Augusto al Gusto: Reading Your Stuff Aloud, Oracy Month

One In A Hundred-Thousand: Your Best 2 Minutes

Michael Sedano

Every year for eleven years now, poetry has been the motive of 100,000 people focused on themes like peace, justice, sustainability. La Bloga invites your participation with a video recording of you reading your own work for two minutes. Our On-line 100K Floricanto happens on September 21. Due date: September 14.

When you write, you make it right. Now read it and make it sound right. Give each word what it earns and deserves. Honor your Arte with a thoughtful reading.

Announcement details are at this link. Rules there offer guidelines--variance happens--except two minutes is the limit.

Your video reading will be your writing. Not necessarily the best two minutes you’ve ever written, the best two minutes—or shorter—you’ve ever read. 

Today, La Bloga adds six Ekphrastic prompts in search of a poem or a paragraph.

Back in May 2018 (link), La Bloga teamed with Oscar Castillo to share ekphrastic poetry created from Oscar’s Smithsonian photographs by Professor Margarita López' students at Cal State Channel Islands, and published in El Canto de los Delfines.
Oscar enjoyed the experience and I hope to share something like that, with this month's ekphrastic poetry or prose prompt. I took the suite of six photographs of an Esperanza flower feeding an Allen’s Hummingbird at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, a week ago. 
Capturing the bird and the flower that day, that moment, was my challenge. Your challenge is What do you see in the photograph? If Google is working well, click on an image and scroll a slide show.

Email for details on buying prints, note cards, playeras. Note: La Bloga maintains a “no selling” policy so, like  stockbrokers say, the actual offer is in the email (link).

Guest Writer: Raymundo Jacquez, Jr.

 

What voice do you hear when you read Raymundo Jacquez’ account? Do you hear a fifty-years older man taking a sentimental journey? A vigorous headstrong vato who hasn’t learned his lesson yet? A Veteran with his head on his shoulders?

Read "The Kitchen Exile," aloud to someone and videotape yourself. When rehearsing a reading, give the important words and phrases appropriate emphasis. Do it cold and let the words come at you. Then listen to yourself while you follow along with the text. Identify words and phrases that you feel more than others, that have information that needs to stand out, where do you have fluency issues?

 

Evaluate your oral performance with four goals in mind:

 

•Saying the words written on the page. Incidental changes happen, but is it you, or the writer?

•Are you using micro-pauses or full stops for emphasis and clarity?

•How often did your eyes get off the page? Did the eyes make contact with camera? When you create eye contact you’re creating emphatic space, it’s a form of pausing to catch your breath and to make a point.

•Are you cranking up the playback volume? Speak as if people across the room were in the conversation. Be sure you enlarge the conversational space to include the gente in back, make them pay attention.

 

Reading someone else’s words is wonderful preparation for reading your own. When you rehearse a personal reading, limit yourself to three practices once you have all the elements together. More than three, you predict yourself and lose effectiveness. 

 

 

 

 

 

THE KITCHEN EXILE
Raymundo Jacquez Jr.  

Except for Joy, things were going from bad to worse in my life. I didn’t like Cal-State. I felt totally out of place. I didn’t belong. I was a fraud. I stopped going to classes and just dropped out. I didn’t care if I lost my student deferment. I was tired of playing the game. What the hell anyway, if I wanted to be a writer I had to experience everything life had to offer. Hemingway was Hemingway because he lived what he wrote about. People could read his books and know he had walked the walk before he had ever talked the talk. 

War had its own value. Wasn’t war one of the most predominant chapters in human history? The more I thought about Vietnamrite the more I convinced myself that I didn’t want to miss out on my generation’s war. Every American generation went to war. Why should my generation be any different? It was an American rite of passage. I just wished my war had been a little more black and white as to who were the good guys and bad guys. I didn’t like the idea that there was a real big maybe that we were the bad guys. I had almost decided to go, when my Dad made the decision for me….well maybe I helped a little bit. 

Dad and I had gotten into another argument about the war at the dinner table again. Mom had made chicken flautas, which was spiced chicken, rolled up tight in a corn tortilla. They looked like gun barrels. I had forgotten the point I was trying to make, or if I even had an objective beyond just pissing my Dad off.

