Excerpt 1: Humiliation

"Humiliation"

In 24 years and some months, I’ve come to understand that memory is like bad weather. Completely out of our human control. It flares up when it pleases, how it pleases, and stays, especially during traffic, until it’s ready to go.

F*$@AS$%**! A beat up Toyota with silver chrome rims cuts in front. A wrinkled old skin-head glares through his rearview mirror, sticks his fist out of the driver’s seat window, and flips the bird.

That fat middle finger always takes us back:
When we first realized we needed our mothers in order to survive. When we first realized we truly loved her. When we realized that loving her and needing her were entirely separate moments. When we realized that we’d fallen in love with our best friend. When we realized we were neither the Natives nor the English colonialists of our history books, but we were somehow still Americans. When we realized that despite varying skin pigmentation and bone structure there was something familiar about all of us – there was something that was the same. When we realized what the concept of God was. When we doubted the way God had been preached to us.

Our first moment of empathy: The red balloon popped and trampled on by happy children at a Saturday birthday party. Our 2 favorite dolls. How each one of them felt against our cheeks in the morning . . .

In between all of those tidbits of nostalgia, however, boil raw humbling snapshots. The unbearable humanization we do not, although we dare try to, escape.

Age 4 – Humping the armchair of your grandmother’s plastic couch while she slept on it at the other end. Wearing wet clothes to school, reeking of sewer midday, and having your teacher so lovingly ask (without condescension) if you’d bathed that morning. Getting your heavy flow at lunchtime the one day you don’t wear your panties to school. Shopping for a nice dress with your new friends and paying for baggy boys pants because they were the only ones that fit you. Being called a “dumb Mexican” by a Chicano with a skateboard, darker and shorter than you, as his beautiful blue-eyed best friend chuckled in your direction.

Being drunk for years and years: The bad breath and the missed steps, slurred come-ons and sloppy kisses, failed attempts at romance with a stranger and successful one-nighters lost to the haze. The times you couldn’t cry by yourself, but balled like a madman in front of your employer.

Humiliating moments that – whether you’ve lived them or merely read them – make you want to crawl into a hole where butterflies go to die.

Undeniable, inescapable, memorable humiliation.

Follows you like your birthday. And like your birthday, you can either celebrate it or hide from it under the covers and plan your death.

I prefer to rest my throbbing forehead on the wheel and have a good laugh. That and the rest of my Bacardi.