Rolando André López

Gringorriqueñx is a metafictional prose-poem novellete that governed by the spell of the Monkey Mind, which Buddhism describes as the principle of play, restlessness, and trickery in the human imagination. Named Mono, after Monkey, the protagonist in this experimental fiction deals with the inherent curse in the spell of his name. 

UN MONO GRINGORRIQUEÑX EN NUEVE ESTAMPAS // 

A GRINGORICAN MONKEY IN NINE VIGNETTES

A novella minora 

1 

Mid90s. In a house in Bayamón, Puerto Rico I learned from my parents’ reactions to American sitcoms: when to laugh, grimace, when to shout at the TV. When I saw them arguing about my mother’s weight, I started arguing with myself. Clase de mono, I said to the mirror. My hairy belly became a question, my unibrow an investigation, and my brain an ongoing fight. The prosecutors in my neural networks held up the taunting I received at school as Exhibits A through Z of evidence for my hairyness, fatness, and motherlikeness, the triple-death combo that made me guilty of being, in my tormentors’ words, a maricón and a llorona, despite my contagious smile that the mother in my mind, the only lawyer for my beauty, held up as Exhibit A of my worth. 

I was given the name and all its tastes: “mono” was the first insult I ever received, and also the first compliment, when my doting grandmother said, “qué mono este niño.” I was. Just as well, in an elementary playground, a child can point at the wide ears of another and mock their mono-like earlobes, remark on the preponderance of their mono-like hair, even mock their mono-like laugh; I also got those things pointed out to me. For the Monkey’s laugh is larger than human, every crack an ecstatic sign of triumph. A wild sacrament. And I was that, too. A name is a signifier, the marker of a person, the beginning of a gathering.  

2 

2008. My freshman year, a college dorm in the American South. My friend perceived my sociopolitical observation as enfolded within his joke about my ethnic origin. Harmless. He said, self-stereotyping, Well, up here, it’s much more simple. This is America, and you’re a Mexican. He chortled. I drew a plastic smile on my face. I had explained to him that America meant not country but continent. I was Latinxplainin’. Where are you from? Oh, Puertah’ Reekuh’? What part’uh Mexicou is that from? LOL. A few weeks go by and I start saying it like that, even my own name, with the slurry rhoticity of the properly pronounced Anglo R.  

3

 “‘You know, ‘Rene, I’ve often wondered why more colored girls, girls like you...never ‘passed’ over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do. If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.’”

— Nella Larsen, Passing, published in 1929.

4 

Early to Mid2000s. Back in la isla, in the hallways of my allboy high school, years before then, I’d become friends with the basement kids. We came up with the sickest jokes and watched beheading videos from websites dedicated to third-world macabre—ah, post-911, entertainment would never be the same—just like many of the American kids who’d make green card jokes about me. With time I learned how to be cruel. It didn’t always work, but when it did, I struck gold. Guys breaking apart in laughter. 

Sometimes just breaking. During free periods. Begin by cornering some jodible kid sitting by himself in the basement lockers, asking an absurd question (Hey man, did you hear about el Chicken Man?). When they say they don’t know or What de carajos did you just say, you ask again, stepping closer to them (He hides in the trash, likes to bite the heads off little pollitos…); two of your buddies encircle you as you do this, so the target’s feeling outnumbered. When target says De qué carajos are you talking about then you put your hand on their black uniform pants and rub their thigh in vicious strokes going Píopíopíopío!!!! Cabrón! Observe reaction, see how much you can get away with before he comes at you with whatever he’s got, which is the point of the game, seeing what they have. Someone’s always capturing the reaction on camera. 

Ya, ya, chico, I’m not in the mood for this today...

Bro, I said stop...

Why do you do this? 

Puñeta, dije que YA

If a fight begins, we all laugh, especially when the target beats up the cameraman.   

Off in a corner, Efi, the future poet in a school uniform, played Yu-Gi-Oh with the nerds. He’d eventually craft verses to capture the futility of our sentimental education. But back then, his verses were about a chica from the neighboring allgirl school. He was a becado, and she was rich. He lived in the Felipe Maldonado-Rivas housing project and she lived in a large estate in the Bayamón mountains, with old gardens and the remains of what used to be a farm. He was in ninth grade, she in eighth. They were in drama together. He kept telling me I should join, but I was shy. 

