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The night Grandma burst into my room and caught me in bed with Raul, the urchin, rolling away in a whirlwind of naked limbs and stained sheets and wet popping kisses, Grandma poured a drip-drip of ancient sorcery into one of her morning prayers and beseeched the multicolored saints on her altar to turn my penis into a green-streaked canary with onyx eyes and a fleck of blue feathers in its wings.
I know why Grandma had chosen a bird for her curse. Right after father had left and mom had given up the ghost, I was conveyed to Grandma’s house not as a guest but as a permanent resident. Grandma called the limb dangling between my legs my “pájaro,” deplumed by my filthy hands and even murkier mind. “Stop skinning your pájaro to the bone! You have no bones there to begin with! Or, are you trying to make your pájaro fly away with all that yanking? Your grandpa used to flay his pájaro to exhaustion when he was your age, too, and because of that, he only gave me one daughter!” I heard the slight shuffling of Grandma’s steps retreating and the creak of my door closing. The unremitting, looming saunter of her scurrying feet echoed and bounced. Then silence wobbled in and the talcum-powdered moon tucked itself behind blankets of stardust and light. Then morning came, and I heard a chirp-chirp between my legs. I opened my eyes as the first ray of sun crept in through the window and pricked at my face. There it was, a puny-looking feathered thing. It had no clawed legs, no frothy tail. It was just the upper part of a bird sticking out of my pelvis instead of the phallus-shaped chunk of meat that used to stand like a flagpole every morning. I reached for it, driven by a flummoxed instinct. My balls where still there, sagging and sweaty, but the bird pecked my hand away, flapped its wings and let out a deafening chirrup. *** When I was eleven, the War of the Doodled Penises unleashed its devastating wave upon the corridors and backyards of my school. You had to watch your belongings, your locker, even your face, or you could end up with an engorged, veiny penis drawn all over them with permanent marker. Girls were the main targets; their shrieks of anguish and disgust engulfed the room and swelled the pride of the anonymous artist. It was mandatory for boys to participate: a sort of initiation to the club of masculinity. You had to make your mark in order to be accepted. I tried. I doodled a tiny one enveloped in flames on the upper edge of all the pages of a girl´s notebook, so if she flipped the pages at all-out speed, she would be entertained with the nickelodeon of a flying penis crashing to earth like the Hindenburg zeppelin. But that was it. I never dared sketch another one. Until Grandma brought Felipe home. I amused myself with the odd allure all those pictures of penises invoked within me as I ambled through the school hallways. I gazed at each one of them a little longer than I should, as if they were calling me to do something with them, or with mine. I yet couldn´t decipher what; they were moons and I was a lost satellite orbiting carefully, ready to absorb whatever planetary signal they were preparing to share. Grandma referred to the female private organ as the papaya. There was a widow we used to see on our way to the market, buttoned up in black to her neck, rambling down the cobblestone street. “That poor papaya must be bruising up underneath that hearth between her legs,” grandma mumbled one day as we walked past her. “What is a papaya?” I asked her one day. “The film of flesh God gave us women to push good for nothing men into this world,” she answered, grunting and puffing. “The way you say it, I don´t think I like papayas,” I replied. Grandma stopped in her tracks, pivoted on her heels, and cast daggers into my chest with her eyes. “Oh, you will like them! By God Almighty you will! If not, He can spit down a thunderbolt this instant and cut me in half.” I stared stolidly at the ripe, sliced papayas stockpiled in the market, wondering where this patch of flesh that looked like an upturned mouth could be attached to a woman´s body. Why was I supposed to like it so much? Did a woman’s papaya also have those black, lustrous seeds on the sides? I touched it when the fruit vendor was distracted, and comforted myself by thinking that at least the consistency was nice. One day at school, some boys shared a stolen, crumpled Playboy magazine. I finally saw the papaya on a woman. There was no mistaking it for another shape. The kids jumped like apes. How eager they were for a chance with a woman. I felt a little aroused by the picture, but no fireworks detonated inside me. “I think I like my pájaro more than that,” I said, thinking of the little bird in my pants. “That is because you are a faggot” someone said, and all of them burst into laughter and chanted “faggot” until the bell announcing the end of recess rang. But it was true; even when I started waking up all wet between the legs, the part of my mind responsible for manufacturing erotic dreams was full-blown papaya free. *** Grandma, always a savvy, business mogul, decided to sell some of grandpa´s old clothes. She coerced the owner of a department store that had recently gone out of business to sell her an extra male mannequin. Don Virgilio handed over a handless, wooden figure covered in sickly, corrosive spots and stripped white paint. Grandma baptized her new acquisition Felipe, after an albino cousin who had died of liver trouble. When she wasn´t carting Felipe to the market with grandpa´s clothes draped over his frame, Grandma deployed the undressed Felipe to the far end of our living room. |
The pancake flatness between his legs made my brain spiral out of control like an enraged washing machine. I knew Felipe was a boy: his built-up physiognomy, the absence of breasts, the muscled arms and legs. But the penis, the very organ my father had said made me a man, was missing. I wanted to help him. That void made me feel terribly sad. What if I kissed it like mom used to kiss my finger when my hand got slammed in the car door? What if I licked it? Would that help?
