my mouth and flip her over, catching her mouth under mine and pushing the champagne into her. I pull back in the dark to my side of the bed, smiling. And then? I prepare to be slain.

You have to understand that there was months of sexy tension build up exploding all over the place right? So in the middle of our wild thrashing there came a point at which we ran out of bed and she was dangling upside down from the ribcage over the edge of the bed with her neck protruding at this terrible angle, and me teetering on the top of her with nothing but her to grab onto and unable to move or else we’d fall. Her hands were gripping the sheets, trying to steady us as we rocked at the edge of the bed. And then? I lost it and started to laugh. Luckily, I know how to fall. Luckily, I ended up on the bottom as I’d hoped to. Luckily, nobody got hurt, though later she said she was fearful that her neck would break. I was too.

I have found myself wondering, like seriously contemplating, in the week since then about what would have happened if her neck had really broke and she had died. Would I have run outside naked and screaming with wild hair and smeared make up? Would I just call 911 and not run anywhere? What would her ghost have done? Where would she wander to? How would I live with myself? How would I explain things to people? Would people hate me? Would she hate me? What about her family? And the chisme, my god.

I don’t think I would have run outside. My instinct would have been to stay close to her, my dear friend and sometimes lover, and kiss her cheek and tell her pretty stories and pretty things until help came. Pretty things like maybe the stories of birds my grandmother believed hard in, like when your love is far away, and you wake before sun to a bird singing outside of your window, know that it’s your love come to find you in the dark. Or maybe Chavela’s memories of the rainforest that was home to her. Or maybe the pretty and hard truths about home that we’ve both struggled to understand and know. Or maybe just how much I like to see the round of her cheek go pink.

Pero anyways, none of that happened. And what did happen was that we laughed. And then kept fucking on the floor, and then in the bed some more.

The next day, when she drives me to the spot where my car is parked, we kiss. I like the sexy butch friend’s kisses, though I never know how long or how hard to kiss her during daylight, or in public, or when we are not naked, so that these kinds of kisses we share sometimes become questions pressed and twisting in the mouth of the other. I usually kiss her to the point where I could fall into her and then pull back quick, before she can. And after this kiss, I tell her thank you for kidnapping me. She tells me gladly, anytime. I watch her drive away in my rearview mirror. I go home and sleep for thirteen hours, and ride on the bliss she left me feeling for the next few days. Comadres, compadres, gente, let me tell you that it’s a week and a few days later and I still have bruises and hickeys.

Will there be another time? Many times? Any time, like she said? I don’t know. All I know is to love each moment of this life as it comes, and take it for what it is. Just moments.

And that, queridos, is a story of living and dying and some of the spaces in between from the heart of Cherry, who has returned to fill your time and mind with stories of moments and more moments.

You can glimpse below some things written in recent months. I shall tell you more of my life in weeks to come.

2007-02-11T22:19:00.000-08:00

Y Mas Caballero

It rained again last night, and the smell of rain soaked in through the window and into the bed to make our eyelashes damp and our fingertips ache. Mikey looks up at me from between my thighs to sigh to me "Ay, Nena. You smell to me like the rain does. Like the rain just when it hits the earth. When the earth's been waiting for it." I watch him closely not just because anytime anyone says anything with their head that close to your crotch you'd better be listening, but also because Mami always used to say "Never, I mean never, let a man look at you between the legs. Because when he does he'll know everything, everything about you, Nena." Y ya. Maybe Mami would say that Mikey La Boy was no man, but his words could still blister my belly, leave me raw and scorched, even as they steam sweet in my ears. He's looking at me, looking hard, eyes gone to glass, throat tightening. I don't look away from him.

"You smell like my island to me."

"Yeah, well it rains a lot there." You say that to every girl with caramel thighs you fuck, puto. "Entonces I just smell like everyday to you." He's moving, hooking one arm around each one of my hips, sliding up my body.

"No, Nena, only the good days, just the good days. And everyday's a good day with you, baby girl." And even as he's diving into me, I can already feel the heat of loneliness slapping at me from the crumbling dance halls of his island, decaying stages we've both dreamed on, the tricky glamour of spotlights to hide the dark circles, the scars, the tired ankles, heartache, too tight crumpled satin dresses we rip from our bodies like other lives we've been torn from. Hot, like a sigh to your black stockinged knee, a wailing trumpet in the dark, the shudder of a requinto raging across borders to wound you like the memories of all the things our mothers carried here. The next day I leave.

After I've gone, after I've left Mikey La Boy's couch, left his sad butterscotch eyes and the heartache he wore around his neck, after I've left his kisses and after I've made my last glorious descent from our perch in the heavens down the five flights of stairs to the hell of our survival, after all of this, and after I find my way back over the mountains, I never ask Mami if she missed me. And she never says so. I work the cherries the next spring. Dusty, dirty, sticky, wormy work, hair wrapped under rags and back aching from the heavy crate strapped around my shoulders and pushing down my tits. Bug bites, scratches, bee stings, fingers that never want to wash clean from the juice, and a high-pitched pesticide cough that will last til December.

Mami spends her days at the potato plant, nights with her novelas and her santos. All the in between times she spends waiting for me to get married. Thinking about the money that's gonna get us. Thinking about the good money my loving will get us. New roof, flat screen TV, new transmission, tires, brand new l.e.i. jeans. Thinking about the goat she'll kill for the wedding. Thanking her saints for getting her a pretty daughter with pretty eyes and so many pretty parts. And me? I walk past the edge of town every night, past hissing snakes and coyotes and owls and the creatures I can't see to watch the sky set purple and the river go cold.

One evening I'm back from my shift at the orchard, elbow deep in a bowl of steaming chicken thighs because Yeseñia down the road is getting married come tomorrow night. I'm peeling fat and skin off the meat to roll into tortillas for taquitos when I see none other than Mikey La Boy's lost and sorry butterscotch ass in my front yard. I'm trying to wipe the chicken parts off my arms with a dishtowel. I'm trying to find my eyeliner and smooth my hair and put the empty glasses and beer bottles in the sink. I'm trying to put on a bra and pick up the piles of laundry waiting to be folded and find my red sundress with the white polka dots on it and make Mami quit snoring so loud on the couch and change everything, everything about this dusty part of the world I come from. But I'm out the front door with none of these things done. "Nena." Hat pulled tight to his head and full mouth calling me.

2006-12-18T22:23:00.000-08:00

The Wonders of Pink

A year ago today I was about a week and a half into my cross country relocation road trip which was more like a round the country relocation road trip on account of going from the Northeast to the Midwest to the deep South to the Southwest and then up the West Coast.

A year ago today I believe I was trying to get through most of Louisiana and close to the Texas border before the day was over. I had left Atlanta earlier in the day and was having terrible late night dinner and terrible late night adventures in a casino on the Mississippi River. I mean I was trying to get to Louisiana before my day was over, it was about 1am but that's not really important because there is no such thing as time really in a casino or on a road trip, is there? Because this is the way of things invoking destiny and raw need and magic and luck and the human will always, right? Things like gambling and love. I think that was what the whole trip was about really. Not gambling and love specifically, although yes, but about destiny and need and magic and luck and will.

I reasoned that the flood had happened, my apartment got ruined, and my lungs burned with mold as a matter of destiny, you see. Because even though it was traumatic and just awful, I did know that it wasn't time for me to be on the east coast anymore, I always knew that I'd go back west one day, and I knew that I needed a nudge to make it happen. I didn't have a place left to be. Everything I owned was with me in the car. I didn't know what was gonna happen to me out West. I reasoned that magic, luck, my unstoppable will, and the many charms I'd gotten from both God and my mama would help me figure it all out.

I'd had a very long day, drawn out because at each and every stop I'd make ofrenda and because I'd discovered early on in the trip that I was fascinated by the things that people bought in gas stations and convenience stores along the highway. I was content to watch this at length. You can learn many things about a person from this, and know part of their story, if you learn how to look right, and I've always been a girl who burns to know the story. Even the stories of strangers I'd only see once, in passing.

I'd had too much mascara on for too many hours and my kidneys hurt a little from mild dehydration and exhaustion. But I felt a calling to be here, that I really needed to be here, so here I was. I wondered around the huge floor, weaving through the collage of light and sound and vibration, resisting the urge to smoke, and watching people losing and winning and rocketing between tears and laughter, elation and despair, all these endings and beginnings, and Ellegua laughing his ass off in every corner I looked, like he did around every bend in the roads I was flying over, through my dreams in sleep, and in every room I found myself in on those nights.

The most precious thing I carried with me around the country? Cinderella. The same Cinderella storybook I'd had since birth, with its tattered pink cover that is worn in spots, its fraying spine, its crinkled pages, and the dreams and hopes and giddiness it spun dizzy in the guts of my baby femme soul. Holding the book in my hand makes me love the baby femme I was deeply, and makes me realize that I've had the same desires since the beginnings of me. It makes me appreciate the ways they've grown as I've grown. In cleaning out the apartment I had thrown it in a crate to be hauled away. The very same night that this had happened I lurched out of my sleep at 4am, sat up and told my sweetheart "I am not getting rid of Cinderella and I'm not getting rid of Cinderella!" Ok, Cherry, the sweetheart said, and rolled over. I went outside in the lethal Massachusetts cold to unlock my car and dig for Cinderella in the crate.

I didn't have the typical reading of Cinderella, you see. I have really sweet memories of my father reading Cinderella to me in his halting English and mispronouncing all of the words while I combed his hair with all of my ribbons and barrettes and corrected his pronunciation. There was plenty I related to, and still relate to in the story; the class dynamics, and having to work hard to survive. Not fitting in, and being excluded and taunted and ridiculed for who you are and what you do to survive.

Being thought unattractive or undesirable or never good enough because of who you are and the things that make you. Fighting to not internalize this. Speaking up and sticking to your convictions. Demanding fair treatment, only to be laughed at, and then told, well ok, if you do this and this and this. Making all of it happen because you are a crafty and resourceful girl, only to be beat down anyways. Never forgetting your dreams or the things you wish for so that they manifest for you, even if it's just for a minute (and how you delight in the minute). That tough divas make do. It didn't matter if you were poor. If you had imagination, craftiness, and resourcefulness, you could make wonderful things happen. And wanting to go to the ball!!!

For me, it was never really about that Prince in the story's traditional context, even though it would have been easy for it to be, as a small town girl with limited options. It was all about those things above. And it was about the ball gown, made just for me. The crystal shoes, that only fit me. It was about the glistening pink floor and spinning on it. How this meant freedom and redemption to me. And how I wanted these things to my core. Even if it was only a dream, from a storybook. Even if it would only be temporary, for just a little while. Even if these things were almost always out of, just beyond, reach.

Ok, except the Prince was maybe important in the way that maybe I really needed, really, really wanted some beautifully queer creature to love the way of my heart, and understand the way of my heart, what freedom meant to my heart, and how all of these things were precious to my heart. And also to rip off the dress and fuck up my make up and find their way under the corset and through the crotchless panties and leave my hair knotted after making me come many, many times.

Like I write in WDNAW (Yeah, I'm quoting myself. Y que?): "What I saw in Cinderella was a story full of possibility, determination, courage and survival. That despite whatever oppressions, hardship, and hating you lived through, to believe that you were deserving of love, to go out and claim love, and to love and let yourself be loved, when the world told you you were worthless, was a triumph." This was an important truth for a queer brown femme girl from a scary small town to hold on to. And yes, I still want to move across a pink dance floor in clouds of pink and feel divine with a prince who understands these wonders of pink.

The most precious thing I left behind? One of the saddest things about leaving the East Coast was having to get rid of the clothing archives, but especially the lingerie archives. I've kept lots of pieces through the years of both clothing and lingerie, and specifically bras. It was important to me to hold on to the very special pieces I've collected over the years for the sake of wardrobe fun, costuming and theater (and everyday theater too in the tradition of the diva aunty), and because I wanted to have a substantial collection of pieces to pass on to the people I love, or even give to strangers out of love, one day. And mostly because I believed in the history that each thing held, how they embodied a sense of the things I had lived and known. I wanted to pass on my stories and histories, glamour and love as I had known it. And each piece, but especially each piece of lingerie, had a story about both.

I'd kept almost every bra and bustier I'd owned since I was 16. It didn't matter that at least half didn't fit. Every bra has a story about the people I put it on and took it off for, myself, individuals, and/or publico. Too many stories to write right here, right now. Naturally I couldn't bring the archives cross country with me. And plenty had started to mold in their home in my closet. So they were tossed.

All the stops made on the way down South were to say goodbye to friends and places, and give them things that had been mine. The pots and pans and 'naughty girls need love 2' shirt to Starchild. Other clothes to other femme friends, and I can't remember what else right now. I left heartfelt notes written on my Hello Kitty stationery behind for the friends I had stayed with and shells from the collection I'd brought with me across the country in a shoe box, this being the second most precious thing I had traveled with.

The first night after leaving Massachusetts I am in New York. I climb into the bed of my sometimes lover with my most of the time lover and undo the clasp to the tulip cupped fuschia satin bra with black tulle overlay accented by large dots of black velvet adorning the cups, and a corset drawstring between the cups that doesn't really function and is more for decoration, but is just smashing nonetheless. I remember buying it with my East Coast femme girls when we were in Seattle the spring before. I toss it to the sometimes lover's floor and watch it still warm with the shape of me. Later that weekend would be goodbye parties, brunches, gatherings. Some sad, some sweet, some wild. All full of reminiscing and the missing that had already started. New York was another little home I had made, full of people I loved deeply.

