None of My Dreams Came True

Week 73
So long since I’ve written I feel sad and ashamed to write again. What is it I’m writing about? Or writing for? Whose mind is it anyway? I’ve sold so much of it and spent so much time recovering from my mental prostitution that I don’t remember who or what or why I am.
None of my dreams came true and now I’m too old for dreams and writing is about dreams. Writing was about my dreams. I dreamt of being a writer. I lay in bed planning to write stories for Christian children’s magazines that I imagined would pay me 100 pesos, an amount that stood for a lot of money to me back then. And I lay in bed after the beatings, or after simply being made to go to bed way before I was tired so that my mother could have a break, having at last traversed my terror (long moments spent trembling about diseases I’d overheard the adults discussing: varicose veins could kill you and my mother had varicose veins, 4 cruces de diabetis, el cancer de la mujer the Chuchundegui), I would arrive at the domain of my own free mind. And I would have wonderful dreams about my future self. Those were my first stories that later became my poems and my fictions. Delicious forbidden futures where the women could go to the movies on Sunday wearing high heels and cut out dresses that exposed one or both breasts. Or futures where I was la cantante de la iglesia and traveled in trim little suits on airplanes the way my father traveled to preach.
Then came dreams of revolution. The dream that we could grab the future and make it happen now. Those years with Ori when we thought we were about to win. The Island would be independent, launch its own little socialist enclave the way Ventura did. Even if the last domino refused to fall, it was possible for one domino here and another there to leap to the future. Ori insists it wasn’t only a dream. It was a missed opportunity. History offered the opening and we didn’t seize it and history moved on.
It could be centuries for the time to be right again. There’s a human geology at work. And now the uprisen forces have sedimented into layer upon layer of oppression.
So how to write when I no longer dream?
But this is a temper tantrum. Because I do dream. My real life takes place in my sleep. It is my waking hours that are unreal. My waking hours of wage slavery. What goes on here? What is embedded in the not knowing and the knowing of what goes on here?
I don’t remember my longings but they make me wake up in tears. And there’s a voice from my dreams that’s telling me, write about work, write about dying at work, write until you find the life in it.
Work has been insane with Xiomara out for surgery not telling anybody what the surgery is. Everyone certain it’s cosmetic. She’s gone for a lift and lipo in the DR, is the dominant tale. She’s in touch by email and her cell. Solly’s been nuts as a result. Not like her to bite my head off and give me a hard time, but I barely dare set foot in her office which normally is open door. And all week I’ve been trying to get a loan. On the telephone with the bank. Faxing them paystubs. And Solly refusing to write me a letter explaining that although my money has come via different fiscal agents I have actually been employed by the same agency. What a fine time to let her inner fascist emerge!
And me still trying to clean up the debt Ori left behind when he went away.

He went to prison. Ma. He’s in prison for the rest of his days. You can’t call it something else. This is what Machi used to say. I dreamt Machi last night. A physical dream. He’d come home wearing a red sweatshirt and he was happy to see me and we were close again and he hugged me hard and close. My son again. I woke up crying. So much of my life I’ve spent longing and crying in my sleep. When we first came here from Ventura I’d wake up sobbing in a state of pure heart wringing longing. But before that it had been longing for Papi to come home. And now the longing for Papi is translated into the longing for Machi. The rage at Papi being gone is translated into the rage at Ori.

And with Xiomara away and Solly consumed with the fallout from her absence (the program sites are haywire: union grievances, rumors burning about the imminent program shutdowns, changes in the timeline from one moment to the next about the shutdown, depositions from the wrongful firing lawsuits against the firings that spark off Xiomara’s best friend’s rampages, Xs best friend’s darth vader appearances, all of us on our toes, who’s here today? Seductive Y or glaring Y or take no prisoners Y?)

in the midst of all the madness there are these odd islands of time

Is it the eye of the storm? Or quicksand? Or being becalmed in the middle of an ocean but dimly hearing the thunder from afar, aware that in the distance somewhere the storm goes on and on…

We are the executioners of a terrible cruel law. The law of welfare reform. We are the ones who have jobs only because others don’t. We are here to ameliorate the blows as capitalism falls; or rather, in the guise of ameliorating we deliver blows. It makes all of us a little bit insane.

