What We Are (4 page)

“I ain't homeless,” I say. “I mean, sort of. I have a motel room I stay in.”

“So?”

“But it was paid for by a fellowship. Which should upgrade my status a bit.”

She looks me up and down. “Fellowship?”

I smile, nod.

“As in money for scholarship?”

“As in the Leroi Jones Hookup for Off-the-Hook Artistic Achievement.”

“Okay, look, I—”

“Even went to school here once upon a time.”

“—don't have the time for this.”

“Let's be nice to one another, goddess.”

“I will be nice”—liking the way she's been addressed but still detesting the source—“when I know what team you're on.”

“That's what I've been trying to find out. Forever.”

“Answer one question.”

“Shoot.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don't know. I guess I just happened to be here. Think of me as an involuntary volunteer, how's that? Like an eyeblink.”

“You better not waste my time this morning,” she says.

“Or what?”

“You think this is a joke?”

“I think you can't speak the language of the people you're trying to help. Some might say that's the joke. And yet you think you're their leader.”

She bites her lower lip, and I think she might cry. I immediately feel bad. She says, “I'm not sure I like you,” turns, and strides off.

I try to keep pace. Don't know why. I might as well tell her I'm dying, call her
brother
, and twitch at every step. Might as well ask her for three dollars. Anyway, I just might.

I wanted to afford the happy crankster the same respect she doesn't give me, or anyone, but I just added him to a long list of people with whom the next encounter, whenever it happens, will be awkward; I'll end up apologizing, not out of fault or even misinterpretation but a need to clean the slate, as in, “Before we'd ever met, Mr. Crankster, sir, there were giant unclaimed sins between us.”

It will be an attempt to repair the weathered, spindly, immemorial rope bridge strung between us time-bound mammals. It will be saying
sorry
for a life lived—not ours, mine or his, but Ours. That's it: Sorry about this story to which you and I indelibly belong. Simple contrition that we've had to cross paths in the first place under this
Taking fate and physics and luck and all that shit and trying to claim it. A secular, interpersonal Yom Kippur.

Just atone for the blown deal and move on to the next apology.

We're alone behind the church in the mission garden beneath an old adobe cloister, restored, you can see, very recently. Vines of ivy branch and climb along the wall. Gardenias and orderly patches of impatiens and petunias line the walkway. It's a rainbow of petals, touched or kissed by some ineffable spirit that we hope came from the labor of the faithful but that probably had more to do with the tax-free designs of the well-endowed.

“I'm sorry about that back there,” I say.

“Don't fuck with me,” she says, squatting down to a stack of orange leaflets on the ground. They read,
AMNISTÍA POR TODOS. UNIDOS VOTAREMOS. SOMOS AMERICANOS
.

“Well,” she says, “are they right, Mr. Translator?”

“
Sí
,” I say. “
Es
A-OK.”

“Now,” she says, not missing a beat, “what I want you to do is take each of these leaflets and fold them like this.”

She holds one out in front of me. All that you can see on the face of the leaflet is Che Guevara's tilted beret: the overused visage, the cliché for the cause. I copy the motion exactly, looking off at the church, folding it in half once and then once again. I hand it over and she nods but doesn't move. I know she won't let it rest. She has enough safety and enough time to expect perfection in her life, even in its most minute and elementary details.

She says, “Try again.”

“I'll take care of it, don't worry.”

“We'll see.”

“Yes,” I say. “
Puedo hacer eso. Un perro puede
.”

“We need them ready in an hour,” she says. “There will be people at the rally who are in-betweeners. Curiosity seekers. Some will be swayed to our side when they see the passion of the
gente
.”

“The people.”

“Others will pick up the banner after a speech that'll move them, or that they can identify with. Some will only be convinced by words in print. The
literatura
.”

“Literature? Books?”

“What you have in your hands right there.”

“Ah, yes,” I say, looking down at the seven magical words in Spanish, “
Sí
. I see.”

