Veracruz, Mexico. 1974.
Her mom had basically told her to bring home the bacon or not come home at all. And for a while she didn’t. She ran the streets and did what she wanted in a spell of adolescent rebellion, turning tricks for food and shelter and spending the rest on drugs, mostly pot and pills and cocaine, those being her favorites, and not bringing home the bacon.
Finally her mother tracked her down and convinced her to come back to the fold, mostly on account of her having three younger brothers to whom she’d always been a surrogate mother- as young as she was- since her mother was nothing but a drunken old pig of a useless bastard’s whore who never did anything good for any of them.
As if to underscore the point she suddenly hailed a scruffy little Beatle-headed Indian street urchin over. He was five or six with wise old man’s eyes that had a common flash of life force that told me immediately he was one of the brothers.
I’d seen the kid around the bars a lot too. Now I remembered I’d even given him a few pesos from time to time when he’d come over and sit at my table, playing with the napkins or whatever.
She talked to him like a mother might and told him to go get his little brother. With a playful pat on the ass she sent him across the plaza and soon he reappeared with a jet black haired Indian doll of a toddler in tow. She took him up in her arms and playfully cooed and coddled him and it was obvious from the love and tenderness she displayed why she hadn’t been able to stay away for all she despised her mother.
The way she treated those kids with strong and tough playful spontaneous affection and love was a work of art. A beautiful thing and tragic at the same time. Because I knew that for all her sweet and tender joyous force of character, the fact was she was a drug addled crazy little whore now. And I knew that she too would soon enough end up just like her own old haggish washed up whore of a mother, hovering in the shadows of a piss-reeking whorehouse alley like a fat, bloated old spider. Shit…
She told me as much, perhaps without meaning to when she told me she never wanted to have any kids of her own because she wouldn’t want them to have the life she and her brothers had. Which sadly foretold exactly what would happen to us all soon enough.
She knew it too and by talking about it that way it was as if she strived to exorcise the inevitable. Demons. Demons all around us as we sat there talking and drinking.
Then suddenly they almost seemed to materialize, as the winds began to pick up and the palm trees swayed to the south as if bowing to a harsher northern master. A storm was rolling in off the gulf.
You could hear cups and beer cans and trash blowing away down the street.
Her little brothers scurried off to find shelter from the coming tropical deluge as little Lupe whistled loudly for the bill.
It was time for us to go.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 1974, 2009.
damn…
love conquers all.