Everytime my dad came to visit me, he'd want to go all over New York. I'd lose my shit on these trips. Get endlessly frustrated at the way he'd want to do everything and see everything I couldn't stand to, and how he'd film it the whole time. He'd make me take him on ferry rides to Ellis Island, to ground zero, all over Central Park, to Chinatown, where he'd love to film people selling shit for hours. He wanted to learn everything and see everything, but mostly learn the ways that people survived and made their way there.

He is like me, in that he loves stories and loves deciphering a person's story through their movements and actions. And so he'd watch. For hours. Be calm, he'd tell me. Your uncles, the people back home, they have never seen this, and they will never get to. Not in their lifetimes. None of this is real to us. You? You've seen a lot. More than we have. Remember that. I'd imagine him taking the tapes home. How he'd show them to anyone who wanted to see, relatives, neighbors, strangers. How he'd answer all their questions and tells stories the whole time.

I wanted to go give honey to Oschun that casino night. I made my way out of the casino vortex to try and listen to the soft quiet sadness of the ground and river. The casino was like a terrible empire rising out of the river and I couldn't find my way to the back of it where I knew the water was. I was lost in a terrible streetlamp lit maze of walkways that seemed to go nowhere, fingering the packets of honey and chocolate in the pocket of my jacket.

When I visit Iyawo in her farmhouse in Indiana she has just made santo and there are no mirrors in her house. I realize I don't know how to live without the reassurance of my reflection greeting me when I walk into a room. I realize as I walk around the rooms in her house that my reflection is the first thing I seek out when entering a space. Yes, it's vanity. Yes, it's the things my mother taught me about fighting and survival. But most of all, it's the Ochun in me, who seeks herself out. Yes, it's a kind of deep magic. The kind that means falling into the sticky depths of self to give, growing love and sex as deep and tumultuous and twisted and powerful as any river, being willing to fall into the face of the sun and sacrifice physical beauty to face transformation and the unknown if it means your people will survive, being able to save the world through sex, through learning and re-learning the exhilaration and hard truths of desire, one person, one orgasm, one audience at a time. This is how she walks through me.

In the end I finally find my way to the back of the walkway maze, to the river. I feel her pull, see her glisten majestic in serpentine swells and stunning shadows, calling for me. I long to run to her, to sing her, to feed her, like a good daughter. I want to find her edges, peer in, and seek myself in her darkness. But there's a gate jutting out of the ground between us. And a sign warning danger nailed to it. So I guess I have to love her from here. I contemplate this for a minute, leave the honey and chocolate at the foot of the gate, find my way back to the car, and push on.

2006-12-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

Puro Teatro.

I wanted to be my diva aunty when I grew up. Diva aunty was fine. Devastatingly beautiful and sophisticated. Intelligent, independent, proud, and always composed. Scarlet lips, flushed cheeks, eyes she could work like a weapon, an ass that nobody could or will ever forget, even if they tried or wanted to. And the tacones. A pair for every day of the year. For every occasion, every outfit, every mood, every kind of weather, every time her heart had ever been broken. She was who I learned about brunch shoes from. And working in theater. And the theater of every day life, too.

When she entered a room, she would make people stare and forget to breathe and spill their drinks and not be able to close their mouths. When I got to go places with her when I was little, I would follow right behind her, moving like she did in my red velvet dress and matching purse, taking care to ensure that my patent leather mary janes made at least as much noise as her four inch snake skin stilettos. Head high, eyes forward, mouth relaxed, shoulders back, ribs lifted, pelvis forward to accentuate the swell of her behind. Her walk, a beautiful and deliberate choreography of extended ankles, swaying hips, graceful wrists and a gently rippling bosom.

My sister asks me Friday morning why I only slept four hours the night before. I say because I was up late having wine and feeling very sorry for myself. She says oh miiija! Why? What happened? Who are you sad for? At this question I feel myself go all prickly.

Myself tonta! I tell her. Yes, I was sad for myself. I need the diva aunty, I say. She understands these things. Yes, my sister says. Go to diva aunty's tequila getaway. I'm envisioning a night of good food, playing with make up, gossiping, good tequila, song, and of course, intergenerational emo puta tears, when I remember.

I remember that having lived so much life, and having always been diva, and having always been emo, and having always been ultimately alone and in love and then heartbroken only to be alone once again, sometimes the diva aunty gets sad and seeks alternative therapies for her sadness. Not straight up therapy-therapy mind you. That would not be diva enough for her. The latest thing she's tried is a complicated kind of aquahypnotherapy. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work or what it involves. But it apparently has caused significant changes in her diva lifestyle. No sleeping til one or two on weekends. Bouncing out of bed with a smile on her face instead of the diva scowl, stretch, roll and flounce. Buying gifts for others instead of for herself. Who knows what other kinds of changes this will bring?

My sister and I remember the aquahypnotherapy at the same time and say ohhh. 'She might not give you good advice anymore now that she's all happy and shit" my sister says.

"I know. She even rushes to get dressed on the weekend now and leaves the house before eleven, even if she is hungover." We contemplate this quietly.

The diva aunty is a famous lover.

Meaning she has loved well, been well-loved, famously loved, and famously in love. Loving her was all the rage at one point in movimiento history. Her walls are adorned with pieces from her Chicano artist exes. Goddesses, virgins, saints and whores, all the things we live to believe in on cold and lonely nights, all fashioned after her unforgettable form, striking features, and unquestionable elegance. She drove people to vision, to belief, to their knees. A shelf on her bookshelf holds an empty and intricately engraved onyx box and the books written by her lovers. Poems for her. Characters based on her. Stories for her. Passionate dedications scrawled in shaky, desperate cursive, in Spanish, in Spanglish, in English, messages only she could really decipher. Sometimes I sneak to them, to peek at her other lives.

Tear streaked ink runs down the pages of two or three such dedications. Teeth marks and wrinkled pages adorn another book. And I imagine her in the quiet of a rainy Seattle night, lounging in a burgundy satin negligee and bedroom slippers in her apartment, Lola Beltran wailing on the stereo to cover the noise of her own terrible grief, lip print on the open tequila bottle, and teeth sinking into the words of her beloved like an animal, like she wanted to eat them. Words, lover, and all, I mean.

Loving her was all the rage.

It's rumored that she's dated every Chicano poet, artist, activist and scholar of her generation. But you know how people talk. She abhorred marriage and broke dozens of hearts because of this. A few times I've run into them, the diva aunty's lovers. At readings, symposiums, conferences. Men I've never met or men I knew when I was little. They approach me. Say my name slow. Aren't you the diva aunty's niece? I knew you when you were four. And look at you now. Or maybe they say where you from and I tell them and they say oh, I did some work there once, or oh, I knew someone from there, and we realize the connection. And then? They smile, their eyes go far away, maybe remembering a kiss, a promise, an ache. They chuckle to themselves. Your aunt is a special woman. We had some good times together. They squeeze my shoulder, look deep in my eyes, tell me to tell her hello and walk away.

The diva aunty is my best ally. She talks to me about my work, asks about shows, helps me put together my lotería business cards, lets me have the few publications I've been in since moving back here mailed to her house so the small town neighbors won't shoot me. She has many gay friends, you see. The diva aunty listens to me. To my long and complicated love stories. To my elation and anger and sadness and joy. Always carefully, always with patience. She understands, always. And love stories are always her favorite, of course.

Sometimes she scolds me. "Guuuuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaat?!!! You call that poor person the manwhore? And they don't even know it? Shame on you, Cherry, have shame." But when I tell her the whole story she says oh, well that makes sense then. Other times she says "Guuuuuuuaaaaaaat?!!! Leave that girl now. You have no more business with her! Leave her! After that? She doesn't deserve to lick your heel marks in the dirt!"

But the diva aunty guards her past, her stories, her adventures, her heartbreak real careful. The only time I can get her to talk about love or theater is when she is drunk. She is my favorite person to drink tequila with. Although it usually starts out with wine at dinner, and dinner is prolly her famous and elegant chicken enchiladas. And if you are lucky, perhaps I'll make them for you some day. Then comes the tequila. And the rancheras and intergenerational emo puta tears. And the flaming hot cheetos con limon. And finally the stories. She sighs. Looks up and then closes her eyes. "When I worked in el teatro…" All her stories begin this way.

Loving her was all rage, I have heard. She was selfish, non-committal, demanding and terrified. I realize that people might say the same things about me. But I still want to be the diva aunty when I grow up. She is an elegant, aging diva. And she is very. Very diva. She is strong of heart and knows the heart well. She is unbreakable, having known so many things and times, and places. She is alone. She is the original emo puta por vida.

In truth, I am not like her. I don't always retain composure. I say exactly what I think when it suits me. I am loud where she is quiet, emotional where she is calm, sloppy where she is neat. And I never learned, and am not really interested in learning anyways, how to sit with my legs closed. And I always, always give lovers second chances.

Sometimes after the stories and intergenerational emo puta tears, it's my once ex-best friend, and now just friend, otherwise known as Birthday Friend, who shows up at the front door, just off work. Birthday Friend is the only person I have ever said forever to. But this only works because we don't fuck. Birthday Friend, who still does things like write our names with a finger and "4 ever!" on the hood of my dusty car in a big heart just to make me smile. Birthday Friend, who I sneak into the diva aunty's house at 3am to feed enchiladas after we've been out discussing vampires and rubbing lip stain on each other's lips with our naked fingers in a crowded bar all night because we've always loved each other just a little too much like this.

It has been a tumultuous year of loving for me here.

My lovers have mostly been bad for me in one way or another. Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but they were. They have all been far away from me. Which I usually appreciate for good reasons, but still. They have all fallen hard for me, and into me. Some have been inexcusable macho assholes. They don't deserve my affections and I have no intention of ever speaking to them again. Some have been demanding. Some have made unreasonable requests of me. Some, of course, have wanted to marry me. All have broken my heart in one way or another.

There's something terrible about feeling heartbroken in a place you are stuck, a place as vast and lonely as this one with its deep, violent river, sadistic cliffs, and barrenness. You feel grief in this way, the way that you feel the land. There is something that is always profoundly sad about my queer heart being broken here, something about mourning a desire or a love that has no name or place here. A place me and others have known violence in and run for our lives from. Only so we could live. So we could name and feed our desire. So we wouldn't know this famine anymore. Something about the ways I remember growing into my desire here, the things I prayed for on knees gone raw from saying too many rosaries, heart stretched unbearably open under the watchful eyes of nuns. Or the things I prayed for swollen-eyed in my pink bed when I knew everyone was sleeping.

But this grief? A hopelessness that pushes at your skin from all directions, grief that makes you want to run to find the edges of the world, a wildness that makes you feel as abandoned as the land here. Tears that I've held dizzy in my chest for days erupt at 4pm on Friday. I walk away from my job. I leave all my shit there. I get into my car. I'm crying in my car at stoplights, on the freeway, passing cars whose drivers look twice when seeing my twisted face and tears. I'm a wreck. I dial East Coast friends. No answer. I start in on the West Coast friends. No one's picking up. I want away, so, so bad. My mind goes to the quick calculations it always does in these moments of desperation.

Fifteen dollars and I can be away from all of this. Fifteen dollars, Seattle. Thirty dollars Portland, forty dollars the top of California, fifty, sixty San Fransisco, eighty, ninety LA. But I don't really have twenty, thirty forty, fifty dollars with me right now. I have a five-dollar bill tucked into my bra and a jumble of change under the seat, too many tears and tits.

And freezing rain makes getting out of town impossible today. Fuck this. And the wallet left behind on my bed this morning and an almost empty gas tank means not going far away right now. Fuck this. I don't want to go home right now. My mother will be sipping tea at the table, reading. Or chopping onions in the kitchen. And when I open the door she will see my tears, which I just can't fathom right now.

So I go to the place I've gone every time love's gone wrong for me here. The far corner of the parking lot of the church I grew up in. I turn the car off. Scream from my belly, and relish in the sensation of the scream filling my throat and mouth and space around me. I scream at the graying desert sky. I scream at the water, licking the curling lip of land. I scream at the church behind me. I scream til I see black spots. I scream until my throat is raw and I know I can't speak anymore. And then?

When I know I can't speak, I smooth my hair and wipe my eyes and get out of the car and walk towards the church. I get closer to the door and feel myself crumbling again. This is another home, another rejection, another heartache, another place I've remembered and dreamed about sometimes. I'm crying again before I reach the door. I just can't fucking help it and can't keep it together. They are the kind of tears that are unstoppable, the kind that make people get out of your way and shut the fuck up. When I open the door I see faces from my childhood, aged now, hanging garland on the backs of pews. I move quick and they don't recognize me. I'm glad that they don't, but still a part of this, of not being recognized or remembered hurts so deeply. I am erasable from this history, from this story.

I dart into the Virgen de Guadalupe's chapel, to the right of the front door. I shut the door quick behind me, leaning in relief, letting the ache out in sobs I can't hold back. The room is dark, lit by novena candles. Heavy with that fire holy water copal rose scent of Mexican holy places everywhere. The smell of hope and fear and death and faith and love and redemption. The smell of want. I see the saints from my childhood, the same statues, things that knew me a lifetime ago. I feel myself broken, sinking into the floor against the door, suffocating on this sorrow. I see three viejitas in the chapel, looking at me.

