A Call Lightens the Past

By Victor Rios
Co-Editor in Chief

It has always been a fleeting but inescapable thought, one that would present itself when his identity and whereabouts would be put to question either by strangers—who would later become my friends—or the parents of friends whose unselfishness so often guided them to teach me about the respect I never learned at home, once they found out.

Who was my father? Up until a few days ago I knew verbatim his name, the very stoic left side of his face, that he was a drunk and other insignificant “facts.”

More often than not, throughout the very turbulent years during which I developed—except when I was pissed off at them—I would ascribe the role of father to whomever lent their core selves to be considered my mothers husband (though as they would say in Mexico illegitimamente). I always enjoyed that pretending game. That is, up until I gained my first brother, whose existence justified—unjustly—a furious and heavily repressed (thanks in part to many ass-whoopings) jealousy that would take years to boil over and, not unlike a psychological improvised explosive device, explode with hatred directed at the one whom the rest of the human family generally loves: my mother.

Once in the US, I gained a new father, and a new set of step brothers and sisters. Once again, this helped to cement jealousy as part of my very being. Looking at my stepfather play with his children; carry the smallest on his shoulder while holding the other two’s hands on the way to mass, and me walking next to them intently paying attention to the other fathers and children—I tried to pass it off as a mark of coolness for a long time.

It never occurred to ask about him (my father) for fear that…well, for pure fear. I also knew that she (my mother) would tell me he was a drunk, a violent person and worst of all, gay—the root of a prejudice I held tightly until Professor Chance pried it away from my cold, still-living hands.
While I generally dismissed any profound wondrous sentiments, I did build (on top of many other unrelated negative aspects) a resentment towards him, for, despite the ten years I lived in Mexico, in the same residence only three blocks away form his mother’s house, he remained incognito and incommunicado.

More recently, (about two months ago) the curiosity that had yet to kill the cat returned, and resumed the nearly overbearing quest to find out more about the man I almost hated but had yet to meet. So I squeezed my balls really tight so as to not let any testosterone out of them, and asked—in a nice and kid-like squeaky voice—my mother to please find out his whereabouts. Surprisingly, she agreed—but unfortunately she never did get back to me. To her, I am just like my father: un alacran (a scorpion) who has lost his way much like his father did. Many times she related this to me (through loud explosive yells) and my ex-girlfriend (in a nicer way). In fact, she trusted my girlfriend so much more than she did me that she related to her the nature of my father’s untimely end.

“He died of a rare disease,” said Maribel, my ex-girlfriend.

“What? First of all, why would she not tell me to my face?” I responded fiercely. “Second of all, what does she mean, ‘a rare disease?’”

Without a second’s thought, Maribel’s saddened face (which as she later mentioned was expressed it for me) responded, “In Mexico, they usually refer to a ‘rare disease’ when people die of sexually transmitted diseases.” My mother was once again invoking my father’s supposed sexual preferences as the reason for his death.

A can of curious worms had definitely been opened, but extracting information from my mother’s “Pandora’s box” would be the most difficult aspect of the ongoing venture toward finding out more of my father. During the scant future meetings before the start of the semester, I would make simple attempts, not to pester her about my father—but I knew I had to somehow ease her into a comfortable state in order for her to talk to me about that. Instead, I asked about her family tree, of which she had such an ornate intimate knowledge. But when she got to the end of all she had to mention it—a venting that she had not gone through in a while. Like a squirrel that ungratefully runs from a human after having taken an M&M, she quickly recoiled and said her goodbyes. “We’ll talk some other day,” my mother said. “Thanks for calling.” (Of course, calling her, too, is something I barely ever do).

