Chipina. Santiago Jimènez Jr. 1990. Arhoolie.

 In those days, in the time before Starsky and Hutch, in the TV broadcast era of Mary Tyler Moore and Lawrence Welk, if you walked out of the front door of my father’s house at the corner of Drew and Bryan, and took a left, you’d be walking east in the direction of Interstate 35-W. The second house on your right was where my best friends Junior and Paul lived, in a three bedroom house—their family had converted an attached garage into a bedroom—with their parents and an older sister, Kathy, another brother Louie, and two more sisters their senior, Janie and Stella. Remember that scene in The Exorcist when, near the exorcism’s grim finale, Karras comes back into the bedroom from having taken a well deserved break, and discovers Merrin’s dead body; remember that look of dumb uncomprehension on the girl’s face, before the demon Pazuzu has fully grasped that Merrin is dead? Stella always looked like that, like an aggressive demon paused, but she did decipher for Paul and me the whispered words on the 10cc bridge to I’m Not In Love one summer, and that’s how I’ll always remember her. It’s to Junior and Paul that I owe my working knowledge of street football, street baseball, and marbles, the concrete pitch of the city street that divided our parents’ homes the site of our neighborhood games. The family across the street—my father’s next door neighbors—moved away when I was still a child but a young son, Jerry, was one of the first people I knew who died of AIDS. Next door to that house lived the Auvenshines. One of my earliest erotic experiences was watching, from a window in my sisters’ bedroom, Gary work bare chested in the backyard one summer afternoon, the sweat glistening against his skin like some strange new graffiti that, with help from my suddenly vibrant desire, I could read in a quicksilver translation. Beside the Auvenshines, still heading east, lived my father’s youngest brother and his wife, along with my two cousins Elliott and Elaine. Maybe because he was family, Elliott could draw out my anarchic spirit like nobody else could, and we still share secrets so polymorphously perverse that the glee of them, the sheer power of their unadulterated vulgarity, ultimately destroyed whatever bonds held Elliott and I together. He now lives in another state up north and I can’t remember the last time we spoke. Across the street from the Auvenshines and my uncle lived first, the Halls and then, Mr Petty, who I recognized from his work at the local library branch. Beside my uncle’s house, under a year round tree-shaded, darkened gloom that even prevented the growth of a front lawn grass yard, is where Raymond lived, the Dostoyevskian kidiot I shared elementary schoolrooms with, and who, in another era or culture, may have been revered as a holy savant or seer; one afternoon in class, as Mrs Guzmàn read aloud from some now forgotten text, Raymond sat wordlessly at his desk, staring blankly ahead of him as he translated, by an improvised gnostic hand language, what he heard Mrs Guzmàn say aloud to the phantom whose presence among us only Raymond was aware. Continuing east, we reach the house where Gabriel the sociopath and his three siblings were raised by Graciela, a severely anxious depressive, and her husband Chencho, an abusive drunk who worked as a cook at the neighborhood El Chico. During weekday business hours, Gracie was a frequent landline caller to our house, her marathon Spanish language conversations with my mother the stuff of Roman Catholic sympathy and domestic drama. Today, in our media obsessed age, with its intense scrutiny of issues related to authenticity and persona, I think my mother was at her most intelligent in phone conversations like these. The figurative wall erected between herself and the person on the other end of the landline enabled her to obliterate distractions that might have distorted the force of her analysis of her own feelings as she spoke and listened. Engaged on the landline, she was sometimes seated on the leather recliner in her living room, angled to face the massive Curtis Mathes console television set, or she was reposed on the bed in my sisters’ adjoining bedroom, or she stood over the gas range built into the island of the small kitchen where she prepared our morning, afternoon, and evening meals. Performing the domestic rituals that traditionally characterize the roles of housewife and mother, her attachment to the landline clearly severed her tenure as household servant and, in doing so, allowed her to effortlessly access the fragmented humanity that had fallen apart within her because of marriage. The structural properties at the far end of that city block were both businesses: a still operational custom-mounted longhorn shop founded in 1937 by a cousin of Gene Autry on the south side of the street, and, opposite it, the distribution office of a now defunct tooth cleansing product in powder form called Blue Bottle. The widow of the patent holder for Continental Laboratories Blue Bottle Formula (expiration December 8, 2001), Eunice Crouch, lived on site. I was only inside of the Crouch house one time that I can remember. It held a dismal ambiance with drawn and curtained window blinds through which a ghostly bluish sunlight was filtered, and the space was cluttered with office debris that reminds me now of what living inside