Thick White Crust - HAUNT
August 5th, 2008by N.L. Belardes
BAKERSFIELD, CA-
It’s time for a breakdown.
The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake.
Update: Listen to GSpot Interview: Nick Belardes - Magic Realism, Bugs and 9/11
H A U N T “There will be strong memories, my brother,” smiled Bonifacio.
He held his arm around me and hovered there in the room like an archangel. Still dressed as he was while waiting tables at the local bistro, his white waiter’s uniform had big round buttons that dotted a double-breasted waistcoat. His arm was a seraphim wing that held me securely, while his wide, downturned face, as kind as it ever was, hung close to mine. Thick shiny black hair, normally bushy and unkempt, had been trimmed short and wavy against his head.
His full lips parted a little but he said nothing more. And then his image faded.
Yet, he was there.
Dark and olive-skinned, Bonifacio stood next to me, a strangely Arabian-looking Chicano with brown small-set eyes and strong square features. He smiled handsomely even though he had added a few pounds since I last saw him wandering drunk on downtown Bakersfield’s bar alley streets.
It was late April, 2001. We had both seen my mother lying in her funeral casket just the day before. Her eyes had sunk as if two black coals had been placed over them, then lit and burned away to reveal the deep pit of death that hangs above the face of the dead.
Her skeleton no longer danced beneath her skin with movement and life. It was held still by an unseen hand, hung silent and no longer brooded over the passing of things. She had begun death’s dance in the spirit underworld, perhaps even smiled again. Spirit-skeletons smile, move beneath fiery sparks of the living. Ghosts dance among them. Devils and angels too. They sanctify the under-realm of mankind. They flood the spirit darkness. They wave their hands and suddenly there are bright glistening waterfalls of red-lit Roman candle rain falling into infinity.
Later in Bonifacio’s house on Elm Street we ate jalapeños with beef smothered in cabbage, green onions, and green salsa all wrapped in hot flour tortillas.
“Those memories,” I said. “They will haunt me.”
“Your father, I understand. But your mother—she will be no ghost.”
“No? You can’t be sure of that. Like all writers’ dreams, they will haunt like a curse. I am surrounded by visions, Bonifacio.”
“Eat. The food is good, right? Fill yourself up before your crying soul takes too much of you.”
Bonifacio was as good of a cook as he was at waiting tables of wealthy businesswomen, politicians, salesmen and ag-brokers. His delightful method of cooking—as he explained his every move in the kitchen, politely, with fondness for those he served—made him very much like his migrant mother who had recently fallen ill. Her polite smile and command over a kitchen was more than the enduring love of a migrant over pinto beans properly taken from sorrowful fields and cooked to perfection. It was pure Mexican culture driven into the heart of the Southern San Joaquin Valley. The slow transformation of a people, to see, through a meal, through a mountain of refried beans, cooked and mashed from a long night’s soaking, to become washed clean through the love of a migrant mother. I could tell Bonifacio saw himself, like other sons of migrants, transformed into an educated generation of cultural wanderers.
I remember Bonifacio’s hands and eyes as he flipped a tortilla on the stove. I can close my eyes and see the drop of corn oil splash into a pan and the beans mashed upon the heated oil in a kitchen that smelled of an old generation.
Months later at the University I saw visions of both my mother and father. The visions began with me imagining myself young, sitting isolated, pale, staring at the walls in the ghetto-house I used to live in—its rolling green carpet full of folds beneath my cold feet, as if it too huddled to keep warm in our unheated house.
I could see myself on a torn leather couch where I contemplated my young dreams of growing up to be an artist, a writer, and not a truck driver like my father who often drove to the ends of the Earth and back. I swore he did. His truck rattled as he drove. It kicked dust into an awakened god-eye and other times pressed muck further into the cornea of the sleeping giant. I knew father would drive to the tips of the starry universe where high above the clouds lay a large platform. He would gaze over its edge. Dust dropped like stars from his boots into swirls of galaxies.
