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Looking for Treasure

"LOOKING FOR TREASURE"

Going to the Edge - see ABSTRACTS

Going to the Edge

The Monte Carlo labor camp was a small maze. Side sleeping rooms, storage spaces, short passages, and large work areas made a gothic pastiche of our living space.  We always felt that many small secrets were carried out and left to sleep in its cockeyed spaces. Everyone seemed to be looking for places to hide things, whether a piece of jewelry, or some porno, a knife, and even money. An awareness of secrets stashed in niches and a sensitivity to finding their hidden presence is how I uncovered my Abuela Victoria's stash of whiskey bottles, and how I came to be despised by her as a snitch, a chismoso. Soon after I showed my mother where Abuela's whiskey bottles were hidden, my grandmother was confronted by my mother and Uncle Joe. Abuela angrily returned to Corcoran in the central valley, where her oldest daughter lived and worked in a bar. The name she called me, however, stuck to me, and I became irritably undependable, sullen and independent, and incorrigible, not just because I was despised by my grandmother who wished me ill, but because all this, everything, took place in a gothic world.

Only the Café's open kitchen in the interior maze of the Monte Carlo was well lit at night and this only until the restaurant work was done and the lights turned out. Once you left the kitchen area, you entered a shadowy room and a dark hall dimly lit by a naked dangling bulb, if it was left on, which was not often. Using the bathroom at night and going from puddles of night into clouds of blackness was always problematic.

Three toilets in dimly lit spaces served the entire hotel and labor camp. They were stuck away in dark corners, hidden away like deluded relatives. Located behind the family sleeping rooms, one toilet served the restaurant workers and whatever extended family happened to be there. A second toilet was located in the back courtyard in a storage room converted to a shower stall and toilet stool. This one served the hotel's boarders and the field workers who rented the shacks ringing the back courtyard. The third bathroom, the only private one in our cockeyed inner sanctum, belonged to the master suite, a string of three smallish rooms under the hotel's stairs. The first room in that string was our father's farm labor contractor's office filled with crates, tools, and payroll files piled up. The second room was filled by a spongy double bed with a spring mattress and a gas heater. The third yet smaller room was the private bathroom. Only family used it, even if infrequently.

All three bathrooms featured a fluttering, low-watt bulb that hung from the center of the room's ceiling, casting shadowy glimmers of light. Even by day, we thought of these toilets as places for strictly doing one's business and quickly getting out. The toilets were impossible to use at night without seeing faces or shapes in the dark corners and doorways. Finding your way into the center of a black bathroom at night, reaching out trying to come into contact with the light bulb's string to switch it on, always felt dangerous, as if hidden forms were suddenly going to become real and too naked to touch. Several times I couldn't find the light string, and I sat on the toilet with my eyes closed. This only made the darkness worse, and sometimes I wept from my powerlessness. Rather than repeat this journey, I learned to hold my urges all night. Laying there in the dark, I unknowingly practiced the trick of becoming insensate. Perhaps this was preparation for a life as a fieldworker and for learning how to work as if without pain.

The three-room master suite was interconnected by narrow doors through their common walls—one, two, three. A fourth door was an outer door that opened abruptly from the dark and damp half-room bath to the back courtyard. The bathroom housed a claw-footed, chipped, and roll-lipped porcelain bathtub at one end. The bathtub squatted heavily on a wooden floor stained dark by water, worn uneven by age, and slightly slanted because of the room's poor foundation. A stained toilet bowl occupied the other end ten feet away, its broken seat leaning against the wall ready to be used if necessary. Next to it was a smelly can that held wads of soiled newspaper and smeared tissue. Squalid? Labor camp rasquache. Always uninviting to me, I learned to not smell and not be repulsed when using these dark places. These places taught me how to turn off one sense or another—sight, hearing, smell—but most of all, I learned out of necessity how to switch off fear in any kind of darkness or spookiness. I would need this trick of switching fear off many times while living in Guadalupe Gothic.

Another of our dark spaces was the third-floor attic, a triangular hovel with exposed framing that ran the length of the Café's peaked roof. Reached by narrow outside stairs, the attic hovered in our apprehension above us and was unused by men or women and not at all by the labor camp's children, who were frightened of the attic. Night sightings of a smoking figure without features, sitting like a phantom figure at the foot of the attic steps, were reported numerous times. Because the bulto, the phantom, sat on the wooden stairs leading to the attic door, the stairs were avoided by everyone. The attic sat without being used, which was unusual because space was extremely valuable in the camp.

