If I told you my name you’d call me Rafa; if I told you who I was, you’d call me crazy. But that’s okay. I have a hard time believing it myself sometimes－that I was that man that was featured in that news story about that crazy incident that happened on that college campus on that clear day in April.
I used the word “that” like a hundred times in that sentence but that’s okay. I don’t talk too good. I’m an uneducated Mexican who doesn’t speak much English. In fact, I’m talking to you in Spanish right now, and if you speak Spanish like I do, then obviously you are not having any problems understanding what I’m saying. The same is actually trufle if you don’t speak Spanish, because the narrator has been kind enough to translate everything that I’m saying to you, so that’s that! There’s that word again: that. It’s kind of appropriate that it keeps popping up because the word “that” translates to “ese” in Spanish, and “ese” in Spanish can also be used to describe what I happen to be: an ese, or like I said before, a Mexican dude. Just another of many in this country that comes from a long line of menial and manual laborers who’ve managed to scrape out a living by pushing things around. My family has pushed mops, lawnmowers, hand trucks, mail carts, wheelbarrows, room service carts, strollers with little white babies in them, bus carts, dollies, fruit and ice cream carts, drugs – you name it, we’ve pushed it. But you know what, ese? At some point, push comes to shove, and that’s what this little story is all about.
I was working at the University－pushing things around like always: push brooms, vacuum cleaners, even one of those buffer machines that keeps the floors nice and polished. The gringos call it a burnisher, but I called it a chingadera in Spanish and “the boofer ma-CHEEN” when I was trying to say “the buffer machine” in English. Like I told you, I don’t speak the language too good. I can understand it well enough but if the subject matter is not work-related, I struggle to put my own sentences together, and that struggle is what put me in that unwanted situation to begin with on that fateful day when the soda ma-CHEEN in the quad stopped accepting change.
“Rafa!” shouted my supervisor, “Go put a ‘No Change’ sign on the Coke machine!”
“No chench?” I replied with my shitty English.
“No change!”
“How does it write?” I asked him with my shitty grammar.
“Just the way it sounds!” he yelled back before storming off. He was a very impatient man and was always yelling at me in front of the students and the professors. One day he yelled at me so hard that I cried a little bit. It wasn’t even my fault. If someone leaves a chalkboard unerased, then it’s my job to erase it and keep it clean. How was I supposed to know that I was erasing some fancy theorem that a professor had posted for his math students to solve? There was no sign that said DO NOT ERASE, so I erased it. That’s what I get paid to do, and afterward, I paid for it.
“Use your empty head!” my supervisor screamed in my ear before apologizing to the professor who had posted the problem. Some of the professor’s students stood behind him and laughed at me, calling me Good Rafa Hunting. At first I was confused because I didn’t get the reference and then I was shocked that they even knew my name, but the shock wore off later on when I was crying in front of the bathroom mirror and I saw RAFA embroidered on my work shirt. It appeared backward and it made me realize that the English word AFAR was an accurate way to describe my personality.
I’m shy and distant. I keep to myself, and I don’t start trouble. I don’t even start conversations. Maybe that’s why I never got married. Maybe that’s why I never got involved, because I never get involved. I’m backward, just like my name in that mirror, and I watch things go by me from a far away distance. I don’t go to concerts or restaurants or sporting events. I go to work and then I go home. I don’t even watch movies. After the tears dried that day, my coworker Nacho had to tell me the students were calling me Good Rafa Hunting because of some movie about a genius janitor that solves complicated theorems in the hallways when no one is looking.
“Except you erase them when no one is looking,” he was quick to remind me. I still have never seen the movie, but apparently that genius pushed around a chingadera at a university like I did, so he must’ve been a paisa just like me!
But back to the soda machine. I had my orders: post a “No Change” sign and spell it “the way it sounds,” and as always, I did what I was told. I wrote the words on a white piece of paper with a black marker and stuck it on the soda ma-CHEEN with red electrical tape. I wrote the note in large capital letters for the whole college to read: NO CHENCH
After that, I started working my push broom around the quad and not two minutes later, I overheard a couple of male students (Kevin and Garrett) commenting on my prose.
“Chench?” asked Kevin. “What the hell is a chench?”
“I don’t know,” replied Garrett, “but whatever it is, it’s forbidden. Maybe it’s some kind of protest.”
“Who cares!” said Kevin as he dropped some change into the coin slot and immediately came up empty-handed. “What’s this bullshit?” he shouted and I remember thinking to myself, “These kids are in college and they can’t even read.”
They started banging on the machine and that’s when I decided to turn and get the hell out of there, but they saw me and quickly came over.
“Hey, OM-bray!” shouted Kevin. “Your soda machine is busted.”