I could see visions of my mother stretching her white arms into the room. She grew like a giant. Her raised arms seemed to go through the ceiling. They went up toward the white and blue of the sky that fell upon the roof of our home in South Bakersfield. White and cloud-like her pale arms reached and reached. As she yawned and then smiled, she stretched even higher until there was a final creak of her elbows and her smooth arms came downward, back from the infinite sky to grip around me tightly.
“Such a little boy. Let me pick you up,” she would say as her eyes shone toward me. I always noticed her eyes. There was always that same look beneath her fragile hair, the same golden that filled my little head with amazement. I was like a kitten, purring, staring at her eyes as if they were great balls of bright string spun into stars. I was fixated, entranced, in love. She was there—her open-eyed suns washing me, never dissipating and never the Tule fog of the Southern San Joaquin’s cold mystical mist.
She picked me up and carried me to the patio where she brushed dried mud from my pants. I had been outside with my brother. She knew we had been digging tunnels through the dirt, using water to soften the ground so our hands could easily claw into the earth beneath the backyard weeds. We had dug and dug. Our heads pushed right next to the ground. Mud stuck under our eyes like shadows. We spit as our mouths filled with the muck of rich topsoil as we reached deeper into the ground to pull out worms and rocks.
The dead of the valley danced into our eyes back then. Here was our city yard of dust, our sandy dirt yard, our foxtails yellowed by the summer sun. If you dug deep enough back then, you could find the thick dark soil that cakes the valley’s soul. And deeper still, through the thick white crust of skeleton bones, possibly to the hard eye of the spirit itself, to scratch the surface of the iris upon which our valley rests: on the eye of the dead sea spirit whose bearded head sometimes shifted side-to-side to see the oil pipes penetrating toward its spirit mind, where with the slight turn of its head could shake the curve of the valley and cause dust and disease to rise into the smoggy Southern San Joaquin air. That was the giant beneath us, beneath Bakersfield, beneath the skeleton bones. We were close to its god-eye surface every time we dug. We just knew. And so mother picked me up after dusting me off and held me close.
This was our home in a ghetto off South Chester Avenue, near Union Avenue, near old Highway 99. Ours was a house built into the ground like our own dreams of tunnels and mud, dried like a foxtail—yellowed paint on the exterior walls—brown stains, including aged egg yolk that once dripped down into brick-walled marigold flowerbeds, and then deeper into the earth, toward the giant eye buried beneath us. The house was supposed to be in browns, not yellows, as it had been painted years before in the Seventies.
But years bring stains of course.
Mother alone brought it all to life—though she endured her hardships. She had married a Latino man in the early 1960s who wanted to be a cop as much as he wanted to party and get laid by the local girls of the San Jose College he attended. Let’s not forget the girls of his apartment housing complex whose doors he slunk through late at night.
I heard he met mother out by the apartment pool on a glistening blue California summer day. He had flashed his white teeth, had shown his muscles hardened from training. Since he had been a lifeguard, he could swim endless laps in the pool and still blow water like a spouting whale while floating on his back. He sang sweet Beatles tunes to my mother who sat and smoked in the shade near the poolside.
Later, he tried to become a cop. But he soon quit his passion of wanting to be a man of the peace. He told mother he couldn’t handle the death of his cop friends. The truth of it was he couldn’t pass his exams. He wanted to join the war effort, he claimed, but couldn’t because of us children. The truth was he somehow escaped the Vietnam draft through ROTC and police work. He had always been afraid of dying.
When I was a little boy my father was kind. He never drank beer like my alcoholic grandmother who downed cervezas like they were lemonade as she sat out on the patio. Unlike her stench, his was a sweet breath that kissed my forehead every night when he arrived from where he worked driving a Chevron Oil truck across the Santa Clara Valley.
When his arms went around me, he wrapped me in an aura of machismo that gave me security that the world was safe, far from anything I could ever watch on television: the news, the Vietnam War, the Israelis killed at the Olympics, the demon movie exorcisms that father took us to the drive-in to watch. Those would all haunt me until father’s arms found me shivering with visions of the god-eye staring up at me from the ground. Put your head to the earth. You can still hear skeletons dance in the sparkler rain or whisper as they hold each other close, squeezing ribs; bones rattling.
