Like Son Read online

  These details didn’t make sense. I’d just picked him up from the V.A. hospital. He’d fought in Vietnam.

  “Wasn’t there an eye exam when you got drafted?”

  “Once Uncle Sam found me, nothing mattered except trying to get me killed.”

  And then he started in on a rant about how Vietnam had never been his war to fight, about how he’d grown up in Mexico with no clue he’d been born in the States, so why should he have had to go to war for this country? And, unbelievable as it may have seemed, it was true—he really hadn’t known he was a U.S. citizen until he was drafted. He also hadn’t known until he was eighteen that when his mother was pregnant with him, his family had gone north as braceros to build railroads. 1943. Chicago. And—yet another detail you’d figure most people would know about their own lives—he hadn’t learned until he was a grown man that he’d once had a sister. Rosario Maria Guadalupe Cruz. My father’s sister Rosario had been four years old when the family went north. And when the family came home less than a year later, she was no longer with them.

  Rosario met tragedy while she and her newborn brother were living with their parents—along with thousands of other government-indentured Bracero Program laborers—in a Chicago railroad company’s shantytown. Their makeshift home was constructed out of barely modified old train cars located on a dusty stretch of land adjacent to a strip of railroad. The living and working conditions were barely one step from slavery. My father’s mother was a proud woman; she didn’t like leaving her home country to be so shamed. Hard work didn’t upset her, but a lack of dignity did. She had wanted to be treated with respect. And she longed to spend more time with her newborn son, she wished she didn’t have to leave him every day with the old woman who came to the shantytown each morning before dawn and watched the workers’ children for a hefty cut of their pay. My dad said that his mother once admitted that in Chicago, after a particularly trying day of breaking stone into gravel to be laid out under the tracks, she had cursed God for giving her such a trying life. She told my father she’d forever regret that moment of weakness because, a few days later, in what she interpreted as retribution for her ingratitude, the railroad—that angry and almighty steel-and-oil God of industry—threw thunderbolts at her.

  Quick rumble flash, a supply train derailed. Heavy weight skipped thick tracks. Screech metal snapped. Rattle impact, the train crashed into the perimeter of the shantytown. In the bright-sunshine middle of the day. It was a pretty day. A very pretty day. The camp was near-empty. Most everyone was working far from there. Few were injured. Only one died.

  Rosario had been playing by the side of the railroad.

  My father’s mother, devastated by her little girl’s death, refused to speak a word of their time in Chicago. She forbade her husband or anyone else ever to mention it. As it turned out, the gods weren’t done with the family yet.

  One afternoon five years later, the trio settled back into their life in Mexico, my father, now a young boy, was helping his father tend to the family’s small farm. His mother was inside their shack home, presumably preparing supper. My father felt shivers on his arm as a sudden thunderstorm filled the sky with electric air and heavy raindrops. When a thunderclap rattled the field, his mother must have thought of the shantytown in Chicago. She would have thought of her little girl. A lightening bolt outside, too close outside, too near the house, much too close, shook my father’s mother to the core. And outside, in the field, my father watched as celestial brilliance reached down and anointed his father. Singed black to his toes, the man died instantly. One could conclude, and many did, that traces of the flash seared my father’s vision, swam through the veins of his eyes, and, although it took many years, slowly turned him blind.

  Unfortunately, my father was not yet blind the day his pueblo’s grocer, who was also the post general, found him at Sunday service and told him of the letter waiting. “It looks important, Francisco. It’s from up north.”

  With nothing more than a piece of paper translated by the grocer into Spanish, the U.S. government took the farm tools from my father’s hands, forced him to report to San Diego for processing, taught him how to shoot a rifle, and shipped him to a jungle in Vietnam.

  Thirteen months of hell later, my father returned to Mexico speaking English and with ever-worsening eyesight. Soon thereafter, he decided to move to the States—a country he had never seen with clear eyes—to embark on his newfound birthright: the American Dream.