Que te pasa hija? One gets up and moves towards me. But I can't talk, just shake my head. She pulls me to my feet and into a pew beside her. Have you sinned so terrible? She says this winking at me. I look at her through tears. If only she knew. I look away from her. I laugh for about two minutes, between my sobs. Rocking and laughing and tears. She takes my hand between hers and massages it. I stop laughing. All I can do is cry. Thick tears that push me beyond the places of this new sadness to old, old griefs and aches tearing through me like riptides. I fear I can't come up. The lady holds my hand and smoothes my hair and the place between my shoulder blades and rocks with the sobs that shake my body.

There were times that the Diva Aunty was not unbreakable. There's the time that she got in her car with a bottle of vodka and handfuls of sleeping pills and drove herself into a random corner of a random apartment complex and downed all of it. Someone found her. Sometimes our heroes are never perfect.

There are some things you can't hide from people, but especially things you can't hide from your mother. When I walk into the house I know she'll know. And she does. When I walk in the door, she appraises my tears, swollen eyes, trembling lips, shaking chest and doesn't say anything. I cry harder. We look at each other across the uncrossable, my queerness, my sex, my rejection, my heartbreak. She doesn't know how to make it better, doesn't know how to protect me, doesn't know how to reach me, or get to me, or find me, her queer daughter who once abandoned her to save herself. All we can do is look at each other hopelessly over this divide, this dark, jagged, daunting border impossible to traverse. This desire.

*******************************

The sun shines so bright here. Not like the East Coast. I should be filled with it. Not filled with this grief I've carried with me for the year I've been here. Not climbing walls of rock to curl into the cliffs I used to jump from half-wishing for death as a teenager, dangling my head and arms over sometimes, just to watch the dove shadow I make on the red rock. Singing no lo puedo creer que te escondas en mi piel despues de tantos años to my own shadow and the mermaids swirling somewhere in the river below me.

The sun is so bright here. Not like the East Coast. I should be filled with it. Not crying facedown into the folds of my pink satin comforter, even as the sun pulses thick through the pink curtains of my girlhood. Crying muffled in the pink so no one can hear. Tears spread quick on pretty things like mascara, lace, satin. I stay facedown gasping in the salty mess of sadness which somehow makes me feel better. One time I read that the chemical makeup of our blood is the same as the chemical makeup of how the ocean used to be at the beginning of time. I think about this once in a while when lost in the sweet bodycrush of fucking. How I've wanted to ride my lovers back past rage, back past the sun, back past all beginnings, back past us, back past death and still know breath.

*******************

I wake up today feeling battle weary. Bruised and very alive for having been so shaken yesterday. I'm running late for the first day of a dance workshop I'm teaching to "at risk" young women in a residential training and education program. I'm running around the dim and freezing studio, organizing music, trying to warm up, pulling veils and scarves out of my bag, having lots of doubts. What can I possibly teach another person right now in the middle of my mess? What can I possibly teach these girls who have already known trauma and loss so early in their lives? I'm striding around the room in big steps. I spin in the middle to look at my reflection in the mirror, this collection of parts and pieces and experiences that make Cherry. I fall into one of my favorite movements - figure 8 rib circles layered over hip shimmy, back of right hand to temple, left hand pushed out like saying stop! I close my eyes to feel my body better. To root myself here. To this life.

A whistle. Daaaaaaamn, mama! Can you teach me how to do that? My eyes flash open to a Latina moving across the room, maybe 16 or 17. I smile at her. I sure am gonna teach you how to do that, I say. I remember that I knew hard things early in my life too. It's never stopped me from wanting or loving or believing. The other 7 girls show up one by one. They all look battle weary, reminding me of a littler me, and how little I feel right now.

The diva aunty is one more person who has taught me love, having loved deliciously and often. Sometimes when you walk into the diva aunty's house, it's like a shrine to botched love. Sometimes I wonder why she has kept all her ex-lovers' works and masterpieces and gifts so close to her. But it was love, and it was love that was hers, and perhaps there's no such thing as failure or success when it comes to loving. There's things you want to remember, always. Things you want to hold on to. Pieces of each other that become embedded in the heart. Slivers of lives, stories, memories, that come to live deep in you. Things you wouldn't know how to extricate if you wanted to.

Divas like us? We'll always subsist in the wonders of heartbreak. The glorious agony, the sorrowful mysteries, the prickly edges of pleasure and anguish that make you learn yourself better each time.

Divas like us? We will always be brave. Pick ourselves up. Take the sexiness or energy or love or memories that were given us by our loves and let them find their place in our hearts and memories and lives and stories and prayers, all these places we call home.

Divas like us? We'll always be broken, and we will always love again. And again, and again, and again.

Divas like us? We will always find each other. Again and again and again and again.

2006-12-07T22:17:00.000-08:00

Caballero
excerpt

That summer I lived out of bags and slept on Mikey La Boy's couch, he was todo un caballero. Always. Completely. Thoroughly. Too much. Even when I didn't want him to be. Eyes always on mine when we talked, when we danced. Never on my popping chest, swinging ribcage, the hips I circled beneath his hands, grinding into his palms. Eyes locked on mine, even when I looked away from his and the air going thick between us. Never looking towards the mess of stringy, sparkly underthings I'd take out of my bags at least once a day to smooth out and refold the way I liked to. Eyes on the ceiling, telling me a story about some place, scheme, or person he'd left behind.

Nothing. Even when we'd strip down during that hot, hot summer because Mikey lived in a tiny two-room place on the fifth floor and fifth floor in the summer is never pretty. Shades pulled down, lights off, fans humming, drowning out the street noise and building noise. Sometimes stretching out on the gray linoleum floor cuz it was too hot to do anything else. It was always my earrings I pulled off first, then the rest while he got down to his gray and black boxer briefs and out of his t-shirt and reached up under his wife beater with a terrible sigh to tug off the binder holding his chest down. Pulled it out from under, tossed it on the couch, stretched and breathed real deep. Eyes on a spot on the wall somewhere above my head while he told me his mami's secret recipe for mango coconut flan. "I'll make it for you sometime, Nena. First put your mangos and one peach, just one, in a pot of salted water with limes, and you cook it, just til it's boiling…"

It's times like these I want to pretend I'm JLo at the beginning of the Jenny from the Block video. Lounging steamy and bored and elegant and restless in my chonies on a couch just like this one, eyeliner on and ready for the parade, adoring fans, Gucci fur, and destiny that's awaiting me just around the other side of the pulled-down shade. Yeah, I'm JLo, you be P Diddy. Well, before things went bad and she told him sabes que puto, sabes que, that's enough. Or way too much, really, I think. Or I'll be La Lupe tearing off my clothes onstage mid-song with that beloved golden, mammoth La Caridad pendant held still and steadfast in the cleavage. And you be my Mongo Santamaría, pounding out my redemption on your tambores, propelling my voice and body through the honeyed pulsing edge of time, your hands sweeter, smoother, faster than any God's could ever be. Touch me, por Dios. Cuz it's really my body you play, yeah, you move me, baby. Bang it for me, daddy, burn me to my knees. Ride me. Yeah, I'm Lupe and you be Mongo. Well, before things went bad and she ran off to that other puto and finally Jesus, losing her money, music and good name on the way.

No no no, I'll be the beautiful Princess Itza, you be Popo, just like on the huge wall hanging my Tía Celia used to have hanging in her living room when I was a little girl. I'd look at it every day for hours. Just looking. Memorizing everything about it, the grief on Popo's face, his hands clutching at Itza. Itza's hair flowing all around them. The wonder that was her barely covered body.

Yeah, I'll be Itza, who died just from the love her heart had known, love caged tight behind those famous tetas. Love that was for you, pendejo. But if you be my Popo? You can watch me forever, Mikey, como quieras. Kiss me. Cry for me. Clutch me. Rage against any that dares to cross me. Lift me to the red-skied dawn and let the morning stars all bless me, let the doves sing prayers for me to the fading lady moon while the peacocks cry my name and the sun shatters the night just to kiss my hair and breathe the fire back into my eyes. And if I opened them? Still you'd be there by me. Watching me. Cuz that's how much you love me.

All these little lies we tell ourselves to cover us and the scars we breathe. Lies that color us pretty, that cover the marks on our bodies from working the fields, the factories, these streets. Stories to cover the wounds from the ways that people hate us, the ways we fall. Stories that make me flawless, expensive, important, and treasured, like some old white lady's Tiffany lamp. Stories that erase the chest you hate and maybe trade some parts for others. Lies. Because really, I'm no princess, I'll never have furs, I don't sing. And you don't love me, cabrón.

Just us in our skin under the dark steady hum. We'd be sucking on popsicles, grape my favorite, even though the stain on my mouth made me look like I was dying, cherry his, even though the stain on his lips made him look like his Tía Leti. Waiting for the dark to come to cool our tongues, dry our sticky scalps, hush the humid rice, beans, and weed air that is our living. Waiting for the dark to come to do our running, make some money. Waiting for the dark to come between smoke breaks, growing stacks of popsicle sticks, sweaty tits, and stories just like this.

I'm on my back, propped up on my elbows, watching Mikey hold my right foot in the palm of his hand. He's painting my nails a glistening shade of ruby, a color I think our insides must throb, glitter and all. "Calmate, Nena, Be still." .......

2006-12-04T22:15:00.000-08:00

Monday Confessions

Why Wait til Friday? Here we go.

1.

Sometimes I eat the Mid East Feast from Trader Joe's. Always in a strange city, in a parking lot, in a parked car, windows up, doors locked. Always fast, with eyes darting. I can cook a beautiful and pleasing several course meal of Middle Eastern dishes to feed my friends like I did on Sunday, even before delivering two tight performances and managing to get my rhinestone studded eyelashes on straight even though la fierce femme was not around to help out. But sometimes, instead I buy this for five bucks and scarf down the pasty and flavorless hummos, stale pita, rock hard falafel, and questionably seasoned tabouleh in seven minutes tops. It's gratifying. It's horrible. It's home. A seven-minute fix.

2.

I always, always, always have a suitcase on my floor, half packed or half unpacked, depending on which way you consider it. Half packed for the next trip, which is always a week away. Or not unpacked from the last trip which was only a week ago. I thrive on the impermanence of things in my life, the just for now sense of movement that I think was passed down to me genetically from people who left and were always leaving and moving and always coping and always setting up home here, then there, and putting up with it, with the impossible, just for now. Since I am only here for now, the bag always stays on the floor.

But today when I get home I unpack. Everything, right away. Even the things that never get unpacked and live in my suitcase because they are always ready to go, just like me. The small zippered case of silky ribbons, in multiple hues, widths and textures, and having multiple uses. My oldest corset that knows my body only second to me. Silky lace top thigh-highs still holding my mango-honey-roses scent I sometimes like to run my cheek against. The fancy, the slinky, the sheer, the tight, the lacy. The things I can't wear here, because they don't suit themselves to the rough and tumble desert landscape. The things I don't wear here because they don't suit themselves to a conservative, repressed small-town culture. Things I don't wear here cuz it's not really safe to. Sometimes I wonder if people would recognize me in my other life here. Sometimes I wonder if the people here recognize the me from my other lives, if they can see me for me.

The other day I'm in line at the Dollar Store. I've found a few treasures the likes of which can only be found at the Dollar Store, red glittery star decorations I can transform for many other purposes, picture frames that will hug the faces of my far away friends, miles of garland I have serious plans for. I notice that the cashier is unmistakenly butch. I am so surprised and happy I want to jump and scream, except that could mean bad things for us both. I'm not attracted to her and I'm not trying to flirt with her, but I so desperately want to be seen by her right then.

I feel very weary about not being able to be my whole self in any one place. When I lived far away I did what I wanted when I wanted, wore what I wanted when I wanted, fucked who I wanted when I wanted, and came back here only twice a year to be routinely and sufficiently retraumatized enough to be made ready to leave after a week or two. Now there are only brief respites. No wearing things I want when I want or fucking whenever I want. No wanting how I want to want. No being wanted how I want to be wanted. Now this place is back in me, in my eyes, in my mouth, in my fingertips and hair. I take it everywhere. I leave it smeared across a lover's body, bouncing off walls I laugh between, haunting strangers who look me in the eye for a second too long.

When I reach the register in the Dollar Store I smile and say hi. The butch cashier mumbles and looks at me without looking at me in that well trained butch way while she rings up my things. I smile and say hi again. The line stretches long behind me. The store is full of people. Straight people. Who I sometimes imagine to not have as many creative uses for garland as say, me. The butch looks up to look me in the eye and then back down and then says hello did you find everything you were looking for today. I say mostly everything except maybe a few things.

I know she can't see me, that I look like every other kinda-pretty long haired small town girl walking in the door who survives only because she remembers she was once crowned fiestas patrias queen, or survives only because she spent her last twenty dollars on a pair of cheaply made stilettos that she has nowhere to wear and it doesn't matter that she spent her last money on them because right then she loves them more than anything, more than her life. Like any other small town girl who survives only because she gets her nails done even though she can't afford it so they can be pretty for the rest of her day off before heading back to the fields, the factories, the cleaning jobs. Like any other small town girl who tastes freedom in tequila shots and stolen kisses and the places deep in the desert you go to cry so nobody will hear you. Because sometimes you love these things more than anything, these things that make you survive. Like any other girl. I am that girl.

You have a nice day, and you come back, the butch says. Yup, I say and walk out the door. But then I turn around and come back in the door. I go back for the prayer card machine. You stick fifty cents in, turn the knob, and out pops a prayer card. Saint on the front, prayer on the back. It's a little bit like drawing tarot cards. Today? San Judeo. Patron Saint of Impossible Situations.

