Don't You Forget It

MCG with "Sammie"
photo by Bill Fox

         Almost every morning during my early elementary school years, until I cut my hair short, a betrayal of my Mexicanisma, my mom would brush my long hair to get all the tangles out. I'd sit between her legs, and she'd pull the blue brush with the long rat tail through my hair, slowing the brush through the tangles unless I pulled away or winced. If I moved too many times, she'd get frustrated and brush hard or whack me on the head. I learned to sit still and let her braid my hair because I liked having her this close. I thought it must be how kittens felt when their mother's licked them clean with their scratchy tongues. 

         It was hard to sit so still and not wince when she had to work out a big knot, but I knew she worried what people would see if I went to school looking dirty. I knew that worry had something to do with why she yelled at me for not changing out of my school clothes to put on play clothes right when I got home, or when I got holes in my tights, usually from tripping and falling on the playground. My hair in tight braids was my mom's way of making sure I looked neat and cared for and not a dirty Mexican.

         But my straight hair and my braids caused people to assume I was Me-wuk – what a pretty little Indian girl. And I was in Indian club at school. Mom had made sure that my brother and I be in the club. Having grown up in East LA during the Chicano movement, my mom had learned some things. She told me that Mexicans were Indian, Indian and Spanish mixed together, Aztec or Mayan Indian, so we could be in the club too. It sort of made sense to me at the time, and I liked getting out of class make crafts with tiny beads on a small loom, even beaded Christmas ornaments for our tree. But sometimes, even I wasn't sure who I was. Some people assumed I was Me-wuk; others asked, “what are you,” and I'd answer the best I could at that moment.

         One spring afternoon, when I was nine or ten, mom had company – some riff-raff from town, a couple, who came around from time to time to see if she had a joint to smoke. Being the oldest of three, I liked to hang around and listen to the adults talk. I'd wash dishes as quietly as I could so I could eavesdrop on their conversations. I knew my mom didn't really want me “hovering around,” but I also knew not go too far in case my sister woke up from her nap because if mom's friends were still there, I'd have to take care of her. So I had to be there, but I also had to make myself invisible.

         I looked out the window over the sink. The sunlight filtered through the massive oak tree that loomed over our house. The light on the ground looked like shadow lace. The neighbor's rooster was crowing as it began doing every morning at around four and continued throughout the day. The conversation in the living room went from being about someone who got pulled over by the cops in town, to a fight in the bar, to the joint they were smoking. Once I finished the last of the pots and pans, I noticed that it had grown quiet in the front room, so I wiped my hands on my pants and went to investigate. Mom's friends, the guy with long blond hair and a blond beard and the woman in jeans and barefoot and wearing a halter top, even though it wasn't quite warm enough yet, were sitting on the couch not talking just leaning back quietly with heavy eyes. I could hear the water from the toilet, so I knew mom must have just gone to the bathroom.

         “Hey Michelle,” the woman said in one of those voices adults use when they don't have kids of their own and don't know how to talk to kids in a regular voice.  “Look at your hair. It sure is long and dark. What are you Indian?” she asked. It was the question most followed with making a comment about my skin or hair.

         “Yes,” I said, looking up to see my mom. “Indian.”

         I could tell from the look on my mom's face that I said something wrong, but she just sat down and finished her conversation with her friends. Figuring I should try to make myself invisible again, I went back to the kitchen to put some of the precariously piled dishes in the cabinet before they fell over and got me in trouble. I decided then to make sure that my sister was still sleeping and to see whether my mom was mad at me by passing again through the front room and testing her reaction. When I passed by, she didn't react at all which wasn't a bad sign, but it wasn't a good sign either. Once in the middle-room, I held my breath and peered into the crib at my sister. I listened as the conversation in the front room wound down and heard the screen door slam. Not quite two years old, my sister stirred in her sleep, the honey-blond curls around her forehead were damp with baby sweat. At this I decided to go outside and read, but my mom stopped me in the front room. Coming out of the kitchen with a glass of water in one hand, she charged at me and grabbed my arm with her free hand.

          “You’re Mexican. Do you hear me?” she said, looking me hard in the eye. And don’t you ever forget it!” And she squeezed my arm tight to make sure I had really heard her.

         I opened my mouth to speak but all the air used to form words had been sucked out of me. All my senses now humming, I could hear the neighbor's rooster crowing in the distance.

