2016 | Ten days into the new year and Big Poppa was gone. The last time I saw her she was in a handsome, silk, slate-blue bathrobe, watching CNN hosts speculate on the 2016 election still nearly a year out.
That was five days ago.
Big Poppa had been on her side of the bed, smoking in her bedroom inside a house in the beautiful Mediterranean-inspired Los Feliz hillside neighborhood, where she had always longed to live. She had been a nanny in her UCLA days for Quintana Roo Dunne, the adopted daughter of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, perhaps the most read West Coast literary figures of the twentieth century. The family lived in Los Feliz, and the couple were Big Poppa’s introduction to the life of the writer, the younger Córdova seeing the way two writers could think and write interdependently, passing in the hallway without speaking, their cigarettes on the verge of breaking ash. That is what she had always wanted.
Today I can’t help but fixate on whether or not Big Poppa died thinking Hillary Clinton would ease into office. She looked so strong the last time I saw her that I thought we would get another two or three months to confidently speculate on the future of the country, a future that didn’t include her.
I pushed the blankets away, my body an oven, and sat up in bed. It was an unusually chilly January morning in southeast Los Angeles, the sound of the barrio softly booming with banda, a sign of late Saturday night spilling into the early Sunday haze of hangover. The noise was layered by my phone vibrating with the news of her death. My neighbors would be heading to church soon and I was still lying under several layers of mismatched blankets; the walls in my room were cold to the touch. I felt the blood rush to my head. My mouth, dry. And my heart, of course, was pounding on the door of my chest.
Oh, Jeanne.
I looked at my phone and automatically dialed Sandy’s number.
Sandy was in Austin when I called, ending a conference weekend over a big brunch with a much beloved mentor. She kept sending me to voicemail. I spiraled into the mouth of new grief. I texted, Jeanne died, and she finally picked up.
I’m so sorry, Gata.
I hung up the phone. She did her best to comfort me from the noisy foyer of a hopping brunch spot in downtown. I wanted her words to soothe before the maelstrom of terrifying sadness came for me.
She was who I had brought home to Big Poppa, who had posed with Big Poppa in a few photos I knew I had to snap. Big Poppa, whose eyes instinctively sparked at being cradled by Sandy’s ample femme curves, and now Big Poppa was gone. All the blessings were starting to mix—on my behalf, Jeanne had loved Sandy, an accomplished, gorgeous, Chicana femme with a beautiful mind to match. But Big Poppa’s words had been haunting me. Would I be on equal footing with Sandy in Big Poppa’s eyes? Was I stable and healthy enough to enter into an adult relationship with someone who had a career while I floundered on my mother’s couch? Why was stable adulthood hard for me to inhabit? Could adulthood be legible in other ways? Big Poppa had left this earthly plane, her body in pain, leaving me to figure out what it meant to be a grown butch on the precipice of forty. Would I ever make her proud?
Before the cancer kept Big Poppa bedridden, she and I would ride around town, grabbing coffee, sitting around the park benches in Little Tokyo, and shopping for boots and leather jackets, shooting the good shit between us, butch dad and butch son. Our identification with masculinity playfully threaded over language. Jeanne would never be my mom, nor I her daughter. Our butchness was so ingrained in our queer bodies that we read as ladies only to a world that didn’t really matter to us, that couldn’t read the magic in the code we spoke with flesh and blood. We were ladies when our food arrived and guys when the check came.
You’re a good butch, Raque-bebe. We can’t lose any more good butches.
________
Sandy and I kept going back and forth.
It wasn’t so much the fact that we started out as just another hot and heavy affair in the clichéd romantic simulacra of our making. A science fiction hot enough to melt an ice cap. My body will always remember its first Tucson summer—hiding out with Sandy for two days in one of Tucson’s oldest neighborhoods, Barrio Anita, an address marked 666. Ours, a desire, fit for a beast.
Sandy phoned me later that evening when she was back at her home in Tucson. I had just returned home from seeing Lynn, Big Poppa’s partner and now widow, as part of a large group of lesbians who had assembled in hopes of offering succor. We had gathered like the twelve disciples around Jeanne’s lifeless body, which hadn’t been moved from the bedroom yet, to offer a ceremonial circle, hands clasped to one another, to proffer her spirit with the lesbian pledge of love to who she was when she walked among us on earth. We were dyke Vikings sending her off with a pledge of devotion to her memory from that evening forward, as she moved to a Valhalla we knew to be peopled by other legends of lesbian activism. Losing Big Poppa was huge not just for me but for a whole generation of lesbians who wouldn’t have language or culture if it weren’t for her.
