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

humongous bong that her parents, thinking “it was for Arab tobacco,” brought back from Morocco. They take a yearly vacation abroad and thought this memento would have “ornamental value.” It clashed with the furniture, though, and Vicki snookered it out of storage from the attic, and now has it as “ornamental value” in her own living room.

It took us about two hours to finally leave for the party. Vicki has really straight, naturally blonde hair. But she hates it because it won’t hold a perm. So while we were smoking and talking and listening to the Beatles, she spent about half of those two hours just with her curling iron. Maybe I’m just a teensy bit jealous but I don’t know why she bothers with any of it. I mean she is just as gorgeous from the moment she wakes up and from the moment she steps out of the shower.

So, Vicki borrowed her mother’s station wagon, which is very luxurious and comfortable, and we took off for the party. It was in West Hollywood on Sunset Plaza Drive. We made bunches of wrong turns, got lost for another hour, and didn’t make it to the party until after 10 P.M. Great view from the living room but you could barely see it. The place was jammed elbow to elbow with people.

It was such a groovy evening. But it’s already after two in the morning and I have yet to crack my books for the Psych mid-term tomorrow. So I’ll save the juicy stuff for my next journal entry. So, “say good night, Gracie.”


December 18th:

I could hardly wait to get home from work. With only three hours of sleep last night, I’ve been one sorry puppy all day. But I’m itching to write my new journal entry. I think it’s almost addictive. Probably because everyone in my family is a closet intellectual of one form or another. My mother, Carla Maria, since I was old enough to remember, has spent every minute of her spare time reading. And I don’t mean dime novels or true confession magazines, but heavy stuff.

She was the best student in her high school back in Juarez. She showed me her report cards, “not to brag but to show (me) that it’s part of the Batista heritage.” She never got less than an “A” in any subject except Home Ec, and that wasn’t because she can’t cook – because she can, really well – but because she and the teacher had what Mama politely calls “personality differences.” What I think that really means was that the teacher was a major asshole.

Anyhow we only got a television when Gabby, my little sister, was about three years old. I was already thirteen. Mother definitely has a thing about TV being a negative influence, anti-intellectual... blah, blah, blah. So when she finally caved in to our protests, the television she gets has a crummy little fifteen inch, black and white screen. I’m not even sure where my mother found such an antique, probably in a garage sale or something.

I’ve felt like such a total dork most of my life because everyone would be watching their huge color TV’s and be all excited about the latest Soupy Sales antics – like when he flipped the bird to the producer of his show – and I’d just have to pretend to be part of the in crowd.

But the good part is that because my mother knows more about history and politics (her favorite subjects) than half of my college professors, some of it has rubbed off on me and Carlos and Gabby. It rubbed off on Manny, too, but I don’t like to think about that since he was killed. It still hurts too much.

Since Carlos got out of Nelles last year, he spends most of his time at work. But when he was a younger teenager he wasted a lot of his time just hangin’ with his pachuco friends. He was always trying to prove how bad-assed he was. He wanted to cover up the fact his big “secret.” When he wasn’t being cool, he was reading books – just like his mother and sister. That’s one way Carlos and me are really alike.

Oops, I just wrote “Carlos and me” when I really should have written “Carlos and I.” Mother would freak about that, she’s a Mexican nut for English syntax.

So, Carlos and “I” both love to read. We’d pass novels back and forth. I think in one summer we read everything we could find by Herman Hesse, Albert Camus, and, of course, Jack Kerouac. Carlos has these alternating fixations that he is the “Steppenwolf” and that he is the “Stranger”.

Maybe two summers before that, we’d read every novel that John Steinbeck (he’s Mama’s favorite) ever wrote. Our biggest difference, though, is that I also have a secret life, kind of like Walter Mitty, but it’s as a poet. Maybe this journal thing fits right. I have a shoebox filled with my poems – just like Emily Dickinson. And I suspect that I’m gonna die with them still in the shoebox. I’d never show them to anyone. Again, I’m like my brother. We don’t do well with burla, which is Spanish for “ridicule.” I really need to practice my espaňol. Like Uncle Gordo says, “it’s the vernacular of at least one half of our heritage.”

Carlos and I both like to think of ourselves as pretty tragic figures, and we both have what Mama calls, “rampant imaginations.” In fact, I happen to know that he spent the better part of seventh grade saying to everyone about me and him, “somos los recién llegados y huéfanos,” that we were orphans who had just recently sneaked in from Mexico and that we lived by ourselves in an abandoned shed on a parking lot. Carlos was good, he practiced those words until he got them just right.

