My father was fine. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing. Just the opposite. Even with the rumors flying about him—that there was something, just a little something off there; just a little something to wonder about—he towered over most fathers because he was strong and tall and handsome. He held his own in our neighborhood and made me proud of him. I upheld his noble quality in my mind, even as I was washed in shame from an early age because of his deficiencies.
He was different. People told me something else after he died, mostly relatives who had known him for a long time but also some of his old-time buddies from work whom I hardly knew. “Your father was very nice. He had the manners of a prince. Something about him was very courteous and correct. Nice. Kind. Gentle. Decent.”
He was fine. But not in certain departments.
When it came to cussing, my father wasn’t one of the champions. He couldn’t compete with the best on the block, with the masters in the neighborhood. Fathers of the boys I hung out with, those guys—those pot-bellied men smelling of cigarettes and beer on a Saturday afternoon in a garage, hanging around a workbench. I’m talking about the pros here, the men I looked up to. Aggravated in my sense of my father’s incompleteness, I saw in them versions of absolute manhood. They were the real thing, the real deal.
The fuckmeisters, that’s who they were. “Fuck fuck fuck,” they said, in their manly domains, cussing out the world—their fucking bosses, the goddamn fucking hammer that had slammed their thumbs, the fucking government, the fucking wetbacks in the alley behind them, the fucking Okies at work, the fucking niggers, the fucking Japs, the fucking you-name-it Jews/communists/rich bastards, anybody remotely threatening them. Anybody responsible for their stunted lives. “Fuck them!” They cursed the neighbors next door playing the stereo too loud.
“Fuck!” It came trilling out of their pinched lips like a glorious afterbirth. At whoever. At whatever.
“Fuck those fucking assholes.”
My dad didn’t know how to sing this song, I thought, this F-song, couldn’t even strike a minor note in it— one fucking F-word was all I needed—and it set him apart that he didn’t know. He didn’t cuss properly. He said chingao. He muttered a quiet damn.
He had other things on his mind, maybe. Big things.
But I was waiting, waiting for him to show me.
It came again, a payday, and my father and I were cruising down Atlantic Boulevard on a Saturday afternoon. We’re going into the heart of East LA to Builder’s Emporium on Third Street.
It’s right next to the police station and the hilly park with the pond.
My old man’s going to treat me! I’m doing all right on the baseball team and I deserve a bat. I bat seventh but make it count and on the way there we’ll stop for a burger, too, at his favorite joint where they serve them big and greasy.
The sun pours into the car. The music plays on the radio, static-filled mariachi, hectic Mexican voices coming at us between the songs, exhorting us to buy sofas, cars, appliances in the greater East Los Angeles area. “¡Compra!” He turns it off and pats my knee. Smiles. The best, the best. My old man.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s okay.”
We sail along.
My old man sits erect behind the wheel of the old Falcon. “El Falcón.”
El Falcón has been handed down to us. My mother pleaded for it. When my single aunt moved up to a sporty Mustang to keep up with her set, my mother was on the phone with her.
It was coming on.
“Please, Ellie, give us your car, so I can put away a little money for when Alberto can’t work. I know it’s coming on. I know it’s going to be hard for a while before we get on our feet again. I’m going to have to apply for disability and…”
“Ay, that’s still a long ways away. Don’t think about it.”
“Not so long, Ellie. I can see it in his eyes. The way Estella and those relatives from his side of the family have described it. It’s coming on.”
“Well, sure, you can have the car, anyway, of course.”
“Thank you, Ellie. That makes things easier.” My mother sat at the kitchen table with a worried look. But she had a plan.
It was to save. She didn’t want to splurge on the new car we needed, but in a fit of not-like-Mom extravagance, she did buy a new car two or three years up the road, bought it right before things got really horrible. She did it out of frustration and crazy anger at the Fates.
But that’s the subject of another essay, that car that almost ruined us. That car that didn’t help at all.
“Oh, goddamn it, I just wanted a new car! I thought if we got it God wouldn’t be so cruel! I was so stupid! I thought… I was in pretend-land! Pretend-land! Damn me! Damn me! How could I be so stupid?”