Creeper

"Amelie, "Sammie," MCG, and friend Anita
a visit to SF before graduation

         He called himself a skinhead. His head was shaved; he wore jeans, suspenders, and tall doc martin boots. He repulsed me, but I was seventeen and I had only two weeks, just two weeks left in Tuolumne, that tiny, tiny town at the bottom of the valley, that had held me too tight with its big mountain arms.
         It was June and the days were long and hot, longer now that leaving was so near. Mom was out of her head from too much meth and not enough sleep. She was either wiping at her nose and sniffing or screaming, using every version of the F word with a "shit" and a "goddamn it" thrown in for emphasis.

As if in a final act of self-hatred, a final cut from the serrated mountain-shaped knife, I began fucking Creeper, or letting him fuck me. Recovering from a broken neck, he wore a neck brace which gave him a de-helmeted Darth Vadar look, and his head shaved with a razor nearly everyday, still flaked with dandruff that up close made him look like a very old man. Still it happened at night, after the beer and the desperation set in. It happened in the dark.

He said he was a skinhead, and I knew what that meant, but still he hung around people he was supposed to hate, or did hate, or whatever. And that's how I felt, whatever. There was no one else. I could tolerate the revulsion for just two weeks. I had been hated for so long already, none of it felt real anymore, and I was going to leave it all behind. I just had to get through these last fourteen days -- the bitter end of a long sentence, just 336 hours, 20160 minutes, 1209600 seconds of the dusty driveway, the dry star thistles, the go-no-where roads, and the dead feeling inside.

TRAILS

MG and White Tiger guitarist after playing a party

My mom was sleeping it off -- coming down hard off some shit, but I had to get her signature on a note that I wrote about why I had been absent from my TRAILS class -- a class that taught responsibility, teamwork, and outback hiking skills, and culminated in a four day hike in Yosemite.

Strong students had been specially recruited for the TRAILS class. Being recruited for the class was not just based on grades or being a straight A student. TRAILS students were expected to demonstrate a particular kind of integrity, and I had been chosen along with: my best friend Amelie Sanchez, Matthew Johnson the straight A, former football player who was nice to everyone and who had spent sophomore year history class staring at me from across the room, athlete and best all around, Gail Morning, a Me-wuk friend and fellow Indian Club member from elementary school, and several others.

“Consider it an honor to be chosen for this class – an honor,”  Ms. Somerwell would repeat often throughout the year, at least once a class period when we first began.

“Mom,” I said quietly, hoping that it wouldn’t take much to wake her.

“Mom,” I said again, but she didn’t even stir.

I leaned in toward the mound of body under the covers and looked for the slightest movement: a muscle twitch, an inhalation, an exhalation. Had I seen something? I wasn’t sure. She was a sound sleeper everyone knew that.

“Mom,” I said, grabbing her where I thought a shoulder might be and giving her a good shake.  “Mom, wake up, I need you to sign this note.”

I had had bad cramps, too bad for school, so I wrote my own note, as I often had to do. I couldn’t bring this note in late either, for TRAILS students were not allowed any unexcused absences the entire semester, and we had all signed a contract in which we agreed to this important stipulation, among others. A late note would be met with suspicion, and any unexcused absences would result in not being permitted to go on the four day, three night hike after spending an entire year learning how to cook on single burner camp stoves, tie special knots, read topographic maps, use compasses, and how to clean bacteria from water using a portable hand pump. With a groan, mom rolled over -- "Mom, sign this note please," I pleaded, sliding a pen into her right hand. Finding the notepaper, she scribbled out ragged version of her signature, grunted, and rolled back to sleep.

Awake and lucid mom’s friends like her for being loud and fun. I didn’t see anything fun about sleeping for more than a day already. She was also known for saying every version of the word “fuck” possible. Fuck, fuck you, fucker, fucking, mother fucker, and when she smoked what she thought was some really good weed, or accidentally whacked her finger with the blunt end of the hatchet while chopping kindling, “Fucking-A!” To her delight, her friends called her “Wild Woman.”

While hanging around in town with friends, people would pass by me and say, “You’re Wild Woman’s daughter, aren’t you? How’s she doing?” or “Is she at the house right now?”  I answered the same each time. People thought I was stuck up.
“I don’t know.”

But I knew she was at the house. She was always home, at least physically.

Later, I’d get back to the house to find the same person who asked me questions in town sitting on the couch, my mom in her chair nearby, and a plume of smoke wafting around their heads. Sometimes they’d both be sniffing and wiping their noses, quiet for a moment while I’d pass by and go up the ladder to my room in the attic.

