To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Read online

  To the Last

  Man I Slept with

  and All the Jerks Just Like Him

  To the Last

  Man I Slept with

  and All the Jerks Just Like Him

  By

  Gwendolyn Zepeda

  Arte Público Press

  Houston, Texas

  This volume is made possible through the City of Houston through The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, Harris County.

  Recovering the past, creating the future

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  452 Cullen Performance Hall

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover design by Giovanni Mora.

  Cover art by John M. Valadez, “Adam and Eva, The Guest is

  Leaving,” 1986.

  Zepeda, Gwendolyn

  To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him / by

  Gwendolyn Zepeda

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-55885-406-1 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3626.E46T6 2004

  813’.6—dc22

  2004048531

  CIP

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  © 2004 by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  Imprinted in the United States of America

  4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Half-White Child of Hippies, Born in Houston in 1971

  I Hate Clowns

  Blue Birds

  I Used to Steal

  Aunt Jeanie

  A Big-Breasted Woman Is a Hard Thing to Be

  God

  Ghost

  Raining

  Love and Animals

  Carnival Macho

  To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him

  Ants

  In Heat

  To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (Revised)

  The Bus Driver

  To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (For Real this Time)

  Aunt Rosie

  To the Last Man I Slept with, and to Everybody Else

  Low Brow

  My Lord Alpha Male

  The Gai Jin Perspective

  How to Be a Trailer Trash Housewife

  Fiction Is Good Because It Lets You Pretend You’re Lying

  Crazy Tony

  Reina Cucaracha

  Eddie

  Alexandra and Me

  Tina

  Love and Humanoids

  For Aunt Sylvia.

  Half-White Child of Hippies, Born in Houston in 1971

  I Hate Clowns

  Every time I tell this story, it’s different. I’ve told it so many times, by now it’s probably a lie. But it lives in me like a fungus, and I have to vomit out as much of it as I can, whenever I get the chance.

  When I was little, my parents got divorced and my mother went to live in a hospital. My brothers and I lived with my father. I love my dad very much, but he didn’t know how to dress us right. We dressed ourselves and our clothes never matched. My dad sometimes forgot to cut our nails or to make sure that we used the shampoo and not the conditioner when we were taking a bath. But it was okay. He loved us, he taught us many important things, and he took us to the mall.

  One day there was a clown making balloon animals in one of the mall’s hallways. The mallway. Whatever. The clown was just like every other clown I’ve ever seen in Texas—an older white guy dressed in polka dots and big shoes. He had black stubble showing under his red nose and white makeup. All around him there were little blond children laughing and screaming for balloon animals. Their thin blond mothers waited impatiently around them. My brothers told my dad they wanted balloon animals. I wanted a balloon animal, too, but I already knew, even though I was only eight, that this was going to be a bad scene.

  My dad went to sit on a bench, where he pulled a science fiction paperback out of his back pocket and began to read. We waited around the clown for our turn. I tried not to stare at the little blond children and their thin blond mothers. I remember reflexively making my hands into fists so that no one would see my nails. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was wearing boy’s corduroys with a hole in the knee, or that my hair was tangled around cheap plastic barrettes from Fiesta instead of barrettes with beads and ribbons made by a thin blond mother, but I could hide my dirty nails. I remember looking at my little brothers’ hands and wishing they would make them into fists, too. But they were too far away for me to whisper it to them.

  As the clown made each balloon animal, he would crack jokes. After a while, even though I was only seven or eight at the most, I realized that most of his jokes were of a personal nature. He would say to a little boy, “Hey, pardner, I like your boots. You gonna be roping some cattle today?” All the other kids would laugh.

  The clown would say to a little shampoo-commerciallooking girl, “Boy, you sure are pretty. Who are you, Marilyn Monroe?” And the kids would laugh some more, as if they knew who in the hell Marilyn Monroe was. While we waited, I became more and more nervous. I knew the clown was going to say something about me, and I didn’t think it was going to be that I was pretty.

  When my brother got to the front of the line, he started excitedly telling the clown what kind of animal he wanted. But the clown had to crack his joke, first. He looked right down at my brother’s hands—it was like he had read my mind—and said, “Boy, you sure gotta lotta dirt in those nails. Whaddaya do, grow potatoes in ‘em?”

  Everyone laughed. At first my brother did too, but as the bratty little bastards laughed harder, pointing at his fingernails and screaming “Ha, ha—ha, ha, ha!” he realized what was going on and put on his blank face.

  My brothers and I all had our blank faces. They were the ones we wore when sincere white women asked, “Where is your mother?” and we, sincerely, couldn’t tell them where our thin white mother was. They were the ones we wore when the bright blond people with their shiny clean nails looked at my father and whispered, “Is he one of those Iranians?” “No . . . I think he’s a wetback”. Although I was only seven or eight, I had already learned to use my blank face all the time. I tried to set the example for my brothers, but they were still too young to understand the way life was.

