the eXile - editorial

Issue #14/95, July 20 - August 3, 2000

On Open Letter to Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs

Today, on the eve of no event in particular, we at the eXile write to you, Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs, a totally anonymous person with a weird-sounding name whom we found on the internet through Yahoo! People Search, with the following important message:

Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs, you live on 611 W. 53rd St. in Hialeah, Florida, which as far as we can tell is a pretty shitty section of Palm Springs. Judging from your name, you and your sisters/wives/beaner girlfriends are half-Cuban, half white. Or a little bit of each, anyway. Probably there's some other stuff mixed in: a taste of Irish-Catholic blood from the alcoholic social worker who visited your Deemed-Most-Needy grandmother in her basement during the "War on Poverty" days of LBJ; a hint of heavily-sweating Bangladeshi or Lebanese mailman from a few years later; even that little puddle of defiantly perceptible negroid genes, left over from the ten dozen or so strapping Caribbean slaves who knew they could at any time visit your white trash great-great-great aunts, or any other of your bucktoothed female relatives from 200 years ago, and not even risk a lynching. When it comes to white women, youse takes what youse can gets. And your grandma's grandma's grandma was what they got.

Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs, we fucked your mother. We fucked her when she was alive, and we fucked her three years ago, after she died over her taco. You know how people say about a woman that they wouldn't fuck her with their worst enemy's dick? People said that about your mother. But we fucked her anyway. The few teeth she had left in her head fell out when we rolled her corpse over in its coffin and gave her mouth one last workout. We cleaned off the bits of shredded lettuce and chili sauce when we were done. And man, we have to say it— she smelled better dead than alive.

Ana... Ingrid... Your daughters? Your wife and sister-and-law? How many other names couldn't they fit into your white pages listing? 611 W. 53rd St must be bursting at the seams, planks splitting left and right. You people live like animals... stacked on top of each other with your 2-karat gold crucifixes all tangled in the zippers of your maroon jeans, and the arms of your discount-bin Hanes tank top undershirts. When your workfare check comes in, you spend all but a few dollars of it on crack, splitting the rest on a single cold tortilla for the whole family. "Papa!" cries a little boy, tugging at your DPW coveralls. "? Por que no tenemos mas comida, para comer? Tenemos hambre, Papa! Waaahh!"

You look closely: your son, but what's his name? Enrique? Estefan? It's so hard to keep track. "!Callete!" you shout, smashing his cheek with the back of your hand, sending him flying across the room. You take another swig of San Miguel and turn the volume up. "Dije, stop that crying, puto!" you shout. "Daddy's watching Jeopardy!"

"This even whole number," says Alex Trebek, reading from a card, "comes after one, and before three."

"Jo, what is six, mang!" you shout, raising your bottle.

But you pass out before you hear the answer. Asleep, fly open, in your plastic-covered recliner, you fall into a dream. You are dreaming of your birth. Or a time shortly after it, anyway. There is something soft underneath you—a discarded pizza. Friendly fairies, resembling what you would in adulthood know as flies, buzz around your head. The sky above you is not a boundless horizon, but a clearly-defined rectangle, walled in on all sides with deep-blue opaque edges. You're in a dumpster, outside the motorcycle repair shop where your mother left you, on her way to pick up her chopper.

Through the miracle of the internet we know where that motorcycle shop is. We clicked on "Businesses located near Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs" and found that fateful place-"Tombstone Cycles, 3468 S. Military Trail, Lake Worth, FL". We called up. "It's me, Eduardo!" we said. "Do you remember me? The little boy, do you remember? All those years ago?"

But they don't remember. It's just a motorcycle shop. It always was just a motorcycle shop.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, we at the eXile sit in our elegantly-furnished apartments in silk bathrobes, periodically checking the stock prices that flash across the screens of our whirring pastel-colored iMac computers. The smoke from our Dunhill cigarettes wafts across the neatly-manicured interior "space" our decorators designed at great cost, and then out into the fresh open air, through the thin slits of our Venetian blinds. Fresh out of the shower, all alone with our work done and no more appointments to make, our flaccid pink members brush pleasantly against the buttery leather of our living-room seats. Aaaaahh.

Life is good, we think to ourselves. People like us were born for life in this world. And as this familiar thought passes over us with its usual sense of satisfying revelation, we take a sip of carefully-aged Courvoisier from our crystal tumblers and stop with a sip (because for us, a sip is good enough). And then, to round it all off, to make the feeling complete, we send off, with a click of the keyboard, this open letter to you—Eduardo Ana Ingrid Debs, of 611 W. 53rd St., Hialeah, FL, 33012-2523.

Links