Sometimes, I’d put the needle on the The Clash’s London Calling album that was usually sitting on the turntable and turn up the volume so it shook the floorboards and ceiling over their heads. The distinctive guitar intro pounded its fist in the air.

         I didn’t so much as choose TRAILS as it  chose me. Even after a month or so in the class, I wasn’t sure if I should have taken it as one of my precious elective courses, but being specially invited to take the class gave me recognition for something other than my spiky hair, heavy eyeliner, or my mother’s habits. But I didn’t even like living in a small town in the mountains, and here I had elected to go hiking in Yosemite for three nights and four days with two high school teachers once the school year was over. While applying Deet to ward off mosquitoes and worrying about getting our food in a tall tree, so as not to attract black bears, all my friends would be on their third then fourth night of partying, drinking wine coolers and hanging around down in Crystal Falls or Jamestown. I didn’t know what I was going to miss out on, willing to miss out on, or what I had elected to be a part of.

I only knew that Ms. Somerwell and Mr. Nicholson were my two favorite teachers, who taught two subjects in which I excelled: English and History. Mr. Nicholson was my Honors English teacher. An avid runner and backpacker, Mr. Nicholson wore jeans and t-shirts in the classroom and had an easy way with students. Ms. Somerwell, also an avid backpacker, taught history and English. Even though both Ms. Somerwell and Mr. Nicholson were communist hippie types, she was more formal in her knee lengths skirts and blouses and a bit older. Ms. Somerwell was both brilliant and absent minded, and her teaching style more straightforward and serious than Mr. Nicholson’s, who was inclined to humor. Together, they were a great pair, and in his or her own way, each made sense of learning for their students.  Another class with my two favorite teachers together seemed like a great idea, but was I really interested in learning how to pack light, to tread lightly on the earth, by staying on the man made trails and packing out all my garbage, cook dehydrated lentil soup, or snack on gorp all day long? I actually did care about preserving the land, for I had been in Indian club, and had learned all about the power of mother earth from the tribal elders and from my own mother, but I was also sixteen. I cared more about hanging out with my friends, and boys, and going to punk shows at The Farm in San Francisco whenever I could, and playing music in my own band, Bitchfight. We played parties with a local heavy metal cover band that had a black lead singer but called themselves White Tiger. As perplexed as I was by their name, I forgot all about it whenever I saw their super talented and attractive guitar player, Timothy Hill. I wanted to care about the TRAILS class; I really did. But I was feeling pulled in so many different directions. All the different sides of me not always fitting neatly together leaving me feeling ragged and torn.

I stopped for a second at my mother’s door before stepping over the threshold, expecting her to stir or say goodbye. That didn’t usually happen, but I didn’t want to miss it. She wasn’t going to wake up again until we had been in school for two or three hours already. The house was quiet. I had helped my sister get ready for school and shooed her out the door about thirty minutes previous because she had to be to school before I did, and she had to walk, just like Amonie and I had done, unless it was raining, snowing, or below 50 degrees. On these cold days, mom would get out of bed and put on her bathrobe, pull on her men’s work boots, her mass of black curls flat on one side from the pillow and drive us to school. Once at the school, she never got out of the car, but she would wait in the car, waving until we got safely to the sidewalk.

Most Monday mornings, she’d have been asleep all of Sunday, after being awake since Thursday or so, sewing, listening to music, and sitting around the front room with various greasy-haired dudes, or her gravely-voiced female friends, and an occasional woman with a missing tooth who popped over to cop a little of what mom had around that week. Sometimes on Thursday nights late, I’d have to climb down the ladder from mine and my sister’s shared attic bedroom, and tell mom and her friends to turn down the music, usually Pink Floyd’s, The Wall, and to “shut the hell up” because my sister, brother, and I had to go to school the next day.

For some reason, I decided to wait until after class to give Ms. Somerwell my absence note. In class we had been talking about the importance of the buddy system, especially during the unguided, off trail, cross-country trek that we were required to do in pairs during the hike, the one that went off, in the end, without a hitch because it wasn’t all that long or all that hard after all. The plan was that Mr. Nicholson was to go ahead of the group and wait for the unguided, cross-country pairs to make their way to him, using a map and compass, while Ms. Somerwell waited behind, sending a new pair on their unguided trek every twenty minutes, or so, until we all met up with Mr. Nicholson, at which point Ms. Somerwell would make the trek herself to where we were all indeed waiting for her at the end. We had already learned how to use the snake-bite kit and other first aid techniques specially designed for hikers. And it was impressed upon us how important it was that each of us really learn and practice each technique, for our buddy’s life depended on it. I understood the buddy system.

