Fade Into You Read online

  “That was so pale-man of you. Don’t colonize my car again.”

  “No, man. Never. Eat what you want.”

  “I will. I do. Hey, let’s get out of here.”

  “Yes, please!” She grabs my hand and we run into the sunshine and toward the F lot steps, descending in a flurry toward her car, a waiting vehicle of change.

  We’re at Bennie’s house, Chelo’s cousin. He lives in Lincoln Heights and we go over there sometimes cos he’s got weed and lets us smoke and hang out, and because his friends are pretty cool and he’s into rock and roll and we’re into rock and roll and his friends are sexy. They’re seniors and we’re juniors and some of them are a little older and it’s better than my house which is empty, boring, far away, and covered in antique things that can break. Or Chelo’s house with her parents at work and where her sister Adelicia and Adel’s baby live. Bennie has albums and reggae and an old Impala in the backyard that we sit in listening to Lords of Acid, “Marijuana in Your Brain,” and get goofy. Bennie’s friends are ravers, and they always have these rad fliers for gatherings with names like JuJu Beats and Nocturnal Wonderland, PEZ dispensers filled with Special K, JNCO pants, and plastic rainbow chains, pacifiers, and candy necklaces. Mixtapes with DJs named Paulina Taylor and CandyKrush spin these foot-spazzy beats. We get high and sway kind of silly. Lords of Acid demand that we just blow. So we do. Sucking down joint after joint, getting dizzy snorting up K, and acting out our fantasies of sixties rebellion.

  Bennie is also super hot but because Chelo is more or less my best friend I can’t go after him, not that it would matter anyway cos no one is ever after me. Especially Bennie, who has every punk rock Betty hanging around waiting in line. Pick of the Bettys he’s got. Oh yeah, he’s also an artist and has a giant notebook he tags in and draws pencil drawings of Aztec heads and rainbows in pastel. He uses those fat paint markers and sometimes Chelo and I steal a few and huff them in the park, laughing and stumbling. His work is good. He’s not as good as Chelo though, who after three years at LACHSA is trained and on her way to being a real fine artist in the sense that she will one day have a gallerist and her influences are wide and developed. Oh yeah. Chelo is a terrific painter. I suppose I waited a really long time to reveal that. Chelo can paint. Like a boss.

  Bennie’s dad (Chelo’s uncle) is a director. He made some Radical activist films in the seventies/eighties with the Chicano art collective Asco and sometimes walks in from meetings in which he and other still-kicking seventies La Raza walkout radicals are trying to autonomize El Sereno and says “wassup” and that he just brought home tacos and Topo Chico and us kids can “help ourselves.” One time I went over and Cheech as in Cheech was there, dropping off some fliers and picking up a painting. I stood in the hallway of their living room, mouth open, high and freaking out, heart beating like boom boom boom until Chelo shoved me toward Bennie’s room and hissed, “Be cool.” The short long of it is, it’s a great place to be after school when we’ve both actually made it to the end of the school day and want someplace to chill.

  “Check it out,” says Bennie, popping The Wizard of Oz into the VCR. “Chelly, put on Dark Side.” He motions to his stack of records and she jumps up and grabs it.

  “Arturo said that if you watch Oz and listen to Dark Side at the same time, it matches up. Sounds tight.”

  “Damn, this cover,” she says, turning it over.

  “It’s the shit.” The rainbow eye zooming out of the pyramid of the moon makes everything else on this earth seem small and inconsequential. It truly is the shit. Bennie pulls the record out, puts it on, drops the needle, and Roger Waters and David Gilmour float into our existence. Dorothy and Toto wake up in black and white. We light a doob, lie on our backs, and peek over our feet at the Oz beast, puff passing as the guitars and cash machines wail and cha-ching.

