Werner Gomez

A Trip to the Motherland

My first trip to El Salvador comes in bits and pieces. I certainly remember the 6-hour flight feeling like an eternity. I also remember liking the food on the flight, but I’ll chuck that up to my inexperienced palate. The descent into the airport and subsequent landing is something I do remember; something I remember from every airplane trip. The anticipation of finally reaching the destination, watching the tiny city below grow bigger in scale as we got closer filled me with excitement. The feeling of falling was always something that scared me and excited me all at once. There is a hill on Hoover St. that a driver hits coming from Pico toward Washington that my dad always drove over when coming back from Ague’s house or when coming back from the best taco place in town, El Taurino. I always loved the sensation I got when the car stopped going uphill and rapidly descended down Hoover. The plane landing was scarier than anything else. Strange things went through my mind when I felt the first impact of the tires hitting the runway and the plane leaping off the ground a couple times. “I’m going to die,” ran through my mind. That’s a lot of stress for a 5-year-old.

While still up in the air, I looked out the window as the plane was circling the airport waiting for clearance to start the landing process, I was in awe of how green everything was. Fields and jungle as far as the eye could see. L.A. certainly looks nothing like this place. When I walked off the plane and stepped into the airport I was smacked in the face with instant heat and humidity. It is hot in El Salvador and ridiculously muggy. As a cute kid raised on a combination of an American and Salvadoran diet, the mosquitoes found me irresistible… and there are a lot of mosquitoes… a lot.

One of my uncles on my mom’s side picked us up in a microbus. He loaded us up and we took the 31 mile drive from San Luis Talpa to Soyapango, which is right next to the capital, San Salvador. The route was beautiful. I got a closeup look at all the vegetation I saw from the plane. There was lush jungle everywhere I looked. Roadside hut restaurants were strewn along the side of the highway, along with fruit stands, cows, and goats. It was like nothing a city boy like myself had ever seen.

When the scenery changed to the towns along the way, the buildings and the people were all different; the colors of the buildings were different from what I was used to, the style of the trim on them was different from anything I had previously seen in real life. I might have seen similar things in the novelas my mom watched. Every town we passed had dirt roads; only the highway was paved. Sure, there were sidewalks, but the road itself wasn’t paved. The same was true when we reached Soyapango; dirt roads. The main streets that led to the city’s main commercial areas were paved, but not the ones in residential areas.

We arrived at my grandma’s house in the neighborhood that I’ve heard my parents refer to as La Vieja Jesús, which translates to ” the old Jesus” or “the old woman Jesus” whichever makes more sense. The street the house is on has a gate at the entrance, probably a remnant of the civil war that had taken place earlier that decade and the decade precluding it. Every house had a steel screen door and all the windows were barred. Every house was made of brick and mortar and this being a country with tropical weather, every house had tin shingled roofs. The symphony that played on those roofs on rainy nights was spectacular.

When I walked into the house, my grandmother, Mama Tilde, was eating her lunch at the dining table that was situated in the living room. I was shy at first, but she urged me to go over to her. To this point I had only heard her voice over the phone and had seen pictures of her in our family albums. I walked up to her, she gave me a hug, a kiss on the cheek and asked, “¿Como estas, hijo?” (“How are you son?”)

“Bien,” I said in a timid voice (“Good”)

She had a very soft voice. She was in her late 70s, skin was a slightly reddish brown and wrinkled. Her hands had grown rough, not only from age but also from a lifetime of working with her hands. She wore a dress, the traditional dress that working-class women in El Salvador wear; at least women of her generation and women of the generation of my mom’s older sisters wore those dresses. Mama Tilde always wore an apron. She owned and ran a pupuseria for decades and the apron was her cash register, her purse, and just general area to store anything anyone else would need to carry with him at all times. And she had short curly hair; a little salt and pepper fro.

I turned to my left, coming from the hallway and out of his room was a tall kid with a face I recognized from photo albums. He was tall for a 12-year-old and lanky. He walked over with a sheepish grin on his face which accompanied the black fro he had on his head.

“Mira, ese es tú hermano Richard,” my mom told me. (“Look, that’s your brother Richard.”)

Without hesitation, I ran over to him and gave him a hug. He didn’t quite know how to react and only halfway hugged me back. I was fine with that. I now had a brother and that was pretty cool.

I didn’t meet my sister until later on that night. Once we got settled into my grandma’s room, unpacked our clothes, and set up mosquito nets over the beds, we headed to my grandma’s pupuseria where my Tía Dora (mom’s younger sister) was running the restaurant. She had a darker complexion than the rest of us, a deeper brown, closer to a darker hue of caramel. Her hair was short and curly, but not quite as curly as Mama Tilde’s or my brother’s hair. She had a mouth that just spewed profanities.

