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.  

Delilah

Coming of Age -- The High School Years

My mom called me that sometimes. It started somewhere around middle school.      

I knew about Delilah from the yellow hard-back book of Bible stories that my grandfather had given me. Even though the yellow book didn't say so, Delilah was a harlot who betrayed Samson after seducing him with her cunning beauty. I had learned that much like I learned other things, from listening to different versions of the same story, the way they were told, watching expressions on adults’ faces when they told them, and putting it all together in a way that made the most logical sense.

         Many of mom's male friends told me that I was pretty when I was little. What big brown eyes you have, what pretty skin, like a pretty little Indian girl. Once I turned eleven they just leered or pretended I didn't exist at all, which was just fine with me. I didn't understand the connection between those looks and my mom calling me Delilah. But I sensed there was one.

          Two of Mom's friends made me keep a secret. I was a good little secret keeper – nothing like Delilah at all.

                                                    *   *   *

         I am sitting as close as I can to the door. In his white, 70's model Datsun pick-up truck.
         He is driving with one hand, weaving down Apple Colony Road.
         His other hand is on my thigh, snatching at my skirt. He pushes it up; I push it down. I lean closer to the door, sitting now on one hip.
         He's drunk, just on his way home from the bar where he's been all afternoon. My mom is at his place, probably making dinner. I was on my way home from school, walking down Apple Colony Road when he stopped and told me to get in. This had never happened before.
         He leans the right side of his body across the seat and feels for my thigh. The truck swerves toward the shoulder.
         We had been staying at his place quite a lot. It was much nicer than our house. A tidy Victorian style farmhouse set in the middle of two or so lush, green acres of land, a large corner property.
         My hand is on the door handle. I try to get a glimpse at the speedometer.
         His hand finds my cotton underwear. He's pulling it to the side, fondling me. The white fence along the road rushes by.
         I lean back toward him, now sitting on his hand, an attempt to hold it in place. I grab at his wrist, pulling it away. I am eight or is it nine -- I don't know.
         The truck swerves to the left.  

         I can see the house.
         His hand is back on my thigh, fingers searching for the elastic pinching at my inner thigh. I clamp my legs together. He lets go.

         I pull my skirt down, smooth it over my lap.
         Both hands on the wheel, he turns the truck uneasily onto his property, the gravel crunches under the tires, and the truck lurches to a stop.
         Inside the house, I have no words for what just happened. My mom is in the kitchen. It all looks so wholesome -- the tidy house, the white metal kitchen cabinets, something simmering on the stove, only some days she goes to the bar too -- it's where they met.
         I hear him behind me greeting her, pushing the screen door open behind him, and I go to the front room and turn on the TV. It was one of the things that I had liked about his house -- besides the fact that it was so clean.                        

                                             *   *   *

         By fifteen I had another secret. I had given it up to a bleached blond, Billy Idol look alike.

         Mom was in the middle-room that had been transformed from a bedroom to her sewing room since we were all older and needed a bit of privacy. I shared the newly converted attic bedroom with my sister. We had to climb a ladder to get up and down, but once there we had a room away from everyone. My friends slept over only when my sister Zhanna stayed the night with her friends because then she wouldn't try to butt into our business. Mom was focused on some sewing project. I could hear the squeak of the foot pedal as she pressed down and the slamming sound of the sewing machine needle working its way in and out and in and out of the fabric. She had allowed my friend Sammie and her friend Sam the Billy Idol look alike to spend the night in my room. Maybe she thought that Sam was Sammie's boyfriend. Well he wasn't. And he wasn't mine either, but we had been making eyes at each other for a couple of weeks even though I knew that he wasn't really attracted to me, maybe just curious, so I let him get on top of me, but not for long because it hurt, and maybe I was changing my mind. Annoyed, he pushed me away and rolled closer to Sammie who was stoned and already asleep.

         Soon after, I began having a recurring dream. I was pregnant just like Rachel and Winnie two of my childhood friends. Pregnant and frantic because it was almost too late to get an abortion and no doctors performed abortions in Tuolumne County, and I didn't know who I could ask for a ride to Modesto. All I could see were the mountains that surround Tuolumne, and I was stranded, stuck in the middle of the valley, floating there but unable to rise up and see over the top – to see what was on the other side.

