My Mother

by Brad Taylor Negron

My mom and dad are New Yorkers who left the tenement streets of the Bronx and came to Los Angeles when West Side Story was real. They have the scars to prove it.

"They used to break bottles on a fence and follow me home. Look where they got me." Mom's story of her scars terrified me.

"They?" Who were "they"--and could they find us here at my grandmother's bungalow in Echo Park? (Which was often filled with people who had been exiled from many places--Socialists and Communists, violin soloists, and lesbians who had fled Castro's Cuba.)

I tell people that my family absorbed lesbians during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those lesbians were a big part of my childhood, arriving midday wearing military gear and sporting masculine pompadour haircuts. They'd show up with hot bread in thin bags and produce sticks of sweet guava paste while my grandmother poured strong coffee.

Then, the merengue music would begin, and the lesbians would start to dance like Desi Arnaz, taking turns whirling mom around. She would giggle, the flan would jiggle, and for a Proustian moment all was right in the world.

When I remind my mother about this, she laments, "Why don't you remember the skiing and the leather jacket we got you? It's always the lesbians with you!"

Mom was not a butchie; she was boy crazy. During World War II, she worked in a factory that manufactured medals of honor for soldiers. She sat for twelve hours a day attaching the medals to gold braids and ribbons. Then she would place them in blue velvet boxes to be sent overseas. What no one in the factory or the federal government knew was that my mother was writing her name and address on pieces of paper and sticking them into every box. I asked her if she ever met anyone that way, to which she sheepishly replied, "Yes." The topic was dropped.

Our family business was operating batting cages. The pitching machine spit out the balls at lightning speed. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax. Whitey Ford. 50 cents for 12 pitches. Of course my mother ran the place, and I was her slave: selling candy, hosing down the street, and the most dreaded of all jobs, feeding the pitching machine with balls. I call it my black and blue period.

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