#him holding gumbo like a burrito

[finnbin]

all the boys looking FANTASTIC oh and Mudd's there too I guess

[no-ns-en-si-ca-l]

Some Moments Leading up to This One • Christina Catherine Martinez

RATS

At some point the rats got out of control. Our parents purchased the rats from a guy who bred them in buckets of wood shavings in his garage. We surveyed the containers like they were windows full of puppies. The little pink and white things wriggling around in them were to be our pets. That they were bred to be food for larger pets belonging to families moving in more robust circles of economic activity did not occur us children. 

COPS

My father was mildly obsessed with cops, tried several times to become one—making circles on practice tests for the written exam, making circles on the dirt track of the Sherriff’s training academy behind our house—but there was always some clerical snafu or abstruse psychological red flag (one question they ask is whether or not you turn around to look at your waste before flushing the toilet. Apparently there is a wrong answer to this). On rainy days my brothers and I slurped ramen noodles and watched the police documentary series COPS on Fox 11. Matthew lived next door and was a couple years younger than me. His parents told him he was too young to watch the show, but he pleaded them into the odd compromise of watching the title sequence only, which succored him enough to stalk the neighborhood with a nerf gun singing the theme song, bad boys, bad boys, over and over under his breath. 

We were home schooled and Matthew was not. Every morning, around the time my mom began clearing up the breakfast dishes and herding us together to begin the day's work, I would see Matthew's little face inch past the living room window in his grandmother's big white Cadillac. I can’t remember if she lived with them or not, but she was always around, functioning as part chauffeur, part babysitter, and all around emotional punching bag for this supremely unhappy family (the entire second story of their house was added on as a private bedroom suite for mom). Every afternoon my brothers and I returned to the window just in time to see the white car pull up to their tight, golf-ready lawn and watch Matthew's backpack sail through the passenger-side window, followed shortly by Matthew himself. He yelled and spat and kicked papers and shit all over the lawn, without fail, every school day. It was such a treat. I credit this daily theater with planting the seed of skepticism in my attitude toward institutions, and I suppose by extension, to anyone in uniform.

Still, as committed members a religious suburban community, of some of my parents' closest friends were officers of the law. Not the slack-jawed, double-chinned avatars of male torpor, but sweet, boar-bristle ‘stached men with bright eyes and prematurely creased foreheads. The kind earned from continually raising brows at things children say. Especially children who don't go to regular school. Dad stopped trying to become a cop after noticing their off-duty penchant for K-Swiss sneakers and Hawaiian shirts. 

Eventually, between the hours of 12 and 6 am, between backseat blow jobs and furtive jam sessions, I would run into these men. A tense skein of trust evolved as they circled the perimeter of my adolescence; tapping the glass, raising their eyebrows, and waiving me home. I lived in cars, but I was no good at it. I wondered what separated me from the subjects on COPS, who also just wanted to hang out but invariably, somehow, ended up face down on the sidewalk. I asked Gonzo what his rules of thumb were for letting girls off with a warning. He was immune to crying and pleas of period emergencies, but once, upon pulling over a swerving vehicle and finding a woman covered in exploded burrito, he did let her go. Gonzo is a close family friend, and I was convinced that he was the greatest cop that ever lived. 

Years later I asked him why, at tender age of thirty five-ish, he left the po-po biz to become a teacher. He said he didn't like kind of person it was turning him into. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL

For a radical experiment in parenting, try this: take a feral child (who loves Jesus), strap it to a translucent purple backpack, and place it in a structured learning environment. Years later— 

APPLES

A lot of our games were about dying. The best, by far, was the night we tried to enact as many stock movie death scenes as possible without laughing. We were just hanging out. Someone was on the floor, and then Nadal starting noodling something sad on the piano, and then it kind of took off from there. We played a swan song for a gritty, browbeaten cop with a heart of gold (a peculiar trope, and, as I learned years later after experiencing the privilege of transatlantic flight, a particularly American one). We slipped through the hands of an action hero clinging helplessly to his buddy dangling off the edge of a cliff. Grenades crashed all around as Paul and I played out a lost cause on the battlefield. I cradled Paul's head in my arms, taking his shirt in a vice grip and screaming, “Don't you die on me soldier!" and then, for context, finessing a line about how he can't die, because he never taught me his secret gumbo recipe. Paul gasped for air, phantom blood filling his throat and mouth. It dribbled down his chin, sputtered off his lips and onto my shirt. Everyone clapped their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing. Just before his eyes rolled back in his head and his neck went limp, Paul pulled me close and whispered in a Cajun accent, "Don't forget the nutmeg,

mon ami....

" I brushed my fingertips over his eyes to close them. At this final touch, we could hold it no longer. Everyone burst laughing, crying, chugging beers, and yelling

ok, now me! me and you!

