“Pendejos,” Oscar grunted. He took out two and placed them underneath his tongue. He didn’t offer them to me, but he did hand me the keys. “Hold these” he said. The sun had just set, and I could hear the sounds of crashing waves in the distance. By now I wasn’t so keen on returning to Albuquerque with barely an adventure to show for it. I thought maybe if I proved to Oscar that I could be a fun companion he would forget that I wasn’t the author of those poems. Maybe then I could stick around long enough to start on my autobiographical series and display my own genius. I was surprised to find my desire undiminished. It had only lain dormant.

  I embraced the reveler’s role. I ordered the beers this time and several shots of tequila, lining them up all in a row and making sure each one was poured to the brim. Unconsciously, I started speaking Spanish to those around me, and after a few drinks my tongue lost its rust. I even called over a few women who had been eyeing us. I ordered drinks for them, too.

  All along, Oscar remained staring at his large hands, his face fixed in a gloomy, hardened expression. He didn’t even answer when two of the buxom girls with painted cheeks put their arms around him and asked, “What’s wrong, good looking?”

  I had a girl, too, copper-skinned with bright red lips and large gums, which I discovered when she smiled at me. I informed her that I was an artist and my friend here was a writer and that we were traveling through Mexico writing and drawing our adventures. She demanded that I draw her and her friends. After all, weren’t they now part of our adventure? I couldn’t deny this, but I had to confess that I had already filled ten notebooks and was all out of paper. She called over a snot-nosed boy and gave him a few pesos. She explained that he was her son. He would run and purchase a notebook from the corner store. Ten minutes later, the boy was back and I had a new notebook. I opened it up right away, and my lady friend, bubbling with excitement, insisted on sitting next to me. I wanted to explain that first I had to write a few preparatory notes, but when I looked at her face, her eyelids painted blue, her brown cheeks painted red, and her gleeful smile, I didn’t have the heart to disappoint her.

  “Draw them, draw them!” she cried, pointing at Oscar and the two women who were having little success raising his spirits. Then she whispered into my ear, “You can draw me later.”

  I began drawing Oscar and his companions.

  “It’s so light! I can’t hardly see it!” my lady friend cried.

  So I pressed the pencil harder.

  “Oh, I can see it now, it’s wonderful! Keep going!” she encouraged.

  I traced the contours of the figures. I drew the women first, much to my lady friend’s delight. She recognized them immediately. Then I drew the background—the empty tables, the crumbling walls, a bald light bulb—then moved on to the foreground—the bottle of tequila, the tumbler, the glass ashtray. My lady friend was practically through the roof with excitement as she watched the scene before her replicated on paper. Finally, I moved on to Oscar. Oscar and his large body, his large breasts and stomach, his large arms, his thick neck, his broad jowls. I could avoid his face for only so long. Finally I confronted it—first his flat wide nose, then his pursed lips, then his dark burning eyes—and it was there that I saw the face of a man lost, a man in pain, a man utterly disappointed with life.

  When I finished my drawing, I allowed my lady friend to show it to her friends, who oooed and awed. She then paraded the drawing around the bar, holding it up for everyone to see. She even showed her snot-nosed son, who smiled and said, “It looks just like them!” And then he asked when I was going to draw his mother, which led my lady friend to repeat the question in a much more provocative tone. I was made to understand that this drawing session would take place behind closed doors. I rose from my seat, took another shot, and began dancing with the woman. Meanwhile, my new notebook was being passed around the room. Everyone was so nice and congratulatory, and some even requested drawings of themselves. It felt so good to hold my lady friend close, even though her kid was still watching us with snot streaming down his face, that I lost track of everything, including Oscar. I didn’t realize he had risen from the table and walked out of the bar.

  I didn’t discover his absence until the woman suggested we find a place better suited to that special drawing session. I turned to tell Oscar that I would be leaving his side. I almost thought he’d be happy for me. He didn’t have to worry about my ability to have an adventure. We could carouse together. But when I turned to the table, he was gone, and the two women who’d been at his side were leaning back in their chairs, sharing a cigarette and wearing the same bored expression. “Where’d my friend go?” I asked them. They shrugged.

