Tidal Wave Dreams

Tidal Wave Dreams
Sad plight of the Wage Slave.. When it is my own time I don’t remember what to do with it.. I wake up terrified.. Of what?
El mundo se esta gastando.
Global warming has passed the tipping point. I dream of rising tides and tidal waves. My therapist use d to say these were my feelings rising, or my fear of the feelings I’d hidden, beginning to rise.
Should I confront Solly about Machi? Should I go after him? Am I abandoning him or giving him room? What did I do wrong?

I called Solly’s home number and when her machine picked up I hung up the phone. She’ll have my number on her caller id. She’ll remember it maybe. Or Machi will see it. She’ll know I’m phone stalking her. Them.

Machi screaming at me…The memory comes sharp and vivid. Machi screaming:
“I just want you to be happy? That’s all I want. To see you happy. You’re the one who needs to smoke a blunt.”
Or Machi screaming: “Where’s the revolution the two of you were going to make? I don’t see it.”

Where indeed.
The wheel of history turned an d now we are underneath it. Not riding the top but seeing how many of us will still be living when it rises again.

My dolls. The little girls who were maybe 6 and 7 when I was 12, 13, 14, came to play with the dolls in my blue bedroom (how it bothered me that it wasn’t pink). These little girls I treated the way I wished to be treated myself because I aimed to show up adults, prove it could be done, that children could be treated well. As if they were human. They did not need to be given a “tentealla”. Need to be reminded que “los ninos miran y no tocan” are “seen and not heard”. Or told lies about sex, say.
These little girls, Gildita and Chuchi, and maybe Lourdes, and rarely Gracielita who didn’t like to play with dolls much and always wanted to be the prince (I had very few boy dolls), always went for the princess dolls and for the French royalty doll. But I couldn’t. I could never imagine myself having been royalty in the days of kings and queens. I could only imagine myself being a serf, a slave, a farm worker, a seamstress in a factory of hundreds.
Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar el arroyo de la sierra me complace mas que el mar.

Driving home from school, passing the mansions of Miramar, I discover this thought and say it out loud. “Why don’t they take the extra money these people have and give it to the people who have none?” I can’t understand poverty. I can’t understand what God is doing? I want to ask my Father who is a minister why instead of preaching bellowin g sermons about “el sexo”, he doesn’t bellow about “los ricos”, to shame them not against sensuous pleasure, but against greed.
So I was part of a critical mass of young people to whom despite censorship and distorted history lessons and mind numbing sit coms and nightclub acts on tv, the rationality of communism had seeped. I osmoted enough thirst for justice from my own Father, from thinking about Jose Marti, that I invented communism.
And my Father looked at my Mother and said to her, in that tone th roaty tone of voice I knew meant he was proud of me, “Nos salio comunista la nina.” For the first time I knew that no matter what Mrs. Crespo and Miss Nogales said in school, and especially the old lady who taught fourth grade whose name I never remember and who I remember in a clase de moral y civica taught us that communists ate babies , to be a communist was good. Somewhere in his mind my father could tell that Jesus himself had be been around now, would have been a communist, would have wanted all that wealth Jesus could never have even imagined humans would create, to be fairly distributed on the earth.

Later I found out that sometimes when my Father was gone he wasn’t away preaching but “conspirando”. That was why my Uncle called it years later, when I returned to Ventura for the only time with Machi small enough to still sit on my hip, small enough to still breast feed although he could walk around and talk his own way. He said, “Tu Padre y yo conspirabamos juntos.” That time my Aunt, his wife, was visiting us and neither my father nor my uncle came home in time for dinner, and my Aunt was visibly frightened, and I thought it was because maybe my uncle had gone and gotten drunk, now I understood it. My uncle and my father were conspirando. I know my Father snuck money out in his clothes so exiled revolutionaries could prepare invasions; I know he snuck back manifestos among his sermons. All these things could have gotten him arrested, and tortured, and killed. When I saw the photographs of the tortured in the occasional uncensored magazines, I imagined one of them could be my own Father.
We hid out his good friend who was an urban revolutionary. He slept on our couch for several days. I was warned to never say a word to anyone in school about our guest. One of those afternoons, a rare occasion when I was allowed to visit a friend after school, I was dropped off by her mother’s chauffered car, and my father asked me who my friend was to have such a car. I said her father was a General of some s ort. My father’s face went white. “You didn’t say a word about our guest right? No dijiste nada!” He affirmed it. He answered his own question. He didn’t want to know. But I was inwardly thankful to god that nothing had possessed me to tell my friend Anit a about the man sleeping on our couch.
I already knew to keep my family’s secrets. It came naturally to me not to tell anything that went on in our house. My father’s overwhelming sense of shame had saturated me. Shame that our home was never quite clean enough. Shame that our possessions were not dustfree and new. Shame of our essence. My father was always terrified he’d found indicators that the corruption, the irreversible corruption had set in. And if the house was not clean enough, orderly enough (unlike the other Tias my mother always had a job outside the home) these were the signs he looked for for proof that our essential corruption was emerging, irreversibly blooming. My shame was that my mother beat me up. No, we were not the lovely family o f the brilliant preacher. We were the sordid family where the mother went nuts when the father was gone, which was very often either to preach or to conspirar, and beat the daughter up but never the son.
There had been no danger that I would tell about t he weird man sleeping on our couch. I avoided telling anything at all about the inner workings of my family. I simply watched my friends’ dustfree uncluttered shiny pineoil houses with luz brillante shined tiles and set meal times and set tables, and lots of conversation, and occasional snuggling by daughter and mother on the parents’ bed, for clues as to how the normals lived, and I’d gotten very good at letting them hold on to whatever they imagined was the home life of a preacher’s kid.

In my own fa ntasies of myself as revolutionary I didn’t imagine myself ending up a tortured body in an uncensored magazine photo spread. I imagined myself withstanding the tortures. I practiced not feeling when my Mother hit me. I believed I could make myself feel no thing as my nails were pulled off and my eyes were gouged out. Try as they might, they could not get to me because I had taught myself how not to feel pain. (In truth my migraines make me cry.) Not consciously as a child, although always unconsciously onc e I was a political activist as an adult, that terror remained, ruled my choices. But as a child, I applied my child’s immortality to my dreams of being in a communist cell. I had no idea what that was but once I heard my father say the phrase in some adult conversation I was near being seen and not heard but still hearing myself, I was fascinated and I spent many of the long hours between when I was put to sleep right after dinner way too early to be tired, and when sleep finally saved me from my gerbil turning brain, imagining myself with other young adults having meetings in back rooms and planning revolutionary actions…
Always there was something going on…tacks strewn on roads punctured dozens of tires blocking streets and tieing up traffic…or planes flew overhead looking for rebels…or neighbors disappeared to el exilio or because they were tortured and sometimes rumors burned through that a body had been found no eyes no fingernails but still recognizeable as somebody’s husband or son.

Those concrete terrors were no match for the unnamed terrors that permeated my mind and kept me breathing shallow and watching before I spoke. They didn’t faze me then even though they paralyze me now. I loved my communist cell fantasies. To plot and conspire with the immunity and impunity of a super hero!

I’d give anything to still be able to do that now.