Cold Turkey
I came back to life with the same pain that a leg cramp brings when it wakes you from a stupor. My dehydrated body twisted in agony. Though my muscles were constricted, I couldn’t stop shaking, wishing I could return to the painless state of death. I could only hear my own voice yelling. My eyelids refused to let in the light of the living. The people in the distance could’ve sworn I was dying again—some poor bastard who had run out of luck, or an addict going through withdrawals, like Lennon at the end of Cold Turkey.
I need somebody—to kill me, I thought, lying on the ground. The pain, like an earthquake, came back in aftershocks, never letting my body rest.
Help. Please.
Just anybody—please, end it.
Nobody did. After hours devoid of mercy, my body drew in breaths of the cold night air. When the spasms subsided, I lay shivering on the pavement, the puddles the rain had left in the street soaking through my white shirt, assaulting my skin.
The smell of piss and weed brought me to the realization that I had been dropped in the middle of Avenida Revolución.
I won’t stand out, at least. I must be better now, if these are the thoughts I’m having after being brought back to life.
Should I try to stand up? Or to stand out? This street would close to let walkers meander across it; no car would pass at this hour. A revolutionary change for Avenida Revolución—letting people walk without fear of being run over.
Giving up hope of being run over, I tried to stand despite my closed eyes. The attempt consisted of rolling onto my side, soaking my shoulder. I was in a white shirt, apparently. No jacket, though.
“You can’t sleep there.”
It wasn’t my voice, but it wasn’t wrong either.
The child’s voice gave my eyelids permission to open. The bright streetlights broke the chastity of my second first sight into the world. A beautiful dove picked at scraps on the pavement—the gray ones with a black ring around their necks. I had never been shat on by a dove. I could say that much.
“You really shouldn’t sleep there,” the insistent child said, standing next to the dove.
“Why not?”
What I really wanted to ask was: why do you care? And why aren’t you wearing any shoes?
“I dunno—it’s in the law.”
“Are you a cop?”
“I am a child, sir.”
“Not a cop, though?”
“No.”
A silence more beautiful than a child’s voice drifted through the piss-soaked air. A soothing coo from the dove slowed my heart rate. The faint tapping of distant walkers across the boulevard mixed with the sound.
“Coo.”
The dove answered, coo—coo.
“Coo,” I answered back.
Coo-coo.
“Coo.”
A musical call and response that would make Paul McCartney weep. We shared a moment.
“Coo!”
The Yoko of our composition derailed the exchange—the footwearless child interjected.
“No, you can’t pull it off.” I said.
The kid and the dove did not respond to my call. Eventually they would leave—the dove would fly, the kid would wander off somewhere shoeless. Would I remain on my side in the street?
I had tried to leave before—but I was brought back.
“You should really wear some shoes.” His dirty, soiled soles deformed against the shape of the pavement.
“I don’t need any shoes, sir.”
“Lucky you.”
“I am a niño de la tierra. We don’t need shoes.”
“Like the bug?” I asked. I’d never seen those bugs before.
“Yes. A cricket.”
Morbid curiosity pushed my head upward. The second thing my eyes would see in this world would be a Jerusalem cricket.
But the child was just a child. A blue striped polo shirt, short hair, large ears. The children down here always had large ears and large eyes. The same school-mandated haircut.
“You’re ugly,” I said after studying the kid’s face, “but not bug-ugly.”
On my second attempt at rising, I ended up on my stomach.
By the end of my life, I had been a metaphorical carpet—walked over by everyone. Now, on my second breath, I began again as one, unable to rise to my feet. Someone would eventually walk over my useless body. Hopefully a pretty one. I didn’t mind either male or female; maybe I could discover something new about myself.
“You can’t get up?” said the bug kid.
“Coo,” said the dove.
“You’re still here?” I said.
“Good luck,” he answered before leaving. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”
I thought, what a polite bug child. The kids down here had droopy eyes, large ears, and were a bit ugly, but they were polite.
“Coo,” said the dove as it left me as well. I was grateful it did not shat on me as it flew away.
The other side of the pavement felt exceptionally cool. I would give a third attempt at rising after some rest, I figured—it worked for Jesus.
I let the murmuring sweet talk of gentrified downtown lull me to sleep, the English and Spanish conversations along the boulevard surrounding my stretched-out body. What an exceptionally well-made sidewalk the city workers at Obras Públicas had given us. It caressed my cheek better than my mother ever did. What could my mother be doing right now, and would she even care?
I knew you would end up like this, she would say.
I wished I could be a child of the earth, without worrying about footwear, or a dove circling the mirages in the clouds, projected by the gleaming moonlight. I wished I hadn’t thought of my parents before sleep took my reborn body.
No sooner wished than done—the dream carried me back to a memory with them.
There was no arpeggiated whole-tone scale cutting into the scene. This wasn’t television. It wasn’t El Chavo—or Chaves, as it was called in Brazil.
Dreams are like forgotten books with a bookmark—you open them wherever someone else left off. Trusting you to follow the storyline even if you can’t remember what came before. I had some recollection of this memory. It had been a birthday, one that involved our family traversing Tijuana to get to the expensive bowling alley.
My wide-eyed, big-eared child self sat in the back of my mother’s SUV. I knew it was a birthday, but I couldn’t recall which one. I must have been ten or eleven. It was when I saw my first hanged body on the bridge by Boulevard Dos Mil.
Despite it being our birthday, despite that first sight of flesh long suspended without life, my memory harps only on my father’s words as he drove calmly beneath the scene: “They must have done something.”
My eyes were too young, the bridge too high, and my father’s words far too serene. I couldn’t read the banner hung beside the bodies. I could barely read at all at that age; I had always been a slow boy growing up.
After successfully tiring my siblings and me by taking us to the only bowling alley in the city, my parents muttered among themselves in the front, our small bodies ragdolled in the backseat.
Leaning into the window, my eyes still open, I imagined a small figure running alongside our car, traversing the city’s skyline behind us, until the thought was interrupted by questions: Were they sleeping, just like my siblings were? How did my father know what they had done?
My child’s face began to cry, fear gripping my weak body.
“I’m telling you—there’s something wrong with your son,” my father muttered to my mother.
“He’ll grow out of it. Give him time.”
“He’s always been too slow. It took him this long to learn how to read.” He paused. “How old is he now?”
“You need to give time to these things.”
There is something I must have done, for growing up as awkwardly as I did. Simply growing older, the people surrounding me unconcerned with my presence. Like the last two sips in a coffee mug, left alone to grow cold—never given the chance to warm anyone.
