Pedro Santos has lost everything. He lost his freedom when he was sent to prison, lost his wife, his kids. Pedro lost his mother, who died while he was locked up, without ever getting a chance to say goodbye. Ultimately, Pedro even lost his faith. That doesn’t stop his mother’s followers from turning to him for help once he gets out. Pedro’s mother, Paloma, was a powerful Santeria priestess, dedicating herself to using the mystical mesh of Catholicism and African Yoruba religion that rose out of slavery to aid anyone who came to her. Pedro wants to help, but can’t understand why anyone would look to a faithless loser, like him. Yet, all they see is El Milagrito, the “little miracle” that beat death twice by the time he was nine, and must therefore be destined to be a healer. If only he could heal himself...
In my novel, Chango Crying, we meet Pedro as he’s released after four years of incarceration near Baltimore for selling cocaine to help support his own young children after his wife abandoned their family to try to make it as a stripper in New York. Having nowhere else to go, Pedro returns to his mother’s tiny apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. When people hear that El Milagrito has come home, they flock to Pedro. Despite no longer believing in the magic promised by Santeria and its rituals, he is obligated to help. Paloma only had two rules: turn no one away, and ask nothing in return. Saying no would dishonor his mom’s memory.
It’s not long before Pedro finds himself in way over his head. A desperate Manhattan socialite turns to him for help in finding her son, who disappeared in Mexico during Spring Break. Reluctantly, Pedro fulfills his obligation to 'turn no one away' and risks his newfound freedom by leaving the country while on probation. Pedro is able to track the socialite’s son to a pair of brujos, evil Santeria practitioners who sacrifice humans in dark, brutal rituals designed to protect a powerful Mexican drug cartel, and is soon caught in the midst of a violent drug war. He suspects the socialite’s son is already dead. Once the brujos discover his presence, Pedro needs to find his faith, fast, just to stay alive. Otherwise, he's going to need another miracle.
I might be kissing a man today. This is nothing new. I’m an affectionate guy who’s been known to smooch the occasional lucky fella. But tomorrow’s kiss would be, by far, the most important hombre รก hombre smackdown of my life. You see, tomorrow’s Same Sex Kiss at Chik-fil-A Day, a protest of the company’s head’s words and deeds with regards to same sex marriage. ChiK-fil-A boss Sam Cathy speaks out against the trend of accepting the civil marriage rights of all people. He spends his customer’s money, or at least a sizable portion, on efforts to stop Our progress towards a society that treats all our citizens equally.
My kiss would come on the heels of a counter-protest on August 1, where many of our less enlightened American friends and families defended Cathy’s right, as an American himself, to say and spend as much as he wants to defend traditional marriage. Most were bigots, afraid that gay culture will pervade, worse—pervert, what it means to be American. “God hates fags!”
Some who claim to support progress got in the long line to fill Chik-fil-A’s tills, plenty of it which will undoubtedly be dumped into Cathy’s moot war. “I support gay rights, but I LOVE chicken!”
There are a few who have taken the opportunity to poopoo marriage all together, saying that it’s something the government shouldn’t be involved it at all, ignoring things like the tax benefits of marriage, or the ability to put a spouse on one’s insurance, etc. “Marriage is a dumb institution anyway.”
Then there are those who’ll dismiss my kiss as just a stupid prank that doesn’t even call to light all the other organizations that donate to anti-gay marriage causes, many of them retail operations, like Chik-fil-A, who nobody’s paying attention to, much less boycotting. “You’re wasting your time!”
The thing is, I don’t want to live in a nation where our morals are dictated to us by a narrow interpretation of someone else’s religious views. Giving special creedance to one group's religious morals over another’s is downright disrespectful, not to mention unconstitutional. I’m not going to discuss what some mayors are opting to do by blocking Chik-fil-A from their cities and towns. That does raise issues of censorship, but has nothing to do with my kiss.
I don’t expect the naysayers to approve of my possible man-to-man kiss, later today, whether I raise their homophobic hackles, their chicken-loving hackles, their anti-all-marriage hackles, or their there-are-more-important-things-to-do hackles. The great thing is that this is America. I don’t need anyone to approve of my actions. The only person I have to justify my kiss to is myself, and I do that just fine. You see, I am a culture warrior, and we are at war.