I impossibly manage to fit all my clothes in the dresser drawers. Shoes in the closet. Rearrange my make-up trunk. Find more dollar bills hiding in the bottom from last night's show. Put them in my wallet, made fat for a little bit from generous tips (thank you, thank you mi publico!). I drag the suitcase out and put it away.

3.

There are places that sadness lives in the body. On me, it's between my shoulder blades. The space between them feels wider when I am sad, like a chasm , a canyon. Like the cliffs I like to climb and cling to. Like how the heat of my breath on the rock and the way the wall cradles my chest keep me living. A big space like that.

On me, it's the place where my breasts meet. Because so many things fit so nicely there, I guess. Keys, dollar bills, a lover's head, favorite lipsticks. All the things you take care not to lose.

On me, it's the place where my upper thigh meets my crotch. The place that's not belly, not leg, not pussy. Just an expanse of skin stretched as hungry and desolate as any desert will ever throb before the harsh eye of heaven.

On me, it's a place high in the cunt. A place I let only the sweetest of lovers touch. Only them, even though sometimes I crave the divinity of being so opened. Every month when my period comes I think of my grandmother's story about how the wombs of women cried tears of blood every month for the heartbreak they would know in life. I suppose she told me this because there were many, many things she couldn't cry for.

She would tell me this dry-eyed, serious and earnest. I was young when she would tell me this, and would look carefully at her eyes, just like my own but set deeper in her face more gnarled and beautiful than the trunks of all the trees I'd come to know in my lifetime. The trees for climbing and getting lost in, the ones I'd sleep below on hot summer days, the ones for kissing and getting lost in lovers under. And while I tried to imagine things and adventures and kisses that awaited me later in life, I'd wonder at the heartbreak she had known.

2006-12-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

Jewels, Part I
Head, Heart and Chocha revisited

I am about nineteen or twenty years old and slumped inelegantly on a burnt orange overstuffed chair in the waiting room of the downtown office of the white waspy therapist I go see for an hour every Friday at 1pm. I am sullen, looking around as I always do at the carefully assembled room of potted plants and trees, tasteful yet understated furniture in a variety of subdued earth tones, simple lamps that project warm light, and the huge neomodernist watercolor of a Sedona sunset that takes up the upper half of the wall opposite from me. And of course, the noise machine, and the eternal stack of three or four New Yorker magazines she kept next to the overstuffed burnt orange chair on a distressed yellow side table she probably paid too much for at Pottery Barn. Why can't white people wear out their own shit? I probably thought this to myself on this day. That, and that I'd never been to New York, which I thought about every time I hostilely flipped through the pages of the New Yorker.

I don't think that on this day I was rageful, as I often was in this period of my life, from dealing with my uncle's murder, struggling with the relief and heartbreak of finally leaving a community I was never safe in, the post-trauma induced insomnia that kept me up for days on end, pounding the keys of my friend's borrowed typewriter and purging lived stories from my body that my writing teachers would say were too outrageous to be believable. No. On this day, instead there was a quiet sadness. A hopelessness. It was stupid cold. Snow was falling from the bruised New England sky in chunks the size of balled fists.

My skin had faded to a goldeny-gray dirty dishwater color and on most days the turquoise of my veins ran chaos over my breasts and arms and belly, a map that didn't make sense to me or anybody else who tried to follow it or untangle it. I had chopped off my thick waves the weekend before in a drunk fit. I cried immediately after. But I was hoping to the heavens that my short hair would get me more girls, you see. Or forget the girls, just some respect, goddamnit. Femmes, any kind of feminine really, did not abound in this time and place, and girls like me who showed up to New England women's colleges with tackle boxes full of 99 cent store makeup, a mean miniskirt collection, hot rollers, hair spray in an aerosol can, girls who weren't afraid to tuck a switchblade into their garters, we were the dim-witted renegades, defectors, and rejects. Which coulda, and shoulda been real sexy, right? Yeah, if I'd had any friends at all who weren't scared of velvet and powder puffs and didn't try to stage an intervention with me around my anti-feminist tendencies every time I got dressed. But I digress.

The therapist? She had a hyphenated last name and drove a forest green Honda CRV which she kept impeccably clean. Eileen Fisher clothes, a bright but muted tangerine or scarlet lipstick and nothing else on her face, a cloud of citrus, bergamot and jasmine always floating around her. She moved in quiet, measured, deliberate steps, never wore her amber hair past her shoulders, and had a terrible habit of blinking incessantly when I spoke. She lived on Massasoit Street. The fanciest street in town. Behind an iron gate in an ancient Victorian that looked airy and well-kept and just like the gingerbread houses, the castles, the haunted estates of my most elaborate childhood fantasies.

How do I know all of this? Because I was taught to pay attention, you see. I could never afford not to. And because she, unwise lady that she was, didn't think to scratch her addy off the back of those New Yorkers. I am so so so much smarter than you, I thought when I encountered this. Not that I tried to look, I just saw. And not that I tried to remember, but my memory is photographic (I get it from my mother). But being the boundary conscious girl that I am, I didn't even glimpse towards her house despite the fact that I took a shortcut over Massasoit often. Ok, it didn't have much to do with boundaries, really. It had to do with the fact that I knew how these things work for the queer, brown, and pathologized, and I was not about to go to jail for allegedly stalking her. Or worse, have people think I had an unnatural fixation on her. Cuz really, Eileen Fisher? Nuh-uh. Truthfully? I did glimpse, but not til five years later, after I'd stopped going to her, and after she had left town and vacated the house. But none of this has much to do with anything at all, and is not really not important for what I'm really gonna tell you.

So while I would wait for the therapist I would flip through the New Yorker and read the poems and stories in them. Stories that had nothing at all to do with life. I would crinkle my nose and sometimes roll my eyes. And then I would despair. Because all these stories were so much different than the stories that were mine, and if this was the standard, then shit. But this was habit. And I didn't know my own writer's voice yet. And I was little. And I thought I should read them since everybody else was. And most importantly, I needed something to calm me before I went in to therapy, and the stories in the New Yorker, stories with characters whose lives and wishes and authority were so different from my own became my calming and distancing tool. So on this winter day, I am waiting, slumped in the burnt orange chair. I pick up the New Yorker on top, find the story, and start reading.

Except it's different this time. It was a voice I knew, one that was like home. It was a story I knew, one I, or anybody else I knew from home could have lived.

I don't know how to tell you about this story. How that story got under my skin, how those words crawled, ran, leapt, found their way through the chaotic and tangled map of my veins, just to find my heart and pierce it. How it ripped me open in the most painfully exquisite way possible. How it made me feel love so hard it shocked me. How it thawed me out and made me cry tears for things I didn't want to. How it made me give into the tears, and my grief, and my longing, and my homesickness. I dissolved into a sobbing mess, catching the tears in the cuff of the ill fitting boy sweater I was wearing, borrowed from my best friend, an Italian butch from Boston.

In the middle of my feverish thoughts I realized that I couldn't bear the thought of ever being too far from these words. I was mourning them while they were still in my hands, as I did with many things during those years of my life. So I ripped the story out of the magazine, folded it up with my unpainted, stubby-nailed fingers and jammed it in my jeans pocket while I tried to compose myself. I figured that unexpected tears in the waiting room, new choppy hair, boy clothes and ripping the waiting room magazines would be a huge red flag to the therapist.

The story haunted me for weeks after. It still does, actually. So much that I still have those pages, folded up just like so. Like a dark secret, I've carried them house to house, and even cross country. I always know exactly where they are because those words saved my life a little bit that day. I've unfolded the pages through the years and read the story again to feel the same things, and then folded it up again in the same erratic, grieving and lovesick pattern that my twenty year old fingers carved out once. It always makes me remember who I used to be. And remember that I used to dream wildly of writing stories that powerful.

But the other part of the story is this. I'm reading this story, and on the page is this glossy ad for this necklace. It was a simple, adorable, sweet, not too pricey thing that like the story, I also immediately loved. I wanted it, bad. I wrote down the number. I looked at the necklace. Then I scratched the number out. Somebody is gonna give this necklace to me one day, I thought to myself. I just knew it.

I am telling an emo puta this story on the phone the other night. I tell her this story because in the midst of our conversation we decide that it's time to revist the list. You know what list I am talking about right? The infamous head, heart and chocha list, of course. "Cherry, I think it's time to make the list." She makes hers on the back of a rejection letter. I make mine on the back of a job description for a job that I applied for and am not gonna get. While we are writing, I recall one of the first items on my most recent list. I laugh. I tell her what it was. She laughs.

"Jewels?" the emo puta says. "What, like butches and bois who are so sweet they are precious like jewels?"

"Well, sure. Yeah. But when I wrote it I really meant jewels. Jewels like jewelry." I feel compelled to explain to her that I know this sounds bad, that this is not how I really am, but good friends already know this, and know that when I say something like this there is always a story behind it, so I don't. I just tell her the story of the story and the necklace.

Actually, the first time I got jewelry from a lover was just horrible. I was in my early twenties. It was a platinum band with miniscule diamonds and bigger sapphires, I think. Or some dark blue stone. It was very expensive. It was also sleek, lovely, cold, deliberate, understated. It reminded me of my therapist. The lover who gave it to me was ten years older than me and reminded me of Starbucks. And worse, he was in law school to become a corporate lawyer and wanted to marry me and whisk me off to the West Coast and buy me a big house on the beach and some sperm too. I guess in the big house on the beach I would have spent my days looking at the sunset. I guess I would have had all the time and nannies in the world I could ever wish for to write pointless stories to send to the New Yorker. But of course it didn't work out between Daddy Starbucks and me.

Daddy Starbucks was a Chicano transguy I had met in a fiction writing class a few years before. He was a senior and I was a sophomore. It was the second worst fiction writing class ever. The professor was a tall white New England bred man with pock-marked skin, stringy brown hair, and a terrible scar on the right side of his face. He lived on the Cape, had a very delicate ego, and also a lithe, lovely, pill popping wife from a good New England family with wispy blonde hair who spent her days writing children's books and feeling unattractive. He liked to look at my crotch when I walked to the front of the room to hand him my stories. He would also offer me chocolate gone gooey from the heat in his hand when I went for my one on ones in his office. 2 years later, before graduation, I found an unmarked manila envelope in my mailbox. Inside were all of the stories I'd written for the class, with his comments on them. Perhaps it was habit for this professor to not give back his ex-students' stories til they were graduating, but don't you think it's a little bit creepy?

So one day before class Daddy Starbucks taped a note to the class door that said that class had been cancelled. The pock-marked professor's sensibilities were very offended. Those of us that showed up after he did had to witness his coming apart. It was the kind of thing you are embarrassed to watch and at the time are not glad to watch at all, but later in life are really glad you saw. He forbade us to leave the room, tugged at his hair, pulled the English department chair out of class to reprimand us, demanded that we submit writing samples so he could determine who was guilty, paced a great deal, called the Dean of Students, slumped over the table, put his head in his hands and was silent for five minutes, peeked up at us, and finally told us to leave.

After the semester ended, it was a few more years before I saw Daddy Starbucks again. We ran into each other at some East Coast Chicano event. Daddy Starbucks had started law school. In retrospect, I can see that we hooked up for all the wrong reasons, and that we were all wrong for each other, but these things always, always have ways of happening. Everything about the relationship was all wrong. Well, first of all just let me say that Daddy Starbucks was all wrong.

Daddy Starbucks wore grey mock turtleneck sweaters from Eddie Bauer and J Crew, would attempt to buy me clothes from Ann Taylor, and always wanted to boil the potatoes when we made papitas for breakfast so they wouldn't be so fattening, instead of throwing them in the pan with oil and garlic and onions and spice and a kiss like any self-respecting Latino would. You know what word he used for horny? Randy. For fuck's sake, there are so many other ways to tell me that you want me besides saying "I'm Randy." Randy is a 6 foot tall Nordic man with a walrus mustache and halitosis, something I want nothing to do with. And yes, Daddy Starbucks liked Starbucks.

But we carry on for a good while, as sometimes happens when you fall into these things. Eventually I bring Daddy Starbucks home to meet my parents over the holidays. Unbeknownst to me, Daddy Starbucks sequesters my father in the garage. Over bottles of Corona, Daddy Starbucks tells my father how much he loves me and promises to take care of me forever. This is exactly what my father wants to hear. So later that night after everybody is asleep we are in the living room in front of the fire place. Daddy Starbucks is lying on his side, facing me, arm around me. I am turned away from him, intent on the fire, wondering what the fuck I am doing. He pulls out the ring, and starts crying. I start hyperventilating which he mistakes for sobs.

And so begins the first of many stories of the latin lovers who have so desired to marry La Cherry. But this story is nowhere near over, oh no.

Next installment soon.

2006-11-28T22:12:00.000-08:00

The Nativity

Our dear friends on the East Coast (ok, you prolly notice that I'm referring to myself with the royal "we" huh? Never a good sign. Yeah, I *do* think I've done a great job of keeping my Leo sensibilities in check in the last year, but you know, I'm a little stressed out. I have a bit of stitching left to do, and I have a cover letter to write and I have to pack and in order to pack, I have to unpack my make up case of life and death because it's too heavy to carry in my hands through the airport and on bart and it's too big to fit in a suitcase, and the contents of it are too delicate and numerous to be mushed about in a regular make up bag.)

Ok, so like I was saying, our dear friends on the East Coast, for this month's installment of the infamous Desire play party for queer women and trans people of color, have decided to make it Nativity themed. Yeah! Like as in Mary and Joseph and the wise men and the manger and the Baby Jesus and the donkey and the frankincense and the myrhh and the shepherds and the sheeps and the angels and the barn stalls. What would you be? What would you be? I know what I would be.

