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A Toda Máquina
by Alejandro Murguía
(01/22/03)
She was hanging around the parking lot at an AM/PM in Sacramento, a little Chicanita with tight jeans tucked into lizard-skin cowboy boots and a small suitcase held together with duct tape. Her sunglasses sparkled with rhinestones, giving her a glitzy look that didn't fit in around here among the trash and homeless pushing shopping carts. This was the rough part of Sacra, where desperate women turned tricks in cars under the shadow of the State Building. She wasn't exactly hitchhiking, me entiendes, but she didn't need a sign that said here was a huiza ready to split Dodge.
I'd nearly finished pumping the fifteen gallons of Supreme when she came up behind me and said, "Can I ride with you to the freeway?" Her voice had something about it that made my stomach tighten up a notch.
I turned around real slow like and there she was in the shimmering heat of the parking lot, suitcase at her feet, hands on her hips, and jeans that looked like she'd taken a brush and painted them on, being careful to detail the seams and pockets. I didn't know if she carried good luck or bad, but I should've known. Lizard-skin cowboy boots. Rhinestone sunglasses. A wild bush of hair framing her oval face. I've always been a chump for women, so I said, "Órale, hop in."
Without another word she threw her suitcase in the backseat and slid in front, against the window, away from me, a coil of plastic bracelets bunched up on her left wrist. I'd been a long time in the country without female company except for Sage Pumo, a Hoopa Indian, wide as a bear, so this little smoke of a woman had most if not all my attention.
I floored the Camaro and shot out of the parking lot. "So what's your name?" she asked. I told her mine and she told me hers -- Adelita Guerra. "Nice to meet you," she said. "It's always good to make new friends." She offered her hand, and I shook it. It was a worker's hand, rough and stained from picking walnuts, maybe yesterday. She dug into her front pockets for a frayed pack of Juicy Fruit and offered me one. "Naw. Go ahead," I said. I didn't tell her I hate gum. She chewed smacking her lips, happy as a kid on a school trip. I had Los Lobos playing on the tape deck, "La Pistola y el Corazón," music that makes you crave a nice cold one. It'd been years since I'd drunk a beer, but you never forget.
When we came to the freeway on-ramp, she sat up. "This doesn't look good. Can I ride to the next town?" I glanced at her from the corner of my eye, and that tightness in my stomach just got tighter. I couldn't exactly kick her out in the middle of nowhere, so I hit the on-ramp with a thump and revved the Camaro out, angry at what I'd gotten myself into.
I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the road, not wanting to look at her. Still, I could sense her gauging me, like a good hustler on the prowl. On my way to Sacra I'd seen a head-on collision by Redding, two cars twisted into pretzels with no survivors, and that's what I was thinking about a few minutes later when she asked, "Pues, where we going?"
I checked the rearview mirror for Highway Patrol and ignored her question. Adelita shrugged as if she didn't care, and tapped her boots, grooving to the music. It took a few miles before I settled in to enjoy the big monster working under the hood of my cherry-red Camaro Z-28 that made the white stripes of the road zip by in a blur. A string of red-and-black magic beads swayed from my rearview mirror, keeping time. Then she started drumming her fingers on the dashboard, like she was playing a piano or something, and I had to sit up and pay attention. She held her head up, like a prize filly, with arrogance and confidence. That's what first pulled me to her, made me question myself. I moved into the fast lane to get clear of an eighteen-wheeler that was hogging the road, but I had no real hurry to get anywhere. I pulled on my goatee and pondered her question. Where are we going? We? I hadn't thought about us as we. More like -- her there, and me here. ¿Qué no? I lived happy outside of Weaverville, along a desolate stretch of gravel road at the edge of the Trinity Wilderness, a free man, just me and my music. My nearest neighbor, Sage Pumo, occupied a cabin several miles down Highway 299. At night, I had a clear view of the stars in the California sky. So I didn't need complications, and I had enough grief since my dog Reagan got squashed by a logging truck.
I looked her in the eye. "I'm headed south."
"Then I'll ride with you. I'm going to Vegas."
I took a closer look at her. "Why's that?"
"I'm a singer. I sing rancheras, huapangos, boleros. I also play the accordion. I'm going to be a star."
"There's a lot of talent in Vegas. Lots."
She frowned for just a second, like that thought had never crossed her mind.
