I remember what I remember
I remember writing a poem
About me
About you
About the Christ
About the thing in the garden:

We were stars in my mother's belly.
We were the faces of the angels,
like the angels we came into this
world with blood on our wings.

The angels are God's hit squad:
Whenever He wanted someone assassinated,
He sent an angel to do His dirty work:
Sodom and Gomorrah.
The angels always smell
like fine cigars.

My father's mother was a poor Indian who made
and sold confections in the streets
of Guadalajara to make ends meet.
The town doctor was
Don Francisco Lima,
of Castilian descent
and my grandmother,
Benigna's, paramour.

Don Francisco died when my father was very young.
My grandmother
armed herself with a gun
and took my father to the
funeral to see his father for the last time.
This was scandalous to
Don Francisco's grieving family,
and his practice which was the entire town.

As a boy I imagined my grandmother
stepping out of a Paul Muni cloud of dust
with a long barreled gun in one hand
and this filthy neonate in tow in the other hand.

The white European-descent-small-Mexican-town
aristocracy
must have shit in their white stucco catholic church!

My father would relate these events to me
while at the kitchen table,
in tears,
between drinks on his only day off.
When my father spoke of his childhood
in Mexico,
I could hear the mariachis singing
"La Paloma" in the background
and see the white dove on the windowsill.

One hot, dry day after the funeral my grandmother,
accompanied by my father, was selling her candies
when she was approached by a young man on horseback
who turned out to be my father's half brother.
He evidently was abusive to my grandmother.
Why else
would one hack his own half brother to death?

My father fled the country.
He was wanted for murder. The story got murky.
My father was drunk and pissing in his pants.

I don't remember him ever vomiting;
he was a real pro.
Anyway,
he became a romantic fugitive,
bumming around the country eating raw potatoes, iguanas
(the Mexican walking lunch)
and hiding in abandoned barns and farm houses.

He finally made his way east to Veracruz
where he boarded a merchant ship bound for Europe.
He was a stowaway.

His tale of survival was permeated with spirits
and machismo.
He hid in a coal bin
and ate whatever moved within his reach.
He was discovered by a stoker
who took pity on his emaciated
and filthy condition.

This chthonic creature
from the bowels of the ship
saved my father's life
by sharing stale bread
and rotten vegetables with him.

My father was convinced
the stoker
was not what he appeared to be.
He was the vision serpent sent
by his forefathers to rescue him.

The stoker's aspect would change
from a man to an animal:
sometimes he appeared before my
father as a bat with bread
as a snake with water or
when my father was homesick
and missed his mother
the stoker would appear
as a spider with sugar.

The stoker must have been my grandfather.

My father was not afraid of the dark.
It was its vastness
and lack of sunlight
that my father found foreboding and ominous.
In the immensity of that metal darkness
he would cry for the sun to appear
and blind his mind of all memory.

 His tears were
   tiny glass scorpions
     tumbling from his face,
       shattering on the floor
         forming little pools
           of light.

The soot-covered wingless angel
of mercy never betrayed my father's
whereabouts to anyone on board ship.
My father expressed these events
to me
with reverence
as if he were reciting
a long forgotten prayer.

Although he was frozen and silent,
I imagined his eyes
were speaking to me
and divulging secret adventures
that I would
understand when I got older.
Perhaps even undertake myself.

My father never spoke to me or my
brothers while he was sober. He was proud of the scars on his face
and a bullet embedded in his back that looked like a baby trying to
escape from a flaccid marshmallow Easter egg.

He never played with us or touched us
except when he was drunk.
On Sunday mornings he would wake us
up: He would be wearing my mother's negligee,
her bra, exaggerated makeup and sloppy lipstick.

He would come into our beds to roughhouse with us.
Through my mother's nightgown I could see
and feel the hair on his body,
like chicken wire covered with velvet.

On Sunday mornings I attended mass at Saint Cecilia's
Roman Catholic church with my grandmother,
Dolores,
which is plural for pains: Many pains.
She was my mother's mother.


