1 I can assure you that the last thing I want to do is to scare you off, away, further than you are headed already because you are, in your own words, just starting out your life, and I, by my own account, am halfway done. It is not my intention to stop you. No one stopped me, try as he--or she--might. I kept moving, like a shark, in one concentrated direction. No, never has anyone stopped me. Nor can anything, short of death.

6. His birthday is tomorrow, but twenty-two years ago, on that day, Mami busted him with his girlfriend. A beautiful Polish girl who was twenty-four years old at the time. Papi was turning thirty-five. Mami had bought him a new set of timbales. Because our landlord did not let us play music in the flat, Papi said he had taken them over to Al's house. Papi had been out all night, said he had gotten pretty loaded and was picked up by the cops coming home and thrown in the drunk tank.

Once he went to sleep, Mami, who had taken to searching his pockets, found a cleaner's ticket. There was our last name on it but with an address that was not our address.

Even though we left Papi sleeping, by the time we got to that address--which was three bus rides away, in the white section of town--his Caddy was parked right in front.

We stared at each other when we got up to the door, then Mami pushed it open, without knocking. There he was, dressed in one of his new swinging birthday shirts, and as always, whenever out in the world, although he was inside, he was wearing his shades. Annette--because she had a name now, it was Annette, and very suitable too, I thought--was petite and had her hair frosted. She was sitting on a couch across from Papi, who sat, cross-legged on a La-Z-Boy chair, in a way that made you know right away that it was his chair, his place in that room. They had no so much as stirred when Mami and I burst in.

They had a big row the night before, Annette began to babble. (Introductions were not needed.) She was trying to break up with Papi because he would not leave his wife. He had forced his way into her house. His arms were covered with fingernail scratches. She had called the cops. I had never heard Papi so much as raise his voice at home.

Mami, who up until then had never been any good with English, did a good job getting her point across then and there. "So!" she started, sweeping across the room. (Papi and Annette frozen in their places.) "Here are the timbales I bought you for your birthday!" And pas! The timbales went flying in a loud way, the LPs, too, that Mami knew were his, Perez Prado, Machito, Ray Barretto, his man.

"Just tell me one thing, Nat," Annette said from where she sat on the couch. "Do you love me?"
Mami stopped flailing things about and looked at him. I stopped crying long enough to look at him, too. He was just too cool.
Then, expressionless--you couldn't see his eyes behind those dark glasses--he said, "Yeah, of course I love you, Annette."

9. "He was very proud of you," Ash Can told me at the wake. Ash Can, who, more than Papi, could never hold down a job. Mexico, dope, music, women, all the same stuff.

"And I, of him," I answered.

10. I have this friend who is a writer. She says her lovers hate the fact that she fictionalizes everything that happens between them. Even in the throes of a heated argument, she will stop to take notes, telling herself, remember how he looked when he said this, what you were wearing and exactly how it felt to say such and such. And they hate it, her lovers. She writes pretty tight stories, too. She doesn't give a hill of beans what they feel about it. There are always more lovers. There are always more stories to write.

Papi did not like the book I wrote about him. I knew this because he said nothing about it. But when he came to see me in California, after he'd been had a few beers, I readied myself. "I feel like my life is an open book," he said. (Just like Nat, never one to pass up a clichè.) But, having anticipated that I'd need a reply since the family boycott of my book, I shot back, "It isn't your life, it is my life. And it isn't your book. It's mine."

12. "There's something to be said about innocence," you said to me last weekend, when I snatched you away on a rendezvous, to meet my friends in San Francisco, to see theater and Almodovar's latest film, to drink at a Latino cross-dresser bar. You said this with regards to the twenty-year-old sophomore you had sent on her way (not without some reservation), so that you could spend more time with me. You struggled for three weeks with how to tell her because you so much did not want to hurt her feelings. Innocence was something that she could give you and that I could not, you told me. Innocence in females to feed the male lover's ego held its place in nineteenth century romance novels. Also, always in Mexican society--which you, she, and I share.

Was I to serve my life as the perennial apprentice of a man, be a static symbol of innocence--which men yearn to believe in, in this havoc of a world they've created? Is that what you expected from her?

Once innocence, an all-too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it has become wisdom.

I so much prefer the wisdom in your eyes to the innocence of your remarks.

14. Mami had two children when Papi met her. Was Papi looking for innocence in Annette? There was the same age difference between them as there is between us.

