|
Saturday, May 01, 2004
Wow. Everything's changed. Looks good. Just back from a semi-self-induced hiatus. Let me reintroduce myself:
Manuel Mendez, some call me Manny but nowadays most everyone calls me Ocho. I only have eight fingers, long story, (you should start at the beginning) and thus the nickname. It has a certain ring I guess, Ocho Mendez. I hate it. But I'm stuck with it like a nose or a lazy eye.
I just got out of jail, ok, that's where I've been, why I haven't been posting. They don't let you do that sort of thing there. It seems driving drunk is against the law. Got busted in my ex-wife's car to make it all worse and fucked up. It was just one of those things, you know. Didn't come to a complete stop at a stop sign, fastidious cop, just doing his job, puts on the light show, checks my look, doesn't like it, breathalizer, cuffs. It ran like a commercial in my brain the entire time I was locked up. Haven't been able to heal up this with my ex, haven't seen my daughter.
But I'm clean, man. I took that time to really look somewhere inside and find a way to form my future. I'm working at it, every pulse beat, not drinking, not wanting to, for maybe the first time and you know what? It's good to be back among the living.
posted by ochomendez at 12:53 | link | comments (14)
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Things happen. And usually all at once. I ask myself: how does a fairly mundane life suddenly change, suddenly take a dive into chaos? A friend of mine, no need to give out names, is in the middle of a personal crisis just as bad as mine. He drinks too, so you can say we're asking for it, that we're prone to misfortune, but it seems bigger than that, particularly in his case.
He's going through a divorce, a nasty one, and that's always difficult. Makes the whole world fuzzy, hard to focus on. Then he loses his job, too many missed days, caught sleeping, coming in piss drunk was the last straw. Then he has a wreck and totals his car, luckily not drunk or it could have been even worse. He takes all his earthly possessions to the pawn shop, TV, VCR, wedding band, gold watch his momma gave him, everydamnthing, gets the cash, something like $600, heads to the grocery store and loses his fucking wallet. Doesn't know how or where. Everything gone. Finally, he gets a part-time job at a convenience store and on his third night, him feeling like life might slowly be getting better, and he gets robbed at gunpoint, the robber taking what he can, including the hope of a man barely getting by.
Maybe it's just being poor. I know rich people have troubles too but it ain't the same. What I worry about, and I do worry, is maybe, for the both of us, this is just the beginning.
posted by ochomendez at 11:59 | link | comments (4)
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
He’s going to live. Again. Doctors said this is his second heart attack. First was three years ago, had a double bypass. This time a triple. Maybe next time it’ll be a quadruple. Maybe I shouldn’t be joking but I am. Maybe I’m a sick bastard. Maybe.
I haven’t been to see him. Just talked to the hospital on the phone. It was Rolando that told me about what happened and how. He was the one the jail officials contacted. Apparently, Ruben left Rollo’s number as the one to contact in case of emergency. Can you believe it? ‘Yeah, let me stab your ass, try to kill you, but if anything bad happens, can I call you?’ Ruben’s a sick bastard too. That’s where I get it from. It’s hereditary.
He’s recovering slowly, is what they said. But he’s tough as nails, they said. Harder to kill than a flea, they said. Said he’s 58, two heart attacks, various stab wounds, buckshot along the left side, torso, bullet wound to the thigh, and just like his youngest, missing digits. Well, just one. Little toe, left foot, severed, who knows how. But he’s gonna live. Probably can’t die. He can only be erased, recorded over, put in a shoe box and forgotten. But he’ll live. Probably forever.
posted by ochomendez at 11:41 | link | comments (3)
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Who am I really? I guess I haven’t been completely honest here, where I am nothing but what I write, too afraid to come clean even in anonymity. I’ve written some heavy stuff but the stuff I leave out is even heavier.
I said my mother died, and she did. When she found out she had cancer she brought us together, her sister too, and told us she was going to die. She said she needed us to stay home with her to help. Me, Javier and our aunt did. Rolando couldn’t, with his family and all. But he helped when he could. The doctors said with chemotherapy and a "redefinition" of a healthy life, she could maybe pull through. My mother never believed it. Neither did I after the sessions. Chemo is an eater of life. She was always sick and weak afterwards, throwing up, crying, telling us to leave her alone even though she needed us to help, to survive.
I guess the depression from the illness was too great, her life too much of a hardship. Maybe the chemo would have helped eventually, the accepting of a redefined healthiness. But when my father left it murdered her, she was never a wife again, never my mother, we were never her sons again, and when the cancer came she knew it was over. You could see it in her bones. I came home one day and found Javier holding my mother, there on the floor, her body just a caricature of itself, dead, Javier crying, three different bottles of prescription drugs empty on the end table.
So why tell you now, what’s the purpose? We need to clean our lives, the dirtier they are the harder it is to breathe, the harder it is to walk down the street and look people in the eye and smile.