Racing by the stairs one evening at dusk at about age seven, I saw a black shade, wearing a black hat, sitting on the bottom step. I stopped dead in my tracks at the nightmare figure, spun around in one motion, and blindly raced back into the Monte Carlo kitchen. I was struck silent for several hours, wandering around troubled before I told my mother what I had seen. By then I wasn't upset. I just wasn't sure I wanted to say "I saw him" or to believe in frightening hallucinations, which were happening all the time with high expectations they would appear. It's easier to imagine that one's mind is cracked than to believe that spirits able to invade the world will come at you with powers to torment you.

"Estaven bien locos," Uncle Joe said of Renteria and Gomez, who had hooted naked from the Monte Carlo rooftop, both hiding in the sheen of a full moon behind the hotel's false front. I remember seeing from below Renteria's leathery face gleaming wildly while he squatted exposed, his naked knees shining yellow in the moonlight before men ordered me and my brother away.

When several men had to be arrested because they climbed out on the rooftop and yelled down, threatening to jump to the street below, others alluded with raised eyebrows that treasure was probably hidden in the attic and that its curse had driven them mad. After these incidents, we told these stories with a cold shudder, supporting the belief that the attic was haunted by particularly tormented phantoms who could steal your mind.

Then in 1944, the all-out World War II effort demanded all available metal from communities, including all scrap metal. New hoes, knives, and files to replace those we used in our work were not available. The one's we used began to wear out, and tools became increasingly scarce. Men wrapped tape on broken files for handles so the last pieces could be used at least once more. Others bent their hoes in creative ways without getting ridiculed by the others and were instead admired. The interest in these creative ways was widespread, and I could see the meaning of innovation happening right before my eyes. When I became a full-time stoop laborer, as a way of lessening my labors, I had learned to heat my hoe and bend it to increase the sharpness of its bite when it hit the earth.

But meanwhile, World War II raged on, and finally someone said "The attic!" and the search for tools was on. The low attic's narrow door had been unopened for years, but now World War II caused the camp's men to breach the attic. Five men armed with lanterns forced open its door. But this was days after Antonio, our father, "The Old Man" as my brother calls him, had braved the attic steps by himself in the middle of the day, running up the stairs in his black boots. He broke the attic lock with a quick hammer blow and pushed the door open about a foot and peered in. He realized he was going to need light, turned around, and headed back down the steps when he claimed—although he was up there up himself—that he was shoved hard from behind. He flew feet first, his fedora flying off. He was shoved so hard, he slid and bounced all the way down the dry wooden stairs on the backs of his legs and buttocks. The lips of the steps splintered as he scraped down the stairs, impaling his back side with long bloody splinters and smaller ones that looked like armies of ants. He was disabled for weeks while my mother and others slowly plucked splinters from his behind. The ritual reminded me of pulling cactus stickers from my little sister's mouth after, at age three, she had grabbed a cactus pear from an open bucket and taken a bite. My brother and I felt The Old Man deserved the phantom shove and tried not to smile at the sight of him hobbling to the bathroom.

But the war was real and tools were scarce. Five men charged up the attic steps in plain daylight with my brother behind them. I brought up the tail end, as always, straggling behind him. The men shoved the door open and filled the attic with yellow lantern light. I peeked from the landing through the open door. The men wore their bandanas over their noses and mouths. Their shadows in the lamplight moved bizarrely on the attic's triangular ceiling. The attic floor was entirely blanketed with six inches of dusty fibrous powder that had thickened into a grey landscape. Beneath the thick dust, a few crates were sticking up like desert buttes. Our reward was meager: two worn-out hoes, one broken and one twisted hoe, and no knives or files. Without tools to find, there was not much to see. A couple of crates were shaken, and when they didn't contain any tools, they were pushed aside. The men were quick to get out of the billowing dust they raised as they moved around. One crate, a heavy crate of books, was dragged close to the door and left there. I noticed the crate and tried to blow dust off the books. I choked and gasped from the cloud that I stirred up. I stumbled out of the attic with blackened teeth behind my brother. I would be back, but not for months.

