The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (30 page)

Once in Santa Barbara, an American's Riviera, Strawman starts to strongly feel the urgency in his mind. He thinks, “It has always been there, kind of, really.” He doesn't understand, but he knows.

Lately, during his relapse of skulling the neighborhood, not the thoughts themselves, verified one of his fears. The sky, alley, and roofs are quietly empty. Yes, Straw's eyes absorb disturbing possibilities. Strawman endured the lightning, the pounding rain, and pronounced winds as they heightened an awareness of the light and shadows. But his eyes threatened his mind with the browns, greys, and blues of the neighborhood. Even after the storm, he cannot ignore the recurring black tracery of the branches on the skeletal winter trees.

Dawdling is thinking too. With decisiveness, Straw says to himself, “I will not be fed to the lions.” Unleashing emotional freight, he storms about the alley, kicking wood, cans, and cardboard boxes, shaking wall pipes, then paces aimlessly before becoming momentarily stoic. Then he begins to direct indictments at the walls in the voice of a street vendor, and at the rate of an L.A. lawyer. That desperate action underlines the absence and need of that boyhood bond with guys that shared a precarious lifestyle—those arrested, on the run, that have jumped bail, killed, or were killed, those here one day and gone the next. They could never plan too far ahead in their tragic
romance with life. “What happened?” he asked himself, desperately kicking a trash can. Then the sound of a siren galvanized him into action.

Again, his time of submission waivers. He will get professional help later. As much as possible must be accomplished on his own. Since the death of Kennedy he noted the cruel truth: even the death of a president leaves the desired impact. It's the active life. Temporarily, he will go on. Soon, he will pull back.

Strawman positions himself on the sunny side of a corner building on lower State and Bath Streets. The reason is obvious—places like that are popular think spots. It is where divine insight ingeniously borders the insane observation.

While his stomach craves a Spam sandwich with chips, the Perrier bottle, filled with water, appeases his want. It is temporary. Strawman will soon be back on his pride diet, pure park water, fruits and juice from markets' discarded lemons, soup from the Mission, and milk from creamers he'll pick up at coffee shops before he is told to leave. Occasionally, he will deal for a small bottle of Gatorade to help his body retain salts, but will never beg for good or panhandle money. His is a proud life, not a glamorous one.

A reflection off a window makes Strawman look across the street at a cigar store. He'd lived through the advent and popularization of the space program, color T.V., The Beatles, Woodstock, $.74 per gallon of gasoline, the Pill, T.V. zappers; now, it is his personal computer which astonishes him with a thought. His concern is beyond the recurring soda pop observations which go flat, not fizzing to maximum pressure. Then he forgot what he thought he remembered.

Customarily, he rubs the pressure ridges on his forehead. This time he diligently recalls a conversation with Brian, a Berkeley buddy, a conscientious Native American, beyond the kind with a vaccination mark under his armband. Brian was proud of that. He believed in the Spirit and the spirit of man, the epitome of all existence. “We believe in freedom and exhibit grace,” he quipped as the poetic light from the Mohawk Gas sign lamentably dramatized his landscaped face. A hurt breaks into his thought. Strawman's memory is lit with the bold, circular sign which looked like a luminous buffalohead nickle. The sign is a tragic neon totem to idealistic Americana. It stands for Americans who like to live with the past, not in it. Strawman laughs, lightly, but cathartically. It is rare. And it's okay because they had laughed then. Shortly after the past conversation, Brian registered as a conscientious objector, which the draft board appropriately processed. Soon afterwards, Straw accepted his one-year tour in the Viet Nam hell. He returned, like many others, with nerves as twisted as Kudzu, and lowered expectations of his country and himself.

Straw returned home to drugged crazies that he only came close to understanding. During a summit session, one of them suggested he read the Faustian legend “Blue Blazes.” Initially, Straw didn't because he was in a stage of his life when he despised trains, not to mention train stations, because of all the jumping on and off trains he was doing. He had to be continuously on the
move. Anyway, reading about someone else's last moments of a tortured existence focused on the pain and sacrifice of unrealized expectations wasn't what he needed.

