How a Chicano winds up selling magazines door-to-door
There's been no upsurge of requests for more of my fiction; nevertheless, I'm posting another piece of the first chapter of my unpublished memoir from 1968--selling magazines door-to-door across the Southwest. Below you find out how I got started. The first installment appeared at:
http://labloga.blogspot.com/2006/11/theres-chicano-mss-that-get-published_15.html
My regular haunt was the Circus Club. It was in the neighborhood, had some great jazz and made the best Comfort Manhattans and vodka gimlets. I made it a point to only show up with a woman, as if daring the doorman to deny me the chance “to impress my lady," as they said back then. They never turned me down or asked for an I.D., which would have amounted to the same thing. It taught me to always tip well.
Now for the free and white business. I wasn't Anglo; I was a Mexican. We called ourselves Mexican, mexicanos, sometimes Latinos, even if we were born in the U.S. Other terms were used, but usually only for derogatory purposes. Like pocho or mojau, which denoted a wetback, a recent arrival, still uncouth in the ways of the U.S.
And we would never have thought of or called ourselves Hispanics, a term used by some brown people in pockets of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. So I wasn't white, okay?
Was I free? Well, I didn't have many responsibilities from prior years because I'd failed at most of them. I'd dropped out of UT-Austin after a stint with physics and Russian that left me doubting my ability to salvage a C average anytime in that century. After showing up at home with the disappointing news for my mother--that her first-born might not turn out to be a college graduate y la manzana, apple, of her eye--I started job-hunting the San Anto streets.
I found and took lots of them--encyclopedia salesman, truck driver, piano mover. I eventually reached some stability working housekeeping in Santa Rosa Hospital, sneezing my way through sweeping, when my sinuses acted up; thanking the Lord for my stuffed-up nose, when detailed to clean up cancer patient rooms left sullied by bodies unwilling to leave Earth quietly and marking their passage with gobs and chunks of internal organs and vile secretions on walls, floor and furniture; and generally regretting I hadn't more studiously attacked Planck and Chomsky texts while in Austin.
After a few weeks I was promoted, all the way up to elevator boy on the graveyard shift--not my dream job, but it sufficed. Between raids on the cherry pie in the hospital canteen and plenty of time to read or talk with the just-as-bored nurses, it wasn't bad. Other than an occasional four-in-the-morning removal of a cadaver that wouldn't wait for the day shift, if things got really boring, I parked the elevator between the first floor and basement and slept, knowing that the second or third buzz would wake me.
The good life never lasts, so a couple months later I got promoted again, this time to orderly. It included a pay raise, probably a dollar over minimum wage, which except for federal laws would have been $1.50 per hour in Texas, given the beneficent biases of Texas legislators in those days. Maybe things have changed by now.
But orderlies deal more directly with patients, so how would this be better if I'd handle bedpans filled with bodily expungents and septic poison? Why take a job that added the words impaction, obstructed urethra and colostomy to my vocabulary? In Spanish we have an expression to explain this: por pendejo. The antiseptic translation is, "out of stupidity," but that wouldn't explain how this was upward mobility. So, I have to clarify that I was also in it for the glamour.
The glamour was I got to wear a white, starched, spiffy uniform, not the hospital issue that hugged no part of your body at any critical bulge or cleft. You only wore those until you saved up money to go downtown and get something sort of tailor-made.
Then you could strut down the hall to the nurses' station, styling like a Latino version of Dr. Kildare, ready to rescue nurse-damsels in distress from the big fat lady in bed 601-B who'd fallen on the floor and needed a spiffily dressed, young Mexican to lift her back into bed, because the forklift had maybe gotten stuck on the elevator between floors, and nobody could wake up the new elevator boy. Ah, the poor soul. If he only knew what he had to look forward to, if he could just learn to wake up faster.
Anyway, as a new orderly I wouldn't get a day shift. It was swing shift for eternity because the old guys in their forties who worked days wouldn't move on until they'd busted their duodenums lifting too many big, fat ladies back into their beds. Even after that, there were other old guys in their thirties on the swing shift who had ten years seniority over me, and they'd get days before I did.
But the eleven-to-seven hours had side benefits. Go figure--nurses on that shift had no social life, either. They got off at 11:30 p.m., and unless they had a novio boyfriend, then spiffy dressed orderlies didn't look that bad as dates, if they had a car and money.
My co-worker Richie M. had a car, a '65 Chevy Malibu. The maroon one that made grown men jealous. The SuperSport that turned nice, young Catholic girls into smiley, giggly hitchhikers.