After class, I waited for the other students to file out of the portable classroom, and handed Ms. Somerwell the note.
“Here’s my absence note,” I said, handing the note to Ms. Somerwell who was standing absent mindedly by her desk, looking as if she couldn’t remember what she was about to do, as she often did.
“Oh, yes, thanks, Michelle,” she said, opening the note and taking a look at
what it said.
I  studied her face, as I usually did when she wasn’t looking at me directly. She described herself as being from the East Coast, and she looked like a couple of my mom’s female friends from the East Coast: brunette, pointy nose, and pale, fragile looking skin around the eyes, sagging a bit around the mouth. She was a small-framed woman, a little plump, and cute with eyes that twinkled or flashed depending on her mood.
She furrowed her brow.

“I had bad cramps,” I said, “I’d much rather be at school.”
“This isn’t your mother’s signature,” she interrupted.
“Yes, umm, she did sign it, but she was like, um, asleep. I had to wake her.”
“This is not your mother’s signature,” she said again, still staring at the piece of lined paper in her hands.
“I wrote the note, and my mom signed it,” I said, trying to sound confident. I was glad that I had waited until after class to hand the note over at all.
“ I didn’t expect this from you, Michelle. Frankly, I’m shocked.”
My mind raced for a better explanation, and I wondered how the buddy system was going to work with an odd number of students on the hike.
“I’ll have to take his up with Mr. Nicholson.”
I wondered what it would be like doing the unguided trek alone.
“I am disappointed,” she said, looking me straight in the eye.
I didn’t say anything. I could feel the blood rushing to my face.
“Really disappointed.”
Suddenly, being able to do the hike felt really important; everything was on the line. I opened my mouth to speak. The bright hollow floors of the portable classroom stretched out in all directions around me.
I was holding my breath now, waiting for Ms. Somerwell to say something more, but she didn’t.  

Ride

         Whenever you ask your stepdad for a ride to town, he tells you to get a ride with Paul, his friend who’s been coming over a lot lately after work or on the weekends to drink beer. They work construction together. Your stepdad is a carpenter, a good one. You don’t like Paul. You only want a ride from your stepdad in his truck with his beer cans on the floor. You ask again. Your stepdad tells you that Paul’s driving to town soon and that you can get a ride from him. Why can’t you just wait?

         “I can give you a ride,” Paul says nodding hopefully, his stubby fingers wrapped around a sweaty can of Budweiser.
         You don’t say anything and decide to start walking before stupid, ugly, drunk Paul decides to leave and sees you walking down the road and tries to pick you up, tries to give you a ride. It’s summertime and you have a few hours of sunlight left to use up on getting out of the house. You’re bored. You need a soda, something cold. You’re tired of listening for Randy and Al’s Oldsmobile at the end of the driveway and thinking about Al coming up your driveway in dusty jeans, his long strides, and cool, slow gait.
         You don’t know why your step dad doesn’t get it. He’s a pretty smart guy even if he has started liking Ronald Regan, the cowboy president who wants your mom off welfare, who called her a ‘welfare queen.’ So we got tired of living off of lentils and blocks of government cheese and she let her boyfriend move in and started dealing too to make a little more money on the side. We are finally not just barely making it. We have a washing machine and a dryer. We don’t have to hang clothes on the clothesline anymore or take extra care shaking the stiff jeans extra hard when taking them down from the line to get the earwigs off. You’ve been stung by one those bastards a couple of times.
         You look at the sky a lot because it’s big and blue and beautiful. You wish that you could see over the mountains. You see yourself in your mind, one tiny person at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by tall, tall mountains, no way out.
         Even your boyfriend Al doesn’t like him, doesn’t trust him, has seen the way Paul looks at you up and down out of the corner of his eye. You go to your room whenever Paul’s around, but when Al’s there you don’t have to. Al shoots him dirty looks and encourages you to sit with him somewhere in the yard, but you know Paul is putting ideas in your stepdad’s head, asking questions about you and Al that your stepdad doesn’t want to answer.
         It’s crazy having to protect yourself like this all the time, from just a feeling, a bad feeling in your stomach. If it weren’t for Al, you’d think that you were seeing things, that you were making it up, that it was all in your head. But you’ve been on that ride before, someone else’s truck, hands, fingers, your skinny little girl legs.
         You want to scream at your step dad, scream at him right in front of Paul. “I don’t want his ride. Don’t you get it! Don’t you fucking get it!”
         But you don’t. You don’t scream. You want to, but you don’t.

