Authors: Victor Yates
D
aredevil cliff divers lured tourists away from Europe to Acapulco in the 70's. Young men in Speedos stretched out their arms to swan dive off a dizzying cliff plunging into shallow water. They transformed into acrobatic fish-eating birds. Wide-eyed onlookers held their breaths. A divers' miscalculation meant life or death. For the divers, it was freeing, seeing the world from above; the way seabirds view the world. It was dream-like. They awoke underwater; that is how one local described it.
Two years ago, in 1996, Father snatched up an assignment shooting a festival in the city of dreams for the Chicago Tribune. He arranged that I would receive one hundred dollars to photograph five up-and-coming singers from Mexico City. On the second day, I asked Father if I could shoot the cliff-side performance while he shot a jazz band from Cape Verde. He told me to wait, without screaming, and after he finished, we could hike to the cliff together. Hours earlier, I met a loudmouthed boy my age with perfect eyebrows at the café next to our hotel. He was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with a group of young men in Speedos, of all ages and all with white teeth. I sat down at the table beside theirs, and he sat in the chair in front of me. He pronounced my name “Car-Seat.” In English, he asked if I could photograph him diving. Through my limited Spanish, I said of course and asked him to pose standing in front of the coffee shop. I shot a provocative picture of him, from the shoulder up, looking into the camera with a lit cigarette in his mouth. His face was sexual and beyond sexual in front of the red-painted sign. He smoked cigarettes, not like chain smokers on the street do during winter in Chicago. He smoked slow and deliberate like he was savoring a decadent dessert. Or, maybe he was attempting to memorize the taste of the ceremony. Then, I shot him in profile highlighting the trail of peach fuzz leading into his red Speedo.
For me, it was dream-like watching him fly off the August-colored cliff. The cliff looked sculpted with rust, tangerine, and beige clay. His muscular body turned into a tumbling rock and then turned weightless in the salty air. The seconds after he dissolved in the foaming Pacific and emerged unscratched seemed like hours.
After he had strutted back up, we carried on a colorful conversation without words. We stood about twenty feet away from each other and used our heads, hands, and lower bodies. I hid behind Father preventing him from seeing us speak. While gesturing I could not leave, I kicked over Father's drink at my feet. He knocked me across the face. My camera dropped to the ground. The cracking sound ripped up my insides. I stared at the broken telephoto lens and without thinking I punched Father in the face. He fell, and his head crunched on impact. He did not move. Neither did anyone else around us.
The diver helped me move him away from the gawking crowd to a grass-covered area. “Look at his chest rising. You didn't kill him,” he said.
“He will kill me the second he wakes up.”
“When he opens his eyes give him more to drink. He won't remember anything.”
The diver waved down the shirtless vendor, selling Mezcal in an ice cream cart, and bought two. When father woke up, I told him to drink to feel better, and he guzzled down both. The pulpy mix was dark red and tasted as if it had strawberry, pineapple, coconut, cream, and sugar. Later, a balding hotel employee told me the drinks sold on the cliff were alcoholic, and I should not drink them. The alcohol in my two cups was tasteless. The drink I spilled was Father's second as well. The diver waited with me, rubbing my back and offering me cigarettes until my brothers found us. I told them that Father fainted from the heat. Father came to, and my younger brother asked him, what happened.
“I do not know,” Father said, stuttering.
Junior laughed.
Knowing I could start laughing, I faced the tanned men on the cliff, exposing my excitement only to them. Junior draped Father's hairy arm around his sweaty shoulder and said he would walk him to the hotel and that I should continue photographing the performance. The moment my Father and brother's heads vanished from the rock path, the diver pulled my hand. We sprinted down a different path with lush vegetation, through a palm tree forest, out to a beach blanketed with naked men. The diver slid down his Speedos. I peeled off my sticky t-shirt. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. His body was as stiff as the howling wind by the cliffside. We stood on the golden beach, barefoot, dancing, kissing and groping each other until we heard a baritone laugh. Beside us, a bush-bearded woman in a pink sequin gown whistled. We laughed, running behind a rock. He rolled down my swim trunks. Joined together in want, we lowered to the sand and connected genitally and sensually and fell asleep. Footsteps woke us. I rushed back to the hotel, shirtless, with my hands in my shorts, hiding my erection.
