When I Consider My Culture
and my identity, I wonder why I was given Dad before anyone else—why God deemed him necessary—to influence my decisions about women, food, money, fear and existence in a way that was often perverted and certainly pervasive, and I wonder why Dad took the role all too seriously, giving me stories of growing up in Jalisco, Mexico—about an hour from Guadalajara and in a green belt of milpa with pale husks and feathery tops, and coarse, black volcanic rock—to the beat of a different drum, heavy and oppressive, where he fought with local, fumbling police and federales, as he ripped one man’s ear off entirely with a rock, going to jail and pleading for bail from my abuelito again, and how he grew up knowing two things: always give money to family to help support them (they are more poor than we are), and love unconditionally (because they are family), and how he did those things but he also cheated on Mom any chance he could, he also spent money on women in bars, feeling their soft shaven legs and gently-sloped young breasts, and how he even created a bastard child between another woman’s marriage and his own to Mom, but mostly I wonder how the desperation in the lessons of my youth didn’t overwhelm me because it was the truth of who he was, but a lie in action—in other words, he taught me to do as he said not as he did—which is fine for a kid, but not for an adult and it makes me sad and so I’ve had to learn my own lessons outside what Dad taught so I don’t treat women like shit and fuck them just because they are objects to be fucked, and while I care about respect, it isn’t my driving force, my raison d’etre, and I most certainly don’t fight police (or anyone for that matter), and in the end understand that while I am Latin, I am Hispanic, I do love Mexican music and even my dad, I formed my own sense of identity because I had to or I would have gone crazy; and perhaps, maybe, possibly, I did for a while.
Don’t Be a Dick
and if you are a dick be the best-damned dick you can be, not just because that’s what your dad pounded into you drunken night after drunken night, in words and an occasional lashing from a belt, empty Coors cans and bottles of brandy tipped over on the cheap mobile home carpeting, but because people remember that bullshit more than they remember forgettable good stuff like high fives, lending money and not askin’ for it back, winning a crappy set of Ginsu knives at a local home show expo, enjoying a round of beers from Mike at the local VFW and even though you are higher than a kite you get a Modelo Negra because why would you pass up free beer, or buying your girlfriend silky, taupe lingerie when she visits you but then she breaks it off a few months later because she found someone more Mexican, more dependable, more of a dick, bro, and wants to keep kissing him even though you lived together for six months, but never mind that memory because it is, in fact, not a good one. Be the best-damned dick you can be because as your dad might unapologetically explain one day, every nice-smelling woman is for pleasure not for trust, alcohol is for chugging not sipping, money is to hoard not to spend–without an obnoxious end goal at least–and throwing punches shows people how serious you are and not how pathetic you seem, but also know when you are the best-damned dick you will most certainly hurt someone, and that someone might be you, but fuck it, at least you’ll be memorable in some way, and find some identity, and (as any best-damned dick might say) who doesn’t want that?
Fuckeveryoneelse in a Non-hostile, Non-oppressive, Non-hateful Way
He was a Spic and hated Mexicans, romantic but hostile, oppressed, or trying to be, so he wrote a content warning poem about his Hispanic culture and how he was at fierce odds with norms and thought he was cool as fuck because he wanted people to know it, so he proclaimed it loudly in word from the highest Arizona mountaintops with excessive emoting and enthusiasm about how a chubby Hispanic boy from a rural mining town who didn’t bang a woman until he was twenty-one (possibly a half-life or even full life for other bros, like his two nineteen year old cousins who were raised by pistols like at the end of a movie about Pacho Villa, in Los Angeles by local Mexican gang members), and whose first kiss was with a cute, naked dancer with sandy brown hair and blue eyes, large breasts and hair under her arms, and tasted vaguely like sweat and cigarettes, in the Living Room–a gentlemen’s club–where his best buddy paid two dollars as a tip afterward, and who later (after a severe breakup with his first girlfriend) went on a sexual tear in Tucson, bedding as many women as he could and was pretty dammed good at it despite his massive emotional and physical trauma, and even played a game called conquest with his four bro roommates with dismissive icons like a circle for a kiss, a heart for heavy petting, and a box for penetration, made it through awkward adolescence and then adulthood and then found regret and a desire to make a different kind of mark on this world, and in some fanatical way make sense of who he was because as he heard recently the present isn’t always a direct line to a man’s past because if it was it meant everything he experienced from his years as a young acolyte in a hot, woolen cassock and white surplice, to youth leader in Catholic Youth Ministry, from failing undergrad to becoming business owner for a strategic marketing firm whose job was not only to teach customers how to sell but to sell the customer on his ability to sell, and that he had a choice to become a chef, a priest, or an artist before college (considering them each with equal seriousness before choosing none) might be meaningless if another new life mistake popped up in a life of mistakes and judgmental eyes, more specifically his own, and so while he writes even more now he also recognizes even if he is a Spic to some he doesn’t hate Mexicans anymore because on a basketball court one day where he played ball among young sinewy black men, dark tattooed Hispanics, awkward bulky Asians, and balding whites with nice three-point jumpers, and was called the N-word so many times he was somewhat desensitized but still didn’t use the word himself because he didn’t like the prospects of getting jumped, just like others weren’t allowed to call him Spic just because he had tattoos and olive skin, or used Spanish to talk with his teammates, because even though the world has a sketch of what racial tension is, it is nothing like what the drawing actually is, and he finally understood they all got along as they passed the ball, made a few buckets, ran hard to twenty-one and I got next, and gave each other pats on the ass, it was okay to be Latino, to love himself, and not care one bit what others think, not just write about not caring because fuckeveryoneelse in a non-hostile, non-oppressive, non-hateful way.
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Martin Perez is a Hispanic MFA student and writing fellow at St. Mary’s College of California, focused on creative nonfiction. He has a degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona and graduated summa cum laude. He has lived most recently in California and Arizona.
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Brian McPartlon (Schenectady, New York, 1948) attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Pie Projects, Santa Fe and the International Art Museum of America, San Francisco. Press includes LandEscape Art Review, Magazine 43, Dream Noir, Arkana, and Pasatiempo.
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