  “Don’t worry about him,” my lady friend said, putting one hand on my neck and the other hand through the buttons of my shirt. I could feel her fingers on my hot sticky skin. I momentarily imagined our entire bodies pressed against each other. She kissed her son goodbye and told him to go to bed soon. Then she told me, “Pay the bill so we can go.”

  That was when I realized I needed to find Oscar. “My friend has our money,” I said as I rushed out the door. I looked for the Impala and found it still parked down the street. Oscar wasn’t there. I looked left up a dark street, then right toward a cluster of lights and what looked like the sails of boats. I could hear the crashing waves and the sounds of sea gulls. The air was different, thick and salty. I had never been to the ocean, but before I could contemplate that fact, I heard a commotion at the bar and someone cried out, “He left without paying! Get after them!”

  I hurried to the right, keeping in the shadows, and breathed a sigh of relief when I thought I saw Oscar’s large frame in the distance. The streets were quiet except for a drunk’s blubbering lament and a group of musicians heading home for the night. I lost Oscar for a moment, but then I saw him out of the corner of my eye, heading down a long, dark pier.

  “Oscar,” I cried out, immediately shushing myself, afraid that I would alert our pursuers.

  I drew closer to him. He was slowing down. At the edge of the pier I saw Oscar’s shadowed form stop. I moved closer, the waves drowning out my approach. He held something in his hands. A stack of paper. Were these his writings? No, he only wrote in notebooks. It occurred to me that he must have Enrique’s letters. What was he going to do with them?

  He took out a lighter and held it to the edge of one of the pages. A tiny flame flicked out.

  “No!” I cried. “No, don’t!” I rushed forward, stumbling on the pier’s rough wooden planks. Two small fishing boats bobbed up and down on either side of me. Oscar turned, but didn’t seem concerned that I was there. He held up another page and the lighter’s flame swallowed it, too. He threw the burning page into the water.

  “What are you doing?” I cried. “Stop this! Those aren’t yours to destroy!”

  “They belong to nobody,” he said. “No one knows they exist, and no one ever will.”

  “They belong to me!” I cried. “He was my friend!”

  Oscar was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You don’t deserve them. Your friend died a long time ago. He’s dead, and nothing can be done to bring him back. He doesn’t care if his poetry lives or dies.”

  “Yes, he would’ve! He deserves to be remembered!”

  “You should have thought of that a long time ago. But you couldn’t see his genius. He killed himself for you. I can see it in every poem. He killed himself because he loved you, because he believed in the world as you saw it. He would’ve done anything for you, and you—what did you do, pendejo? You abandoned him, thinking yourself more important, your quest worthier—”

  “Yes! You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t treat him as he deserved. All I cared about was myself. So I’m an egotist, but so are you!”

  “No, I’m not. I live my life for others. I’ve sacrificed my life for the people—”

  “That’s not true and you know it. All you care about is yourself. Why else would you destroy these poems?”

  Oscar was silent again. “What a brilliant faggot,” he muttered. “He’s too good. It’s too painful. Every poem . . . it tears out my heart.”

  “Then why destroy them?”

  “Because I’m tired,” he said, shuddering. “It’s just like what happened when I was in the service and preaching about Jesus and the gospels to them goddamn Indians in Panama.”

  “I’d love to hear more,” I said, inching closer. I wanted to grab the pages out of his hand. “But how about you hand me those poems first.”

  “I was the best damn preacher until I stopped believing what I was preaching,” he continued. “But you can’t just stop between one day to the next. So I kept preaching even though I knew I was a liar and a phony. Same thing happened again. I thought the Brown Buffalo was going to lead the Chicano people to the promised land. But the Brown Buffalo doesn’t exist. Only I do. And I’m tired of people. All people. I’m tired of myself. I’m tired of you. I’m tired of trying to be a part of something . . . I’ve spent all my life trying to be a part of something bigger only to discover over and over again that I’m all alone.”