Green Acorns

         It was spring. The acorns on the trees were green and a couple of months from browning in the sun and dropping to the ground. Sometimes while wandering around the yard, watching for Les and Al’s car, I’d find a seedling growing up from the ground, an acorn now growing into a tree.

I was on the pill, had been for almost a whole month. Now I could have Al in just the way I wanted him. My mom and her live-in boyfriend knew it was going to happen, and they weren’t doing anything to stop me. Just like they couldn’t stop me from going to the clinic in Sonora, getting a pelvic exam, and three month’s worth of birth control pills to keep me from winding up like Rachel and Winnie, or even like my own mother. I kept my circle of green pills within a big circle of white pills, with the foil on the back, snug in their little plastic case in my green army bag purse, and the second and third month supply in my underwear drawer in my room with my journal that I sometimes wished my mother would read. 

Getting on the pill had been Amelie’s mom’s idea, and she drove me to my appointment at the clinic at the old hospital building, where my mom went only when she had to deal with welfare business, or to pick up her food stamps because she hadn’t sent in the monthly income report in on time.

         My mom had become increasingly distracted by her habits and her illusion that we were all safe in our small town. I didn’t have to tell her anything and I knew she wouldn’t ask because it was easier pretending not to notice, or being in denial about what I was doing on the weekends in the dark.  She noticed if I got a B instead of an A, but she never said much when I did get A’s; she noticed if I hadn’t done the dishes, but it was as if she was paralyzed to do anything about the fact that I was using sex to get another kind of attention.

         Al came around with Les once or twice a week. I’d stay around the house, poking my head out the front door, every thirty minutes or so, on the days I expected them to show in Les’ white classic Olds. They were friends of my mom’s – some connection of some kind. Al closer to my age than either Les or my mom – eighteen or nineteen, I wasn’t sure, would only say that my being fifteen made me jail bait, a risk he didn’t take lightly. He and Les were growing weed out across the river and were careful not bring too much attention to themselves, which was probably hard. Al was lanky, 6’2 or more, with dark skin, long dark hair, and almond shaped eyes that were often covered by narrow, green or purple-lensed biker glasses. He was a Mexican in a white person’s body -- his dad Mexican like my mom and me, and his mom white. She lived in town with Al’s two Mexican-looking younger sisters. 

         Mom and Les would talk business in the front room with a joint, while Al and I sat in the kitchen, only not at the table where everyone could see us. I’d sit on one counter, and he’d lean on the other across from me, his long legs crossed and his dusty steel-toed boots planted under my bare feet, which dangled from the counter. Sometimes, he’d talk me into making him a quesadilla, but usually we’d just talk in veiled circles about what we both would rather be doing than sitting in my mother’s kitchen – always a variation of the same conversation.

         “You’re gonna get me in trouble.  You should be doing the dishes,” he said, shifting his weight on his elbow.

         “Me?  I’m just sitting here. I can go somewhere else.”

         “Sitting there all wanton and shit,” he’d say looking over the top of his narrow shades.

         “I’m just keeping you company, that’s all,” I said, kicking his thigh with a bare foot, letting it graze down the inside of his leg before pulling away.

         “I’m keeping you company,” he insisted.

         “Oh, you are? Then do something besides just sitting there looking cool.”

         “Like what?” he said, grabbing my foot.

         My breath caught in my throat.

 The radio was on in the front room, and I could hear mom and Les talking.

         “Like, I don’t know; I’ll bet you could think of something,” I said, pushing the sole of my foot deeper into the palm of has large dark hand, finally able to speak

         “I could think of a lot of things,” he said, releasing my foot. “But like I said, “You’re trouble.”

         “Trouble, huh?”

         “Yeah, trouble.”

         “I thought you liked trouble,” I said, sliding off the counter, my legs straddling his feet.

         “I do,” he said, sliding his feet away and straightening up. “But not jail – not that kind of trouble,” he said, putting a hand in his pocket.

         “I see,” I said, stepping in close again. I could smell shampoo lingering in his hair and the earthy smell of soil and new perspiration on his skin.

         “Hey, Al, you ready to go?” Les shouted from the front room.

         “Yeah, man, I’m ready,” he shouted back, not taking his eyes off of me.