“¿Puta vos, ya llegaste?” she greeted my mom and offered all of us some pupusas. (“Fuck, you finally arrived.”)

The pupusas weren’t like anything I had tasted in my 5 years of existence. Talk about farm fresh. The pupuseria was a stand alone cinder block building, just four walls, some tables and the stove top. It was right next to the mercado where farmers of produce and livestock sold their goods; freshly butchered, freshly picked.

I’m pretty sure that the pupuseria was the place I first met my sister, but I can’t remember it happening there. The first scene I remember of my sister is at one of my uncles’ houses. It was dark out, the light was shining from the doorway of the house out onto the dirt street. She was standing outside in the glow of the light filing her nails. She looked over at me and I stopped in my tracks. Zulma was about 12 or 13 years old at the time and I remember admiring how beautiful she was. One of my female cousins, Elsi, teased me.

“¿Te gusta verdad? Si está bonita,” she said laughing (“You like her, don’t you? She’s pretty.”)

I looked away in a feeble attempt to hide my embarrassment. Zulma laughed, called me over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Everything else about that month-long trip faded away from my memory as time passed. My birthday was celebrated, we went to Apulo to the Lago de Ilopango, played with goats at one of my uncle’s houses and listened to stories about the war.

When we came back to Los Angeles we were joined by my brother and sister. How they got to the U.S., I have no idea. The important part is that they were here and I was no longer alone.

Be careful what you wish for.

When I continue my story, I’m going to jump a couple of years. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more about my life.

In the Beginning There Was One

There isn’t much I remember about being a toddler, not sure that most people do, no residual memories left over from before I was five years old. My parents were a couple of immigrants trying to make their way in Ronald Reagan’s America, I guess the earliest situations I can recall took place sometime in ’87 or ’88. I was a single child, or so I thought. There were a couple of pictures hanging on the bedroom wall of the one-bedroom apartment we lived in, an apartment that was the perfect size for a young couple with one child. The faces I always looked at were of two toddlers, they were maybe about one and two years old at the time the photos were taken. Zulma and Richard. Those were the names of my sister and my brother. Despite having seen pictures of them as preteens, I always had the idea in my head that they were younger than me. I thought myself the older brother. Maybe them not being there physically allowed me to imagine myself as the one in charge, that I was the older one looking out for them.

Back then my parents’ work schedules didn’t sync up. My mother worked in the mornings at a sweatshop, sewing clothes together while my father worked graveyard at a big printing press. Mom would drop me off at a nanny (Ague, we called her), she was the mother of one of my mom’s coworkers. That lady became a big part of my childhood, she was my nanny since I was a couple months old and a sort of surrogate grandmother. Somewhere around noon my dad would pick me up from Ague’s house, she lived in the Pico Union area of Los Angeles, and take me home to spend the rest of the day with him. He’d make me lunch, take me to Hoover Park and he’d play basketball while keeping an eye on me as I played in the sandbox and on the slides. I always loved the sandwiches my dad made me. He would cut a pan Francés (bolillo roll to you non-Salvadorans) in half like a torta, slather the two halves with mayo, add slices of Kraft’s singles, freshly cut ham from the carnicería that was on the way home, add some leafs of lettuce, and slices of tomatoes. To drink, nothing washed a meal down like a nice big cup of flavored drink. We always had two gallons of the stuff in the fridge. Every week my dad would buy two one-gallon plastic jugs of it in whatever flavor he was in the mood for that week; grape, cherry, strawberry, pink lemonade, lime. If you could make an artificial flavor of that fruit, it was found in a gallon jug at the local mini market or liquor store for a dollar. Sure we could have bought Kool-Aid and made our own, but these “juices” were mixed right every time.

Sometime around 4 or 5 p.m. my mom would come home from work. My parents only had about an hour to spend together before my dad had to go off to work. They basically had enough time to eat dinner together.

