Agustín Palacios

Xican@ Teatro

humming birds don’t go to church and don’t have chichis

(Monologue)

(10 year old Julio Cesar enters from left stage holding white linen women’s underwear in his left hand. He is dressed in blue overalls and has a rip at the level of his right knee. Julio Cesar starts playing with the underwear. Spinning them with one finger and pretending he’s a helicopter. Then he stretches them pretending they are a slingshot. Then he puts them on his head, as if they were a mask. Then he tries them on over his overalls, but they are too big. He takes them off and begins to smell them and caressing his face with them.)

Mi mamá vende calzones. She sells calzones with sponge for thin people that don’t have enough nalgas and want to look like Jennifer Lopez. Is funny. She sells bras that squeeze all your fat and make your chichis look fat. Is funny. She also sells extra super large stuff for biiiiig biiiiiiiiiiiig women (makes a big circle with his arms), como Doña Pola. My mom doesn’t like that lady cuz she smells funny and when she tries on the underwear she leaves them smelling like sour dough. Yucky. I think she knows it to, cuz she chooses her bras and tangas real carefully. She buys everything she tries all the time, but not always.

(Looks at a guy on the front row.) Tu que me vez pinche güey. You think I’m funny cuz I’m talking about underwear. I bet you I seen ten times more naked women than you have. Pinche güey. (Turns to the audience again. Takes out a Gameboy from his back pocket. )

See this Gameboy. I bought it. (Turns to the guy.) No no te lo presto por mamón. (Back to audience.) I got money. I told beto and Juan that they could come over to my house if they gave me a dollar. Se están poniendo bien flacos cuz they don’t buy tortas during lunch anymore. We go to the back yard when the ladies come and step on a bucket so we can see inside the restroom window. Women change there cuz my mom doesn’t like them in her room. She says el cuarto de un matrimonio es privado and that she is the only woman that should come into her room.

Mom never thinks nothing cuz I’m her lit’ humming bird. And I don’t cause trouble and have good grades. So she thinks I never do nothing.

Me and my friends just go to the back yard and pretend to play with Pepito mi perico. Mi parents got it a month after I was born pa’ que fuera mi carnalito. Cuz she can’t have no more babies. Quesque le sacaron la nariz de la panza. I didn’t know we had a nariz in the stomach, but that’s what they took out and she can’t have no more babies. So I’m the only one. I don’t even have cousins. Just beto and Juan.

We don’t even play nintendo any more cuz it got so busy for my mom. She says that we’ll go to Mexico when she gets a thousand dollars. She want to build a nice tumba pa’ mi abuelita. I never knew her, but Mom says I’m kind of like her.

Anyways, we climb on the bucket so we can peek through the bathroom window. I stuck a lit’ rock on the window rail so it don’t close now.

One day a lady noticed that Juan was looking at her and her chichis. Is funny. Chichis. Anyways, she didn’t say anything or nothing. Juan says that Carmen started pulling at her chichis and making faces like she was making del baño. I didn’t believe him and got angry at him por mentiroso. But it was true. One day I looked at Carmen too and she started pulling her chichis looking up at me. It wasn’t funny. I felt weird. I felt that I wanted to feel my chest. But I don’t know. I get scared cuz I think chichis are gonna grow on me to. But I feel I want to feel chichis on my chest. But please don’t say nothing to no one. Juan won’t hang around with me anymore. He’ll think I’m joto. Pero no soy. I like girls. I like Lupita and Maria and Blanca. I like girls a lot. I even have a girlfriend. Vicky. She is growing chichis too. Nice. I told her I was going to get her a bra and she kissed me on my cheek. I kissed her on the lips once too. Like my mom kisses my dad sometimes.

I don’t tell her I look at women’s chichis cuz ya no va querer ser mi jaina.

I don’t know why Carmen does that.

