Dear Mr. You Read online

  What did you do, Yaqui boy? Did you do like Sammy and most of the Mexican boys, marry the girl you took to prom? In Guadalupe everyone had a place. The Yaqui Indians, your people, had their space farther out. I wouldn’t have seen you before and I don’t even know where you went to school. My one good friend when I was fifteen was Mexican and she brought me to your hood. In the overly white community where I lived, all was murderously medium. It was hard to locate yourself there, where everything was a moderate version of something that didn’t dare reach too far up or dip beneath the middle. I went to the barrio instead, trailed along to every Posada and quinceañera; anywhere there were empanadas and mariachis that ended their sets with “Sabor a Mi.” You would never have come to my street where every boy was a football star and every girl a popular cheerleader. I hated them while sometimes wishing I was one too, a girl who was invited to dances, walked home, or occasionally felt up by a creepy uncle.

  I was never noticed in my fifteenth year except by you, deer dancer. It was your Pascala and my Easter. I walked through Guadalupe to the far field, where white girls whispered that Mexicans took victims and tied them up with phone cords to rape them. That didn’t scare me half as much as walking the halls at school and I didn’t believe them anyway. I was the only white person for miles and blanca I was pale as notebook paper without the lines. I noticed the houses getting smaller and the yards more chaotic, overrun with broken cars and swing sets that served as laundry lines. We started to see more of your people as they walked to their Easter, the big holy day. Soon there was just the smell of dough frying and clusters of people, some in costume. My friend headed for the biggest group, packed so tightly that we couldn’t see what they were looking at. Flashing her brilliant smile at a neighbor, she grabbed my hand and he made space for us so we could slip in front.

  You were there. There was an old man feet away from you, playing a drum made out of a gourd floating in water. Someone was singing in Yaqui, that language so heavy on article and air, its sounds so untenably painful that every note was someone begging or losing. The music was only background though, because I was watching you. My friend whispered

  The drum is the deer’s heart, floating, and the sticks they play are the breath in his body

  I don’t know how long it took for you to hypnotize me into reverie. Before the crowd parted I’d seen your antlers above the people and part of me had worried, oh God, not an animal sacrifice, I am an Episcopalian after all, I can only jive with so much, but it wasn’t. It was you, sacred, beautiful boy. You were dancing with a full shed of antlers on your head while your audience stood rapt and reverent.

  By legend the deer dancer has to be summoned to dance, receiving the invitation in his sleep. It’s a calling in your culture, where grave decisions are made based on dreams and flowers. Photographing a deer dancer was not allowed and signs of warning were posted. For those who believe, the dance is a fortification so strong that it purifies just to watch it, and since you don’t know how many dances you will see in your lifetime, you should see every one you can. You were my one and despite your shaggy black hair and dirty face you felt as much a deer as any I’ve seen disappearing into the trees. Though probably my age, you’d had more thrown at you and lived harder. Your lower body was so thoroughly covered in red earth that it seemed you’d been left in the sun to rust.

  I moved a half step closer, and sensed something more than saw it. A question loomed and the answer couldn’t possibly be yes to does he see me but it was. I could feel myself being seen, though you weren’t looking at me as much as dancing at me, finding me from some radar at the tip of your antlers while arching in my direction. You’d caught my frequency from where I stood at the edge of the crowd, trembling. Your chest was brown enough to make that dirt look like a softer shade of chalk as your breath made your ribs appear and recede. My pulse quickened when your deer raised up as if tracking a mate nearby. Your body was equal parts human and animal; it made me feel safe and hunted in the best way. I wanted to pet you and feed you, I wanted you to chase me and take me with your teeth. I wished you could turn my legs that red dirt color by pinning me to the ground underneath you.

