By Paloma Martínez-Cruz
The first is named Steve Stahl. You have no claim on him; the concept is beyond imagination. Enjoy quiet contentment as you color your tree trunk brown using a box of crayons that sits between you. Steve surprises you the day he announces, “I brush my teeth” and pecks you on the cheek making a smacking sound with his lips.
This means something.
For the end-of-year dance recital, the teacher’s aide pairs you with Juan, a dark brown boy who speaks only Spanish. The teachers choreograph a preschool version of the Mexican hat dance, and you see that a blond girl has suddenly materialized to be paired with Steve Stahl. Had she been in your class the whole time? How is everything about her so yellow? Steve Stahl gets right down to the business of dancing with her, which is just as baffling as her sudden appearance. How is he unwilling to boycott the dance or at least throw a crayon at the teacher’s aide in an act of defiance?
Explain to the grown-up who wrangles your class into position that you and Steve belong together. The teacher will impatiently say that the girl’s parents would be upset if they saw her dancing with Juan. You are disappointed, even though Juan is friendly. Attempt to use your Spanish with him. Juan responds with a confused look and what you feel is an unnecessarily exaggerated, “¿qué qué?”
In your later teen years, in a coincidence specific to the tribal maps of L.A., both of your high school boyfriends are half Irish and half Mexican. You imagine the fathers: a motley caravan of Irish men that start out in Chicago or Boston, guilty of some vague malfeasance or family shame that compels them to run for the border with their big yellow teeth and cartons of Winstons. On the way, they are unexpectedly rescued by a señorita in East L.A. with her real estate magnate’s eye for fixer uppers. Note that, from Steve Stahl on, the white guys you run across are no big mister payday and a homegirl or a paisana is always bailing them out of their fate of dollar menu fast food and gin blossom dereliction.
Have your second divorce in Chicago while you are living in the neighborhood where one of the bars is called “Mi Segundo Divorcio.” After that marriage dies, go out with David from New Mexico until he breaks up with you via text message the week after you relocate to Ohio to direct the university’s Folklore Center. Two months later, discover he is engaged to his former student, which you know from stalking him on Facebook.
Miss certain things about David. There was the bad spelling on the menus you both knew how to appreciate (a guebo) or not having to explain the tecato cousin who would sometimes show up to Tata Chela’s for a shower and a meal. There was the place you dubbed the Mala Vista Social Club, the illegal Dominican after hours joint where you would snort coke from the tips of ignition keys in front of a three by four-foot portrait of a light-skinned baby.
In Ohio, there’s nothing but Steve Stahls everywhere: at the club, the grocery store, the car wash. ¡Imagínate! People ask you where you’re from and after you reply, they tell you, “We have salsa dancing here.”
Seek out a social life on the events websites and go to the soul dance party where you observe that the men are all in flip flops, cargo shorts, and baseball caps. Next time, opt for swing dance because there’s a better chance they won’t all be wearing Velcro sandals.
When you are very drunk, leave with the shy one. Let him come with you back to your place and tell him, “I never do this” before quietly excusing yourself to vomit into the sink because the toilet is too far down and you need to hold yourself up by bracing the sides with both hands. Be prepared to use the plunger in case the vomit doesn’t drain. Run the tap for a while until all traces are gone. Generously gargle before heading back to Brad. Kyle. No, Brad. Kyle?
Do not say his name.
He pleasures you. Discover that it is possible to experience both an orgasm and oceanic isolation at the same time. He falls asleep quickly and you hear him fart against your thigh in bed. He is nude when this happens, which is upsetting. In the morning, he asks you to go on a real date.
“I’ve dated an Indian woman before,” he says.
Congratulations are in order: you have now opened the door to sad dick. It’s time you swing the pendulum back from all those fantasies about a wedding day after the merest exchange of glances. There she goes, Mrs. Chavita Paradise, signing that new name in cursive in the sky.
Avoid swing night. Resolve to continue exploring the night life, even though it’s likely to offer a consortium of beer gutted, cargo-pant-wearing, plug-and-play types covering the Eagles, a band you do not care for with the possible exception of “Heartache Tonight.” Wonder how these men are not exhausted from the effort of making no effort, of perfecting the look of never trying, of saying to the world, “I haven’t figured out pants.” Even so, you may not stay at home with no friends. Better to go out and listen to another white guy tell you that he took Spanish in high school but got stuck at reflexive verbs, that once he went snorkeling in Cozumel with his family and saw an angelfish, that these aren’t real merlot glasses.