Coincidentally, after combing frantically (as I had done many times after finding out about my father’s death) through many directories in Guadalajara, looking for someone who may be even remotely related to my father, I gave up, as I had done before. It was 3 a.m. in the morning (and yes I was going crazy), but out of my—as the hot-head Glen Beck would say—gut, I said “let me check facebook. Hell, it’s the world biggest social networking site, my odds may be better there, and plus I can leave one of my meaningless messages.” I punched in the words “Rios Zubieta,” my father’s two last names; sure enough, the results brought with them one person—Luis Enrique Rios Zubieta. Before any attempt at asking whether he held any relevant information, I spied on his friends; it turned out that he had only 25, of which all but one were beautiful females of all sizes and shapes and backgrounds. But no one other person held his last name. I heeded no mind to this, the most looked at this man’s face—his flat forehead, his slanted eyes, and his serious face all added to the aura that he may be in some way related to my father.
The only way to know was to again to squeeze my balls and send him a message in Spanish, which read:

Hello, my name is Victor Javier Rios Lopez, I am from Guadalajara Mexico and I am looking for someone who has, or has had a very similar name to the one I have. If you know of anyone, I would appreciate it if you contacted me. If not, then, I am sorry for taking your time and, without a second’s thought, please discard this message. Thank you.

At that moment only one hope persisted, “this guy better get my message!" The chances that he would read it were very much diminished, since his last update to his facebook page had been on June twenty-third. Much to my surprise he did answer, though brief in content—“apparently you are my brother’s son, contact me at…”—it was enough to get those butterflies in my stomach rolling. For three days the thought of calling gnawed at my brain’s innards, “should I call? What if it turns out to be he is not?” At school, a surprise quiz which involved writing for the entirety of the class put whatever resolve to do well to the test, my fingers were jittery and I could not stop thinking about a person that may turn out to be someone else—in the end I got a meager B.

Around 7 p.m. while staring at the phone and unconsciously tossing and bending the phone card I obtained earlier that day, curiosity got the better of me; I picked up the phone to make the call of a lifetime. Dialed the card’s access number, the pin code, and the phone number to my uncle, and expecting the tides of enlightenment to pick up, I heard a disastrous and impersonal computer generated “you have dialed an invalid phone number.” “No!” From the other room I heard, “What happened?” It was Maribel, after explaining that I meticulously dialed every character, she said “let me try, I do this all the time.”—quite the comforting exaggeration for about two minutes when she too received the incessant response.

Ten minutes passed trying to figure out what we were doing wrong; finally we decided to call customer service—this turned into waiting far longer than expected, but finally the unusually nice lady on the other end related what we were doing wrong and connected the call. Within seconds someone did answer, “Bueno?”

Every nerve within me flinched into a brief pause, and then finally my lips broke through that mold and after what felt like a quaint introduction, I reminded him that I was calling as a result of his response on facebook. With hesitant sternness Enrique said, “Well, I am your father’s brother, ah…” as if searching for words he went on “well Victor, I would like to see you face to face.” My newfound uncle initially perceived my broken Spanish as a sign of inherent Americanism which included the availability of enough funds and time to travel to Mexico—of course, his idea could not be any farther from the truth. A brief intro into the current endeavors I am currently embarked in and hinting at the ‘funding’ issues Enrique related his own situation “I understand, I work as a paramedic and I am hurting too, like the President [Calderon] said, ‘When the US catches a cold, we get pneumonia.’”

“As for your father, well…how should I tell you…Your father, Victor, died three years ago,” Enrique said; though expecting some kind of grief to pour out he continued, “sorry, to have to tell you this over the phone, this was not my intention.” Despite the intense seriousness of the topic I shrugged it off and said to him in a composed and nearly happy manner, “I already knew that tio; mainly, I would like to know more about him, his family, and anything else that you deem important for me to know, seeing as I never met him in the 19 years that he was alive.”
The most revealing of conversations ensued; I held the phone closer to my ear than ever, pressing it hard and hoping that my eardrum would take account of every vowel, vocal expression and perhaps even give me a picture of what my uncle looked like and what he was doing. My father apparently had died of stomach cancer and complications from drinking too much alcohol in a Tijuana hospital—far from the rare disease account previously related to me. Victor remarried and had two more children; my uncle giggly said “you are the legitimate one.” Expecting never to see me again, he named the older of his kids Victor Javier Rios (8) and my young sister Irene Rios (5)—“I hope you are not offended because my brother named his kid the same as you,” my tio said. There is nothing that I could do or say to change that fact, what certainly does hurt is that they lost their father far too early in their lives, even if they did enjoy his presence more than I ever could.