  The clown, who was probably an alcoholic who couldn’t keep a better job, paused so that all the laughter could subside. Then he said, “You know, sometimes a little soap and water can be your best friend.” The brats and their mothers nodded solemnly, recalling the verse from their Middle-White-People Class Bibles.

  As the clown finished up his inflated masterpiece, I ground my teeth and imagined how sweet life would be when I grew up and got rich. I would drive to the mall in my Stingray Corvette. I would walk inside, wearing my tall brown boots and flowing skirt like the ladies from Fleetwood Mac. I would point to the clown with a long, clean fingernail and say, “You are stupid.” He would immediately remember what he had done to my brother and, seeing how rich and beautiful I had become, would feel very, very sorry. Maybe he would even die.

  The clown made my youngest brother a balloon without comment, and then I dragged both brothers away to the bench where my father was waiting. He looked up from his book and asked where my balloon was. I told him I was too old for those things, and then we went home.

  I thought about becoming a professional clown killer a
fter I graduated from high school. But then, instead, I went to college.

  Blue Birds

  Iwent to Kindergarten at A small neighborhood school right near the center of Houston. Our class consisted of children of Mexican immigrants, children of Vietnamese immigrants, and me, a half-white child of hippies who had been plunged, through tragic circumstance, into the barrio of her Chicano father’s extended family.

  Our school planned to put on a program for the parents. It would consist of musical performances and important information about new teachers, student accomplishments, and head lice epidemics. My class—the Kindergarten class—was to dance to a song about birds. The choreography rehearsals were intense. We formed a circle with our clasped hands and then, one by one, each student would play the part of the happy bird that flew around that circle, weaving in and out under the raised wings of its peers. Although we did this in time to a jaunty piano tune with optimistic lyrics, the only looks I remember on our faces were those of confusion, apathy, or grim five-year-old determination.

  A week or so before the big event, our teacher Mrs. Miles mimeographed notes detailing what we were to wear on the day of the program, and pinned them to our shirts so that we could courier them to our families. My note was a page-length drawing of a girl in a long skirt and blouse. It very clearly said (in English, at least) that the skirt was to be blue and the blouse was to be red. The boys had only to wear white shirts and black pants, in keeping with American men’s formalwear customs of the last several hundred years.

  My grandmother, the matriarch of our house, put on her glasses and studied the note, then conferred with my father and my aunt. Some time after that, a small red skirt and blue blouse were posted on a coat hanger, high on the closet door.

  I knew that it was all wrong. I knew that it was supposed to be a blue skirt and a red blouse—it said so right there on the note. I didn’t dare to broach the subject with my grandmother, though, knowing from hard experience that her reply would be something like, “Go over there and look at the note. Mira—no, not there. There! Pick it up you think it’s gonna bite you? Get your hair out of your face. Look at what it says. How can you be so smart at school and so dumb at home? Chinelas. I told your daddy he should have baptized y’all.” It would end in me being, as usual, the one who had gotten things wrong.

  Carrying out my tradition as class misfit, I walked to school on the day of the program with my hair uncombed and in the wrong clothes. All the other girls in our class had known each other since the day they were born or a couple of weeks before that, in the towns below the Texas border before their parents had risked crossing the Rio Grande in order to give their children the gift of performing in American public school programs. These girls’ mothers had all gone to Clothworld together and bought the same red fabric and the same blue fabric, and then gone to each other’s houses and sewn all weekend. These girls showed up on the morning of the program with exactly matching red blouses and blue skirts, and red lipstick and blue eye shadow. I was the odd little girl out, deeply ashamed.

  Mrs. Miles looked at me pensively for a while and then went across the hall to consult with Mrs. Yee. They were often discussing me, poor motherless child that I was, or else taking turns trying to comb the tangles out of my hair.

  It was decided that my fashion faux pas could be played off. I was supposed to read a little speech in the program, anyway, introducing the new music teacher. I had been taken out of class during naptime for two consecutive days in order to practice saying “round of applause” without a stutter. It would seem, it was decided, as if I were purposely dressed in colors exactly opposite from those of my classmates in honor of my two-sentence speech.

  The hour of the program arrived. We danced our dance, and I said my speech. Everyone clapped. I felt a little better.

  My dad didn’t see the program. He hadn’t wanted to miss a day of his job with the big typewriter manufacturer that would lay him off within the year and then go on to become a multi-billion-dollar computer corporation. My grandmother wasn’t able to attend the program, either— maybe because of important developments in her favored daytime television series.

  I never told my family that they had put me in the wrong outfit, or that I’d been chosen to read a speech. But, for the next program, I did ask my aunt to give me some lipstick.

