On Maleness and Silence

This essay first appeared in El Andar magazine in Spring 2001.

i

I was in a van with five other writers from the Sundance Writer's Fellowship. We were driving from the Salt Lake City airport to the Sundance Film Festival. Our conversation turned to the Oscar winning film, "Traffic." The three fellows who'd seen the film had immensely positive things to say about Benicio Del Toro and Luis Guzman, not only about their roles in the film-two cops on different sides of the US-Mexico border-but also about their careers.

I had a completely different read on one of the actors.

"I can't stand Luis Guzman. There's something buffoonish about him, always playing the same twirpish role. He's the fawning funnyman, wheedling and cracking jokes. I couldn't stand to watch him as Eddie in "The Limey." He was irritatingly ingratiating to Terence Stamp. In "Carlitos Way," again, yap yap yap, ass ass ass-kissing. "Boogie Nights," blah blah blah. Fuckin' diarrhea of the mouth. And, of course, there he was as forensic expert Eddie Gomez in "The Bone Collector," adding the comic relief."

It came out quick, a stream of insults that revealed more than my simple distaste for the film characters Luis Guzman portrays.

Later, my friends Josh, Ernest and Eric asked me what was really going on with my animus for Guzman. What I'd said in the van struck them as not being about Luis Guzman at all.

I believe I have legitimate reasons not to like the actor. Guzman once said in an interview that he likes to bring a comedic edge to the parts he plays. He claimed that he doesn't want the viewer to like him. He prefers that we either love him or hate him. So, on his recommendation, I prefer to be irked by his comedic edge which ultimately doesn't seem edgy at all, but all too much resembles Lee Trevino's jocular antics, jumping around, joshing and jibing.

And he never plays a convincing bad guy. He was tiring to watch as Cyrus in DePalma's "Snake Eyes" Just another self-deprecating brown man, minstrelsy, Amos n' Andy. It's like he's the Latino stepnfetchit.

But as I lay in bed that night, my friend's questions made me wonder-why did I viscerally resent Guzman's onscreen presence? It's axiomatic that we hate in others what we really hate in ourselves, so the real question I explored went something like, "What embarrassing thing about myself does Guzman remind me of?"

Then I recalled myself as a nine-year old boy after my mother died. I was needy for attention. I joined the school drama club and quickly became the class clown, always ready with a quip, willing to play any slapstick role. I even brought a comedic edge to a villain I once played named Murdoch. I was all yuk-yuks, embellished arm gestures, and exaggerated grins and smirks.

And for two years in junior high, I performed watered-down Cheech and Chong skits at church camp, to an audience of a hundred white kids from the San Fernando Valley. I had them in stiches. But I was a brown Pagliacci, the tearful clown who disguised his sorrow by performing the funny role. Several fathers of the white girls at my church told their daughters that we could be friends, but under no circumstances were we allowed to date.

After a few years of acting awards at school, I quit the stage. Physical abuse at home accelerated to a point where I could no longer handle the disparity between my sorrowful soul and the laughing face-as all the best comedians must. I sensed that my extreme desire for adulation made me look desperate, that people somehow could see that I was nakedly insecure. And as an intense adolescent, I wanted desperately to be taken seriously and given some respect. (Within two years I forced my father to respect me when I stabbed him in the neck during a particularly vicious beating in which he broke my rib and arm.)

Eventually I became a criminal-dedicated to making an unlawful living-and I tried to destroy the haunting childhood memory of myself as the clown, the ingratiating chatterer who wanted people to do anything but be silent in my presence. Frankly, I think I took myself too seriously when I became a bank robber.

ii

Incarcerated men find their intimacy in the silences.

When Flaco and I were just becoming friends at Lompoc Federal penitentiary, we'd stand outside of my cell for twenty minutes and barely talk. We'd mostly just watch other prisoners. After five minutes of silence, I'd say "Al rato" then walk inside my cell. He'd walk back to his cell, never offended, because we knew that we'd be back to hang out the next day. Flaco was one of my favorite people in prison, precisely because he wasn't afraid of the silence.

In prison I prided myself in being able to live six months next to a young prisoner and never utter "Hello" or "What's up?" to him even though we practically bumped into each other several times a day. I didn't need to play well with others anymore. As my body and heart got meaner and harder, so did my ethic on silence. It became important to associate talking with babbling and babbling with weakness. Silence was considered strength.

In "Traffic," Benicio Del Toro resembled, in his chilly intensity and long, tortured pauses as a stoic and incorruptible Tijuana cop, the early and best work of Edward James Olmos as the silent-as-a-crypt police lieutenant in "Miami Vice." So of course, I'd admire and affiliate myself with Benicio Del Toro's character, Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez. Throughout the ordeal of his life in the film, Benicio's character kept his own counsel.

The great carnival promoter PT Barnum said that there is a sucker born every minute. But the silent male ethic says that you can only be suckered or hustled if you listen to the carnival barker. In prison, that's the guy pimping his boy-toy for a carton of cigarettes to get into a poker game upstairs; or the guy offering to get you high for free so he can shove his johnson in your drunk mouth at the end of the night.

Prisons are notoriously full of these talkers, hustlers, flatterers and toadies. Like all good confidence men, they use words to confuse, to toss up dust as a ruse, to wear as a disguise to connive their way into a space otherwise not permitted to them. To avoid the hustle, the safest thing to do is tune out the chattering class of prisoners and let them know that they can't insinuate themselves into your world with blather.

One of the first things you learn not to do in prison is turn around when someone shouts "Hey you!" You make them call you by your name or you keep walking and make them come around to address you from the front. Turn your head too fast and you will have displayed a weakness for being taken off your stride by words. Being silent makes you a small target. You can't be hustled, humiliated, or sucked up into someone's intrigue.

