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  FOREWORD: THE STORY IS THE THING

  MARK BERLIN

  God bless her, Lucia was a rebel and a remarkable craftswoman, and in her day she danced. I wish I could tell all the tales, like when she picked up Smokey Robinson on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, smoking a joint, as they headed to his gig at the Tiki-Kai Lounge. She got home late, a little Chanel left under the scent of sweat and smoke. We went to a sacred dance at Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico on the invite of a minor elder. When a dancer fell, Lucia thought it was her fault. Unfortunately, so did the entire pueblo, us being the only outsiders. For years this was our totem for bad luck. Our whole family learned how to dance on beaches, through museums, into restaurants and clubs as if we owned the places, through detoxes and jails and award ceremonies, with junkies, pimps and princes and innocents. The thing is, if I were to tell Lucia’s story, even from my perspective (objective or not), it would be hailed as magical realism. There is no way anyone would believe this shit.

  My first memory is of Lucia’s voice, reading to my brother Jeff and me. It didn’t matter what the story was because each night held a tale in her soft singsong blend of Texas and Santiago, Chile. Songs like “Red River Valley.” Cultured, but folksy—thankfully lacking her mother’s El Paso twang. I am perhaps the last person to have talked to her, and she again read to me. I don’t remember what (a book review, a bit from the hundreds of manuscripts people asked her to read, a postcard?), just her clear, loving voice, swirls of incense, wisps of sunset, both of us sitting in silence afterward staring at her bookcase. Just knowing the power and beauty of the words on those shelves. Something to savor and ponder.

  Along with humor and writing, I inherited her bad back, and we would groan and laugh in unison or harmony as we reached for more Cambozola, a cracker or grape. Griping about medications and side effects. We laughed about the first precept of Buddhism: life is suffering. And the Mexican attitude that life is cheap, but it sure can be fun.

  As a young mother she strolled us through the streets of New York: to museums, to meet other writers, to see a letterpress in action and painters at work, to hear jazz. And then we were suddenly in Acapulco, then Albuquerque. First stops on a life that averaged about nine months in any abode. Yet home was always her.

  Living in Mexico scared her witless. Scorpions, intestinal worms, falling coconuts, corrupt police, and eager dope dealers; but as we reminisced the day before her birthday, we had somehow survived. She outlived three husbands and God knows how many lovers; doctors had told her at fourteen that she would never have children and wouldn’t live past thirty! She bore four sons, of which I’m the oldest and most trouble, and we were all hell to raise. But she did it. And well.

  Much has been made of her alcoholism and she had to struggle against the shame it brought her, but in the end she lived nearly twenty years sober, producing her best work and inspiring a chunk of the new generation with her teaching. The latter no surprise, as she had taught off and on since she was twenty. There were tough times, dangerous even. Ma would wonder aloud why no one came and took us kids away when it was really bad for her. I dunno, we came out okay. We all would have withered in suburbia; we were the Berlin Bunch.

  Much of our experience is unbelievable. The stories she could have told. Like the time she went skinny dipping in Oaxaca on mushrooms with a painter friend. They freaked out when they emerged from the water, green head-to-toe from copper in the stream. I can only imagine how that looked with her pink rebozo!

  I won’t even try to describe the junkie recovery colony outside Albuquerque (see her story “Strays”), but imagine Buñuel and Tarantino doing a movie inside a movie involving sixty hardcore ex-cons, Angie Dickinson, Leslie Nielsen, a dozen sci-fi zombies, and the aforementioned Berlin Bunch.

  My favorite memory is of a sunset in Yelapa glinting off Buddy Berlin’s saxophone, swirls of bebop and wood smoke as Ma cooked dinner on a comal, her face radiant in the coral light, flamingos fishing, legs akimbo, in the lagoon outside, the sound of surf and pinging frogs, our feet crunching on the coarse sand floor. Doing our homework by lamplight and scratchy Billie Holiday.

  Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.

  Mark Berlin, Lucia’s first son, was a writer, a chef, an artist, a free spirit, a lover of animals and all things garlic. He passed away in 2005.

  THE MUSICAL VANITY BOXES

  “Hear the instruction of thy father and mother, for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head and chains about thy neck. If sinners entice thee, consent not.”

  Mamie, my grandmother, read that over twice. I tried to remember what instruction I had had. Don’t pick your nose. But I did want a chain, one that rang when I laughed, like Sammy’s.

  I bought a chain and went to the Greyhound bus depot where a machine printed things on metal discs … a star in the center. I wrote LUCHA and hung it around my neck.

  It was late in June 1943, when Sammy and Jake cut Hope and me in. They were talking with Ben Padilla and at first made us go away. When Ben left, Sammy called us out from under the porch.

  “Sit down, we’re going to cut you in on something.”

  Sixty cards. On the top of each card was a tinted picture of a Musical Vanity Box. Next to it was a red seal that said DON’T OPEN. Under the seal was one of the names on the card. Thirty three-letter names with a line beside them. AMY, MAE, JOE, BEA, etc.

  “It costs a nickel to buy a chance on a name. You write the person’s name next to it. When all the names are sold we open the red seal. The person who chose that name wins the Vanity Box.”