  In 1973 the Laserium in Van Nuys created laser technology and Griffith Observatory hired them to make a show. The way the story goes is that the observatory’s attendance was low and they wanted to hip it up. It was ’77 and Dark Side of the Moon had just been released, was psychedelic, and probably seemed like the natural choice. Only thing they didn’t count on was that it would be such a hit they’d have to offer three shows a day. Matinees started almost immediately and ditching class to see the Dark Side lasers became a local kid tradition. Eventually, as the decades passed and the city fell into disrepair and white flight grabbed the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley by the throat, city maintenance lost money and White Fence and Hazard popped up on every corner and Rodney King was beat down in the street and smoke and fire filled South LA and the El Monte Flores kissed the earth with blood and Northridge shook loose from its roots and O. J. took the citrus city hostage and the Raiders sailed away, Rampart bubbled up from the tar pits of corruption and baby diapers weren’t uncommon on the grounds of Disneyland, Magic Mountain became a battlefield of bangers and the people of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles came out of their homes to stare as the sun became eclipsed by the moon, the observatory grew empty and teenagers tagged the seats and carved their initials into the wood armrests and the soda machine dripped yellow and the Tesla coil grew faint and the ceilings cracked and we showed up to sit and laugh and throw cigarettes at one another across the empty theater, our turn to take in the mythic lasers of our older siblings’ youth. You raise the blade you make the change. There’s someone in my head but it’s not me. And if there are cloudbursts and thunder in your ear and no one seems to hear, just tap your heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home.”

  ×

  We crash Chelo’s house after Bennie’s and her parents are on the porch smoking doobs.

  “Hey, come over here,” calls her dad as we walk up the cement path to their white stucco craftsman. My dad loves to talk about how in the eighties “the Mexicans” stuccoed the beautiful homes of his youth, even though I’d be sitting next to him, being half-Mexican. He just appreciates architecture, “It’s simply stating fact, Nicole.” We have always been just two people, my dad and I, sometimes sharing space.

  Baby-girl toys and a plastic Playskool giraffe faded from years of sitting outdoors, its cowboy-sticker seat brittle and disintegrating, reflect a foggy light from the bright sun. Her dad stubs out his doob and her mom follows. They give a cursory half-hearted swish of already dissipated smoke. Chelo sits in her dad’s lap and lays her head on his chest. His beige Dickies have been ironed at the creases and his wifebeater appears adhered to his glowing body, as if slowly being absorbed by his glossy skin. Everything has taken on a dreamy patina and I sit on the crumbling river-stone porch and look up at a pair of pigeons nested in the wooden beams of the house, bits of brown palm frond and white takeout napkins peeking out from the attic lattice. In the distance, long palm trees, trunks like thin bent straws, are brown forms against the amber-hued sky, downtown in the distance, the black outline of shadow covering the remnants of the detailed day, blurring into dusk.

  “How was school?” he asks. She sits up and shrugs.

  “Okay I guess.” Her legs are bent like a flopped-over puppet, her head hung low. She pushes hair out of her face and smiles and he tenderly squeezes her nose.

  “Fuck you,” she says, “I’m not a baby,” pushing his hand away. He smacks her chin quick and sharp and she slugs him close and sharp in the thigh then gets up and looks at me. “Come on. Let’s go.” She opens the screen door. I follow her into the dark house as the screen swings shut, slamming behind on squeaky hinges.

  “Hey, let’s grab a joint,” she says, and I follow her into the backyard, where on a cinder block in a sea of yellow weeds sits a paper bag from Vons. Chelo leans over it and plucks a thick perfectly rolled joint. She holds it up and squints. “Looks about right.”

  “Goof ’tard,” I say, trying to grab it from her. She pulls it away and smiles, her tongue squeezing between her two front teeth like it sometimes does.

  “Come on,” she says, skip-walking t
oward the side of the house where we’ve arranged two upside-down Home Depot buckets, rolled home with our feet, for our chill zone. Beyond her house is the cemented Los Angeles River, winding toward the Sixth Street Bridge and downtown. Out here it’s still the SGV, though, sleepy and tagged.

  A boy about our age hops the wire fence behind Chelo’s house from the ravine. “Hey,” he says nodding at Chelo. “Is your sister here?”

  “Who are you?” she asks, sounding tough and folding the joint into her palm.

  He’s wearing long black Nike sweatpants and a wife-beater, his black hair buzzed short, skin reflecting the last bits of sun, casting beams off his tanned shoulders into the distance. The moment holds me in its psychedelia. “Is Adelicia here or what?” he asks again, ignoring Chelo’s attitude.

  “No, she’s not, and who are you?”

  “I’m Dez. She knows me.” I look at his arms and he’s got the EMF for the El Monte Flores across his chest, peeking from behind his beater.

  “Is she in trouble?” asks Chelo, growing bold.

