Twenty-five Cent Stories

February fifth–that is today–is Jose Olivares’s–that is my grandpa–deathday. He died twelve years ago. I knew him as abuelito, my mother’s father, the old man with slow steps. It’s still hard for me to imagine him as anything other than that. Not as the young bracero, later the patron, or as my mother remembers him, the stern father who made his teenage children be in bed by 8:00 PM and who kicked her out of the house when she married my father. The old man I came to know spolied us with toys and candy (by fifth grade I had my first cavity). For us, Abuelito made the twenty minute drive to Limon’s Market, where we were allowed to ransack the candy ailes, order up sheets of carne seca, choose a comic book, and splurge on a medium Blueberry-flavored Slush Puppie, while Abuelito chatted with the grocer’s owner, Limon. Before so, however, we had to have our haircut done next door at Pete’s Barbershop.

Pete’s Barbershop came complete with a twirling candy-striped barber pole. Pete himself was snow-haired and the tallest Mexican I ever knew then, although I was pretty short myself, about four feet tall. Pete–wait, why am I calling him by his name? Abuelito had us call him Maestro. Pete was the Mens’ Cut Maestro of Thermal, California. What could you get at Pete’s other than a haircut? How about a tub of blue men’s hair gel. A ninety-nine cent palm brush cholos used to slick back their hair. You can watch a Spanish black & white film on the thirteen-inch TV. Or perhaps the film was in color and my memories are in black and white? Or maybe the film was in color but the TV was black & white. Either way, as his grandsons one by one had their hair cut, Abuelito chatted Maestro’s ear off. About what? Who knows? Even that young I knew Gramps didn’t have much a life. When we were done, and the youngest of us–done crying, El Maestro handed us a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum for our courage.  

Around the corner from Pete’s was a Tru-Value Hardware. Abuelito chatted with the manager, a man whose name on the shirt patch I’ve forgotten but who always had a golf pencil wedged between his temple and ear. That man escorted Abuelito out to the lumber yard as I stayed behind in the store, slurping on my slushing, and observing the bins of nuts, bolts, screws, and other odd things that I told myself that one day I would assemble machines with these parts. Abuelito came back with planks of 2×4s for which use, I don’t know.

When we became adolescents, my brother Albert and I, I guess I can admit, took an innocent advantage of his generosity. Candy alone could not satiate us. We asked him to buy us a Game Boy, an expensive Nintendo guide book for games, and of course, Nintendo game cartridges. We had him once buy us a game called T&C Surf Designs: Wood, Water, and Rage, based on the 1980s surf apparrel, Town and Country Surf Design, that featured a cartoon cast of characters that included Joe Cool, Kool Kat, Tiki Man, and Thrilla Gorilla. Abuelito made the 30 minute trek to Indio to buy us this. Feeling guilty that we might send Abuelito right back to Thermal after buying us a forty-dollar game, we invited him in to watch us play. It was a pretty stupid game, I think years later: choose a character–a tiki man, a gorilla in swim trunks, and simply surf as long as you can before a wave wipes you out. Grandpanovich sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his stubble and watching silently. What was he thinking? I wish I had asked then. Was thinking about what he had to do once he got back to Thermal? Perhaps the first time he had ever been to the ocean? Or maybe just, in terms of a surfing gorilla, What the fuck?

Abuelito died of old age in his late eighties. Before that, he suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s. He no longer knew us or remembered us and met us for the first time every Sunday for many Sundays. We no longer knew him either. Like Borges’ Funes the Memorious, I remember that I had remembered then of the talk my mother had with Albert and me about our grandfather not having much longer. The talk upset us. But Gramps persisted, for years, even though his mind didn’t. February fifth also coincides with a college friend’s birthday. And that February fifth of 1998, we went out to celebrate. And despite the fact that he treated us for a free meal and we had gone to watch Scorsese’s Kundun, I was washed with sadness all evening. I arrived to my dorm room with thirteen messages left on my answering machine. The first twelve asked me to call home. The thirteenth told me grandpa died. Since then I’ve been afraid of multiple messages.

Since the twelve years of my abuelito’s death, T&C Surf Design has gone defunct, Game Boy is still around in an unrecognizable form. Both the man with the golf pencil wedged between his ear and El Maestro were whittle down by cancer and gone. Limon’s Food Market, along with Pete’s Barbershop burned down. It all returns to earth as ashes, doesn’t it?

Abuelito. Grandpa. Gramps. Grampanovich. We had many names for the one man we can not forget.

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