"But I'm good, I'm real good. When I sing, I feel it all inside me. In here." And she jabbed a thumb at her heart.
Man, some people are real näive. I didn't want to discourage her with tales of good girls gone bad selling themselves for a dime of meth, so I flipped the tape to the other side.
We were crossing the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, miles of tomatoes and strawberries separated by irrigation ditches, and crop dusters flying low, spraying a fine pesticide mist over the perfectly laid-out furrows. Two thin vapor trails, almost faded, crossed in the eggshell blue of the sky. The sun was slanting down behind us, setting the mountains on fire. Adelita removed her sunglasses and laid them on the dashboard. She squinted at the mean farm fields, and the corners of her eyes crinkled up where the first crow's-feet were beginning to take a grip. She crossed one knee over the other, drummed her fingers some more on the armrest, and hummed a tune I couldn't make out. I didn't want to stare at her, but she was kinda pretty in a country sort of way. In her late twenties, I guessed. Don't get me wrong, Adelita seemed game, like she'd been around the block a couple of dozen times. Her mouth had that hard edge women get after twenty-five when they figure out life's not going to treat them right.
But I wanted some details. "So where you from?"
She tossed her head back over one shoulder. "From there."
"Sacramento?"
"Colusa."
Colusa, land of dust and walnuts. I could see why she'd want to leave. "How'd you get to Sacra?"
She answered -- with a throaty, wicked laugh that stood the hairs on my arm at attention.
I took a wild guess. "You running away?"
"You could say that."
"A bad relationship?"
"Sort of."
"What? Husband?"
"Are you loco? No husband."
"You have family? Kids?"
"You sure ask a lot of questions."
"Maybe you should go back."
"Never."
"The kids'll be worried about you. I can always turn around."
"Try it and I'll jump out right here. I'll never let a man tell me what to do. Ever. I'm through with that."
I could tell she was serious. And it really wasn't my business. We passed Santa Nella and I had the Camaro doing eighty and thinking that driving alone ain't so bad. I checked the fuel gauge and figured out when I would need to make another pit stop. Up ahead, a black, ominous cloud tunneled out of the middle divider; something was burning. I eased off a notch on the gas.
I noticed she was staring at my tats.
I had the Virgen of Guadalupe emblazoned in India ink on my right forearm. Two chubby angels beneath her feet unfurled a banner that said Perdóname Virgendta. On each knuckle of my right hand was tattooed a letter. My other forearm had a blue heart, and inside the heart Norma/Por Vida. I was sixteen when I did that one. I even had a little Native American glyph on my shoulder for Sage.
Adelita was eyeballing the Virgen, so I said, "You want to touch? Go ahead."
She scooted closer to me and touched the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her fingernails were like needles puncturing my skin. She left her hand on my arm a second longer than necessary, as if feeling my strength.
"Ever seen tats like these?" I said.
"Not really. Where'd you get them?"
I shrugged. "Tough tattoos. Long, sad stories."
"You don't want to tell me, do you? What's the matter, don't you trust me?"
"It's not a question of trust."
"What is it then? You afraid I'll tell The National Enquirer?
Crazy woman. I don't know why I said, "You'd look real fine with one."
She shot a look at me that burned right through my skull.
"Where would you put it?"
That surprised me. Where would I put it? Where would I tattoo her for life? I pressed my thumbnail just under her blouse into her shoulder, leaving a red mark like a half-moon. The air around that part of the valley must have been highly charged with electric particles, because touching her hit me like a live wire. A pure jolt of energy. I would not lie, carnal. At the same time, I saw the object on the middle divider was a semi rig that had jackknifed, the steel cab all mangled, charred, and smoking like a plane wreck. A fire crew hosed the wreckage with streams of water, but it was too late. No man could have survived that accident. We passed by it in a flash.
Adelita scooted back to her seat and I mentally rehearsed the business I had in El Ley. Under a false compartment in the trunk were forty Ziploc bags of red-haired sinsemilla. This stash belonged to Sage, her whole harvest. Her first husband had left her seven hundred acres of prime mountain real estate complete with underground springs; her second husband had left her a tractor. I was just her neighbor and a hired hand, but already I felt like husband number three. I helped plant the crop during the spring and watered it in summer, running a PVC pipe from the underground source to the budding plants. Sage held the main percentage, and I usually made enough to keep in buds during the winter months, and, if I was lucky, to survive till the next harvest. This year, though, I had offered to unload the crop with my main man in Pico Rivera. Tyrannus Mex was a boxcar of meanness, the
main connect in East Los, and he paid cash on the line. So I was making the run with ten pounds of the highest-grade herb in the world. Real triple-A stuff. Sage and I were looking at maybe fifty grand in pure profits, just like the big boys running paper scams. My percentage would be enough to live in style for a whole year.