The Star of Bethlehem, bitches.

Come. Follow me. And I will lead you home. I would direct you to bask in my light, but there's a fair chance you already might, perhaps. Oooooh! Somebody's Leo nature needs to be checked!

I think I need to be slapped, in fact.

2006-11-16T22:10:00.000-08:00

Me Duele
for the wind and a lover

Because I have a weekday hangover. Because in the midst of my weekday hangover morning 20 minutes to get ready messiness I realize I have run out of my signature eye color. Because there is no Sephora to be found in any direction for at least 200 miles. Because I can't wear fishnets and gogo boots to the day job as I so desire, knowing that these things always have potential to make the ugliest of circumstances better.

So I take my unilluminated eyes to the panadería after my father takes one look at me and proclaims 'pan y azucar, mija, pan y azucar' no questions asked. I am holding my tray of sweets and waiting in line, studying from behind my big shades the autographed poster of my sister's band that is tacked to the wall behind the register. And as I sometimes do, for a quick second I think about what it might be like to have posters from some of my shows displayed with the same ferocity and pride. Not like I ever want anybody in this windy, dusty place to know my business, but how cute would it be to roll up to a panadería or a taco shop or a convenience store in a small town and see some queer hot scandal scotch-taped to the paint chipped wall right next to the sacred heart, for people to be like, that's our girl, that's our girl!

When I reach the front of the line and after Mrs. Vela has inquired about the health of all my family members, the whereabouts of my sister and when is she coming to visit, and do I have a boyfriend yet because Mary's son Lupe is still single you know, and spends all his evenings tending the church grounds, and after I answer yes, yes, everyone's healthy, my sister just got back from touring and she'll be around in a month and says that nobody makes bread like you do, and no, no, no, no boyfriend for me, I'm way too busy, I realize I've left my wallet at home.

My lower lip goes out. It shakes a little. "Ay no, mija, no…" Mrs. Vela recognizes the signs of a full on Cherry meltdown approaching, having seen them since day one. She tells me not to worry, to just pay her back next time, that she knows where I live after all. I thank her. I let myself imagine for a minute that maybe I'll bring a stack of my own posters when I come back next time. I think, listening to the bag of treats rustling against my leg and the door chimes talking flight in the desert wind that I will sing a morning song to the wind, like:

Viento, you lick me good, how you tug at my clothes and push your way into my bones, like the best lovers do. But that doesn't stop you from finding me. No. That doesn't stop you from finding me. Chase me. Slap me. Breathe through my mouth. Tangle up my hair. Shake my windows at night. Sing yourself through my dreaming, til I wake to tell you Viento. Quiero ser tuya. Si, tuya. And that won't stop you from finding me. No. That still won't stop you from finding me. And maybe you have already known the underside of my skirt, the smell of my scalp in heat, the sweet of my breast bone, yes, I am yours. But that doesn't stop you from finding me. No. That doesn't stop you from finding me.

2006-11-08T22:09:00.000-08:00

Mercury

Perhaps you know that Mercury has been in retrograde since October 28th and will be until November 17th.

But did you know that Retrograde Mercury is crossing the face of the sun today at 3pm? That's why the sun is so shiny today. Don't go looking directly at it thru a telescope cuz it's similar to a solar eclipse and the sun's luminosity in this moment could blind you or do you harm. But that's not to say you shouldn't enjoy the light and love its warmth. Verdad?

In astrology this is called a conjunction, but because Mercury is so close the Sun, the retrograde and the conjunction are more powerful than usual. Mercury crossing the face of the sun today is big news for Leos.

A quick breakdown: This is a challenging moment for Leos, especially triple Leos. But it's also a powerful moment if you can ride with it, in which big issues you have struggled with for a long time have potential to be made right. This moment is about making peace with your demons.

Mercury Retrograde always affects Leos in special ways, like in the realms of Leo finances and in communicating with friends and lovers, because these are the ways that Mercury influences Leo, and because Leos are ruled by the heart.

This time the mercury retrograde is passing through Leo's 4th house (in addition to crossing the face of the sun backwards today). The Fourth House is known as the House of Home. Home is the place where we begin and the place where we return to, or think about, or long, or dread returning to. The Fourth House is also very much about the concept of home - security, comfort, roots, history, love, family, a solid posse, locating the self, and grounding the self. It also has to do with things coming full circle and beginnings and endings. And being at peace with our histories and the places we've been and come from. All of these contribute to the process of becoming a true, actualized and individualized self. This is how we come home.

What this retrograde means for Leos is that issues related to security and one's place in the world may surface. There is also potential for old, unresolved issues with family members to surface and your home environment being on edge. This, on top of all the normal retrograde stuff that we all tend to experience – fucked up travel plans, wacky phone and email mishaps, misinterpretation and miscommunication in most realms of life and general confusion and chaos. And you might spend wads of money on pretty, but much needed lingerie like I just did Monday. But more on that later.

More on the retrograde, for all signs from Café Astrology:

With Mercury retrograde for the most part in the sign of Scorpio, this is an excellent period for getting in touch with our instincts, motivations, and "dark" side. Emotional communication is not as valued as more rational approaches in our society, and now is the time to explore our more intimate and emotional natures and how these affect our decision making processes. Increased sensitivity, or emotional "radar", is likely. We should watch that we don't get into a paranoid frame of mind, or read too much negativity into what others say.

2006-07-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

A Day Before Thirty

It started with some words, like many things with me do. Precisely these ones I wrote and sent off to an ex:

I appreciated the way you saw hope and possibility is so many places, the way you fed me ice cream in bed, and that you wrote the best letters.

That was all. Nothing else, even though it had been a year or two (I cant remember which) since we stopped talking, stormily. I did not sign it. I also did not tell her about the things I didn't appreciate about her, then or to this day. Like the stiff-jawed, angry way she chewed that reminded me of my mother, how she could never say when she was mad or sorry, and her tendency to drunk dial and not remember a pinche thing, which reminded me of my father.

I did think about telling her I wished her well, and that I hoped the last year or two of her life (I cant remember which) had been good. But I had to think. Did I really wish her well? I didn't want to say it unless I meant it because that is the kind of person I try to be. Sincere and honest. And I wasn't sure I meant it. Its hard to wish somebody well who leaves you for someone else, especially when the someone else is a skinny dog-faced white woman with no ass and a people of color fetish who has lived in Asia for the past two years. I think that's how I said it back then, except meaner, if you can imagine. It's still hard. Even when she was one of a few different lovers you had back then. Even when you got a year or two's perspective now. Even when you realize that it had everything to do with her, and nothing to do with you. Even if you've found 2 dozen people in the time since then who adore your mess of thick, thick hair and hips, your brown sugar skin and Arab eyes, the Latinisms that slip into your speech and walk on the regular.

I'm not proud to say that we hooked up after, that I regretted it, that I acted a little bitch and said more mean things. In public. So I apologized, sincerely, because I meant it. I listened to the phone by my bed ring desperately and incessantly night after night for six weeks after that while I laid on my bed and admired my limbs, gone hard from all the laps I swam that summer to forget her.

The fact that I'm writing this is probably doing me in right now. She's certain to find it. Even though I didn't post it on my regular blog. After analyzing my regular blogs entries over the past year or two in an effort to determine what, exactly, motivated me to send a letter right now today after the past year or two's worth of silence, and after googling my name to see what comes up to further aid her analyzing efforts, she'll enter 'I appreciated the way you saw hope and possibility is so many places, the way you fed me ice cream in bed, and that you wrote the best letters' into Google and find me here.

The thing is that I got smacked with some nostalgia. That in remembering the things that have befallen me in the past decade of my life as I'm about to begin another, she, and the fabulous letters I used to get from her came to mind. Ok, and also because I felt some guilt about my weaker moments in the past decade and have felt the need to re-resolve things that felt even a bit unsettling to me as my birthday approaches. Ok, ok. And because thirty seems really big to me and I can't completely undo my family's and cultures' ageisms even though I've got wonderful, hot friends in their thirties who like me are the slutty, oft broke beautiful rebels of the world. Yet even so. For my peoples to be thirty and unmarried is an abhorrence, the effects of which I'm really feeling since I left Massachusetts for the West, and am ever under the watchful eye of my family.

What happens next?

She, unlike the Colombian playwright I also loved briefly during this particular muggy spring and summer, will still have my phone number. She, unlike the Colombian playwright who could never remember my phone number when she was in town, and who left it on the nightstand next to the bed we'd wrestled all over on the last night ever she was in town before she disappeared to the attic with my hot rican neighbor, and I left without saying goodbye, would know exactly where it was.

They both had tongues like dragonflies. Tongues that could take flight in your mouth and make you dream up iridescent, quick flitting wishes you'd be foolish not to speak out loud. The difference is that the letter writer would listen deep and careful, in that Aquarian way she had, and want to give you all the things you longed for. The Colombian playwright held no illusion of giving you anything and didn't really want to, anyway.

Their tongues, you see, were much different than the tongue of the short writer friend from New York who I hooked up with 2 or 3 times during this same period too. We threw poems at each other quicker and harder than pistols drawn for love.

I am telling Prima about this dilemma, and this time in my life. She says Ya, mija! Basta con tu putiando already. Calm down. I mean how would you feel if the love of your life was out putiando con to el mundo? Shit, and those were only the lovers from one or two years ago. We are sitting at the table with a bottle of wine and our checkbooks. This is the only way, we have found, that we can ever brave our finances. Prima's philosophy regarding finances and wine is that you only live once, so you better live well. The wine is from the winery that my dead gay uncle, murdered in a homophobic act of violence over ten years ago, spent his adult life boycotting and plotting against after picking their grapes for three summers. For this reason, the wine always tastes more bitter, and shockingly more sweet, to me than it is supposed to. I know that Prima is thinking about my Oakland lover of four years when she says this.

Well maybe I just have a different understanding of love than you do, I tell her. The last time we sat at the table with a bottle of wine and our checkbooks was around the holidays. And that time it was she who had the dilemma. Unlike me, she is a one person at one time kinda girl, and had two people and some very hard decisions to make. Why don't you make a list, I said, of everything you want, expect, and need from a sweetheart. And make sure you articulate the difference I told her. I pulled out two of my special journaling pens. That girl wrote. And wrote, and wrote. And wrote some more. I decided that my list would have to be divided up differently: head, heart and chocha. She, unlike me, had kept her list, and remembered everything on it. Her list had stayed the same she told me. I lost my list. I cant remember anything on my list, but I do remember that the list led to some crazy role plays of notable moments from Mexican myth, history, and pop culture. Bien, pero bien, bien hot.

The thing about me is that I have always known exactly who I wanted in any given moment, and will act on it, which is the exact opposite of Prima, who has always known what she wanted, but not who. Its just that I never know what I want from the people I want. Pero this isn't bad, I think.

And the letter writer? Yeah, I loved her. Not in the back up the U-Haul and call the preacher sense. But after we kissed, I knew I would love her, though not very much. And perhaps not for very long. So I kissed her again, knowing this. But why? Prima had asked me. Why would you put yourself through all of that if you knew from the beginning that she wasnt it? Because it was precisely for that reason. The sweet hotness of the temporary. The realness and bravery of I dig you, I really do. But maybe I just want to kick it with you for a little while. These are words that people just don't speak often enough.

This is what my Boston love can't understand. Everybody thinks that I'm a player, he likes to say, but it's not like that at all. I don't really care either way, but I feel no need to tell him this. Boston love calls me from the airport last week. I'm calling to tell you that I'm not gonna be able to call you for a while mami. Boston love is off to the Caribbean, and will be when I get to Boston in another week.

But I didnt forget about you. I did not forget about you, mami. I could never. When Boston love and I were breaking up for the second time he tells me: Damn. You are so beautiful. Why you gotta share? And then I'm crying big tears that have nothing to do with Boston love, and everything to do with me. Boston love's head is in his hands. I'm an asshole. Boston love proclaims and begins to pace the room, I'm such an asshole.

Just leave, I say. Sometimes Boston love, who's also a fabulous letter writer, likes to tell me what his wedding day is gonna be like. The church, who will be there, what he'll wear. I stopped dreaming about weddings half a lifetime ago.

I'm sorry, mami. He stops pacing.

Go away, I say. Ill miss the smell of his shoulders most, I'm thinking.

I am not just going to leave you like this. He's kneeling in front of me.

Yes. You are. And he does. Boston love tilts my face up, wipes the tears from my cheeks, smears them on his jeans and kisses me before he walks out. But later just that night were twisted in sheets together. Otra vez.

Falling in love with you must be like getting jumped into a gang. This from Prima, whose gangbanging days are long over. We are watching the sun set through the kitchen window, which is the only way to watch the sun set right now because its still 105 degrees outside. You get pulled in, knocked over, get your ass kicked from eight different directions. Y pa que? All to belong to you. All to be your girl. Or guy. Or lo que seas. She sounds rather sorry for the people that fall in love with me. But they come out on top, I want to say. In the end they are standing, and maybe they know one or two things they didn't before.

I used to write poems in the letter writer's bed. And when I recited them under hot stage lights that were hundreds of miles away from her, for hundreds of strangers, it's our skins I thought of. I was always too excited to sleep next to her. My skin would glow bronze against the gold of hers. I tell her about the time I was hiking and I found two logs in the river that lightning had struck. How they twisted all around each other, the exact color of us. How they looked like petrified people, who got caught, tangled in their love for each other.

