The Small Man's Mother...

"His mother's tears fell in vain
the afternoon George tried to explain
that he needed love like all the rest..."
- Rod Stewart, The Killing of Georgie

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - Life had not been kind to less-than-handsome Lencho Chavarria. Kids in school made fun of him all through junior high and high school. His grades were mediocre and his activities outside the classroom non-existent. Lencho Chavarria, better known to his enemies in the Barrio as El Manco because of his manner of walking, had grown up to claim his place in the working world, taking a string of odd jobs that included washing cars at a fleamarket, making tacos at a side-of-the road taqueria and selling insurance to the elderly. Lencho liked to think of himself as being human, but his life was more that of an animal.

At age 60, he found himself with little to do. The insurance job he'd held for nine years was gone, taken from him by a supervisor who openly said his looks were hurting sales. Lencho loved to wear his yellow pants, the green ones and the orange ones also part of his fashion. "Perhaps you should try working at a Casa de Cambio," his female boss told him when she dismissed him for wearing bright-red pants, a green shirt and a white tie. "Those, Lencho," he was told as the security guard led him out of the company's office, "...are the colors of the Mexican flag. You do yourself no favors with that ridiculous outfit."

Chavarria had not had the smarts to make his case for bright colors. He'd worn odd clothing all his life, and had even tried starched khaki pants, but lost them when he'd grown in age. Unsympathetic clerks at department stores forever pointed him to the children's department, and he went that way into his late-20s.

But it was his mother who Lencho blamed for his rotten existence. She had never been a woman to praise him, to lift him up when he was down, to believe in him. In fact, he drew on the beatings he got from her, on the cursing and on the abandonment. "That's what ruined me," he would say to his only two friends, Alberto and Javier. They, too, were from the Barrio, and both of them had lived similar lost lives. Alberto had enlisted in the Air Force and been drummed out after a fellow male airman complained of sexual harrassment. The troublemaker Javier had worked as a policeman in Los Fresnos, but been fired after lying about a donut break. The trio now hung around together, seen in local bars and seated inside Javier's battered pickup, Lencho always in between the others in the front seat.

Then one day Lencho Chavarria began working for a local politician. He would bury campaign signs and nail posters all across town. He felt good about that. Nothing he'd done to that point had brought such satisfaction. Lencho began thinking he was doing something meanigful, becoming a player. He worked long hours and eventually became the politician's Gal Friday. He updated the man's Internet site without fail all day long, 24/7/365. And when the boss needed a snack, Lencho popped-up and raced to the Taco Bell at the nearby corner. Things were finally going in the right direction. He felt good about himself for the first time in his life. Booze and women had been replaced by politics and website-updating. Life was good.

But lost in flawed Chavarria was the concept of truth and honesty. His boss was not a good man; in fact, he had no morals. The guy would do and say anything he wanted, forgetting the idea that serving the community carried some responsibility. Lencho never saw it. He kept pumping out positive stories about the candidate he backed blindly. Not a day would pass without Lencho claiming his boss was "viable" and upstanding. Of course, he wasn't. The underworld of Chavarria's universe was soiled and largely dishonest. He could see it, yet he did nothing about it. He kept on his path to ruin like a trained monkey.

When he found a free moment, Lencho would pick up the phone and call his aging mother, to report on his work and to seek advice from the only person he trusted 100 percent.

"No seas un pendejo," his mother would say, succinctly. "No te burles del mundo, cabron."

Lencho would nod. He knew what his mother was saying, but something else drew him elsewhere. He had always been shunned by the popular kids in school, seen as a Naco, someone not good enough to befriend. Lencho Chavarria knew he got some respect by associating himself with the politicians, even the ones who openly called him an idiot. Bad love is better than no love at all, he had written on his palm one day, a line he would soon tattoo on his upper arm.

When his mother died several weeks later, Lencho Chavarria cried like a child. He'd kept his feelings in check throughout his adult years. It was his way of fending off being seen as a wuss. But, here, he let go a river. His mother was dead.

For the first time in his life, he had no one who might aim a kind word in his direction. Lencho watched the cardboard coffin lowered into the grave and felt a line of tears stream, down his face. "I'm sorry, mother," he said, softly. "I have been a bad person for most of my life, mi viejita, and I have dishonored our family name."

Then, like a thug expected elsewhere, he turned and began walking away from the burial ceremony, leaving the only two other attendees, her mother's weeping sisters, there to watch the pouring of the filling dirt. By the time he cleared that section of the weed-filled cemetery, Lencho had returned to his world

There was the politician's website to update. He inhaled and threw out his small chest. It was an angry face Lencho flashed at a gravedigger arriving to prepare another site...

- 30 -

[EDITOR'S NOTE:...This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living persons is strictly coincidental...]