  “Mami, come with me,” he said to his mother. “We’ll get you papers.”

  “I won’t go,” she said.

  “It’ll be good.”

  “No.”

  His mother knew that the roads up north were not paved in gold. But even after two years of an American war, my father was still naïve enough to hope for the best. As he boarded a bus north, his mother took his hand and in his open palm she placed a small honey-colored pebble, a memento she’d picked up once long ago as she walked along a rural dirt road leading to church. “Remember your home.”

  My father kissed the pebble and tucked it in his pocket for safekeeping. He hugged his mother and told her he loved her. He promised to write often, to send money and visit as soon as he could. He followed through on most of his promises, but he never saw his mother alive again.

  Slowly, my father built a life for himself. He found employment. Worked long hours. Tried to save money. Fell in love. But no matter what he did, his world still blurred and darkened with each passing year. When I was a child, he often held me close, not exactly out of intense affection, but more specifically—knowing one day he might wake without the ability to see anything at all—to memorize the features of my person. More years went by. More work. Less love. Less money saved. On and on.

  All throughout my childhood, my mother had tried to make me hate my father. Her efforts were useless—I’d always respected my father, if for no other reason than his ability to strike out on his own, to leave home far behind and just go. Countless were the times I’d wanted to follow his example. But I’d always been too chickenshit. Sure, I’d moved to the big city thrill of Los Angeles the instant I graduated from high school, but please, my disaster of a childhood home and mother were barely forty-five minutes south, and—although we’d stayed out of touch and our paths never crossed amidst the sprawl of L.A.—my father and I did both live in the same county. Ultimately, my move toward independence was like that of a kid who said he was going to run away and then went and pitched a tent in the backyard instead.

  So there I was, wishing I could be far, far away from everything I’d ever known, and yet I sat in a booth at Canter’s with my father. Me: a twenty-two-year-old with the selfabsorbed myopic vision of youth. And my father: a middleaged blind man.

  “It’s called retinitis pigmentosa,” he said. The condition, he explained, caused degenerative eyesight and eventual blindness. And it skipped generations.

  “So I don’t have it?” I asked, ashamed to be so hopeful.

  “No, you do.”

  Our order arrived. I bit into my sandwich for distraction.

  The blindness actively affected only males, my father said. But female offspring of the blind generation carried the gene and could pass the blindness to their male children.

  “You,” my father emphasized, “are a carrier.”

  I choked a little on a dry bit of rye bread—more at my father’s loud insistence that I was female than at learning my hypothetical son might be blind. Throat cleared with a swig of soda, I asked: “And retinitis pigmentosa is a terminal illness?”

  “What?”

  “You said when you called … the doctors told you …”

  “Oh, no, that’s unrelated.” He waved his hand as if to shoo away an irrelevant and bothersome topic. “The pain in my gut got so bad last week that I called my doctor. They ran tests at the hospital. The pathologist says he found cancer. They’ll operate, but they think it might keep spreading.”

  The pain in his gut? Wh
at the fuck was he talking about? He mentioned it like it was some long-standing topic we’d discussed endless times before. The elephant my father tried to ignore sat himself directly on my chest. I was stunned. Confused. And speechless.

  “Anyhow, if you ever get pregnant,” he said, almost cheerily, “there are options.”

  He uncapped his Sharpie and felt for the paper napkins he’d spread on the table between us. At the center of the napkins, he drew a circle that was supposed to represent me. The marker’s ink bled out in a spindly spiderweb mess as he drew another line. He meant the line to start at the circle’s perimeter and extend outward. Instead, the line intersected the circle, and I thought of that old magic trick where the magician saws his assistant in half. I’d always hated that trick. I knew it was all smoke and mirrors, but there was something inherently creepy about the illusion. What if something went wrong and the assistant really got sawed in two? What then?

  “You could selectively abort,” my father said, and wrote a jumble of overlapping letters I presumed would have read abort if he could have seen his own writing. “I know it sounds awful, but it’s an option,” he said.