         I'd wake from these dreams in a panic or rouse myself enough to know it was a dream, a dream that I had to force my way out of. I wasn't going to wind up like Rachel, or Winnie, or Katie the cheerleader at my high school, a junior who hid her entire pregnancy because she didn't show. She cheered on the squad in her short pleated skirt and black vest with orange trim into her last trimester. The baby was born with bruises on its face born after Katie was taken to the hospital with inexplicable stomach pains. The next thing her parents knew, she was birthing a baby. And she was from a good family. No one ever called her Delilah.

         I had to get on the pill quick. I had still only had sex that one time, but I knew I couldn't stop it, to go back, back to pretending there was such a thing as childhood innocence, a time when others took what they wanted from me, to now being able to choose with whom I wanted to share it. My dreams were trying to tell me something and the reality was all around me – a rash of teen moms in Tuolumne, a couple were my friends, walking around town pushing strollers and wearing half-tops.

         Amelie's mom took me to Sonora to the clinic where I had to speak with a nurse practitioner, get a pelvic exam, and learn about different methods of birth control: condoms, the pill, the IUD. And they made me talk about my family life. I lived with my mother, sister, brother, and step-dad, and no, I didn't know my real father. Finally, they gave me a wheel of pills that would prevent my worst fear: an unwanted pregnancy and what I imagined would be a life of doom stuck in Tuolumne forever, keeping secrets that weren't really secrets at all.

Who Is The Fairest Of Them All?

No good pic for this story, but I do love this one with friends
who always made me feel good about myself.

I didn’t understand what a feat it was that Tom Sear started going together early freshman year until he broke up with me less than a month later. Tom, a JV football player, was considered rather attractive in his olive skin and sandy brown, feathered hair. Many of the freshman girls who hadn’t gone to elementary school with him, and who weren’t immune to his cool look of suede loafers and corduroys, spent a great deal of time talking about his perfect hair, pretty green eyes, and pouty lips. I wasn’t too aware that he was what most would consider “out of my league,” for the most popular and desired girls usually had big blond hair, light-colored eyes, and long white legs that looked good in cheer leading skirts or shorts. I knew not to mention that Tom had given me several sidelong looks around campus. I got the feeling that no one would believe me anyway.

        After hanging around after school during Tom’s football practice with my friend Brandy whose boyfriend was also on the team, and waiting to take the late bus home so we could all sit together, Tom and I began “going together.” We hung around one another shyly between classes, at first, but we’d soon be breaking the school’s PDA rules, kissing feverishly down on the wooded bridge which was surrounded by a grove of young, green trees in the middle of campus. Tom would grip his hands around my waist and hoist me onto the flat concrete railing and push himself between my legs, holding me tight around the back to keep me from falling. Our foreheads, noses, and lips, now almost level, met, and a charge of tongues conducted an electric volt, Tom’s grip tightening and loosing around my back as he leaned in and then pulled me tighter to him. My heart raced and my head felt light like the sound of the rustling leaves in the trees over my head.

         Then a couple of days before my fourteenth birthday, it was over. Tom broke up with me. 

         Just the day before, he had been standing between my legs, his arms around my waist, kissing me in his hot, sweet way, and the next he was telling me it was over, saying nothing about the dark-haired, but much lighter-skinned girl, named Marcie he was going around with just days later.

At first, I couldn’t figure it out. I went over the entire month long relationship in my head: we never had an argument; he never looked at another girl; all we ever did was kiss and say nice things quietly to one another. I spent the two days leading up to my fourteenth birthday crying and wondering what I had done wrong. After school one day as I was waiting again for the early bus, Brandy found me and told me that she had talked to Tom, “He said that he just doesn’t want to be around you anymore.” Whatever that meant.

For months and months, it seemed like it meant that no other boys felt like being around me either. I didn't dare look at the few Mexican boys who went to Summerville High because it was better to go around pretending that we didn't know we were Mexican ourselves let alone hooking up and drawing attention to ourselves. And I didn't dare thinking I had a chance with older boys. And since there wasn't anyone at the school who looked like Paul Simonon of The Clash, there wasn't anyone that I was really even attracted to, but I really wanted to be liked.