Right now we’re in the old Falcon, the family heap. The beloved blue junker. It groaned so much and creaked so loud around every turn you had to love it. The seats were torn and the grill was rusted and the bumper twisted and the thing roared like a beast when you started it.
But it was ours. El Falcón.
“Teach me how to cuss, Dad.”
“What?” He hardly hears me.
But it’s on my mind having spent an afternoon with Gilbert and his dad yesterday, Mr. Murillo, probably the king of them all.
“Fuck” was probably tattooed on his chest before tattoos became so popular.
“I think there’s some kind of protest march today in East LA,” my dad says.
“I don’t care.”
“Me neither.” But on the way back from Builder’s Emporium, we notice a bearded Chicano tailgating us. We hear him honking at us.
Everything goes haywire for a second. I feel scared and alone.
But then my old man saves the day. But that’s not coming up for a while yet.
We haven’t even gotten there.
It was coming on. Then it was here.
Three or four years later it bowed into our lives in a fit of forgetfulness that took him from hospital to hospital until he got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the closest the doctors knew to Huntington’s disease then, because my mother hid all the pertinent records documenting the incidents of the illness on his side of the family; she thought we’d be labeled nuts. The stigma was too much for her.
“Maybe it’ll just go away,” was the generational mantra. But it wouldn’t just go away.
“It’s just so horrible.”
It’s unbearable, not the shadow of it, but the absolute reality.
I cope with my own risk—50/50 go the odds at conception for the child of an afflicted one—with a simple plan. If I have it, if I start manifesting symptoms in the near future, I will show Jesus how to suffer. Not. I will take the gun to my mouth and blow my fucking brains out because I don’t want to die like that.
“It’s not dying that’s frightening me,” I keep telling a priest-counselor I see on occasion. “But dying like that.”
“But don’t you see it’s all part of life. It’s just another death.”
“It’s not just another death, Father. You don’t know. I can’t stand hearing about the suffering people have endured with cancer or whatever substitute they think is equal. The suicide rate for people at risk for this beast is astronomical. For a reason. It’s hellish.”
“It’s life.” He argues back, and I say my piece.
“You don’t get it unless you’ve seen it and are at risk for the same exact thing. I won’t even listen to anybody else on it. Bye!” We smile and hug because we love each other and care about each other and nothing else really matters much, does it?
“Take care.”
“I will.” I go out into the night fraught with anxiety.
A few miles up the road our stomachs growl at the same time, almost, and make us laugh. It’s time to eat lunch for sure.
We stop at the burger joint and slop up the works.
“It’s good, no?”
“It’s good.” Napkin to my mouth, wide-eyed in the fabled land East Los, always trying to figure it out. Told there’re bad things here, I don’t see much of it.
Then a cholo holding a sock to his nose walks in, stumbles, forces his way to the bathroom. He can barely walk.
People wince at the counter, sneaking looks.
“Don’t ever do that,” my dad says. “That’s stupid. Poor guy. ¡Ya nos vemos!” He yells to the cook he knows, Herminio standing behind the counter proudly in his white apron stained with food, the grill sizzling behind him.
“Okay! ¡Hasta luego!” He waves a big hand in the air, watches the cholo, solemnly, trot outside again, his face smeared with paint.
“Jeez,” he shakes his head. Goes back to wiping the counter.
But periods of worry come and go, and leave me unmolested for blessed chunks of time. Deep within me, I feel I don’t have it. My brother, on the other hand, has it right now, as he sits in Kansas at his dining table with his wife and kids, holding hands, saying grace, a Christian.
“Amen.” I’ve been a witness to his courage.
And on to Builder’s Emporium we go. It’s a big hardware store with a striped awning out front.
Electric doors slide open.
“You go get what you need. I’ll find you.”
I wander. I stand under the lights swinging a good old-fashioned #28 Louisville Slugger that I still have in my closet, leaning against the back wall.
“I want this one, Dad.” I check-swing it.
“Okay, get it.” He reaches for his wallet limping up the aisle, the slightly off gait better today. He’s had some sleep. He’s not tired.
It’s his day off. The day he gets to do what he wants. The day he wants to hang around with me.
He pays with a smile. He handles this transaction, and I’m proud of him for that.
“Isn’t Steve’s dad a little weird?” I can hear it, unspoken, around me.