  “Hell of a lot of Vanity Boxes!” Jake giggled.

  “Shut up, Jake. I get these cards from Chicago. Each one makes a buck and a half. I send them a dollar for each and they send me the boxes. Got that?”

  “Yeah,” Hope said. “So?”

  “So you two get a quarter for every card you sell, and we get a quarter. That makes us fifty-fifty partners.”

  “They can’t sell all those cards,” Jake said.

  “Sure we can,” I said. I hated Jake. Teenage punk.

  “Sure they can,” Sammy said. He handed the cards to Hope. “Lucha’s in charge of the money. It’s eleven thirty … get going … we’ll time you.”

  “Good luck!” they shouted. They were shoving each other over in the grass, laughing.

  “They’re laughing at us … they think we can’t do it!”

  We knocked on our first door … a lady came and put on her glasses. She bought the first name. ABE. She wrote her name and address next to it, gave us five pennies and her pencil. Precious loves, she called us.

  We stopped at every house on that side of Upson. By t
he time we reached the park we had sold twenty names. We sat down on the wall of the cactus garden, out of breath, triumphant.

  The people thought we were darling. We were both very little for our age. Seven. If a woman answered, I sold the chance. My blond hair had grown out twice the size of my head, like a big yellow tumbleweed. “A spun gold halo!” Because my teeth were gone I put my tongue up when I smiled, as if I were shy. The ladies would pat me and bend down to hear … “What is it, angel? Why, I’d just love to!”

  If it was a man, Hope sold. “Five cents … pick a name,” she drawled, handing them the card and the pencil before they could shut the door. They said she had spunk and pinched her dark bony cheeks. Her eyes glared at them through her heavy black veil of hair.

  We were concerned now only with time. It was hard to tell when people were home or not. Cranking the doorbell handles, waiting. Worst of all was when we were the only visitors in “ever so long.” All of these people were very old. Most of them must have died a few years later.

  Besides the lonely people and the ones who thought we were darling, there were some … two that day … who really felt it was an omen to open the door and be offered a chance, a choice. They took up the most time, but we didn’t mind … waited, breathless too, while they talked to themselves. Tom? That darn Tom. Sal. My sister called me Sal. Tom. Yes, I’ll take Tom. What if it wins??

  We didn’t even go to the houses on the other side of Upson. We sold the rest in the apartments across from the park.

  One o’clock. Hope handed the card to Sammy, I poured the money onto his chest. “Christ!” Jake said.

  Sammy kissed us. We were flushed, grinning on the lawn.

  “Who won?” Sammy sat up. The knees of his Levi’s were green and wet, his elbows green from the grass.

  “What does it say?” Hope couldn’t read. She had flunked first grade.

  ZOE.

  “Who?” We looked at each other … “Which one was that?”

  “It’s the last one on the card.”

  “Oh.” The man with the ointment on his hands. Psoriasis. We were disappointed, there were two really nice people we had wanted to win.

  Sammy said we could keep the cards and money until we had sold them all. We took them over the fence and under the porch. I found an old breadbox to keep them in.

  We took three cards and left through the alley, in back. We didn’t want Sammy and Jake to think we were too eager. We crossed the street, ran from house to house, knocking on doors, all the way down the other side of Upson. All down one side of Mundy to the Sunshine Grocery.

  We had sold two whole cards … sat on the curb drinking grape soda. Mr. Haddad kept bottles for us in the freezer, so it came out slushy … like melted popsicles. The buses had to make a narrow turn at the corner, just missing us, honking. Behind us the dust and smoke rose around Cristo Rey Mountain, yellow foam in the Texas afternoon sun.

  I read the names aloud—over and over. We put Xs by the ones we hoped would win … Os by the bad ones.

  The barefoot soldier … “I NEED a Musical Vanity Box!” Mrs. Tapia … “Well, come in! Good to be seeing you!” A girl sixteen, just married, who had showed us how she painted the kitchen pink, herself. Mr. Raleigh—spooky. He had called off two Great Danes, had called Hope a sexy runt.

  “You know … we could sell a thousand names a day … if we had roller skates.”

  “Yeah, we need roller skates.”

  “You know what’s wrong?”

  “What?”

  “We always say … ‘Do you want to buy a chance?’ We should say ‘chances.’”

  “How about … ‘Want to buy a whole card?’”

  We laughed, happy, sitting on the curb.

  “Let’s sell the last one.”

  We went around the corner, the street below Mundy. It was dark, matted with eucalyptus and fig and pomegranate trees, Mexican gardens, ferns and oleander and zinnias. The old women didn’t speak English. “No, gracias,” shutting the doors.

  The priest from Holy Family bought two names. JOE and FAN.

  There was a block then of German women, flour on their hands. They slammed the doors. Tsch!

  “Let’s go home … this isn’t any good.”

  “No, up by Vilas School there are lots of soldiers.”

  She was right. The men were outside in khakis and T-shirts, watering yellow Bermuda grass and drinking beer. Hope sold. Her hair stuck now in strings over her olive Syrian face, like a black bead curtain.