Always on the hunt for books at age seven, I decided to climb the outside stairs to the unlit attic over the Monte Carlo Café. Braving the attic by myself, I unhooked the broken lock and pushed the door open enough to drag the tightly packed crate of books out onto the little landing. When I finished blowing the dust from the book spines, I saw that I had rescued a complete set of strange books. They turned out to be a 1922 world encyclopedia, featuring dinosaurs in a world creation framework. They were picture books of strange worlds, strange plants, and stranger animals. All this was completely foreign to me. I tried to imagine dinosaurs walking the fields around Guadalupe. Leafing through the volumes, my mind became a mystery theater featuring these strange worlds. I felt disconnected from my body. Reading the encyclopedia would come much later.

Isolated and hungry for things upon which to rest my eyes, I would spend hours alone turning the pages from picture to picture, from dinosaur to dinosaur, without learning anything but what I could imagine. At some point, I began to sound out words and worked at reading them by matching pictures to words. I started using what I learned in school to read in flashes about the various dinosaurs and their worlds of imaginary flora and fauna.

The encyclopedia fascinated me because it was also laced with many illustrated stories from Aesop's Fables.  I would become an English reader by studying these over and over until, at some point, I understood their messages. Be kind, be fair, be good, they said.

Without adults for guidance, I took my beginning lessons on how to become a person from Aesop. I particularly identified with the fable of the gentle prince on horseback who passed through a forest carrying a message to a neighboring king's palace. Deep in the forest, he came upon a colony of ants streaming across his path. The prince instinctively pulled his horse back. An illustration of the prince on horseback watching a trail of ants busy at their work staged the situation and the problem. Does royalty trump all else? Should the prince proceed over the ants on his royal mission?  Was he too important, the ants too unimportant, to bother finding a way not to disturb them? Looking down on the streaming ants and after a pensive moment, he took a different path. It was an inconvenient route, but he took it, rather than disturb the busy ants that crossed the forest floor. His decision felt grand, a simple and beautiful way for an important person to act. My heart felt grounded and happy at the prince's decision. I loved the ant creatures as much as I loved the prince for showing us that he was magnanimous and not above the lowly. 

About that time, I stopped shooting birds with my slingshot. Holding a tiny titmouse that quivered in my hand as it was dying just didn't seem like the right thing to do, at least not the princely thing to do. I decided it was better, nobler, and grander to be a prince rather than a hunter. Aesop made me feel ennobled to be a child with a keen eye.  ■

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SUMMARY: The scene takes place in 1944 in Guadalupe California. We are a family of agricultural fieldworkers. What used to be a stagecoach stop and hotel, the Monte Carlo Hotel and Café in the late 1800s, has become a boardinghouse and cantina for fieldworkers. My family owns and works the boardinghouse and weekend cantina. We live in the backrooms. The hotel is still named the Monte Carlo Café.


Be Tonight, Prayer & Tribute, and Distant Evenings



Be Tonight  |  Prayer & Tribute  |  Distant Evenings
Musica de Campo - see ABSTRACTS

PART I:
BE TONIGHT

Leaving industrial Los Angeles and returning to Santa Maria at the height of California's 1960-1970's housing construction boom, I found day jobs among roustabouts working here and there in residential construction. I worked in the finishing of new homes, wiping excess grout from ceramic tiling in kitchens and bathrooms, behind tile setters, as well as carting trash, empty boxes, and scrap materials to dumpsters when I wasn't needed to wipe tile.

I joined in the roustabout's penchant for hard work and hard nights in Central California's throbbing economy. Nightclubbing in those days when the Monterrey Jazz Festival featured Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck and Cal Tjader, when the Beatniks were eroding and flower children were springing up among the hippies like daisies, my brother, Tony Jr., was blowing on his alto sax the sweetest, bluest Blue Moon solo that I've ever heard. Standing on a whirling dance floor under cobalt blue strobe lights, I heard my brother's familiar horn. He was playing for a mixed crowd of construction workers mingling in their best sweaters with dopeheads and hipsters dressed cool; with gals in low tops, tight skirts, and dangling earrings; young club goers dressed provocatively; and Latinos and Whites looking for the proverbial good time.