And in one of those islands of time Lucha and I spent a long time talking. We started over the file cabinet partition.
Lucha was sobbing when she got off the phone with Jody’s counselor. Jody threw a chair at another girl in group and after that she went awol. Lucha had no more time and no more money to go out West again. The counselor didn’t think she should come. Jody’s struggle was to take responsibility.
But the counselors are not the mothers. I said. Our struggle is to keep them alive long enough to get strong and viable. Jody was doing well. Jody had stopped cutting.
So maybe that’s why. She’s strong enough to take on even more of whatever is breaking her heart, I said.
It’s easy to see on another person’s child. So I said to Lucha, It’s not that you’re not a good Mother. You are. Not perfect but good. It’s what happens to them when they get outside the house. It’s not you Lucha. It’s oppression. It’s coming into a world that makes no room.
Then Lucha rolled her chair so that we could see each other and when I saw that she was crying, I rolled my chair over to her side, furthest from the door. If Solly walked in, which she probably wouldn’t because I would ask her again about my letter for the bank, we’d be hard put to look like we were working, not both of us in tears. But still, we each grabbed folders and a pad.
What’s happening to our girls? Lucha was wiping her tears away with her buttery bagel napkin.
What’s happening to our boys?
I was too ashamed to start right in on Machi and how he had left me and had gone, or maybe had gone, to stay with Solly. The shame of that burned me into silence.
So I talked about Machi’s friends. It helped me believe it was them he’d left home to get away from. Them and not me.

It boggles the mind. These boys I knew all my life and watched growing up and although it looked like they lived on the same block and went to the same schools and were traveling the same path, were actually on another planet, or another lock of the canal, another space, another track. So now Circus is dead. And F is in federal prison for life. They each could have been the other. I have compassion for the murdered boy. I have compassion for the murderer. Although he’s doing time for one he didn’t do and I believe that. He’s doing the time because he held to gangster honor. He was the one who didn’t rat. Everyone says R is the killer and R is still walking the Barrio streets. Another way to be a thug. They had charts with pictures of these gangsters at the trial, the barrio boys. F was in my house recording in Machi’s room one of the times the cops walked through on the strength of Chepi’s information. And there’s Chepi who turned rat. Or that’s what I believe even if Machi doesn’t. F got out the back door and over the backyard fence and down the narrow space between the two multiple dwellings fronting the next street. But they caught him later that day.
Circus was coming here, trying to reach safe haven, after the 13 other mothers’ sons stabbed and kicked him on the avenue. But he only made it as far as the uphill corner. His blood was frozen there next day, on the icy sidewalk, mixed with dirty snow.
Then there’s Pedro, waiting to be sent upstate for violating his parole robbing a car again, after being laid off again and again and again, from jobs that in any case could provide no adrenalin rush of any sort.
Lucha said. What must it be like to live knowing in the back of your mind at every moment that you may know where your next meal is coming from but certainly not the meal after that? The unrelenting unabating primal survival terror of their lives. I lose sleep about how will I pay for Jody’s school, or manage the debt I’ve accrued to pay for it, or cover my mortgage if I get laid off. But they have nothing. No job. No prospect of a job. No skills but their street skills. No trade but hotwiring cars or knowing which corner is best to peddle crack.
The murder F’s sent up for, was over F’s mother’s crack location. Was it going to stay in the family or get taken over by a rival gang.
But I go on with my litany. I go over this litany of what’s happened to the boys alone in my mind when I can’t sleep and once I started reciting it out loud to a human witness who might be able to actually hear me, I couldn’t stop myself
R got caught with alcohol in his blood and now he’s in jail again. He’d been doing really well. First time he’d stuck with any program.
C I have no idea. The last time I saw him he came by to try to sell me a microdvd player. He was so strung out he scared me and I didn’t let him indoors.
Lucha nodded. They become another person with the drugs. God forgive me but I was afraid of Jody.
Where does this leave us? She said. What do we do? Just sit by and watch the genocide and imagine we wouldn’t have stood for what the Germans stood for. Hitler wouldn’t have happened on our watch.
We’re all the Germans, aren’t we? Watching our young people go down.