ORANGE MESSIAHS by Scott A. Sonders (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

her so. She makes it seem like my going from the Eastside to the Westside of L.A. is the same thing as her swimming across the Rio Grande river. Please! Give me a break!

Then of course she adds her typical political commentary by saying, “I’m not so sure she would’ve abandoned me if it weren’t for that new Amendment. Letting people vote at only eighteen. Rosalia, you know me, I signed the petitions because it’s the democratic way. But now look. It’s backfired. I’ve lost my baby.”

I’ve a brother, and a little sister whose nickname is Gabby for Gabriella. I had another brother, Manny, but he was killed near the same time that I was raped. He’d been named for my mother’s brother, Manuel, who everybody has called Gordo since forever. Sometimes I think it’s my fault that I got raped and that little Manny died. And I definitely know it’s my fault that my Mama has had a pretty hard life. I was born here, well, in Texas anyway, but I still know what it’s like to be called a wetback.
Mama’s had to work so hard to raise us. If it wasn’t for me, she might have been able to go to college like my Uncle Gordo. He went to Chicago Northwestern and became a big-time architect.

My uncle, who I absolutely adore, has come to visit us almost every Christmas. Even though he practically worships my mother – she’s his older sister – he still gets annoyed that neither me or Carlos or Gabby speak much Spanish. Well, okay, “fluent” isn’t even close. He says, “If the kids don’t respect their language, they won’t respect themselves.” He says it’s a matter of la raza, taking pride in our Mexican heritage.”

But Mama is adamant. She’s not one to be bullied in an argument when she thinks she’s right. And usually, if she thinks she’s right, she is. She reminds him that our father is an Anglo and that “Pa’ hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Qué vale toda sus educacion sí todavía hablas ingles sí con un acento? 2

I wanted to make Uncle Gordo happy. I tried to read “Cien Aňos de Soledad,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in the original Spanish. I failed horribly. I felt that reading through it, word by word with a dictionary, was like my own “hundred years of solitude.”

So, about my therapist. Her name is Dr. Diane Rosen and she’s trying to help me stop thinking such guilty and “destructive thoughts.” I really wish I could be just like her. She’s around thirty-five with a little girl named Becky Sarah. What a beautiful name!
Anyway, Becky is extremely smart and beautiful, just like her mother. And her name reminds me of a book I once read, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nearly half the girls I know have the same middle name as me, “Maria.” I think it’s a rule for being Catholic. If you’re a girl then you have to be named after “Mary,” or, at least, after her mother, “Anne or Anna.” And if you’re a guy then you have to be named after Mary’s husband, “Joseph or Jose.”

Of course, I know a lot of guys whose first name is “Jesus,” which in Spanish is pronounced “Hay-soos.” But they pretty much say it’s something else because it’s not considered a cool name anymore. Hey, I’m Mexican, well, half of me anyway. Most of my friends are Mexican. Around here “Jesus” is a common name. But the white kids laugh when they hear it – they pretend the name is “Hey Zeus.”

I’m straying again. What I wanted to write about tonight was a discussion that I had with my mother, last night when I went over there for dinner. I’m really thankful for my mama, by the way, because she’s an extremely hip person, not like most other mothers. In fact, I think if it weren’t for us she’d probably have been a beatnik when she was my age. Maybe she’d even be a hippie now and live in San Francisco on Telegraph Avenue and teach political science at Berkeley. She is very political. She’s been on, at least three that I know of, anti-Vietnam peace marches. Last year she campaigned in our neighborhood to get the 26th Amendment passed to lower the voting age to eighteen. She says that if her boy is old enough to die for his country, he’s old enough to vote.

2 “How will they find decent employment without knowing perfect English? What is all their education worth if they still speak English with a Mexican accent?”

But anyway, Mama had read the “Ann Landers” column in this morning’s Herald Examiner which talked about a kid who’d been given up for adoption and now that he was eighteen was “poking around and looking for his real mother.”
This is a sore spot with my mama. Outside of our immediate family, no one knows that I’m technically illegitimate. This information would be considered very shameful if it got around.

My father is an Anglo who I’ve only met a few times when he has randomly appeared for a few short visits. When I was between about ten and twelve, there was even a period that he lived with us, but that’s the last time I saw him. The way mama tells it (and of course this is the Readers Digest condensed version), my father was called off to fight in the Korean War just before he and my mama were going to get married and just before he even knew that she was pregnant. It’s my father who gave my brother and me the parking lot. Carlos runs the place and gives me a small allowance every month from the proceeds.