But working up close in the mountains has a way of stripping you down to bare emotions. After toiling in the herb garden, I would relax with Sage in the sweat lodge, where I had a chance to consider her ample, hairless body and her sizable breasts under braided black hair. One of her nipples pointed up and the other pointed down, and that just increased my curiosity. During those late summer months a female bear had taken to showing up every morning around my cabin, and when the bear started looking good, I feared for my sanity. So instead I squeezed my skinny hips between Sage's broad thighs, and she rubbed us both to warmth and human comfort.
The night before my trip, Sage and I were snuggled under her Pendleton blanket. Suddenly she sat up. "Maybe you'd better not make this trip. I had a dream last night about you, and your luck's about to run out." "Naw," I said to Sage, "I don't believe in dreams." Then we humped like bears in the woods, with lots of growls and thrusts and groans and moans, but not much passion. Sleeping with Sage Pumo wasn't exactly love, but it was convenient. I did have other business in El Ley, and the thought of it kept me quiet for miles. El Ley had stopped being my town a long time ago. I was going back to bury my only brother, a half brother really. Even though he was the product of my father's affairs, and we never lived in the same house, we spent a lot of time together as teenagers. We have a saying in the barrio that fit the two of us -- blood is thicker than mud. But he'd been on the streets awhile, and I'd lost touch with him. Ten years maybe without hearing from him, then the yellow envelope from the V.A. office with the cold notice. He'd either been robbed or beaten, or both, nothing in his pockets but thirty-four cents when they found him drowned in the El Ley River. The El Ley River that's about three inches deep. I wondered if they would bury him with the box full of medals he'd brought back from Vietnam. He'd been an honor student in high school -- who would have guessed this would be his end? But it was. And the anger of it kept me burning, kept me awake many nights. I was going back because it was the right thing, but I wanted to leave quick and clean before the jaws of El Ley clamped down on me again.
Adelita pressed her knees together and withdrew into her own world. I scraped all thoughts about her out of my mind and drove on. We were by Kettleman City, the road like an arrow aimed at nothing, the sky big as a canvas, with two small puff clouds blowing across the blueness like tumbleweeds. The only signs on the road warned PATROLLED BY AIRCRAFT. This empty land could make anyone a desperado.
"I'm taking this exit," I said. "You decide what you want to do."
She sat up, looking at me as if I'd insulted her, then she turned away and looked out the window, like there was something to see, the Grand Canyon perhaps.
After parking, I went to the head and took a long leak, taking my time to shake my thing dry, hoping that maybe Adelita would be gone by the time I got back. But when I stepped out there, she was still scrunched down in the car. So I bought a pack of sunflower seeds in the Quick Stop and kept my eyes on her just in case she'd step out to stretch her legs or use the head. But she wasn't taking any chances. I felt sorry for her and brought her a soda when I came back.
"I guess that means you want to ride," I said.
"That's right," she said.
If women are a puzzle, this one had a thousand mismatched pieces. I pulled back onto the freeway and tried the radio for a while, but picked up nothing but static and a country preacher begging donations and spewing hate and prejudice. Just what this country needs. So I snapped it off. Adelita was chewing on a hangnail, not looking at the road.
Finally I said, "So what songs you know?"
She looked up at me like a puppy that wants to please.
"You want me to sing?"
"No. I want you to tap dance backwards."
She put one hand over her mouth to hide her smile.
Then she sang, bajito at first, a little unsure of herself, one of those classic boleros from long ago, "Perfidia," a song of passion, heartache, and betrayal. Linda Ronstadt had nothing to worry about. Not yet anyway. Adelita went off-key on the high notes, and she forgot every other line and just kinda scatted her way through the lyrics. But her voice and phrasing simmered with raw emotion that moved even a coldhearted vato like me. With a few lessons, who knows how far she'd go?
