Then I was thinking about picking up the thread of a conversation we’d abandoned a few months earlier.

I should explain: We were waiting for Jimenez to come haul away four buckets of white paint and an old rust-brown wheelbarrow.

Just then Jaramillo said, "Charles Mingus."

"Yeah?" I said.

"Mingus spent time in a Bellevue ward."

"All our great artists spend some time in a Bellevue ward."

"It’s a prerequisite for artistic greatness in America. That and institutionalized illiteracy."

"Yes--art, like love: another controlled form of insanity. "

"Tell me something. You ever made sweet love at a prayer revival meeting?"

"Oh yeah all the time."

"Tongues and everything."

"Slapping hands. Jumping. Shouting? Yeah, tongues."

"Language the Devil can’t understand."

"Phonemic divinity."

Then we were quiet again. I knew Jaramillo was wondering whether Jimenez would put two and two together and figure the whole thing out. I imagined hearing the long low wail of a distant train. It occurred to me that this would be the perfect sound to fill in the silence right now.

And some wind chimes maybe. Nearby, but not too close--far enough for their inherent nature as wind chimes to be subsumed into new definitions as distinctly articulated textures of wind, near enough to maintain some trace history of the wind chime structure itself. Four, five distinct tones. Hollow. Brushed steel.

Then Jaramillo was busy drinking from a bottle of Pepsi Cola. It was all an intense swirl of blue and red and white, and green-tinted glass, and syrupy brown inside. The glass threw off hard white sunlight. There was an old violence hovering on the periphery. I touched my fingertips to the white scar just below my neck and above my heart. Kiss of barbed wire. Jaramillo welcomed the possibility of tetanus with open arms.

I should explain: This had always been his cultural advantage over me.

"The willingness to accept a rare, incurable displease," I said.

Jaramillo grunted. "The belief in our best and blightest."

"Faith-based iniquities to feed the poor and hungry."

"Intellectual property rites and anecdotes for the richest one percent who can afford them."

"The role of mainstream media in shaping impressionable young land-mines," Miranda said, from inside the wheelbarrow.

Jaramillo grunted again. I grunted. Miranda grunted.

I should explain: Miranda was Jimenez’ second cousin twice-removed by a previous marriage. But that didn’t matter to any of us. Least of all to Miranda.

I should explain also: Jaramillo was in love with Miranda. He called her My-randa. He said, "Help My-randa, Help-Help-My-randa."

The bilingual linguistic possession was one-way though; she would never forgive him for sexualizing her ethnicity. He argued it was an unconscious thing that just sort of happened as he dozed off between commercials one night. Outdated inappropriate context sneaking up on an innocent (post)modern somnambulist with God-given testicles and other properly functioning apparatus. This was the story he was sticking to. Like Elmer’s glue. Miranda would repeatedly threaten to shave off all of Jaramillo’s extraneous body hair and send it in a large, plainly labeled manila envelope to the local INS office for extensive observation and testing. I would offer to draw up a grant proposal for funds to cover all related expenses, and then we’d talk about the use of the werewolf as metaphor for subsumed cultural and sexual identity. This of course would make Miranda roll her eyes.

"Pedestrian," she’d say. "Pedantic cowardice. The elitist urban academic experience can be so damn full of itself sometimes, que no?"

Miranda had a thing for the suburbs. She was convinced that was where all the real violence was happening. Behind closed prefabricated doors. On the quietly humming escalators of vast shopping malls. Rustling in the sculpted greenery of freeway onramps. Twisting in the deceptively simple curve of a clean white culdesac.

As you can see, we all eschewed use of the hyphen as much as possible, but it was not uncommon for us to picture, gleefully, a sullen army of future poets and conceptual performance artists quietly incubating in rows and rows of brand-new identically beige three-bedroom-one-and-a-half-bathroom tract homes near San Ramón, California.

Then Miranda sighed and said, "Fuck. You know? My life is just one dangerously weaving slowspeed freeway chase after another. Helicopters hovering overhead. An endlessly regressive trail of silent police cars flashing lights behind me. Guilty middle-class bystanders ready on tax-funded embankments with bottled water and cigarettes and motherly legal advice. All for me, the Possibly-Dangerous-Fleeing-Suspect. Corporate newsvans cut me off at the knees and then film my response as I curse and flip them the bird. In the upper righthand corner of the screen they got these clocks now--you seen them?--that document the time of the chase as it happens. It says, CHASE TIME: 1:37:42. It ticks off the seconds. Only, it’s counting backwards to zero. And it’s gradually speeding up. And underneath it is this endless rolling scroll of ticker symbols and stock prices from the New York Stock Exchange, and the fucking stock prices keep fluctuating, wildly, every time I contract and release my pubococcygeus muscle. It’s true. I swear to God. The SEC is even, at this very moment, considering approval of a new market index based on my ability to hold back the flow of urine under duress. I swear it’s true."

Neither Jaramillo nor I disputed any of this.

Despite their Spanish names, of the four of us, I was the only one with what you could call an authentically Latino-based ethnicity. Miranda described herself as someone else’s projection of several ethnic identities--though she never specified which ones, nor whose projection. Jaramillo was content to latch himself obliquely onto my father’s birth in Mexico and leave it at that. No one ever asked why I had a Ukranian name, or blue eyes, or yellow hair. Only Jimenez knew the truth, and I knew he would never explain it to me.

Then Jaramillo was pursuing a post-graduate degree in undead Native American languages and advanced anti-semiotics.

Then I was learning how not to speak German and English, one phoneme at a time, in a luxury trailerhome park in Silicon Valley.

Then Miranda was disorganizing a big polka pool party for the wealthiest five percent of the world’s population of papier-mâché effigies.

Then Jimenez finally never showed up, and we ran out of things to say to each other.

I should explain.