MIX-TAPE OBITUARY

It sounds backwards, based on your reputation, but you don’t go to the liquor store, you head to aisle twelve of Northgate Market. That’s where it goes down, El No Sé Qué—The I Don’t Know What. You’re talking about some sci-fi grip—Big Sis was the only other one who witnessed it—and you named it during “visiting hours” saying goodbye to her at the hospital. You don’t waste time considering cans of Goyas. You get to the produce. Salads are behind glass doors. Or at carne, you take a number, and stand near the glass like you’re waiting on asada. Hell, what you’re shopping for ain’t the point.

What the point is: is that you find a fogged refrigeration unit and stare long enough to feel your baseball cap’s band around your head expanding. Your bomber jacket falls like you’ve shouldered off your skin and you open, forehead a supple soft-top convertible. Instead of feeling cold from the fridge, your icy nipples melt in the motion of the cosmos, reminding you of the plastic sealant you wrapped around brown boxes at your factory job through high school. The breakroom window once framed Sis, cramming SATs on weekends at a table near the vending machine; no one could test her, beneath Lowrider bikini calendars, with Linda Ronstadt in the headphones. But it’s been years, and that factory-plastic-cosmos feeling seals your mouth until your pores become small mouths, suffocating—

You’re standing beside a tree in the middle of a hayfield. The tree is enormous and its shade is good and just. Workers’ shadows, deeper than shade, lay around eating lunch, harvest tools rusting in the grass without their workers.

Across one basketball half-court length of field, a cow chews soft grass stalks. Sweet-smelling greens and yellows startle the air.

Una fucking vaca. That is all. For reals?

The cow turns its ass; lets swing its udders at adjusting. In that instant, it’s face to face. This vaca wears no bell, but a bucket with a ladle—so you lift it, drink. You give it water and it’s nuzzling you in no time. What gives you pause is the bee upon its nose. The bee upon its nose is the size of your thumb, wearing DJ headphones. The bee, when you say hello, holds up one of its many feet to pause you, and presses another foot to one headphone, presses tight. Nods. Soon it lifts the headphones from its head, and blinks. “All done. Know thine own Jam, know what I mean? Essential boundary-work, you ask me.”

The vaca’s enormous eyes blink. The vaca asks, “Are you El No Sé Qué?” Its jaw goes back to churning.

You ask, “How would I know, if I’m the I don’t know what?”

The bee sings in the key of C, “Exacto, Homie.” The vaca’s rubbery nostrils flare beneath the bee’s feat, and the bee side-eyes a drop of mucus as it lands nearby. You notice now the bee wears a sweatband, stitched with the numbers 411 in the Old English filigree script of your barrio. The stitched numbers land on the sweatband where, according to the yoga VHS you antagonized your sister to pretend to force you to watch, your third eye maybe is. Sure, it used to be you started at the liquor store to end up at the liquor store. But for years now, since your sister died, you go straight to the grocery—

—Wake up at the liquor store hours later, just in time for the neighbors who aren’t family and who are only going to see what they want. Sure, it’s the same liquor store as usual, but now that you’re clean you’ll admit even more than they’re comfortable hearing. This is what you get when you reach into the brightly lit air-conditioned closet of the food aisle: a vision of a vaca and a bee, and a need to know “El No Sé Qué.”

“The I don’t know what,” when you translate it that way, makes a fool out of you. It’s more complex than it sounds. Once, you were sitting in the blues of your Catholic school uniform, drawing on your desk in pencil warm from its dryshave in the sharpener on the front wall. The old nun sparrowed offkey Irish Christ-songs to Chicano-slanged Virgen María devotees, while the boys competed to be Joseph in the Christmas play to get next to the Mary-playing Juanita. The nun disrupted the song to say you were tagging the desk with graffiti, and she said a phrase you did know, so foreign, “Wont to do.” You weren’t tagging your desk, you drew art there to save, and most importantly: you didn’t know the word “wont” could mean more than will-not or refuses. But it was not the first time music moved words inside you, how wont could mean want and won’t and wasn’t, and would, at once.

You’d been guessing one at a time: Was it El No Sé Qué of the Teenaged Dreams, Waking Wet and Mourning What?

Or was it El No Sé Qué of the Lack of Metal Bands with Lead Guitarists of Mixed Heritage? Terrible. But even worse, really, was if El No Sé Qué was more of a which.

El No Sé Qué of End up Outside the Liquor Store When You Headed to the Grocery, has happened forever around this neighborhood, to other innocent familia, too. But none of it makes the news. The one time it did—because some girl in the car crash went to Valley Christian High School—that was the night your valedictorian Sister, from the carful of girls from Our Lady, said she was passing the torch to you, no?

She was down for the count in that bed at Downey Medical, and instead of taking that torch you bought liquor, what you could with that factory-job dinero, and you drank it outside the store in protest, and you woke up to crunching boots, a bright light, and a pounding headache the color of summer dashboard whiskey.

The Bee listens, holding its headphones down at its thorax, politely, almost out of sight. When you’re done talking, the bee offers its tiny headphones to you. You reach down a thumb and a pointer finger, pincer the tinny sizzling sounds up to your ear.

El No Sé Qué of the Pungent Funeral Soil, and the too soft grass nearest the grave. El No Sé Qué of the Black Hatted Tío, Tío’s Many Ringed Hand offering the Guitarra’s neck. El No Sé Qué of the Invitation to Play It—Her Favorite Song. El No Sé Qué of Hands skilled, and Tongue Tied on the Spanish in Your Father’s Mouth. De la sierra Morena Cielito lindo vienen bajando . . . El No Sé Qué of the Bolo Tie at Your Tío’s wrinkled neck, his grey goatee nobly obliged to document his worried face… “Mijo, it’s okay if you don’t know the song.” El No Sé Qué of All the Spanish You Learned to Speak Won’t Sing Them Back to You.

It’s the vaca’s voice, saying, What on earth are you hearing?

—the guitar strumming crinkled by the headphones; the crinkled music of a candy bar turned loose to fall. The plastic sheen of a bikini calendar on a greasy wall while, sister’s mosquito-bit ankles crossed, blue shoes kept time, twinned rhythm.

“Well?” The bee uses one hind leg to scratch the full pollen sack on another. “Is this your Jam, or not?”

You swallow. The ladle in the bottom of the Vaca’s bucket is dry. The vaca tongues a grass-stained tooth. It says, “Don’t pressure him. It’s disrespect if he follows her, but disrespect if he steps over.”

Resting in the shade of the tree, your shadow wears headphones of shadow. You’ve always smiled saying you were born wearing headphones. To good listening there is no direction.