Two days ago Ruben, my father, had a heart attack in line, waiting for a dinner of meatloaf and powdered mashed potatoes, in a county jail, where dirty lives only seem to get dirtier.
posted by ochomendez at 11:36 | link | comments (6)
Monday, December 29, 2003
You know, I've only now thought about the new year. New. Year. Something in the way those words fix in our heads, as if the turning of a page, the folding of one day into the next, can put all the bad behind, place it in a scrapbook, keep it for later. How do you fold years though, how do all those pages turn? I guess it is nice, though, to be able to grab hold of the new, leave hours in a cup and make a fresh start, forget the false ones.
Saw Rolando and his wife today. Went by for BBQ. Family is family regardless of what happens. He said the DA wants to make a deal with my father because the charges are gonna be hard to make stick. Rolando said it was like he wasn’t even stabbed, the DA, rather the DA’s office is treating it like some minor domestic dispute. Since there really isn’t any proof that Ruben was trying to kill Rollo, the wounds were superficial at best, the DA says its for the best to get him with something. Rollo thinks he’s afraid of losing. I think it’s almost better just to get it behind. Make everything new like its factory sealed and clean as an old lady's car.
posted by ochomendez at 13:10 | link | comments
Thursday, December 25, 2003
Wow. Thank you people. Happy holidays.
This Christmas ain't much different from the last few I've had. Only thing different this X-mas eve is at least I have you.
I remember when my daughter was 2. We were renting a house, the three of us, I was still a husband and a full-time father, the tree was green, laced in ornaments and white lights, there were gifts and the smell of pine was as filling as food. We let Olivia open the gifts Christmas eve, she was 2, what did it matter? Her eyes were like open mouths, they just took in everything, the world was a present to her, we couldn't believe how happy her little laughter could be, and her gifts were nothing, small things, things that cost nothing, but she loved them and we loved her and it was because we were together and as three we made it warm and nice. She was 2 and the whole world lay before her and this future of now, this present being, was as far away as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, as far away as the Roman Empire or the birth of Christ. No way could she imagine how things would be now, everything young behind her, her life opening as wide as her eyes that Christmas, her father just as far away as the dawn of man.
I guess we all lose our father eventually, one way or the other. I only wish the best for her and for you out there, in this world of typing and deleting. ocho
posted by ochomendez at 12:04 | link | comments (2)
Saturday, December 20, 2003
It's a good thing I don't have to think at work, otherwise I might have a tumor by now.
Have you ever weed-eated (weed-ate, eaten-weeds, run a weed-eater) for hours on end? I'm not talking one of those little electric numbers but a gas-powered, commercial-grade, ass-whupping, eye-out-putting, Stihl weed destroyers? After 6 hours your hands feel out of body,detached, like they belong to someone else. You're covered in grass, or in my case today, the dust of deadness. I know it's snowing in some places. I know it's cold. But here, the sky so blue, cerulean doesn't even come close, the sun is just laughing at winter. There's still work for guys like me, grass just yellow and dead but still in need of trimming. I work and the world becomes neat and orderly. Except my own.
Ruben's trail is set for January 12th. The state is bringing their charges against him. He can't afford bail and doesn't know anyone who could. I talked to Javier yesterday and he was less than willing to help. He can't accept anything that has happened. He lives on planet Mars.
Today the cafe is open late, so I write and try not to dwell. Coffee is a drug now. I take it in, waiting for everything else, like the jaundiced grass, to die and be whacked away, dust on my shirt, pollen lost in blue.
posted by ochomendez at 12:29 | link | comments (4)
Monday, December 15, 2003
Wow. Time flies. So, this all happened, what, weeks ago? Been writing about the past: make all this present tense.
Javier never went to see Rollo at the hospital. Rollo's already out now, electricianing, working wild spark into something tame. Had been trying to get hold of Javier without any luck. Called his house, went by. No answer. I finally went to see him at the hotel today, he's a concierge, and he got pissed. Didn't want to hear anything, didn't want to deal with it, threatened to start some shit there in the lobby of his marble floored, brass and deep-dark-wood-everywhere hotel but I backed off and split. He's got his reasons I guess. Came home and had a beer. Then seven. Came to my little cafe away and now this.
I looked out the window today of my second floor crap room. Thinking about the wrongness. It was a beautiful day here, sunny and mild, sky, blue, deep enough to put your hand into it and lose it, and I couldn't see it, just saw the staleness of my living, a building of bricks, fleshless, my room like a dirty cup. If it weren't for work, all those men with voices of violence and goofiness, strange how men can be so awkward and dangerous, I wouldn't have anything at all.
I went to see my father in jail earlier in the week, him in orange, me in blue. We talked through plexiglass over the phone. He looked old, beaten. I opened my mouth to say something but what came out was not what I had rehearsed time and again, what came out was not like I had planned. We talked and I didn't know him, he was not my father and he was, I was not his son and I was, we said our things and we didn't. We hung up and managed smiles the way some people manage to live with illness; not well. I left and behind me people were still talking on the phones to other people just out of reach.
posted by ochomendez at 13:12 | link | comments (4)
|
|