I thought about where Big Poppa’s soul would reside now. Would she be with Yolanda Retter now, her rival and friend, an important librarian and archivist of Latina lesbian letters who called herself the gadfly of the body politic? I identified with Retter—another cantankerous butch in love with every femme in West Hollywood but too prudent and prideful to ever show a crack of vulnerability in her butch armor.
Nobody could afford to be a tender queer in those days.
When Yolanda died, Big Poppa eulogized her proudly, underscoring Yolanda’s work with the National Lesbian Feminist Organization and her numerous other contributions to the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California and to the June Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood, as well her more personal and eccentric talents—Yolanda was a carpenter and an airplane mechanic who bought and sold rare books. Yolanda, using her gruff exterior to benefit a nascent lesbian community coming together in public for the first time in the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, often directed security efforts as a chief monitor for community events. She was security coordinator for the people of color contingent for the first lesbian and gay March on Washington in 1979. She directed more security at the Los Angeles Dyke March and Sunset Junction, when the street festival was free and young Latinx families lived in Silver Lake. And Yolanda had, according to Big Poppa and Lynn, a knack for writing seventies-era button slogans that, in her own way, dissed and honored lesbian gender. “One sister’s butch is another sister’s femme,” “You’ve just been served by a Lesbian,” and “Marimacha, y qué?” A lesbian separatist through and through, Yolanda once stepped in the threshold of a lesbian gathering at a Chicana studies conference to ensure that no men—cis or trans—would be allowed to enter. Even Sandy could attest to that moment as she had been a young graduate student aghast at Yolanda’s separatist tactics. Eager to inhabit the moniker “Yolanda the Terrible,” she and Big Poppa once got into a fistfight over a femme that both had dated. I heard Yolanda swung first.
________
In bed again, staring up at the ceiling, phone in my hand. I had also broken the news to Sandy that David Bowie died on the same day as Big Poppa. We were both bewildered at the level of loss that day. The queerness of it all—two huge figures passing hours from one another, figures who bookended two important histories that buoyed the likes of Sandy and me, two queers at odds with the distinct worlds we were born into and who, with eight years between us, could still find common ground in our losses. She hadn’t learned of Bowie’s death because she was mid-flight from Texas back to Minneapolis, where she now lived. That move made our being together harder as she was now thousands of miles farther away from me than the mere five hundred between Los Angeles and Tucson. Just when I started to feel like we could bridge our differences, the physical gap between us widened.
Sandy coaxed me out. I wanted to belong to her. Give her my body, my secrets. Secrets that lived in well-hidden places, like the sky in Tucson that passed for the ocean when I was missing home. No one I was intimate with had ever thought to look up into the various constellations of shame that shadowed the life I was trying out for myself. Or to look down and see the mosaic pieces of my broken heart, a crushed ruby, hiding within the rubble of the gravel in the wash near her house. But she knew where to look, how to dig, pick up a shard and let the light shine right through it. And she was a good reader. A close reader. An interpreter of the ways in which my upbringing became the source of pain that brought me to poetry. And my poetry was what brought her to me.
I could have been an archival text, the way she studied my opaque marginalia with the intense monastic discipline I have admired in most scholars. She cracked my code. Sandy opened me so far wide I wasn’t certain I was capable of closing myself back up again, a safety tactic I had somehow unlearned in her presence.
I read Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love when I found out it was Sandy’s favorite, a book about how Sedgwick, a well-known queer theorist, begins a post-cancer therapy session but doesn’t want to fall into providing prosaic responses that help explain away her depression, her anxiety, her codependences. I thought about the cancer regimen I had been spared and the cancer diagnoses Big Poppa had received over the years. The cancer that had finally stuck. I read the multitude of ways Sedgwick considers her therapist a love object and produces lyric poetry and haikus that obscure the wild constellation of neuroses she carries. Reading it was somehow sublime yet still pessimistic. I felt myself getting sick, the last chapter of the book placing me firmly into my own depression about Sandy.
