I spent my early childhood in El Paso, Texas.
We lived in the desert, literally. If you stood on our front porch and looked
across the street, there was sand and cactus and horned toads and tumbleweeds.
Desert as far as you could see. Or at least as far as a small boy could see.
Sometimes I would say to my mother, “I’m going to play in the desert, okay?”
This seemed to me to be a perfectly normal thing for a boy to say.
This is the jumbled story of things that can
happen to a small boy in the desert.
Coyotes ate my dog once. We had a little beagle
named Missy. One night she heard wild yips, yelps, and howls, in the desert
night. She went to investigate and never came back. I hear that coyotes like to
eat dogs and cats. They’re easy prey, and wild animals do not have the luxury of
being sporting.
My little brother drank desert sand in El Paso.
We had glasses and were pretending that we were pouring Kool-Aid into them, only
we were pouring sand. The girl from next door and I pretended to drink, but my
little brother thought we really were drinking, so he tossed back a full
mouthful of sand. I remember him crying and sticking his tongue out. It looked
like one of those doughnuts that are rolled in cinnamon and sugar.
There was a huge canyon in the desert across
the street. At least it seemed huge to me. If I stood on the edge and looked
down into it, it would make my groin and stomach tingle. Later I learned that
this was simply an arroyo, a dry gully or creek. The drop was probably no more
than ten feet. But I spent the entire time we lived there terrified of falling
into the arroyo because I heard that a boy named Chuck went over the edge in
roller skates. What he was doing in the desert wearing roller skates was never
made clear to me. But I remember the idea of falling with heavy boots and wheels
on your feet was something so terrible that it haunted me until we finally
moved.
My great-grandmother once visited from East
Texas where my parents grew up. She brought grapefruit because she and my
grandfather thought grapefruit was one of the greatest miracles and joys in
life. They talked a lot about grapefruit and made special trips to places where
you could buy it. I don’t think they had much fruit when they were kids, so it
was still a wondrous thing to them. One morning I was pushing a small car around
on the floor, and I went into the bathroom on my hands and knees, only to be
stopped dead in my tracks by my great-grandmother’s toenails. I ran to my room,
utterly horrified by what I had seen.
Years later I could still remember her
toenails. My memory was that you could lift up her big toenail and there was a
secret place underneath it, like a little pillbox. The secret place was divided
into two sections by a membranous wall of skin. I became convinced that we all
had a space like this under our toenails, but most of our toenail lids were
stuck shut for some reason. I used to daydream about what I could hide in my big
toe if I could only find a way to pry open the lid without it hurting so much.
When I finally got old enough to understand
that our toes aren’t hollow, I also realized that the membrane toe-space divider
of my memory looked exactly like the limp membranes of a grapefruit that are
left after the meat has been eaten. Obviously our childhood memories, dreams,
and reflections have a way of getting a little jumbled.
In kindergarten, I fell in love with a
black-haired, brown-skinned girl named Carmen. I loved her because she colored
in the lines better than anyone else. When she used crayons she pressed them
lightly on the paper, and all of her strokes went the same way. She didn’t push
down hard with her crayons and scribble every which way. That was when I came to
understand that you shouldn’t color with a crayon held tightly in your fist. You
should hold it lightly and at an angle. Carmen taught me that, and I loved her
for it. I used to imagine her face, smiling and confident, and her arm moving
back and forth over a piece of paper.
Four years later another girl named Carmen
became the first kid I ever knew who died. We came to school on Monday morning to find our teacher crying at her desk. She told us that Carmen’s family had
been in a car accident and that she had died. Her empty desk sat there in our
class, haunting us. I couldn’t keep from staring at it. One little boy who was
always mean said, “Oh well, I guess her batteries just ran down.” It made me
feel sick when he said that. He was a pretty unhappy boy, as I recall.
That afternoon I walked by Carmen’s house on
the way home from school. I stood on the sidewalk staring at the front of her
house until someone came out and asked what I wanted. I didn’t know what to say,
so I turned and ran. After that I walked home a different way.
El Paso is the only city in Texas with mountains nearby. Sometimes my parents would take us up into the mountains to
beautiful places where you saw how the desert would look if there were no people
and houses. Just natural desert, brutal, stark, and beautiful.
There is an arid joy that comes when you learn
to feel the beauty of the desert. It is a joy without frills or margins. An
empty canteen or a cactus can take this joy away in an instant, but if you are
safe and have time to look and feel, the part of your brain that is at the base
of your skull can love the clarity of the desert. You can love the dry air and
the way the temperature drops at night. You can love the harshness of it. You
can even love the coyotes and all the hard and mysterious things that define our
lives. All the things that we never, ever forget.
rlp
Images of El Paso
