You
It was a hot California summer afternoon when we first met. In that moment I thought, “I know you, but where have we met before?”
A charming man of Mexican-Indian descent, limited English, illiterate but intelligent, you were dressed in raggedy baggy mis-matched clothes. You sported scraggly fu Manchu whiskers. Oddly juxtaposed by a dirty baseball cap, a single long thin black braid, laced with strands of grey, hung down your back.
We enjoyed hosting you for dinner on a number of occasions, satisfying your cravings for a taste of home-made Mexican cuisine: hand-made corn tortillas, pinto beans refried with lard, fry-pan-cooked spicy rice, traditional grilled salsa hand-ground in a molcajete, fresh epazote leaf garnish, steaming hot sopa de pollo, tasty comal-seared arrachera, spicy hot guacamole with a touch of lemon. Sometimes we served you ice-cold tamarindo water or the tart cranberry flavored hibiscus blossoms tea.
Twice that first night after we met, the #44 Firehouse engine rolled past my house. Each time, less than a minute later the sirens stopped wailing in front of your house. The next morning, I heard the news: you were in the hospital, again at Death’s door: it was not the first time and certainly would not be the last.
By the time we met, your life was already slipping away with a liver gone bad and your body wracked with pain, swollen with edema. All hope of an eleventh-hour miracle liver transplant had faded. As a diabetic, you were left to limp along as best you could with a handful of drugs each day and enduring never ending rounds of ammonia ravings and emergency ambulance rides.
You and your wife had been together many years and many of those years you both did some hard drinking and smoking. The relationship began as most relationships do: you lived and slept together and all was well. Then the drinking and the good times with the boys began to take precedence. Your wife no longer held your interest. She was not Mexican and that mattered somehow, but you had not looked at it hard enough to understand why it mattered. You spent so much time away, anyway, and the things your amigos talked about and razzed you about kind of shriveled your dick, made you feel less ardent. Besides, the wife got fat and old, right? But YOU didn’t get fat and old, just more interested in the booze and the boys and what was on TV or who was texting you. You forced yourself to get up each morning, shuffling into the bathroom, gritting your teeth against blinding hangover headaches, grabbing that first cup of coffee and reaching for that first beer. Octane fueled work kept you going all day long and sometimes late into the evening. You did not look forward to the hard looks you would get from your wife when you eventually came home for the night.
Early in the morning, your dick would get hard. Grabbing for her and forcing the issue brought some relief before you fell back into a deep dreamless nap after which you rose to face another day’s work.
One night when you grabbed for her in the dark.....she was not there. Nor was she there at your side the next morning. From then on you slept alone. Your drunken snoring, bad breath, stinking body and wild punches at phantoms in the night, had landed one too many times on her nose or head. Her answers to your inquiries of where she slept last night were cool, matter of fact. She would not be persuaded to sleep with you again until you stopped drinking.
By the time you did stop drinking, you were too sick, too tired; the damage done to the relationship and your health was irreparable.
But, for what it was worth, your wife did not leave you; she still had your back. She was still there in the house but she didn’t care if you ate or starved, or if your clothes were clean or dirty. She could still be trusted with your money. She paid the bills and made sure the doors were locked when you both left for work. She didn’t hide letters addressed to you or the phone calls from god knows who. She rented the house and you were her boarder. You were just someone who happened to live with her and to whom she was loyal. And that loyalty was a far cry from the passion and interest you both shared when you first met and married.
Eventually it all became too much to bear. As a parting gift to your wife, you beat her black and blue with the cane you leaned on to take each painful step. You grabbed a small rolling bag and left on a bus headed south. In reverse migration, you headed home, again slipping across the Mexican border without an ID. Enduring a torturous journey, painfully embarking and disembarking at each bus stop along the way, you headed into the deep reaches of Guerrero’s high mountains.
After decades of absence, you arrived home in time to greet and bid farewell to your ancient parents. In quick succession, your mother and then your father passed on. And, as sons are wont to do, you followed in your parents’ footsteps, closing your eyes on this life and crossing the bridge that spans the distance from this world to the next.
Now you are done with your life’s game; it is good you have crossed that bridge into the next world, to rest and celebrate. You enriched my life simply by having known you. You were loved.