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8:02 p.m. - 2005-05-20
Love Rant
"I know what you are capable of," Jose delivered ever-so-casually, looking intently at a place in my soul that had never been seen, as if it were just a penny on the sidewalk. He was what would have been know in an earlier day as a 'cad'. He didn't so much walk as swagger. He had a shock of black hair sweeping across his wide brow, a thick black mustache grazing full lips and black, black eyes that could expose and cultivate an underlying wantonness otherwise dormant for a lifetime. He was Mexican and Lebonese, everything about him exotic. Shamelessly he bragged about his "womans". One of his "womans", Pat, he had married several times. Legend had it she had tried to crush him against a chain link fence with her car. Burned his hand with a spoon. She was the mother of his two girls, Elvira and Elisabeth. She would follow him and show up unexpectedly everywhere. His watch was engraved, "Mi Vida" (My Life), a gift from her. He was a self-professed Marxist, but not an atheist. Once I asked if he believed in God. "Yes, my dear, but we are not His priority". Nothing was sacred, especially my baby heart. I would lock my '70 VW Bug outside Head Start. "We don't want your lousy car", he would remind me. "We" being the collective marginalized masses he presumed to speak for, "la raza unida" (the people united). I lived to be in his presence, even from afar. I would stand on the classroom steps pretending to sweep, waiting like Cinderella to be invited along on one of his 'social worker runs'. Maybe once every twentieth time, he would motion for me to join him and life was everything it had ever been cracked up to be. I enrolled in Conversational Spansih, but he mocked my efforts to communicate. "Hola, que tal?," I would say with my Gringa accent and he would laugh that deep lusty laugh that made me at once ashamed and exhilerated. Once while riding in his old white Mercedes, he suddenly screeched to a halt and jumped out. A woman came running up to him, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shouted in Spanish right in his face. Since it was clearly not "que tal?", I had no idea of what he was being accused. He always wore these thin pastel shirts, a pack of Lucky Strikes and a twenty or on a good day a fifty showing through the pocket. The Head Start kids loved him. He would paint handlebar mustaches even on the girls. We would trail behind him on the way to Smart & Final, where he would buy everyone these watermelon candies. He did magic tricks like pulling coins out of the kids' ears. They were mesmerized. Once, gently holding the translucent orange tail, he breathed life back into a dying goldfish and I discovered that I loved him. If love meant that you could see the very atoms waltzing in the air. If love meant that every breath was laced with helium. If love was a secret that animated every random thought. If love was less like pulling an elephant uphill and more like fireflies swooping in sultry circles on an Indian summer night. If love was being seen for what we are capable of, not for what is expected of us. From the moment I saw him, there at Head Start that day that he eclipsed even the August sun, every poem I wrote was for him. And he would read them all and I could tell that he was pleased. We would sit across from one another in a blue booth at IHOP. He would order me a Sweety Pie (apple a la mode) and for an hour, I was a poet. One day I happened to bring a small piece of driftwood I had found at the ocean. He took it, varnished it and gave it back to me. For years, we would exchange it from time to time, an unspoken pact between us. I wanted him to love me but he would say, "I care for you. I am not your husband or your father or your brother, but I care for you". And, looking back, I believe he did. One day, bold and frustrated, I told him, "Sometimes I feel like taking off my ring and coming to you". He laughingly reminded me that, if I were coming to him, I'd better bring the ring. But I never went to him. I would simply lie in the grass on my front yard waiting for my husband to pull in the driveway, looking at the cloudless sky and marvelling that the very same sky covered Jose. And time, as it will, passed.

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