  “You’re not alone. I’m here with you—”

  This made him laugh. A hysterical, frightening laugh that quickly morphed into a sob. He tried to choke it back and shook his head violently as though to rid himself of the emotion. After a moment he said, “Earlier today I called my son, and I told him that I was gonna hitch a ride back on a fishing boat. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “Then let’s head back. We’ll head straight to that publisher in Los Angeles you mentioned, drop off Enrique’s poems.”

  “I can’t even bear to make the drive—”

  “I’ll drive, it’s not a problem.”

  “I don’t have any masterpieces in me,” he said.

  “Okay, but about the poems you have right there—”

  “I thought—I thought that if I’m not going to be the leader of my people, then at least I’d be the greatest writer they ever produced.22 But there’s no greatness in me. I know that now . . .”

  “I understand what that feels like, believe me, but that doesn’t mean you destroy someone else’s work. Now, just hand me Enrique’s poems and we can talk about this over a few more drinks.”

  “I just want to forget everything,” he said, and with that he took a fistful of pages and lit them on fire. I couldn’t take it anymore. I rushed toward him and leaped for the burning pages he held in his hand. But he raised them, forcing me to jump on his back and try to hoist myself higher. But the most I could do was hold onto his neck and try pulling him down. I heard him gag. I pulled on his neck harder. “Let go,” he managed to say.

  “Drop the pages!” I cried.

  The burning pages dropped from his hand and fell onto the pier, disappearing into the white flame. “No!” I cried. “Why did you do that?”

  He tried to wrest me off, but I was enraged. We struggled. His elbow slammed into my cheekbone. I fell onto the planks. Oscar stepped back and tripped over my leg. He teetered, and then toppled, a post momentarily breaking his fall. I heard a gigantic splash. I scrambled to the edge and waited for him to pop out of the water. I waited and waited. By the time I realized he wasn’t coming back to the surface, it was too late to run for help, too late for me to jump in after him. I couldn’t even swim. I kept waiting, and waiting, expecting Oscar’s giant buffalo head to emerge. But nothing.

  At first, I thought justice had been done. He had tried to destroy Enrique’s poems. He had tried to erase Enrique. But when I scooted over to the stack of pages that hadn’t burned, I saw that the words were typed. Enrique’s were all handwritten. I skimmed through the first few fragments. These weren’t Enrique’s poems—these were Oscar’s! He had been destroying his own work! I rushed to the edge of the pier and stared into the pitch-black water, thinking that if justice had not been done, that if Enrique’s poems had never been in danger, Oscar would rise from the depths. But he never did.

  I was a wreck for several days. I didn’t know what to do. I found my lady friend at the bar and apologized for running off. I explained that I had nothing but a baggie of pills to my name. Then I told her what had happened at the pier, and that I was ready for whatever punishment came my way. She could alert the authorities if she so wished. But she was surprisingly unfazed. She told me that I shouldn’t worry, that there were probably a thousand bodies in the bay, and that no one knew who we were or even that we were there. Soon the body would disappear into the sea. She kept trying to console me by telling me that I would never be caught.

  “But I’ve killed someone. I’ve killed my friend . . . I mean, he was sort of my friend.”

  “It was an accident. You will never be caught, don’t worry, my love, and give me another one of those pills, won’t you?”

  She seemed to really enjoy the pills. When I told her I didn’t have enough money to pay my bar tab, she explained that she’d take a few pills to the owner. When I told her that I didn’t have any money to eat, she took another few pills and returned later with some cash and a plate of steaming tacos. When I finally decided to leave town, but didn’t have any money for gas, she took the rest of the pills and returned with enough money to last me several trips.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll never get caught,” she said, still not understanding that it was my conscience that troubled me. I had blood on my hands, all because a man tried to destroy the evidence of his failures and frustrated ambitions.

  Enrique’s work remained safe in a neat little pile in the back seat. I brought it to the front seat. His poetry was my only companion. I decided that when I got back to Albuquerque, I would send off his manuscript immediately. I had been too close to losing it forever. The world had to learn of Enrique’s genius. I couldn’t hold onto it as if it were written for me and me alone. It belonged to posterity, and I had to ensure it got there.

