hack

(note: this was just supposed to be another shortie in my usual vignettes, but, it kinda took a life of it's own. that's all)

while at half-price the other day looking for a new copy of the wild boys (like most books i know i have and want to desperately re-read, i find it mysteriously absent from my bookshelf), i noticed like a million copies of oscar casares' brownsville on the shelves.

this brought a smile to my face.

i haven't thought about this man in years, but i've hated casares since i was in high school and he got invited to my school as a "guest speaker" by my bitch of a new journalism teacher (a story for another time), and he basically spent the whole time talking about how he's such a great writer and he won all these great scholarships and awards and flirting with my journalism teacher and it made me as sick as roseanne roseanna danna must've felt.

bah. i've read his shit, and it's trite at best (not that my writing is any better). it's just that ... uh, i grew up in brownsville, too, and i know most of the places and things he'd written about. sure, it's all about point of view (and his, as he's admitted in interviews, is thinly veiled fiction), but he paints the city in this cerulean pastiche that just makes me want to gag.

one of these days, i'll write a book about brownsville to counter his. and it won't be thinly veiled fiction. it'll be totally non-fiction, or as close to it as i can get. i'll write about how his grandparents (who live two houses down from my parents) were always really, really mean to me. and about the sad, lone gay bar, with all the sad, obviously gay men who would try to pass themselves off as straight (like my high school drama teacher).

and, related to that, how it's so hard to be out in brownsville. because you can't. or at least not when i was growing up. just really how sad it is to be gay, know it, your family knows it and it's generally understood, but you've never said it, you'll never say it, you'll have your good "friend" come over to major family functions, but you're not gay. (i know this has changed a bit since i left brownsville. they've gotten a more, highly visible gay bar. but, that wasn't the case growing up there.)

i'll write about this party i went to with my friend crystal and this cute guy named xavier made her get out of my car to check her out before allowing us to park and go to said party (all the while we made doom generation cracks and later found out he worked at the whataburger by sunrise mall).

i'll write about "going across" to get drunk at 16. because it really was a kinda rite of passage.

i'll write about how my earliest memory is of helping my father roll a joint and about all his cracked-out pothead friends that would show up to our house to either get high, borrow money from my dad, or, well, i guess it was really just those two things. and, sadly, my uncle red (his name is richard, but since he was a redhead, well, duh; also in a related topic, i once briefly dated a pothead named richard/nicknamed red) falls into said category.

i'll write about seeing border patrol agents chase illegals through the ut-brownsville campus and seeing escaped inmates run through the newsroom of the city paper.

i'll write about how my parents cheated on each other. a lot. one of the more memorable times was my junior year in high school, and my dad had moved out, and my mother essentially took me or my sister with her to stalk his mistress. and then, in an attempt to get him back, my mother went to a curandera and got some "potion" that she was instructed to put into one of his favorite foods, and when he ate it, he'd fall back in love with her. so mom slipped it into some fried oysters, and it gave dad food poisoning, and he had to stay home and mom nursed him back to health. and they were back together. for about 8 months. rinse. repeat.

related to the above, how the last time my father cheated on my mom and moved out (circa right after i graduated high school, and i mean like a couple of days), his new lady had him hooked on cocaine, he'd lost a lot of weight, and when i confronted him about everything, and how fucked up his and mom's affairs had fucked me up, all he had to say was, "when you're married, and you have a girl on the side, you'll understand what i'm going through."

and i'll write about the time i was at el chile and saw casares there being overly friendly with a woman that wasn't his girlfriend at the time (or maybe they're still dating; i really don't give a shit).

basically, i want to shit all over casares and his "literature", and i was happy to see that so many people obviously agreed with me as they didn't want his book cluttering up their bookshelves.

yeah. fuck him.