It wasn’t like we didn’t have a shot at fully being together. Sure, we came from different worlds with distinct categorical markers, only to come together to create more distinct categorical markers about ourselves—I was raised by Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants in southeast Los Angeles; she was a Tejana red-diaper baby. Four generations earlier, the border crossed them, not the other way around. We were trying to reconstitute ourselves as a brown butch-femme couple while riding the wave of fixity that these identity categories proffered. We indulged in the romance assigned to two queers who longed to enjoy a gendered, butch-femme dynamic that emerged in surprising ways—the red in her fingernail polish, the dirt on my Redwings. It was a gender binary we kept alive in our private, intimate spheres. We were the On Our Backs centerfold that never happened. We had difficult childhoods, difficult parents, and we turned to various forms of nerdom to escape these soft prisons. We left our white partners for each other.
We were just like any other couple vying for happiness, despite the odds.
________
In the days and weeks after Big Poppa died at home, Lynn, newly widowed, along with any number of close friends and I would gather around the large wooden dining room table in revolving door visits to sift through photographs, articles, papers, and online tributes to the life of Jeanne Córdova. One image that easily caught my eye was a lesbian newspaper clipping of Big Poppa sitting in lotus position, a big smile on her face and a thin, bohemian, leather headband poking under her fallen pompadour.
What is this? I exclaimed like I had just panned for gold.
Oh, that. Lynn looked up and slowly smiled. You know, Raq, this was at the start of Jeanne’s desert period. She had just sold the business and went on a bit of a vision quest.
Is this what Jeanne looked like when you two met?
I knew Jeanne and Lynn had met—as in all great love stories—at a lesbian support group in West Hollywood. Jeanne had just turned forty and was looking to start the next great chapter of an already storied life. I had heard many of these stories over the last few years as Big Poppa sat me down many times over diet cream sodas and menthol 100s and narrated the ways the lesbian and gay movement had both thrilled and exhausted her. Jeanne was the first at most everything where West Coast lesbian history is concerned. She helped cofound the city of West Hollywood, a bastion of protection for the nascent lesbian and gay community of Los Angeles. She was a delegate for a national gay and lesbian caucus at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, holding up a sign on the floor that said LESBIAN DEMOCRAT. But as she neared her fortieth year and saw all the ways the movement was moving right along, with new blood coming to tend the outgrowth from the seeds of change she had helped to plant in the early seventies, it made sense for her to interrogate her truer callings. New trails were what Big Poppa loved to blaze. I just didn’t know that the desert had figured so prominently.
Jeanne loved the desert. When we first started courting, we would road-trip through the Southwest, camping here, really roughing it some nights in Jeanne’s old Dodge pickup. Lynn’s voice would quiver but she looked up like she was seeing the film-strip of memory unfold over our heads. I poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table, careful not to sully any of the precious materials filled with important Big Poppa history.
And Jeanne really knew how to live. She’d say, “Lovey, how about we go to a hotel, get a hot shower, and then go antique shopping in Santa Fe?” The room erupted in awws and whoops at the gallantry that was Jeanne.
Jeanne loved the desert. We lived in Gamma Gulch for a few years before moving to Todos Santos. In fact, that’s where she wants her ashes to be scattered.
________
Gamma Gulch is a neighborhood—or what passes for one—in the exteriors of Yucca Valley, California. It is located next to the unincorporated community of Pioneertown in the Morongo Basin region of San Bernardino County’s High Desert. The historical town was originally incorporated in 1946, cofounded by actors Russell Hayden and Dick Curtis, who had first “discovered” the parts just west of Yucca Valley while exploring on horseback a small swath of land nearby that Curtis had bought for filming Wild West flicks of the era. Other investor partners included Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, entertainers who brought their aw-shucks wholesome cowboy acts out west to Hollywood. The winding four-mile drive northwest to Pioneertown from Yucca Valley has been designated a California Scenic Drive. A place where people go as a means to escape their lives—where you go to fake your death, forget lovers, hide the body, or conquer whatever monkey’s clutching to your back.