I make up a story I only tell myself:

They are fucking. One of them wishes to stay like this forever. So the sky opens up just like the Red Sea did once, and firebolted dragon tears descend with a fury to smash them. And the lovers see it coming, know something terrible is about to happen, and cling to each other, screaming their love for each other right through their dying. Then silence. Stillness. They realize they are locked against each other unmoving. The wood I see right before me, right now. But suddenly, it was not what the one lover wished for at all. All she can do is cry. And her tears are lapping at the toes of my shoes, begging to swallow me, making me shiver under the smoke colored sky. I think the lovers can hear the blood moving through me. I know they must be hungry. I turn to run from my own story.

And the other lover? Thats the part I still have to figure out, you see.

The letter writer said she would never forget me. It was a thing we would discuss occasionally. I don't like to get involved, she would say, normally. Meaning, I dont like to get involved when a fickle person, such as yourself, has other lovers and relationships and cant be exclusively with me. But she never told me why exactly it was that she was involved with me, even if she didnt want to be.

Easy sex, pendeja, Prima had declared, downing her third glass of wine. But no, it wasnt that simple.

Think you'll forget me? I would ask the letter writer occasionally. We both knew I meant after, like after we were over, that there'd be no forever or ever after for us. Usually we'd be laying, looking at each other, some part of our bodies knotted together too trickily to undo.

No. Her voice would be between a whisper and a sob, a sound that's always made me squirm. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't, she says.

Prima's phone begins to ring in another room. She doesn't move for it, is still glaring wide-eyed at the molten light splitting the sky apart in bloody streaks. We stand side by side, our forearms and hips sinking against each other.

What happens next?

I want to tell Prima that I'm sad. That I'm scared. Maybe today is what so many of them never got, my lovers. I want now. I dont know about the tomorrows. Its a wonder we've made it to today, with all the ways we are hated in the world, with all the fighting, all the ugly things we've seen, and uglier things weve had to do to survive. And I cant believe I've gone and made it to thirty.

No, I finally speak up. Falling in love with me, for me - is like becoming a shooting star, but in reverse. Like being born to something different and flying through the universe just to see everything, believing I can sail forever.

Solita? Prima has to ask.

Just like the sun, I say.

2006-03-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

From Abortion Rights to Social Justice:
Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom
April 7-9, 2006
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA

10 Reasons to go to the CLPP Conference:

1. I’ll be there! Workshopping on Saturday on the previous post’s topic and on intimate partner violence in qpoc communities. (Pero what a Leo way to start a list of reasons!)

2. They provide childcare.

3. They provide meals.

4. They provide housing.

5. They are able to provide some travel vouchers/subsidies AND the Peter Pan Bus stops right at the campus. So it’s a quick and easy trip from NYC and most points east. So I expect to see all you NYC people there.

6. If you don’t know much about the movement for reproductive justice, or only know what the privileged white mainstream movement tells the world, come and learn!

7. It’s a great place to explore new ideas, connect with folks working on similar issues from all over the place, and make connections between movements.

8. Loretta Ross will be there, and you should never pass up a chance to hear the incredible and esteemed Ms. Ross share her thoughts.

9. You can get up to date resources and info on all kinds of safer sex and STIs, and if you so desire, learn how to give yourself a self-exam, speculum y todo. You can probably get a speculum too.

10. It’s a good time. Even (or maybe especially) with the verbal chingazos that are bound to be tossed about inevitably.

CLPP Says:
If you are committed to reproductive rights and social justice, this is THE place to be. On April 7-9, 2006, people will be gathering at Hampshire College to unite for reproductive justice. For this 20th annual reproductive rights conference, we are expecting hundreds of participants from the US and abroad and are offering more than 30 workshops and trainings. Conference speakers address reproductive freedom as it relates to a broad range of social justice initiatives including economic justice, healthcare reform, racial equality, peace, freedom from violence, youth liberation, civil liberties, and LGBTQ rights.

Over the weekend, you will learn about and share organizing experiences and strategies, broaden your understanding of reproductive rights, and make connections with other related movements and issues.

The conference is free and open to everyone. Whether you have been working on reproductive rights for decades or are new to the movement, you belong here! The conference is a forum for learning and networking for people of all ages and from a diversity of backgrounds.

Questions we think about at the conference:How are abortion rights, sex education, economic justice, prisoner rights, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender health, population, environment, and immigrant rights connected? How can an individual activist or community group focus on one social justice issue while standing in solidarity with the larger movement for progressive change? How can organizers in different communities - geographic, identity-based, campus, or otherwise - learn from and strengthen each other's activism?

Join us from April 7-9, 2006 to rejuvenate your activism, share your skills, and take your part in building the movement

More Info and Registration here.

2006-03-04T23:18:00.000-08:00

First of all thanks dear publico, for the comments and notes of support you've sent my way in the last week. I appreciate it. So this great org in Oakland asked me a while ago if they could reprint an article I'd previously written. I said of course, but that I'd love to expand it a bit to talk about some of the current struggles around linking the reproductive rights, queer and trans movements. But then I realized I had so much to say on the topic that it turned into its own thing, which you see below.

I wrote a lot of this in the jobsearch office and had many great discussions with the people sitting next to me about queerness, abortion, sex, genders and people's thoughts, experiences, understandings and misunderstandings about all of these things. I was surprised at how receptive and eager people were to discuss all of this, especially because this is a relatively conservative, Catholic and militarized area. It reafffirms to me how powerful and effective one on one dialogue can be in making connections and getting people to consider things from a different perspective.

So it's a draft and you can hit me up with feedback which I always appreciate, either thru comments, or by the email button to the right and down.

Linking Movements, Linking Lives

While there is much common ground between the movements for reproductive rights, queer liberation and trans liberation, much of the focus on linking the movements has centered on the right to parent and make families. This is a natural connection, and one easy for the movements to unite around. Yet the predominant vision put forth by the mainstream movements fails to address some of the core issues that are challenging to the linking of these movements and is only one part of a very complex struggle. Oftentimes the ways in which the mainstream movements tend to address this common ground around parenting and reproduction are in ways that are only relevant to people with considerable privilege. Often it is done so from a perspective that does not acknowledge the dynamics of systemic oppression at the root of the movements and inadvertently perpetuates them.

For example, one issue is the call for greater access to reproductive technologies as a reproductive right for queer people. While it’s a fundamental right for queer people to create families, we need to be able to examine, acknowledge and engage around the racist, ableist, classist and sexist dynamics of eugenics that many reproductive technologies have been and are still used for. Recipients of public benefits, immigrants, female bodied people of color, farm workers, people in recovery from substance abuse, incarcerated individuals, and many other individuals and communities have been affected by coercive sterilization and other reproductive technologies and experiments without knowledge or consent. Reproductive technologies are also used to define who is an acceptable human in terms of ‘desirable’ traits and characteristics, many times employing racist and ableist preferences in modification or selection of traits. Potential donors can also market themselves as high quality genome sources. This has profound social and capitalistic impacts, placing value on certain bodies and lives over others.

Additionally, many of these reproductive technologies are only accessible to economically privileged people. Poor queers don’t have access to pricey reproductive technologies or reproductive assistance services. We then encounter the dynamic of the economically privileged having access to such technologies and services as a matter of choice, similar to abortion being only accessible as a matter of choice to people with privilege. As Loretta Ross has often said “Choices are for people who have them, and lots of people don’t.” In making links between movements, it is important to shift the paradigms beyond advocating for the things that only the privileged have access to or benefit from.

In thinking about reproductive technologies, it’s important to take into account the experience of trans people. I think it‘s imperative that the voices of trans people be at the center of discussions around linking movements. As a non-trans, gender conforming woman with femme privilege, I can’t speak to the experiences of trans people, nor on behalf of trans people. Hence I offer these thoughts as an ally, and as a person who has been dissatisfied and disappointed with the hesitancy of the reproductive rights movement to take on issues affecting the reproductive, sexual, and general health and well being of trans and gender non-conforming people, and for the many ways in which transphobia manifests in the reproductive rights movement. As part of the process of undergoing a legal change of sex, many states mandate that people undergo surgical procedures through which they are sterilized as a precondition to a legal change of sex Oftentimes people aren’t notified of any options for banking eggs and sperm for future use. This is another example of coercive sterilization and a way in which reproductive choice is unfairly limited to a group of individuals.

Yet what’s left out of this dialogue is the experience of trans people who choose not to, or don’t have the economic resources to undergo gender reassignment therapies. The positioning of this as a central issue of reproductive justice does not account for the many issues of day to day survival facing trans people with less resources, and the ways in which having less resources, especially when coupled with transphobia, affect overall health and well being. Some of the challenges facing trans people with less resources that affect health might be things like access to basic, fundamental needs such as food and shelter, as well as employment and housing discrimination, violence, and barriers to accessing healthcare. Because reproductive justice is really about survival, all of these matters deserve our attention, advocacy, and allyship as a matter of justice.

Many of these issues and systems around reproduction and parenting for queer and gender variant people further enforce who gets to be a parent both within and outside of the queer community by privileging one type of family over another. This is the case with transracial and transcultural adoption. Transracial adoption determines what sort of people have the ability and resources to parent without acknowledging the imperialist, racist and classist dynamics of white, first world people adopting children of color from third world countries. We need to consider not just the sovereignty of nations when thinking about working against imperialism, but of individuals who are not able to parent their children due to conditions created through imperialism, as well as the effects of globalization and the many violations of human rights that occur as a result of these things.

Similarly, when we think of fostering children involved with the child welfare system, we often don’t think of the conditions which compromise survival for the split families. We don’t often consider the ways in which certain families and communities are targeted and policed more than others, such as single mothers, low-income families, differently abled parents, families of color, and queer, trans and gender non-conforming parents of color or with lower incomes. We need to recognize this as an extension of the targeting, criminalization, and state intrusion these individuals and communities already unduly receive. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 stipulates that a parent loses parental rights to a child who has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. This has a specific impact on incarcerated women.

78% of incarcerated women have children, and two-thirds of incarcerated women are women of color. Due to the remote locations of many women’s prisons fewer than half of these women are able to see their children and families while incarcerated. Incarcerated women are at a high risk of losing their children as many of the children are placed in foster care for the duration of their incarceration. Further compromising survival for some people who have been incarcerated is legislation specifying that anyone who has been convicted of a drug-related felony is barred from receiving cash or food stamps and living in public housing.

The implications of all of these facts are many: that the legislation around retaining parental rights disproportionately affects women of color, that when facing incarceration women of color also face being dislocated from their communities and isolated from their resources and support networks, making it more difficult to ensure survival. And finally, that the legislation around drug felony convictions and access to benefits also compromises survival and one’s ability to provide for their families. This is all particularly alarming when we think about differences in sentencing such as the difference in minimum mandatory sentencing between convictions involving crack and convictions involving cocaine. Our movements need to think about the implications of these facts, particularly in the context of the state deeming certain individuals acceptable parents and others as not.

There are multiple ways that the right of people of color to parent their children and the right of communities of color to know dignity, autonomy and safety are threatened all the time, every day and without consequence. The truth of the matter is that we are still having our children stolen from us. Through the foster care system, through the juvenile detention system, through incarceration, through transracial adoptions, from nations the US has fucked with, through war. As long as the cycles of racism, classism, imperialism, and the criminalization of our communities continue, this will hold true. If we are going to talk about reproductive justice in terms of individuals not being able to make decisions about their bodies separate from what is going on in their communities, then we need to talk about dismantling the United States government and its racist and imperialist practices, and consider the far-reaching impacts of this racism and imperialism that make it difficult and often impossible for individuals, families, and communities to survive and be sovereign.

The movement for abortion rights hasn’t always been clear in articulating the right to have children. While white feminists during the second wave were engaged in battles over legality – mainly the struggle to legalize abortion, and keep it legal - women of color were engaged in daily struggles just to survive, further complicated by the added challenges of facing racism in all sectors of their lives like employment, housing and shelter, parenting, and in the navigation of social service systems. The reproductive rights movement has rarely accounted for any of this, but especially the rights of families and communities to just exist without daily hassle, harassment, and turmoil. This has resulted in a distancing between the reproductive rights movement and the actual lived experiences of whole communities. In re-envisioning our struggles and in envisioning the linking of them, we need to think about creating movements that account for all of our varied experiences, truths, realities and lives.

Furthermore, the mainstream movements for reproductive rights, queer liberation, and trans liberation historically have been, and primarily still are headed by white, middle class people. The primary platforms of all of these movements are framed around issues of legalization - in the reproductive rights movement, around abortion, in the queer movement around legalizing gay marriage, in the mainstream trans movement to include gender reassignment therapies as part of comprehensive health insurance coverage. But all of these movements need to recognize that struggles framed around legality reinforce the body’s dependence on the nation state, and that this makes it very hard for people from communities that are targeted by the nation state to connect to the movements.

Laws were established, and largely are still designed, to protect the rights of white, wealthy citizens, and in many cases legalization primarily benefits people with considerable privilege. In many cases laws don’t protect the best interests of people of color, the undocumented, poor people, differently abled people, and queer and gender variant people. How can we place trust in a legislative system that has continually hurt and oppressed us? Given this, how can we believe that struggling within this system is going to be in our best interests? We cannot. When we get caught up in fighting for legality, our fundamental needs and the things we need to survive often get left by the wayside.