But he’s not, he’s not! He’s okay! He’s just bought a quart of oil he puts in the trunk in the parking lot.
“Get in, let’s go home,” he says.
I sit next to him, my bat in the back. It clatters around with the oil.
“El Falcón!” I shout it out.
He smiles. Smacks the cracked dashboard. “This pretty baby is all right. My baby, ha? Yours too.”
Cases. There had been plenty, an uncle in San Bernardino, a whole family wiped out in Pacoima, cousins and nephews and both his sisters in Guanajuato, succumbing to the gene, the bad gene, symptoms and signs showing up in the fifth decade, conclusively, shadowy signs, beforehand; fifty-fifty chance: gamble, you lose. Marry a man and love your children, you lose.
My old man and I have made it a day. Started off from home with my mother’s blessing. “Have a good time!” Turned the corner of the street in the tortured Ford and gone past the neat line of plain tract homes offering a pleasant view out the windshield. Boxy homes with small windows and, in some, larger picture windows and upgrades of one kind or another, like wrought-iron curling around a porch and manicured lawns and heavy knockers on expensive doors a little misplaced in such humble surroundings but stuck there anyway. “Rita Sanchez bought a new door! It’s a nice one. Got it at Builder’s on sale! Her husband installed it. He’s a handyman, you know.” Could do things my dad couldn’t do. Calculate. Measure. Patiently hang and figure.
Especially with each passing year.
We get out of there. Ride past the park and the old convention center slated to be demolished for new homes and make a right at the busier street. Dip under the bridge to East LA.
My dad got sick. Turned incompetent in a night or two, a week, a month, a slow year? Who could tell anymore?
He worked for the Sante Fe Railroad, was proud of it. Was able and sturdy. Dependable. Fuerte. Un trabajador bueno. A good worker.
But now he was sinking fast. Muy, muy rapido, he was going down.
His friends from work came to tell us one night. They brought him home.
He had reached a sad point, confused at the yard. He needed to see a doctor. He was endangering other people’s lives; he had lifted a heavy piece of equipment and forgotten to tell anybody and it had fallen and almost killed another worker. That’s why they were here; they had been covering up for him for a long time, watching him wander around the tracks at night with a lantern in his hand, directing him and steering him away from trouble, foremen and bosses. Now they couldn’t look out for him like before. He had to go.
They said this all politely and nervously, standing in our living room in their overalls, with goggles wrapped around their necks, the trainmen’s kerchiefs and golden crucifixes peeking out.
Mexicanos, con dignidad, my father’s compañeros.
My mother listened intently. When they finished, she sighed, agreed that something bad was happening. “Algo muy, muy feo está pasando aquí.”
She thanked them for coming and bringing home her husband and offered them coffee again, whiskey, and showed them to the door kindly when they declined. In his room, my father wailed and cried; two weeks later, he was back home in bed asking, wondering, what the doctors had found out at the hospital. They had stuck a million needles in him and given him a spinal tap and he knew, staring at the ceiling in his bedroom with the small radio on, mariachi music, puro mariachi pouring out (“La vida no vale nada…”), he had it. His father had it before him and he had it; trips he had taken to visit his ailing father in Tijuana stormed in his mind. “¡Ay, es horrible!” He cried aloud, he gasped, he wailed. He prepared us for the coming years with a symphony of misery. But this is a good memory, the good stuff!
East LA! A day in the capital enjoying the sights, starting with looking up under the bridge with the big Santa Fe logo painted on the metal side.
“Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe!” We all say when we go under it as a family, proud to be a railroad family for all the perks and lore associated with the line.
We get free passes to anywhere in the country! We make it to San Diego once a year, see the waves rolling upon the beaches, and it’s enough for us; we pack a lunch. Spend a day at the zoo watching the gorillas toss shit our way… Memories!
Oh, Atcheson Topeka and the Sante Fe!
“There it is, Alberto,” my mom says when we pass under it, craning her head to see the royal blue lettering circled by white. “It keeps us in tortillas.”
“Y tacos,” my sister says, trying Spanish, and we all laugh.
She can’t speak Spanish worth beans. Neither can I. Can master the pronunciation. But beyond that, like me, is hopeless.