An additional insight flashed upon Straw about the spirit of Native Americans as he noticed the cigar store Indian. The carving itself was more than the silent advertisement that nicotine in its various forms was available inside; it was a symbol of peace, after nearing their extinction.

“Oh yeah, peace,” Strawman said hollowly to himself. Maybe that thought was exactly why he like the cartoonized Presidential Seal: a toothy mouse in its “Last Act of Defiance” was flipping off the eagle which clutched it, with one talon. Importantly, the cartoon was true to Truman: the eagle looked toward the olive branch, toward peace; it held the arrows in the other talon. Yet, on the T-shirt, power had replaced diplomacy, though the two stayed together.

The cold took his thoughts.

Again, that day, Straw begins to suspect that the frigid evenings have seeped through his scalp, into his brain, making him squirrelly. Timely, he remembers that crazy people don't know they're crazy. They think everyone's like them. But they remain anxious because of the ongoing, threatening feeling from the question, “What's going to become of me?”

A piece at a time, Straw is dealing with the dilemma that Nicaragua had posed for him. His decision not to go there to fight was justified in that, this time, he would surely die in combat. So he stayed. And for a while he'd collected money, signed manifestos, and had even written revolutionary poems.

When the sadness of knowing what he is capable of doing yet not able to do overcomes him, he must get on the move. The temporary calm achieved by movement makes the difference though he is not purified, just removed. And the cleansing that was to take place didn't. Very often, from then on, his life pendulates from resignation to surrending to the madness of being all the way back in the future.

Strawman feels his bones loosen from his muscles and sag against his skin. That's what happens every time he allows his mind to trail off into the safe, thoughtless dark of his netherworld. He remembers, as if to further encourage himself, the sadism and the lack of common sense associated with the invention and introduction of the guillotine. It's said that the sadist French inventor, not too packed with common sense, cut off his hand to demonstrate how cleanly it worked.

Thought in silence no longer intrigues Straw. In the past, it used to allow him conscious control of himself. It used to, but not so much anymore. Every day, while sitting on a bench on the boardwalk, he'd sit and read any newspaper. One day, while aware he was turning the pages at set intervals, not even pretending to be reading, someone walked by and commented, “You have the paper upside down,” as if suspecting the inner section was right side up. It no longer mattered. For a time, by then, he was beginning to look
pensively between the lines and columns. But one thought would not consistently emerge from the convention.

Later, he went back to the same bench, at the same time of day. Acting troubled and looking confused he'd stare, from an athlete's crouching position, at the composition of the sidewalk. Straw was good at skull cinema. “Are you alright?” someone would eventually ask. And he would invariably answer, “Yes, just watching a turtle drowse,” to keep it academic.

For variety, he would customarily sit and stare at the waves. To catch people's attention he would sit as if hypnotized. “Are you okay?” someone would intermittently ask. “Yes, I'm looking at the earth from outer space,” he'd answer then add, “we're a water planet,” as they stepped up their stride to get away.

Progressively, he begins to lose that impulsive ability to twist and to turn everything. The more he contrives, the less he sees the difference—the more thought tortures him. At times, he has to make a canny effort just to keep a hold on himself.

While standing like a tragedy in rags at the front of Casa María Furniture, Straw is no longer merely a rootless memory on the make, for the day's sake. He does not recognize Mr. Milktoast, his psychologist of old, walk up with two men.

“What are you doing?” Mr. M. asked curiously, with the uniformed men standing at a comfortable distance.

“I came back to S.B. to experience the ocean with the sand,” Straw said, though startled by the interruption.

“Where have you been all this time?”

“There for years and around for months.”

“Around where?” Mr. M. asked suspiciously.

“Floating around like a butterfly …” he said having forgotten the ending. There was one.

“At a collector's convention?”

“That too,” Straw answered.

“Straw, you don't look well,” Mr. M. stated, standing akimbo, but caring.

“C'mon Judd, it's always been like this,” Straw answers, looking vacantly, while trying to decide why he accepts being called Straw and not by his name: Miguel Distraw, Michael, but never Mikey.