Richie was a mexicano from the Southside, with Four-Roses slicked hair to match his Elvis Presley looks (way before Elvis porked out), Sunny Ozuna lips and a Marvin Gaye charm to his slight Mexican accent. He was a high school grad being all he could be and having a great time doing it. Richie swore he got into every girl's chones, or panties, that he ever took out. On a double date, I later learned that some of those chones must have been hanging out to dry on the line when he got into them, but for a time I believed the legend.
So this legend and I, who hoped to become a legend, started scheming about nine each night on who we'd ask out. By eleven we had nailed it down or been turned down. We'd make a quick run for liquor (Richie was a real 21 and had an I.D. to prove it) to pick up a bottle of rum, gin or whatever flavor the nurses we'd hooked up with would drink. We made three or four of these trips a week, since both of us were stupid, Mexican and about twenty-one.
What happened on those nights--out on the piers of Woodlawn Lake or in the bushes of Breckenridge Park or in the back seat of his '65--those gaps can stay gapped. Suffice to say that a lot of alcohol was consumed and new legends engendered, by both of us.
Again, the good life never lasts. Richie got his letter from Uncle Sam, followed by his shipping out to Vietnam. I never heard from him again. He's not listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall, so maybe he didn't return in one of the bags that served the same function as the gurneys we used to carry the deceased down to the hospital morgue. At least they had died for a good reason, like cancer or old age or depression.
Soon after he shipped out, I had it out with one of the hospital "nuns," as we called them, over a patient I'd befriended. These Catholic nuns ran Santa Rosa Hospital much like the Gestapo administered Dachau. Sneaking a patient a bottle of whiskey one night apparently crossed the line, as far as one nun was concerned. That's how I wound up back on the streets of San Anto.
I sat in the park across from the hospital for a while the evening I was fired; it's a part of my family's history in other ways. In the San Antonio Library archives there's a photo of the park with the owner of La Prensa newspaper and my grandfather, along with all their staff. My Uncle Mario is in the photo, just a toddler, so he doesn't look like he just lost his job.
Sitting on that bench, in that park, I shouldn't have felt like a new world had been offered me; but it had. And I'd had it with regular, back-wrenching, piddley-ass jobs. I vowed that if I wasn't going to be a college grad, I'd at least shoot for the big time, mucho dinero. Un buen jale. There was no stopping me now.
A brief stint to a promising career as a Post Office clerk convinced me I could memorize zip codes and postal schemes just about as well as I'd done with Planck's constant and Slavic past participles in Austin. Okay, maybe the outrageous amount of money I blew, the more outrageous amount of whiskey I drank and the running around with nurses of outrageous character, who I was still in contact with, had something to do with the Postmaster General biding me adios, but, anyway, I was back on the streets within a matter of months, otra vez.
When you're young, you can keep going through episodes like this, from job to job, without your mind or body getting tired. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going, I could have remained a San Antonio Mexican for the rest of my life. But there was this one girl ...
It was another of my embarrassing, career-changing episodes of life, where the only explanation is, the Devil made me do it. I've done more than some people, sometimes for no good reason. Por pendejo applies well here, too.
The way it ran down was, I'd gotten in deep, hot and heavy, with my First Nurse, Susan. Problem was, no matter my grandfather's photo, my lineage wasn't as good as certain other Mexican families in town, like First Nurse's. Her mother liked me, maybe, despite my uncouth ways and history. But her father knew I was a bum, a dropout, and he could probably smell the Southern Comfort on my breath.
Just when things between us got so hot--not that there was much space between us some nights out in the oak groves, where we fogged up the car windows while the radio played the Turtles harmonizing "so happy together", and my experience with amateur "petting" seemed about to be replaced by getting to third base, or further so that I might soon learn what rubbers were for--just then, her father gives her an all-expenses-paid summer in Mexico.
Okay, maybe it wasn't a deliberate, sneaky way of getting me out of her life. But I did learn that if my daughter ever hooks up with some deadbeat, low-class drunk, I'll find the means to send her to Cuba, for a year if necessary.
Where the Northside sticks of San Anto might have witnessed the volcanic release of a young Mexican's sex drive, what remained as she boarded the plane was one Godzilla of a hormonal overload, without the appropriate one to share it with. So what does El Pendejo do while First Nurse dances the circuit of Mexican society? What any horny boy does--he finds First Lay. And spends the summer of '67 learning more about sex, sexual positions, exhibitionism and how much fun bad girls can really be, than ever found in the pages of Stag magazine.
Those adventures came to an end when First Nurse returned to find out about El Pendejo's summer exercise program. She made it coldly clear it was time to add a different chapter to my life, without her.