At night I would sneak into bed and lie next to father. I remember that. Yet I also remember his distaste for it, the initial groan that would go up, and my eyes—they squeezed tight as I tried to be invisible and not displease him. And then minutes passed like hours and I lay in half-slumber and he lay groaning again in what I thought was displeasure.
After I grew up he had become a ghost. He would float on the wind in the mountains above Las Vegas. He gambled himself to death. And so we buried his ashes in the mountains near the vista lookout to the old 1950s atomic explosions in the desert. Toward his end, he passed out coffee and donuts at the local Catholic Church of Our Mother of Guadalupe, and then afterwards in those same afternoons, he passed out coins to his God of the Gold Spike Casino in downtown Las Vegas. I had passed by there many times and would wander inside to see him beckon to the video-gods, those pre-programmed slot machines, those heartless artificial non-intelligent beings that outsmarted him. They took his life, his money. They stood in rows like the soldiers he could never be. They saluted. They marched. They suffocated. Their eyes spun and they spit dirty money.
I saw the waitresses he lusted for with his aged machismo reeking like his dime store cologne. I saw the cowboy hat pressed hard over the crease on his brow, pulled down toward his deep chocolate eyes. He had lived in the east of the city under the morning shadow of Sunrise Mountain. He was deep in the gloom of materialism, of sin-capitalism run rampant. Yes, dark America lurks. Las Vegas, it’s the city of wealth and stench, where the Native American bums parade down Fremont Street under the grand light show canopy. There, the metallic sky of the Earth blocks out the stars as animated light shows of Sinatra and Sammy sing, jets roar, and the heartbeat of a planet thumps to the drinkers who still congregate by the trash cans, near the liquor markets across from the Harley-Davidson store near Fourth Street.
Nearby in a casino my father died in my dreams. I imagined a fire gutting a few casino rooms upstairs. He died after being told that he might not get a payout when all the lights were flashing “Royal Flush” on the penny machines. In my mind I wasn’t there to see it, but when the smoke filled the casino and people jumped from the hotel rooms to the scorched roofs below, he had stayed behind, hid behind a machine, hoping the fire would be out soon. Terrified, he breathed the black smoke air and then died after choking on it. He thought he was about to win big any second.
The city had killed him. “He wouldn’t leave his fucking machines.” That’s what I told everyone in my dreams, that father thought the machine was his. And so he wouldn’t leave it behind to burn alone, especially when he thought a royal flush was headed his way.
The addiction-reality wasn’t so far off. The machines had killed him. He was found in his big rig holding his glow-in-the-dark rosary, his head bowed, a last slot machine prayer likely mumbled as fast as the cars zooming past where he parked along the freeway. His skeleton dance had begun there on the back of the casino freeway snake. It kicked up sand and threw tumbleweeds like spells. Dust blew like sugar.
And so he was buried high above his city in the mountains overlooking the Mojave Desert wasteland. There he flies in the mountains near the plaques dedicating the conservationists who built a lookout over the September mountain. There, wildflowers in reds and yellows paint a descent into the Nuclear desert, where the mushrooms of our sacred American past once exploded into great fiery orange spirits to loathe and to marvel at.
Years before mother died, her long brown hair had turned grey. She wound it above her head, and never let it flow. She never let it fall like it had during my childhood when it had always brushed against my face. Then suddenly one day she cut it short, clipped it herself into grey-brown waves above her blushing cheeks. Toward her end, her big bright eyes became filled with cataracts, covering her lenses just like the thick white crust of skeleton bones over the god-eye. Yet just before she died they again shown with the light of the sky. Only they glittered with the dusk sun and no longer the glory of morning brightness.
I hadn’t been there for her death. She was in pain. She hurt for a full day. She knew she was dying. She said it in the hospital the way you expect angels to release their trumpet sounds that call for armies to waste the hordes of Philistines and Mongerers: “This is it—I am going to die today. There will be no tomorrow for me ever again. I will be remembered and then soon forgotten.”
