The Boy Who Loved Esther

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

McALLEN, Texas - How do we remember our youth? Is it through old friends? Do we swim across our road-weary brains and beach onto those moments that, well, have remained unforgettable even as a multitude of others fill the larger gaps? Do certain towns, certain songs,certain years, fuel that desire to recall years when we were young, young being 10 or 11 or 12?

I love to go back to my younger days here, in the City of Palms. High school is largely a blur, but every now and then something comes full-clear, like that time I was busted for skipping classes and taking a bus to Mexico with two other friends. You could do it back then. Or that time we got into it with some clowns from Edinburg High (there was only one back then) at a rock club called The Green Flame over by the airport. Pushing and shovings led to a semi-brawl of sorts, with all of us bolting for the door and diving head-first into a dark-black Chevrolet Biscayne from the mid-1960s owned by the father of one of the guys in our gang, gang here meaning just four high school kids wishing to be hip.

Laughs always came easily back then. Being 15 seemed a good age to be stupid, to try and be tough, to act like Mr. Big Stuff on campus.

But a few years before that, I had fallen for a healthy 13-year-old named Esther Escamilla. I'd met her at an outdoor dance party held in a friend's backyard. His mother had placed a record player on a chair and his father had strung some lights across the grassy dance floor. It was free and it was what now would be called good, clean partying. No booze, no drugs, no bad language. I remember Esther in her pleated skirt and sandals, a white blouse, and a full head of hair that made her look like a lioness. I danced with her alot, Twist songs by Chubby Checker and Joey Dee and Dee Dee Sharp. I can still see her.

Who knows what became of Esther? One day she was not around, and when I asked my best friend about her he said he thought her family had moved. She'd known where I lived, but, no, I never found a note in our mailbox. Nothing. She was gone and I never saw her again. For sure, she married and had six or seven kids. She moved like someone who would become a good mother, her dancing choreographed as if by the Virgin Mary, no slouching down to my knees, no pouty mouth, no major red lipstick. I see her and I see a little girl wearing her innocence nicely. Those kids she had likely became police officers, schoolteachers, nurses. That's what I'd say now, although perhaps the Leave It To Beaver aspect of those days have something to do with that. I can't even bring up images of what it might have looked like to make love to Esther Escamilla. She might have made me very happy. She may have been the one Valley girl who would have kept me, would have forced me to stay home.

But everyone has his or her own memories of a first girlfriend or boyfriend. Few of us dwell on it, or have so much free time that we can push our brain to bring back the excitable scenes from high school, from teen parties, from those magical years that are the 16s, 17s and 18s.

Much came afterward for me, and of course I left my hometown after high school to enlist in the U.S. Navy. That was followed by college and my long pursuit of the best jobs in Journalism. I married the mother of my two daughters during my last semester in college. We divorced five years ago. We remain friends, I think.

Somedays, when people in the Rio Grande Valley who know me and know of my travels and my criticism of life along the Mexican border use that against me, I go back in time and take my brain to the noisy halls of McHi, where friends would skylark like crazy between classes, when walking into class after the bell was a badge, when saying horseplay in the Boy's Room or hanging around the soda machine outside the cafeteria had created the tardiness, when coughing in class was not about not being able to breathe, but because it was a way to message friends seated in another row, when saying "Black Power!" loudly as class ended seemed cool, that stuff. I don't know that I'd like to go back to my teen-age years.

Too much angst there.

Too many unknowns.

But I would like to go back to those nights when Esther Escamilla and I danced to Chris Montez's "Let's Dance," and when we would hold hands in guarded fashion, and when I would feel a certain sadness when her mother would show up and drive her home.

I recall my walk home was the height of loneliness...

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