My older brother ‘Melo was a cabroncito growing up. That means he was a handful. He’s still a travieso as an adult but fortunately my folks don’t have to deal with him anymore. Any discipline is now carried out by law enforcement and the judicial system, but that’s only if he gets caught, which is rare. The same was true when he was a kid. He’d lie, cheat, and steal but he never left evidence at the scene of the crime. I know because I would usually witness his delinquent behavior, then witness the witness tampering that would follow as he advised me not to tell anyone, lest I get my “balls ripped off.”
But he wasn’t always such a smooth criminal. It took him a while to learn self control and the importance of a good cover-up. Doing something wrong and concealing evidence of that wrongdoing is crucial to beating the rap, and he wasn’t getting away with anything early on. When he was five, he started writing on school walls, but that sonso would always write his own name. At six, he stole some action figures from a kid and tried to resell them to the same kid the next day. A year later he gave us the infamous Mama Joe incident, but no cover up would’ve helped him that day anyway, because there’s only so much cover up that a cover-up can cover up.
I remember it was a scorcher that afternoon as my parents drove me, ‘Melo, and my little sister Anna through the dodgy streets of a slum on the south side of town. As a kid, you take everything at face value, and driving to Mama Joe’s house made it clear that her neighborhood had an ugly face with very little value, which made me even more uneasy. I was already super uncomfortable from the heat because that meant my balls were sizzling something fierce from riding hump in the backseat of our 1980 Camaro. As the middle child, I always sat in the middle; in family portraits, family counseling meetings, and the family car. At first it was cool sitting on that metal hump between the two rear seats because I was elevated above my siblings, but it didn’t take long to realize that it was actually the worst seat in the house, and once you pick your seat as a kid, you’re stuck with it until adulthood.
First of all, there was no seat belt on the hump because it was part of the car frame and not intended for sitting, so while everyone else was securely strapped in their plush vinyl seats, I was propped up and untethered, riding in constant fear of being launched through the windshield in the event of an accident. Secondly, you were straddling the frickin’ transmission tunnel so naturally that sucker heated up like a frying pan, despite the thin layer of upholstery carpet that separated my tender sack from the surface of the sun. So while everyone else was sitting comfortably in their plush vinyl seats, I was getting my eggs fried on a sperm griddle, which is likely the reason I never had children of my own. Thank you, Chevrolet! And my unborn children thank you, too, since I now own that ranfla, and probably would have subjected them to the same torture.
It was no surprise that our first time with Mama Joe would also be our last. Other kids had one sitter because they were well-behaved and their parents trusted them to look after their children, but we hardly saw the same person twice because of Carmelo the Menace. We didn’t have a chance to get acquainted with our niñeras so I only vividly recall a couple of them: one was a black lady featured in this story named Mama Joe, and the other was this crazy vieja named Flora who watched bad TV at the highest volume and spit loogies on her own living room floor. It was carpeted and her ratty dog with one eye kept licking up all the phlegm. I almost puked and Anna had nightmares for a week but luckily, ‘Melo “accidentally” broke one of Flora’s car windows with a brick and we were never allowed back into that house of horrors.
“Welcome to my home!” said Mama Joe with open arms when we finally arrived. They were big ol’ arms, too, much like the rest of her. She probably weighed about three hundred pounds and looked like a giant when we walked into her tiny bungalow. I want to say she was in her mid fifties, and if I had to venture a guess on the design period of her home, I would also guess mid-fifties. Lots of Formica and wood paneling, plastic furniture and retro appliances, and there was no TV! In its place on the living room floor was an ancient RCA Victor tube radio that crackled with doo-wop. It was kind of creepy, and our folks must’ve felt the same way and probably wanted out of there more than we did because they didn’t stick around for long goodbyes. After we heard the Camaro peel out of the driveway, Mama Joe’s demeanor went from sweet to sour in a heartbeat.
“Okay, you damn kids, go outside and play!”
“Where’s the TV?” asked ‘Melo.
“Ain’t no TV. Now go outside and play.”
“Outside? It’s too hot!”
“Go outside!” she insisted. “Getchya butts in that backyard and don’t touch nothing!”