Anyway, he is clever! He even showed one friend the “shed,” which of course is on the same not-so-abandoned parking lot that we both now happen to own. Even though Carlos and I speak hardly any Spanish, Carlos enjoys using as many Chicano words and phrases as possible so he can “blend in with the barrio and intimidate the yokels.”

When he’s around his friends or in school, he adopts this masquerade: he walks like a pachuco and speaks like a cholo. This is pretty amusing to me because, at home and at work, he speaks English like a surfer who was born and raised in the Valley. He used to dress like the other homeboys, too. Baggy chinos with sharp creases, a starched white tee shirt and a Pendleton buttoned only at the neck. But after he got out of Y.A., he lets me pick his clothes with my 20% employee discount.

Now he wears stovepipe Levi’s that we distress and fade ourselves by washing them with lots of bleach after rubbing them for an hour with sand. He’s also going for his bachelor’s degree, at night after work, at Cal State, L.A. He wants to be the first Mexican film director in L.A.

Wow, I’m rambling again. I get so carried away. I wanted to talk about “The Big Party,” so here goes. When we finally found the right address and went inside, the place was SRO, so packed to the rafters that you could hardly take a deep breath, as Vicki would say, without giving some guy a cheap thrill. Well, that may apply to Vicki because she’s got this fantastic-Playboy-Bunny-figure. I’m not exactly flat-chested but Vicki is a guy magnet. She’s what anyone would define as “really stacked.” Plus, she’s gorgeous and funny and has a personality that could light up a New York City blackout.

Also, though, she is already twenty-one and a Libra, so she knows her way around. I mean, she’s very... overt! Just as an example, about two minutes after we get to the party, this guy, who looks like he stepped out of a poster of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, sort of accidentally-on-purpose bumps into Vicki’s bosoms, and makes this fake-type apology which was just a big come-on line.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but if your heart is as warm and lovely as your breasts, I’m sure you’ll forgive me.”

But Vicki, without so much as batting an eye, says to him, “Well, if your cock is as hard as your elbow, my phone number is 555-6969.”

I could’ve died right there. She is so fresh. I would have guessed that the guy would just turn to stone. But instead, just as cool as a cucumber, he says right back at her, “That’s cute but, in some cases,” and he points his finger from his elbow to his wrist, “it’s also this long.”

Qué‚ cojones – I’ve never seen such balls! But Vicki doesn’t get flustered either. She gets this demure look on her face and says, “Hey, you’d better get a letter of recommendation, if you want me to believe the unbelievable.”

So he says, “I’ve got more than one. I really do. I’ve got signed affidavits from at least ten ex-lovers, back at my place. You wanna come read them over?”

Then Vicki takes my arm in hers, and as she turns her back to walk away she retorts, “Well, if you were really all that good, at least one of them would have taken you as her hostage, not as her lover.”

So James Dean starts getting desperate and even more aggressive. He pushes though the crowd and plants himself, ahem, firmly in front of us.
He reaches out, puts his hand on Vicki’s shoulder and says, “Look, I’m really attracted to you. If you ladies would like to get high – uh, you do get high don’t you? – well, why not come over for a toke of some super fine shit I just scored last night. Hey, I even took a shower about an hour before coming to this party. So I’m really clean, if you catch my drift.”

I could feel Vicki was getting impatient. You could hear by her voice that her throat was tightening up a little. She looked away from James Dean and at me and said, “Well, Ramona, do you think he could’ve made his sales pitch a little more rudely?” There was a heartbeat or two before it seemed like they both regained a little composure.

The guy looked at me this time and said, “The lack of tact does not deny the fact.”

I’d been invisible until that moment. I felt a surge of adrenaline, like I’d gained some kind of power by having Vicki’s arm in mine. There was an alkaline taste on my tongue, like her electricity was charging my batteries. I opened my mouth but the words that came out were Vicki’s, not mine. I looked at James Dean hard and icy and said, “So what you mean by “clean” is really that you don’t have crabs or clap or anything, right?”

He says, “Yeah, I’ve been working on the Pipeline for the past twelve months in some pretty remote parts of Alaska. Lots of Eskimos, but no TV and no sex. I’ve been as pure as a newly driven snow.”

I could feel Vicki looking at me, letting me take control. I retorted, “How chaste of you. With Mother Theresa as your only competition, you should petition the Church. Keeping such a big thing as yours in your pants for a year