The key grinding sound in our room lock should have reminded me who I was. At the door, Father slammed his forehead against my forehead and grimaced with blood-shot eyes.
“I could choke you right now,” Father screamed. “What happened to your camera?”
“You broke it.”
When his hand rose, I saw his face under better lighting.
Not only had the Mexican sun given him an even tan, but also, I had given him a black eye. Father seeing the black eye meant life or death for me. I fed him red-colored drinks during the remainder of the trip.
W
alking inside, whiffs of cooked goat, roasted cauliflower, garlic, chilies, and lemon assure me we're in the right place. The sign outside only says Shorty's. Reddish-brown, yellowish-brown, brown, and green herbs in barrels emit scents of a Somali kitchen. Rice crunches under my gym shoes. Snap, pause, snap, fingers create a beat in a song playing. A man in one of the aisles hums along. Further inside the market, I smell onions, burnt matches, frankincense, curry, and floral black tea. Camel milk, goat milk, sheep milk, buttermilk, and fruit juice bottles line the refrigerated cases. A prepared food counter, with hot lights, glows in the back. The pale blue walls contrast with the golds, oranges, limes, and pinks on the shelves from fabrics, packaging, tins, and trinkets. Dozens of white stars adorn the walls. Each is five-pointed and perfect. On the sidewall, Somali proverbs have been painted in large letters. The word “women” capitalized stands out in one, and it reads,
Where there are no WOMEN, there is no home
. Underneath it, is the proverb,
Get to know me before you reject me
. A buffalo's tongue, in an advertisement, underlines the last two words.
“Salam alaikum,” Father says to an older man.
“Thank you, son,” the man says and repeats the greeting. He unhooks a pink box, hands me a slice of cake in a lace doily, then gives Father a slice.
The cake is three-layered with white frosting and white filling. I taste cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, vanilla, coconut, raisins, orange, carrots, and a woman laughing. An oil smudge stains the doily.
“My son you want another, no?”
The man hands me a second slice.
Before I can say thanks, Father says, “You are too kind to us, uncle.”
A flash of pink at the end of the aisle disappears over to the next aisle as I lick my fingers. The pink is a collarless, pullover shirt worn by a young Somali man. Through the shiny material, I see his pierced nipples. His features are mousy, and his ears stick out on his small head. He dyed his short curly hair blond. His goatee and the patch of hair under his lower lip match. Strands of gold chains loop around his neck in a gaudy fashion. They vary in length with the longest reaching below his belted waist. Gold rings exaggerate the length of his neck. On his wrists, he wears gold cuff bracelets. His pants are a darker pink and have a gorgeous floral print. The belt is black; however the print is floral. Dark eye shadow and pencil highlight his hazel eyes. Every eye in the back of the market follows him.
“What the hell,” the server at the food counter says.
“Khaniis,” the older man says.
Father repeats the slur, then says, “twelve,” to the server, pointing at the sambusas under the hot light. The man ignores them as he flips over a bag of corn flour. A yellow mist falls from the bag. My palms start to sweat. I tap my chest feeling for my camera, on a strap around my neck, and touch nothing. It's in the car, I remember. The server's eyes do not move from the man's direction as he boxes the puff pastries along with mango chutney and fava bean salad. Following behind Father, I grab a container of caramel fudge with camel milk and cardamom. The man slinks past the tea, coffee, and dessert aisle to the next aisle in the back. Father huffs, dropping the take-out boxes on the front counter. I push the candies behind it and search for the man with the gold chain strands, but don't see him.
A minute later, the cashier mumbles, “khaniis,” looking in my direction.
“What's the problem?” someone says.
The man with the gold chain strands stands behind me in line.
“You're the problem. Get away from my son.”
Father yanks me behind him. My elbow bangs against something flat and hard and throbs in pain.
He hawks up phlegm, spits in the man's face, and slaps two twenties on the counter, stomping to the exit.
Looking over my shoulder, I watch as the man wipes the gob of spit from his cheek. He hands the cashier a single bill, but he throws his hands above his head.
“Get to know me before you reject me,” the man says.