Today to hear of Yucca Valley and its more popular older sister, the town of Joshua Tree, is to hear of the government shutdown’s impact on these small, sparsely populated high desert towns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. People have come into the Joshua Tree National Park to steal or deface the largest of the yuccas, which grow only in the Mojave Desert. The Mojave yucca plant and the Joshua tree are the iconic fauna of the region, symbols of sun-soaked hardiness that proliferate every winter onto the IG timelines of our collective existence. They are sites of lesbian weddings for the witchy ilk who couldn’t imagine finding the goddess in Palm Springs. It’s where Gen X slackers came to pioneer Airbnb properties, ushering in an era of celebrity recreational occupation of these lands. Joshua trees are California icons, alongside the redwood, and are the kind of species anticipatorily grieved as the climate crisis continues to improvise its terror on the hottest pockets of the Southwest desert. The desert blooms of recent years have turned heads eastward to places like Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, whose 2018 super bloom was particularly stunning in a year that saw an uncharacteristically heavy rainy season. And, of course, for the last two decades the Coachella Valley Music festival has been forging relationships between millennials and Gen Z music lovers and aspirant hipsters and the desert. We didn’t have Instagram in 2002, the year I saw Björk at Coachella. I was a twenty-five-year-old weirdo who stumbled into the desert oasis without any articulated hopes of capturing the most magical of magic hours. What was a selfie to a digital immigrant?
When Jeanne and Lynn lived in their part of the high desert, on the end of a bumpy dirt road on Gamma Gulch, Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree were in the midst of a desert renaissance. I imagine these two lovers clutching one another tenderly, their eyes adjusting to the dark purity of those desert night skies, teeming with stars. The kind made impossible in Los Angeles. The early nineties were a golden era of sorts for music and art centered around Pappy and Harriet’s, an old biker bar that catered to the motorcycle outlaw set of the seventies who roamed the highways surrounding the high desert. Serving some of the best barbecue outside of Texas, Pappy and Harriet’s of the late eighties also served not only bikers but also the rough mix of locals, artists, Los Angeles nouveau riche, off-duty Marines from Twentynine Palms, cowboys and more hipsters barely surviving the winding five-mile stretch of death-wish roads that branch through the valley. On any given night you could chain-smoke under the Perseid meteor shower as you grooved to Victoria Williams or rocked out to Queens of the Stone Age while Ed Ruscha pontificated over kale salad just a few tables away. Or you could catch Jeanne in light denim shorts and a dusty Stetson Texas two-steppin’ with her new girlfriend, Lynn, the cute ginger with the South African accent who had never dated a butch before. Lesbian lovebirds nesting in the desert, blending in with the other self-imposed exiled weirdos.
________
I had gotten laid off from a “good” arts administrator job in San Francisco when Sandy and I first started communicating. I was a “community arts curator,” which sounded so meaningful, as if the praxis had somehow been more than just processing contracts and ordering catering and staving off the cultural takeover by our new tech-industry warlords. Within the organization middle managers battled to choose the artists and themes that would bring to fruition projects, happenings, small exhibitions, and public programs for a San Francisco demographic that was becoming more and more homogenous. It was bureaucratic violence meting out death by a thousand meetings that all should have been emails. Or in nonprofit parlance—organizational restructuring. Just as communities of color found themselves struggling to maintain their homes in a changing San Francisco culture, I suddenly found myself without a business card identity to buoy me.
My self-esteem was imperiled and so, of course, when Sandy made a series of butch-femme specific social media posts, I would post the occasional flirtatious comment. I thought I had some authoritative experience as someone who weirdly tethers herself to such a blatant label—a categorical marker to ensure my waning visibility.
All the back and forth on social media finally leveled up into direct message territory. I toyed with Sandy and sent her photos of me doing my best impressions of Cesar Rosas, lead guitarist for Los Lobos, since we both had pockmarked chubby cheeks, wore Wayfarers, and had an inexplicable cucumber coolness that read puro suavecito. She then purchased every chap-book I was selling through my tiny press. A few weeks of radio silence and then she wrote that my poetry had fucked her up. I read her message after returning from a weekend of camping in the East Bay with my white girlfriend and all of our queer white friends.
________
She said I seemed capable.
We were both in committed, monogamous relationships with white women who cared deeply about us. Yet it was precisely that relational configuration that enabled Sandy and me to offer each other shelter. There is something to be said about the comfort of recognition that comes from a lover or friend who looks like you, or at least looks at you like you are family, like there is familiarity in the ways you have both suffered. To find a lover who has been in the same position in the power structures that dictate our ontologies. We each saw the other’s pain of misrecognition—such deep, howling pain about how our lives had escaped us. How we followed the trail of aspiration, stability, and still felt stuck.