  Too abruptly the singing stopped. For a moment you were frozen so still that I began to doubt you’d ever actually moved. When you finally relaxed, you bent over with your hands on your knees, coming back. One of the musicians gave you a handful of cigarettes and some of the men reached for them in exchange for a small tip as a sign of respect. Looking around almost wearily, you ignored them and didn’t stop. Instead you walked across that circle and closed it. You aimed straight in my direction. I stayed fixed on you, your brown eyes, your mouth as you advanced to me, who’d never had a boy walk to her before. Not in that way, to choose her. The last few steps of your approach, with all the men trailing behind, your face was square on and meeting mine at its most open. Taller than I realized, you gazed down as my legs shook, my arms all goose flesh with you only a deer’s distance away. We stared into each other until you held up a cigarette and said

  Quieres?

  I shook my head no. You shrugged. I offered a smile, really more than I’d ever willingly given any boy. You smiled back and sighed quietly, turning and walking sideways for a few steps to not close off from me, I thought. A quick last glance and you were off, walking alongside the Fariseos as they pelted you with flowers.

  • • •

  There are relatively few of your tribe left, do you count each other? They sold your people for twenty-five or fifty centavos a head, you were hunted like the deer but no one talks about this. No one knows you. Where I grew up your people lived and still live, not far from the desert where those deer run wild, most of those animals not living longer than four years. Mountain lions, men with archery kits bought online, there are too many hunters for deer to live out their potential life span. Their greatest downfall is mating season. That’s when a buck grows careless, letting go of those eyes in the back of his head. If he gets that twitch, hoping a mate is nearby, he will turn right toward that trace of something, suddenly dreamy and reckless. That hope can lead him straight into a bullet; desire then becoming just another hard way for a deer to fall.

  Dear Risk Taker,

  I remember staring at the Avedon poster of the Beatles when I was four and a half. Years old. It was taped to the wall behind my sister’s bed and I would bore holes in it, staring at them while she played their records, which I already knew. When I was seven or so I was putting on a play in my backyard for an audience of zero, called “Imposter Beatles.” My character was a girl named Sweetie who was seduced by four men claiming to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Sometimes the girl down the block joined in but usually I enacted the whole thing alone or with my dog. The beginning was a montage where Sweetie received compliments from Paul about her personality and halter dress, followed by a section where she played on the swings while they serenaded her with songs from Revolver. At some point she began to tap into clues that these were imposters with a plot to kidnap her. Some days Sweetie was gagged and handcuffed by the Faux George, with sadomasochistic implications that were probably unsettling, having been conjured by a second-grader. The play ended with me atop a dirt mound in my yard, arms raised and reaching for the escape rope tossed by helicopter from the genuine Paul McCartney. Paul climbed down and risked his life, all the while singing “Here, There, and Everywhere.” The whole thing satisfied my rescue fantasies and my need to be validated by a rock star while wearing a halter dress. I wrote a letter to a television station trying to get some interest, but my parents never mailed it.

  By the time I found you I was still devoted to the Beatles but I was in high school and ready for something else. Rickie Lee Jones and The Smiths were a couple years away but your music was on time. It was a shove that made me want to fight back. My brother brought me your records one by one. We’d sit in his room and listen to each track with him jumping up and diving into air guitar or stopping to move the needle back so w
e could re-listen to a lyric. Sometimes he’d lend me one overnight so I could listen as I fell asleep, and when it ended I’d tiptoe over in my nightgown and start the whole record over with the volume lower. You were showing up on my porch when I listened to your records, driving me away in your banged-up car. This was better than my actual life and the metallic taste of rage on my tongue that I couldn’t even locate or explain to anyone. You were a loner in a small town too, isolated and branded weird. I put on your records and imagined the two of us finding each other, both alienated and starving for affection. I snuck out my bedroom window to meet you in abandoned amusement parks and garages, I could feel your leather jacket against my cheek, and see the relief in your face when I showed up, someone who never accused you of sulking or being strange. For the whole length of your song we ran through alleys and whispered on pay phones. I nursed you after brawls in the parking lot, sneaking home your white T-shirt and scrubbing the blood out of it in secret, all the while defending you to my imaginary friends who worried about me for dating a monosyllabic hoodlum with a broken muffler.