Victor Javier Rios Zubieta was the youngest of 7 kids in a family that prided itself in the intellectual; two engineers, two doctors, two lawyers, and my tio, as he said, “well I am the least well-to-do of the family, I am a paramedic, but I love what I do.” My tio, coincidently spent my father’s last hours, by his bedside. While working in San Francisco, tending to artists needs while on tour in San Francisco area, he received a call from one his sisters; one of his brothers was in Mexicali, and needed someone to treat stabilize him, “I went with the though of stabilizing my brother and sending him to Guadalajara, where my sister would treat his hemorrhaging brain—which I did, but two days later, your brother’s wife called me, after years of not hearing from him, I immediately went to Tijuana, that’s where he went to look for you, obviously, he never did find you, but he stayed there, long story short, I got there three days before he died. Again, the plan was to stabilize him, and take him to Guadalajara, where again my sister would treat him—but it was too late,” said tio Enrique.

Father was an imperfect person—drunken spates of violence define the memories mom remembers him for—but my uncle knew that he loved me, in spite of all that he did (which he did not deny, and in fact, he added womanizer to the list of adjectives that describe my dad) tio says that he tried to get in contact with me, but every time he tried, my uncles (my mother’s brothers have more than just a screw loose) kicked his ass. “I remember your dad would go to your mom’s house and ask to see you, and between two of your uncles would fight him, he would then go back to the house, clean the blood off his face and go drinking again, after that, he would again go back for more, and again return empty handed, until he finally gave up. Years later, he would ask me whether I knew of you. Other times he would ask me to go ask for you. And then he completely fell off the earth, no one heard of him until his last days,” added tio Enrique.
Twice I returned to the store to buy new phone cards after being unexpectedly cut off—apparently, giving the caller a warning that the minutes are about to expire is too much to expect from any of the countless phone cards at the store (not even a beep). The talk of my father dominated merely a quarter of the conversation, the rest was a galore of discursion of each other’s lives which at time’s seemed like parallels. He turned out to be a gallant who loves talk of metaphysics, lover of books as well as of news of all kinds (with the exception of gossip), and of films from all over the world. “Do you like the movie ‘Déjà vu?” tio Enrique asked with a now usual and comforting mijo (my son). I never did watch the movie, but suddenly that place in time and the exact feelings running through my innards felt impressed the thought I had been there before; at the mention of this tio Enrique replied I felt the same exact way mijo.

The last time that he felt that way was a few years back, before he had to tend to both of his brothers illnesses while at San Francisco International Airport. There tio Enrique was stopped by immigration for carrying a friend’s baggage; in it were panty’s bra’s and other womanly garments. “Why are you carrying these clothes?” said the immigration officer. After explaining to him that his friend had forgotten the clothes one year earlier in Guadalajara for nearly two hours tio Enrique finally gave up, and told the immigration officer that he would no longer speak in English and that he would require a translator if immigration wanted to continue the very same line of questioning. Obviously exasperated by the constant interrogation tio Enrique gave up. “You know what officer, I am going to be attending the Gay Pride parade”—which coincidently happened to be the day after—the officer angrily responded with another question, “are you questioning my intelligence?” Soon after, a translator arrived and the officer retrieved to his office. After explaining to the translator the situation and relating to him the gay pride story, after a hysterical laughing session, the translator talked to the immigration officer, and had to resign to stamping my tio’s passport.

“Welcome to America…I hope you leave soon,” said the immigration officer; he then took tio Enrique’s baggage and dropped it on the floor. “You know what I did, I took all the clothes that fell out, stuffed them back into the baggage. I took my card out of my wallet, I gave it to the officer, I looked him right in the face and told him “Next time you go to Guadalajara make sure you call me, I will go to the airport, pick you up and show you what the meaning of hospitality really is,’” said tio Enrique. “In spite of all the bad things your dad and mom did…there is no more time available for this call,” said an automatic message.

I hung up the phone, sighed and went on to work on chemistry homework. Two weeks later I finally asked my mother again for some answers.