After six weeks of messaging each other we agreed to meet in Los Angeles—I came from the Bay Area and she, the Southwest. It was one night that became a week. I was chasing a high. In between marathon lovemaking sessions that left me sweating, I gulped down copious amounts of French spring water like I had just conquered the Tour de France of fisting. And chasing the high got expensive. I racked up credit card debts paying for flights and weeklong Airbnb stays in my city and in hers. I was trying to prove to Sandy that I, a brown, nonprofit-class butch, would wine and dine her in the only way available to me.
________
Lynn had put out a call to the inner circle for help. I came over on a warm Southern California evening to relieve her of overnight care for Big Poppa. This was when the height of the cancer revealed itself in the roughest soul-shaking coughs that racked Big Poppa’s thinning body for the rest of her days with us. Lynn was losing sleep on top of the mounting grief she was depositing in her emotional bank. And I was content to split my time catching a few winks on their leather couch in the living room, with an alarm set to wake me every two hours to give Big Poppa her pills.
It was midnight, which meant I hadn’t even thought about sleeping, let alone felt the tug into slumber, but it was time to get Big Poppa’s first round of medication from four separate snap-capped vials. A booming locomotive in the other room startled me to sit up suddenly.
Big Poppa? I whispered gently, hoping not to startle her, but Big Poppa was in deep slumber. Big Poppa, it’s time to take your pills. Big Poppa stirred slowly, her eyelids fluttering open.
Can you help me sit up?
I pulled the blankets down slowly and felt the heat rise. I touched Big Poppa’s bony shoulder and soft back and felt her long-sleeved pajama shirt soaked with sweat.
Which drawer do you keep your pajamas in?
I walked over to the tallboy dresser in the room and pulled out a new pajama top for Big Poppa. I turned on the lamp, sat on the edge of the bed, and gestured for Big Poppa to raise her arms over her head. I peeled off her nightshirt, her back hunched down, chest concave, and ran a dry washcloth to her underarms and shoulders. I quickly got her clean pajama top on to save her from catching cold, but also to preserve her butch dignity.
How’s that? Better, yes?
I have to pee now.
Yep, I gotcha.
My body tensed up at the solicitation of a new intimacy, but I quickly let that pass through my body and assured Big Poppa that I wouldn’t let her down. I took a deep breath as I bent at the knees and wrapped one arm around Big Poppa’s lower back and put her arm around my shoulder. I slowly walked us through the night-lit hallway and turned on the lights in the bathroom. I lifted the toilet seat and helped Big Poppa pull her pajama pants down and then sat her on the toilet seat. She looked up at me and smiled meekly, though still mischievously, as if to say, Can you believe this shit?
________
I got heart palpitations at the thought of my mother ever meeting Sandy. Sandy was not a girl, or at least not the kind of girl that would register on my mother’s emotional radar. I was afraid that my mother would see me and say that I was the overgrown girl. Or boy. Or whatever awkwardly phrased term my mother would come up with to name my immature gender. I never heeded the signals of adulthood correctly—college, marriage, home ownership, children of my own. I saw my parents struggle with three of the four stages and it scared me into never aspiring toward a domesticity that could be reduced to a bumper sticker slapped crookedly on the back of my car.
Don’t ever marry, my mom always says when we get to this part, when I come home after breakups with domestic partners. I guess she could sense that I wasn’t cut out for that life. My mom married twice. It was what she had to suffer to survive her own growing up in the rural mountains, where El Salvador meets Honduras, and what she had to choose to make it out of there alive. I wanted to marry Sandy and I wanted that desire to find its bullseye. I had just returned my mother’s rings but I wanted to ask for them back. I needed to make sure that desire fell on all the right reasons. Maybe I was too educated and too spoiled, and that meant never having to settle for marriage to strengthen my economic lot the way my mother had to do when she first got to this country. I also was too much my father’s daughter and my mother knew that. My mother was my first riddle. She spoke a few words and fewer phrases, like codes to break down. She spoke them all like words cost money, so I was often left scratching my head trying to decipher whether I was cool or whether I was a fuck-up in her sad, hardened eyes. Marriage was never easy for her, and she modeled to me to find shelter in the world by relying only on myself.