“I don't think you do,” she says, and then she's off.

Though I feel a bit used, I'm happy to have something real to do this morning, which, I see on the leaflet, is the fifth of May.
El Cinco de Mayo
, a Mexican holiday celebrated here on the streets of San José, California, USA. A day that annually ends with broken store windows and burnt vehicles and a few beaten American citizens and millions of empty Corona bottles and segments on the local news about the beauty of diversity and a historical clip about the legacy of Cesar Chavez and how the city's first Hispanic mayor, Ron Gonzales, promises to end discrimination at once and us whatever we are still breathing in yoga deep this belief that all is right in our good land where the planet's inhabitants come at the end of the dream to camp between two identical strip malls made of staples, paste, cardboard, and lots of air.

S
PRING BUDS
of the cherry tree ruffle like pink tissue paper in the soft breeze. Clouds even here in this oxygen-deprived valley are white as bone, pillowy, environmental eye candy. On days like this you can understand why a nation would push west to the Pacific coast. The Cesar Chavez chant—“¡Sí,
se puede! Sí, se puede!
“—doesn't seem to reach the undisturbed heavens, caught in a wind tunnel somewhere above our heads. All around us are signs of our own ephemeral heartbeat.

“¡Sí,
se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

Hundreds of cops are funneling us into checkpoints like cattle into the chute, waving us through the peril of barricaded intersections, beneath flashing red lights and suspended banners that say
VOLUNTARIOS Y TRABAJADORES DE LA COMMUNIDAD
, these uniformed men and women of the thick and faint mustaches, plastic toothpicks, and American-flag pins, hiding behind mirrored glasses and badges, then the bemused business owners at the doors of their establishments, unconcerned by a movement that won't amount to more than a dent in the local GP, tapping their thighs with rolled newspapers,
munching on toasted onion bagels, draining bottles of alleged spring water, knowing their windows won't likely be shattered in this daytime deal of promised sobriety from Hispanic sources who know better than to give any chum to the cable media sharks, a helicopter with FOX News on its belly hovering overhead like some Grecian god chopping up the smoggy pollinated air of this place, a local news van docked at the corner of San Pedro Square and Starbucks, cameras springing out the rooftop, the sliding door, the backside, a mechanically mutated cockroach expanding its wings—and me, walking with a hand under my chin, unable even if I tried with everything in me to be a bonafide testament to the event, absolutely physically unable to join the chant.

“
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

Athena is walking toward my side of the street. She's cutting across dozens of paisas and Chicanos, striding out, it seems, at a faster pace. I like looking at her in the gentle gleam of silence between us. I'd like to box her up and open her at my leisure, like a poem. Under-arm hair aside, she is a beautiful woman, nearly my height, which in a crowdful of Toltec descendants is as statuesque as Gulliver. Trying or not, we both stand out. She likes it, I don't.

I shrink down, walk on.

“
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

I try to get ahead of her so she won't open her mouth in my presence and ruin the peaceful new image I have of her. I look up at the turquoise jerseys of two San Jose Sharks of the week, Gok and Michalek, the smell of steaks from AP Stumps wafting across my face. It's loud as a college hoops game, and suddenly I hear her. Amost like she's shouting at me, but I don't dare turn toward the voice.

She's posted in my right ear, and when I finally look over, her wide-open mouth almost swallows me: “
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

Five thousand people packed into Santa Clara Street, and she's found me. I nod, look forward again, try and pretend it's not happening.

“
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

“Got it,” I say, smiling at her, speeding up.

She speeds up with me. “
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

I know,” I say, not turning toward her this time, mumbling to myself. “I'm not deaf.”

“
¡Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede!
”

I turn and shout, “Get your ass out of my face!”

She retracts in horror, silent. Already she's walking back across the guileless crowd pumping their fists. She tugs on the back of some paisa's sleeve, and when I see the devotion on his face for this woman, good old prescience sets in and I try to make space, twist the hands of Fate to my pacifist liking. I gave the father a promise, yes, but I'd like someone up there to let me watch the rally in the veil of anonymity. Let me make a clean decision, unberated.