I picked one of the flautas off my plate and instead of eating it I started pointing it at everybody like it was a gun barrel. 

 

“Ratataatatatta…..” “You are all dead, you dirty commie bastards. I’m gonna kill you to save you! Long live Amerika. Seig Heil, mein Papa.”

 

Dad blew up. He got up and he called me outside. We went to the backyard together. I thought we were going to go to blows. I was scared. I had never hit my father and I didn’t want to. But he looked like he was going to hit me. I was relieved when he started just talking.

“Look Ray, if you’re a coward and don’t want to go let me know. I’ll join and go in your place right now!” 

I was infuriated. Blood rushed into my head. He had challenged my manhood. No one called me a coward, not even Dad. I had taken his macho jingoist bullshit for too long. “That’s a joke, you’re too old to go, and you know it!” My voice was getting louder. I didn’t care. If he wanted a fight he had one!

“Ya, easy for you to say it’s a good war, go die. It’s not your dick on the line!” 

 

I nearly screamed it. I thought he was going to slap me. I was shaking. I had never talked to my father like this before. I knew there was no turning back. We were both laying everything out on the table, nothing held back. 

“You’re a coward” 

 

He said it simply, and without emotion as he pulled away from me. 

 

He was sullenly resigned to the fact that his oldest son was some sort of commie pinko coward or worse. I saw the look of disdain on his face mixed with a deep hurt in his eyes. He was my Dad, and what he thought of me was more important to me that what everybody else in the whole world thought of me. I did not care what my country, God, Congress, Tricky Dick, or all the saints in heaven thought, but I did care about what my Dad thought of me. I tried lowering my voice, and placed my hand on his shoulder. 

 

“Dad, I could go to Vietnam, but it won’t change me, I’d be the same person, with the same ideas against the war as when I left. They can have my body, but they’ll never get my mind. The real war is here against the oppression of the gringo ruling class. We’re their latter day niggers, and I don’t want to die with a sombrero in my hand. I’d rather die with a rifle in my fist.” 

 

I was quoting Emiliano Zapata, and sounding like a revolutionary. I knew these were the right buttons to drive my Dad crazy. I was right. We locked horns. Neither of us was going to give an inch.

“No, you’re wrong; you couldn’t go into the military and come out the same…” He was somewhere else when he said it, another place, and another time. Maybe he was thinking about his own generation’s war. I didn’t care. 

Dad moved away from me, shrugging my hand off his shoulder. He walked back into the house. I could hear Mom in the kitchen reciting the Rosary with the Spanish radio station that played the rosary every night. She would recite the Rosary as she cooked the night’s dinner. She told us that we must all pray the Rosary because the Blessed Virgin had commanded it at Fatima for world peace. She didn’t know it, but world peace was about to get really personal. “I’ll show him” I thought.

The next morning I went to the Hayward recruiting center on “A” street. All the armed Forces were represented there - the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Marines. I checked out each of them. I saved the Marines for last. Everyone had offered me the moon if I’d sign up for a three or four year hitch. Only the Marine Corps made no promises. The Marines had a two-year, no frill enlistment contracts. Besides, my Dad had been in the Navy. What better way to rub salt in our father/son feud, and continue the rivalry, than to join the United States Marine Corps?

I signed the papers. I was theirs. I was to learn later that U.S.M.C. was an abbreviation for “You signed the Mother Fucking Contract.” I was also going to learn that nobody goes into the Marine Corps and comes out unchanged.  “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” is a lot more than just a catchy slogan. I asked to go in as soon as possible. I didn’t want time to think about what I had done. I might want to change my mind.  The Marines kept their promises; they always did. Within two weeks I would be gone. 

I went home from the Recruiting Station. Dad was still upset about the night before. He was sitting at the head of the table in the dining room eating his evening meal. I couldn’t wait to let him have it with my “good news”. Instead of starting an argument with him about the war I changed tactics. I sat down at the opposite end of the table for a sneak attack. The wary look on his face said he was expecting a frontal assault. For a Navy guy he had good instincts.

“You know Dad, I’ll bet Vietnam ain’t so bad. It’s probably got friendly villagers and beautiful beaches. A guy could get a good suntan over there.” 