It may be a pointless war, but it is a war nonetheless. I say pointless because progress is inevitable. Society evolves. However hard people may try to stop things like ending slavery, interracial marriage, or gay marriage, the best they can do is slow it down. As far as gay marriage is concerned, every new generation is less inclined to see a problem with it. Those who do are simply adhering to old beliefs and calling it “tradition” so they can wrap their hate in a pretty little package.
Even if I did nothing, all those backward thinking people would eventually die off, and the pushback from the religious right would barely exist. The question is, can I just sit on my ass and wait for all these bigots to die. I can’t. Why? Because I have too many friends who are in same sex relationships that they want to, but can’t, take to the next level. Some even have kids. Laying back quietly and biding my time does nothing to help them achieve their goals. What kind of friend would it make me to ignore the blatant inequality they have to live with?
So yes, I’m a culture warrior, and today is just the latest battle in what may prove to be a long, hard war. The law legalizing civil marriage for all in Maryland has been challenged, and enough bigoted theocrats signed petitions to place the law in referendum limbo. So far, no such law has held up to referendum. Any law ratifying the civil rights of citizens should never be put to referendum. Can you imagine if interracial marriage laws had been put to the people? Thank goodness for the Supreme Court’s wise decision in Loving V. Virginia. Hopefully, this case will make it to SCOTUS, soon enough; and they will rule properly, as they did back then.
Until that day comes, however, the fight is up to us. Until then, I will continue to fight for what is right. I will continue to fight for freedom for all. I will continue to fight for everyone’s right, including yours, to fall in love with another consenting adult, regardless of sex, and try to find your happily ever after. Not doing so would be, to me, Un-American. I want you to approve. I want you to at least get it. But it’s not necessary, as long as I’m okay with it. I am.
Now, any of you guys wanna kiss me?
snapshot
Staring
at the only photograph
I have left, Easter—your head
wrapped neatly in a paisley
scarf, alabaster skin set
off by the scarlet of your top,
all 5’ nothing of you dwarfing
over the 3 of us, [how small
we were, and how as big
as the world you seemed to us
back then] holding JoJo’s fragile
little hand—JoJo, in his blue denim
overalls with a strap dangling
off his shoulder and his Buster
Brown do, free hand gripping
one link of the chain link—your other
arm held hard against KiKi’s heart—
KiKi, with her baby doll dress & her baby doll
smile & her white knee highs— and
there I am, the Little Man all grown
up at 8 or 9 or whatever, hair,
as always, waving wildly in the wind,
stylin’ in my plaid polyester belted lounge
lizard jacket, with matching bell
bottom bottom, foot propped
up, arms spread like I owned
the world like I knew I did;
all of us there, at the base
of Lady Liberty, Manhattan &
its now extinct towers barely
bursting through the fog, celebrating,
not God, not Jesus, not life, nor liberty,
nor the pursuit of happiness, but
love: the love that we could squeeze
out of this fucked up family that we
shared, that we accepted for better
of for worse, or for worse than that
because how can we forget those times?
I stare
at this, the only
photograph I have
left, & I imagine
the others, the ones
I don’t have, the ones
lost, the ones destroyed, even
the ones that never existed,
like the picture I never
took of you during one
of your dazed for days days,
lounging & lost in your
euphoria, hiding from problems
I didn’t, still don’t quite,
understand, like the picture
I never took of you bruised,
battered & beaten by
whatever flavor of the month
macho-sick monster you were
sampling, like the picture I never
took the day you cashed your
first paycheck, leaving the drugs,
the drink, the drunks & the drama
packed away neatly with your past,
or like the picture I never took
of you bloated, bleeding & bleached
on that hospital bed, your past
unpacking itself to prevent
your progress,
your present,
your presence…
your life briefed
down to vital signs & bad
mistakes you had already paid for
with interest.
Staring
as I tend to
do quite often, more
often than I like to admit,
at the only photograph
I have left, I am left
wanting more:
more than these faded
foggy fucked up fragments
that I can’t quite feel,
these pieces of memory
that float around in my head,
incomplete & inane,
that I can’t touch
or hold or strum
like a stringless guitar,
or cry on; they don’t
have the power
of this picture,
this one picture
this one last picture
where life was set
aside one Easter Sunday
just so
that we could remember
that even the fog
could not hide
the love captured
at the base
of Lady Liberty.