Nights with my mom weren’t as eventful. We didn’t live in the worst neighborhood in L.A., but it wasn’t the safest either. That apartment on the corner of W22nd St. and Magnolia Ave., a large two-story purple house that was divided into four apartments, was still a better bet than where my parents previously lived. I’m not too keen on the exact details, I just know that their apartment was somewhere on Broadway in Pico Union. One night, coming home from the movies or a dinner date, my parents were attacked by a mugger with a knife. My mom was abiut 8 months pregnant with me at the time. The whole thing was going down just a few feet away from the front security gate to the their building. My dad pushed the guy off enough for him to grab my mom by the arm and start running for the gate. He got to it and opened it and bolted for the door of the building. In his haste to get the door open and both of them into safety he didn’t realize that my mom was still at the gate struggling with the assailant trying to get the gate door shut. The mugger had managed to wedge his foot in the way of the door, keeping my mom from being able to shut it. The gate and front door were only about 20 feet from each other. When my dad realized what was going on, he rushed to help my mom wrestle the gate door closed and the couple were able to make it safe inside. Needless to say because of prior experience, my mom wasn’t going to advertise that there was a woman alone with a toddler in that apartment. So, we stayed in, I played with my toys and my mom watched novelas until it was time for bed.

Religion didn’t ever really play a part in my house. Both my parents were raised Catholic but we never went to church. Hell, in my immediate family, the only ones that haven’t been baptized are my dad and myself. My mom has always believed in God and my dad never really spoke about it, at least not while I was growing up. He always wore a crucifix, so I always assumed he had some sort of belief. Someone had given me a Bible storybook, written in Spanish, that contained all the Bible myths in illustrated children’s story book style. When you have drawings of a man fighting a lion with his bare hands, no story is ever boring. Something of the sort is always going to grab the attention of a kid right away.

Right before bed, I used to pray. I used to pray for the well-being of my family in El Salvador (people I had only heard of but never met); for my grandmother, Mama Tilde (mom’s mother); the grandfather whom I never met, Papa Marcos(mom’s father); the two uncles I had met because they lived in L.A., Tio Tulio (mom’s older brother) and Tio Jaime (dad’s older brother); for the only cousins I knew at the time, Patti, Claudia and Jenny (Tio Tulio’s daughters); and for all my cousins, aunts, and uncles in El Salvador. Mostly, I used to pray for my baby brother and sister, the two photos framed up on the bedroom door.

I don’t know if my parents ever corrected me, if they did, I don’t remember. I just went on thinking for a while that because I was the only child physically in the house, I had to be the oldest. Right before I was about to turn five years old my parents planned a month-long trip to El Salvador, I was finally going to meet my family and I was going to celebrate my fifth birthday there in the neighborhood my parents grew up in. Also, by some perverse way the Universe likes to mess with me, about a month before we went on that trip, my mom got pregnant with my little sister. At this point in time, my dad’s work schedule was more in sync with my mom’s, he had switched over to a morning/day shift and they were able to find the time to go ahead and make my sister.

This is the news I went into my trip to El Salvador with. I’ll get into that trip next time.

So come back and I’ll tell you more about my life…

All I really want is some chocolate cake

When I was still living in Los Angeles and going through my freshman year of high school my dad took advantage of the bussing options that Magnet school allowed parents, enrolling me in a school that was far away from my neighborhood because he didn’t want me hanging out with the same bad crowd I was running with. The problem with trouble-making kids like myself is that no matter where you go, you’ll always find trouble. It was a whole new school with kids I was meeting for the first time. I was having trouble with my English teacher that first semester. I’ve made it pretty clear that I am a trouble maker, but this teacher seemed to think that I was the only disruptive kid in her class. There were times where it made no rational sense that I had caused whatever disruption she was upset about, but I still got a referral and was gifted some detention.

Obviously I had a lot of issues with that teacher, so the following semester I was switched to the other Magnet teacher that taught freshman English. I did a lot better in that class, went from failing my freshman English class to getting an A. In that class I also met a girl that I fell in love with the moment I saw her. She didn’t attend the first week of school because of a family trip to Mexico, but when she walked to her desk – that was directly facing me from across the room – I was mesmerized. I cannot look back and objectively say that she was the most beautiful girl I have ever laid my eyes on, but there was something about her that just struck me. She was a very nice girl, a shy girl with a certain innocence about her and I enjoyed talking her. I was a bit shy myself and I hadn’t told her or anyone else that I liked her, kept that card close to the chest.

Later on in the semester my 15th birthday rolled along. My homeroom teacher let my classmates know that is was my birthday (I was never the self-centered, attention whore, asshole that needs people to acknowledge him. I know this whole entry sounds hypocritical because by the virtue of my writing it, I’m bringing attention to it. This write up is just a necessary evil). Word got around to all my other classmates in my other classes about it being my birthday and everyone treated me with a lot of love and attention, which I didn’t really want. The best part of that day wasn’t the presents I got later on, I don’t even remember what they were. The best part was when the girl that I liked came up to me in the hallway and in full view of everyone, gave me a hug and a nice kiss. It wasn’t even a full make out kiss with tongue. It was a kiss on the lips, closed mouth, but it was a lot more memorable than all the kisses that came before and most of the ones that came after.