We march past the classical Hotel De Anza and Market Street, under and out the concrete bridge of highway 87, beneath the lean palms and long-trunked elms of Guadalupe Park, the flaky bark floating off the trees like ash. I don't want to look over, but I do anyway. She's displaying the geometrical skills of an airport flagger, one arm raised over her head to bring attention to herself, the exact point of the compass, the other aimed at me with a slight lead to account for my quickened step. If she had a slingshot and a dead eye, she'd squint her aim at me, let it loose, and I'd be finished.

Several paisas are in lockstep phalanx formation around her. Their wannabe proletariat goddess. I slide behind the cover of a paisa grandmother in a Mexican-flag muumuu, my right shoulder lifting ever so slightly to protect my chin.

We're separated by a forked barricade, the crowd divided to different sides of the stage. First dozens, then hundreds of people between us. That's good. Bye-bye. A gringo in a flea-market poncho has been strumming an acoustic guitar all along, rollicking side to side like a deadhead on the Haight, singing:

¡
No nos moverando
!

¡No nos moverando!

The air is warm now when it sits, cool in tiny gusts of wind. We move toward the music and take pamphlets from women in yellow shirts that say Trinity Episcopalian Church. We pass the booths of the United Farm Workers of Salinas and El Teatro Campesino, stacks of books for sale with Hispanic themes, Hispanic authors, American classics in translation:
El Viejo y El Mar, Las Pasturas del Cielo
.

We weave our way around the cabin of a truck, a burrito house called La Victoria handing out samples of its creamy salsa in tiny plastic containers, security guards in shades on the bumper of the trailer. The grass cut low for our arrival, the trail around Guadalupe Park taped off. Joggers with headphones and bikers in racer's gear share the dirt along the creek, paying no attention to us as we approach, pass, move on. The wind comes again and goes. The gringo's squeaky voice grows with each step, and by the time we reach the stage, five speakers ten feet high are beating on our eardrums. The chanting dies down now, tech claiming its audio territory. The crowd slithers onto the field, fanning out by the dozens, empty spaces right there, and then gone.

Native Azteca drums sound from the far end of the field. The gringo knows his cue and lets the song dwindle down, shouting, “
¡No a la guerra!
” as loud as he can.

Father McFadden and other clerics are climbing the stage. He's in his purple robe, caution in every step. His slumped posture evokes the veneer of holiness, of calm at the heart of chaos, Jordanian grace under pressure.

I want to call out, See, Papa Mac! I made it!

And he'd call back, Just like you said!

He's joined by a pale woman in a similar purple robe except that hers has yellow flowers over each breast. Youth and spring in her step, as if she's just gotten off a treadmill. She's followed by a brotha with a
full-on 'fro, cool, smooth in his ascension, slight swagger up the steps, vaguely angry. A Punjabi Sikh in a maroon turban next, tentative, respectful, looking a bit caught in the net. And last up a Jewish cat in a pricey Italian suit and a skullcap, New York–sure of himself.

Papa Mac takes the mic from the gringo musician, the gringo bowing repeatedly, and commences to lead the crowd in a prayer. Everyone onstage, even the Sikh, has his right arm lifted at a 45-degree angle from his shoulder.

“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

“Amen.”

“I walked the streets of Watsonville with the great Cesar Chavez,” says Father McFadden. “He was a man who loved his people and his God. He loved life. This is all that we aim for in the city of our friend: to go forth with absolute confidence in his mission. We met in the summer of 1967 at Assumption Church in a town called Freedom, where ...”

I start to drift, just like I'd done as a kid at Papa Mac's homilies. I can't help but question the union on the stage, how far the groups stand from one another, how all the
UN
countries are represented except the delegate from Mexico. All the paisas are down below with me.

I want to shout out, What happened to all the Mexicans? Will they get a chance to
habla
?