  One man gave us a quarter and his wife called him before he got his change. “Give me five!” he yelled through the screen door. I started to write his name.

  “No,” Hope said. “We can sell them again.”

  * * *

  Sammy opened the seals.

  Mrs. Tapia had won with SUE, her daughter’s name. We had an X by her, she was so nice. Mrs. Overland won the next. Neither of us could remember who she was. The third winner was a man who bought LOU, which really should have gone to the soldier who gave us the quarter.

  “We should give it to the soldier,” I said.

  Hope lifted up her hair to look at me, almost smiling … “Okay.”

  I jumped the fence to our yard. Mamie was watering. My mother was playing bridge, my dinner was in the oven. I read Mamie’s lips over the H. V. Kaltenborn news from indoors. Grandpa wasn’t deaf, he just turned it up loud.

  “Can I water for you, Mamie?” No thanks.

  I banged the front door rippling stained glass on the wall. “Git in here!” he yelled over the radio. Surprised, I ran in smiling, started to climb into his lap, but he rustled me away with a clipped-out paper.

  “You been with those dirty A-rabs?”

  “Syrians,” I said. His ashtray glowed red like the stained-glass door.

  That night … Fibber McGee and Amos and Andy on the radio. I don’t know why he liked them so much. He always said he hated colored people.

  Mamie and I sat with the Bible in the dining room. We were still on Proverbs.

  “Open rebuke is better than secret love.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.” I fell asleep and she put me to bed.

  I woke when my mother got home … lay awake beside her while she ate Cheese Tid-Bits and read a mystery. Years later, I figured out that during World War II alone my mother ate over 950 boxes of Cheese Tid-Bits.

  I wanted to talk to her, tell her about Mrs. Tapia, the guy with the dogs, how Sammy had cut us in fifty-fifty. I put my head down on her shoulder, Cheese Tid-Bit crumbs, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  The next day Hope and I went first to the apartments on Yandell Avenue. Young army wives in curlers, chenille bathrobes, mad because we woke them. None of them bought a chance. “No, I don’t have a nickel.”

  We took a bus to the Plaza, transferred to a Mesa bus to Kern Place. Rich people … landscaping, chimes on the doors. This was even better than the old ladies. Texan Junior League, tanned, Bermuda shorts, lipstick and June Allyson pageboys. I don’t think they had ever seen children like us, children dressed in their mothers’ old crepe blouses.

  Children with hair like ours. While Hope’s hair ran down her face like thick black tar, mine stood up and out like a tufted yellow beach ball, crackling in the sun.

  They always laughed when they found out what we were selling, went to find some “change.” We heard one of them talking to her husband … “Just come and see them. Actual urchins!” He did come, and he was the only one who bought a chance. The women just gave us money. Their children stared at us, pale, from their swing sets.

  “Let’s go to the depot.”

  We used to go there even before the cards … to hang around and watch everybody kissing and crying, to pick up dropped change beneath the ledge under the newsstand. As soon as we got in the door we poked each other, giggling. Why hadn’t this ever occurred to us? Millions of people with nickels and nothing to do but wait. Millions of soldiers and sailors who had a girl or a
wife or a child with a three-letter name.

  * * *

  We made out a schedule. In the mornings we went to the train station. Sailors stretched out on the wooden benches, hats folded over their eyes, like parentheses. “Huh? Oh, morning, sweethearts! Sure.”

  Old men sitting. Paying a nickel to talk about the other war, about some dead person with a three-letter name.

  We went into the COLORED waiting room, sold three names before a white conductor pushed us out by our elbows. We spent afternoons at the USO across the street. The soldiers gave us free lunch, stale ham-and-cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, Cokes, Milky Ways. We played ping-pong and pinball machines while the soldiers filled out the cards. Once we made a quarter each punching the little counter that kept track of how many servicemen came in while the woman that did that went somewhere with a sailor.

  New soldiers and sailors kept coming in with each train. The ones who were already there told them to buy our chances. They called me Heaven; and Hope, Hell.

  The plan had been to keep all sixty cards until they were sold but we kept getting more and more money and extra tip money and couldn’t even count it.

  We couldn’t wait to see who had won anyway, even though there were only ten cards left. We took the three cigar boxes of money and the cards to Sammy.

  “Seventy dollars?” Jesus Christ. They both sat up in the grass. “Crazy damn kids. They did it.”

  They kissed and hugged us. Jake rolled over and over, holding his stomach, squealing, “Jesus … Sammy you are a genius, a mastermind!”

  Sammy hugged us. “I knew you could do it.”

  He looked through all the cards, running his hand through his long hair, so black it always looked wet. He laughed at the names that had won.

  PFC Octavius Oliver, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. “Hey, where’d you find these cats?” Samuel Henry Throper, Anywhere, USA. He was an old man in the COLORED part who said we could have the Vanity Box if he won.

  Jake went to the Sunshine Grocery and brought us drippy banana popsicles. Sammy asked us about all the names, about how we did it. We told him about Kern Place and the pretty housewives in chambray shirtdresses, about the USO, about the pinball machines, the dirty man with the Great Danes.