Mayan butterflies swept away in blue flocks from his jazz saxophone in the moody ambiance. Dancers, flicked with sensuality, moved to erotic pulsing. The strobe lights shining black on women's lips, their skin glittery satin, turned their dancing into a dream of sirens, their gold accessories spitting ice-blue lasers as they danced up and down. Everyone could find someone here. It was a hot time to be in Central California. The place was hot.

Through the dance crowd, as if through a moving curtain, she appeared at my table. Tall redhead, hair now shinning darkly, eyes brushed with demure indigo lashes, her face a beautiful mask and her body an hourglass shape turning slowly as she talks to me. She wants to dance. She says, "Please."

On the dance floor, she dazzles in her slow and fractured stardom. She attracts men, but her husband is serving a life sentence for stomping a man to death in a restaurant parking lot, in front of the man's family. His criminal cohort, several of which were also convicted on lesser charges, has kept an eye on her by ever threatening harm to suitors. She has been alone since her husband was convicted more than two years prior.

All tables are full and the dance floor is packed. The long bar has standing room only. My brother is playing Blue Moon again. Everyone is sharply dressed and eager to dance. It's Saturday night. The place is buzzing, jazzed.  I see some joints change hands.

My brother is rapt, blowing through a forlorn horn the rising rapture I'd heard and seen many times. His horn's silver rim flashes, up, down, side to side, fingers relishing tightness with his horn, his hazel eyes under closed lids. Up on stage wresting his solo from an improbable and forlorn demise, my brother seems an anguished angel over undefined space.

From so much jazz, so much improvisation, Tony Jr. nosedived and crashed time and again, as if cursed with the broken wings of our father's disdain for artists. As he says today laughing, "I climbed the ladder of success many times only to find out as I reached the top that I had it leaning against the wrong building."

The redhead wants to get back together, she says and pouts. Her hips are double-barreled. We boogie, blue fugues cavorting among figures, beginning again and again in music too distant to be real except it crushed you with its sadness and sexiness. We danced for hours.

We left the place together, Cynthia and me. We spent the next two years living together. I drove around with a pistol under my car seat and a baseball bat behind it before I crashed to earth after giving someone a beating and getting the hell out of town. ■

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  Marcela's Lament - see BORDELLO

PART II
PRAYER & TRIBUTE, 2001

Canek dijo:
Day by day the sadness and the violence in
Canek's heart grow. Once he spoke aloud his
thoughts. Now he is nearly mute: fists
clenched, he walks alone along the road of
thorns, of stone and sun. His shadow goes
with him. In Canek's eyes the blood of the
Indians burns. His shadow is red.

Working in the woods and the fields, my necessity-based economy functioned through a bricolage life, its quick and surprising productivity, its tendencies toward growth, toward burgeoning and efflorescence, a contagion of effects like an agrarian metaphor of divination, the way the double-looped boustrophedon turns the earth open, furrowing it in endless loops. At life's every turn the creativity edge is everywhere, not just where imagination is producing change, but where destruction's double helix squirms in its aesthetic essence, as it did when we found our bricolage ways.

I became a bricolage problem-solver no matter where I was, no matter the circumstances. This empty-minded way of thinking made me adept as a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies as I mixed and matched (bricolage) concepts and methods from different fields. This was feral creativity.

I had stumbled onto a simple bricolage truth for economic healing of my impoverishment: improvisation engages and creativity builds. With this I could let go of injustice and resentment.

From this vibratory experience of productivity, I came to make a paradoxical distinction by saying in my teaching work, "I am at my best teaching when I am most learning."

Written as a reminder in a corner of a later notebook is:

We think, we think, and we think
but the power to conceive
is to see again.

This is to remind me of the primacy of perception. This is to remind me that seeing is the power to create and that creativity is fundamentally a healing art of the mind. ■


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Distant Evenings - see E-BRICOLAGE

PART III
DISTANT EVENINGS


Saved from Myself

A dark migrant
Traveling
Fire at my heels—
     On bridges to everywhere, anywhere
     Beyond the fuming black lagoons
A child blinded in my arms—
Nowhere to die

This could not be helped,
It could not be otherwise

3/2/98


When it dawned on me that my migrant way was constrained by the same forces that browned my arms and shaped my hands, that being indigenous and rasquache (doing with ruined things) defined my psychological roots, I also felt my brother's message, broken angel messengers that we were—to enter improvisation in all worldly nudity, into its erotic ubiquity, improvising a radical vision from nothing everywhere—creatio ex nihilo—by my very insistence.

