So

by Lucy S.

Chatting with my nephew Ricky yesterday online, I sent him a link to the song, “Don’t Let No One Get You Down” by War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqhJqudKOY I asked him if he likes it; he said, “Yeah, I like all those oldies.” So that made him ask me about another song by War because his sister Rose used to play it all the time after her partner William got deported to El Salvador and ended up killed there. So I found it for him and sent him the link. 

“So” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ixhqGsuqI

We were just joking around before that. He found some old photo of me in his grandma’s photo box from my early teens, and he wrote me saying, “You were all gangstered out.”

***

And that sent me tumbling in my mind into my own connections. "You were all gangstered out," which is an exaggeration – a joke --really, we were all sort of pretending back then out in our desert town, many Joshua treed miles away from L.A., before it turned into the real and more dangerous thing even out there. We knew we weren’t fighters – we knew were mostly playing – and we laughed at ourselves, sometimes joking that we had a gang called “Lancas.” We were a fused blend of sarcastic and sentimental with carefully guarded sincerity – guarded because someone could mock the hell out of us for it, and who knew when to trust it in some people, having seen sincerity, too, used as a means to an end… 

As in my first boyfriend who'd cry and tell me again how hurt he was that his mom and dad weren’t together if I said I was going to end our relationship or even asked him directly why he said or did some of the things he did to me. He did and didn't mean the tears and the sadness about his parents' situation. It was and wasn't a lie. 

His mom and dad weren’t together because his dad used to brutally beat his mom. Getting free of him was essential to her well-being and survival. Agnes went on one date with him one night in her teens and he raped her – “So that was my ‘first,’” she told me one time. And she got pregnant. She told her mother, and her mother blamed her daughter for going out with him and said who knew if she was telling the truth about rape anyway, and she'd better go to him now if he’d have her. Yes, he’d ‘have her.' He was determined to ‘have her’ if he could. So she married him with no happy wedding and moved in with him and his mom. 

My teenage self told Paul one time that his mom was ten thousand times the person that his dad was – not that an equation like that makes any sense – that she was a GREAT woman and he was such a piece of shit. Now I feel guilty and kind of ugly for using the curse words then or here because I’m talking about Agnes in this paragraph (and it was his dad -- but I used to get so mad that Paul idolized him when he knew what his dad had done to his mom) and Agnes never could stand those words – the most she’d say was an annoyed “Bless you” to replace “Damn you” – she hated words and phrases like fucking bitch or piece of shit or even ass as in Shut your mouth you fucking bitch or I’ll beat your ass you piece of shit which might be said if she confronted him when he blew through ‘their’ money or he started seeing someone while she worked all day holding the 40 pound riveter at Lockheed and then came home to her job as the sole functioning parent to their five kids. Joe used to shoot those words at her as he shoved and kicked and slapped and punched her, until finally Paul’s older brother Jesse pulled a butcher knife on his dad during a beating in the kitchen, and Jesse said Hit her again and I’ll kill you. And later at long last, Agnes threw Joe out when she was in her mid-30's… and Paul was 10.  So I thought Paul’s real yet strategically used sadnesses missed the point in terms of what was tragic in the situation. 

His own pain was both genuine and feigned. Responding directly to my questions about his own burgeoning abusiveness or accepting any 'ending' to the relationship that I tried to enact by speaking it -- these were always deferred by his own tears about these histories so far beyond us yet connected, always connected. Neither he nor I could pry the true and false elements apart.

Which makes me think now about how I’ve always had such a hard time knowing how to respond to people who have been so hurt and need something so huge that I don’t know how to give it or where my own traumas and needs and hopes and efforts and rights to some happiness – or are there any ‘rights’ to happiness? – where all of this might stand in relationship to all of that. 

***  

I laughed reading what Ricky said about me being all gangstered out in the old picture, and wrote back, “Yeah vato.” He wrote, “Orale ese.” I wrote, “Hey vato come and visit us here [in the Midwest] and I’ll take you for a cruise in my firme minivan so you can find a ruca to take back to Nevada.” And so on. (Chola/o talk…) Silly stuff, with happy faces, and his LOLs and my hahahahahaha’s.  Then that first War song popped into my head out of nowhere, a song I hadn’t heard or thought about in so many years. I just sent it on a whim, associating it only with good old times with Gloria and Ana in the Lancaster of long ago. I even kind of meant the song toward him. “Don’t let no one get you down, Ricky…”  Be happy, my nephew…

It is so easy to step from the level ground of lightheartedness and good old times into the forever fall of trauma without meaning to.

One War song connected to the other War song for Ricky, to the one Rose used to play over and over at her dad’s when she and Ricky were living there after William was gone.

And now – well now I’m thinking about when Rose lived with us different times, how she’d play her cassettes (she never figured out how to burn CDs so her favorite mixes were on cassettes), same couple of songs over and over – rewind – play – something I do, also, but on CD now or computer, as if a certain song were just the happy tonic – or, more often, painful medicine my mind needs to understand beyond words, to grieve some more, to submerge myself in it in order to finally be filled with it for a while and then be able to let it rest again.  

This is something that people who disdain sentimental songs may not understand. They may not realize that you may know whatever it is they might say about the song, and you don’t care. They, like you, have no actual answers for why some people do some of the awful things they do to each other while others who have been brutalized (like Agnes) become fiercely strong caregivers; or how to heal what gets wounded or if healing is even a goal or should be used as a word for living with love and anger and anguish and bewilderment and anxieties; or what to say; or where to go to be better; or when we might get way beyond these cruelties, as individuals or as a world. Sometimes a song bleeds the pain out after enough repetitions to let us finally stop playing it until we can return to it later as a receptacle for what must be expressed somehow but might be partly contained and then let out in that song so that we can bleed without too many hard scabs, and remain soft somewhere in our encounters with the world.

One thought – one word – one scent, sight, song -- elicits one memory that has its own “So” path to another in every person, all of these connections grown in different orders in each particular living mind and body, so that you never know what may lead to what. So you are never quite safe from having hurt brought up to your surface again or from plunging down to bring the pain of another back up from chronic to acute, again and again.

So this time, I wrote to Ricky, “Hey, we were joking around and now look at us. We’re all sad.” He wrote after a while, “I think we’re just getting ourselves all sad.” I said, “Well sometimes I like to think of her and be both happy and sad. I smile thinking of when she used to say, ‘Oooohh, my JAM!’ when she lived with us.” He wrote, “Lol and once I went to the back door with her and she was dancing with this girl and boom she fell right on top of her and got up like nothing happened lol.” We keep it light a little longer, if this can be called light, and then he says, “I’m trying it’s hard cause I had to see her covered up.  I got traumatized.”  Ricky went to see her body.  I sit here 1500 miles away unable to hold his hand or look him in the eyes to convey that I’m with him on this, at least as much as I can be. I type, “yeah” and then he types, “But I’m trying” and then I type, “yeah that’s all you can do” and then he types, “Yeah”… 

All of this makes me think about something Julie, Rose's and Ricky's younger sister, said to me not too long ago when we were talking on Rose's birthday. "You tried to help them, Lucy. When you love people, you try to help them." And I thought right then with inexpressable gratitude, "Julie, you have all the wisdom in the world right in this moment." I said, "So did you, Julie. You did so much."  So maybe that's it, the big answer.  If we love each other, we try to help each other. 


"Don't Let No One Get You Down" War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqhJqudKOY

"So" War http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ixhqGsuqI