The facialist examined me up close the other day. Being Californian, she felt compelled to read my "aura" before applying steam, then clay masks. "At first, I thought that your eyes held lots and lots of sadness," she said.

"But no," she reconsiders, after an hour of talking and doing things to bring color back to my skin. Far from pale, I am Earth-dark like you. But all this holding in of sadness and all this suspended time, waiting to finish up here, have caused my skin to turn sallow. "No," she says, "those are survivor's eyes, the wise eyes of the poet that you are. Be good to yourself. Find someone who will make you laugh. You only need to bring back that glow that your inner being radiates. Poets do very important work. They come here to heal the planet, but they must protect themselves. They feel everything."

21. I've seen Mami drunk, smashed, completely loaded, twice in my life. The first time was at the end of that day. When I got home from work, she had a half-empty bottle of Cutty Sark in her hand. Papi's shirts were all laid out on the bed. When he got home, she was going to send him packing to the Polish girl.

The other time was the night before I left for Europe to do research on a book. I was going away for a month and I was leaving my fifteen-month old infant in the care of his father, in her care, in the care of my whole family and a reliable baby-sitter--who was a friend and also cared. To her mind, I was abandoning my baby. Bad mother I was. Bad mother, bad wife. No-good woman.

That evening, over two decades ago, when Papi got home, he told Mami she was silly for listening to gossips. He put all his shirts back into the closet and sat down at the table for her to serve him his supper.

31. You, at twenty-three, loverboy, have never been left, you say. Your family members, mother, father, each one intact. Except through death, I too have not been left before. We announce this to each other, like two opponents in the ring, as if to leave were a victory of some sort, even through death.
Would it not be more triumphant to say, I stayed? I simply loved and did not want to leave. Leaving is for the defeatist, the egotist, the one who is not worthy of the love he or she rejected.
Perhaps not.

Like you, I adored my life, lavished myself with its sweet aroma, shamelessly derived pleasure from sheer existence. Therefore, also like you, I thought I would be punished by our jealous Mexican Catholic God and die young. I dreamt of it frequently as an adolescent. My father had also been so much this way, and though he did not die young, he did not die old. Once, when he was the age I am now, after an evening of beers, slumped in a chair, he began to sob arrantly, "I don't want to die. I am afraid of dying." He went on like that before passing out.

He died unresigned to death, he had loved his life so, just breathing, long after the adventures, lovers, and highs were behind him. Without a job, or great comforts, he attached himself to the petty things of his surroundings, the novelty of the VCR, new CD player, neighbors he got on with and even those with whom he didn't and those surviving lifelong friends. His desire to stay had nothing to do with any inability to leave anyone. Although I had been with him, holding his hand, wiping his brow, keeping the oxygen mask in place, ceaselessly for six hours, he did not say goodbye, so much as raise his hand in a father's blessing. Instead, he asked me to open the hermetically sealed hospital windows, to open the door wider. Air. All he wanted and needed on that winter night before dying was air.

35. It was a long time since I talked to a man, in the twilight, in shadows, kissed his hands, heard his secrets, told him my own. Don't turn on the light, you warn me when you cry. Otherwise, you become bullyish, resentful of me if I catch a glimpse of your tears.

The night of his thirty-fifth birthday so many years ago, after he left Annette's apartment on his own (after we'd gone), he met us at his brother's house, where a birthday party in his honor had been planned and we were waiting. Shortly after he arrived, to funeral silence, he began to cry. "Comfort your father," my mother, who did not move from her spot, ordered me. "You are so cold. She has always been so cold," she told my uncle and the other guest as if I weren't there. "Put your arms around him." She insisted, "Tell him to come home . . ."

36. Sometimes, I forget and think he is still making plans to visit this summer. I long for his voice on the telephone, that easy manner of his, the vacant, repeated promise of "If there's anything you need, I'm here." I asked you this morning, "And when I go through the tunnel, this thing so popularly known these days as the process, when I write what I must write, not what I want to or how I wish I could write, not what anyone will necessarily want to read for any reason, just what I've needed to write--tell me you'll be on the other end. Tell me you'll say something ismple like, 'Apolinar, let's go for a walk on the beach,' or 'Time to eat, let's go get a taco.' Remind me that I am still a part of this world." If there's anything you need, I'm here.

Instead you kissed me, just as you always do before leaving. I tasted your lips, your tongue, the acrid isolation of each man and woman and knew then that you would not come back, no matter what.

written by Ana Castillo

from "Loverboys"
--stories© 1996