A Mayan dance in half light, the message was the alchemical prima materia as star music with a yellow dog howling at emptiness. Our birth coordinates of fate and destiny, our place of numbers in Time and Space, are given us, some say as our choice. As brothers we always believed that "Cedillos" meant how to read signs and to stand looking up. How could this crude envisioning from nothing, from the negative, become a modern way of knowing? Streaking light and fog across all our pathways El Grito, its elemental message rising on the experience of Death and Celebration as one, was our defiance. Our defiance blocked abandonment of these accidents of birth. This Replacing tasted like anti-life, like drinking the black elixirs of other cultures.

Lurching from injustices to situational defiance happening at the moment was interesting but costly. Rather than challenging persons, I began to refashion the raw energy of defiance.

"If you evoke the Id, you need to have a way of engaging it, a way to transform it or else the Id will turn back on you and burn you. Better not to evoke the Id if you don't have some way of discharging it into something useful."

I'm talking to a blond Polish princess, a fulsome immigrant psychoanalyst in New York City sitting across from me. She is studying for her doctorate and I am her professor. I am sharing with her what I have learned on the road.

Evoking the Id as I went along, committing to creativity, improvisation, non-intentionality, equally making enemies and friends, I'm sure I left a trail of smoke from burning holes in my social image. Chicanos all around me were being defiant in attitude, in issues, and challenging the menacing structures cast by entrenched unfairness. Like mountain peaks, we saw that white people continued to cast shadows by standing in everyone's sun. We knew this was real because of what political, economic, and class analysis eloquently called out to us: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We knew that Power announced itself by imposing its presence. We felt it before we could see it.

Learning as I went along, I began to think of myself as a changeling coyote, half-human skinned, half-surreal creature, the two parts always in the mirror at the same time. The coyote plays all parts of every way, which is no way after all—not this but that, and not that, but everything and nothing, stepping through paradoxes. It is very coyote to hide in the open by living in society without distinctiveness.

Beginning my time of actively feeling coyote, I moved quickly everywhere. I arrived early for job interviews so I could bricolage my persona from what I could see around me, particularly the social language and styles in office magazines, wall pictures, plaques, and routine office activity, levels, and kinds of neatness. I acted like the chameleons I remembered running in the shallow flow of central California creeks. I could be anyone now, a production foreman with good numbers, a white-collar person sitting in the back row in groups, Joe six-pack dressed in any man's sweater and polyester pants, a smiling "Jose, can you see?" wallpaper persona. Bland works. A blank screen works best of all. Letting others make a psychic impression on your mind makes the blank screen seem familiar. I shifted into what I would later call my coat of many colors, today a simple clerk with pencil behind my ear, tomorrow a consultant with tie in a professional meeting, and the day after a folk artist working rasquache and picking up curbside trash, and the day after an iconoclastic loner ignoring an insistently ringing phone.

Jumping from job to job, here and there, all work situations were simply clustered task terrains to be crossed with the patchwork personality of a badly stitched Mesoamerican from Guadalupe. Job jumping led me in my academic life to think about least-cause principles of motion. These principles became my way of evoking and handling the Id.

Changing jobs every six months rather than let my submerged defiance set fires against injustices, I used impending impact as a wave, a motive force to leap as if from stone to rock, before I did something I would regret. Attending a Colorado Governor's conference in Denver as the executive director of a community-based organization, I sat next to a highly placed Chicano state bureaucrat.

I asked him "Why do so few Chicanos rise to top levels in government and other organizations?"

He answered, "Because we're defiant and we don't fit in. We always come into conflict."

Rasquache roots grip deeply. ■

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SUMMARY: After I was laid off from my teaching job, I began to write what I thought was going to be my first book. It grew to over 450 pages and then morphed into two books. The two books then split off again, and I found myself working on three books with a total of almost a 1,000 pages of thick, multi-stylistic prose. I began to prune and cull what I had. What follows are three such culls from different parts of the three books. These will be replaced by other outtakes every so often. All the images are pieces of my Bricolage artwork.