Can’t speak the rapid-fire stuff or understand it.
“Yup,” my mother says. “There it is.” Reflective, my mother is not without irony or a broader sense of the world, our own place in it amusing to her as long as things are going fairly well.
She reads, she thinks. “It keeps us, how should I say it, from needless want. They give the peasants a little more than most. Hooray, Santa Fe!” She smiles with us and enjoys the moment.
My old man getting sicker and sicker; meanwhile, my brother out of a job and getting in fights, trouble, because he carried the disease, had the gene, too: gamble, you lose.
My dad wild-eyed and scared, scaring my friends away, not recognizing them at the door, rolling up in his wheelchair and spitting it out, “Vaya, vaya, shoo! Go ’way!” until he couldn’t even do that.
Moaning from his bedroom, the house filled with his agony.
And my brother caught, trapped, in its snare.
It was evident from an early age. “Junior, what’s wrong with Junior?” Relatives asked, out of earshot.
“Isn’t he kind of like his father already, showing it?”
Friends testified to his weirdness. “Something’s wrong with your brother, man. He can’t act right. Is he sick or something?”
They couldn’t cope with him after a time. He was too awful to be around, too mean, too moody, too unpredictable in what he might say to embarrass you, mostly, to make you feel bad and awful about yourself; not consciously mean, but stupidly oblivious to all that is hurtful. Socially unaware. Uninhibited. Unacceptable.
That was my brother. A lot like my father.
Only my father shifted to normal among adults. Courtly, kind, decent, he became a true gentleman.
Not Albert, though. He remained a pain, alone.
East LA! A totally familiar but mythic country a few miles away! Every trip is a journey worth recording!
Around us, the walls sound off with new graffiti. UNITED STATES OUT OF VIETNAM! NO MORE CHICANO DEATHS! VIVA LA LUCHA!
CHICANO POWER! Everywhere around us.
CHICANO POWER!
East LA holds its breath, puffs up its chest and breathes out forcefully. FUCK UNCLE SAM!
BROWN BERETS ALL THE WAY!
CHICANO POWER!
East LA gains a new pride. Old-time conservatives appear in the local paper wondering about this war now. We get news in Commerce, down the street. Our boys are dying, too. Two in the last year, and who knows how many since it began.
Commerce’s finest. Enlistees. Draftees.
Drift above the angry signage and find a home here …
In East LA!
My brother wants to be a part of it; he can’t. He wants to be a cholo. My mother won’t let him. “What, are you crazy?”
But he’s insistent. Bussed into a bad neighborhood for junior high, he picks it all up, the look. He wears a red headband the day he stumbles home from a ditching party.
“Hey, homes,” he greets me.
But my father moves in. He wrestles him to the ground and takes it off at my mother’s urging, “He’s drunk, look at him, he’s drunk!” And his friends have ripped him off and he’s bleeding and he’s drunk, hopelessly, endlessly drunk, until he’s…
Nobody’s resting these days. Everybody’s rebelling.
The Protest March turned into a riot and Ruben Salazar is dead at the hands of filthy cops, pigs, Salazar the famed journalist who told us the truth, but the protest movement stayed alive and to hell with the war.
“No more war! War is bullshit!”
The vets say it all, those who don’t wear their medals proudly at recruitment centers. Mexican Americans always serve their country well, those fine brave soldiers known for their valor. Now they’re protesting crazily, with the college kids and the peaceniks, a few of them, anyway.
I see them arguing with supporters of the war at the park, getting into it, coming to near blows a few times. “Yeah, I’m a disgrace. I’m a disgrace to the country for saying I don’t like to kill people anymore, I don’t believe in it. I’m going the other way.” He holds a hand up with two fingers spread, looks dopey on purpose. “Peace. But it’s better than this.” He puts the finger in his face. “That the government gave me.”
A Christian; sick, hopelessly, endlessly sick, in Kansas now where he just retired from the army, cheerfully, bless his soul, a Gutierrez never cries in public (a little family pride there), we lick our wounds in private; I’m breaking the family code, I’m fucking up too. I’m doing all the wrong things howling and hopping on the red hot stones of life like a gleeful idiot laughing in the face of death that ugly mask cara de Huntington’s and doing worse even fucking and fucking with capital ABANDON heedless of consequences making love to my wife my beloved wife without a rubber the sacrament of coming partaken.