Your father almost jumped off a bridge into the 710 [freeway] when his girlfriend left him. But that’s what he got for giving her money I had saved up for our future. He’s a coward and if it weren’t for me …
Her voice trailed off but she left the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight out, the electricity softly shocking my body into the kind of submissive hold I had felt my whole life. She was prescribing me medicine or dictating my choices with a soft fist, a velvet glove. Did I not have what it takes to be in it for the long haul?
________
We watched the wedding video a few nights after Big Poppa had passed. Lynn, glassy-eyed, sat in the dark chocolate brown leather club chair that stood about fifteen feet from the large screen television in the sunken living room.
Wow, I marveled from my corner of the couch, watching Big Poppa in some King Arthurian-style velvet tunic stretch out both arms to Lynn, coming down an aisle in an unnamed outdoor setting. Women’s music icon Holly Near had just sung their wedding march and taken her seat in the audience. Big Poppa is forty-seven in this video. Her hair is coiffed into a relaxed brush cut, soft sparkling eyes resting on her partner in crime, and her smile is easy, dazzling. My god, this butch is charming, I chirp to a roomful of swooning lesbians.
There were about six of us in Lynn’s living room toggling back and forth between aww-ing and grieving, exhausted from taking turns to excuse ourselves from the room and go cry in private. In one of these flurries of exiting the room, bodies moved past me but I never tore my eyes from the screen. There was a close-up moment between Lynn and Big Poppa, a teasing twinkle in the butch’s eyes and an utterance of supreme butch confidence that I hoped one day to spectacularly repeat myself: It’s not like you’re marrying me for my money.
________
I made my living that year in Huntington Park, traveling to present my work in a variety of cultural centers, museums, and universities. I was packing a suitcase while also unpacking my books, the evidence of some previous life I had spent developing my mind. There were so many books—novels and theory, proof that I wasn’t always a nonprofiting paper pusher. Breaking a sweat and covered in cardboard box dust, I was trying to lay an order to my things while wearing thrifted basketball shorts and a threadbare white tee, the uniform of the neighborhood boys and young men I’d be passing on my way to various appointments with the world, a future I had to manifest otherwise I would go crazy. This was the bit of control I allowed myself after swallowing my pride and returning to my parents’ home. The living room was a shallow sea of open-mouthed U-Haul boxes creating a maze between me and my smartphone when I heard the familiar bottle popping sound that indicated I had a new text message.
Can you talk?
________
I had to keep walking in the direction I wanted my life to take, as a teacher, a writer, a healer of sorts. A healer of self more than anything. I was done with what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs.
I was supposed to fly from Baltimore to Minneapolis to visit Sandy, but we fought and she uninvited me at the last minute. I ended up going back to Los Angeles, which had some divine timing to it. The weekend I had arranged to see Sandy in Minneapolis had become the same weekend that Lynn organized a mass lesbian outing to Yucca Valley to release Big Poppa’s ashes into the stunning mammoth rock formations in Gamma Gulch. I thought I was going to miss the ceremony, but I ended up missing Sandy. Who was I kidding? Butch-femme relationships were a dying breed and here we were doing the dying, watching our previous relationships die, losing our patience for each other on top of watching our queer elders die. It was losing faith that got easy.
________
The twelve of us who were present on the first day of Big Poppa’s death were also present for the day we released the last remnants of her earthly presence into the desert ethers. We packed ice chests filled with Diet Cokes into our cars and caravanned for nearly two hours from Los Angeles into the land of Joshua trees, their arms raised skyward as if heralding what we felt in our hearts. That our father was heading toward where she belonged. Freedom would soon be hers, arriving on the terms she fought valiantly for.
I plucked a hawk feather that I kept on my altar and stuck it in my shirt pocket that morning. Later I dipped it in the container and filled its tiny barbs and vanes with her ashes, the aerial ink imbued with the power of Jeanne Córdova. I raised my arms and let the feather go. I watched the ashes fly into the limitless blue above the boulder where I stood, the expanse of wild desert below. I swallowed the salt of my nasal drip, lit a menthol under my hat against the pounding wind, inhaled and raised my silver Diet Coke can to the only Big Poppa I would ever know.
