Chapter Fourteen
(1989: Houston)
Back from Allen Parkway, Gabriele pulled into the driveway of the house she and Betty rented. She drove beside three black girls at an adjacent property who were tilting back a large stone. As Gabriele opened her car door, she wondered what was underneath that had gotten their attention. It had to be a salamander, a gecko, or a swarm of large fire ants. A two-part skeleton of a midget in a partially underground ossuary wasn't in the realm of possibility; but whatever existed there, it caused their squeamish giggling. She felt a little squeamish, herself, at the thought of children grotesquely disgorging into her senses. What made it worse was the fact that they were there doing this when she was in such a need of finally reaching her home-her sanctuary. She thought about the Turk that had been decapitated twenty- three years earlier, although it seemed only days ago. Back then she had been as young as the youngest of the three girls whom she was now looking at.
She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice. Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness, would be more active in its behavioral influence.
Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes! Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable. How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele did not feel much misanthropy.
Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life. The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise. Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.
"What are you doing, girls?" Gabriele smiled at them and walked toward the stone.
"Wer' gonna killem, Lady," said the eldest girl.
"What per se are you hoping to rob of a life?"
"Lady'speakin' Shakespeare," said the eldest.
"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second one.
They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've already had breakfast."
"Lady'speakin Shakespeare again," said the first one.
"Oh, that Lady," scowled the second one playfully.
"Yeah, it's the Shakespeare language," continued the first, "But I'm good at figerin'out Morse code so I can do this. There's more English in Shakespeare than in Morse code. She's meanin' she already had breakfast but I don't think that matters none. It ain't an issue."
"Yeah-ain't anissue— any o'that," mimicked the second one.
"You can put it in your 'frigerator," said the oldest
"Pootit in your 'frigerator" said the third and smallest of the girls. The two eldest girls laughed at her intrusion into the conversation. Everybody began to laugh including Gabriele.
"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past, present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their limitations.
"Damned if she done takenway the lizzardknife," said the second one in disbelief. To the luck of all concerned Gabriele didn't hear them and wasn't even aware that one of them tried to spit at her from behind as she was walking toward the house. She climbed up the stairs to where she and Betty were living.
She hoped that Betty would not be there. She needed some time alone to be in that harmony within and to probe the endless fathoms of her probity and intelligence without the intrusions of the outside world. Even in childhood, Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German. A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and bit). Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she died would the human race cease to exist? People came and went as they should and friendship was merely for those of feeble ideas needing to be reinforced by the herd. For her whose ideas were such steady companions and was real within herself without needing to be reflected in her associations with others what need had she of the Betties of the world. She had never met a German whose example confuted the stereotype. She remembered the few times that her father took her to a beach along the East Coast and the myriad times when he took her to the beaches in Turkey. She always wandered to one side of the beach, culling certain miscellaneous seashells to examine as her father sojourned away from her with pensive and hard expressions, sunk in his own mind. The expressions told her that he savored the idea of being alone in his own cold, watery depth. Despite the fact that he had taken her to the execution, she loved him most as far as people were concerned.
She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity." Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist, professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle, and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone, and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away.
Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The whole f— world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug. If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.
The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars. Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items. There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls in her eagerness to leave.
"What's wrong with you, woman?" yelled the eldest one.
"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and bulging hominid-like—the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was, Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked, cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based upon their whims.
In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony, the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel, the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas, the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment. She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all. I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.
Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita! Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa "orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but only make his stay intolerable for everyone.
"But you buy shit for us to eat!" he stormed one time.
"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal favorite.
The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it— If you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f—
There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.