The crunch of boots on the graveled path outside my cottage — a gritty sounding of expectation and betrayal. Thinking back on the long walk home in the crisp winter dark — west down San Carlos, past the supermarket and the used car lot and the angry young man at the bus stop — I wondered at the divisions in time and our fractured history that place us here in our perpetually cascading present, cultivating memories in competition for the truth. “Nosotros somos Mexicanos” he sang. And the way he whistled loudly while he paced, watching me approach — too loudly — daring me. Daring me to understand the words (he was sure I didn’t) and his anger and his pain “. . . somos Mexicanos.”
. . . we are Mexicans . . .
You could spot the guys from Mexico. They carried themselves in an oddly elegant manner. And why not? Their fathers’ (fathers) fathers had been landowners here long before we stole their homes and history. Before we did our damndest to trample their pride into the dust of California. Before Fante fucked Camilla in his LA flophouse, and Mulholland watered the Los Angeles Basin with the blood of farmers from the Owens Valley — before Fremont turned rogue and ran roughshod over los Californios, campaigning against the Mexicans in an undeclared war with his rabid band of los Osos — American marauders in a country not their own. Manifest Destiny . . .
Yea, the young men with their Mexican boots and native blouses had earned their elegance. And their anger. And their place in the crazed history of our adjacent and unaligned communities . . .
* * *
Treading the steps of those tired old stairs leading up to the cottage entry — an eight-light door with an inner curtain of heavy green fabric keeps prying eyes to themselves (old habits). The key in the deadbolt and the light’s toggled on, and a welcoming view of books to the right and poems in play on the desk to the left, at once comforts me, and reminds me . . .
Home again and another day racked. But there’s beer in the fridge — longneck bottles, and I think of Morrison in that dive bar in LA every fucking time I take one up. Pop the top and settle into the old chair with worn and faded cushions under the Irish flag tacked to the wall — a relic gifted me by Jack before he flew the coop and disappeared into Nevada (somewhere — I never saw him again). The flag a manifestation of the rejection of my father’s blood I entertained for a while, adopting a name from my mother’s tribe — Michael Timothy O’Neill — a naive, immature effort to humiliate him in compensation for all he’d done to me. My own petty theater of embittered resentment and I’d held it dear for quite a long while.
I smile at my failures.
But the beer is cold and it feels right as I mouth the bottle. The pints I’d shared with Hitch on campus had run their course. (I’d be fine.) Another session “philosophizing.” Pitchers in the pub and his voice rising as he veered closer to the line. Philosophizing. His way of reminding me (or convincing himself) that, despite his respect for my writing and scholarship, at the end of the day, to him, I was “just another fuckin’ honky.” Reminding me, again, that I’d best hope he keeps his Christian faith cuz, the day that stops, he’s “gone huntin’ honkies.” And I’m the first motherfucker he’s comin’ after. He enjoyed reminding me. Fifty-fifty odds as to the durability of his faith.
So I sat my seat and downed my beer and reflected on that angry young man on the street and todos los Mexicanos and all the shit we’d done and the indignation we’d birthed in them with our rationalized theft of territory and time.
And yet — it occurred to me — one indignation is born of another: it’s not popular to talk about but, the Mexicans we’d trampled underfoot had been served with a certain comeuppance — for they were thieves themselves. Driven by greed underwritten by religious authority and an empirical sense of self, they’d hiked north from the heart of New Spain to establish all the Alta California outposts ensuring their authority over the natives, los Indios. They came with their twisted faith and boxes of indulgences and the legal writ of the Requerimiento to inform the natives they were suddenly subjects of a monarch they’d not heard of and beholden to a God they’d never known.
It all made sense to the heirs of the Inquisition . . .
A fervent belief in the moral authority they’d architected during their scuffles with the Moors over the Iberian Peninsula — the rationalized concept of a “just war” fought in defense of the Christian god underscored their actions. Belief was the oil that greased the skids of their North American campaigns, from the Caribbean to the Californias. It was not for nothing that priests accompanied the soldiers on those forays, offering extreme unction as they spread their catechism across their new colonies . . .
Belief — with all of its corrosive potential — is the engine of authoritarian rule, and tribalism is our birthright. And belief and tribalism exist within the compact of convention. Men will always find their way home to this enduring model, episodic dalliances with utopian indulgences notwithstanding.
And the Castilian compact — echoing their belief in just wars in service to Jesus, El Salvador — served the Spaniards well in their efforts to subjugate the native bands of Alta California. The Ohlone, the Chumash, and the Esselen — just a few of the tribes compelled to come in from the wild and learn to die from disease and infestations offered them by forced labor in the confined spaces of the Catholic missions.
Yea, one indignation deserves another. The trampled on are trampled upon just as they trampled the tribe that came before them. No one gets a pass. No society, no ethnicity, no race is innocent of the expansionist entrepreneurialism emblematic of human social commitment. And this had been a toxin percolating between Hitch and me. He knew his African history and he knew that I was right — that we were right — and hated that. Yea, we were friends. We read together and traded interpretations of the texts we shared. We cooked chicken with rice and beans in my kitchen. We drank together in celebration of a hardfought friendship, but he needed his nemesis. Not that he hated me; rather, he needed to hate the idea of me, a white guy he admired in spite of his own adherence to the conventions of the community he served. So he reminded me frequently that I’d best hope he kept his faith. Yea, I was his friend — and sometimes I wondered if it was me he hated for that — or himself.
I went to bed and thought about Hitch and friendship and the chasm between belief and truth. And all my pattering and what shape my work might take. How would I reconcile knowledge and hope? Always something. Tomorrow’s another day. Mañana man, mañana . . .