Transformations. How we came to be who we are, what the shapes and the forms our passages have taken, wending our way through our lives. As cicadas rub their legs together to make sounds sculpted out of night’s fabric, so the shreds of life’s dark billows blow inside me, whispering, "Speak. Tell. Confess..."
This diary is dedicated to Joseph.
For some years, I grew up in a rural area of Hawaii, in the far flung jungles somewhere between Hana and Haleakala, deep in the heat of the 1970’s when counterculture was still well in its ebb and flow. My parents decided to ditch the nuclear family, electricity, and the world at large. Here was a sort of utopia that brewed me up. Amidst saddhus, poets, soulful tabla players, gospel singers, Rastafarians, and radical lesbians, our twenty or thirty families lived in thatch huts. Like wandering liliquoi vines, the children grew wild; we were raised by wolves. Black wolves, red wolves, white wolves, yellow wolves, wolves who wore rainbows, wolves who went nude. We ran in packs together through the undergrowth, shrieking and whooping and shoeless with our sharpened sticks, and we were family all.
My brothers had dreadlocks. My baby sisters too. We slept together under the stars, mounded into heather beds, four years old, brown arms and legs tangled up in our one bed with my tanned white limbs, immutable and fluid. Were we related? How many were we? I never knew. We were One Love, One Family. My thirteen aunties never cared about blood and never told who was who. Maybe the secret there is still immured in the clickety chantings of the cicadas and their nightly bhajans.
Years passed. The mainland came and my utopia faded from dreams of waves, leaves, chants. The adventures rolled in and out, and oh, there were many. Money got a bit into the mix and one day we got off a plane to "The Big Apple," and it was biting cold as we walked out of JFK airport. My heart sunk looking out for that giant apple, wherever it was. Lucky for me, my young mind was quickly distracted by Greenwich Village, 1981, where two leopard-print haired, leather-clad, punk rock lovers kissed passionately on the corner. I’d watch them from the fire escape after bedtime, feeling this vicarious sense of pure joy. New York City was filled with steam, cars, and high speeds. I took solace in these two. From that window, the world would go by...
And more years passed.
And more years passed.
With the passing of every year, new cataclysms came and went. New worlds were invented, new regimes. I had to learn English that no kine pidgin. I had to learn shoes. A bicycle. Strawberry Shortcake. I had to learn to sit up straight like a proper lady, to wear skirts. I learned to go to school. I learned to live in a really big house – a mansion with a pond out back – where there was still an old, painted-up school bus parked out in the front driveway inhabited by a man with a long black beard like a wizard. I learned a lot of dichotomies. And then I learned that I was Jewish, because the kids at school began to harass me about it every day, this little pack of bullies (I’m guessing they weren’t wolves of any sort). One day...
One day...
They got me. Bad. On the way to the bus. I was nine years old and they were calling me "kike" and screaming that I was a little boy too in my fly pink Lee Jeans and Izod Shirt, my ash blonde hair cropped short like Luke Skywalker’s. I remember their white arms tossing me down, tangling up my white arms, and I remember blood staining the little alligator over my heart, and then, and then, they tore my pants down to see if I was hiding a penis.
Well I wasn’t. I’m a girl. And I was crying my eyes out with my clothes half torn-down on the blacktop by the bus, and after that, I must have stopped remembering because there’s nothing left to tell but silence.
School’s changed. Life happened. Cancer roared into the station too, at twelve. Stage IV metastatic cancer. My first period came while I was holed up in the children’s ward on my twelfth birthday, vomiting and bleeding all at once. They told me now I was a woman, not a girl and brought me in a cake that I couldn’t eat. I remember lying there thinking, "It’s okay to die. It’s okay. Everyone does it sometime or another. Relax." Someone sent a bouquet of proteas from Maui to New York.
The next year, I became Joan Jett, Josephine Bakker, Siouxsie Sioux, and Theda Bara all wrapped up into one, sneaking out to punk clubs in search of those leopard-haired lovers tangling their shiny leather up like twin serpents. I cracked open the Zeitgeist of the 80’s in wild, frenzied, furious seeking of life, it’s hot breath in alleys or wild places, urban jungles.
By fifteen, I was out, in California, on my own. Parent-free. Working. Hard. I was a hard worker and held down many, many jobs, trekking around with compadres who are now, by and large, dead.
Then the rest of it. The part that’s just the beginning.