“Soda ma-CHEEN?” I asked.
“Yeah, it took my change!”
“O, si, si,” I confirmed. “No chench.”
“What?”
“No chench!”
That’s when Garrett piped up, “This must be the guy behind the chench protest!”
Kevin was losing patience. He looked down at the name on my shirt, “Listen, Ray-fuh, I don’t give two shits about your little custodial crusade. I just want my money back. Cum-pren-day?”
I fired back with the classic Mexican dodge “No speak-a-English” and you would think I had pissed on the floor the way they turned to each other and shook their heads with equal disgust and disbelief.
“See? This is what we’re up against, Garrett,” said Kevin. “These freeloading taco-heads that come to our country for the freedom and the opportunity and don’t even bother to learn the goddamn language.”
“I wish Dallas Carver could see this.”
“Dallas Carver!” I exclaimed with enthusiastic recognition. For weeks I had seen that name printed on fliers all over campus. He was some kind of political figure, and his upcoming visit to the school to share his controversial views against illegal immigration was causing a heated divide throughout the campus. A bunch of students would post the fliers one day and then a bunch of other students would tear them down the next. That happened every single day for two weeks leading up to the event. I know because I had to sweep up the mess, and every time I did, I grew a little more annoyed with that name: Dallas. Who names their kid after a major city? I never met a Mexican named Chihuahua or Zacatecas but I guess that’s part of what makes us different－the language－but that silly observation wasn’t what was upsetting me. Dallas Carver was an angry bigot. My coworker Nacho told me he was known for spewing racist comments about immigrants, especially Mexicans, and I could feel a hatred of my own growing inside of me. I’ve never been much into politics (a political agenda is about the only thing I never pushed in life) but push was coming to shove, and I knew it was time for me to make a stand in life and give those two assholes a piece of my mind.
“Dallas Carver es A-okay!” I bullshitted with my stupid thumbs in the air. Okay, so I chickened out, but what did you expect? Putting my foot down would’ve just agitated them even more, and I told you before, I’m not confrontational. That’s why I pretended to relate with them－so they would shut up and leave me the hell alone.
“Oh yeah?” Kevin asked in a condescending voice. “You like Dallas Carver?”
“¡Si, si!” I told him. “¡Muy bueno!”
“We should bring him to the speech tomorrow!” said Garrett.
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea.” Kevin ripped a Dallas Carver flier from a nearby wall and shoved it in my face. “You go to speech tomorrow?”
I nodded and pointed to the flier. “¡Si! Dallas Carver! I work, I go!”
They took down my information and told me they would find me before the event the following day. The plan was to trot me out on stage during Carver’s speech to make whatever statement they were planning to make but I had no intention of furthering their cause. I just wanted to get back to work and then go home and get some sleep. The university was expecting a huge turn out for the event and my supervisor had been reminding the cleaning crew to get a good night’s rest before the big day because we were not only cleaning up the mess afterward, but also helping the event staff set up beforehand.
The event was scheduled for noon at the campus courtyard, a beautiful square with a big lawn and surrounding maple trees, and I remember it was a bright, clear day that morning when we finished setting up. At around 11 o’clock, the courtyard was already packed with students, faculty and event security. Protesters held signs that said WE ARE ALL IMMIGRANTS and REFUGEES ARE PEOPLE TOO and they were met by counter-protesters with signs of their own: FOREIGNERS GET OUT and DEPORT THEIR ASSES! The two sides chanted slogans at each other and at one point it escalated into enough pushing and shoving that a few security guards had to come over and break it up. Things were heating up and I could tell there was going to be trouble that day so I decided that I would go back to the custodial facilities building and hide in my locker until the dust settled. When I turned to leave, Kevin and Garrett came out of nowhere and pounced on me like a couple of hyenas on a warthog. They dragged me through the crowd and took me backstage to meet a clean-cut, well-dressed young man with a button on his lapel that read “ICE is Nice!” His handshake was soft and his voice was even softer as he introduced himself as Dallas Carver and thanked me for being there. I couldn’t believe it was him. He was so kind and polite. Then the emcee introduced him over the PA system and he flipped like a tortilla.
“Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Mr. Dallas Kane Carver!” It must have been the roar that followed－the combination of wild cheers and angry boos－that got him all worked up because all of a sudden he started hooting and hollering and running around the stage like a complete idiot. It was like watching a pro-wrestling villain when he enters the ring before a big match: he acknowledged his supporters in the crowd with wild gestures of approval and then yelled madly at his detractors when they interrupted the exchange with their jeers and wild chanting.
