Half Full by Pacifico Geronimo III

Half Full

essay by Pacifico Geronimo III

I discovered pretty early on how fun it is to make shit up. I wasn’t dumb about it, like the kids at school who claimed they saw fish with huge dorsal fins in the irrigated grass on our playground or boasted about how their dads had won the lottery and were driving golden Corvettes, but only on weekends. Those kids lied for no reason. Or maybe they lied for obvious reasons, to get attention, or to impress somebody. Not me. I knew making shit up worked best when the person you were telling could participate, so it had to be believable. I made shit up that, if you could buy it, made the world a more interesting place to be. There was one person with an unwavering appetite for my lies, and that was my mom. She was my audience of one. I told her I was reading books for enjoyment at school before I could even read a sentence, instead piecing together narratives by looking at pictures and returning home to lay out intricate plots for her, entire children’s stories I’d made up. “Can you believe it,” she’d say to my dad, “he got all that from a book at school!” If my mother could be counted on to enjoy my lies, my father was a tougher sell. Something about the way he was always averting his dark eyes made me think that those eyes held great power, as if by simply allowing them to settle on something he could reduce it to rubble. Come to think of it, the only times my father’s gaze remained on me for more than a few moments were times when the look inside those eyes would scare me half to death if I dared to stare back. He knew about this power. He seemed to feel bad about it. And he did things to mitigate, hiding them behind a pair of his Ray-Bans, or the viewfinder of his giant RCA video-camcorder. But I still remember those rare occasions when my father’s eyes finally homed in and clamped down on me. My mother called those his doll’s eyes, a reference she’d taken from a movie about a giant, killer shark. I knew what she was talking about. When he was mad, my father’s pupils and

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irises were one, so inky black they seemed either bottomless as the Mariana’s Trench at night, or walled off, shallow as a razor blade. I learned to save my embellishments for my mother, my friends at school, my little brothers. When I was with dad, I kept my story straight. At school, I told my friends that my dad had brought home a video game just like Mortal Kombat, but better, with more violence. I described the characters in detail — the reptilian guy who fired green flames from his mouth, the character with metal hands and wolf head, the woman with double jointed legs and a scorpion tail — all of them half breeds and half-truths, a mix of things I’d seen before and things from my head. Sometimes I woke up in the morning and bullshitted about dreams I’d had the night before over the breakfast table, about deep sea snails with luminescent eyes or birds big enough to pluck me from bed and fly me over the city at night. What difference did it make if I’d dreamt these things in the middle of the night or in the two seconds before I let them fly out of my mouth, just to fill a silence? For all my tall tales, I was often bothered by a thirst for the truth. I can remember several instances of pretending to sleep in the presence of one or both of my parents, laying there with my eyes closed, and I remember hoping — this seems strange to me now — but I remember hoping for one of them to slip up and give the game away, so to speak. Maybe, I imagined, in that private darkness behind my eyes, maybe they aren’t really married. Maybe they aren’t really even my parents. Maybe this Santa Claus story they’ve been telling is a giant lie they’re using as cover for some darker truth about the world. (When I eventually pressed my mother on this topic, explaining how I knew it was impossible for one man to see everywhere, she told me he had little spies, tiny spiders and flies that watched me from the walls. I’ll admit this gave me pause, allowing me to believe in the Santa myth for a good year or so longer than I otherwise might have, and forever altering my feeling about tiny indoor spiders). Maybe the best lie I heard told to me in those early days, my favorite kind of lie overall as a kid, was told by a little girl I went to pre-school with, at a Montessori school I remember only for the ivy plants that overhung the patio on which I spent most of my recesses. I don’t remember her name. She had curly hair that shined different colors under different light and puffy skin so white she looked cold all the time. She pointed to