Then she did something I wish she hadn't done. She hummed a few bars of "Historia de un Amor," and I remembered everything I wanted to forget. Of all the songs in the world, "Historia de un Amor" held bitter memories of three summers I wasted in Soledad Prison, lifting weights, playing dominoes, killing some slow time. Another pinto, Shorty from Visalia, a tattoo artist with a disfigured face, did my tats. He plucked a thread from a blanket, tied three needles to a Popsicle stick, then dipped the jailhouse invention in a bottle of India ink. He outlined the Virgen first, a jab at a time, then filled in the details, the rays shooting out behind her, the hands folded in prayer, the two angels. It was my idea to add the banner and the words. Working from a photograph, Shorty made the Virgen look like Reina Sarmiento, my outside woman. Later, he did the moon and the stars at her feet. It took him six months to finish. This was late-at-night work, another pinto keeping a lookout for the bulls, while Shorty worked the needles, and each jab stung like a betrayal or a false kiss. At lockdown time, with the cell block quiet, I spent each night in my bunk tracing the cracks on the gray ceiling, knowing my friends were living their lives, having kids, going to parties, and I was doing time, eating off metal plates, walking the yard, watching my back, and going to sleep rubbing my cock to those train whistles blowing lonesome as coyotes, wondering if anyone remembered me on the outside. And her singing that one song brought it all back, indelible as any tattoo.
After Adelita finished she was silent for a moment, like she was waiting for the applause. I was lost in my own memories.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"You're sad. But you have talent."
She smiled, and I noticed she had one black tooth near the back of her mouth. "The minute I saw you, I could tell you were the man for me."
Let me tell you, carnal, sometimes a man gets tempted to throw everything away for a woman. Like there's one of those Oaxacan carnival devils on your shoulder, the ones with the red horns, giving you bad advice. Just pushing you to do something stupid. A man has to be on guard for these moments. And it looked like one of these moments was upon me. I took a closer look at her. She wasn't much you could hold on to, thin as a fence post really, and that Colusa soil still dirtied her nails. But I had a powerful urge to bury my face in that wild hair of hers and smell it. I wanted to feel what it was like to squeeze her in my arms and wake up in the morning with her dark face next to me. And I could feel myself sinking into her temptation like I was waist deep in quicksand.
I'd stayed away from temptation for years. Especially Chicanitas, my only heavy vice, those brown girls. I'd been through the bad hurt before. Real bad. Back in the days with Reina Sarmiento. My one true love. My always and forever babe. Her name in blue letters on the knuckles of my right hand. I ruined my life for her, lost three years in Soledad, taking the rap when we were busted holding two kilos of some potent Jamaican ganja. I threw a beer can at the cops when they busted the door down and got an assault tacked on the possessions charge. That meant a felony, some extra time. And when I came out, what did Reina have waiting for me? I had a stash of nearly ten grand before the takedown, and she couldn't tell me where the money was. Down her arm and up her nose. I loved that woman so much, had kissed every nook and cranny of her body, had dipped my tongue between her legs and over her breasts, now I wouldn't kick her in the ass if she bent over. So you see? That's why I don't believe in love.
After the pinta I had gone north to get as far as I could. To get as far from the grief and drugs and booze of East Los as probation would allow. Now my colors were neither red nor blue, I was neither Norteno nor Sureno. This was my first trip back in ten years, and I was tense. I meant to make the deal with T-Mex, sign the forms for my brother's funeral, and be out within twenty-four hours. And never go back.
Adelita pulled down the sun visor, then, looking in the mirror, rolled her hair up and knotted it in a bun. A small curl slipped out of the knot and down her nape, and that just drove me crazy. Right there I would have sold my soul to hang like that curl and kiss the back of her neck. She reached into the backseat and hauled her suitcase up front, ripped the tape off, and I could see all she had in there was a beat-up accordion and a pint of peach brandy. The real sweet stuff. She shoved the bottle at me.
"Have a drink with me, cowboy."
I licked the dust from my lips. "No, thanks."
I fished in the ashtray for the joint I'd been hitting on the night before with Sage. Up to this minute I had forgotten about her premonition. Now here I was with a woman who was a dream chaser.