  A searing hot pain surged in my stomach. My pastrami on rye threatened to travel upward and out. I pressed on my wrists to stay grounded and try not to puke. My discomfort was not caused by the thought of an abortion, per se, but by having a conversation with my father—who’d just breezily revealed he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer—about being pregnant and selectively aborting a baby boy who might be blind because of something I had apparently inherited.

  The situation sucked.

  “Dad …”

  “By the time you’d want a baby,” he marched on, “doctors might be able to manipulate an embryo’s chromosomes. It’d be expensive, but be sure at least to ask.”

  He found the left edge of the napkins, dragged his index finger halfway across, and drew another line from where he imagined his circle daughter to be. He wrote a long tangled mess of totally illegible letters that he probably intended to read artificial insemination or test tube baby, but could have just as accurately read: I’m a freak show and you’re a freak show and any kid you have will be a freak show too.

  “Really, Paquita, it’s amazing what science can control,” he said.

  There we were, living proof to the contrary. My chromosomes defined me as a daughter. And cancer was irreversibly sabotaging my father on the most essential of cellular levels. Our bodies were failing us in ways science could never entirely repair.

  “Dad, are you scared?”

  Such a stupid question. But I asked it.

  He sighed. The skin on his face hung loose and pallid. He was going to die. Soon. Sooner than either of us realized. He sipped from his heavy ceramic mug of coffee. Black. Two sugars. Plastic brown stirring stick still in the mug.

  “Dad?”

  He reached his hand across the table and I met him halfway with mine. With a squeeze as warm as his sick flesh could afford, he said: “I don’t want to die alone.”

  And then he cried. Openly. Loudly. Uncontrollably.

  I silently vowed to be the perfect son.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Iemptied the feces-filled plastic bag secured to my father’s abdomen.

  “I can’t do this. I can’t,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and tried not to let him hear as I gagged.

  “You shouldn’t have to do this either.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Of course, nothing about the situation was okay. My father would be in the hospital for another week. His surgery had been only a partial success. After minimal recovery time and a round of chemo, he’d be scheduled for more surgery. As it was, once the surgeons had finished removing much of his intestine, they’d sealed the lower end of his colon. Then they’d removed a small circle of skin at the original incision site, led the top half of his colon through the hole to the surface of his skin, and sewed the colon into place. That thick fleshy pink little nub fit into the opening of a plastic bag, which was adhesive-secured to his shaved-clean lower abdomen. Hence the colostomy bag which I cleaned for him. An enterostomal nurse stood by and watched to make sure I drained the bag into the bedpan properly.

  “Mr. Cruz,” she said to my father as she supervised, “when you’re able to get out of bed, you will empty the bag directly into the toilet …”

  I imagined my father straddling the toilet as the nurse said many patients prefer to do, his shirt pulled up, pants unbuckled but not pulled down, boxers lowered slightly.

  “It’ll become second nature,” she said. “You won’t need help.”

  Thank God.

  I loved my father. Dearly. And I wanted to help. In any way possible. I’d take as many days off work as I could without getting fired. I’d fucking get fired if I had to. I’d really do anything.

  But thank God.

  I checked the clip sealing his plastic bag twice for good measure. If that clip slipped, the nurse warned, contents would leak. Weeks later, the first time the clip came undone unexpectedly, we tried to laugh away the humiliation of his shit-soiled shirt. This was our failed attempt at controlling a situation that allowed us virtually no control at all. Dying. There was nothing we could do about it. My father’s body was less his every day.

  As months of chemo and subsequent surgeries passed, my father slept more and more. He was so still at times that I checked to find signs of his rib cage rising and falling. It terrified me to realize his slowing body was practicing for final sleep. And then there were his funeral marches to the bathroom to heave vanilla Ensure. He vomited a disgusting sweet stench of white fluid. Even applesauce wouldn’t stay down. His face was gaunt. His eyes, already virtually useless, seemed to shrink outright in sockets that were themselves hallowing at a frightening rate. One day he woke up the color of stale flan. Jaundiced. His liver joining colon. It was all going to pot. Strangely, the physical misery of this protracted death was contagious. Depletion burned deep in my core. My vision blurred. My bones ached.