  At the age of six, one of my goals was to learn to be sexy. Our cousins and babysitters Monica and Biba, although they now deny it, were my most influential mentors in this regard. They had the long hair and tight jeans that I yearned for and that kept their teachers from telling them apart. My brother and I knew the difference, though, having spent many hours with them between elementary school dismissal and my father’s rush hour commute. Biba was the fighter with the extra-spicy vocabulary. Monica was the lover with the sophisticated ways. Sixth-grade men left their longtime girlfriends in hopes of catching Monica’s eye. When these girlfriends sought vengeance, Biba defended her sister with furious, birthstone-ringed fists. Then, the sisters fought each other with icy taunts, dramatic slamming of doors, and hair pulling extraordinaire.

  I aspired to Monica’s popularity and Biba’s independence. They taught us many, many things: how to make wishes with fallen eyelashes, which cartoons were worth watching, the meaning of the word fag, and how to curve one’s knuckles perfectly while throwing the finger.

  One year Monica showed us the school portrait in which she stared haughtily into the camera.

  “How come you’re not smiling?” I asked.

  “Because boys think it’s sexier when you look mean,” she explained.

  I mentally filed that away.

  The next year, her picture featured crinkled eyes and a dimple on which all the grownups commented favorably.

  “How come you’re smiling?” I asked when we were alone.

  “Because the stupid fucking camera man kept telling me I was sexy,” she scowled. I resolved to be on my guard for such things.

  Whenever we wished on eyelashes, stars, or slow-moving planes, Biba’s wish was to be fifteen. I lived in awe of that age, wondering what the teenager who’d taught me about bras and Kotex could possibly have left to learn.

  One afternoon, Monica and Biba taught us to dance. Biba put a disco record on the turntable they’d gotten for Christmas. In the dark little corridor between their bedroom and the bathroom, Monica said, “Look, I’ll show y’all The Freak.” She danced to the slow throbbing beat. We copied her movements, rocking our tiny pelvises back and forth and running the tips of our fingers from our hips to our heads and back down again. My brother Zonky, in pre-Kindergarten at the time, successfully mimicked Monica’s eyeclosing and sensual moans.

  During the twenty-five years that have elapsed since then, he has done The Freak or variations on that theme with women all around the world. Unable to loosen up enough to win approval that day in the hall, I eventually became a housewife. So did Monica and Biba, actually. I was disappointed, expecting them to end up as game show hostesses or Russian double agents. There’s still time, though. I’ll give them another couple of years.

  When I was in first grade, I played a secret game with another Spanish-surnamed, white-looking girl whose name was Regina. We would run to the space below the stairs or the corner under the fire escape slide. I would whisper, “Let’s speak Spanish!”

  She would gesture and toss her hair like her mother as the long vowels and un-aspirated consonants flowed from her mouth. I would hold my hands up as if smoking one of my grandmother’s Pall Malls and rasp, “Bueno . . . éste . . . mapalapa repalaba catobalabra. Pos, mira . . . el quelapracapa. ¡Ven p’acá! ¡Ándale!” One of the few real Spanish words I knew was bolilla. It meant “white girl.” I never said that during our games.

  I went to a different, special school for second grade but saw Regina again years later, in a different, special high school. Unnerved by my new surroundings and relieved to see a former comrade speaking fluent Spanish with her friends, I pulled Regin
a aside and asked if she remembered me. She said she did.

  “Hey, remember we used to pretend to speak Spanish all the time? I finally learned it for real, too!” I proudly confided.

  There was a pause and a vague reply. Then she smiled and gently went away.

  It didn’t even occur to me until many years later that she had probably been speaking real Spanish from the very beginning.

  Still in first grade, I had a fight with a new Spanishsurnamed white-looking girl. (It was the 1970s. Suddenly, they were popping up all over the place.) Peggy and I decided that we didn’t like the looks of each other and nothing would remedy the situation more quickly than a fistfight in the schoolyard.

  Under the coaching of my cousins and Peggy’s big sisters, we managed to complete three rounds of mutual hair pulling before the bell rang and all the spectators deserted us for class. Sweaty and exhilarated from our moment in the ring, Peggy and I became friends.

  This relationship filled the recent gap in my social life left by the slow desertion of my best friend, Letty. Although she had, like many of our classmates, newly arrived from Mexico, Letty’s love of learning and quick ear for language had made her the only child in our Kindergarten, besides me, who knew the whole alphabet. This mutual exclusivity had forged our friendship. The very next year, however, cutthroat classroom politics erected barriers between us.

  “Which one do you like better—red or blue?” asked jealous Idresima as Letty looked on. I picked red, being that it was the color of lipstick and the sports cars driven by the best characters on TV.

  “Ha, ha! We like blue because that’s the color of heaven,” she said, fingertips touching and eyes piously rolling upward. “Red’s the color of the DEVIL! You’re going to HELL!”

  I met Letty’s eyes silently as everyone around us laughed. She said nothing.

  Exposed as the agnostic liberal my parents had raised, I had no choice but to spend the rest of my recess hours at the school playing with the white children of hippies. They had trickled into our neighborhood as their parents got old and discovered the joys of renovating Victorian homes.