Hearing that, I know I can be as strong as him. Strength is being honest in the face of death. It outlasts death. The world outside of the glass door comes alive with newness. The hinges groan as I open it.
Fa-thud, I hear within the store, the sound of a body hitting the floor. One of the gold cuff bracelets rolls past my foot into the parking lot. The bracelet splashes in a puddle of black water.
Turning to look, Father yells, “you see” and his voice stops me.
The street before me stretches out like a country of the dead. A scream drops the plastic box I'm holding. One of the candies explodes, revealing red bits on its insides. The glass door slams open and I force my eyes to stay on the ground. But looking at the blackened gum doesn't stop the screaming. I ball up the doilies and throw them in the puddle.
A
matte black bible with thick gold lettering is one of the few possessions I have of my mothers. On the first page is the hand-written message,
He who tells the truth doesn't sin but causes inconvenience, love Fatima Tynes
. My grandmother, Fatima Tynes was my mother's babysitter from age two to thirteen. At age two, I learned that honesty could lead to violence. How I learned, is one of Father's gift-wrapped stories to present to the family, gathered, eating dinner during the holidays. He starts the humiliating story snapping his fingers, a Somali gesture meaning long ago, then he says, “The first time I spanked Carsten,” in his storytelling voice.
And the story goes:
While reading a magazine alone in his bedroom, Father heard a crashing sound in the winter morning chill of our apartment.
Next Father says, “Before checking in on you boys, I glanced into the
guest bathroom.”
He noticed a dark flat object smaller than his hand on the tiled floor. When he flicked the light switch, he saw the tip of another object sticking out of the toilet bowl. Submerged in the water was his prized Diana camera. The same cheap, boxy camera he used shooting soft dream-like pictures that his editor at the Chicago Tribune said made him breathless. Part of the back of the camera had broken off. The tube-shaped lens barrel, black on the inside, had broken off as well. Bits of pale blue pieces and black pieces, from the plastic camera, had settled in the bottom of the toilet.
Junior loved sneaking into Father's bedroom, stealing his cameras, and pretending to be a wild animal photographer in Africa. Naturally, Father thought Junior destroyed the camera. He busted into Junior's room. Junior was snoring in bed and by default exposed me as the wrongdoer. To me, Father's cameras were Triple X-rated, forbidden, and shiny toys to fondle.
“The naughty boy wasn't asleep in his bed,” Father says, retelling the story.
Father flipped up the lid to the wicker clothes hamper that I enjoyed eating animal crackers inside. Then, he flung open the doors to my sliding closet. Six wood slats fell. A cheaply churned out product, the two doors were entirely horizontal slats, from the top to the bottom. The slats fell with the tiniest tap.
“You weren't hiding under the bed either,” Father says.
Rage transformed Father into Grandfather, and he hurried into the kitchen, flinging open the bottom cabinet beside the refrigerator that was free of pots and pans and Tupperware and cleaning products. Two frightened eyes widened. He dragged me out, helpless, crying, and kicking.
“Did you move my camera?” Father yells in character. “Wee did it. You whined.”
Wee is how I pronounced Reed, what my older brother prefers people to call him instead of Junior.
“Don't ever move my cameras again,” Father yells.
He smashed my head down on the kitchen floor, forgetting I was his child, and not a rag doll made of cloth. Repeatedly, he punched my face and neck until the high-pitched barks of the dog in the apartment below ours un-hypnotized him, and he was no longer his father beating himself as a boy. After the spanking, as Father refers to it, I crawled under my bed. I screamed and pounded my fists, breaking the pain. Father locked himself in his bathroom on the opposite side of the apartment where he could not hear the screaming.
“I was miserable for the rest of the day,” Father says.
And the way that he says, “I'm sorry,” next, for what happened fifteen years ago, leads me to believe he is apologizing for every time he knocked my head to the floor after that. I need to believe that.
When Father was younger, Grandfather would pummel him until his knuckles were bloody. Father told him that he would never beat his children when he became a father. With his first-born son, Reed Junior, I guess it felt natural, the first punch. The sound probably carried him back to his childhood, like the hoot of an owl, mixed with fruit bats fluttering over a mud hut. Fist to bone. Lesson to the flesh. Never forget son that you are mine.