In "Traffic," Javier Rodriguez (Del Toro) and his young partner Manolo-played fairly by the versatile actor, Jacob Vargas-are picked up by the military, handcuffed and driven in an SUV to the deep part of the desert. Manolo cracks under the pressure of the arrest and confesses his one-man plot to betray General Salazar to the DEA. He begs the soldiers to believe that his partner, Rodriguez, had nothing to do with his plan. Rodriguez is guilty of his own betrayal, but he sits silently in his seat. When they arrive to the deserted location, both men are forced to dig their own graves. Manolo is killed; Rodriguez spared. The soldiers clearly didn't know anything about the plots, but they knew that the hasty arrests could cause someone to offer an unsolicited confession. The soldier's ploy partially worked because young Manolo did not suspect the treachery. Rodriguez, on the other hand, was clearly willing, in his silence, to contemplate horror.

The more I thought about my assessment of Guzman, I realized there was another character in the film who in one scene personified the belief that excessive rambling is a sign of weakness or an inferiority complex.

Frankie Flowers is an assassin in "Traffic" who is kidnapped and tortured. His tormentor finally shows some mercy, allowing him, bruised and battered, to eat a good meal and drink wine at the General's table. Frankie develops a bad case of Moctezuma's revenge of the mouth and his conversation turns childlike as he rambles on about stereos and how much he has always liked them. Then he betrays his accomplices to the evil General Salazar. (In a film that revealed the human condition at its seediest, this scene stood out as one of the most disquieting, reminding me of the genuine terror on the faces of the bank tellers I robbed.)

But when Frankie Flowers was finally shot, I thought of that babbling old grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." The old bat so irritated her kidnapper-The Misfit-that when in the end he shot her, an accomplice noted as he dragged her body, "She was a talker, wasn't she?" to which The Misfit replied, "she would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Steven Soderbergh, the director of "Traffic," reinforced the notion that the noisy ones are the most expendable characters in any drama. Guzman raced to his death when he got in a car and started the ignition rigged with a bomb. We sense that if he'd been less impetuous he would have been able to hear his partner yelling for him to stay away from the car. Manolo's girlfriend signals at one point that she thinks his thoughtless talk would end up being his doom. And Frankie Flowers is shot by the men he betrayed-because he talked. In those westerns of our youth, we always knew that the bandido in the saloon would get his comeuppance by the strong, silent Gary Cooper-type sheriff. In Hollywood films, fatuous laughter, compulsive gabbing and a belligerent swagger, are behaviors that are code for a recklessness that can only end in humiliation or death.

A few months out of prison, I couldn't stand myself talking so much on the phone. During one long conversation with a new friend, I had an intense desire to simply say "Al rato," and hang up. Instead, I pulled out a small white piece of paper and black marker, then boldly wrote on it: SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

Then I taped the paper to the desk lamp so that it dangled in my face, a reminder to cut my conversations short and not let my life be characterized by too much talk.

I was, after all, the prisoner who during two years locked in solitary confinement, started playing concentration games, such as seeing how long I could last without uttering a word. After several weeks of two and three day warm-up silences, I finally was able to remain silent for an entire week. I was trying to master the art of silence. That's when I fell in love with the texture in the labyrinth of my solitude.

Guzman isn't the only inane talker who has bothered me since my release from prison. One afternoon, a few weeks out of prison, my father and I were driving in my van. He was yappin' away. When he saw a yellow house he said, "My aunt Concha in El Paso lived in a yellow house like that one when I was a boy." When we came to a stop sign he said, "I like the way you drive slowly and don't screech to a halt." When we passed a park with old men playing board games at tables and benches he said, "I never liked backgammon or dominoes. They seem like kids games. Now chess, there's an adult game."

After twenty minutes of listening to his incessant prattle, I realized I was hearing echoes of every insecure boy in prison whose constant chatter was the release of nervous energy. I was embarrassed for my father. Finally, at a stoplight I turned my head to him, cocked it quizzically and said, "You talk a lot, don't you." I was as rude as if he'd been obese and I noted that he ate a lot.

iii

Although I came out of prison and have worked hard to dismantle simple notions of maleness-the weak vs. strong paradigm, for instance-I know that when I went into juvenile hall to conduct writing workshops, I still had a tendency to use my "prison vision" to divide the boys into weak and strong. I found myself treating better the kid who could swim with the sharks when he graduated to the next level. I had disdain for the kids who would live on the margins in adult prisons, relegated to the victim's camp, extorted from, used for sex, or killed. The strong kids in the hall were silent and serious; the weak ones were the babblers, insecure and desperate for my approval.

So is that it? Is my disapproval of Guzman-and the kids at juvenile hall-really about a residual prison ethic of manliness? About talkers personifying weakness, and the strong men silent as totem poles?

The famous Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, wrote that we Mexicans "increase our solitude by refusing to seek out our compatriots, perhaps because fear we will see ourselves in them, perhaps because of a painful, defensive unwillingness to share our intimate feelings. The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them."

Paz's is a broad generalization, but in the end, I know that the intensity of my prison silence was due not so much to the strength of my self-discipline or skill at self-censorship as it was to my fear of falling into a verbal trap-and therefore opening myself to being made to look like a fool.

I've always stated that I became a man in prison. But now I'm embarrassed to admit that when I watch Latino men perfect their craft as they portray fictional characters, there is still a part of me that compares them to a specific category of Latino: the milieu of incarcerated Mexican men.

Luis Guzman will costar in five films to be released this year. And I like to believe that I'll never size him up by a prison tier ethic again.

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