“Let’s go!” said Kevin and the two of them escorted me to center-stage near the podium and microphone that I had helped to set up just hours before. At first I was panic-stricken. I had never been in front of a large audience before, but then I looked out into the audience and I started to recognize some of the faces of the people I got paid to clean up after and the familiarity started to calm me down a little, even though they were were all screaming at each other and carrying on like lunatics. I guess that’s politics for you. It can light a fire in your belly like an ingested bowl of chili peppers and make you yell and wave signs in public that say STOP doing this or VOTE YES on that. I even saw an obese guy toward the back yelling at nobody and holding a sign that said NO CHENCH. “Some of these college kids will latch on to anything,” I remember thinking to myself as I shook my head with discontent, and that’s when it caught my eye. It was just a shadow at first, up in the trees, and then it moved and I could see that it was a person… a man. I looked at the other maples and apparently people had climbed into them to get a better view of the stage, but the first guy I spotted kept drawing my attention. He was shifting around a lot, and when he finally settled on a limb between two branches, I could see that he had a rifle strapped over his shoulder.
“I can’t hear you people!” By now, Dallas Carver had ripped the microphone from the podium and was working the crowd into a frenzy. They were pushing and shoving and security had to step in again, much to Carver’s delight. I looked back up at the tree and the man was now holding the rifle in a shooting position, peering into the scope and taking aim at the stage. Carver was a moving target and I knew that once he stopped, he would end up in the sniper’s cross hairs. I made a move to go and warn him but Kevin and Garrett tightened their grips around my arms like they were afraid I was going to do something stupid, and that’s exactly what I did. I shook myself loose and ran between Carver and the crowd and faced the shooter with my hands in the air. “¡No dispares! ¡No dispares!” I cried but I guess the son of a bitch didn’t speak Spanish. The first shot rang out and all hell broke loose. People shrieked and scattered in all directions. The second and third gunshots echoed through the square soon after and that’s when I felt the burning hole in my upper chest. I looked down and saw a dark spot on my shirt that quickly expanded and soaked my name, which was upside down and appeared as ∀Ⅎ∀ᴚ.
“I think that’s my blood,” I said, but no one was around to hear me, and there was nobody around to catch me when I blacked out and crashed to the same stage floor I had helped to assemble just hours before!
So here’s the part you didn’t hear about in the news reports, the part where I died and came back to life. Usually, a person dies and you hear nothing about the experience because they take that information with them, but sometimes a person comes back and they live to tell about it, and you hear it on the news, but you never heard that about me, because I never told anybody. And listen, I never really believed in it either－the whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life business－but once it happens to you, there’s no denying it. Even before the doctors told me that I had been “clinically dead” for about five minutes during surgery, I knew I had gone to the other side, but like I said, I didn’t say anything. I think it’s because my experience wasn’t all supernatural like it’s supposed to be. I didn’t see a tunnel or a bright light at the end of it. There were no angels and I didn’t get a visit from my dead grandmother, Abuelita Paula. She was the woman that stepped in and raised me and my sister Charo when our parents split up and then split altogether. I was a teenager when she died and her final words to me on her deathbed were “I’ll come back for you real soon,” which is not something you want to hear from someone who’s got one foot in the grave, especially at seventeen when you think you have your whole life ahead of you.
“Wait, what have you heard?” I asked, but she never replied. She just passed away. That was twenty years ago and I’ve been dreading an early visit from her ever since, but she didn’t make an appearance that day, thank the Lord. In fact, I didn’t see any relatives in my vision, dead or alive. The only person I saw (and this was the only thing I saw) was a creepy individual made up of different people and various elements, like one of those magazine collages I used to see around campus, with a bunch of different parts taken from different places and put into one place to create a whole new image. The person I saw had Dallas Carver’s face and he was wearing my bloody work shirt with a rifle slung over his shoulder, only it wasn’t his shoulder. The body belonged to that obese guy in the crowd who was yelling at no one, like a voice unheard, except Dallas wasn’t yelling, and he wasn’t holding the same sign. He was just staring quietly at me, as if he was looking into a mirror, and the sign he was holding in his hand said NO CHANGE. Obviously these were all images I had witnessed the day of the shooting, most of them seen just moments before that lunatic put a slug in my chest so I don’t know, maybe it was just a dream.
When I woke up in my hospital bed, my hand was wrapped in a rosary and clutched between Charo’s praying hands. “You’re squeezing too tight,” I said and she screamed with a delirious delight I hadn’t heard since we were little kids. She ran to the door and when she opened it, I saw a police officer standing guard, which terrified me. What did I do? Am I going to jail?
“My brother is open!” she announced to the cop (her English is worse than mine) and he nodded and gently closed the door.
“Am I in trouble?” I whispered.