She was quiet, and people said her mother was a freak, a mute woman who never left the house. All which made her more interesting to him. When there weren’t any jokers in the hallways, he and I would sit and talk, and I would hear everything about her. But after December of Freshman year, he left without saying goodbye, and the only person who didn’t make fun of me was gone. He had a scholarship but his grades didn’t cut it. I hated the Physics teacher as much as he did, but he got F’s and I got C’s. For the rest of the year I would make mean caricatures about her, who had it out for me and was always looking for reasons to give me detention. Like when I doodled a Monster on her test giving her the finger. I got a 78% based on the score, but then she dropped it to a 0, giving me the only F in my high school career. She was a mean old white lady, just like the ones I’d had in elementary school who’d forced me to wash my mouth with soap for laughing too much. The attitude then was, Fuck those old Spanish ladies and their White Jesus. I took the five detentions with pleasure. The girl my friend Efi loved, of course, came from a Jesus-loving family, that weird faction of traditionalist Catholics with a cult to Soledad, the Saint of Darkness. Her mother was from Colombia, her father from here. He owned a small store of liturgical devotion, and he was the son of a famous dead baseball player. Whose inheritance is where the family money came from. When I asked Efi who this player was, he told me, El Caballo. I had heard of him: “The Horse who played Baseball,” a contemporary of Peruchín Cepeda and Momen Clemente, a man known for a face-shape that made him look like an equestrian human. He was a power hitter and home runner but boy was he slow to get to the plate. Indeed, he had been rejected from the Equestrian side of his family for his slow gait, like the owl who sang the blues in a family of classical singers. For years he hit home runs for El Combo de Mona, the baseball team that represented the small town at the south of Puerto Rico, a little island by the island, a fish by a whale, arrived at by ferry, populated by charming anthropomorphic animals and animal-like humans. He had disappeared suddenly in the late 70’s, and some say he had been radicalized.

The girl, he never stopped talking about her: she was an artist, and he wrote ekphrastic poems describing in detail a painting she had shown him of a Waterwoman riding a Flying Bull. I kept telling him to show it to her, but he just went on rewriting the poem, over and over and over, showing me each new draft. By the 32nd, I had no critiques. I told him, Efi mano just show it to her already. She’s probably expecting something by this point. Why do you mean? he asked. Well, you have been hanging out together, both online and offline. There’s the sweet remarks, the talking late into the night… And she knows you won that certamen de poesía. True, he said. And she’s probably learning about Pablo Neruda as we speak, I said, theatrically looking around us in the hallways full of lockers and the smell of puberty juice in the air. I never showed him the 57 poems I’d written about the religion teacher’s daughter.  He never made fun of me. Indeed, he called me wise. I think it’s because he was just a fool as I. When he got kicked out of school for low grades, I went up to the drama teacher and offered to replace him. I would go on to play the part that kissed his crush. The only kiss I had in high school. I, too, ended up writing ekphrastic poems. I, too, kept them to myself. 

With the jokers, it was different. When we didn’t have someone to laugh at, we picked a stereotype to graft jokes onto. In those moments our victim was an invisible ectoplasm which became more and more visible with every crack and punchline. Thus we conjured Sambo or El Negro into our presence. As well as the Blonde, the Dominican, the Homeless Person, the Disabled person, the Woman, the Yanomami, any other indigenous group. Most iconic of all the Hungry African Child, brunt of the cruelest jokes. Given the right circumstance, the right classroom, and the right teacher offended by the right things, nothing, nothing, nothing was outside the realm of the jokeable. Sometimes we got the teacher so upset they had us put our head down for the rest of class. This we called victory. We conjured up stereotyped effigies to burn them in laughter. I came home with the burns and called them experience. 

5

Octavia Butler said God is Change. But I keep thinking only Gold has never changed value. Esperanza Spalding sings, in 2019, six months before a pandemic, live in a Boston hotel: You are black gold, you are, and the line is mine when you sing it; Terry Lyne Carrington’s on the drums; there’s a piano and a guitar too, but in the light of this memory, the blue light of a Boston hotel jazz club, it’s only the two of you I see. Confieso: Esperanza, cuando tú me lo cantas, I believe it. Maelo Rivera would call you a mulatita preciosa. You wore your Queen afro and a white astronaut jumpsuit: LIFE FORCE. (Your life force you say is undated and I believe that too.) Along the side of your right sleeve, like a tattoo on the suit, a heart is sown like a purry-red army medal. Onstage you played that bass like a mad trickster swanning through the changes. You saw me in my Janelle Monáe hoodies—my own signifier—after the show. I was hanging out by one of the tables with turahn. A fancluster of Berklee students awaited your presence in the back of the club with gawky eyes. As you passed me by to meet them, looking out the corner of your eye—and catching mine—as if your gaze shone through the lens of a silver screen, you said to me, I like your jacket, eyes all Dorothy Dandrige. Ay bebé I was not ready to be seen, so I only said Thank you, I like your suit. You were black gold shining like new in the blue. And I hid in my signifier, my Dirty Computer hoodie.