Instead of taking her quickly, the aneurysm worked slowly on her throughout a very long day. It wrung her abdominal artery with great pain and throbbed its way slowly into a death woe that contorted her face as she plummeted into full arrest. The ballooning arterial wall reached its twilight and so the bursting had occurred. In the coffin with her eyes no longer open, she had become a shadow. No longer starry-eyed, there under sunken moon closed lids once lurked the planet of her soul.
What had she done in this town? This Central California town? She had made her existence far from Las Vegas in Bakersfield. Yet she had been borne years before from the machismo of a long dead marriage. It gave birth to her in 1986. Father felt the labor pains of mother moving through his groin. He had grown despondent, angry. He loved another woman. His machismo meant that his other woman could be flaunted. She was paraded around the family like an elephant in make-up. It was the circus of my youth. But mother rebelled. She began by not removing the stains from his petroleum-soaked work shirts.
“What is this?” I remember father yelled. “There are stains on my shirt! How can I even go to work?”
“I can’t remove them,” mother would say with a sullen look. Her lips quivered, but she held her ground. My brother and I watched from under the kitchen table. The family dog was there with us. It was a little female black-and-white sheltie. She lay with her head on her paws and let out a moan the way sad dogs do just before a storm.
“This is not what should happen in a family. I will have to buy new shirts!” father declared. The dog barked and father looked toward the direction of the table. He saw brother and I staring—our big eyes wide and wet. Father’s face was red. He fumed. He stormed from the house where his other woman waited in her big white car that sat like a circus tent. She was seated in her ring of tricks, decorated like a ballooning clown of frills and polka dots.
But that was just part of the birthing of mother: the labor pains. Not long afterward, many of father’s shirts were full of stains. He went to work in them. He stopped caring as he grew more despondent over the rebellion of mother and her birth.
I am certain to this day he was full aware that she was of his making. He, the Creator. She, the new creation.
I think his role eventually even pleased him far after she left him, except for the pain of pushing her through his oily womb. Because when she finally left—her symbolic beginning—the childlike maturity she had been driven into would grow into full bloom. She had penetrated the air from the pulsating and laborious womb he had created within himself. And then after the turmoil of her birth, she grew and grew, until her new life killed her.
Read more of “Thick White Crust”:
Part One: H A U N T
Part Two: B O N I F A C I O
Part Three: S E P T E M B E R
Part Four: L E G A C Y
Part Five: G R E A T G R A N D M O T H E R ‘ S B U L L E T
Part Six: N O N - M I G R A N T S
Part Seven: D I A d e L O S R A S C A C I E L O S
Part Eight: T H E G A T H E R I N G
Part Nine: W H I T E F L I E S A N D W I D O W S
*************************************
N.L. BELARDES is a journalist, blogger and videographer. He writes several media blogs, including Noveltown’s Paperback Writer and Nick 2.0 (Formerly on ABC23). His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.
Tags: 9/11, author, California Writer, casino, Chicano fiction, day of the dead, Death, dia de los muertos, Las Vegas, Latino, magic realism, N.L. Belardes, September 11, sugar skulls
This made me cry. Not only because I can relate on so many levels, but it’s amazing to hear your past the way you tell it. Through pain and rebirth, this was beautiful.
The 22nd paragraph… begins “The dead of the valley danced into our eyes back then…” I read that paragraph like, five times.
Your soul dances in your words and your words dance within my soul, fluid, painful and divine like a haunted tango.
I dab at the sweat and tears and await the next movement across the thick white crust of skeleton bones…
Wow, so many parallels and so many memories stemming from this. It’s very tragic, in a way.
N, this should have gotten more comments but the length was problematic or maybe you got toppled by too many other new posts.
You’ve got the makings of a memoir here and you really flaunted your talent with lines like “Her skeleton no longer danced beneath her skin with movement and life”. Like the rest of the piece, creepy but beautiful.
Dad at the slots was so sad, so so sad.
Nice pic.
A fan: I think you’ll enjoy the rest as I post chapters here… it gets more disturbing and more beautiful.
Josie: That was one of my favorite paragraphs to write in this chapter. When I had an agent (He died in a car wreck. Long story) we used to talk about the Central Valley and its peculiar alkaline soil: the thick white crust. He was from Taft, California (There Will Be Blood movie area sort of) and then played for the Cal Bears years ago. He was very aware of what made the southern Central Valley unique: soil, water, and for years…football. Though this isn’t a football tale. But that paragraph. It has spun so many discussions and hopefully more to come.