If our fight is solely focused around upholding Roe vs. Wade, we might not be acknowledging how inaccessible abortion remains for most people due to location of clinics, transportation issues, the cost of the procedure, parental notification acts, the Hyde amendment, 24 hour rules, lack of adequate, appropriate and multi-lingual information and care, and childcare and work restrictions. If we are fighting to uphold Roe vs. Wade, we are probably not thinking about the barriers facing many families in their struggle to survive and live their lives with dignity and autonomy, free from undue harassment and targeting. If our fight is solely focused around gay marriage, or for insurance coverage of gender reassignment therapies, or for access to cyropreservation services, we might not be talking about our hungry or our homeless and the basic, fundamental needs that are unmet for many lower-income queer, trans and gender non-conforming people. If we frame our fight around these issues, we make the assumption that everyone has access to affordable health insurance and appropriate health care. We might not be talking about the employment and housing discrimination that many queer, trans and gender non-conforming people (especially people of color) face.

Given the realities of the world we live in most of us, and our bodies, are dependent on the nation state. But we can work towards change and work towards creating autonomy for our bodies and communities. There is more than one way to imagine connections between the reproductive rights, queer liberation and trans liberation movements. A more expansive vision would not only bring together people interested in the issues that our movements encompass, but would also critique the inherent oppressions in the systems surrounding survival, sex, parenting and reproduction and fight for ways to make them just for everyone. The tenet of the movement for reproductive justice is that you can’t make a decision about your body separate from what’s going on in your community. Considering this I think we can push further the analysis around linking movements.

Reproductive rights activists, queer activists and trans activists need to make the connections and expand the visions of our movements, reframe and re-prioritize the platforms, and work towards a society in which each community and each individual can live with dignity and autonomy. We can unite around the places that our movements do intersect, and do so from an anti-oppression perspective. We can advocate for and we can provide comprehensive sexuality education in our communities, and encourage healthy, positive and fun dialogues and attitudes around sex and sexualities. We can, and we will share resources and remedios in the way that we always have, trusting in our collective wisdom and knowledge. We can support sex working, or street-involved people from our communities. We can create social safety nets, and we can work towards undoing the way that current safety nets such as shelters, domestic violence programs and sexual health programs are heavily gendered, and therefore make them safer and more accessible places to go.

We can demand and advocate for better access to healthcare and health education for everybody. We can work towards establishing clinics and community health centers in our neighborhoods, on our terms, in our languages, and with our best interests in mind. We can work towards ending interpersonal and state violence in our communities. We can educate our young people on our histories and provide them with anti-oppression training and in doing so we can ensure that the next generation of queer and trans people has a safer world to live in. We can acknowledge the beautiful history and legacy of the many varied and creative ways that queer people, particularly poor queer people and queer people of color, have found to parent and make families. And we can go on being our fierce, resilient, resourceful, beautiful, brave selves. We’re just too sexy not to.

Cherry is a West Coast based queer Chicana writer, organizer, educator, theater artist, and mother. Her work focuses on sex, reproductive justice, anti-violence organizing, and qpoc movements through the lens of whole community health, as well as documenting the lives and histories of queer people of color for future generations.

2006-02-22T14:48:00.000-08:00

When I Was a Brat

We all know how much I love to write things I’m not supposed to be writing when I’m supposed to have finished writing other things several days ago. It’s part of my process. I realize I’m developing a terrible reputation for never getting things where they are supposed to be on time, though I always have good intentions. But compared to the rest of my reputations this one seems rather trivial.

So the other day I was updating my friendster profile. This made me think about adjectives I’ve used to describe myself at various phases in my life, and words people have used to describe me. Of course the words brat and bratty came to mind. I think I’ve actually been called a brat quite steadily throughout the duration of my existence until about 2 years ago. In my early life it was because I was not a well-behaved child. I was a princess, bien chiflada, marginally spoiled because I was so fucking cute and nobody could say no to me nor deny me anything, and hence, manipulative with my affections and facial expressions. What? Most Leo children are like this. And I will say that I most likely learned all of these behaviors from my beautiful mother, may God always bless her. I’ll also say that despite everything, these behaviors have served me well in my life and that my beautiful mother taught me well.

Pero anyways, in my adolescence, I was a different kind of brat, but still a brat. There was the normal stuff like throwing tantrums at home and jumping out my bedroom window every night. I would get caught passing venomous notes in class, engaged regularly in boy/girlfriend thiefing, wrote mean songs about people who were mean to me that my punk band would perform publicly, and because few people could stand my brattiness, was always in one fistfight or another.

Then in my early twenties I was super brat, as one or two people here can attest to. Of course I had grown up quite a bit, and now knew how to act. I was not mean without good reason. I had learned not to pursue anyone else’s sweetheart unless it was ok to. I didn’t get in fistfights anymore although I missed them sorely. I had actually grown to be a person with a very sweet nature, a Leo who tried to be conscious of her Leo tendencies and tried to channel them productively, and a loyal friend who would always keep a secret. This was the era of the Hello Kitty battles and the queer brown femme fabulousness that Starchild and I made an art form of exuding. But still. I was a princess, bien chiflada, marginally spoiled because I was so fucking cute, and because there were always people ready, willing, and waiting in line(s) to spoil me, etc. And with so many years of bratty practicum under my skirt, I was just lethal. I’m too embarrassed to disclose all my deeds and doings in a public forum such as this, especially cuz these years feel not all that long ago. But if you one day ask me, I’ll tell you some stories.

And now? Well. I still may be called a brat by the people who know me best on the occasions in which I am misbehaving especially terribly. But the word brat doesn’t really suit me or my tendencies anymore. Because besides not being a brat anymore (and yes, I insist that I am not) brat connotes littleness and cuteness and really, a controllable nature, like something that can be reformed through punishment and discipline. Amores, I am beyond reform at this point in my life. And I am no longer little, nor sweet, nor cute. I may be pretty, witty and gay. Or stunning and grabbable and clever. I may know exactly what I want and how, and when, and where, and I may be unyielding and stern and bossy. And high maintenance on occasion too. I realize that really, I’m just a bitch now. Many of you will agree with me. But you know what you know what you know what?

Bitches deserve spankings too.

I’m just saying.

2006-02-06T21:00:00.000-08:00

Con Permiso

Pardon my long absence. I spent a month driving cross-country and arrived with $9 left in my pocket. I had planned to shack up with the generous tía in Seattle while I danced at the Lusty Lady and saved my money so I could get the hell away from here as quickly as possible. But the generous tía’s house was already chock full of people just like me, at a crossroads in their life, with no place to go. So I drove down 90 east a few hours more to central Washington. I fell into a deep depression. Then a few weeks ago I realized I had writing deadlines I was gonna miss if I couldn’t pull myself together and have been a writing machine since. But not in the healthiest of ways. I was sleep deprived, dehydrated, electrolyte depleted, hungry, and stinky.

So this Friday I realized I needed to sleep, eat, maintain electrolytes, and shower regularly, even when in the midst of depressions and writing madness. A large part of the writing intensity was because my recent writings have been framed around my gay uncle’s murder, queer blood legacies, and of course, sex, desire, and love. In writing this I thought it would be important to provide a context for his story by talking about how Mexicans came and still come to be in Washington, and the history of Chicano/Mexicano struggle and resistance in Washington, that many of my tías and tíos were part of. They were my heroes, and their adventures to me were so much better than any cartoon or comic book I’d encountered in my childhood.

During the midst of this I decided I really needed to see my tío’s death certificate. I don’t know why, but I just needed to. So I went on a crazy rampage through family records. I found a lot of interesting things, but not his death certificate. Part of me believed for some wild days that he wasn’t really dead, but had planned a great escape and fooled everybody and was really living a fabulous life somewhere, and that he was going to send for me any day now since he knew I’d had to come back. But then I realized that of course this wasn’t true. That Frosty had had to go and identify the beaten body and has had to tell me about it many times and cried many tears over it. That three years ago when home for a visit I had cried over the unmarked plot of land where he was buried and how my father was so ashamed because seven years after his death, they still hadn’t been able to find money to buy him a headstone.

So truth seeps out of time and places. Right now I’m overwhelmed with the immensity of our family history. My mind is everywhere. Music, death, un-love, a kind of blind kicking and screaming love or loyalty that endures through generations. Rivalry, guns, drugs, music, empty envelopes holding blank folded pieces of paper that once held money addressed to my grandmother and sent by my Tío Mundo. I think about the story of my father shooting a man dead one Sunday afternoon in front of my buelita’s house. How the man hated my father, was jealous and nobody knew why. "They were all in the front yard mi’ja. Your uncles, your father, the children, you in your father’s arms. And they see this car coming from two blocks away, slowly, steadily, and your father knows it’s that tigre and that this is it. He’s either gonna kill or be killed, he says he just knew. He was thinking of you mi’ja. Of everybody that he loved. So he throws you towards the cherry tree and Beto dives and catches you before you hit the ground. You were only five months old or so." I’m told how all the children got sent inside and my father came out pistol in hand and scored the fence, how Beto cowered with me behind the tree, covering my tiny body with this chest and arms. How the guy reached for his gun but not before my father had shot him between the eyes. How the car kept going and collided with the back of Mundo’s toothpaste green colored van, and the engine sat idling for a few long minutes before anybody moved. How my grandmother wailed because she just wanted everybody to get citizenship without any problems. Nobody ever tells me what happens after though.

I look at the articles, newspaper clippings, bios of my famous father. I remember after the states arts commission decided to take an interest in the musicos that had brought their songs with them from Michoacan, Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, up to Washington. They came to our house and our mother twisted our ears and gave us a coscorrón, hissing and you had better behave yourselves before she smoothed her dress and answered the front door with the sweetest smile and voice and invited the white ethnomusicologist, the grantmakers, and the historian in. After my father played we each played for them, as was customary when guests came to visit. When it was my turn, I sat at the piano bench and played without music in front of me, because I did not know how to read music at this time, parts of two Beethoven Sonatas, Ave Maria, Clare de Lune and a Chopin Nocturne. I didn’t even know the names of most of these pieces. You have never taken a lesson before? They all asked. No, I said. They would pay for us to go to formal lessons after this day so we would learn how to read music. They gave my father money just for being a superstar, money to teach two apprentices a year, money to visit schools statewide and do arts in education programming, money for playing in arts commission festivals and at the Governor’s Parties.

When I read the pieces on him, and our family history I am frustrated. I know that it was white ethnomusicologists and historians who wrote it into something they thought white people would understand, something that would translate well. I think of how he tells long stories, full of characters with their own motives and stories, how he tells long stories of places, clubs he played, long smoky nights spent making music and the dramas, stories and lives that unfolded in each one. If these are left out, then you don’t really know the story. I also know that he didn’t write the bios I see on glossy programs and events booklets. I remember being fourteen and sitting with him at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, while he told me stories that he trusted I would turn into one good enough to let his audience know who he was, where he had been and what he had done. And how all of this affected his music.

Boxes of documents that say in scrawly English "Please don’t touch these fuckin box. These boxes none of your fuckin mess." Naturalization papers, birth certificates, photos, letters from Mexico from people left behind that didn’t want to be forgotten. A bank statement dated sometime in 1994 from a bank in Seattle for my Tío Mundo that reads ‘Princess Theater’ under his name. What was Princess Theatre? Where? On some documents from the early years in the states how they don’t have an address and it says something obscure like 6 miles North, Rd. F. I imagine them trying to tell non-Spanish speaking doctors where they lived. And the doctors being mean and stupid to them because they didn’t live in an actual home with doors that locked and a floor and a solid roof, but just some windowless shack with a dirt floor and a sheet sometimes pulled across the front doorway, and a roof that the sun and wet dripped through.

The story of my tía on my mother’s side who met her one true love, the musico, from a musical family just like my father’s, outside of Edinburg, Texas, where both my mother’s family and tía’s love’s family ended up working for a while. They met in a cotton field when they were about 15. When picking season was over, both families took off for something else, somewhere else. "Ayyyy. Her heart was broken mi’ja. She tried to run away and when your grandfather caught her, oh, how she cried. All the way up to Oregon, mi’ja, she cried. And then she was just silent, but you’ll never believe what happened next." What happened next was that a year later they found each other again, in a hops field in Washington, this time. Both families had made it up to the Yakima Valley. "You know hops are the worst thing to pick mi’ja. They hurt you, scratch you up bad, and you just have to keep on picking. So there she was, back aching, hair tied up in a bandana, face dirty, arms bloodied and scratched up to the elbow, and somebody says Normita? And it’s him! And she runs to him, she doesn’t care that her papa is watching, that everybody is watching, and that she’ll prolly get her ass kicked later for it, but she throws herself at him, wraps her legs around him like a grown woman would, and kisses him hard on the mouth."
She lost her virginity to him. She told me when I was 13 or so "It hurt like sandpaper mi’ja, it burned, like nothing else!" And when I looked at her all shocked and shit she says "Well, mi’ja I tell you this now so you will know. Don’t think that when you go giving it up it’s gonna feel all pretty and good like in the movies. I tell you this now so that you know that when you go give it up it had better be for something special!" Except for me it isn’t like this at all, and when I’m lying there defeated and let down and left feeling sandpaper scratched between the legs I think of what she told me too late before I pull up my pants and run away to cry.

But the story goes that they carried on tight til they were about 18 years old. And one night he comes to see her father. The next night at the hour when one half of the sky is deep cool blue and dotted with stars, like how desert people imagine the ocean must be, and the other is still melty orange gold like lava, which is a thing desert people always know, he stands where the two halves meet with his guitar strapped to his back, and he says Normita. And she is sitting on a rock in her faded yellow dress, smiling, her face lifted to the late spring breeze and the breeze tangling her hair, spreading it like raven wings behind her. And he has never loved anything or anyone as much as he loves her in this moment, how she is now, before the sun finishes setting and things change forever and they walk away in the night to begin their adult lives. So he kneels before her, and again he says Normita. And she suddenly looks at him, and her mouth is falling open, and he is mistaking it for joy, for surprise. But if only he had known that just today, her older sister had told her she was leaving for Seattle, and would she consider joining her? Yes, Normita wanted out and away.