It took getting my hopes up about Matthew Johnson, who I didn’t find remotely attractive, to get a sense of what had happened with Tom and why I wasn't one of those girls who boys spent time thinking about. Matthew had stared at me in history class since nearly the beginning of the year. Our classroom, a portable, had the desks arranged in an L shape, the teacher’s desk and chalkboard were at the front of the class; rows of desks descended down the left and the back wall, making it possible to sneak looks, or in Matthew’s case, stare. When Matthew wasn’t staring at me, I snuck looks at him, his pink skin, nose that hooked unattractively upward, and awkward haircut that insisted on parting down the middle, in spite of being too short to do so. Even though he had blond hair and blue eyes, Matthew was not particularly attractive; he was popular and well liked by for being smart and nice to everyone. He also played on the football team, which didn’t really impress me all that much, but he didn’t strut around like some kind of Adonis. He got straight A’s and impressed people in class by his thoughtful insights. By many important standards, he was a dreamboat, and if he had asked me to a dance, I would have said, “yes,” even though I wasn't physically attracted to him at all. In fact, in some ways, I found him quite revolting.

         Thinking about Matthew one morning, while getting ready for school and taking special care to look my best, I saw my naked face, no mascara,  no  eye-shadow, or bright pink blush, when I realized something that had worried me about dating Tom from the beginning. I had black hair, dark skin and dark eyes, and no amount of blue eye shadow, mascara, or even perfectly feathered hair was going to help me blend in better or keep everyone from seeing who I really was – a shabby Mexican girl, trying to pass herself off as an all American girl worthy of a boyfriend.

       Then I had the urge to spit, to spit in my own face, to yank the mirror from the wall and smash it to bits and pieces. I saw the glass shattered at my feet. It was me. I was the problem. Matthew stared at me because he was intrigued and curious. He wasn’t going to redeem or validate or save me. He went out of his way to stare at me long enough to catch my eye before looking away, but he wasn't going to ask me out. I finally knew that.

Punk Rock Mexicana

Proving there wasn't just one white way down the middle of the road.
Props to Nathan Stephens and Jason Meigs for knowing that so early on.

         My angst about how I looked and the world really became clear to me on Saturday, May 28th, 1984 – the day I saw The Clash at the US festival in San Bernadino, California.  Before that day, everyone in Tuolumne made it clear that I didn't look like everyone else, and after that day, I began working really hard not to. But only thirteen years old, and already a Clash fan, I naively showed up to the US festival, my hair still feathered, wearing red terry-cloth shorts, with a draw string bow that cinched up each side, and some strappy-leather hippy-looking flip flops that had belonged to my mom. They were the first shoes of my mom’s that I could fit into and wear. I didn’t even have a Clash shirt yet.

         It was Memorial Day weekend, and Amelie's mom, who also loved the Clash because they sang about Latin America, drove me and Amelie all the way from Tuolumne to the San Bernadino Valley in her white compact Fiat station wagon that would only start when parked on a hill. A seven hour drive took us about ten in the dry valley heat through Fresno, Visalia, Tulare, Delano and Porterville. The dry valley heat blasted into the open windows all the way there because there was no air-conditioning just a fan, the heat making us simultaneously drowsy and unable to sleep, and when we weren't able to find a hill to park the car on, Amelie and I would have to get out and push the car. Her mom would push the car with one hand on the driver side door and the other on the steering wheel, and Amelie and I would push from the back. Just when she thought we got the car going fast enough with the ignition on and the car in second gear, Amelie’s mom would jump in and pop the clutch. When we could get the car going fast enough, it would start with jerk and a sputter. It was a bit of a hassle, and at one point I worried that we might get stuck out there in the hot valley forever.

Or maybe it was that I knew somehow that going back would be different – that I’d be different. But we didn’t mind having to push the car; we were determined to get to San Bernadino before noon on Saturday. In fact we left Tuolumne after school on Friday, arriving somewhere outside of San Bernadino and Glen Helen Park at around one or two in the morning. Amelie's mom, barely able to hold her eyes open a second longer parked the car on a hill, told us to go back to sleep before letting her head drop back on the seat. And so we all slept until I woke at around seven the next morning with a full bladder to find that we were surrounded by empty rolling hills filled with dry grass and weeds – somewhere between nowhere and having our minds blown wide open by Joe Strummer and The Clash.