  “Damn, you ask a lot of questions. Who are you?” he spits, finally rising to Chelo’s invitation. He straightens his shoulders and brings his hands to his waist in loose, ready fists.

  “She’s not here. Move,” she says, brushing past him toward our buckets. “But my parents are.” The handsome boy looks at me and makes no face. I hold his eye for one second and he looks through me and out my back, turns around, and jumps the fence, running back into the empty riverbed.

  “Who was that?” I ask, sitting beside Chelo, who sits up quickly to make sure the boy is gone.

  “I’m not sure, but all these bangers have been coming around lately looking for her.”

  “You think she’s in trouble?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that she hasn’t been around lately.”

  “I’m sure it’s cool,” I say.

  She looks at me and blinks. “Yeah, come on, let’s smoke this thing already, I’m happy to be home.”

  ×

  I’m standing in line outside Mr. Ingroff’s office. He’s our resident Mr. Van Driessen—you know, Beavis and Butt-Head’s school counselor. Behind me is one of the girls from senior orchestra who’s always wearing velvet babydoll dresses with white satin collars and Doc Marten Mary Janes. Basically, it looks like Hot Topic threw up on her at all times. Today she is holding her small metal coffin-shaped lunch box in fingerless lace gloves. Coming down the hall from Algebra is Corinne, one of the most talented, male-desired girls on campus. She’s a third-year theater ensemble member and wears her red hair swirled into a bun, her red lips always perfect, her freckled cheeks small constellations on a peach map. What I know about her is that she had to leave school twice to go to some eating disorder place. I groan on the inside, why am I in this line of weirdos.

  Mr. Ingroff sticks his head out and smiles. “Ms. Darling.” He motions for me to enter. I slump low in the chair and grab my hair and twirl it. He clears his throat and sits back, sizing me up in that way that adults do when trying to discern what type of teenager you might be.

  “It shows in your records that you’re falling behind in your academics and arts, and, in addition, are an absence away from attendance probation.” He stops talking, as if waiting for me to jump in and defend myself, but really what could I possibly say. I have no good defense except that my brain gets so overwhelmed with what needs to get done each night, a light bulb with a wattage too bright, I fizzle into darkness and bite my lip till it bleeds. Or that sometimes sitting in class is akin to feeling the slow hand of death cover your face like a veil until it is all you can do not to get up and slit your wrists right there. Being in motion on the freeway, watching the buildings fold into the blur of other traffic speeding beside you, one hour until every artery is clogged, the last remnants of a care-free afternoon drive, get off the streets by three p.m. or rush hour will slow you down and your brain will scramble all over again—it’s all you can do to deal, and even then wound tight in your chest, the anxiety ready to snap and uncoil.

  “How are you feeling, Ms. Darling?” he asks.

  “Feeling, sir?”

  “About yourself.”

  “I feel fine, sir. I like school very much.”

  “Did you know Ms. Chang?”

  “Did?” I ask, slightly panicked. Jesus Christ what did they do to her.

  “I’m sorry, do you know Ms. Chang?”

  I exhale. “Somewhat. A little, I dunno, I guess.” For the love of fuck, these fucking people.

  “Do you think you would consider yourself to be a young lady like Ms. Chang? Perhaps, in need of someone to speak with? We could arrange something on campus.”

  “Isn’t that your job?”

  “Oh!” he says perking up. “You would like someone talk with? It can be arranged!”

  “No, no I’m fine. I just, it’s been a tough semester with auditions coming up. I’m trying out for the leads. What do you … do, Mr. Ingroff?”

  “I facilitate healing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Will you work then to bring up your grades, show up for class? You’ll need to if you’re going to place first string.”

  “Sure,” I answer.

  “Good,” he smiles, “a bright girl like you. It would be a shame to jeopardize your place here.”

  “What about me makes you think that I’m bright? You just said I’m failing.”

  “Only a feeling I get. Anyway, that’s all. Please tell Corinne she can come in.” And he lets me get away.

  ×

  My mom is earth people. North American. Por vida, holmes. From La Junta, southern Colorado. SoCo. It’s nothing fancy like Vail, it’s in the southwest part, the part that spoons northern New Mexico. Prairies and plateaus. Tiny white and blue flowers that dot highways like bits of heaven. Jackrabbits leaping through the rainbow brush.

