Boy Kings of Texas (4 page)

After a few days, though, things turn routine and I take a look around. These are tough kids, the sort of ten-year-olds even adults are afraid to correct, and classes are quickly divvied into the kids near the front who are willing to learn and listen, and the kids who don't see a reason to be here and are waiting to get home to get back to work, in the back. Or they're here for the two free meals. There's one white girl from the trailer park and I immediately align myself next to her. “Shannon.” I like Shannon—she's kind of trashy though she's just a kid, but we get along fine. We share pencils and paper and write notes to one another and the other kids immediately start calling us “
the gringos
.” Not an optimistic launch.

Eventually things settled down and I made friends with some of the boys, but mostly my immediate peers were the upwardly mobile girls who lived near me, out in the sticks. It was still a tough school; don't get me wrong—but I learned how to swim in it quickly. Kids got stabbed there, with that little nail-cleaning tool in the rear part of the nail clipper or a stubby pencil. But for the most part, we were kids, doing kid things. We developed a very high-stakes and competitive game of marbles before classes. We played basketball and volleyball in a very organized fashion (I did the organizing). We became ingenious at manufacturing flexible but indestructible pens and pencils, as the game of the day was a sort of “pen smashing” competition, where you'd flick your opponent's pen with your own, over and over again, until one of them splintered. So we engineered things like pens filled with glue, pens filled with buckshot, pens from Mexico, pens filled with dirt, pens wrapped in rubber bands or tape, and even pens that could write. I was never really good at that game.

The other thing we did was competitive cursing. This I was good at. Cursing in English, I've come to find, is fairly unimaginative and usually indicates a loss for a retort, a failure of description or command of language, so instead the curser resorts to the general and unspecific, to the emptiness of phrases like, “Fuck you, you cock-sucking motherfucker.” Et cetera.

In Spanish, however, the art form, when it is done well, comes from painting the rudest word picture using anything but vulgar words. Say, for instance, someone is being unreasonably proud of him- or herself. In English, one might say this person's “full of shit,” or, “up himself.” In Spanish, the phrase would be something like, “…
no le cabilla un arroz de punta,
” (“… you couldn't fit a grain of rice up his ass point first, puckered as it was.”)

Conversely, if a person is out of luck, in English he's “shit out of luck,” or “screwed,” or maybe “up shit creek.” But in Spanish, the popular colloquialism is that the person “ …
tíene la madre en rasta,
” (“ … has to drag his mother around”), the suggestion being that the person is so poor, he's got his family in tow, no vehicle. (I learned about the second part to this phrase when I called my father when I was out of work in Seattle, had to admit to being very nearly broken down, very much out of luck and out of work, and said, “
Tengo la madre en rasta.
”
He surprised me by chuckling, and finishing the sentence, “
... y la tía en la manó.
” (…and my aunt in hand.)

These are timid examples, though. We could get very dirty, very biological, very
Aristocrats
in our verbal assaults. For me, somehow, because it was in Spanish it didn't seem wrong, and I got very good at it—especially in Spanish, but also in English. This is what these kids understood at this new school, this is what I was good at among them, and I had developed a reputation as the “put-down” champion, so much so that I could make kids cry or attack in just a few seconds. Normally I'd have an audience, so the attacks were usually thwarted by my friend Arthur, or Agripino and his bunch, led by a kid nicknamed
El Chicloso
(“gummy asshole”), because he always smelled like poo. (I remember once feeling really, really terrible when this one kid, Teodóro, challenged the position of champion and I annihilated him in one or two rounds during P.E. He was inconsolable when we got back into the classroom, putting his head down and sobbing loudly. The teacher finally attempted consolation, asking, “What happened? What's wrong? What's wrong, Teodóro?” He wouldn't speak, so she finally asked the class what had happened, and my cousin Dora raised her hand and said, “Domingo said his mother's anus looks like cauliflower,” which was something I'd heard my Gramma say to a police officer a few weeks before. A few years later, I was driving around with Dad and he had some sort of business with a man who turned out to be Teodóro's father, and as I was sitting in the passenger seat the whole time my father was calling Teodóro's dad
Panocha
, which was apparently his accepted nickname, which means “twat.” His dad's name was “Twat,” and he cried when I said his mother's anus looked like a cauliflower? I just don't understand people sometimes.)

This continued for many months, and I had established myself among these kids in a way that I had not considered myself capable when I first got to Vermillion. I had changed, certainly, but I was able to turn off the vulgarian side of me with an easy, very smart switch, and the minute I stepped off the school bus and entered the house, another switch was flipped and I was clean-mouthed, pissed off and quiet. The minute I got on the bus in the morning, it was showtime: I would be there all week. I still managed my academia to the extent I could—I was the top student, a good athlete, and well-liked by teachers, students, and administrators—but I was also well-respected by the farm kids, who didn't buy into this American “upward mobility” thing, this “education,” who might have otherwise picked on me, thought me soft. I spoke their language, after all.

This created a duality in me that left me feeling soiled and conflicted. I remember one lunch I was sitting with Agripino and Arthur, two of my closest friends at the time, and we were trading marbles while eating our lunch when this scraggly curly haired problem white kid named Billy sat directly across from me. Knowing now what we do about learning disabilities, I think it's likely that Billy was dyslexic and was acting out from his frustration, because there was nothing else really wrong with him except he couldn't write and couldn't read. But he had nothing else so he had decided to be tough.