There’s the military kid who accidentally comes in your eye which leaves it itchy and red so you can’t wear your contact lenses for two days. There’s the hipster in zebra pants and turquoise espadrilles and the Russian who doesn’t want to talk about Ukraine, but who’s a weirdly good beatboxer so you call him KGBeat Box in your diary and he falls for you way too hard so you have to KGBeat block him from your phone. Finally, there’s the taken Jamaican who already has a steady lady but when he tells you about his son who died from choking on a seed, the sorrow of it makes you forget that it’s bad karma to get with someone who’s got someone. He smells of sandalwood and his cock is so big you can’t fully receive it, you have to work the knob from a safe distance while he says, “You do it. You do it.”
Become fed up with sad dicks and nude farters.
Continue to go out for the purpose of making new friends. Head to a show on a Saturday night, but this time as the fierce patroness of measured indifference who doesn’t waste time on terribles. Do not consume more than three drinks. Tequila shots have been predictive of self-recrimination.
Do not entertain glances from the sturdy Quaker-looking man who smiles when you enter the bar. You are here to listen to music and build a new posse and befriend any woman with whom you share the tiniest shred of compatibility. He keeps glancing at you and he’s so white he could be wedding cake. You’re pretty sure he’s Mennonite or Amish or some sort of Anabaptist sect. He wears longish hair and displays the standard issue white guy ease with his own affability that you hate. You also think, No, son. I would eat you alive. You dodged a bullet there, compadre. You’re welcome.
He doesn’t take the hint. The first band plays, and he’s near you by the front of the stage. You can’t help but notice that he can move. Not that he has moves. It’s just unusual that he moves with the beat at all—a remarkable thing in a town where dancing is usually limited to a few sullen head bobs like they’re casting for Rigor Mortis: the musical.
When the set ends, make your way to the bar for the second beer. Sure enough, he pulls into the empty stool beside you. Brace yourself. You know he’s about to say, “Where are you from?” which is another way of saying, “Where do you belong?”
“You’re good at ignoring me,” he offers.
At this point, there is no way to leave his extended hand hanging in the air. Do not tell him that your name is Saturnina Henriqueta Magallanes-Durán. It’s not something you can swing around in a dark bar—you can put an eye out with that thing. Besides, it’s personal, intimate, and, as yet, unearned.
“I’m Nina,” you say when you shake hands.
“I’m Ethan. Hey, this is me.” He swings off the bar stool and heads to the stage where his band is setting up. His name doesn’t matter. As a rule, you do not date white guys.
Enjoy the performance. Watch him front with swagger while his band gives rowdy garage party sounds through an overdriven Farfisa and jangly Telecaster that feel like the Eastside parties you grew up with. Give him your number by the end of the night. Be surprised when he calls (instead of texts) two days later.
Wear a black bodycon dress and heels with low soles (in case you have to run) to meet him at a restaurant you can walk to from your apartment. On your way there, a man in the street approaches you and when he is uncomfortably close, asks what you’re doing tonight. A few paces later, a younger guy walks toward you and says he has eighty dollars to burn.
Eighty.
Enter the restaurant and exchange a friendly hug with Ethan before perching on the bistro chair at the table. He neither compliments you on your appearance nor does he insist on one check so he can pay for the dinner himself.
Move him into friend zone as you sign the tip line for your half of the check.
It’s not a bad conversation, and you need to find friends. Say yes to a low stakes second location for a last round of drinks. On your way to the nearby bar, walk by one of the men that had been aggressive on your way in. Not a peep or sideways eye is directed your way. Marvel at the halo of privilege in Ethan’s radius, the wolf whistles silenced as his claim on you inspires respect that your own claim to your body never could.
Part ways with another hug, knowing you’ll see him again the following week. You both plan to be at the same concert in what you have come to realize is a very small scene.
For this show, pull on your gargantua dress from the back of the closet to tent period bloat. Your bangs are in freakish disarray from the first howls of October wind, but he tells you that you look amazing and asks if he can get you a drink. He breezily greets and speaks to many people in attendance, but stands next to you the whole night. After the show, he buys you a concert tee and presents it to you with an invitation to dinner at his home.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I might cook for you.”
Say yes.
Show up with a six pack of beer and a wave of nerves that catches you off guard. Take one last look at your makeup in the rearview mirror before climbing up the worn porch steps to his house. Find the button to ring the bell, but by the time you’ve freed your hand to press it, he has already opened the door and let you in.
He’s happy over the stove, checking saucepans and peeking into the oven. Offer to open a couple of beers and then head into the dining room once he’s satisfied everything is ready. He’s made fresh pasta with sundried tomatoes, asparagus and a side of garlic bread.
You should have brought wine. You were not prepared for the food to be good.
Accept his invitation to go for a walk after dinner. He takes you on a path near his house that weaves through a wooded ravine. You find a stone bench on the side of the stream to sit on, and this is where he kisses you. He pauses and asks, “Is this alright?”