When one of the old jokers visits me in Boston, I’m still dreaming in life-force Esperanza tones. He sees her playing bass, a poster on my wall. Then the Janelle Mónae vinyl album by the record player. Then, When my ringtone plays Solange’s Cranes in the sky, he says, So you’re into negras now? Crickets wait for the punchline. He reads the silence, changes the subject. I remember how, whenever I came to school with a new band I was listening to, a new book that changed my life, a new film that tugged at my heart, he was the one who said, It’s always something new with you, isn’t it?  

6

After July 13, 2013, the night Zimmerman is acquitted, I go out for drinks to the Columns Hotel with a college mentor. A friend of ours is playing, an Irish skater who’s good with the bass. His ex-girlfriend, a brunette, is singing. After the third sazerac, my mentor tells me: Mono, George Zimmerman is white, which means you’re white, too, no matter how much you throw that POC jargon at me. Relative to the cop in the room, you’re white. And this is America. There’s always a cop. Sorry not sorry. We drink the night away and I can’t stop thinking about Trayvon’s mom, but when Ted’s ex sings Jobim’s “Wave” in Portuguese, her mezzo-soprano crooning helps my memoryflight take wing. I forget that there’s always a cop in the room. 

7

 “‘When the Puerto Rican becomes white enough he’s accepted as white,” says detective Coffin Ed to his partner Gravedigger in Chest Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, “but no matter how white a spook might become he’s still a nigger.” Of Himes’s prose, St. James Baldwin had proferred: “probably the most uninteresting and awkward prose I have read in recent years.” 

8

Early 90s. There’s no way to understand solitude when you’re a happy baby. When I felt them, over here the laughter of gossiping women, over there some hatted cigars playing dominoes, over the smoke the savoury aromatics of creole cuisine. I am a small blot of glad in a huge family collective, a mote of life in a many-peopled womb, many hands of many colors tell me You’re mine. Eres mío mío mío. De mamá. De papá. De abuelita. De abuelito. De Titi. De Tío. De todo.  

There’s no way to understand a distracted student. We didn’t have desks but tables around which 7-10 of us sat. I didn’t make friends. My fragility had been on display for my peers since day one, when I formed a ruckus in the school’s lobby with my frenzied weeping and hollering, holding on to both my parents’ legs, wanting more than anything to not be there. I wish I could say it was because my mystical, black-indigenous DNA magic-sensed the school’s white-supremacist-narrative oppressiveness and the way they were going to stuff my mind with white Jesus. 

I was just, in my mother’s words, a child resistant to change. A crybaby. Eventually I earned the name La Llorona among my male peers. They called me a girl from very early on. Maricón soon after. I watched it all happen. 

In Kindergarten, a Woman put soap in his hand. He had only made one friend. He was the funniest boy in the class, and the boy liked Mono because he was like a little animal with a sharp-teethed open laugh, like a crazy person or a monster, all he needed were trees to swing from. So the Teacher, she stopped class. Everyone went silent, and the two boys occupied that silence with their shared joke for a little too long. Now everyone was looking at them. She walked to her desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a small plastic box that fit in her hand. It looked like it housed a gift for a beloved. She opened the box’s lid and took out of it the lavender bar of soap. Mono looked at the box of soap, it was a small plastic box. It looked like something he had seen in a dream. In the dream, he was in the forest, and he was surrounded by open cages, and the dream was him being aware that around him wild liberated animals roamed, and not knowing how many ate humans. And everywhere in that gloomy forest shifty movements fluttered the leaves. The box in the teacher’s hand looked like something hungry. The bathroom was through a doorway right by the paper tree on the wall, to the left of the chalkboard, the paper tree decorated with blue, red, and white paper birds. Each bird represented a student. Some birds had black stars drawn across their body. Each star represented a falta. Falta: Lack, as in lack of education, lack of consideration, lack of respect.

Three faltas and your participation grade went down five points. Five faltas and you got detention. Talk during class enough times and you had to wash your mouth with soap. If you washed it well enough, meaning you stopped cursing and speaking out of turn and talking back to the teacher, you wouldn’t get a star, it would get erased, the teacher would rip the bird and make a new one. When Funny Boy returned sullen to class, she told him to open his mouth in front of everybody, and she inspected it, put her finger on his lips to open them even more like a scientist checking a specimen, then she looked up and told all the kids, Look at that clean mouth, ready to learn. Then she pointed at the boy who laughed, at Mono, and told him, you’re next. And she gave Mono the bar of lavender soap. This is what happens, she said, and the Mono boy cried no. And when she insisted, he ripped off another button and screamed again and again, no, no, no, hitting the desk like a baby silverback.  

Mono later thought, if I had not cried my first day here, then Funny Boy would have never thought to be my friend, because he became my friend to make me feel better. 

