The Life Span Of My Coolness And Where It Got Me

By Oscar Brajas

Believe it or not, there was one point where I was the most popular kid in school. Both adults and children hung on my every word. The time was 1982 and I was in the first semester of kindergarten. I found myself in a little town in Michoacan called La Hacha in a makeshift school that shared space with a barn and an ice distributing plant. The children and adults were fascinated with me because I was a rare bird. So many of their friends and family had left Mexico to come to the United States, but I was the first to leave the United States for Mexico. The adults would often try to find a way to ask me if my parents had committed a crime or if my mother was running away from my father since he was back in the United States.

I was the weird kid who would climb into the pigpen to further examine the pigs. What did I know? After all, all the wildlife I had been exposed to at that age was pigeons and those little brown sparrows that are ripe with cuteness and disease. I had never seen any of the animals on a Mattel “See N’ Say”. I guess I just wanted to see if all the rumors were true, that a cow said “moo” and if the duck went “quack”. All of the other students had grown up with these beasts of burden, so they misunderstood my thirst for knowledge as some American attempt to be friends with the animals, and in a way that made me cool.

Within the month I ran everything from the goat pen to the industrial ice machine, which in itself was a large chunk of territory. I would hold court every lunch break as my closest friends Marcos and David, my two man entourage, made certain everyone had a front row seat, but at the same time nobody got too close to the action. Both students and staff would come up to me and ask me how to translate  words to English. The kids would do it out of curiosity while the adults saw it as an opportunity to get a leg up on the competition once they came to the United States. Whatever I did not know, I would make up.

The sessions would usually start off like this:

Como se dice…

Café, and I would say “coffee.”

Salsa Catsup, and I would say “ketchoo.”

Mostaza, and I would say “monster.”

¿Donde puedo tomar autobús número 12?     and I would say, “Hey man, where’s the big bus twelvth.”

The teacher had identified me as one of the most distinguished learners in her class and had invited me to a town hall meeting to introduce the mayor and some traveling doctors who had come to town to talk to the townspeople about hygiene. What happened next would live on as a moment of great infamy within my family.

I had never been onstage before, and I was hypnotized by the bright lights and the booming sound of the microphone. The rundown was simple. The principal would introduce the doctors, and I would come on stage and introduce the mayor in English for his closing comments. So the last doctor started wrapping up his speech on lice and how quickly they spread through hair and then handed the microphone to me. I took that microphone and I froze. Every second felt like an eternity as the mayor contemplated just taking the microphone from me and wishing everyone a good night. He should have followed that instinct.

What came out of my mouth was sheer madness. I began to tell a horrified crowd that I had lice and my sister had lice. In addition, we had caught them from my mom, who had caught them from her mom. In fact, the neighborhood was a dirty place where people not only had lice, they were infested by them. That was the point where my mother rushed the stage and picked me up with one hand and shielded her face with the other.

When I got home the sentence levied against me was a harsh one. I had been expelled from the school and my mother phoned my dad back home in Los Angeles, who suggested that she enroll me across town at the strictest nunnery where the nuns saw curiosity as deviance which oddly enough proved to be the end of my career as a public speaker. They did,t take too kindly to my American whims and rather saw me as the malevolent offspring of Gene Simmons and Elvis, without the cool factor of course.