Call him from the parking lot before stepping into your apartment. On the third date, be sure to prepare for the maybe-maybe-not of staying over, which, of course, you do, because maybe is yes.
Have your first fight on a road trip. Ostensibly it’s over the music selection, but really it’s about his arrogance. You worry that a full sail ban on all forms of ska might be some form of acoustic racism, and while it’s fine to care for different kinds of music, it’s not okay to judge. Become angry and stomp to the gas station restroom without asking him if he wants snacks while he stands at the pump.
While in line for the toilet, picture yourself in the stands with him at an arena concert of white guy tantrum rock. Look at this new Ohio self through the funhouse lens of your disapproving homegirl party crew, Bad Grrlz high on Humboldt kush in bright lipstick, baggy pants, and midriffs dancing to Diamond Girl and No te metas con mi cucu: the antidote to white dorm mates who tell you your SAT scores bring down the average and you are taking a place at the university that you have not earned.
Return from the restroom as angry as before. No, angrier.
When he asks, “Is that still stuck in your craw?” say, “I don’t have a craw.”
Survive the first fight and continue to gather information. Like the way he surprises you on Mexican Independence Day with a dinner of chiles en nogada at his house or takes you to the emergency room when you need to be seen for a UTI. Experience culture shock at his family’s devotion to table games. Spend half your nights at his house and the other nights talking to him about your time apart.
When he tours with his band to places like Dayton, Terre Haute, and Athens, he mails you postcards with handwritten messages about the town’s memorials, canals, and claims to fame, which is how you learn DeKalb is the birthplace of barbed wire. Attach these to your refrigerator with tacky souvenir magnets he brings you from filling stations.
When he asks you to move in with him, you are sobered by how much you don’t know. How does he handle the proximity of cholos? How does he act when he’s the only gaba?
Enter the Tijuana test.
You can’t remember the first time you visited because there was never not a Tijuana. Your dad regularly took you and Sev, usually with one of his buddies and their kids. You still have pictures of the group wearing wide brimmed mariachi hats, sitting on the burros they always paint to look like zebras. (Can’t burros be their own attraction?)
The shops displayed endless leather vests, bull whips, striped cotton blankets, scratchy ponchos, and wooden balero toys with the small ball that you try to swing into a cup. There were dark-skinned mothers in the streets stretching one hand out for money while holding a nursing baby with the other. There were street dogs and alley kittens and children with no shoes.
And there were gringos.
Tourists in their sandals and shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and your dad would look at them with disgust and snort, “pinche tourists,” even though you were staying in the same hotel as them. Tijuana: shorthand for everything white people consider to be in poor taste, where San Diego frat boys go to get drunk and vomit, where rich white Texans lose their virginity in Zona Norte brothels, where hordes of forgotten people make their living scavenging in El Dompe.
Recall the Bugs Bunny watch you convinced your father to buy for you. The band was made of colored leather pieces joined by crude stitches that told you this was not the Warner Bothers way to accessorize with Bugs Bunny cartoon characters, but rather the Tijuana way. You understood that the Tijuana way was yours and not yours, but it was definitely not theirs because they were the pinche tourists. You were something different. And also you were not.
It wasn’t long before you abandoned your Aztec Bugs Bunny watch—an accessory that revealed the imprint of the border that you did not want L.A. people to see because they thought Tijuana was inferior.
Ethan is excited to get his passport and show it off. He wants to have a look at yours, too. Do not share it with him. He still doesn’t know your full name, and he has not seen you in the amount of makeup that you are wearing for the passport photo. It was taken after the divorce and a credit-card damaging retail therapy session at Sephora. The effect is very chola, with theatrical eyes, white eyeliner, and a dark crimson mouth. He doesn’t know this person. All those times white guys say, “We’re not that different, you and me,” they have no idea how much of you is being stored at an offsite location while outwardly you accommodate only territories they can pace.
He is thirty-six and he has never left the country. His giddiness around the prospect of travel to California and Tijuana is a problem. Is he going to be like this the whole time?
First, your mom’s house.
“This is Ethan,” you tell her, and it sounds stiff in her home, like furniture that’s at once too ornate and too plain to settle easily into the space. Margie’s tiny bungalow in Northeast L.A. is decked out in baseline Latina-who-made-her-bones-in-the-seventies style. A colorful print depicts four floating Che Guevara faces that look serenely into the cardinal directions. A black velvet painting shows a Native American woman standing in a body of water, her head thrown back in rapture beneath a canopy of clouds and stars, a feather clasped lightly in her fingertips.