I fired up the roach with the car lighter, sucked in a little jet stream of smoke, and held my breath like a blowfish. Then I blew a rush of purple smoke that clouded the Camaro. I'd been sober for years, just smoked a little -- once a vato loco, always a vato loco, and the last thing I wanted was to start drinking. Booze was poison to me. I had too much Indian blood, that's what Sage told me. But Adelita tipped the bottle to her lips, and a thin line of brandy trickled down her mouth. I noticed her mouth, wide with full lips, the kind I like. She wiped her mouth with the palm of her hand.
I was holding the roach with my fingernails. "Care for a hit?"
"No. It's bad for my voice."
Once the herb came on, the landscape stretched out, the seconds floated by, and the miles seemed farther apart though I kept a steady eighty. A bug went splat! on the windshield, leaving a dribble of yellow liquid. I could feel the bug's pain, its surprise at suddenly flying into something solid when it thought the sky was clear. Splat! There went another one. I was too sensitive to be in the fast lane, so I moved over to the middle lane and slowed to seventy. And I thought of Shorty doing hard time in Soledad. A woman he loved had poured scalding water on him while he slept, leaving half his face melted like wax. But he survived the county hospital doctors. Months later, he ran into his ex-wife and her new vato, in the Reno Club in Sacra. Shorty didn't care about her anymore, but a fight started anyway and he stabbed the vato with a five-inch blade, right in the neck. So now one man was paralyzed and another in prison, and the woman who'd caused it all flew off free as a golondrina. Pobre Shorty. He should have walked away from her when he had the chance. Poor, stupid Shorty. I learned in the joint there's nothing more dangerous than loving a woman the way Shorty had loved, blind as a worm, the way I had loved Reina Sarmiento. The woman didn't exist that was worth your life. And I intended never to love a woman, any woman, that bad again. But that was the only way I knew how. And faking it with Sage was the coward's way out.
Adelita turned quiet too. She hunched in her corner of the front seat, her knees crossed, and didn't sing anymore, just sipped her brandy through tight lips. Every now and then she'd take a quick glance at me, then look away. The only sound came from my Camaro ripping off the miles. After a while she turned to me, with just a hint of pleading in that voice I would have followed anywhere.
"I need a ride to Vegas," she said. "You want to take me, be with me when I make it?"
I couldn't believe it. Why did I always find the crazy ones? The ones even the devil didn't want. "It doesn't work that way," I said. "You can't just take two people from the middle of nowhere and mix them."
She glared at me, eyes all fired up with anger. "Why not? Or do you want that whole game playing first? Tú sabes, the sweet-talking and the playing around like you don't know what you're after. I'm through with that. Either you come with me or you don't. I'm not asking you again." She pinned me down with those arrowhead eyes of hers.
I stuffed the last handful of sunflower seeds in my mouth and crushed them viciously. Hell, I knew I could get along with her, I could tell, but Virgen Maŕia, what was she like day after day? Passion is fleeting -- I knew that much. One morning you wake up and they want to sit on your face, and you just can't handle it that early, even with the most beautiful woman, so that kills the romance right there. And she was tough, the type that would get back at you while you slept. I could see that. Maybe she poisoned her ex-old man, and that's what she was running from. Or maybe her ex was getting ready to come after her. Maybe there was no ex, maybe it was a husband. So there was that to worry about. She didn't seem too concerned about her kids, either. And I didn't need troubles. I especially didn't need her troubles.
Just to test her, I said, "You maybe have money to get there? You know the old saying -- gas, grass, or ass."
"I'll pay you somehow."
I turned my eyes back to the road: "Chale," I said, "I have business in El Ley."
That hurt her. She stared out the window for a while, like there was something to see, but I knew there was nothing out there. Finally she spoke, pleading but not pleading.
"You don't seem like a bad man. That's all I've ever known. Since I was fifteen."
I didn't want to listen to the oldest story in the world.
"A woman needs some kind of protection. Or else bad men will take advantage of her." She tilted the bottle up and took a long swallow. Wiped her mouth with her hand again. "It's not easy raising two kids alone. And no man wants a woman with kids, I don't blame them. But all I've ever wanted to do was sing. I'd sing in the fields, just to ease that pain in my corazón, right here where it hurts all the way through your back. I'd sing under the trees during lunchtime, or after work, whenever I could. And people were always saying I should get paid for it and they'd pass the hat. You know what you get paid for picking walnuts?"