So she says, amor. You have been good to me. You have loved me and cared for me, and found me after you had lost me, and made me love you even more. But what kind of life can you give me here? What kind of life can you give our children? She did not want her children to live through the things she had. And so she left him with a quick kiss to the cheek, crying her name with his guitar in the night, and calling after her Normita, porque, porque, Normita, por favor, amor, mi Normita. But that is not the end.

She was quick and cool in her delivery, but she ran from that field sobbing as though her life were over. She was sick with grief for months after and the gray Seattle days which her and her older sister had run away to in the middle of the night two days later were so unlike the bright and sunny valley, and did nothing to help. Eventually her amor too came to Seattle, to study at the University as if to prove her wrong. He did well for himself, graduated and became famous for his music, receiving many of the same honors and awards that my father did. She didn’t talk to him much, was busy with her new life in the city. "She wanted to go places and knew she would get nowhere as the wife of a musico, mi’ja." Eventually she married a very nice Filipino guy. Got a job at Boeing, moved right up and was making good money. They had three children together and a very middle class life. Private schools, nice cars, fancy appliances, too much food in the house, spoiled kids who are never disciplined and don’t know how to listen or act right.

Once I was with her at one of my father’s shows where her ex-amor’s band was playing too, and we saw him and his family. And she is flustered and says oh my god! And fans herself and has to gulp her drink real fast. And then after her pulse has cooled and her giggles stopped and her cheeks have faded and only a sad smile is left she sighs deep and says you know what mi’ja, you know what. And I say dime tia. And she says if I woulda married him, then that’s what my ass would look like right now, and she motions with her glass towards Berta, his wife. Berta is one of those beautiful, loud, vivacious, dimpled Mexican ladies who men will never stop appreciating. And homegirl can carry a song. I’m remembering the time my neck got dislocated when Berta’s right tit collided with my head when she was exiting the church pew behind me. I remember she smelled like roses and it made me get all tingly when she came to kneel in front of me and say ay baby I’m so sorry are you ok and I could see down the front of her dress. And then my mother’s voice popped up in my head saying por dios! Is this what you think about in the house of God? Tía gulps down her drink in one swallow and gets up to go say hello. I watch them across the room. The way they look at each other is like they are still in love. All the tías say she never got over him. They don’t say she made a mistake, though.

Once I told a group of friends this story and they asked me what would you have done? I still see myself lying on my back with my arms over my head in a candle lit room, chest filled big with air at this question. Love or adventure? Love or maybe adventure plus other loves? Love or what might be better for me? I really don’t know what I would do, but because I love all of them so much, I say: I think I would have stayed. And wrapped my legs around him every night in our casita with goats and chickens in the backyard, and smothered him with my tetas in the mornings before I milked the goat and lit the stove. And made him Menudo on Sundays, and popped out millions of babies for him, and kissed the top of his bald head when we were old and sucked his cock every day til the very end and called him my tiger and said si si si ayyyy papi ayyyyyyyy dame, dame, damelo duro papi damelo every time we fucked. And then the friends throw pillows at me and say you would not stay, you selfish sucia. And I sit up and I say No! But I would! And suddenly I mean it, big parts of me really, really mean it. So I say, I would, I mean, as long as he was ok with me… But they cut me off and say see, slut. And all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say ‘pues…’ Because loving is never, never, ever that simple.

It’s a wonder any of us are even alive.

2006-01-16T22:03:00.000-08:00

Rejections

A very wise person once told me that almost of all the time when you face rejection, it has everything to do with the other person, and not you. This bit of wisdom’s been useful many times to me. In matters of the heart and in matters of art. If you’re any kind of artist, chances are that you’re gonna have to deal with rejection now and again. As well as be able to take criticism and feedback that’s not always easy to hear. So I spent the last part of the week all enmeshed in this grant application that was due on Friday. I knew that because I had another deadline for mid-week that I would only have two days to work on it. I knew that my time in those two days would be limited because there’s so much noise and drama here and family members who need support right now, and also because I’m required to report to the job search office every morning to engage in job search activities while looking “presentable.” (By the way, this is such a problem for me. I have dress-up clothes and slut clothes and a few sweaters and dance and work-out clothes and a few things for belly dance and two pairs of jeans which I am loathe to wear, and not allowed to wear anyways while engaging in job search activities. I’ve never been required to adhere to any kind of strict work-clothes dress code at any job I’ve ever had and have been able to pretty much wear whatever I wanted and this just sucks because I don’t have ‘appropriate’ clothes, can’t really afford any right now, and they are assholes about it). So anyways, I knew I’d have to budget my grant writing time really carefully.

Thursday morning I threw myself into it. Filled out the application, made the budget, wrote most of my statement of purpose, printed out pieces so I could look them over and choose what to send. I had a good start and wasn’t stressed out at all. I even took time that afternoon to make an elaborate dinner and flip through the Victoria’s Secret catalog, spatula in hand. I even went with my brother to get coffee and give each other pep talks (he had a big paper due the next day). After everyone had gone to bed I started working again. And that’s when all the trouble started. The disk that had my statement and all of my writings from the past year would not open and fucked up the computer every time I stuck it into the drive. I tried my parent’s piece of shit dinosaur computer. I tried my piece of shit barely hanging on laptop that has to be plugged in to even work. Nothing. Nothing I tried was working to fix it.

I had a complete breakdown. It was around midnight and I ended up sobbing into the phone for over an hour about the complete demise of my life. I decided I wasn’t going to apply for the grant. I realized that maybe right now in my life I don’t want to hear that my writing isn’t good enough. No more than that, I can’t handle it. The only thing that’s pulled me out of and kept me from sinking back into serious and risky depression is the writing projects I’ve been doing. Knowing that something is due on a certain day and that I have to follow through with it (even if they’ve all been late) has given me something to focus on and work towards.

I realized that I’d had so many experiences starting with the flood that had made me feel completely powerless, as in totally disempowered and with no options, and just how much the flood had made me feel like this. It didn’t really register til a few weeks after being here, and registers a little bit more every day in strange ways and at strange times. Pero anyways, it made me feel really powerless to watch my children upset and trying to cope with a traumatic event like the flood and the traumatic aftermath of it like losing everything and having to leave behind their friends and community and security. It made me feel really powerless to not be able to do a fucking thing about it. I realize that I am mad at the profesora for being such a shitty and absent landlord, but that I hadn’t let myself until now feel mad at her. I’m mad that even after we’d lost so many things, were only able to occupy half of the house, had to deal with mold and mess everywhere, and suffered so much, that she still kept our deposit. I am mad that I had to leave behind my gorgeous green piano and that her spoiled good for nothing pampered mama’s boys who have never known what it is to want for or work for anything get to keep it. I feel powerless because my lungs still fuck up from mold sometimes. I feel powerless about the insurance mess from my old work place. Human resources accidentally forgot to deduct my health insurance premiums from my salary for the entire time I’d worked there, unbeknownst to me, and then realized this during my exit interview and expected (and still expect) me to pay almost $4000 to them. And they kept my last paycheck without my consent as payment towards this. The whole time I worked there I felt great because this was my first job at which I could actually afford health insurance and it felt so nice to not have to worry about it.

I feel powerless when thinking about how uprooted both my mother’s and father’s families have been in just trying to survive. And how my grandmothers and the women in my family always seemed to just accept their fate and move forward because what other choice did they have. Hands clasped together on their laps in the back of crowed trucks filled with other migrant farm working families, tight lipped and never looking back. Not the hysterics that I am at all.

I feel powerless about the way me, my body and my clothes are policed when I go to engage in job search activities. During the intake the caseworker asks me are you on any kind of birth control, family planning, contraception? No, I say. Well do you need to be on some kind of birth control, family planning or contraception she asks. No, I say again, and she looks at me like I’m the stupidest, stupidest bitch in the world before she stops her typing, closes her eyes, and then opens them again to ask me very slowly: well, are you able to conceive and have children? I guess, I say. She looks me up and down and says well let me go get you a family planning kit. She scurries away and returns with a brown paper sack saying maybe there’s some information or things in there you haven’t heard of before. When I get home and open my goody bag I think I’m gonna find multi-lingual pamphlets on different birth control options, a sti breakdown, and thorough safer sex info. I’m expecting fun colored and flavored condoms, a dam or two, a pair of gloves, lube, hell maybe even finger cots. But all I find is about 30 plain condoms and a tiny how to use condoms instruction sheet, printed in English. Because the sexual and reproductive health of English speakers is somehow more important than that of non-English speakers? When I tell my sister the goody bag story she is outraged and says God! What was she trying to say to you?

All job searchers are divided into modules. Everyday each module does something different. One day we’re tested on our language, math and writing skills. Everybody. In English. None of the Spanish speaking folks are given translation or instructions in Spanish. Nobody explains to us why we are doing this or what for. We are asked to write on how we intend to contribute to society and our community once we find employment. We’re tested on how we read and interpret information. When they hand out scratch paper for the math test the guy sitting next to me asks me in Spanish what is this paper for? Extra paper to work out the math problems I say. I haven’t done math since I was in eighth grade. This has nothing to do with my work he says. Mine either I say. We look at each other and shake our heads and sigh. If you come dressed inappropriately to job search you don’t receive credit for the day. If you bring your kid, you don’t get credit for the day. If you don’t show up and don’t call in before 9:30 to explain why, you don’t get credit. If you are deemed as having a bad attitude you don’t get credit. If you don’t get credit too many times you lose your benefits. They put staff who don’t speak a word of Spanish up at the front desk and when Spanish speakers who don’t speak a word of English come in and starts telling the person their story, it’s sad and ugly, never handled in a good way. A few of us jump up to translate when this happens. I don’t understand why they have people who don’t speak (even some) Spanish employed there.

And I feel shitty about being rejected for the one job I really wanted and was super qualified for, directing an outreach program for a community health clinic for farm workers. The two people who interviewed me were these really stiff, uptight white ladies. We didn’t vibe well at all. I’m sorry, but I think it sucks that a clinic for farm workers is directed by white folks. I think they were hesitant about all the queer shit on my resume. But despite all this, I would have done amazing things there.

I just hate it here. I feel completely isolated and cut off from the world. I am terrified that I’ll be stuck here forever. Weekends are the worst. Not a single thing seems ok. And all of this came out on Thursday night on the phone. I get off the phone and fall asleep feeling so so pathetic and worthless. Friday morning I wake up and try to piece together a presentable outfit. A purple sweater that is prolly too tight by their standards but which covers up all my chest to my collarbone, gray pants I borrow from my mom’s closet. I never look like myself on these mornings and this makes me feel erased.

All of these things make me feel erased. Some mornings I can’t feel me anymore at all. Just this tired, conquered, scared body that does what she’s told. At job search at least we’re tired, scared bodies all together. There’s Jose with the prettiest light blue eyes who always wears the same gray hoodie with a blue hued Virgen safety pinned to the back, crying with her arms wide open. Benita, with her sad rabbit eyes and wide grin, who’ll talk your ear off if you let her and who always know what’s going on all over town and can’t feel her left fingers anymore because of her ex-husband’s beatings. There’s Sarochin, the Pakistani woman who likes to tell me stories because I look like her people and is always telling the younger women to go find a husband while we still have a pretty shape and smooth skin. There’s Olga, the Russian lady who never takes off her jacket. There’s Rosa, the mixed Mexican girl about my age, who never brushes her hair and has a scar on her right cheek and knobby knees and a slight limp. I think that Rosa with the fucked up hair is just beautiful, even though maybe nobody else does. In my dreams, we walk arm in arm to go get ice cream together. We are going to hang out in her living room late into the night and trade stories. We are going to chop vegetables to throw in the rice pot. We are normal people. But I always wake up before we get to any of these places or things. I have the feeling that most of us never get touched. That most of us don’t have anyone to tell us that we are strong or help us remember who we are.

The job search rooms have a heavy sadness lingering around them. All of us have been through some terrible shit. Heads bent forward over job ads, computers. Most of us learn each other’s stories over time. Because we tell each other but also because there’s no privacy during interviews and case reviews and all your shit’s screamed out in the open for everybody to hear. Most of us have lived pieces of each other’s stories at one time or another. Jose, farm worker and it’s off season, with a mama who’s dying from cancer prolly from exposure to pesticides throughout her life. Rosa, abusive ex-boyfriend. Sarochin’s husband disappeared one day. Olga, sexually harassed and bullied into leaving her last job. Benita, laid off, hungry kids at home. Sometimes it’s just enough to know that we’re all breathing together. Worn down, defeated, patronized and controlled but breathing. Even if they don’t put soap in the bathrooms for us. Even if we think that this is just one more way they want to kill us.

I end up sending the grant off anyway. I just sit down at the computer that morning between Jose and Benita and it all comes pouring out of me, a brand new project description, a work sample description. The files on the disk open and I pick and format the pieces I’m sending and print it all out and collate 6 copies as the application says to. I take it to the post office and send it off. On time, for once. I feel good. I feel powerful. I feel less erased. It’s not even about the possibility of getting the grant, which I’m not anticipating getting. It’s just about having something to push on to, and through. Then on to the next thing. This is what’s keeping me close to my body.