Date in Juarez (October 20, 2009. Issue 10.)
A couple of whores stand in the hall and watch Robert with his head in the toilet, and the knees of his jeans soaking up someone else’s piss. The part of his mind that isn’t dimmed or blurred keeps pointing out that as first dates go, this one is shit. That slice of sharp consciousness says hitching a ride to Juarez to get drunk was a moronic move. The whores chatter in Spanish and one laughs.
In the barroom, at the table where Robert’s date waits, the trucker who drove to El Paso watches her watch the whores. She expected them to be cowed and pitiful, or bold and alluring. Instead they look like women in a bar, women at work, women just living their lives, and she’s still figuring out if that is more or less sad.
Cindy, Robert’s date’s name is Cindy reaches for the beer bottle on the table, and the trucker can see that her hand shakes. One thumb slips repeatedly over the label, the nail digging as if at an itch. Cindy brings the bottle to her lips and drinks, but like the last time she takes only the smallest sip. She looks at the bottle as if it has betrayed her. She glances toward the hallway that leads from the barroom into the building’s interior with the same look.
She tells the trucker, “I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“Mike.”
Cindy glances away from Mike as she speaks, “ I gave him the last of my money for the cab. I… could you buy me a coke? Or a bottled water?” She won’t look at him.
“Of course.”
As he waves over a waitress, she apologizes and he tries to reassure her. He wants to tell her that she’s not beholden to him for the price of a coke. The waitress leans into him and says something in Spanish, too fast for him to catch more than the word pesos. “Que?” and she answers “Fifty Dollars,” in English almost as impenetrable as the Spanish.
“She said she’ll um… blow you for fifty dollars.” She looks away again on the word blow, then meets his eyes again.
“Just a coke, thanks.” He smiles as she translates, the waitress seems unimpressed.
“Your Spanish is pretty good, huh?”
“I’ve taken it for three years now.”
Mike wonders if the Mann act extends to the Mexican border and how much trouble he might be in.
In the bathroom Robert wonders if something in his stomach is broken. He rests his head on the cold porcelain.
“Is this where your boyfriend usually takes you?”
Cindy shakes her head and then turns it to look again down the hallway where Robert lurched a half hour ago. Head is still turned she answers Mike. “He’s not my boyfriend. It’s my first date.”
She chuckles but can’t infuse the laugh with any lightness. “I didn’t think I’d be going to a whore house. I thought maybe a movie.”
“No second date for Bobby?”
“No. Oh he hates it when you call him Bobby. He wants everyone to call him Robert.”
Mike looks down the corridor and shrugs, “I think he should be happy we’re not calling him ass face.”
Her grin starts reluctantly but widens. He tells himself it won’t but her smile undoes him and he does, he asks, “How old are you?”
‘Eighteen. Almost. In a couple months. Three. How old are you?”
‘Twenty-three.”
“Oh.” Her head bobs a few times. “Do you go to college?”
“No, but I’m trying to save up and go. I wanted to go, you know but… money and stuff. And I didn’t. But maybe one day.”
Back in the bathroom Robert gives his last ten dollars to a guy with the biggest beard he’s ever seen not on an album cover, for a pill he hopes will make him feel good.
Cindy and Mike both look toward the doors with their mouths making mirror image O’s when six men storm in and the music shuts off. And exodus for the door starts even before the men identify themselves as the police They shout in Spanish “Andale. Larguense!” When they, like everyone else, run to the door, Mike takes Cindy’s arm, his posture protective in a way that registers for her as gallant even through her fear and distraction.
They wait forty-five minutes at the cab stand for Robert. It’s easier without the curious eyes of the whores and the men who communicated their ideas about Gringas in bars with their questioning leers, easier too without the pounding roar of the stereo speakers blasting mariachi in surround sound. They stand closer than they sat, but still keeping the distance between them respectable and polite.
He keeps looking at his watch starting at the half hour mark. He tells her, I need to get back to my truck. I have to call in. We can wait for him at the truck stop.”