I was an altar boy
in the service of the church
and the almighty Father Archangel who
perspired a lot no matter
what the weather was.
A pious man whose gullet
was the ciborium of the
sacred blood of Christ:
Each day,
at dusk,
Father Archangel was in a
sublunary alcoholic fog,
stumbling and grunting in the sacristy,
shooing away the floating angels
he had disgorged into the piscina.

He was often hungover and irritable
the following day and acted as if
he had survived a meaningless war
where he had lost everything,
his biretta,
his immortal soul.

He would be out of spiritual breath
as he climbed out of his wine-colored pit.
During these humane interludes,
he would often speak to me
in quiet tones about the priesthood
and its burdens.

One such burden was his erotic dreams
and the torments he suffered
when he had an erection.
He would ask me if I,
at my age, had erotic dreams and erections.
He would never let me answer the questions,
and interject, reassuringly,
that it was natural and physical.

I knew at that instant he had another
ecclesiastical attack of libidinal repentance.
What is the act of contrition
for a twelve year old priest-fucker?

I thought,
how can I get kicked out of the mother church?
Get excommunicated!
In those days there was no such thing
as ratting-out an aging,
fag priest.

It came to me in a walking dream
on my way home from school:
Saturday night when everyone was asleep
I took my mother's Alka-Seltzer
from the medicine cabinet,
unwrapped them carefully
and placed them in a napkin in my
Sunday-pants' pocket.


Sunday morning before mass
I very carefully substituted
the holy wafers with the Alka-Seltzer.
I arranged them in such a way
that every other person would receive
one Alka-Seltzer.

I felt an extraordinary feeling of accomplishment
and genius for someone who could not read the word "the."
At the same time I was petrified with fear;
my legs were weak and would not carry me.
It was going to be the end of the world.

The Daily News would carry the story
when the smoked cleared
and they found my beige body.

That was wishful thinking.
the big white finger in the sky
would get me first and drill me
like a gimlet right into hell!
Maybe I could cut a deal with the devil and paint signs for him.
It was the only thing I did well in school.
Maybe I could learn to read in hell.
Anyway, I would get there before Father Archangel
and whack him since I was already in hell.

The eucharistic rite was in slow motion:
Father Archangel looked shiny and white,
floating in the air as he performed the rites.
My feeling was he knew what was going to happen
and deliberately let it happen in order to become
a martyr and a saint.

There were millions of expectant parishioners
in the church that morning.
Saint Cecilia,
a church no bigger than a house fly,
in the village of Spanish Harlem,
had miraculously become a gigantic cathedral that morning
because it knew that an extraordinary event would take place
and that I was responsible.

Then everything stopped moving
except for Archangel's hands
inserting the holy wafer
into the open mouths of the expectant parishioners
that instantly erupted belching white foamy lava.

They were like mad dogs foaming at the mouth
and barking at the oblivious priest
as he held the apocryphal Grail up to heaven
offering my body,
my blood
to Jesus Christ.
He screamed!
And I disappeared
into a long puff
of marijuana,
alcohol and drugs.

My mother is a santera:
Santerismo is not witchcraft.
Witchcraft implies evil doing. In Santerismo
the person who offers the service
is the belief system.
The services can bring harm to someone;
can right a wrong;
effect a cure of an illness;
attract or drive away a lover.

She employs auguries,
strange forms of phylacteries,
talismans
and all manner of potions,
including rituals for unrequited love when
menstrua occur.

Notwithstanding,
a santera is a medium,
a vessel for the spirits from heaven or hell:
These spirits would occupy my mother's body
and use her faculties to communicate with the payee.
She did well.

The procurer of my mother's services would benefit,
therefore it is not considered evil.

Only the two demons that are at the right and left
of the devil, Altaro, Altaclan, and the one in front of him,
the most malefic, Altaru, are evil. Therefore, one respects
the devil as he directly does not cause evil.
Evil is the invocation and not the act of placing a glass
of clear water with a rose in it on a window sill.

My mother would dress me up
in little girls' dresses
before I was old
enough to attend school.