  7 May 1995, my twenty-third birthday: My father woke me by singing “Happy Birthday.” I’d slept over at his house the night before, and I was still wrapped in blankets on his couch, yawning, when he handed me a padded manila envelope. The envelope was outsized, eleven by fifteen inches at least. I couldn’t discern what was inside, but whatever it was didn’t weigh all that much. My father had written Paquita, Birthday Girl across the front in fat marker. Reading those words was like accidentally chewing on a piece of tinfoil, but I said nothing to him about it. We’d spent time together nearly every day for months, and I’d come close to broaching the topic with him countless times, but it always felt forced. I mean, he was dying, for God’s sake. And we were in each other’s lives again. Insisting we have some sort of big talk about my gender seemed to miss the point completely. So on my birthday, I tried to focus on his intention, on what was, girl reference or not, a birthday gift my father had carefully chosen for me.

  “Should I open it now?” I asked.

  “Of course.” He reached forward, found the couch edge with his hands, and sat down next to me.

  I carefully loosened the envelope’s taped-shut flap, reached in, and pulled out a solid rectangle of dimensions not much longer or wider than my hand. My father had wrapped the object. And not only had he wrapped it, but he’d wrapped it beautifully. The small something was tucked inside starched gold linen fabric and tied with a white silk ribbon. I peeled off the wrapping paper only to find two more wrapped objects stacked one on top of the other.

  The top gift turned out to be an old clothbound book with a blank cover. I opened it to the title page. A dix ans sur mon pupitre. Nahui Olin. 1924. I flipped through the pages and found that although the title was in French, the book was written in Spanish. From what I could tell, it seemed to be a selfpublished collection of prose poetry, almost like an antique ’zine, really. I wasn’t sure why my father thought I’d want a collection of poems,
but the book was appealing in a vintageobject sort of way.

  “Cool book. Thanks, Dad.”

  “Open the rest.”

  I did and found a small rectangle of cardboard with something pasted on one side. Upon inspecting the pasted something, I instantly felt like I had one time as a kid. I’d been spinning all around my mom’s house, dancing like a total spaz to the Sparks’ Angst in My Pants, when I ran over to the couch, planted my hands on an armrest, did a somersault, and, klutzextraordinaire, slam, hit my back against the wall. I got the wind knocked out of me something good for my dorky dance move. That was the first time I’d ever lost my breath. It was terrifying. And thrilling. It was so intense that I thought I had died; all my other emotions up to that point, even if combined together into one single emotional whammy, came nowhere close to equaling the way I suddenly felt.

  So, what could make me feel that way again? It probably won’t immediately impress you as something very extraordinary. But just hang with me for a minute.

  Pasted to one side of the cardboard was a peeling and crumbling black-and-white photograph of a woman. A portrait. Very elegant. Posed. Artsy. And melancholy as all fuck. Strangely, I was pretty sure the photo had been mounted on the cardboard as a makeshift retablo to be used on someone’s home altar. I was confused by this because I thought retablos were supposed to depict saints—and the woman in the portrait was, from all appearances, most certainly not a saint. Still, the small cardboard object did seem to be a retablo. But, honestly, those pragmatic logistics were neither here nor there. What really mattered was that the woman in the portrait was hot. Beyond hot. In fact, the subject of the portrait just might have been the human incarnation of sex itself.

  I greedily ate up every detail.

  Written in a small careful cursive on the cardboard under the photo was: Nahui Olin. Fotografía de Edward Weston. 1924. Of course I knew who Weston was, but I didn’t recognize the woman’s name or the handwriting.

  The portrait: