Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Riverside, California

195 Each time I return to my ugly old Riverside, where I have never seen a river, only bumper-to-bumper traffic that shimmers its strings of headlights into the evenings along Highways 60, 91, and 215, I remember that this is the place of my learning. I would be more embarrassed to admit what I didn’t know if I hadn’t come from the kind of place I did. I didn’t know, for example, that jeans came in different widths and lengths. I discovered this fact when, as a freshman, I tagged along with some friends to the local mall. I walked into a Miller ’s Outpost because on the back wall there was a stunning display of pants of all shades of blue and black. I zeroed in on the stickers on the cubicles identifying the design and size specifications. 32 x 30. 32 x 32. 34 x 34. 36 x 36. 34 x 30. 34 x 32. 36 x 34. I voiced my wonder: “Jeans come in different sizes?” “Excuse me?” the store worker asked, puzzled. All this time my grandmother had been directing me to the Chinese flea market or to Goodwill, where the strategy was: as long as it fits around the waist, the length can be taken care of at home. I took these hemmed-up pants with me to college, and by the end of the year they were all high-water jeans because at eighteen I was still growing. I didn’t feel betrayed by this knowledge, or even ignorant, but I realized I had to keep these discoveries to myself or else I’d sound like a fool. So even though I was awestruck with the power of my 6 Riverside, California first credit card (no one in my family had ever had one), I kept the giddiness to myself. I had no idea what most other college students discussed when they talked about music or movies or places on the cultural or geographical map. But I caught on quickly. Pretend knowledge was easy. And so was latching on to those people who possessed these privileged keys to the wonders of the greater world, like my lover, mi querido. “Have you ever been to San Francisco?” he asked me. “I’ve only been as far as L.A. Once,” I answered, remembering my ill-fated trip to Disneyland with my family. “Well, I guarantee you that by the end of the week you will have been to L.A. five times,” he said. And he made it happen. Like magic. I needed magic during my first year in college. The students I met had an innocence about them that bothered me. I felt resentful that I was carrying guilt over my shoulders about having left my family the way I did, about having forced my father into dropping me off at the dorms the way he did. I wanted to be punished. That too was another type of magic. “I can tell you are lonely by the eyes that look like rooms with the lights off,” he said to me. And I fluttered my eyelids, recognizing seduction when it happened, responding to it the only way I knew how, by submitting, by letting the older man, who has done all this before, do it again. I need some of that magic now, I conclude as I move swiftly from the Greyhound station to the taxi to the housing complex on Blaine, which looks deserted because it’s the middle of summer and most of the college kids have returned to the streets of their hometowns. As soon as I enter my apartment, I drop my luggage on the floor and pick up the phone. The only trace of my roommate is the sink full of dirty dishes, which will remain unwashed until the end of the week. Of the two of us, he’s the only one who cooks because I never even learned to fry an egg—not with my cantankerous grandfather in the kitchens of my childhood. My lover answers on the second ring. “I’m back,” I say to him. 196 unpinned 197 Riverside,California “Are you hungry?” he asks. “Very,” I say. And we immediately slip back into our customary language of double-meanings and innuendoes. I become aroused simply thinking of his smell. I have learned to latch on to...