(to be continued?)
© Rudy Ch. Garcia 2006
http://labloga.blogspot.com/2006/11/theres-chicano-mss-that-get-published_15.html
- Chapter 1 San Antonio - Part 2
My regular haunt was the Circus Club. It was in the neighborhood, had some great jazz and made the best Comfort Manhattans and vodka gimlets. I made it a point to only show up with a woman, as if daring the doorman to deny me the chance “to impress my lady," as they said back then. They never turned me down or asked for an I.D., which would have amounted to the same thing. It taught me to always tip well.
Now for the free and white business. I wasn't Anglo; I was a Mexican. We called ourselves Mexican, mexicanos, sometimes Latinos, even if we were born in the U.S. Other terms were used, but usually only for derogatory purposes. Like pocho or mojau, which denoted a wetback, a recent arrival, still uncouth in the ways of the U.S.
And we would never have thought of or called ourselves Hispanics, a term used by some brown people in pockets of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. So I wasn't white, okay?
Was I free? Well, I didn't have many responsibilities from prior years because I'd failed at most of them. I'd dropped out of UT-Austin after a stint with physics and Russian that left me doubting my ability to salvage a C average anytime in that century. After showing up at home with the disappointing news for my mother--that her first-born might not turn out to be a college graduate y la manzana, apple, of her eye--I started job-hunting the San Anto streets.
I found and took lots of them--encyclopedia salesman, truck driver, piano mover. I eventually reached some stability working housekeeping in Santa Rosa Hospital, sneezing my way through sweeping, when my sinuses acted up; thanking the Lord for my stuffed-up nose, when detailed to clean up cancer patient rooms left sullied by bodies unwilling to leave Earth quietly and marking their passage with gobs and chunks of internal organs and vile secretions on walls, floor and furniture; and generally regretting I hadn't more studiously attacked Planck and Chomsky texts while in Austin.
After a few weeks I was promoted, all the way up to elevator boy on the graveyard shift--not my dream job, but it sufficed. Between raids on the cherry pie in the hospital canteen and plenty of time to read or talk with the just-as-bored nurses, it wasn't bad. Other than an occasional four-in-the-morning removal of a cadaver that wouldn't wait for the day shift, if things got really boring, I parked the elevator between the first floor and basement and slept, knowing that the second or third buzz would wake me.
The good life never lasts, so a couple months later I got promoted again, this time to orderly. It included a pay raise, probably a dollar over minimum wage, which except for federal laws would have been $1.50 per hour in Texas, given the beneficent biases of Texas legislators in those days. Maybe things have changed by now.
But orderlies deal more directly with patients, so how would this be better if I'd handle bedpans filled with bodily expungents and septic poison? Why take a job that added the words impaction, obstructed urethra and colostomy to my vocabulary? In Spanish we have an expression to explain this: por pendejo. The antiseptic translation is, "out of stupidity," but that wouldn't explain how this was upward mobility. So, I have to clarify that I was also in it for the glamour.
The glamour was I got to wear a white, starched, spiffy uniform, not the hospital issue that hugged no part of your body at any critical bulge or cleft. You only wore those until you saved up money to go downtown and get something sort of tailor-made.
Then you could strut down the hall to the nurses' station, styling like a Latino version of Dr. Kildare, ready to rescue nurse-damsels in distress from the big fat lady in bed 601-B who'd fallen on the floor and needed a spiffily dressed, young Mexican to lift her back into bed, because the forklift had maybe gotten stuck on the elevator between floors, and nobody could wake up the new elevator boy. Ah, the poor soul. If he only knew what he had to look forward to, if he could just learn to wake up faster.
Anyway, as a new orderly I wouldn't get a day shift. It was swing shift for eternity because the old guys in their forties who worked days wouldn't move on until they'd busted their duodenums lifting too many big, fat ladies back into their beds. Even after that, there were other old guys in their thirties on the swing shift who had ten years seniority over me, and they'd get days before I did.
But the eleven-to-seven hours had side benefits. Go figure--nurses on that shift had no social life, either. They got off at 11:30 p.m., and unless they had a novio boyfriend, then spiffy dressed orderlies didn't look that bad as dates, if they had a car and money.
My co-worker Richie M. had a car, a '65 Chevy Malibu. The maroon one that made grown men jealous. The SuperSport that turned nice, young Catholic girls into smiley, giggly hitchhikers.