  I drove the same route back to Albuquerque, passing through El Paso. When I returned to my mother’s house in my shiny car, she didn’t ask how I’d ended up with it or where my big buffalo friend was or how my adventure had gone. Maybe she saw the answers in my face. She knew not to bother me with questions about the loss of my youthful spirit. She sensed that it was best to leave me be. I returned to my room, shut the door, and turned on the television.

  * * *

  19. Lorraine writes: “Ernie was lucky my phone had died when I first read this at 2am because I wanted to call and wake him up. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo was my favorite book when I read it my freshman year of college. By my senior year, I considered Oscar Zeta Acosta to be a sexist pig, but by the time I picked it up again in my thirties I was a little more forgiving. I don’t know—I guess I just knew too many Oscars, insecure and wounded cabrones whom I still loved anyway. At least he was honest about his flaws. I also admired the fact that he managed to write books in addition to being a lawyer for jailed Chicano activists. But what always struck me as tragic was that he disappeared without a trace in Mexico in 1974.” Lorraine is right: Acosta’s disappearance remains a mystery, and I have been waiting for this moment ever since Ernie first wrote in his introductory letter that his uncle had something to do with Acosta’s death. Could it be true? Could the mystery surrounding his disappearance finally be solved? In my excitement, I have abandoned my scholarly caution, not to mention my previous note about the veracity of this story and whether it matters or not. It does matter. I want it to be true. I want to know what happened to Oscar Zeta Acosta.

  20. Hunter S. Thompson gets credit for inventing “gonzo” journalism, a style typified by the journalist discarding any notions of objectivity and becoming part of the story if not the center of the story. But Acosta had been writing this way for years in Chicano publications such as La Raza. In fact, Acosta claimed to have coauthored Thompson’s famous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To what extent the authors collaborated, borrowed, or stole from each other is lost in both figures’ penchant for outrageousness and self-mythology. That being said, Thompson became a key figure in twentieth-century popular culture; Acosta, on the other hand, as Thompson’s three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo, became little more than a sidekick, or rather, a footnote.

  21. Again, it’s necessary to point out the blurring of fact and fiction. Both of Acosta’s published books—The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People—are novels, or described as semi-autobiographical fiction. All writers write what they know, and all readers want to know to what extent the story is based on real life—it’s only natural. So maybe I’m simply reminding myself that I can’t confirm the veracity of our narrator’s account: after all, he lived a largely solitary life, those he knew have passed away, I can’t possibly interview others to verify his story, and he, as a narrator, has confessed to differing versions of his own account. I must keep in check my desire to believe this story is fact, to think that I am really following Oscar Zeta Acosta in his final days. But what does our narrator gain from inserting himself into this mystery? Oscar Zeta Acosta is yet another notorious, enigmatic figure from Chicano history who matters to me (and Lorraine, lest I forget!), but to whom else? Acosta has occupied my thoughts ever since I first read him as an undergraduate and felt that, finally, here was a man as flawed and insecure as I was. He was manic in life, yes, but he was just as manic on the page, and despite his books’ flaws, his language soars. Earlier, I wrote that Chicano literature is un-Dostoyevskian, but the work of the Brown Buffalo comes close.

  22. Acosta’s two published works have the feel of being written in a cauldron. Some critics would say they were dashed off in haste. Perhaps so, but the frenzied style he cultivated took years to develop and isn’t as imitable as one might think. I do wonder, though, what Acosta’s subsequent work would’ve looked like had he lived. The Brown Buffalo calmer, older, wiser, his prose style more refined—would the work be “better,” or was his genius a product of his tumultuous time? I find it comforting that Acosta, like I in my younger days, sought to write the great Chicano novel and failed. We should all be so tormented by that ambition, by the inevitable failure. Until the day that champion is crowned, I will open every Chicano novel hoping to find greatness. Ernest Hemingway once talked about getting in the boxing ring with his literary masters, Turgenev, Maupassant, Stendhal, avoiding a bout only with Tolstoy. It’s too macho a metaphor for me, but it will have to do: I will rest only when I know that our literature competes in the ring with giants.

 

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