Retired prematurely because he couldn’t make the grade, couldn’t make it to sergeant or sergeant-plus or whatever the fuck they give you after twelve years in the service, including a stint in the air force.
So he’s out, and he doesn’t know it, or he knows it and doesn’t care.
Doesn’t let on.
I’ll have a million kids with a million deformities and …
Viva the pro-abortionists! Viva the pro-lifers! Viva everything and everybody because the matter is really very simple!
“¡La vida no vale nada!” ¡Chale! I still say yes. Spread ’em, baby. Your Huntington’s torpedo is coming. All I can do is laugh, and cry, and live, and go on.
All I can do is laugh and sing it again: “¡La vida no vale nada!” Life is worth nothing! But it’s all we have.
We pass out of the Builder’s Emporium parking lot and see it. A few protesters have snaked their way to the Police Station on Third Street. They thrust up signs on the sidewalk.
Are You With Us Or Not? Sign This Petition. ¡Viva La Comunidad!
“Bring the boys home, putos!” A very angry Chicana leans out of a car and shouts to the sky. A cavalcade of bumperstickered activist-bearing vans and flatbed trucks trails her ride.
We’re in the middle of it! A caravan protesting the war!
“¡Ay, caramba!” En el Falcón, the sky-blue bird good for a couple of laughs.
“Vamos a ir a Beverly Hills en el Falcón para trade down. I think the neighbors are jealous.” A joker, my old man!
He was all right, he was all right! He was great, grand, perfect!
Perfectly sad. My brother’s sick and my dad’s dead and my mom’s worried and my sister’s scared and I’m mad; we’re all sick of this. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, so Daddy and Junior can play.
Motherfucker, death. “Hay viene la muerte.” You’re nothing.
An old crone told me at Olvera Street, turning over tortillas in her hands as if the figure of Death on the table before her, La Muerte, was actually making tortillas like her, cackling, laughing, “Hay viene la muerte; mira la muerte, haciendo las tortillas, pues es nada; es nada, mijo, no llores.” That was a few months after I learned my brother was sick. I went back to Fresno where I live and prepared for another funeral, put on my best tie and jeans and sat in a church by myself, thinking of all the good things in my life, and there have been more good things than bad things, and there have been perfect days, too, days when things went well and never stopped being good.
Y La Muerte took a back seat.
The bearded Chicano is behind us, on our ass, a scary Chicano in a Dodge Dart ready to pierce our feathered butt, ready to bring us down. It won’t take much. One little jab and we’ll be dead.
He’ll get off and beat the shit out of my dad. My dad can’t fight!
He’s not that kind of guy! He can’t handle this situation!
The guy is right on our tail, feverish in his beret, scowling, giving us the finger, bearing down on his horn as he takes the turn. “GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY!”
Who’s he so fucking mad at? We’re on his side. Kind of. Were.
“Dad, that guy’s honking at us! He’s giving us the finger!”
“So what? We’ll give him two,” my dad said, and he picked up my hand and we gave him the finger. Two.
He stared at us, gape-mouthed, and floored it to catch up with the people ahead of us, already chugging away.
I held up my hand, trembling. Kept my finger frozen below the window so that people couldn’t see it but I could. It was proof that my dad was all right, like everybody else in the neighborhood.
He could throw the finger when he wanted to! He could cuss with the motherfucking fathers of my friends, too, I bet! But my dad put his hand around mine and closed it.
“You don’t need to show that anymore,” he said. “This is a pretty day, beautiful!”
Then he hit the gas, and I swear, the Falcon soared.
“La Muerte Hace Tortillas” originally appeared in Third Coast and has been reprinted with permission of the author.
Stephen D. Gutierrez published The Mexican Man in His Backyard in 2014. His other books are Elements and Live from Fresno y Los, which won the Nilon Award (FC2) and an American Book Award, respectively. A fiction writer as well as an essayist, he has published his nonfiction in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Under the Sun, Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Third Coast, elimae, Red Savina Review, The East Bay Review and Alaska Quarterly Review. He has a new piece forthcoming in Fourth Genre. He teaches at California State University East Bay.
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