I met this guy. Well, I met a lot of guys. But I met this one guy whom I called "Apple Pie," because he worked on cars, wore blue jeans, loved him mom. He was so all-American that it was pretty exotic. He taught me how to can blackberry jam and change my own oil. He’d been so abused, his father was abusive and beat him daily until he took off under police escort, leaving "Apple Pie" in charge of the family’s expenses at the grand age of thirteen. We had that in common. America has an underbelly. Did you know that?!
Years rolled on. Children came. Marriages started and ended. Chickens were raised in coops. College degrees came. Other things arose that can’t and shouldn’t be explained...
One of my best friends was moving to Arizona. Like everyone else, at some point he lived on my couch during the in-between spaces of renting a spot. One bored, hot day we decided to go to this farmer’s market because he was craving some vegetable curry, and I said sure, I’ll make you vegetable curry. Get in the car. We got some vegetables from a market stall that was just giving them away, and the guy there was all eyes at me. We got to talking. He said, you should volunteer at this radical reading library. It had a yard for my son to play in and free tomatoes and lots of books. Then, I moved in with him. He was a stolid Anarchist. It didn’t rattle me any. I was interested in life, in general. It was another wave crashing down, another part of the cycle.
This is when things got weird.
I’d never noticed how white my world had been until right then. Not all white. But insulated from much. So okay, "Apple Pie" was Latino, but he didn’t wear dark skin or a Mexican name. Friends had been all different races, and some were queer, and a few were transgendered. But we were all united under this subcultural flag where anything went as long as anything went. No, I’d never seen the barrio in my yard, where I pulled up the grass and planted it full of squash.
It was about four out of five poor to working-poor Latino, and now my white skin just gleamed like bone, and when I’d say "Hi" to my neighbors, often their replies were incomprehensible to me, although many smiles and nods.
He was into watching police. By nature, I’m a tag-a-long. One morning this call came in at 10 am – raid, a deportation raid, please bring cameras to film it. Screeching his car down some precarious back roads, I’m in a dress, a long dress. Never did much wear pants after the Fourth Grade. There, we found paddy wagons, chickens, screaming children, broken windows, flash lights in brown faces in broad daylights, chaos worthy of Hieronymous Bosch.
We began filming police stops regularly after that. You know, check points. Everyone they pulled over was brown. White cops. Brown stops. I’d tick mark this off or film it. We began trying to get pulled over by doing donuts at checkpoints in his brand new, flashy, midlife crisis, white man’s car. Failed every time. I’ve scolded cops to their face for screwing this up, demanded they take blood to ensure I was sober. White cops. Brown stops. The tangled up blur of arms and legs and hearts and humanity of my childhood were separated into two distinct and separate colors, sharply demarcated, sharply divided like a wound where one side was light and the other, dark.
Like the chalk report around a corpse, they drew that line around us all.
They murdered my wild, murky bodies with their clean divisions.
Their check boxes were coffins.
I watched car after car towed off from families huddled in the cold as the County made money off their poverty and brownness. Vivid silhouettes of brown bodies handcuffed to stop signs sometimes shot out of the night shadows while driving home. Tax-payer funded military tanks rolled through the neighborhood, searching. Low-flying helicopters over our backyard shook loose the teeth of our house. Our neighbors found blood all over their front stoop from an arrest the night before. The children on my street turned into eyes peering through venetian blinds, faint sounds of cartoons and the smell of food cooking would puncture the day. And one morning, one terrible bleary morning, there was a ruckus out in the front squash patches, and there I flew in my robe to find the paddy wagons on my yard, white pumpkins with their orange guts spilling seeds all over like the Virgin Mary’s heart torn wide open and fertile, weeping seed tears, and there, there it was.
Joseph. He was five years old. Maybe six. A mainstay in my front room, often playing video games with our kids, small, black haired child, thin, brown, screaming now as his parents were placed cuffed in police cars, until finally a white officer came over and gave him a light tap on the head to shut him up. With a baton of some kind. And I fled to Joseph, and tried to wrap my arms around the child, my heart like a piston threatening to burst, and I was restrained. And then something happened, it was hard to see... and when I could see again, there where just white cops, busted pumpkins, and no more Joseph.
There was nothing to tell but silence.
I never saw Joseph again. There was no news reported. And half my street was still asleep and so used to the noise, they didn’t look outside to see what had come to pass.
And then that day I learned that I was not only Jewish. I also learned that I was also white.