How I came to Love the Bucktoothed Aztec Maiden - ROUGH DRAFT

In a shabby border city in the 80s, in an ESL high school, in the hall by the front door, across from the laughable-inept mural of the Battle of Puebla, on the radiator, early in the AM I sat with Mike, who, of course, was drawing. With great, precocious fluidity and control, I now know, as an art critic. But back in the day, when we were, what? seventeen? I just inarticulately knew that Mike was good. Very good. I mean, I could draw, and would, a year later, win a scholarship for my drawing, but Mike had a gift. I swallowed my envy. I was practicing my cool. We arrived an hour before school started. A few teachers with coffee, looking vulnerable or candid or human under the fluorescents shambled out of the faculty lounge, trailing clouds of tobacco smoke. The copy machine chugged and wheezed in the reception office behind us. Then the front doors opened and the kids poured in. We sat on the radiator and watched, as though on a rock in a flood. We mocked: those suede loafers the Mexicans wore, and their hairnets and dickies. The jocks' muscle shirts and blow-dried hair and submissive, chirpy girlfriends. The geeks for all the usual reasons. There were very few we never mocked: the beautiful sad girl in the trenchcoat. Her little brother, who I one morning decided had "moral authority", and, at any rate, had a beauty and severity and seriousness that left us silent. For no reason I can remember, we also never mocked the soccer players, who were somehow, in our high-school minds, not jocks the way that players of American sports were jocks. For one thing, they smoked lots of grass. For another, they moved as a synchronized pack and had a reputation for sudden savagery, though iy was delivered with something like affability. The morning I'm remembering right now Mike singled out a short, fat, bowlegged, bucktoothed Mexican girl for caricature. As a defender of the weak, as I saw myself, I saw her as off-limits, so Mike's choice of target made me uncomfortable. But my cool was more important than my compassion, so I watched poker-faced. He did a few quick and economical sketches. Uncanny resemblance. Funny exaggerations. Her thick makeup almost clown-like. Her teeth horsey. Her hair towering and precarious. Her boobs spherical, helium-filled, and in the way. Once he get her right, he began a new drawing: a feather-plumed, muscular, stern-faced Aztec [god? prince?] strode up temple steps carrying, not the voluptuous and swooning virgin maiden of Mexican folk-art iconography, but the bucktoothed girl. The more likely virgin. I tried but failed to contain my laughter. It was a great drawing, a great joke, irresistibly funny.

I don't remember how it happened, but at some point I had learned that I could walk into the reception office and make a copy and would not be questioned. I just acted like I was on an errand: brisk, focused, entitled. When Mike did a good drawing, I took it into the office and copied it. Then we looked for a good place to hang it. My gift to match Mike's drawing was an ability to jump at least two feet higher than anyone else in the school. I could stand flat-footed on the gym floor holding a basketball and suddenly launch vertically and dunk the ball behind my head. I was just about six feet tall at the time. I could reach almost eleven and a half feet. I donated this gift to Mike's art. I took those copies, added a strip of tape to the top edge, found a good display wall, grasped the copy in my right hand, took a long step, leapt, and left the drawings high above the floor. We always did this at the last possible moment before the late bell rang. The halls were nearly empty. We aimed to create a noteworthy mystery.

People noticed. We liked to lean on a wall within sight of our latest "hanging", as we called them, and watch students stop and laugh or shake their heads. We lived for their speculation and comments. Mike lived, I think, for their approval. "That's AWEsome!" could make him smile through his cool. A caricature of our jowly, gorilla-browed and much-loathed Principal was received with such glee that we heard kids talking about it in class days later.

Not all our hangings were well received. Some were notorious. Mike's gift came with a deep undercurrent of anger and aggression. His caricatures were not cute or endearing. They were mean and pointed. He was usually calm and very quiet, but when he mocked someone or something his color rose. He spit. And when he drew to mock, the drawings seethed with bitterness and contempt. They hung in the halls, out of everyone's reach but mine, transmitting unease. Our classmates responded. When they laughed, it was at someone's expense, with adolescent cruelty and schadenfreude. When they didn't laugh their faces contorted. I think they felt disgust and pity. I often did.