Mom likes that he helps fix the toilet and prunes the tree in the courtyard. He is in awe of the fruit that grows from tree limbs and the retro storefronts and signs in the neighborhood that looked run down and neglected when you were a kid but have now blossomed into powerful hipster magnets. He declines her offer to smoke pot after a Thai food dinner that she ordered from down the street. (Every white guy in the Midwest imagines all our mothers are magical cooks—ancestral food heaped in earthenware pots; tables laden with anthropological recipes. Sorry, bruv.)
The next day, drive the rental car while he takes in the vistas of California’s mountains and coastal towns on your way to the border. His passport is out, ready to collect its first ever stamp, but a border official in a brown uniform nonchalantly waves you through the booth, and that’s that.
Once you cross the border, your navigation apps become spotty. It turns out there are two hotels called Caesar, the first of which is called Hotel Caesar, and the second Caesar Hotel. Hotel Caesar is the famous one, where an Italian American restaurateur attracted tourists during the prohibition by improvising a salad from romaine lettuce, lime, parmesan, coddled egg, and anchovies. That’s where you have your reservation, but the other one is where Ethan’s GPS takes you.
Take stock of two women in severe makeup standing in the crumbling entryway. Their colorful bike shorts are so tight you can see every contour of their outer labia, and plunging necklines display ample cleavage. They stare at their phones intently, looking up from their screens into the eyes of anyone who passes. Pull the car to a stop in front of them and feel bad about blocking their view of the street.
You recall your parents making Tijuana look so easy. They would breeze in and drop luggage off at the hotel before setting out to explore the streets and shops lined with pungent leather goods and zebra donkeys. The data connection is shaky, but you finally manage to tease out the location of the other Hotel Caesar. Carefully pull the car away from the curb, leaving the women the room they need to ply their trade.
“Did you notice the sex workers?” You ask.
“They were sex workers? I thought they were just ladies going out.”
“Yeah, they’re on the job.”
Quietly wonder what else he doesn’t see when it’s staring him in the eye, hoping to make him the next john. Or mark.
You finally locate the storied birthplace of Caesar salad. Inspect the bathroom for roaches but discover a clean facility with individually wrapped Rosa Venus soaps on the rim of the free-standing sink. By now it’s seven and you’re ready for food. After generous plates of enchiladas, caldo de pollo, and, obviamente, Caesar salad, you are ready to head back to the room to make your evening plan. It’s a Monday, but Monday in Tijuana isn’t like Monday in other places. The city is available for year-round, all-hours, all-vices hospitality.
Open the bottle of Shiraz you bought in San Clemente. Alta California feels like weeks ago rather than earlier in the day. Ethan’s energy is galloping around the room. He drank tequilas—plural—with his dinner and he’s getting his Irish second wind. After the day of driving through L.A. traffic and visiting coastal towns on the road to Hotel Caesar and drinking those margaritas with your heavy dinner, you are staying put. More to the point, the test would be nullified by your presence, so you insist.
Go. Out.
“Stay on Avenida Revolución,” you tell him, then kick your feet up on the bed and sip wine while Morgan Freeman dubbed in Spanish flickers into your Rosa Venus perfumed room. Freeman tries to save the planet from aliens that people shit out when they die as though from diarrhea. Your mind swims with visions of Ethan rubbing up against sexy Tijuana pickpockets and swarms of little kids who bring the bludgeoning death to tourists, but by the time the heroes stomp out the final alien larvae, a key scraping in the lock announces his return.
“I went to a bar a couple blocks down,” he says, “and a guy in the street goes, ‘Want a girl?’”
His tale involves a visit to a club thinly patronized by a few middle-aged men. He tells you that he pulled up to one side of the bar, and a gentleman (Ethan’s word) came to sit on the neighboring stool. He was friendly, and both the patron and the bar tender spoke a little English. He declined their offers of marijuana, cocaine, and meth. “Heroin?” the bartender offered in a last bid for business. Ethan bought them all a round of tequila shots that they insisted on distilling in the “Tijuana handshake” fashion. That’s where the waiter cocks your head back and pours an obscene amount of Tequila down your throat.
“You did that?”
“I felt bad I wasn’t buying heroin. It was the least I could do.”
On the way back, the man who asked if he had wanted a girl changed his pitch to ask Ethan if he wanted a boy.
Ethan looks out the window where the city’s lights mingle with his reflection.
How do you test white guys? With vigilance for blind spots. With suspicion and side eye for any hint he’s looking down. With tears in the shower and hidden things he can’t pronounce and tripwire in the car stereo that releases the occasional flare of rage that surprises you both.
In other words, the same as anyone else.
Paloma Martínez-Cruz is the author of Other Bombs (2023); Trust the Circle: The Resistance and Resilience of Rubén Castilla Herrera (2023); Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace (2019); and Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (2011). She directs the Taco Reparations Brigade performance project and coordinates Onda Latinx Ohio.
New Ohio Review 