They sit in the truck with the doors letting the breeze if not cool them at least make a pass at it. Mike lets his arm hang through the window, and Cindy puts her feet up on the dash, so she looks casual from the waist down. The way she covers her face with both hands ruins the effect.
“Cindy, I got to tell you. Far as Robert goes I think you can do better.”
A hiccupped snort interrupts the sniffling then turns to full, all out laughter,
“God I hope so.”
Robert walks from the bar to the truck. He’s got no money for a cab. His thoughts are too scattered to recall or coalesce, but what he’s thinking of is not Cindy laughing with the trucker. It seems wrong. He feels righteous and wicked. Cocking back his arm, he lets the bottle in his hand fly toward the windshield.
When the bottle smashes on the grill, the sound and damage unsatisfying, he launches himself at the truck over and over until it begins to back up, and the head lights blind him and the horn blares.
Cindy and Mike are quiet on the ride to Vinton until he pulls off the highway and she starts to give direction. In front of her house he says, “ Do you want to go out sometime?
“Not to bar. Not to Mexico.”
“Maybe dinner? A movie?”
She offers her hand before getting out of the trucks when he asks if she doesn’t kiss on the first date, she tell him no. Then she tells him, “This does not count as our first date.”
My Holocaust (June 20, 2009. Issue 6.)
She said, “You Jews and your holocaust, why do you think- and clearly you do think so - you, with your endless books and poems and feature films and documentaries and museums, why do you think that you’re the only ones who’ve suffered? What about what this country did to the Native Americans, whom we’ve killed and robbed and raped and descended upon like horsemen of apocalypse? What about all the gypsies who died in the camps? The Armenians? The Chinese? Yours wasn’t the only genocide. Why is your holocaust worse than theirs?”
She said all that to me. And what could I say? I had to say:
Because. Because I know the tunes of their songs. I know the cadence of their prayers, how their homes smelled on Friday nights. I know. And I know how the light moved through their living rooms and parlors with the flicker, flash flicker of candles. I can taste in my mouth the soup in their bowls with luchen or kreplach or 
matzoh dumplings fluffy and light. The bread on the tables, I know the recipe for it. I know how that dough feels under your hands when you push it forward as you knead, and pull it back. Pushing and pulling sweet warm elasticity of silk and pillows soft. I know these things.
And because I know that on my chest, right here - no here - over my breast on my chest, right here is where I’d wear that star. A star that I would have had to sew on myself, with my crooked stitches and would have had to re-sew later when the stitches came undone.
And because when I hear about the tragic statistics of those horrors in Greece my heart can break for them, but I feel no shame. I don’t wonder with a small cringe if I would have had the courage to be shot, to say, ‘No. No, just shoot me ” to be blasted with bullets, taken down, pushed aside, left a body, a sack in the road, on the street on the way to the line to the cars of the train that would push and chug and in locomotive staccato bursts and stuttering stops of chugging movement roll with standing masses with no room to sit in stinking cars filled with people who reeked of their own urine and sweat and doom to camps of barbed wired, charred-flesh-scented obscenity. When I think of what they did to the Armenians I feel horrified, but I don’t feel that twinge, that twinge of panic, fear, numb bewildered disbelief, and certainty that this must be just a nightmare, a visceral shared memory from years before my conception, that resonates.
Maybe in my head I can hear the thump of feet on Tennessee roads, but not that wonder, why did –we- go? Yet, I can hear the shuffle shh shh shh, of feet on railways platforms and smell the dust in rail-yards. Their story makes me sad, but not shamed that a voice whispers why did –we- yes –we- get on those trains. Why did we so politely go. Why were we so well behaved, as they slaughtered us, and mauled and tore us down and apart and made us beasts and objects of pity who prayed to God while He turned away as if what they did was right? Why weren’t we more unruly? What’s wrong with us? And so, no, I feel no shame for the death of the Cherokee. None. And no shame for being ashamed, as I feel ashamed of those questions I bite back and push down of why –we-. Why.
And then I said, and I put my hand on my heart to still the thump of anger and hurt and pure vehemence when I said, “Why is my genocide worse than theirs? Because it’s mine.”