"I don't really care," I said.
"Not very sucking much."
She took a deep breath, shook her head, took another drink. Now she really unleashed it on me.
"My last boyfriend, you know, he did some things to me...."
Damn, I wanted to stop the car, get out right there in the middle of nowhere, and show her not all men were animals.
"So I left my two boys with their abuelita. And split."
"I'm glad you did." And I looked at her, sitting sad as a bird on a wire in winter.
"I'm sure you had to," I said.
"But you're different, I can see that. You have corazon, like me." And she took another swig and smiled, looking like a little girl. A little girl on the run, telling stories and nipping her brandy.
The honesty of her confession wrapped around me like tule fog, and there was nothing else to say. I thought about a woman like her, alone on the road, making her way with strangers who offered rides. The sort of trouble she could get into -- being kinda good-looking, and a little crazy and all. Leaving her kids behind must have hurt some, I guess. And who knows what that boyfriend did to her. She'd probably been chained to the stove, or worse, and this was her only chance, her last chance at life. It was tragic. I mean there was a tragedy waiting to happen, and I didn't want it to happen. I had to admire her taking the risk, getting set one day, packing her things into that patched-up suitcase and slipping out to chase her dream. I just didn't know where I fit in. I'd wasted the first half of my life already, and I sure didn't want to blow the rest over a piece of nearly flat Chicana ass.
Before my life had gone to hell, I'd been a guitarist, sat in on some of the first gigs Los Lobos played when they were still a garage band. Five years passed, and then time in the joint, and after I came out I didn't remember what I had started out to be. Didn't give a damn either. Now I only wanted to live my life, die in peace, be buried and forgotten. My dreams had withered in the day-to-day survival. But something about Adelita was rubbing off on me. Just watching her sit there, a hurricane being born, I felt the itch to do things again, to take chances. Live life at full throttle. It was that funny feeling I'd gotten when I first saw her.
The green freeway sign read LOS ANGELES 90 MILES. I'd been driving six hours. I was tired and thirsty; the thin film of dust over the Camaro seemed to cover me too. I turned to her and said in a voice I didn't recognize, "Let me have a sip of that brandy." That was my choice. Had nothing to do with her. I washed some of that cheap stuff down my throat and handed her back the pint. My eyes burned like I was giving up the ghost.
She was measuring me. "I bet I know what you're thinking."
"What's that?" I squinted at the road so she couldn't read my mind.
"You'd like to kiss me."
"It's pretty hard when I'm doing seventy on I-5. "
But a kiss is not what I was thinking. I was thinking I had just taken my first drink in ten years and was ready for more. The road to damnation -- someone once said -- is paved with wine, women, and weed, and I had a full house. I checked the rearview mirror. The magic red-and-black beads that my shaman friend Maestro Andres had given me hung like a broken pinata, and they seemed to have lost the power to protect me. Adelita slid over next to me and placed her hot little hand on my thigh. The speedometer went straight up.
With Adelita I knew it was going to be all the way, all the time, without regrets, double or nothing. I checked her out sideways and I said, "What about that tattoo?"
Without so much as a blink she reached up and pulled down a corner of her blouse, revealing a sunburned shoulder. The red half-moon of my nail mark was still visible on her skin. Her voice a sultry whisper wicked as a night on the delta: "I've never been tattooed."
I thought of Reina and Sage and all the other huizas I carry stitched on my body. But here was a woman willing to do it for me. Willing to go all the way -- a toda máquina.
"A heart on fire is what I'm going to put there. Then we'll be a pair. Por vida."
She leaned over and blew her hot breath in my ear. My foot went to the metal and the Camaro took off, as if wanting to fly. Then she pressed a hot kiss on my mouth, her plastic bracelets clacking in my ear. This is it, I thought, no going back. I closed one eye and swerved down the middle of that four-lane highway, knowing there was not another car on the road, only her and me, our tough tattoos, and the radials running over those little plastic squares that separate the lanes, going fuckitfuckitfuckit.
©2001 by Alejandro Murguía
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Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front, which received the 1991 American Book Award. In 2002, City Lights Books published a new collection, This War Called Love. The Medicine of Memory: A Mexican Clan in California, nonfiction, is being published by the University of Texas Press. He teaches at San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies.
A Toda Máquina is excerpted from Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, edited by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil
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suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing
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