Jordan: Hey punk, what a great conversation we had at lunch yesterday about this chapter. I’ll never forget it.
Megan: I don’t think the length of this entry was problematic at all. I’m just breaking the norm of what people might be used to. I like to be different, try new things, be innovative with my approaches. I don’t equate comments with views. Some people just don’t leave comments as with the Doug Sharratt, Orange Truck piece. I bet that one in particular becomes the most viewed of my articles here. But I don’t think people will comment much with that piece. Yet I received emails and phone calls about in abundance. I also haven’t promoted this piece in the same way I promoted the weird Comicon piece. This particular entry will build over time. I’ve just started to really tell people about it today. And with each related entry I will tell more people.
With other entries I launch right into newsletters, blogs, etc. to promote. So, problematic length? I heartily disagree. Just a different beasty… and thanks for the kind words about the piece and my pic from Dia de los Muertos last year…
Haunted is an interesting word as you use it . And after reading this , i feel haunted by the thousands of memories of death that came streaming and creeping back from the corners of my mind .Memories i had long forgotten , memories fresh in my mind ,memories of the long past to right now .. Nick , You have a gift for seeing beyond the heart and body ,to deep into the soul where also lies a thick white crust . Thank you …….
Hey N.L.:
I don’t think I can really put it any differently, or any better than those who’ve spoken before.
As always, stunning work. You’re one prolific, splendific writing machine, firing on all six, no, make it eight cylinders.
I’m gonna jump into the length argument because it’s one of the reasons I deleted most of my blogs and don’t post anything anymore. I am incapable of telling a short tale - I’m pretty sure it’s a biological shortcoming and has nothing to do with my writing skills… ahem.
I had a few people write to me that the length of blogs is extremely relavant to whether they finish a piece online - no matter how much they like the reader because people are over their heads in blogging communities and they just don’t have time to make the rounds for a bunch of lengthy peices.
People have honestly admitted to reading numerous inferior pieces to a limited number of well done work because the cyber experience sorta dictates fits and spurts of time usage.
That said - I enjoy some diversity of blog length otherwise, for me, it becomes like watching commercials throughout my day. So every now and again people should buck the length quotient but for my sake - not everyone all at once PLEASE! lol
I absolutely love this entry… the beginning of this beautiful series! Haunt is the perfect title to this entry because it is very haunting…tragic yet empowering. There’s so much emotion, passion, and intensity… I’m so hooked already.
Maura: Your words remind me of the elevator story you once told me. I think some people live haunted lives or have sort of haunting episodes they live through, which that time clearly was for many people.
Rich: I’m just a Yugo amongst great TNB writers.
Josie: Yeah, I’m not always going to offer up short pieces. I don’t mind being wordy or if it takes a few sittings for people to read. That’s the great thing about TNB. There’s a little something for everyone.
chingpea: You’re just saying that because you want me to cook up another batch of salsa.
It’s beautifully haunting… and my favorite of all your literary tales. I’m so glad to be enjoying this tragic and magic story again.
As to blog piece length… it is a little longer than the average blog entry, but the story and the beautiful prose compel you to keep reading. In fact when you get to the end, you still want more.
I do wonder though… do you still see visions of your mother and father?
hey! i was sincere with my reply… but i’ll accept the salsa anytime!
really though, HAUNT is a wonderful starting piece to one of my most favorite works by you. Keep them coming! I’m looking forward to BONIFACIO.
I remembered her and she laughed before Bakersfield.
Matildakay: I haven’t had any visions of my parents in some time. I think I blocked them from my consciousness in some unexplainable way. But then, revisting, re-editing and re-vamping “Thick White Crust” is likely to open the gates to the other side, don’t you think?
Shasta Lake Anna: It’s funny how in my head I blame cities for my parents deaths. Las Vegas killed my father. Bakersfield killed my mother. When really, it’s about people and the paths they chose. Oppression is such a common unspoken theme in Latino culture. And gambling addiction. That’s just a problem a lot of people have. It was my father’s great white whale.
