Application
A Dollar Three Eighty
My Grandpa’s hands calloused the steel
of Chevy engine parts,
resounded in the chime of metal
beneath a rusting ’76 hood.
His truck was skin, darker than his own.
Oil and grit became flesh stretched over bones
and the 8 cylinders rumbled louder than the machine
in the brickyard of Utility Block Co.
vicious as the boss who signed my grandpa’s paycheck.
He bought the truck with muscle
shed off the cold angles of morning
and handed the banker dollars
ground with dirt at Galles Car Lot.
The day the bills were due,
when the money was gone
before the check was cashed,
the truck ran out of gas in the driveway.
He walked to work,
cussing at the expense of 25 cents a gallon.
The day was still dark at six
even the bricks glowed blue like headstones
at the cemetery down the street
as he inspected the cement compressor,
stood in the iron tomb at the center of the yard.
Someone turned on the machine
and the lights flashed orange as daybreak,
steam rose like an angered ghost woken with fire,
and the concrete ran red
as gears stripped his back
when the men pulled him out.
After three weeks in Presbyterian Hospital,
after two surgeries, collapsed lung, 6 ribs broken,
the insurance man showed with pen and paper.
The contract explained the accident bailed out everything,
the loans, the house, the medical bills.
My Grandpa’s blood paid his life off
and the Chevy was bought with the air he still breathed.
Twenty years spun over like the odometer
and truck never broke down,
it only got lazy, he joked.
“My truck is like me,
you make it do too much
it’ll tell you, ‘kiss my ass,
I ain’t doin shit!’”
Sunday mornings, he skipped church
to work on the truck in the dirt driveway,
changing air filters, toping off fluids,
wrenching the chrome off the lug nuts.
He’d been trying to find that damn oil leak since Carter got elected.
But this Sunday, one God did not intend
to be wasted at San Felipe or at Catechism,
I helped my grandpa with the childhood duty.
I shined the flashlight on the dark corners of the engine
and asked, “what’s that do?”
about everything he touched.
Grandpa told me about the accident again,
this time he broke a hip and his spine
and was glorying himself how he climbed
out of the machine with his knuckles
when his brother-in-law walked up the drive.
Tio stood over my grandpa,
quiet as a new Cadillac,
packed a mouthful of Copenhagen
and spat black and heavy as 10-40 when he asked,
“How much you want for your truck?”
and thumbed a handful of bills
hammered from the coins
of last night’s Indian casino.
Grandpa, grinning the rusted teeth
of a junk wrecker said,
“Just what I paid for it.”
“How much is that, oiga?”
Money unfolded soft as the hand of the lucky roll.
Grandpa cleared his throat like a gear, grinding,
“I’ll sell it for a dollar three eighty.”
“So then it’s not for sale, hombre?”
“Not unless you got a dollar three eighty, pendejo.”
Ode to Freddy Fender
In San Antonio,
the Texans flew their flags at half mast
the afternoon you died.
Then rose them back
the next morning.
In Albuquerque,
the New Mexicans
played your songs on the radio
and drank shots of tequila in your name.
The pick-up trucks
with Mexican flags and cowboy hats
painted on the rear window
rolled Pacific Ave.
bumping “Guacamole!”
like it was reggaeton.
The evening news
praised the name you chose
and the journal headline read:
Country Music Loses a Legend.
And the old folks
across the street played
your 45’s on the porch
and danced the way they did
on their wedding day.
Hell, you might have
played their reception.
But the record skips
on the bends in the wax
and the speaker cracks
dust like a eulogy
echoed in an empty church
where the choir
is a lone accordion
playing one note.
You, the sixteen year old
in the saloon in Lubbock
playing buddy holly covers
to drunk honkies
who didn’t seem to notice
the only thing in the bar
browner than you
were the bottles of Budweiser.
Mexi-fro on your head
like a prickly pear
sat atop a cactus.
You took the name
of your guitar as your own,
wore it, slung across
your shoulder
and sang country
like Pancho Villa
firing a 30-30 rifle
across the border
and called it Tex-Mex.
I’ll be There
Before the Next
Teardrop Falls
is the song responsible
for my mother’s conception
and there isn’t a Nuevo Mexicano
who doesn’t know the words
to Hey Baby, Que Paso?
Lovers done wrong
scrape their snake-skin heels
on the splintered floor
at the VA dance
and they kiss beneath
a cowboy song in Spanish
from you.
Who got caught
smoking grass
by the Dallas PD
spent a year in the pinta
and dreamed that Johnny Cash
would break his guitar
over the warden’s head
and rescue you to Nashville.
No one cared the morning you died,
but the AM country station was silent.
And the pick-ups wouldn’t start.
And the strings on my guitar
broke in the case,
never played.
City Built of Ghosts
Where the sidewalk breaks
in the crumble of downtown
the cement bows
into a grin of footsteps.
Where dirt and wind-torn branches
gather like strings of a requiem
composed of the city’s fingers
outstretched and gnarled
from the fury of concrete.
Beneath the solace of asphalt
there is a temple rising like a slow moon
beneath the street,
beneath their gospel,
in the bellowing of Nahuatl prayers.
In the grinding altar of mumble
through mid-day traffic.
And the sidewalk breaks more with each step
as its gray smile
flashes toothless and guilty.
Toothless and guilty
like us who step over the cracks
to dodge the city’s ghosts
at our feet
and think of nothing
as our distractions shout our names.
As we walk the dragging pilgrimage
work in the morning,
the bank at noon,
the bars at night.
Cities were built with a purpose,
like we were built with a purpose
and are forgotten
like our streets that collapse
under the weight
of our days.