The lot still carries our visiting father’s name, PARKER’S SELF-PARK. Kind of clever that Ray Parker, giving a catchy name to an otherwise drab business. But I must admit, that legacy of his does treat us well.

The other reason Mama was annoyed by that news column, and this is more complicated, is because of something that happened which hits a little closer to home. Almost four years ago, not much before I was raped, my best friend, Donna, got pregnant. She refused to say who the baby’s father was, so her father beat the hell out of her for not telling. There was no way she could get an abortion. She had the child, a little boy, at Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, the one on Sunset and Edgemont. I was there when she went into labor. She signed a statement saying her son should be given up for adoption. A few hours later she locked herself in the hospital bathroom and slashed the back of her leg at the knee, diagonally, opening a major artery the length of several inches.

I was the first to find her. It was 7 A.M. The first light of day was shimmering in a hazy mix of fog and smog and illuminating the edges around the letters of the Hollywood Sign, in luminous pinks and golds. The sign looked as if it were announcing the entrance to Peter’s Pearly Gates. Or maybe it was Dante’s Inferno; to this day I can’t be sure. Those muscular brown hills cradling the Cahuenga Pass always felt masculine to me. Earthy. Like damp mesquite, strong and sexual.

After staring out the window, my rapture broke just long enough to realize that Donna had been in the bathroom for awhile without speaking. I shook the door handle. It wouldn’t budge, so I ran to find a nurse. I was scared. Donna had been a good student in Biology Class. She knew her way around anatomy. When the door had been forced open, I saw Donna sitting still upright on the shower floor. She looked like one of those patriotic statues in a park fountain. Her only birds and trees were those that watched from the bathroom’s vinyl wallpaper as she’d taken a stolen scalpel and managed to bleed her own body of its liquid mortality within the space of a few heartbeats, and within the space of elation and sorrow. Her porcelain skin was ghostly. Fifteen years of history had gushed out and collected in red pools on the cold blue tiles. Donna had chosen the tiles so the mess would be easy to clean. She died the way she’d lived, not one to cry for help or make a burden of herself. Overly considerate.

The hospital delivered her boychild to a private adoption agency, where his surrogate parents claimed him. Before that, though, I saw the newborn in the delivery room. He was very alert and perfectly formed, with eyes of delft blue. I am now the only one who knows who the father is.

Against the will of the Church but to avoid a permanent symbol of disgrace, Donna’s parents then had her body cremated. For added insurance, they moved to a different neighborhood where nobody would be able to remind them of what had been done.

I remember standing on the end of Santa Monica pier, where the continent becomes buried by the Pacific Ocean, and I watched as Donna’s ashes were received by the long, gray arms of God.

The Ann Landers letter and these two incidents combined to create the until-one-in-the-morning discussion between me and my mama, a discussion which lasted until it was too late for me to make a journal entry last night. I’d gone for dinner and a visit. I said hi to Gabby who was sitting in the den, watching All In The Family on the tube. Then, I returned to talking with Mama, which became more a monologue on her part.

“Mi hija, you’ve asked me many times about how things were before you were born, before I came here from Mexico.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, “but what does that have to do with why this Ann Landers thing has you so all in a tiff?”

“You’re so impatient,” said my mother, “you really must learn more patience. I’m going to tell you a story, one that is very close to me, one that is part of what makes me, me. But you will need an open ear, a comfortable chair, and some patience.”

“Yes, Mama. Just get on with it. ”Mama sighed, “Well, I guess you’re not so unlike me when I was your age. I was also very impatient with my mother. I think it’s true what the psychologists say about the competitiveness of young women with...

“Mama,” I cut in, “I said a wanted to hear the story, not a lecture, okay?”

“Oh never mind.” she said, “ Anyway, before I met your father and long before having any experience like the kind with Donna’s murder (she preferred this word over the less accusatory term “death”), and when I was only about fifteen myself, I had a best friend, Elisa Mariella Maria Sanchez. She’d been...”

“Elisa,” I cut in again, “is that why you like that name so much?”

“Yes, do you mind if I continue?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“So, as I was saying, Elisa had been adopted by her aunt and uncle. She’d been told that her blood parents had drowned when the car they’d been driving got a blowout, lost control, and flipped off the bridge going from our hometown of Ciudad Juarez and across the river into El Paso.”

“That’s where me and Carlos were born, right? El Paso?”

“Well, yes,” she said. I mean, no. That is, not exactly. You were born outside the city limits, upriver several miles. That’s where the