One time, Mike drew a massive, turgid, spurting penis wearing a sharp business suit, sitting in an ornate golden throne on a cloud, surveying a small, pathetic Earth. Understand that I was Mormon. I was at school early in the morning not because I was an early riser, but because I was required to attend a 6:00AM youth seminary class every schoolday. The penis-God shocked me. The suit seemed somehow an even graver affront, as I thought Mike meant to attack my Mormonism, with its suited hierarchy and corporate structure. As I sat that morning and watched him draw I was deeply uneasy. I loved my church and longed to be better-suited to it, less inclined to rebellion and suspect interests. But I had developed a real solidarity with Mike over several months of sitting on the radiator. I sat and watched and did not show my unease. And when the time came, as the halls emptied after the first bell, I took the drawing into the office, copied it, taped it, and, without waiting for Mike's input this time, I jumped higher than I ever had before and affixed it to the glass face of the portrait of [********] that hung front and center in the entry hall. As I fell back to ground Mike muttered "Fuck, dude.", the sweetest approval I ever heard from him. It was brilliant. All the tawdry neoclassical ornament and grandiose symmetry and faux-ceremonial axiality of the main hall focused on that drawing of penis-God. He sat up there on his throne judging us. Aloof, unassailable, virile, and contemptuous.

Between first and second periods we stood nearby and watched. A student stopped and looked up. Then a few more. There was no laughter. Some shook their heads. Some looked disgusted. Some asked for explanation. That was girls, mostly. Mike stood with his arms crossed. My hands were shaking. It hung there all day. I felt dread. The next morning it was gone. We figured a janitor with a ladder did the rounds every night looking for our hangings. I liked to imagine him re-hanging them in some dank mop-closet around a girly poster. I wrote a short story for my English class in which a janitor collects these crazy drawings until his mop closet is full of them, floor to ceiling, and then a girl is assaulted on campus, and he is convicted of the crime because of his deviant art collection. I had a shaky grasp on American jurisprudence, but my guilt was clear and focused.

I was a lonely kid. I hadn't wanted to move to the shabby border city. I had lived in Boston, and I hated the provinces. I went through my schooldays in grim-faced silence, suffering no fools. I was depressed, I think, but I kept that weakness hidden in judgmental severity. I became a music snob. I dressed like an east-coast artist, though I was a fine athlete. I wrote twisted and dark stories. It seems contradictory now, but I found comfort and refuge in my Mormonism, to which I had converted early in high school while still living in Boston. So when Mike and I started hanging out I put great stock in our strange friendship. We barely spoke, and we knew very little about each other, but we were tight. Even though I spent that entire year sitting by his side, I knew very little about him. In fact, I never knew why he was at school every morning when I showed up at 7:00. He was a cipher. He always wore the brightest Hawaiian shirts and shorts, all of them heavily mended and patched. He wore cracked old shoes. He stunk of mold and I thought I detected a hint of urine and motor oil. His hair was a wild pile of blond curls, Beneath our very different uniforms we shared a lean ropiness. Now, as an adult I suspect that he came from a bad home. Maybe he chose his eccentricity, but I suspect he wore his father's castoffs and lived in squalor. I don't know.

The entry hall, as I wrote, was grand. At the back, above the portrait of [*********] the hall rose to two high-ceilinged stories and a balcony looked over the entry. A cornice ran around the hall. The morning Mike drew the Aztec [?] carrying the bucktoothed sophomore, I undertook a new feat of hanging. I remember feeling some hormonal recklessness. I took the copy and swung my legs over the railing and walked out along the narrow cornice, kicking wads of gum and dust to the floor far below. I stretched and hung the drawing on a well-lit spot about 25 feet above the entry floor. Mike gave a half-smile of approval. I rushed off to class with my hands shaking.

Later I had to get something from my locker. As I was leaning down I felt an explosive pain in one hamstring and in the top of my head, and found myself a moment later lying on the floor with my head in the locker, reeling, seeing stars. A squat Mexican gangster in hairnet and Barrio Hollywood jacket was standing over me, winding up for a kick. I managed to spin out of the way. He pointed at me and said something I couldn't understand, and turned an walked off in a group of other Mexicans wearing the same jacket. As the crowd thinned out, I sank to the floor by my locker. My head was cut and bleeding, a nerve in my neck was pinched, and the back of my thigh was contracted into a hard knot in which I could feel every heartbeat. I think he kicked me in the hamstring. After a while, I got up and left school and took the city bus home and went to bed.