If I had not laughed, he would not have suffered. 

Had I not cried when Teacher told me to wash my hand with soap, people would still talk to me.  

9 

After I get fired from the teaching job, Elder and other beloveds help me pack up my room onto my minivan for my move to Boston. The night before, we smoke weed on the porch of our uptown apartment til 4 in the morning listening to albums we’ve ever bonded to.

We cry out together into the street: make me wanna holler, the way they do my life, ooooh make me wanna holler... and a passing drunk goes, Right on brothers. And we turn it up for him to hear loud enough. New Orleans summer. Humid, I hug my friends goodbye i love u before driving off to I-10.

On the radio stations that we listen to on the way, the Orange Baby’s candidacy is the liberal’s favorite joke of the summer, though for me the hahahaha is reaching the moment where I’m saying ha   ha     ha         ha          ha because a cold feeling at the bottom of my stomach is starting to knock a door in my mind, which is one name for that inconvenient moment of clarity, when the laughter stops and listening begins. On conservative outlets across the country we drove through, the Orange Baby’s candidacy hails the dawn of a new era. He won them over with that riff about immigrant rapists. 

My second stop is in Tennesee. That day I am wearing my It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia T-shirt. It is yellow and featured Dee’s ever perplexed-idiot face. Every person in Tennesee I run into compliments me on it, including the blue-eyed police officer who helps me when I lose my license plate. Somewhere along the highway, it had flown off the back of my minivan. I had seen the screw on it loose before but had forgotten to fix it before the trip, didn’t notice it was gone until Tennesee. After a two-hour nap on the twin bed in my motel room, I walked out to the parking lot to drive over to the pharmacy and saw that my my license plate was missing. 

I decide to report the lost plate to the police. The afternoon is muggy. The whole landscape has that gray, we-could-be-anywhere vibe that characterizes those long stretches of interstate highways, where the culture’s fast food, motels, occasional restaurants, and lots of wide roads bordered by dense forest landscapes. As I wait, the buildings around me seem like giant cardboard boxes with brand names on them. 

The only life comes from music in the air, a car booming it out across the parking lot. A group of kids listens to bassy syncopations, r&b and trap. Do-rags, hoodies, sweatpants and brand name Tennis shoes I can never keep up with. There’s a light-skinned girl in a pink hoodie with gold beads twinkling along her generous black dreadlocks. When she laughs, she leans on her friends’ shoulders, buckling over. She’s the only girl in the group, the only one whose voice reaches me over the music. There’s four other guys. Across the street there’s a bar with a neon sign called The Electric Cowboy.

The cop car pulls in right in front of me, blocking my view of the kids. When the door opens and she steps out, she’s short, blonde, and hyper-alert. The blue uniform doesn’t make her bigger, but the perfectly fitted hat and her long blond hair tucked into it show me she means business. Her face is angular, her chin sharp and pink, her manner concise and military, her eyes focused and lips thin and taut. While walking over to me with a military strut, her head is turned towards the kids. She’s a slow robocop, a hexed algorithm, head looking one way, body walking the other. Android eyes zeroing in on targets and potential threat levels.  

Even when she does arrive to me and starts to ask about the license plate, she keeps looking over at the kids from the corner of her eye. She has this notepad she writes on as she asks me questions, her tone sounding more and more exasperated with each one. The corner of her eye keeps surveilling the kids. Every time one of them laughs. Every time the bass drops and they go ey, ey, ey. Every time their presence sounds out in the parking lot. Eye-lasers on them, she asks, Was your license plate still on the vehicle when you arrived at the premises of the hotel.

I tell her what I remember, I didn’t check. I was so tired, I just walked to my room.

Her eyes don’t move. She’s not looking at the page as she writes. 

I add, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. 

She then looks up at me and cocks her head at me like I’m a fool before the bass goes BWOMP BWOMP and the girl laughs so loud the lady can’t take it anymore and says to me Excuse me before her whole Robocop body marches over past her cop car, across the lot and to the kids, assuming a warrior stance—hands like fists, at her hips, notepad and pen still in both, chest puffed up—and vociferaring, THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY AND YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PLAY YOUR MUSIC HERE THIS LOUD, NOW YOU LEAVE RIGHT NOW BEFORE YOU CAUSE ANY MORE TROUBLE.

The kids’ faces. They don’t even pretend that they’re urged, that they should be in a hurry, though she is happy to wait them out. The only one who lets her anger show in her hardened glare is the girl in the pink hoodie as she slams her door shut. 

When she finally returns, she says, regaining her girl-scout composure, Don’t you hate it when they do that? 

She’s writing down my race as White in her incident form.

I think, I hate it more when you do that.