  No one wants to hear about the congenital melancholy that gnaws at the soul of a teenaged girl, and there was no one for me to tell. Skulking through life as a loser was oddly shaming though, and has continued to trail me through realities that flat out contradicted it. At sixteen I only wanted to be worth the level of beseeching I felt in the wail of your harmonica. It went inside me, that sound. It crept up and under my skirt and made my skin beg back. There had to be someone as lonely as me who needed to be kissed and infuriated in just the right way. I know how to do all that is what I thought.

  It may be that everyone feels peripheral in high school. My one friend and I stuck together, but some days I would walk halfway to school in the morning only to turn around and go back. I started counting my credits in my head, one day realizing I could leave high school altogether in a few months if I took extra classes. “What about graduation? What about prom?” I heard a few ask. “Precisely,” I thought to myself.

  I packed up my records and went to live with my sister, who would instill me with some kind of confidence if it killed her, she would help find somewhere with others like me and stand quietly applauding when I took my first baby steps toward it. My first college dorm room had your album cover taped to the door. I was at arts school now, having finally said out loud that I wanted to be an actress, and I was in the right place. Nothing I could do on that campus was weird enough. Surrounded by every other rejected neighborhood freak, we were unleashed. Freedom didn’t fit yet, but if I wasn’t entirely authentic, I was making friends and jokes like I’d always known how. Boys were following me. I wore opera gloves to breakfast and held my unitard on with safety pins. My friend Ken and I did our one-man shows for each other (he in a straight-jacket, me in a coffin) and he’d sing Waits at the piano while I hung on him and wept. Joe M. called me “girl with no spine”; always draped over a boy like I had no bone or muscle to sit up on my own. We were happily unhinged, those of us who aspired to be Malkovich; to make theater that was incendiary and new. Led by my friend Peter, we started creating it in rehearsal spaces at night. When security banged on my door with a tornado warning, I gave them the finger. My legs were wrapped around the face of a green-eyed boy who also ignored that safety evacuation while you blasted from the turntable at a nearly unlistenable level. I couldn’t get life loud enough.

  The last time I saw you in concert I stood on the stage by the soundboard. The fact that you seem to know who I am is still confounding, but someone told you it was my birthday and you sang a song for me. I was about as close to detonation as I get.

  Afterward I listened to you talk about the show. There is a level of purity in your approach that you could have left by the side of the road years ago. It doesn’t come for free the way you do it and I get the feeling you couldn’t live with yourself if you faked your way through. You said

  We are the custodians of people’s memories

  You feel a responsibility to your audience when you play live. You said you can let it go the way of formula with everyone leaving reasonably sated, or invent it in the moment, which always comes with the risk of failure. It’s your goal to go digging for it each time, letting it grow out and under the audience until they’re part of its composition. I have to hold that up as a metaphor for everything, being prepared and then being brave enough to just be there. Just listen and follow, maybe jump. Everyone leans in, it brings them into your emotional vicinity, because, you said

  Risk creates intimacy

  That works everywhere, but onstage it’s more common to opt for the easy way. It’s a whole other gift when you relinquish being impressive in the moment to make it about the moment itself. Then the love you’re getting back from the crowd is out of the picture. Without risk, it’s just handing out a bunch of pie. Everyone is content but I’m not sure it endures or changes anyone. The clearest about this was maybe Bob Dylan. When asked how he could stand being booed and keep on playing, he said, “You got to realize you can kill someone with kindness, too.”

  Sometimes I still have to go back and sit on the swing set with you at midnight. Feel myself reflected in the broken but unbeatable gaze of another misfit toy. Your songs were so often about an elsewhere, a promised land where things would be okay, like the Three Sisters’ insistent longing for Moscow. Amidst the slamming doors in your songs was a tenderness I was dying for. Listening to you sing about it, romance grew in me like a lotus in the mud, and you always held your car door open so nicely in my dreams. I could sigh just remembering it now. Always looking at me like I mattered, who cares if you were trapped inside vinyl. It got me through, dreaming of your backseat, and that was Moscow enough for me.

  Dear Movement Teacher,

  Any normal person can juggle. You made it clear that sure, certain people could not, but they were abnormally uncoordinated and would never be actors. I was on the fast track to failure being one of two people in the entire class who could not juggle. I could barely toss.