I didn’t told Juan I saw Carmen do that. I just felt angry. Le dije que he was a liar y que ya no viniera a mi casa. Se enojo and he told my mom in front of the customers. But my mom acted like she didn’t believe him. But when the ladies left, she was all, “Julio Cesar, Julio Cesar.” Like she does when she’s angry at me. Other times she calls me colibrí. Pinche Juan, le voy a partir el hocico por chismoso. I don’t like it when my mom calls me like that. It sounds like my name is a bad word. Probably cuz she didn’t want my name to be Julio Cesar. She wanted my name to be Guadalupe, like my dead grandma. But my dad didn’t want to because that was a girls name, no matter if the singer from Bronco had it too. Instead my dad named me Julio Cesar like the boxer. Once he bet o’kinds of money on him and he was all like, “Gánale Julio Cesar, Gánale.” He got all excited that he swore to the t.v. that he would name his first boy after him. Mom hit dad on the face cuz she says you only pray to Santos not to boxers.

But I don’t like boxing. One day Beto got angry at me because I told him que le iba a tumbar la jaina when he went to Mexico for Christmas. He punched me on the nose and I started bleeding. Didn’t hurt. I started crying cuz I had never see so much of my own blood. So I got a palo y le di en la maceta with it. He started bleeding too. Pero I started crying cuz he felled down with his eyes close, like they do on t.v. when people die. So I told him I would give him my Gameboy if he woke up. He did woke up. I think he was just faking it so I gave him a patada on his ass and told him que no le iba a dar mi Gameboy cuz he hadn’t died. He ran after me until he got tired. Then we went to las lomitas to look for lagartijas so we could make them fight. We pretend they are dinosaurs. Mine is always godzilla. (To audience?) That how could we make them fight? Oh, it’s easy. We just put them on a crystal jar and make them crash against each other until they bite each other. It’s crazy. They bite each other’s long mouths. It looks like they are kissing but they are not. What they do is that they cut each other’s tongue and die. Cool, ha? We also fight spiders. You know, those black ones that live under the house. No las viudas. Black Widows are not fair fighters, all they do is run and leave spider web behind so that the other spider tangles up and can’t move. So we don’t get Black Widows, except when we throw them on top of ant hills. We say, pa’ que se les quite. Pa’ que mataron al baby de Don Ramón. Is cool to see how all these red ants crawl on top of the viuda and start tearing legs off.

Summer is the best season because we don’t go to school and can look at chichis! Beto and Juan have little brothers, so their parents leave them pa’ no tener que pagarle a una niñera. What I don’t like is that they send us to Sunday school to talk about God. The lady there is stupid. She says that God makes everything happen. (Mocking.)“God makes the rainbow appear. God makes flowers grow. God puts babies inside mothers. God like everyone except sinners.” Puro pedo. How can god make everythin’? So one day I told lady that Jesus had a penis and that the virgin had chichis. She kicked me out of the class and said that I had to bring my parents if I wanted to keep coming to class. Wanting? Hell no. I prefer to help mom sell underwear and ver las chichis de Carmen. She’s marry you know. Sometimes I feel bad because I feel I’m cheating Don Manuel. He brought me a rabbit once, so is not fair. But is not just that. I feel weird, cuz I feel I’m not right. Without thinking, I sometimes put my hand on my chest looking for a chichi. Then I get scared, cuz, why would I have chichis? Yo soy un vato.

Sometimes I dream that I’m in the restroom with Carmen touching her chichis. But that all of a sudden mom comes in with a bra. And I get all ashame. But that my mom is not angry and tells me to put on the bra. And then I look at myself and I also have chichis like Carmen. And then my mom said that God gave me chichis cuz I don’t go to Sunday school and that from now on I was going to be Julia. And Juan and Beto are looking at me trough the window. And I start crying and go inside the shower cuz I don’t want Juan not to play with me and I don’t want to be a girl after I was a boy. And I turn the water on and then I start becoming water and I want to be water so that I can just go down the drain and end up in the sea. But at the same time I don’t want to. And then I woke up all sweaty and my heart beat real fast, like if I was a real colibrí. And I don’t want to be watter anymore, but a colibrí instead so that I could just fly off and not having to worry about being a girl or a boy or anything. Cuz humming birds don’t go to church and don’t have chichis.