I drew Felipe a penis with a pink marker. I put real time into the task, though. It wasn’t like those rough outlines all over my school. Afterward, I approached my work of art to take a closer look. Taken by an unfathomable force, I kissed, licked, kissed, kissed, licked, and licked it again. And something inside me exploded. *** The summer was hot. That summer my friends held cannonball contests at the river. I brooded over the geographies of their bodies and watched them from afar, pretending I was in charge of safeguarding their clothes. In the year since mom’s demise and father’s departure, Grandma had inflated me with her round-the-clock meals. I looked like a puffer fish. The sight of my body repulsed me. My face had grown swollen and plump, like a cherub. I pinched and pulled the sides of my hips to see how much they could expand. I was sure that if I plopped into the water with the other boys, I would explode and the impact would blow them all into pieces. I watched the happiness that flooded the puffed-out chests of the boys as they jumped naked from one jagged boulder to the other. I watched. They pinched their noses and splayed their limbs and belly flopped into the water while the sun slipped behind toothy hills. I watched the happiness that flooded the puffed-out chests of the boys as they jumped naked from one jagged boulder to the other. I watched. They pinched their noses and splayed their limbs and belly flopped into the water while the sun slipped behind toothy hills.
The sight of those sweet pájaros, dozing like sleepy sea lions against the boys’ thighs, provided me with respite from the waves of loneliness that waterlogged my brain. I entertained myself, imagining just how much I wanted to dip the tip of that napping organ in a cup of steaming coffee, soak it up, and eat it, the same way I would go at a loaf of bread when I was five years old and the weather was cold. I did not stretch my hand toward any of these boys sunning themselves on a blistering rock; I would have been beaten to a pulp. I just liked to picture all the kaleidoscopic options in which I could consume their flaccid dicks. Most of them were soft and wrinkled and contracted due to the icy current of the stream, so I would imagine wrapping them, testicles and all, inside a corn tortilla with a dash of salsa verde. They could also be deep fried like squid tentacles, crunchy, with a few drops of lemon juice and some guacamole. When one of the boys tried to hide his erection under the water, or another one was touching himself behind the bushes despite the lacerating heat, I thought that the best way to eat his dong would be to bake it with flour and pierce it with a wooden stick so I could carry it around and bite it like a corn dog. These thoughts ignited a tingling sensation between my legs, but I wasn´t sure what to do or how to behave when such feelings assailed me. *** Once Felipe crash-landed into my life, however, it all clicked into place and I couldn´t stop my face from sealing itself against the painted pájaro I had given him. My tongue rolled out, ready to lick; my lips puckered up, ready to kiss; before I realized it, my right hand had snaked its way down my pants and now was squeezing my balls and jerking my pájaro with tremendous vigor. Felipe’s wooden response, while silent, annihilated my limbs and turned my bones into Jell-O. I don´t know how much time I spent every day plunged into this ritual. Ten minutes, one hour, one hundred years? The ending result was invariably the same: me collapsing to the floor as if my whole body had just atomized, with my hand squeezing my pájaro at full throttle to stop the electricity shooting through my veins. My fingers felt moist, daubed with a strange, white, soapy emulsion. As I was on the floor, my eyes would focus on Felipe´s face. I would try to voodoo the aquiline shadow of his nose, the buttery shade of his almond shaped eyes, the sharp edges of his cheeks. That carried on until one night I heard Grandma scream my name. My body disengaged itself from Felipe´s handless embrace in a jolt, in a broken chasm of imaginary fluids and blood. I tripped with the shackles of my pants around my ankles and fell on my back. Then Grandma’s frizzy potpourri of platinum-colored hair came into view and her bent-up spine loomed over my writhing body. A mist of rage seeped from her eyes. I wish I could tell you more about what happened next, about what followed after this incident, but my memory goes all fuzzy and starts to bleed out of form. Don Virgilio came to get the cursed mannequin, struggling to drag him out of the house by the head, cursing under his breath because Felipe was too big for his back seat. On his way out, I caught a quick glance of Felipe’s smeared penis. When Don Virgilio finally got him inside the car, Felipe´s milky scalp smashed against the window with a dry thud. I wanted to run to him, but Grandma was holding me by the shoulders. I waved him goodbye from our front door, holding back the tears that were hanging for dear life to my eyelashes, stinging the corners of my eyes. I knew he couldn't wave back even if he wanted to, and that made my eyes even more watery. The car spluttered on its way to the town´s dumpster. I saw it disappear against the setting sun. Goodbye, Felipe, I whispered into my palm. Then I balled up the whisper in my fist and threw it into the wind. |
Miguel Guerrero Becerra is a Mexican writer. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. His work has been featured in Storyscape Journal, The Acentos Review, Taste of Cinema, and Odd Voice. He is currently working on a novel. He lives with his husband in Puebla, México, loves unicorns, and believes you can learn everything you need to know about life by listening to Chavela Vargas and watching Pedro Almodovar's films.