  At breakfast the freshmen could be seen juggling biscuits. At lunch the lawn was littered with us juggling packs of Marlboro Lights while also smoking them, and at night some would exit the showers juggling sticks of deodorant. The hotshots would show off, but most were hoping just to pass the mandatory juggling exam held each week. I was privy to a lot of gruesome meltdowns on the hill that you didn’t know about since teachers rarely wandered there. First-year drama students would buckle from the pressure. They’d throw their beanbags into the grass, swearing through clenched teeth. Everyone except me and one other girl,I though, could keep them in the air for at least a few seconds.

  My friend P. was a proficient juggler, part of the group who could have been plucked off campus and shuttled away to Big Apple Circus. He would join the contingent on the lawn that could juggle while doing somersaults; he could have easily juggled while rebuilding the engine for someone’s car. He was, in fact, in all the promo materials for the school, a photo of him looking gorgeous and juggling while on a unicycle. My friend M. was a competent juggler. M. didn’t go to sleep chasing dreams of you lobbing swords at him until his head flew off. He only went to bed fearing I might have sex with his roommate while he had to pretend to be asleep. Sorry about that, M. I mean, guilty.

  M. meditated a lot because his Aunt O. had sent him to a Transcendental Meditation teacher. I thought that was weird. He’d sit there on the freezing dorm room floor, eyes closed and drooling a little for twenty minutes twice a day. Years later I learned meditation and it changed me profoundly. I now sit there every day with eyes closed, but I hardly ever drool. I’m sorry that, okay, I also had some amount of sex with M.’s roommate while he was meditating ten feet away. It was his special time and that was creepy of me.

  You as our teacher must have realized that we did things most college freshmen aren’t expected to do. During voice class we jogged across campus in our “blacks,” the spandex uniform we wore as first-year drama stu
dents, and as we jogged we held a piece of cork between our teeth to relax our jaw muscles. L., our voice teacher, sent us out the door, clapping her hands to establish a rhythm and urging us to “Flick those fetlocks! Flick! Flick them!” We trotted into other buildings where ballet dancers and opera singers would barely notice us jogging by while chanting SPA LA LA YA YA YA GA GA GA (with the corks it came out more PHA RA RA YUL YUL YUL CAW CAW CAW).

  For the frontier exercise in acting class we sat with eyes closed, rocking side to side and waiting for the urge to roll or jump into the space and enter our “frontier.” Landing in a difficult personal memory, we’d describe our feelings as the teacher walked us through the reexperiencing of it. Frontier involved weeping and shouting unintelligibly, whereas in speech class we articulated plosives and mastered “liquid u’s” so that the word duty became more “dyutee” than “doody.” In text class we sat on the floor in leg warmers taking copious notes while our chain-smoking professor broke down the import of the stress in “Our Town” being on “Town,” and not “Our.”

  My other classes were not the same kind of struggle as yours. I did well in Marty’s class with frontier and the “No Rose Without a Thorn”II exercise. In dance class I was not bad at the routine set to “Eye of the Tiger.” We were stuffing in everything we could and generally having the time of our lives, yet still the elderly, the infirm, could juggle better than me. I sensed you suspecting that my special-needs juggling was emblematic of my inability to be “neutral.”

  The drama faculty wanted us to find artistic “neutrality.” If we didn’t find it we could be drop-kicked all the way home, and my failure to find a neutral-suit made you throw up your hands. I tried but couldn’t even fake it. It’s a speed I don’t offer on my gearshift. I was not issued the particular tool kit of middle. Gymnastics was also an issue. For those who couldn’t swing a handspring by themselves, another student was poised at the spring-off point to “spot” us. When it was my turn the spotter would assume the posture, knowing deep down there would be nothing to spot. My handspring was basically me scurrying down the mat and reaching out with the beginnings of a cartwheel, then squatting and contracting into a ball as though I’d been hit with severe abdominal cramps. Then I’d pop up, arms raised and an impish expression on my face. I thought impish would suggest the spirit of those Russian girls in the Olympics with micro ponytails who never menstruate, but it only made me look spastic.