So Bye-Bye Miss American Pie

The day before Jorge left El Salvador he exchanged his rifle for a guitar.

In the United States he washed dishes at the International House of Pancakes for $3. 35 hour. He played his guitar on his free time on the grassy area of the college where I worked as an assistant gardener.

The first time I saw Jorge he was playing Neil Young’s Out On The Weekend like a left over angel from the 1970’s. I fell in love with him immediately. When he finished playing the song, I went up to him and kissed him. This was my first rock and roll kiss. I still remember the Harvest album taste in his mouth.

I was 16. Jorge was 25.

We saw each other after work to talk, to hold hands, and to kiss. I searched long and hard under his tongue for Led Zeppelin’s Battle of Evermore . I never found it.

I was not much of a girlfriend. I was too ignorant to talk about the social and political situation of El Salvador or about Reaganomics. We mostly talked about music. He liked to hear my rock and roll dreams while he snorted cocaine. Jorge liked to hear how I, after graduating from high school, was going travel with the Grateful Dead or how I was going to buy a red pick-up truck and move to San Francisco. He smiled when I told him I was going to have a son and name him Mick Jagger. I told him my dream about playing guitar. I was going to play a slow version of Sultans of Swing. It was going to be so slow it was going to ache. Jorge didn’t share his dreams. He told me El Salvador had taken all his dreams away. However, he was going to accept a ride to Los Angeles one day on my very own red pick-up truck.

Jorge never invited me to his house. He rented a small room from a mormon family who did not allow renters to bring women to the house. I assured him over and over that I wasn’t looking for a room. I wanted to wait until I was 18. I wanted a big brass bed like in Bob Dylan’s Lay Lady Lay.

As time passed, my parents eventually found out Jorge’s age and prohibited me from seeing him. I didn’t fight their decision. At that time, Jorge’s cocaine use was becoming a problem and at 17 the levee was beginning to dry and the rock and roll bells were starting to break.

When I told Jorge I no longer wanted to see him, he asked me:

What about the red pick-up truck?
What about the big brass bed?


Three years later I saw Jorge at a park. He was playing his guitar. His body had taken a good beating from drugs. He sang The Battle Of Evermore.

I cried all the way home.

A letter from Mexico

I received kind words in the mail. A pair of dangling earrings. A picture of Callejón De Cantaritos. A photograph of Frida Kahlo.

Thank you, Implicada.

It was a lovely surprise.

1. I love dangling earrings. I sometimes make them too. I think I'm a hippie in a universe where I wake up every morning and it is 1968.

2. In the 90's my cousin Dora and I visited Guanajuato. The callejones smelled like oranges and marihuana. We drank vino tinto and sang Maldita Vecindad and Café Tacuba songs in the street at 2 am. We danced with the dead.

3. I discovered Frida Kahlo in the university library where I was studying in the 1980's. The room was dark and cold. Students rarely visited that floor. When I saw her paintings, I felt Frida was mine. We shared dirty secrets.

Thank you for the lovely gifts.

Café Tacuba porque esta noche recordé que un dia bailé con los muertos de la Independencia de 1810.

This is for my student, Jo...........

Because she plays with her shadow at recess.
Because she builds cinnamon houses in her head.
Because all her houses are empty.
Because she was born in the valley of crystal meth.
Because she tells me she wants a "god blanket."
Because she thinks orange light is sleepy.
Because she spent two years in first grade and she still can't read.
Because she came to my classroom a month ago.

Recession

The recession hits home.

My school district's proposal:

A 4% salary pay cut.
171 teachers are going to be without jobs next school year.
Eight furlough days (employees take days off without pay).
Increase class size (from 20 students to 31 students).


I went to my first protest today. I'm tired. I should go to bed. My day starts at 4:30 am tomorrow.

p.s.

Fuck you, Arnold!

(i'm sorry for venting)

Little Demons

We spent Sunday in Santa Barbara. We visited an antique shop and looked at old postcards and black and white photographs of dead white folks. We didn’t see Mexicans. We have difficulty leaving the dead.

We visited book stores too and I walked away from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Robert Crumb’s illustrated version of The Book Of Genesis. I wasn’t ready. I need to finish Cormac McCarthy's The Road and end my secret affair with J.M. Coetzee's short stories.

I took my camera to Santa Barbara and I made an attempt to photograph a stranger’s face. My hands shook. I sweated. It scared me to invade a stranger’s privacy. I was terrified when the stranger noticed the camera pointing at her. Most of the photographs came out blurry and shitty. Strangely, when I looked at the result, I felt a perverse pleasure. I felt like I had stolen something valuable. I stole a second from a stranger’s life.

Little demons woke me up early this morning.

(I saw this video on clock without hands and immediately liked it. Thank you Marcine M.)

Gifts From My Father

My father left a deciduous forest in my bedroom.
He left a pair of red mittens on my bed.
A compass. A church bell. An empty birdcage.

He left three jars filled with dreams. They were all my dreams. My father had been meticulously collecting them since I was four. I broke two jars already.

One day he left a boat. It had some words from a Peter Gabriel song.

Lets take the boat out
Wait until darkness
Let's take the boat out
Wait until darkness comes

( I was inspired by canto de caza's post. Thank you, bichito. Thank you, Peter Gabriel).

noche de rana

Había una rana en nuestra cama. Sentimos el pequeño anfibio entre las sábanas. No nos preocupamos. No había lluvia de ranas. No estabamos en una novela de Garcia Márquez.

El mundo no se acababa.

Sacamos a la ranita por la ventana. Ella regreso a su jardin y nosotros a nuestra cama.

Esa noche Todavia y yo soñamos 20 mil dias juntos.

(Many years ago we rented a vacation rental in Tepoztlan, Mexico. The house was called Casa Ana. This was our second night together..ever).