He sat there and stared at me. The table got quiet. Billy squinted his eyes in the theatrical way that children do when they're pretending to be tough, like they've seen on TV, and he dramatically stabbed his plastic spork into his Salisbury steak, splashing the gravy on the table.

It was on. But I had this one won before it started. Instead of a verbal assault, I diversified by kicking him square on the knee under the table and then tucking back my legs and opening them astride the chair, pulling them back without moving my upper torso so Billy didn't see what I'd done, and he tried to kick me back, and hard, but instead his kick went high and he kicked the underside of the table, scraped his shin hard on an under-support. Dyslexic he may have been, but gullible he certainly was.

The blow was clearly quite painful, and he began yelling loudly. The new female principal came up and grabbed him by the arm, said, “Now what are you yelling about, Billy?”

Billy pointed at me and said, “He kicked me under the table!” That was partially true. Mostly true.

The female principal, whose name is lost to history, pointed to me and said, “This is the nicest and smartest boy at this school. This boy would not have kicked you.” She pulled him out of his chair and he began screaming. As he was being led away, he managed to pull back his jeans and reveal a huge scarlet scrape, bleeding from where the skin on his shin had been peeled back from kicking the underside of the table.

I felt the weight of the world there, the cross-over consequence of my dual personality, and I wanted to chase the kid down, apologize, and tell the principal the truth, but instead, Arthur said, “Damn, Dom; you got rid of him quick.” But I didn't have much time to feel sorry for Billy, as my own rue was already in the cosmic mail.

Dan and Mare were also at Vermillion for their sixth-grade year, but it was as if they were already in junior high, at another school. We never overlapped, never saw one another. My reputation as a gutter-mouthed vulgarian would inevitably show up on their radar, I understood. It was too small a school, and kids, they liked to talk. For the record, I wasn't comfortable being a hoodlum-in-training. I preferred to be the Nancy-boy academic, but the suction of appealing to the neglected element, of having their respect and keeping them quieted, keeping them from looking at me like a target, like someone they'd like to have a go at, that sense of . . . well, survival . . . that was more powerful, and I felt I could walk that line like Johnny Cash. This was a question of survival: I was a soft kid, thin for my age, and fairer and smarter than the rest of them. They felt I was not one of them, not one of the Mexican kids, nor was I one of the others, the white kids, and so I adapted. This was adaptation for the border town.

But I didn't think anyone was capable of understanding, so instead I parceled it out, compartmentalized, and I dreaded the day my family would find me out.

It was Mare who got the word first. One of the girls in my grade found out Mare was my sister, and I must have pissed off that girl at some point because she told Mare everything, in great delicious detail.

I remember that afternoon. I am sent on an errand with this kid named Juan. Juan is scary. He must have been fourteen or so, but was passing off as a ten-year-old. He wore thin cotton shirts that were hardly ever buttoned, a black comb in his back pocket, didn't speak a word of English. You could very easily see Juan having lived in some ramshackle hut out in the Mexican frontiers, a horseman, cattleman, something, and already having been fully realized. There was something elegant about him, something sinister and beautiful, like he was already a man very clearly defined. He scared me and most of the teachers, too. So this afternoon, we're asked to get the projector from the library, and as we're walking down the exposed hallway, we're alone and we're having an easy exchange—this guy that speaks to no one—and he says through a smile,
“Esté vato,”
which really can't be translated, more of a
Get a load of this guy, man
sort of mock shoulder punch, very blokish, and well, I felt that I had done my work. Like I'd arrived, like I was safe.

When I get home, Mom yells to me from her bedroom. The door is shut, because it's the only air-conditioned room in the house. I put my books down and am changing into my afternoon clothes. I'm not expecting anything when I walk into her bedroom and almost recognize the look on my sister's face, one of delight at reporting gossip, tattletaling, and I certainly do not recognize the look on my mother's face before her blow catches me on the jaw. It was the look of divorce. It was the look of hatred only a mother could give her child.

She hits me again, when I recover. She slaps me on the ear, leaving it ringing. She slaps me again, high on the cheek. She backhands me on the lower jaw, nearly chipping my tooth. She slaps me on the eye. She slaps me so many times I lose count, lose a sort of consciousness as I slip back into that cold around my heart, confused, now that I got the beating at home—in this room, it wouldn't be the last time—that I thought I had avoided at school. And the tug from my heart, this time it did snap, snapped like a winter that has never really gone away. This is finally where I went cold.

My father gave my brother and me spankings about three, maybe four times a week. They were painful at first, but eventually you got used to the routines, the motions, you cried loudly so he'd stop and sometimes they'd bruise but mostly they just made your legs rosy—he'd use a belt, sometimes a stripped branch from a tree, if it was available.

A few of those stories really got into my brain, got into my psychology. As I grew older, it became a power play: How long could you take it before you cried? He'd hit you repeatedly, then you'd cry, then you'd get one or two more: That was where the lesson was. That was how I learned justice. And I eventually understood it to be a regular Catholic exercise: You did bad, you got your licks, you did your
mea culpa
for a while, then things settled down. This pattern was repeated until you understood the thing about Jesus: You do it, He pays for it. That's why you should feel guilty. He took your licks for you. Awfully good of him.

But Mom's beating, that I don't think I ever recovered from. I felt that if she only could hear about it, if she knew what that school was like, I was certain she would have understood—Mom was the only bastion of reason and safety and to an extent, love, in that household. Mom was supposed to be the opposite of Dad, but then: this. It was betrayal from a place I had never expected.