“But tell me where you've been,” Mr. M. coaches.

He remembers a trick maybe Judd taught him years ago on how to avoid acting on anger.

He counts to ten. The anger is genuine because it doesn't go away. Judd's persistent questions are taking away the privacy of his mind, the time for clearing thought for which he'd returned to Santa Barbara.

Unknown to Strawman, the time he'd taken to think through his anger and to come up with an answer angers Mr. M.

“I've been developing a big camera that can take a picture of the person as it takes the picture,” he fires back, carelessly, meaning to say, “a picture
that is as big as the person.” But that doesn't make any more sense. Or does it? They exchange words with abandon.

“What have you been doing?” Mr. M. asks again, this time less patiently.

“I won't answer any more!”

“Why not?”

“You've playing with me.”

“With you, how?”

“Okay. I've been developing a lie detector test for probation officers.”

“Why?”

“Ass. I remember your game.”

“What?”

“You turned my self-committal into your promotion.”

Boom! There is was there, he'd finally remembered. Judd had penetrated Straw's memory through the residual conflict of a broken promise. But, then, Straw is not clear about what happened, exactly.

“It's as clear as black and white,” Strawman says, with the expectant hope of their initial contact now gone from his eyes.

“What?” Mr. M. asks.

“You're going to try to take me in,” Straw predicts a challenge.

“Try?” Mr. M. questions, annoyed, not without justification. Last time, Straw had been handcuffed to a chain around his waist and shackled at the feet, all standard procedure at Review Hearings, and he'd almost ripped Mr. M. a new asshole.

“Yeah, try,” Straw says belligerently.

“Straw, we'd better get off the street, we can talk some somewhere else.”

“Talk. You mean ask more questions.”

“You don't understand that I've always tried to help you. Calm down.” That command put a gun to Straw's head.

“Why? You gonna flush my blood on the street again?” But Strawman is not sure again! He's not sure if he remembers it was Judd. Was he thinking he remembers? Anger, as uncontrolled emotion, is as threatening to him as waves of a storm are to a sailor. He is still second-guessing himself the moment before they take all choice from him.

As if a prerequisite to what was to come, Straw pisses on himself. It tickles down his left leg, tickling the hair folicles.

Before he's totally aware of what is happening, an eager officer has him from behind, securely, but not abusively, in a controlled chokehold. Before the struggle is over, the other officer has a swatch of Straw's hair in his hand. The next thing he feels is the loss of his survival arrogance from a knee to the genitals. Sometime after, Mr. M.'s third pair of hands are on him, his punch goes beyond registered pain, numbing the side of Straw's face. For seconds, Straw expectantly waits the arrival of pain to assure him he's still capable of feeling.

In the jail's C-cell, commonly known as the rubber-room, he hisses through his nose to let out the desperation that blurs his vision. He itches from the dried urine on his leg, so he pisses anew. Disgust builds up to create a tension inside which makes him feel like he's sitting in an idling bullet train. His strands of muscles seem to be coming apart. There are no windows to look beyond himself. Before that can happen, he starts to run nowhere, he pounds the wall, he yells. Nothing except incomprehensible sounds and activity penetrates his awareness. He's now sure exists, the isolation make it so. That's the repeated message no matter what he yells, says, or does.

Most of the time that self-assurance is impossible.

A lapse of sanity overtakes him. Straw rants something about man splitting the atom in order to break down the secret of matter. For hours, intensity of feelings and behavior do not cease. Intoxicated with himself, he passes out, not realizing that the initial confrontation that he sought with himself has been made.

Awakened by a cool draft, he's refreshed. His C-cell is too well ventilated, but for then, it's fine. For a moment, the wafts of his body's dried sweat pierce his nose like the worst moments in a small restroom. Then, his attention focuses on emotions reverberating within. To relax his body, he turns from his side onto his back. The camera's unblinking, intruding eye overhead. Their minds hover over his. Being observed requires vigilance. It's ironic, but true. For those who are watching with concern, he sits on his naked bottom, positions himself like Buddha and hunches into a patient's pose. All that is to suggest to observers he's ready, that he wants to be trusted to control himself.