She herded us out into the backyard and slammed the door on us. It’s like she didn’t want anyone to know we were there, or maybe she just wanted us to admire her impressive xeriscaped garden. It was nicer outside than it was inside, despite the temperature being in the mid 90’s. The yard was filled with succulents, sunflowers, dusty millers, annuals, perennials and all kinds of vegetation that we didn’t give two shits about at the time. I‘m only appreciating and identifying the plant life now because of some sloppy research I conducted based on what I remember. I also recall that we never had a nice garden like that growing up at our house, or even a nice lawn. We had large dogs running around so we had dirt and weeds and dog shit. There was also a diseased tree rotting back there that would fight you when you tried to climb it. Tree bark that was brittle with rot kept you from ascending with ease, and when you did manage to get past the trunk, dried up branches would snap and return you to the hard ground below with a hard ¡zas!
Mama Joe didn’t have a tree to relax under, rotten or otherwise, and our little bodies were really starting to cook out there without any shade. Anna wanted water and when I tried to open the back door it was locked. I knocked but nobody answered.
“I’ll get you water, Anna Banana!” assured ‘Melo. “We can pull it out of a cactus.”
“Or we can just turn on this water hose over here,” I countered.
‘Melo started looking around the garden. “We just need a stick to open the cactus.”
Anna and I turned on the water hose and nowadays you wait a while for the water to cool down so that the hot rubber water doesn’t give you as much cancer as the cool water will, but Anna and I were lapping up boiling BPA water with no delay. That’s about the time he found it: an old twirling baton that was half buried in the dirt. ‘Melo dug it up and held it in the air with a mighty “Behold!” like he had just pulled Excalibur out of a stone. He was really into sword and sorcery back then, especially Conan the Barbarian, and in his barbaric head, any long object in his barbaric hands was instantly transformed into the Atlantean sword. “Ohhh, shit!” said Anna before she turned off the water hose. “Here we go!”
At first he was just doing some warm up moves, performing the same kata that Conan did during the recovery scene in the 1982 film. And then, like in the ensuing Battle of the Mounds from the same picture, he decimated everything in sight. The sunflowers were the first to go. They were beheaded execution-style and then hacked to pieces before he stomped on their remains like a ruthless warlord. Next he butchered an ocotillo plant, slaughtered a Pygmy date palm that couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old, then slashed his way through some Mexican sage before laying waste to families of wildflowers and black roses.
It was the same confrontation every time: he would walk up to a plant like it was a person, get all up in the plant’s face like he was making eye contact, then talk shit. “Yo, you want some of this, puto?” You know, like Conan would, and then he’d do some wild spin move and decapitate the plant in one fell swoop before moving to the body to finish the job.
It was a senseless massacre, but of all the vegetation he obliterated, the cacti put up the biggest fight. They were low to the ground and had prickly spines for defense, and even when they did succumb to the onslaught, their insides would splatter with every blow like they had guts inside. That fortitude seemed to bother ‘Melo and he went even harder on the remaining agave, sending streams of entrail spray in every direction. When it was over, I took a long look at the carnage left in my brother ‘s wake, and I could almost hear those plants dying in agony. “Why?! Why us?!” And even louder in silence, I could almost hear my brother relishing in their demise. “Fan Aloe? Dead! Lip Fern? Dead! Red Star Cordyline? Dead Star Cordyline!”
Mama Joe must’ve heard the muted vegetation screams because she came barreling out of her mid-century cottage screaming bloody murder. “My babies! My babies! You killed my babies!” Some old guy came out with her. Apparently, he had stopped by for a cup of coffee, which I’m guessing is the reason we got kicked out. She must’ve rued that decision until the day she died because she was shrieking hysterically and chasing ‘Melo around her mutilated garden hellbent on revenge. Eventually, ‘Melo dropped the baton, and when she picked it up, it was all bent and twisted from the annihilation of Thulsa’s army. She managed to corner ‘Melo near the mangled Podocarpus and was about to beat him with that crooked baton before her coffee mate stepped in and saved my brother’s life. The old man practically dragged her back into the house where she proceeded to call my parents crying. “You better come get these damn kids, and bring your checkbook because they done busted up all my shit!”
‘Melo spent the rest of that year mowing lawns to pay off the damage he had inflicted on both Mama Joe and her precious garden, and my parents stopped going anywhere because the word was out that ‘Melo was one bad baby to sit. One time, my folks just had to get the hell out of Dodge and they left us home alone for a few hours. While they were gone, ‘Melo was climbing that old busted-ass tree in the backyard and he fell out and broke his arm. He cried like a baby until they got back and was in a cast for six weeks. After that, he never went near that tree again.
I think he knew. It was payback. For Mama Joe.