The main reason I enjoy your work so much, is that you write with such descriptive force (as Leppin did) that I have no choice but to follow the story to completion. The even flow of grammar and punctuation make reading you a joy. Your subject matter also deserves mention. I can do that in one word; “Refreshing”. While this is one of the saddest storys I have read, its also filled with the real beauty of living a life full of emotion tightly bound by the intellect of the writer. You truly deserve the praise your work recieves. Your command of the 26 soldiers of story telling inspires me. Kuddos Dear Sir for being blessed with a true gift and for sharing it in such an honest forthright manner. Cheers!
Great work. I remember when you first handed me a print copy back when we first began working together. I’ve always been impressed by your imagination, whether it be talking about alien ducks or serious subjects.
Of course, it’s also good to know that you know you’ve continued to explore your Latino culture - what better way than through the arts!
Peace! Your fellow Latino amigo, Matt
Nick,
This is fantastic, both literally and figuratively, my impressions as I recall them was first strong influence of caltholocism’s patina through which death is kaleidscopically viewed as always as mixed with the paganism it compromised with, thought of Rickard Rodrigues, my favorite networks essayist, then the motif of arms reaching, reaching reaching … finaly the awaited hug, the needed love,then digging diggin diggin close to the earth face touching, eyes looking into the face/eyes through the mud and dust, at first I though Bonifacio was your brother who’d died. but he’s a metaphor for all the symboism of a man/mother/kitchen/food/love. So much interplay between life and death, womans mother/strenght father/weakness in America the destructive addiction to getting a head in America which is only done in the fish market on thurdsays I tell my Filipino relatives.
But lots of shamanistic spiritual stuff I sensed like mescalero things. Have you ever tried ayahausca, the vine of the jungle, The lights in T.W.C. reminded me of an ayahuasca trip I read about this guy took with a shaman down in the Amazon. It seemed closer to ayahuasca than acid or medcaline between which I never could tell the difference.
the transcendence of chronology is so complete as to be sureal, I think you could read the piece backwards, not single sentences backwards, but read the last sentence forward, next tio last sentence forward and so forth. Might be interesting to try.
A real work of the unconscious mind which speak well for your access to you unconscious. I think it mght have real video potential, just a series of the images and the right music, the music could vary, someone good at scores could really play around with that idea.
Sistersheree: I think the sadness in the story to me is like this constant mask reflected in a shower of sparks… you’re not quite sure what you see until the sparks run out. Was it really that sad or was it just the pain people all go through in a story of rebirth?
Matt: You are one of the people who helps keep me tied to my roots. I can’t wait to do my yearly news story on Day of the Dead and always include you in it as we and our friends and family don skeleton make-up… I wonder if Mento Buru will have a new song this year?
Joe: Only someone like you who has been around the block of the American consciousness on a spiritual bull could see all the symbolism and strangeness in my work for what it is…
Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts.
This piece hurt me, in good ways, but I confess, jealous.
Exquisite.
oh man
Such a saddened memory well remembered and shared beautifully
`elliott
Oh NL, This breaks my heart. Your poor mother. Poor you. You write like an angel about the devil and his works. What a gift!
Thanks Irene. That means a lot… thanks thanks…
Nearly speechless. How are you not uber uber famous yet?
Vegas is a killer. You can smell the decay of everything that is holy and decent from a hundred miles away. I’m glad my friend is done with school and back from that shithole.
That stuff about the God eye has me nervous to go downstairs and put my feet on the ground. But I’ve got to smoke sooner or later. The way you can blend cute anecdotes childhood innocence with such twisted….er…Jesus Christ.
Jesus Jesus Christ.
That comment from your son about striking parallels was another punch in the stomach.
I see my grandparents in my dreams alot lately. I don’t know if my grandma even knows that she’s gone yet. My grandpa still doesn’t like me, but his dad was a monster, so I guess we are what we are.
I think I’m gonna wait until tomorrow before I go on to the next chapter. That stuff about your mom, it’s…I’m sorry dude.