of a single wide trailer must be like. I’ve no idea what I could’ve been doing there; an errand for Mom, probably. Across the street from Blue Bottle headquarters, a diagonal shortcut across a vacant lot at the intersection of Drew and Jones Streets leads directly to the cramped but popular Spanish language record store owned by local entertainment impresario and perennial bachelor Dick Salinas. A tireless fixture within the local Hispanic business and political communities, Salinas, like the majority of middle class aspirants to which all assimilation leads, was a born hustler who had managed to breach the city’s white, entrepreneurial class at one of its lowest levels. He’d fashioned his double life to output his passion for conformity; Salinas’ closet was a normality machine for manufacturing the dissimulation fantasy that future gays would later come to fetishize. During middle school, I—along with the other wannabe cool barrio students—caught a city school bus catty corner to the seat of the Salinas empire, his home on Mason Street, and the tiny record store crammed into a minuscule brick edifice behind it. Other Fort Worth landmarks over which Salinas ruled were the El Tango nightclub on Hemphill Street, the Guys and Dolls ballroom on interstate 35, and the Rocket on Jacksboro Highway leading out of the city. In middle school I came to know Salinas’ nephew John, with whom I bonded over our ridiculously irrational love for the Beatles. On Saturdays a family member would drop me off at John’s house and we’d spend a few hours locked behind his bedroom door, hearing records for the first time through one another’s ears and sharing our perspectives on what specifically about our respective lives needed changing so badly that we found it in their music—turns out I wanted a secular, real world entry point into reality. On a trip to Sound Warehouse one afternoon I surprised us both by purchasing, instead of a Beatles record, the newly released Some Girls; it was John’s sister Marie who favored the Stones. One Friday night, I accompanied John and his mother and Marie to a live music dance at the Rocket, where Mrs Cortez operated a concessions stand. The outing eventually turned out to be the initial phase of a grooming project intending to bring me into the Cortez clan as a prospective match for Marie. However, I badly failed that phase, not only because of my complete lack of interest in hustling snacks to overly hormoned opposite sex epicureans, but for suffering the kind of boredom that night that only a child without a driver’s license or a car can sink into because of the utter despair of abandonment and alienation that seizes him. Reading the privilege in that sentence I cannot overstate my sensitivity to those suffocating feelings of exclusion the young and inexperienced queer undergoes when lost in the entanglement of heterosexual mating rituals, particularly when he begins at a social baseline of hot dogs, popcorn, and premium sized dill and sour pickles. The red lights throbbing from the stage in that darkened one room hell cave heightened the evening’s overall impression of nightmare and grotesquerie. Weeks later, the second and final phase of the Cortez grooming project shifted into high speed when John invited me to the movies, the bizarrely appropriate Stir Crazy, featuring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder as prison cell mates. The four of us once again bundled awkwardly into their family car; I stupidly made the assumption that John and I would be dropped off at the movies while the two females went off in another direction on their own errands. At the CineWorld quadplex theater, however, Mother Cortez and Marie joined us and, predictably, following a complicated concessions purchase, we took our seats in the small auditorium. After the lights fell, there was a comical reshifting of seats whose hilariously obvious machinations I still refused to properly decipher, even when Mama Cortez and John wound up in the row of seats behind Marie and me. Later, after the movie, and after having explained the unexpected seating arrangement to my own mother, she became livid, explaining through the lens of fresh interpretation what had just happened to me. I’ve forgotten the details of my unfriending with John, only that his coldly unemotional response to it hastened and eased the windup. Only one block away from the Dick Salinas house, on the eastern corner of Bolt and Jones Streets, across from the Seminary South shopping mall, was my neighborhood library where I learned the valued practice of adapting to the silent rhythms of the mind, that millennias old cavernous quiet that holds the memory of the book. To read is to practice a subliminal form of breath control in which the reader surrenders his respiratory rhythms to the writer’s dictional flow, thereby establishing a physical equilibrium that has been described as variously as religious, erotic, inflammatory, romantic; anything to ascribe meaning to an activity that flows from our involuntary, non-cerebral systemic physiognomy. Walking, reading, the power of memory recollection, even the rules of seclusion and concentration, all of consciousness owes its primacy to the pre-natal mystery of respiratory rhythm. We’re little more than a sentient bellows with playlists and a poor record on human rights. Rock and roll was born of a pair of lungs.