She often photographed me on these occasions
and would show them to her friends with the
casualness of a reminiscing parent.
And with the manners of a pedantic official,
she would speak of me as if I were far away
attending some wonderful college.

In this tableau vivant,
my mother would mention that she always wanted a girl.
In these soft black and white photographs I would be wearing a
velutinous white dress;
bobby socks
and buckled shoes to match;
my hair was long and curly,
and arranged in a coif of light colored ribbons.
I had a puzzled look on my face.

When I began grade school I was ashamed to go to the boys' room
with the other boys because I was wearing little girl's underwear
that were pink and shiny.

While my father was at work,
my mother had male friends visit her.

I was forbidden to ever mention these visits to my father
or my grandparents who lived in the same building just
across the hall:
My family and my mother's family occupied the entire
floor. We were told (I have two younger brothers,
Philippe and Kelly) to stay in our room during these
visitations. I would sneak out and watch my mother
engage in acts with these men that I had witnessed the
night before while my mother and father thought we
were asleep.

I remember one of my mother's paramours in particular,
el Patilludo, the one with exaggerated sideburns. He was always
attired in black bell bottom pants and had shiny, black mummified
hair that was as sleek and tight as a shower cap on his head and
obviously attended to with laborious care. He was taller than my
mother; however, when I watched them he would be kneeling in
front of her between her legs in the kitchen as that was the farthest room and the most remote from the bedroom.

He would have tears in his eyes that accumulated
on his mustache like icicles. My mother would
lovingly, with the tip of her tongue, lick the tears
from his eyes.

El Patilludo looked like one of the flamenco dancers in a poster
that hung in the living room.

I once over heard my mother mention that he reminded
her of Valentino, the great lover of silent films.
Yeah, right. Only if Valentino had the puffy cheeks
of a beer drinker.

My mother's lovers all had code names
as they were more often than not
the surreptitious exchange between her and
her band of house-coat-and-pin-curler friends immediately
following the departure
of one of my mother's lovers.

They were
hungry lionesses
quickly approaching
a freshly killed corpse
of gossip.

My mother was the queen bee who provided
lascivious pollen to these pedestrian drones.

The kitchen was suddenly aglow with their shiny cold cream faces
and the hushed tones of erotic whispers;
a forum for explicit comparisons of amatory techniques
and erogenous wishful thinking as these women were all married and
would not dare cheat on their Carlos and Fernandos.
Mr. Spanish Dick, Sr.
The consequences would be
facial disfigurement
with a straight razor
or two slashes across the ass,
so she could not lay on her back
and fuck anybody else,
by a self righteous,
jealous husband who had been
fucking anything that walked,
in the name of his manly,
macho duty because all mighty
God had given him
is only begotten twelve inch dick!

My family life came to an abrupt end when I mentioned these events
to my grandmother who confronted my
mother. My mother became a beige tropical tower
scintillating anger who threw me out of the house naked into the
hall of the building for betraying her.
I lived with my grandparents after that.
My mother did not speak to me for months.
At my grandparents',
I listened to the radio late into the night.
The radio looked like a miniature church with a green,
luminous Christ that emanated music and white,
masculine voices that told stories.

As I listened
late at night,
I ate salt from my left hand,
while turning the dial
with my right hand.
I was the only human being
alive
on the face of the earth
and I was communicating
with fantastic beings
in the green cathode night.

Eventually I returned home. My father was losing one job
after another because of his drinking. He was hallucinating,
chasing away the vision serpents and becoming violent and dangerous.
When my parents separated I remember going to school on an
abandoned iceberg, not being able to read or spell words that
I could the day before for the teacher. I wrote plays
for puppets; I constructed a theater for them and recited poetry
from memory. All that vanished when my father left home.
Until now that has been the most tragic event in my life.

The end came one Sunday spring afternoon at dinner, when,
what seemed, without provocation, my father cut the left
side of my mother's face. In slow motion my brother Philippe
and I beat him with baseball bats into a pool of blood.
I had a .22 caliber automatic Italian Bareta that I jammed
in his face, cocked the trigger, and told him to back off,
to leave.