Richie was a mexicano from the Southside, with Four-Roses slicked hair to match his Elvis Presley looks (way before Elvis porked out), Sunny Ozuna lips and a Marvin Gaye charm to his slight Mexican accent. He was a high school grad being all he could be and having a great time doing it. Richie swore he got into every girl's chones, or panties, that he ever took out. On a double date, I later learned that some of those chones must have been hanging out to dry on the line when he got into them, but for a time I believed the legend.
So this legend and I, who hoped to become a legend, started scheming about nine each night on who we'd ask out. By eleven we had nailed it down or been turned down. We'd make a quick run for liquor (Richie was a real 21 and had an I.D. to prove it) to pick up a bottle of rum, gin or whatever flavor the nurses we'd hooked up with would drink. We made three or four of these trips a week, since both of us were stupid, Mexican and about twenty-one.
What happened on those nights--out on the piers of Woodlawn Lake or in the bushes of Breckenridge Park or in the back seat of his '65--those gaps can stay gapped. Suffice to say that a lot of alcohol was consumed and new legends engendered, by both of us.
Again, the good life never lasts. Richie got his letter from Uncle Sam, followed by his shipping out to Vietnam. I never heard from him again. He's not listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall, so maybe he didn't return in one of the bags that served the same function as the gurneys we used to carry the deceased down to the hospital morgue. At least they had died for a good reason, like cancer or old age or depression.
Soon after he shipped out, I had it out with one of the hospital "nuns," as we called them, over a patient I'd befriended. These Catholic nuns ran Santa Rosa Hospital much like the Gestapo administered Dachau. Sneaking a patient a bottle of whiskey one night apparently crossed the line, as far as one nun was concerned. That's how I wound up back on the streets of San Anto.
I sat in the park across from the hospital for a while the evening I was fired; it's a part of my family's history in other ways. In the San Antonio Library archives there's a photo of the park with the owner of La Prensa newspaper and my grandfather, along with all their staff. My Uncle Mario is in the photo, just a toddler, so he doesn't look like he just lost his job.
Sitting on that bench, in that park, I shouldn't have felt like a new world had been offered me; but it had. And I'd had it with regular, back-wrenching, piddley-ass jobs. I vowed that if I wasn't going to be a college grad, I'd at least shoot for the big time, mucho dinero. Un buen jale. There was no stopping me now.
A brief stint to a promising career as a Post Office clerk convinced me I could memorize zip codes and postal schemes just about as well as I'd done with Planck's constant and Slavic past participles in Austin. Okay, maybe the outrageous amount of money I blew, the more outrageous amount of whiskey I drank and the running around with nurses of outrageous character, who I was still in contact with, had something to do with the Postmaster General biding me adios, but, anyway, I was back on the streets within a matter of months, otra vez.
When you're young, you can keep going through episodes like this, from job to job, without your mind or body getting tired. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going, I could have remained a San Antonio Mexican for the rest of my life. But there was this one girl ...
It was another of my embarrassing, career-changing episodes of life, where the only explanation is, the Devil made me do it. I've done more than some people, sometimes for no good reason. Por pendejo applies well here, too.
The way it ran down was, I'd gotten in deep, hot and heavy, with my First Nurse, Susan. Problem was, no matter my grandfather's photo, my lineage wasn't as good as certain other Mexican families in town, like First Nurse's. Her mother liked me, maybe, despite my uncouth ways and history. But her father knew I was a bum, a dropout, and he could probably smell the Southern Comfort on my breath.
Just when things between us got so hot--not that there was much space between us some nights out in the oak groves, where we fogged up the car windows while the radio played the Turtles harmonizing "so happy together", and my experience with amateur "petting" seemed about to be replaced by getting to third base, or further so that I might soon learn what rubbers were for--just then, her father gives her an all-expenses-paid summer in Mexico.
Okay, maybe it wasn't a deliberate, sneaky way of getting me out of her life. But I did learn that if my daughter ever hooks up with some deadbeat, low-class drunk, I'll find the means to send her to Cuba, for a year if necessary.
Where the Northside sticks of San Anto might have witnessed the volcanic release of a young Mexican's sex drive, what remained as she boarded the plane was one Godzilla of a hormonal overload, without the appropriate one to share it with. So what does El Pendejo do while First Nurse dances the circuit of Mexican society? What any horny boy does--he finds First Lay. And spends the summer of '67 learning more about sex, sexual positions, exhibitionism and how much fun bad girls can really be, than ever found in the pages of Stag magazine.
Those adventures came to an end when First Nurse returned to find out about El Pendejo's summer exercise program. She made it coldly clear it was time to add a different chapter to my life, without her.
(to be continued?)
© Rudy Ch. Garcia 2006
posted by La Bloga | 6:54 AM
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