As the only girl, more than once I resorted to my privileged trope of peaceful cancer girlfriend. I'd stroke whoever's face very softly and whisper sweet platitudes about Finding New Love and how I Will Always Be With You. The beloveds raspberried in my face with laughter, and then we'd all drink some more. I died at least five times. We drank, the piano lolled on, we laughed until the laughter turned to honking chest rattles because we hadn't quit smoking yet. The roleplay kept going. In high school we'd made exclamations of love to one or more of one another. We filched wine and read e.e. cummings by candlelight, smoked weed and listened to records, made out in the McDonald’s PlayPlace, and screamed at one another in cars, breaking up and getting back together many times over. We heeded the tap on the glass and went home. We threatened to kill ourselves and harbored baroque fantasies about our funerals. Dying for fun at the crash house purged our maudlin adolescence and all its attendant delusions, suddenly petty in light of things like getting dressed for work and swinging a grocery basket in the crook of an arm and filling out apartment rental applications at Starbucks. An ironic bow at the threshold of adulthood, when all the quotidian necessities of independent living were briefly, intensely glamorous. We got oil changes and shopped for work clothes. We stopped buying Nat Sherman Fantasia's and got promoted to shift lead. We had people over for dinner and complained about our bosses. Then some of us got actual cancer, and some of us actually tried to kill ourselves, and once or twice we went blind, stabbing the roof of our mouth with the toothbrush, our girlfriends trying to pull rank on despair. 

We scatter. But we find each other. Years later, Landon and I are sitting in the Seinfeld restaurant in Harlem. I’m on my first work trip with the gallery. Landon entered Columbia University as a film major, and is about to leave with a degree in computer science. Upon learning the average post-graduation salaries for his respective choices, the change was swift. I show him my little stack of business cards with the word director printed under my name. He pays for the meal with an elegant slip of his own card. The last time we dined, it was at a Cheesecake Factory in Orange County. He wore sunglasses to mask the bandages over his eyes, and I wept into some kind of alcoholic milkshake called a Flying Gorilla. 

We pick at anonymous fried brown things and exchange tabs on where we all went. The food here is decent, except for the marinara sauce, which I suspect is with dishwater to make it last. We talked about all of the times we died and I ask, between bites of naked mozzarella stick, why he left the old crash house. 

“I just thought we could be grown-ups,” he said. 

I remembered the giant Patrick Nagel poster that crowned the faux-wood paneled living room, a crouching woman in pink thigh high boots, larger than life. 

“Mmmmm," I said. 

“And we just”—last time I visited the house she had grown a dick, a mustache, and a fist-sized hole near her shoulder—“like, we couldn’t do it,” he said. “We couldn’t have nice things or make a home.” 

“You should have taken out the wallpaper." 

“It was his mom’s." 

“I know," I said, "but that’s a lot of apples." 

MONEY

Money is an excellent balm, very near to forgiveness. I met John Wayne at a comedy show, and he quoted Austin Powers in bed, but the following week he was out of town on business, and it felt good to say “he’s out of town on business” in response to someone’s face screwing up about the yeah baby stuff. It generally worked, and I have no reason to believe John Wayne wasn’t his real name. 

MONEY

“Does the taco place take cards?”

“They charge seventy cents to use a card.”

“Alright then let’s swing by the Chase ATM on the way.”

“Are you for real?”

“Yes. What? Yes I’m for real.”

“You’re just going to spend the seventy cents you’ll save from using cash for the tacos on the extra gas it will take to swing by the ATM for the cash.”

“It’s on the way.”

“It’s so freaking hot right now.”

“It’s literally right on the way.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“I’m stopping at the Chase ATM.”

“If you’re going to trap me in this hot car any longer in order to save seventy cents, then I’ve earned seventy cents worth of bitching for however long this ATM detour is delaying tacos.”

“I can’t believe you can make these kinds of calculations after we’ve been sitting under a waterfall all day.”

“We haven’t even moved in the last five minutes.”

“Fine. It’s worth seventy cents to not have to sit in this traffic or hear you bitch.”

“Do you think if we had universal basic income, Post-Internet art would still exist?”

….

“What?”

“I don’t know.” 

RATS

Oddly enough they fuck like rabbits. We brought home a brother and sister from the bucket guy, thinking they might respect their second chance at life by refraining from incest. Instead they multiplied, and we had to buy more cages to house all the pink little nubbies that kept popping out of the mama rat. Seizing upon this educational moment, our mother encouraged us to learn more about rats, and we observed the little nubbies at length, patiently waiting for them to grow into more comely beings. One day I noticed one of the nubbies lying still while the others inched around the cage with their little salamander limbs. I put him in my palm, and he was cold. I took him to my father, who was preparing his next sermon in the dining room. I had yet to attend public school, but I’d seen enough television to aesthetically forecast the kind of educational moment he might seize upon. 

“Dad,” I cooed, “this one died.” 

“Oh honey,” he said, taking the miniature creature in his hands, “He’s not dead… he’s just thirsty!” 

And with that, he dropped the dead baby rat into his glass of lemonade. 

I froze for a few seconds, then clapped my hands over my mouth to keep from laughing. 

That’s when I became a comedian.