Chile Tales: The Green Addiction

“Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture and so on. I’d stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.”

In Texas, when my parents were still married, we ate fried chicken, mashed potatoes laden with cream gravy, green beans flavored with bits of bacon and buttery light biscuits.  Every item on the menu had its own serving dish, and cloth napkins were always used.

               "May I have another biscuit, ma'am?" I would say.

               "You surely may, Sandra Mae," my daddy's mama would reply and everyone would smile. Or we'd have fried pork chops and suck on the salty bones, but only when it was just my mama and me at the dinner table.

                In Texas, there were black-eyed peas and ham and all manner of greens and put-up preserves.  There was watermelon and homemade ice cream from the hand-crank ice-cream maker.  Daddy held a bourbon and water in one hand, and turned the handle with the other, while Mama and my daddy's mama drank iced tea on the back porch and exchanged polite insults.  My grandma didn't like it that Daddy had married a Mexican.

                "Don't forget your manners out there, Sandra Mae," grandma said, after the divorce, and right before me and Mama set off for New Mexico.  She glared at my mama and then bent down to whisper in my ear. "Remember what you learned here and act like a lady."

               In Santa Fe, we ate pinto beans muddy in their own gravy at my mama's parent's house.   My aunts, cousins, grandparents and sometimes neighbors ladled the beans into their bowls from the pot in the middle of the table.  Instead of forks and spoons to get those beans into our mouths, tortillas wrapped in a dishcloth were passed around the table.

               Each diner split their tortilla, usually into fourths, but the more adept could function well on thirds or even halves.  The tortilla was rolled into a half-moon scoop and the eating commenced.  It required dexterity and speed to fill the tortilla scoop and stuff it into your mouth before the bean juice had a chance to run out the back and down your forearm.  I leaned over my bowl like the adults and soon shoveled like an expert.

                "Hand me another tortilla," my Aunt Frances would say, not at all unfriendly, pointing her chin in the general direction of the tortillas. The only green vegetable offered at my grandparent's table were chiles.  Meat, usually pork, was a rarity and was reserved for the green chile pods.  If I wanted meat or vegetables, I was going to have to learn to eat chile.

               Mama started me off slow, picking up the chunks of meat and sucking the chile juice out.  She’d place the morsel on my tongue like a sacrament, and sit back and wait.  I chewed tentatively, fearing the bite of the treacherous chile pod.  Occasionally, a seed would sneak through making my eyes tear and my nose run.  I'd swallow glass after glass of my grandparent's icy well water, my face contorted in pain.

               Then, I'd ask for more. By the end of that first winter, my yearning for the green was established. I was an addict.     

                                           

               "Hatch chile," the boy yelled from the back of the pick-up.  The truck drove slowly down our street, pausing when a homemaker ran out and negotiated with the chile vendor.  The boy sat atop a truck bed piled high with shiny green pods, some plump and beginning to turn red, others long and thin or curled into a defiant C.  I scooped up a handful of pods and breathed their spicy promise while my grandfather first sniffed and then bit into a pod to judge its quality, the latter variable not strictly related to taste or crunchiness but to the extremity of pain inflicted: mild, medium, or hot.  He bought a bushel adjudged to be medium.

               Yeah, right.            

               In Texas, my father's new wife and his mama might be putting up figs and strawberries, tomatoes or pickled okra, but in New Mexico the women were about to put up chile for the winter.  A certain macha bravado was necessary for this task.

               The pods were laid out on cookie sheets and roasted under the broiler.  Periodically, my aunt would reach in and turn the pods over.  Soon the house filled with the acrid scent of burned green.  She dumped the black-mottled pods unceremoniously onto the newspaper-covered diningroom table.  The black skin of the roasted pods lifted easily, and my aunts, my mother, and I sat around the table and peeled chile.

               Soon our fingers burned, and we began to sweat and sniffle.  Too late my mother warned me not to touch my eyes.  She refused to rush me to the emergency room.  We flushed my eyes with cold water and returned to our task.  At the end of the day we had laid 200 peeled chile pods to dry across the lines strung up in the screened porch off the kitchen.  Adults and child alike gazed red-eyed, with nose and fingertips smarting, at our day's work.

               I looked up at the glistening faces of the women in my family, each one content with her contribution.  I had suffered, and wept, and done my share, too.  I felt . . . full, and at peace for the first time since arriving in New Mexico.  The manicured hands of my Texas relatives might master a pecan pie or divinity, but they didn't have the cojones to deal with the sultry heat of chile.  Feminine wiles and prissy manners had no place here.  

                We were the real women.

First published in what wildness is this, University of Texas Press, 2007. 
Photo by S. Ramos O'Briant "I grew these."

Let the Right One In

St. Martin's Press, 2007

Loneliness plays an important part in coming of age stories. Toss in brutal bullying of a latchkey kid, single moms, a nondescript – read soulless – apartment complex, an assortment of teenaged glue sniffers, drunks, and other layabouts living on their disability benefits and you have the makings of a contemporary take on the usual outsider story.

Add a bleak, wintery landscape and a pedophile, Hakan, who moves in next door to the 12-year-old protagonist, Oskar, with his “daughter” of the same age, and you might have a predictable story. Except that in John Lindqvist’s “Let the Right One In,” the girl, Eli, is a vampire.

A series of gruesome murders occur and Oscar compiles newspaper clippings in his scrapbook. This is not morbid behavior. The story is set in 1982 and the Nintendo Entertainment System hasn’t been invented yet. Anyone who has played a video game knows that plenty of slaughter happens on the screen. Parents reading about Oscar’s scrapbook actually wish their kids would turn off the video games and read about murder in the newspaper.

Hakan is to Eli as Renfield was to Dracula, only with a sick twist. He worships Eli, but it’s his sexual compulsion which drives the truly horrific, and the sickly comic, aspects of this story. He supplies her with blood . . . at a price, but his ineptitude leads to his capture. Even here, Eli takes pity on him, but her sympathy leads to a further twist in the story and Hakan becomes a zombie with an erection. This is new in vampire lit. It is also social commentary. Hakan is a pedophile who will never be rehabilitated, much less killed.

These three are the fulcrum around which the intersecting stories of a multitude of characters converge. The chapters are short and the author feels free to jump into all his character’s minds as they aimlessly head for disaster. This is author as God, but Lindqvist doesn’t disappoint. Even the short chapter where we’re in the mind of a squirrel is well-written and packs a punch at its end. Don’t misread my words – I loved this book. It’s every writer’s dream to be able to get away with these POV shifts. Only a good plot and an author who knows where he’s going can do it.

These twists wouldn’t be enough if they weren’t contrasted with the everyday terror of schoolyard bullying, leading to the eternal question of who is more violent, the humans or the vampire?

The friendship between Oskar and Eli is tender and nonsexual. There is a gender-bending aspect which underlines their bond, and is a further contrast to the adult lives around them. Like some alternative Charlie Brown Cartoon Special, all the adults are marginal or missing. Those that are present are shadowy losers, except the gym teacher (go figure), and he provides only minor optimism. That arrived toward the end of the book so I knew more bad stuff was going to happen to Oscar.

Just when I thought he’d solved his problem with the bullies, they come back in force. In my heart, I was rooting for Eli to appear and save Oscar, and you will be too.