He looked at me as if he were going to tell me one last
story with his eyes once again, he smiled ever so slightly
and told my mother, without ever taking his Maya-bark-eyes
from me, that I would cause her the most pain and
trouble. He left and so did the Mariachis and La Paloma
on the windowsill.

One summer afternoon some of my boyhood friends told me
that their parents had seen my father on a bench on East
110th in Central Park drinking with a bunch of bums.
I don't remember walking or running to the park to see my
father. I just appeared across the street and he was there,
dirty and unshaven.

He was sitting on a bench with his arms around a woman
who was fat and as dirty as he was. There were other
derelicts on the park bench, but the woman fascinated
me for some unknown reason. Her stockings were loosely
rolled around her ankles. My father's once jet black
hair was grey and as long as the Indians' on TV.
Although it was summer he was wearing a tattered winter
coat that was many sizes too big. In one hand he held
a pint bottle of wine.

The woman and my father were both drinking from the same
bottle as if they were sharing some spiritual part of
their lives, some mysterious part of their bodies, with
each other. There was something magical in that bottle
that bound them together. I stared and did not cross the
street to speak to him. I vanished as quickly as
I appeared into another puff of smoke.

I remember it was a noisy spring in Spanish Harlem when
I came home one evening after running the streets. I found
my mother in the bedroom sitting in front of her Bronx-Italian
Renaissance vanity; her face was glowing with mascara
and rouge. She was wearing large ornamental, miniature
playground-swing earrings made of gold, and all her
jewelry and her favorite perfume, FALLOW ME: It was a
dark blue bottle with a white decal of a palm tree and
a quarter moon.

Her hair was in what she called her Joan Crawford up sweep,
held in place, in the center, by a large Spanish comb that
was flanked by two long ornate, lethal skewers.

Her eyes puffy and moist. She looked like a
Chinese emperor with lollipops in her hair. She calmly
faced me and informed me that my father was dead.
Before I uttered a word, she became quite erect and
announced, with an air of glutinous authority, that the cause of
his death was "acute alcoholism." She almost smiled
as if the term would some how dignify his condition in
Central Park. As if he were a great casualty of an
honorable war.

The fierce caveman in drag was dead.
The warrior who vanquished cirrhotic spirits was dead.

My mother began to drink a lot.
One summer night she was drinking and became ill.
She was glistening with perspiration,
cheap perfume and wrapped in cigarette smoke.
She asked me to help her to bed.

She was wearing a house dress with nothing underneath.
This was shortly after my father had left.
I may have been twelve,
perhaps younger.
She asked me to lie next to her.
I did and fell asleep next to her
with extraordinary anticipation.
When I awoke she was a warm mist hovering,
suspended over me,
naked,
a giant night bird
whose soft long feathers
were sweeping my body away
into the cumulus clouds
of pubic black hair.

My pants were down to my knees.
I looked at her for an instant.
A nano second in a boy's erotic time.

She was startled.
I put myself back to sleep.
No, a coma.

the bells
in all the children's books
were broken
all the shooting stars fell
out of heaven
and it was forever darkness
and sadness
at night the moon would burn
thereafter
like a rose
that would always belong
to my mother
I had drunk
Medusa's blood,
in the dark,
saw her face,
but,
unlike Perseus,
I became the blind groom
of unfathomable
fascination

After that whenever she began to drink,
I would stay home with her.

When my boyhood friends would boast of
seeing so and so's panties,
I would go home to be with my mother.

My first arrest took place in junior high school:
a gun.
My second arrest:
a gun, etc.

I was in a club called
The Young Demons.
We were into guns,
drugs and territory.
My life was rehabs,
Arrests and jails
Crabs
Syphilis
Hepatitis
And finally
The mad houses:
These were the walls of insomnia
Where Dante became incontinent and feeble,
Twirling his eighteen inch Asian penis;
Where God sat in an antique electric chair
Preaching the gospel of a heaven made of iron;
Where doctors and lawyers
Burned their faces with lighted cigarettes;
Where human excrement was soap
And patients removed imaginary wires from their throats;
Where the clouds of heaven could be bought for a blow job.