When I went back to school they were waiting. They didn't dare attack me in front of the Principal's office, but two of them stayed in the hall after the late bell rang. I walked past them pretending they weren't there. They followed me to class calling me a faggot the whole way. They were there after class, too. Maybe five of them. I stayed in a group of students. One of the Mexicans reached in and knocked my books to the floor. I managed to grab them before they could attack me. Later, I was in my art class when something hit me on the head, hard. One of the Barrio Hollywood boys was in the class and had thrown a baseball-sized handful of clay at me. I bent down and picked it up, shaped it into a perfect sphere, wound up, and threw it as hard as I could back at him. It skipped off his desk and caught him on the shoulder as he spun away. His stool clattered to the floor. The teacher looked up, came over, and marched us to the office. The principal knew the Mexican, but not me. The Mexican got three days' detention. I got one. After school. I sat in the cafeteria with the usual miscreants, including several from the Hollywood gang. They stared at me and I stared out the window. A short while before the end of detention I approached the monitor at her desk, nodded my head toward the gangsters, and said, in my most even and matter of fact way "Those guys are going to kill me if I leave school with them." She flinched. I said "I need an escort out of here." She pushed the button on the intercom and asked the receptionist to come down. In a minute I was in the Principal's office, waiting. When he came in, he knew my name. "What's the matter, Mr Lewis?" I repeated my certainty that I would be attacked after school. He expressed doubt. I leaned forward and showed him the two-inch gash in my skull. I told him the story, but left out the drawing of the bucktoothed girl. He asked if the attack was unprovoked, and I said yes, and he seemed satisfied. I stayed an hour past the end of detention sitting in his office, doing my geometry homework. Doing beautiful proofs, vowing to myself to stay out of trouble from then on. When I left his office, I walked down long empty corridors to a back door and walked a back way to a distant bus stop. I didn't go to school for a week. When I did, I avoided Mike and started sitting closer to the front of the class. I had avoided participation before then, but started doing the work and raising my hand. I discovered a gift for geometry proofs and creative writing that before I had only suspected. I thrived in a modest way.

I avoided the Barrio Hollywood boys. They cooled down, but I made accidental eye-contact with one between classes one day and I could see hatred and unfinished business in his level stare. Even after that summer break I could sense their animosity. During my senior year I barely saw Mike. I took most of my classes at the University and applied myself and stayed out of trouble at school. One day a few weeks before graduation I was in the hall with just a few other students when two of the gang came down the stairs and spotted me. They both immediately came down the stairs at a run. I don't remember feeling an impulse to run. I just backed up and swung my backpack off my shoulder in a movement more or less like a forehand tennis stroke. It contained at least two fat university textbooks, which knocked the running gangster's upraised arm aside and collided with the side of his head with enough force to throw him off his feet and headfirst into the wall. His smaller buddy collided with me and knocked me backwards onto the floor. I blindly reached up and grabbed something. His cheek and hair. I grabbed and closed my fist and he screamed. I bounced his head off the floor and got up and he stayed down. The first guy I'd hit squared off and wanted to fight. I said, in a remarkably calm voice, "If you take one step toward me I will put you in the hospital. I will break your face." He spit on my shirt, helped his friend up, and they left. I picked up my backpack and headed home.

News got around school that I had beat up two of the Hollywood boys. There was much glee among my white friends. I just felt exhausted. I didn't want their back-slapping. I wanted to done with high school forever.

The next day I saw the guy who had originally attacked me. The bucktoothed girl's cousin, I had learned. He rarely came to school. I saw him put an enormous burrito in a locker and noted the number. this was nearly a year after the original attack and my neck still hurt. In a moment of inspiration, I walked up to the science lab, and, using the purposeful act I'd perfected in making those photocopies, I walked into the supplies closet, grabbed a fat dry-cell battery and a copper wire, and walked back out. Nobody stopped me. I went and found the gangster's locker, ran wire from each terminal of the battery, and welded the locker shut. Just a few quick touches around the strike plate, and a bead of molten steel on each hinge. The smell of scorched oil paint filled the hall.

At lunch I stood opposite the locker and waited. Pendejo, as I'd come to think of him, tried his lock several times, punched and kicked the door, swore in two languages, then noted the welds and swore some more.

Over the few weeks before graduation a terrific stench developed around his locker. That big burrito must have gone anaerobic. Flies clustered around the vents and flew in an out. I pictured maggots. One morning the door was gone. There were grinder marks where they'd cut my welds and the hinges. A faint odor of putrid meat remained, under the smell of bleach.

A year later the leadership of the Mormon church called me to be a full-time missionary in Mexico. When my friends heard this, they said all sorts of racist things and reminded me of the fight. I had always assured them I had no ill will toward Mexicans in general, and that I didn't care where the Hollywood boys were from, but they never quite took me seriously. The fact is, I shamed a girl, and her cousin defended her in his hamfisted way, and I got lucky defending myself. I was a scared and lonely boy, and it felt good to hang out with scared and lonely Mike, there on our radiator, like a rock in a torrent of other scared and lonely kids. We found solidarity, even identity, in our mockery of them. We had an eye for the grotesque, but we didn't have the experience to feel compassion. Now, that bucktoothed girl, I'd pay for her braces.