As much as I liked the attention I got that day, particularly from the girl I had a crush on, as much as I may unintentionally bring attention to myself, I don’t really feel all that comfortable being the center of attention. I don’t have any anxiety about it, I guess I’m just not used to being complimented and praised for a job well done, especially when I did no job at all.

My issue with celebrating my birth is that I didn’t do anything, I was pushed out, I had no choice in the matter. Being born is not an accomplishment. You want to congratulate someone for my birth? Bombard my mother with well wishes and congratulations. She’s the one that did all the work. She’s the one that carried me around for 9 months. She’s the one that was in labor for all those hours and finally pushed me out at 2:12 p.m. on March 31, 1984. She’s the one that nurtured me from her bosom, made sure I was warm and comforted me when I was crying. I shouldn’t get any of the credit.

You want to congratulate or condemn someone for my birth and my still being here? Take it up with my father. He’s the one that put a roof over my head, clothes on my back, food in my stomach. He’s the one that worked two or three jobs at a time to take care of four kids, two dogs and a tank full of goldfish (fish require a lot of attention). He’s the one that helped me with my homework, that nurtured my artistic side, who took me on fishing trips and tried his damned-est to make sure I didn’t end up leading a life of crime. I shouldn’t get any of the credit.

Every year I’m plagued with a barrage of unwanted messages on Facebook. No matter how many times I plead for people not to do it, they don’t listen. Every year a bunch of people I don’t talk to, a bunch of people I don’t interact with – even on Facebook – feel the need to post birthday wishes on my wall and congratulate me for having staved off death for a another orbital cycle. Considering all the times I’ve flirted with death and all the close calls I’ve had, I guess congratulations may be in order. The people I don’t talk to don’t give a fuck about me and I don’t give a fuck about them, so let’s not pretend here. Maybe I should welcome all those messages. It would give me a good idea of whom I should delete from my “friends” list. I don’t care much for phony niceties. I’d rather you just said nothing.

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed my birthdays. It’s not that anything bad has happened on my birthdays, except for that one year Selena was killed on my birthday and everyone was too busy watching the news coverage and not hooking me up with a piece of cake. Just like the fat kid I am, I love chocolate cake and I look forward to getting a slice every year… It never happens because my family gets whatever cake it feels like getting, usually not chocolate. Maybe that’s where my birthday blues come from; lack of chocolate cake.

I love hanging out with my friends and just getting drunk, I love going out to dinner with those friends and when I have a girlfriend or a woman I’m messing around with, I love doing nasty things to her or having her do them to me. But, those are things I love doing whether it’s my birthday or not. I get a much warmer feeling celebrating the birthdays of people I care about than I do celebrating my own. It’s those little things that matter to me.

I marvel more at the circumstances that lead to me being here; the explosion from the singularity some 13.8 billion years ago that lead to the expansion of the universe, that brought forth the elements and created the stars, those stars that continued to burn and exploded in supernovas, the molten rocks that joined together and began circling those stars, the planets that cooled down and developed atmospheres and moons, the earth that housed the primordial soup that was the first life on it, the formation of water that allowed those single-celled organism to spread out further, the flora that provided oxygen to the oceans and the world above water, the first creature that made its way onto land, those creatures that became the first mammals, those mammals that led to Lucy the Australopithecus, that led to Homo Habilis, that led to Homo Erectus, eventually to Homo Sapiens, those ancient humans that migrated from Africa to Europe and Asia, the Asian humans that crossed the Bering Stait into North and South America, the Europeans that invaded the Americas and conquered the indigenous people, those Hispanics that created the Spanish colonies in Latin America, those natives that fought for independence from Spain to form their independent countries, my ancestors that lived and died in the developing country of El Salvador, my parents who met when they were children, my father who dated a my mother when she was raising two kids that weren’t his, the war that upended lives and killed tens of thousands, that cause my mother to look for a better life in the U.S. while leaving her two children with their grandmother while she got things ready in a foreign country, the war that killed my father’s mother and closed down the universities ending his dreams of becoming a doctor and forcing him to look for a better life in the U.S., the circumstances that led to my parents finding each other in the U.S. after a year apart and eventually the relationship that let to my conception.

Those are amazing circumstances and those are the things and accomplishments that should be celebrated. I shouldn’t get any of the credit, all I did was being born.