I remember in my younger days, sitting around the table after dinner, listening to my father tell stories and talk about his childhood and growing up. His stories were quite interesting, but back then I was so absorbed with my own life as a teen and pretty much focused on my own rapidly approaching freedom and future. Now my memories of the exact details of his stories are so fuzzy, and so thinking back to those moments, what I wouldn't given to have somehow frozen those stories in time or to have taken the time to write them down! How many personal stories are left untold or unrecorded?
As I've begun to make attempts at recording other's stories, I've learned some hard and painful lessons about hearing and recording the stories of storytellers. I've found that when hearing a person's untold stories, particularly if it is someone you think you know well, you may experience thoughts and emotions towards the person that are unexpected. I've learned it is imperative that one listen and write the stories told without judging the storyteller. Once a storyteller offers to bare their soul, you must enter that space with respect and humility, lest the stories be locked up or lost for a lifetime. The storyteller, I highlight this Sunday, often speaks of such reference and humility towards others, himself, and the earth's inhabitants in his own storytelling.
I am easily mesmerized by colorful storytellers as I find my own storytelling so matter of fact. It takes a certain frame of mind, knack or skill to tell a story in a way that leaves the listener spellbound. There is one such storyteller who calls Albuquerque his home...Jimmy Santiago Baca. I've been reading and sharing his works since 2007, mostly with young people in detention. I just recently had the chance to meet him and what an opportunity! Meeting one of my favorite poets/storytellers face to face! The following piece is one example of Mr. Baca's work....
Tire Shop
I went down yesterday to fix a leak in my tire.
Off Bridge Street, there's a place 95 cents, flats fixed.
Smeary black paint on warped wood plank between two bald tires.
I go in, an old black man with a Jackie Gleason hat greasy soft
with a mashed cigar stub in mouth and another old Chicano man
working the other pneumatic hissing tire changer.
The walls are black with soot, brown black dust everywhere
and rows of worn tires on gnawed board racks for sale,
air hoses snaking and looped over the floor.
I greet the two old men, "yeah! how's it going?" No response.
They look up at me as if I just gave them a week to live.
"I got a tire needs a tube." Rudy, a young chicano,
emerges from the black part of the room, pony-tailed and plump,
walks me out to my truck and looks at the tire.
"It'll cost you five bucks to take off and change." I nod.
He tells the old Chicano who pulls the roller jack
with the long steel handle outside, and I wait
in the middle of the grunting oval tire changing machines,
while the old guy goes out and returns with my tire.
He looks like a disgruntled Carny handling the Ferris wheel
for the millioneth time, and I'm just another ache in the arm,
a spoiled kid. I watch the two old men work the tire machines
step on the foot levers that send the bars around
flipping the tire from the rim and I wonder
what brought these two old men to work here
on this grey evening in February-
are they ex-cons? Drunks or addicts?
He whips the tube out. "Rudy", he yells,
and I see a gaping hole in the tube. "Can't patch that", Rudy says.
Then in Spanish slang says, "No podemos pachiarlo."
"We got a pile of old tubes over there,
we'll do it for ten dollars." At first I think he might be taking me
but I hedge away from the thought and watch the machines work
the spleesh of air, the final begrudging phoof! of rubber popped loose
then the holy clank of steel bar against steel and ever gently
the old Chicano man, instead of throwing the bar on the floor
takes the iron bar and wipes it clean of rubber bits and oil
and slides it gently into his waist belt in such a way
I've only seen mothers wipe their infant's mouth.
And I wonder where they live, these two old guys
I turn and watch MASH on a tv suspended from the ceiling
6 o'clock news comes on, Hunnington Beach blackened with oil.
Rudy comes behind me and says,
"F**ing shame they do that to our shores."
I suddenly realize how I love these working men, working in half dark
with bald tires, like medieval hunchbacks in a dungeon.
They eat soup and scrape along in their lives,how can they live,
I wonder, on 95 cents a tire change in today's world?
I am pleased to be with them and feel how barrio Chicanos
love this too-how some give up nice jobs in foreign places
to live by friends working in these places and out of these men
revolutions have started. The old Chicano is mumbling at me
how cheap I am, when he learns my four tires are bald and spare flat,
shaking his head as he works the tire into the tire well.
I notice his heels are chewed to the nails and his fingernails
are black, his face a weary room and board stairwell
of a downtown motel given over to drunks and derelicts,
his face hand worn by drunks leaning their full weight on it
wooden steps grooved by hard soled men, just out of prison
a face condemned by life to live out more days in futility.
I bid goodbye to the black man chomping his ancient cigar
the Chicano man with head down and I feel ashamed,
somehow, that I cannot live their lives a while for them.
Grateful they are here, I respect such men, who have stories
that will never be told, who bring back to me my simple boyish days
when men in oily pants and grubby hands talked in rough tones
and worked at simple work, getting three meals a day on the table
the hard way. They live in an imperfect world
unlike men with money who have places to put their shame,
these men have none.
Others put their shame on planes or Las Vegas
These have no place but to put their shame on their endurance,
their mothers, their kids, themselves,
unlike men who put their shame on new cars, condos, bank accounts
so they never have to face their shame.
These men in the tire shop have become more human with shame.
And I thought of the time my brother betrayed me, leaving me at 14
when he vowed we'd always be together. He left to live with some
rich folks, and I was taken to the Detention center for kids
with no place to live I became a juvenile filled with anger
at my brother who left me alone. These tire shop men
made choices, never to leave their brothers, in them
I saw shame with no place to go, but in a man's face, hands,
work and silence. As I drove away, nearing my farm
I saw a water sprinkler shooting an arc of water far over
the fence and grass it was intended to water-the fountain hitting
a weedy stickered spot that grew the only single flower anywhere
around in the midst of rubble, brush and stones.
The water hit and touched a dormant seed that blossomed
all itself into what it was despite the surroundings.
Something made sense to me then and I'm not quite sure what -
an unconditional love of being and living
and taking what came one's way with dignity.
That night in my dream I cried for my brother as he was leaving
all the words I used against myself, rotten, no good, shitty, failure
dissolved in my tears. My tears poured out of me in my dream
and I wept for my brother and wept when I turned after he left
and I reached for my sister and she was having coffee with a friend
I wept in my dream because she was not available for me
when I needed her, and all my tears flowed and how I wept
my feeling, my pain of abandonment, all my tears became
that arc of water and I became the flower, by sheer accident
in the middle of nowhere, blossoming...
Jimmy Santiago Baca