 

Dad looked over his plate at me. I had confirmed his suspicions. He had stopped scooping a piece of meat up with his tortilla and was now moving rice around on his plate. He was wondering where the hell this was all going. He knew I was up to something. 

Mom was busy taking fresh flour tortillas off of the comal and bringing them to the table. She had made a second pitcher of iced tea with lemon. She put the pitcher down without saying anything, but the look on her face said she knew we were at it again about the war. 

 

My little brothers were too busy eating to notice the subtleties of life’s little drama as it was unfolding. They were part of the backdrop on the stage instead of the actors or being part of the audience. Vietnam to them was something on television, a nightly ritual when the news would give the carnage as crisp clean numbers in the body count. As Americans we were born competitors. We followed the numbers to make sure we were winning. Lately the numbers didn’t look too good.  But the score was starting to be kept in the barrios, suburbs, towns, and cities in America. Only the blind thought we were still in the lead.

Dad had just scooped up a piece of meat and chili with his tortilla when I let him have it between the ears. “I joined the Marine Corps today!” 

 

I spoke with a smug smile, without any comprehension what “I joined the Marine Corps” really meant. Dad’s food stopped then slowly made its way into his mouth. He looked at me in stunned bewilderment.” There would be no more fights. I would be going to war just as he wanted. After all, wasn’t it his generation’s slogan “Better Dead than Red” that I had just fulfilled?” Maybe he would be getting his wish after all, and I’d come home in an aluminum tube. I watched the expression on his face change to a hurt bewilderment. I had scored a direct hit.

Mom had heard me from the kitchen. She had heard the straight delivery of my self-prescribed death sentence. I might have as well said I was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. There was only one place that came to mind when you said “Marine Corps” and that was Vietnam. Vietnam was now synonymous with death and war. At Cal State, hardly anyone could locate Vietnam on a map or globe. Now Vietnam was a generational destination spot.

“Aye Dios mio!” came the soft gasp from my Mom’s quivering lip as she burst out into tears and came running to me, grasping me roughly by the shoulders. “No mio, please tell me you didn’t. You’re going to school. You’re going to be a lawyer or a doctor. No mio you’re joking, Si?” 

 

Poor Mom, she seemed so small, and vulnerable at that moment. She was shaking, and her voice was trembling. She was fighting to gain control of the flood of tears that rolled down her checks in torrents. 

 

I felt bad. I wasn’t even dead yet, and besides I had no intention of dying. Dying only happened to the other guys in the movies. Didn’t it?

“You got what you wanted now Ray”, she said to my father. I had rarely seen her stand up to him. “His blood is on you, and if anything happens to my son I’ll never forgive you”. 

 

Mom turned off the stove, and walked into her bedroom slamming the door behind her. There would be no more fresh homemade flour tortillas for him that night. In fact, I figured he’d be in dry dock for a long time. Dad and I just looked at each other. For once, neither of us had something to say. Mom had said it all.

After a few minutes I could hear Mom saying the Rosary. I could see the flickering of the candles she had lit before the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe in front of her small bedroom altar. I could also smell the incense as it made its’ way from her bedroom, down the hall, and into the living room. Mom was in one of her very serious prayer modes. 

 

I knew the candle was probably for me. I found out later it was. It always was.

 

I was born Raymundo Jacquez Jr.  in Oakland, CA in May 1950. My Dad was from Anthony, New Mexico and my Mom was from Texas. I was raised in the rough Oakland housing projects along the estuary until I was five. Then we moved to suburbia. 

I now claim Hayward as home.  I attended James Logan high school in the middle of the Decoto Barrio. In the Sixties I was both a self- proclaimed Chicano student revolutionary and a weekend hippy in Haight Asbury before joining the Corps.  

I received a degree in Socio-Cultural Anthropology; and I eventually retired after a thirty year career with the United States Treasury. 

 

I was not drafted to Vietnam. I enlisted in the Marine Corps. My enlisting was result of an ugly confrontation with my pro-war Navy World War II dad. This excerpt is from Farewell to the World and it documents that fight and the story of how and why I joined the Marine Corps to fight in a war I didn't believe in.