         While waiting in line for the turnstiles of Glen Helen Park, Amelie and I, her mom too, watched all the people around us, a lot of young people, skater types, guys with Mohawks and leather jackets, women with pink, or, blue, or green, or purple hair, some with all four colors all at once; they were older and tougher and cooler looking than we were though Amelie, who was always a bit ahead of her time, wore baggy shorts, her Combat Rock t-shirt, and Converse.  When we finally got to the front of the line, we were stopped by a young man in a vest and pimples who was charged with looking through our bags for contraband or recording equipment. Our tickets stated that cassette recorders were not permitted, but Amelie’s mom brought hers anyway, and hiding it carefully under a newspaper, a sweatshirt, and a bottle of Mylanta which she drank to calm her ulcer, she successfully smuggled it past the young man who only peeked inside her backpack without bothering to move anything around. After closing up our bags and still holding our breath, Amelie and I pushed our way through the metal turnstiles and walked straight into our adolescence.

         Before the first act, the Divynals, took the stage, Amelie’s mom made us find a designated spot near the front of the stage for us to meet since Amelie and I wanted to walk around. People were milling about finding a place to stand or sit on blankets. We saw a group of older teens sitting in a circle playing telephone, girls with big hair, thick eye-liner, and guys with different versions of the Flock of Seagulls hair. Amelie and I stood watching them while we waited our turn in line for the porta-potties. I didn’t think that real teenagers still played children’s games, and I wondered what kind of word or phrase they were passing around the circle. There were people rinsing off in the outdoor showers, women in stripped bikinis and topless men in shorts, and people in lines at booths buying cold beer, and cold water, and US festival t-shirts.  There were people smoking joints out in the open – something I had already seen a lot of, and there were people already drunk, stumbling around and lost. After our turn in the bathroom, Amelie and I went straight to the t-shirt booth to buy t-shirts, and I put mine on immediately, happy to put on something cool over the top I was wearing and my terry-cloth shorts –relieved to be wearing something that declared the new me to the world.

         Being both musicians and edgy music fans, Amelie and knew the words to most of the songs, or at least the popular ones by the bands that played that day. We sang and pogoed along to Oingo Boingo and The English Beat. We swooned when Michael Hutchins from Inxs took the stage, swinging his wild long hair over his shoulder, and Amelie swooned over Stan Ridgway from Wall of Voodoo – she always liked the weird looking guys. We studied Terri Bozio of Missing Persons, knowing that neither of us would ever show that much skin, wear plastic wrap, or have blond hair, and we sang along in earnest to just about every Flock of Seagulls and “Down Under,” and “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work song, but when The Clash, the band that we were really there to see, the only band that really mattered, finally, after a controversial delay, stormed the stage around midnight we were transformed.

“All right then, here we are in the capital of the decadent U S of A,” Joe Strummer growled into the microphone. And right away, after a day of bands and people watching, hair cut at weird angles, assorted scissored band t-shirts, and leather jackets in 110 degree heat, we knew we needed new clothes, attitudes, and new haircuts, fast. But there was more to it than clothes and hair; and we got that too. The Clash took the stage and called us decadent straight away then launched into London Calling, its opening guitar riff, slicing its way through the air. We knew that it was true – technology and music and twenty dollar tickets while others were starving or being disappeared in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador by death squads, and we wanted to be punished by the barrage of loud guitars and Joe Strummer's growl then soothed by the sounds of Mick Jones’ high sweet falsetto, seduced by Paul Simonon's swagger.

The Clash’s anti-American decadence stance spoke directly to us, both Mexican, and weird, and poor, and disenfranchised. Joe Strummer even mentioned East LA – a part of LA where he had probably never been, but where I had been born. It’s like he knew Amelie and I were there and put us under his spell, two Mexican-American weirdos, waiting to receive their message, our marching orders, and so we marched, singing every word to every song, slamming our fists in the air, and tearing up when Mick Jones sang “Somebody Got Murdered” because somebody had to care.

          When the song ended, Joe Stummer railed, “You make, you buy, you die. That’s the motto of America.”

All of it got me thinking something I had not understood before – the thing that I would never say, wouldn’t be able to articulate, even then. Amelie and I were different; we stood out because our skin was brown, and we did not come from money. None of this was going to change, and people would judge us, or try to make us feel like less, ugly even, undesirable.

“You get born to buy, and I’ll tell you those people out in East LA they ain’t going to stay there forever.”

And we hadn’t. I hadn’t stayed in East LA.

“If there’s anything going to be in the future it’s going to be all parts of everything.”

But we were all over, in Tuolumne even, a fact of life in America that wasn’t going to change.

         “It’s not going to be just one white way down the middle of the road.”

         Not just one white way down the middle of the road – not just one way, not just the white way; he was right. Joe Strummer was right about that.