a sparrow hopping across the lattice overhead and said to me “that bird, it came because I called it.” She then imitated the bird’s song, claiming that if I did it with her, more birds like it would come, thinking we were birds, they would come to talk to us. I liked that kind of lie because it was a call to action. As I got a little bit older, making stuff up, even to audiences who seemed eager to believe, became more difficult. Eventually my teachers called my parents and told them I needed to be put in a special reading group before I fell critically behind the others, causing my mom to question whether my teachers knew what they were talking about because of all the books I’d pretended to summarize for her. My friends from school came to my house for a birthday or sleepover and asked whatever happened to the video game I’d told them about, the one that was better and more violent than Mortal Kombat. It was time to reckon with the difficult situations I was putting myself in. It was time to find a different way of expressing myself. Strangely enough, it was my father who offered the way forward, the way for my constant stream of make-believe to keep flowing. He woke me one morning with his eyebrows raised, his exceedingly rare happy self as he whispered for me to come with him. Before I could climb from bed, he gestured toward my little brother beside me to let me know we should be careful not to wake him. I nodded, and followed my dad’s lead, dropping my feet from the queen-size bed I shared with my brother, out into the hallway, across the house and into the kitchen. It was winter in Arizona, one of those Sundays my mother had to go into the office to check on her post-op patients. She was an ophthalmologist. Her patients called her Doctor Wendy Wootton; she’d declined to take my father’s last name because her name was already associated with the business her father had started, years before. In front of the refrigerator, there was my dad’s RCA camcorder atop a tripod, facing nothing, except a blue sheet he’d hung from the wall and an oscillating fan atop a pile of books. I looked to my father, who patted me on the shoulder and directed my attention to the logo on the front of my pj’s — they were my blue super man pj’s. The iconic red and gold “S “ was emblazoned across my chest. With the stringed instruments that open “Ride of the Valkyries” lilting over my dad’s big speakers in the living room behind us, the blue sheet on the wall undulating

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25 slightly, into the left of frame I drift, arms extended in front of me, little fists balled, my black bowl cut fluttering in the fan-made wind, a seven-year-old, brown-skinned, halfFilipino Superman. I’m smiling into camera, showing the gaps where my baby teeth have fallen out, and my father is repeatedly directing me to step back because, in my over-zealousness, I keep drifting forward so my legs are visible, plainly planted on the ground, destroying the illusion of flight created by my upper body hanging into frame, an illusion my father has gone such lengths to create. By the time the big brass hits in Valkyries, my father is laughing and explaining to me I don’t have to sing, we can hear the music so I don’t have to sing it, but evidently I’m just too damned excited, because I keep right on singing the instrumentals, while pretending to fly, my attention fixed on the task at hand, until my three year old brother walks into frame gnawing on his fist, looking between me and my dad off-screen, glancing into the camera with the profound indifference of a baby. Wind created by a cheap electric fan, an aerial skyscape created by a thin sheet tacked to a wall, these elements still contain considerable appeal for me, even now. The idea of trading so little for so much. Of fitting the sky, the wind, and the hero’s journey, into a young family’s kitchen, into a color television, into a piece of plastic the size of a small book, with its slow spinning rollers recording a spontaneous vision through tiny plastic windows. My father never taught me how to throw a baseball. He never said word one about talking to girls, or how to treat a lady. He never walked me through tying a tie, or showed me how to do my taxes or explained to me what rejection felt like. But what I wouldn’t give for the chance to tell him I understood now. I understand. That graduating from Berkeley and marrying a brilliant, beautiful white woman who would go on to become a doctor and you yourself becoming an architect and raising a family in this country as the first generation, the first to grow up here and the first not to have to fight in a war in a very long time, that that was a very noble place indeed to want to call home, to call for a breather, to hang your Mission Accomplished banner. How might have he reacted if he’d heard me arguing that, whether by ignorance or malice, failing to grade our family’s progress in this country on some kind of curve would be yet another item in the same dirty, racist schematic that had been used

against us since 1956, when Lolo and Lola first arrived here with their three infant children. A schematic which, by the way, belongs now where it has always belonged, behind museum glass. My father’s name was Pacifico Geronimo Jr. He was named for the sea. Pacifico. The word meant peace, tranquility, a respite from the storm, not to be mistaken for the way it was adopted during American occupation of the islands from which we originate, when the army sought to pacify the people. What I learned from my father is how to listen to silence. My mistake, it turns out, was not in telling lies, but in not telling them with the urgency of a person trying to survive. My lies would need to become so potent, so believable, even I could appear to forget — who we were, where we’d come from, why we’d come. In his final silence, my father taught me that not having your own truth, in America, is a fate worse than death.

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