“Does it look like you’re in trouble?” she replied, motioning to a room full of flower arrangements, balloons, stuffed animals and other get-well-soon gifts.
The doctor came in and introduced himself as Dr. Jin. He was Chinese but he spoke to me in Spanish and he talked to me about my “sucking chest wound” and chest tubes and all the blood I had lost. I didn’t understand any of it but before he left, he said I was lucky to be alive, and that I should get as much rest as possible before I spoke to the media.
“The media?” I asked Charo.
“You’re a hero, Rafa! Look!” She turned on the TV and a newscast came on that was reporting from the university courtyard. A female reporter stood in front of the yellow tape that surrounded the stage (which was now swarming with police officers and FBI agents) and recounted the full story. According to her report, I was the only person shot during the assassination attempt, but not the only person seriously injured. The shooter, a man from Honduras whose daughter had been mysteriously killed after she was deported, fell out of the tree and broke his neck.
“They’re already saying he’ll never walk again,” added Charo.
The reporter went on and on about how I saved Dallas Carver’s life and they showed a clip of him saying the same thing a couple of hours after the shooting. “That bullet had my name on it,” he said. “But thanks to the bravery and heroism of one selfless man, that bullet now bears the name Rafa Saladbar.”
Charo laughed aloud. “He couldn’t pronounce Saldívar!”
They even posted a picture of me on TV. It was my work picture, the one they used for my photo ID, which they must’ve taken right out of my locker.
“Those bastards!” I yelled. “How did they get my picture?!”
Charo couldn’t believe her ears. “Rafa, you saved a person’s life today. Why do you care about a picture?”
“Because this is not what I wanted. I just wanted to keep to myself and not get involved.”
“Well, it’s too late for that,” she suggested. “You got reporters waiting outside that door.”
“I’m not talking to those jackals!”
She cocked her head and smiled. “Rafa, you just woke up so you don’t know what’s happening. You took a bullet for that crazy gringo who said all of those terrible things about Latinos and it’s already changing things. On TV, on the internet. They’re talking about you all over the country, and about Latinos.”
“I don’t care.”
She turned off the TV and took her seat next to me with the rosary in her hands again. “You remember when Abuelita Paula used to read to us from her book of fables?”
I nodded.
“My favorite was the lion and the mouse. The lion steps on the mouse’s house and destroys it and when the mouse comes out to yell at the intruder, the lion grabs him and says ‘I’m gonna eat you!’”
“That’s not how it starts,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she continued. “Then the mouse begs for mercy but the lion is an asshole and he starts tossing the mouse around like a rag doll, teasing and mocking him, and when the lion gets on his hind legs to eat the little guy, he steps on a thorn that makes him jump and scream in pain.”
“That’s not how it goes,” I insisted.
“Yeah,” she continued. “And then the lion tries to get the thorn out but it’s stuck between the pads of his paw so he starts crying and begging the mouse to get it out and what does the mouse do? He strolls over to the lion’s paw and toink!, he removes the thorn.”
“That’s not how it ends,” I told her and she just kept on going.
“The mouse showed kindness, Rafa, even to his enemy, and the lion learned the error of his ways. That’s why they became best friends happily ever after.”
“You mixed up two fables but never mind that. You really think Dallas Carver is just going to change overnight?”
“He already has. Look!” She pulled up Carver’s social media on her phone. “He apologized for all of the racist comments he made against Latinos and he’s even rethinking his politics.”
“He apologized?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Superman! You changed this man’s life, and so many others, too.”
“Superman?”
“That’s what they’re calling you! Look!”
She kept showing me all of this crazy information online that eventually grew into the cultural phenomenon known as Rafamania, which I’m sure you’ve all heard about by now. If you haven’t, then you must’ve been living under a rock in a cave on another planet somewhere because it was everywhere. And oddly enough, I didn’t mind all of the extra attention. I have to admit, it kind of grew on me. Not the celebrity part of it (although that did help me to come out of my shell a little bit), but the satisfaction. I liked the satisfaction of knowing that what I did helped people. It motivated some of our thinkers to rethink their stances on immigration and it led to reform that actually helped people. That was a big deal. Of course, I never let it go to my head. I was no Superman like people claimed, but I do let it go to my heart every once in a while, especially when I’m shirtless in front of the mirror and I can see the scar on my chest from the bullet that missed my heart by two inches. That’s when I’m no longer just an ordinary ese who wound up in an extraordinary situation… I’m something extra. Remember I told you that the word ese means “that” and “Mexican dude” in Spanish? Well, ese is also how you pronounce the letter S in Spanish, and sometimes in the mirror I’m all three of those: ese ese con ese en su pecho or that Mexican dude with the S on his chest.