  La Junta is a city that is most famous for being near another city: Trinidad. Fruits and fairies and fags, as the larger Republican Colorado population might say, or, the men-women, as my soft-spoken Mexican grandfather, my g-pa, my gampie, the man that rode in each Christmas on the Greyhound to the Pasadena train station with a bag of peanuts still in the shell, might say. Trinidad has Dr. Biber, the Wiz to the city’s Oz, the first doctor in the US to perform gender reassignment surgery. His patients stay in town like Jesus’s followers, and the truck drivers who roll in to fill up whistle and hoot as they pull away.

  But La Junta is just where my grandpa dragged my grandma after the war. A chance to start over, where winter snow is shoveled by both white and brown hands and everyone in every gas station isn’t a first cousin. Where alcoholism is present but not all-consuming. We are Nuevo Mexicanos. Wagon Mound and Ocate proud. Recipients of disenfranchisement, external and internalized racism, handed diseased blankets and shoved in the butt onto that Trail of Tears, tossed a bottle of liquid courage, rolling joints of trauma-coping mechanisms. My mother’s ancestors crawled out of the red clay and left their handprints inside caves, stumbled off boats from Spain. They used the reflection off the stalagmites to light their way out of the past. They made arrows out of obsidian, carved homes into the cliffs, fire danced around a pit of burning shrubs underneath a navy, star-spotted sky, the white, chalky paint from their faces flaking off and floating into the wind. Animism and sage, a sacred circle undulating beneath a sun of life. The blood of our people deep in my veins, fortifying me through this bullshit, they whisper, Mija keep going, mija do better. Comanche Juan De Oñate. My red conquistador. Coyote. Split. Both and none. They were claimed for Spain, they were won by Mexico. They were sold in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. They had their land snatched away, returned, and then challenged for the next two hundred years. They became Yankees. US “citizens” only when the US needed bodies to shoot full of holes in WWII and Vietnam. After that they were just brown bodies to be shot in the street like mangy dogs. They were called Indigenous. They were denied Native American rights and told they were
Mestizo.

  They wear cowboy hats, work the land, talk slow, call themselves rancheros, hang John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy commemorative plates ordered from the back page of Parade magazine above the television. They nail them up next to Jesus and all his plastic flores. They have miniature enclosed dioramas in the front yard holding the Mother. The essence. The miracle that was touched by the miracle. The woman.

  They pull charcoaled cow heads out of the ground. They split the cabeza. They scoop the cheese. They leave oily fingerprints on the oilcloth. They sing me songs at night even when I’m alone in bed.

  They say, Mija, you are not the impostor.

  ×

  Here’s the thing though. It’s all beautiful stuff but it’s the wrong stuff. I’m in Elay, see? We’re in Elay. There’s no cheddar cheese and red and green Christmas chiles here. It’s thin slices of lemon wedges on a paper plate. It’s carne asada and carnitas and al pastor. It’s a fucking fish taco, mang. No beans inside that burrito, no migas or breakfast tacos here. Chorizo or a taco de papa, that’s what you get. Chopped white onions and cilantro. Here is spicy. Here is citrus infused. Corn tortillas, holmes. Get this flour shit away from me. Pulled in flapping from the ocean. Cindy Gallegos came over to dinner in the fifth grade. Her mom dropped her off. She asked if my mother had made Italian food when she pressed her fork into a plump enchilada and orange cheddar oozed out of the center.

  No uvas.

  Walkouts.

  César Chávez.

  Sleepy Lagoon murders.

  Zoot Suit Riots.

  Jaime Escalante, stand up and deliver, mi primo!

  Pride.

  It would be my luck not just to be half-Mexican, but the wrong kind of Mexican. I am not from East Los. My people are the borderlands, the frontera. I am a pale ghost of a bloody past. A daughter of the viceroyalty. A lady of Spain. But I’m not that either. I’m me. I’m SGV. I watch from the schoolyard as the sad boys mark up the EMF, throw down the emero. I live in the cool shadows of libraries. I cough and rip out pictures of Marlon Brando from old dusty biographies. I memorize the lines to A Streetcar Named Desire. I listen to Wanda Jackson and the Cramps inside my room at night, headphones resting around my neck turned full blast. I whisper, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers as Vivien Leigh touches her own chest so lovingly, so delicately, as she realizes no one else will ever touch her that way again. In that moment of self-comfort there is strength. There is survival.