The Big Game.

With the dusky light from the street lamp outside the lone window in the small extra bedroom in Hector and Teresa’s square cinderblock home lighting the bed we shared that summer, Karmen traced the map of the scars on my head like Henry the Navigator or Gerardus Mercator mapping terra incognita.

 

The routes of the scars on my 17-year-old barely-kissed face were as interwoven as the LA road-network, weaving in, out, around and through major natural landmarks. They were semi-human in my case, not geo- or topo-graphical.

Below my lower lip was a one-inch gash from a two story fall onto the linoleum of my mother's house, my baby teeth biting through my still-tender skin. From my eyes there were small red roads like all those that led to Rome, millennia ago. Rudely healed reminders of not-so-long-ago bloodspurt. Bloodspurt that came from no one watching and no one caring and no one not pushing me around because I was littlest, and they could. Maybe, for the very reason that they had been pushed around before me, they needed me to push around now.

Karmen began with a twin set of roadways running from my right eye back halfway to my temple. The permanent gash from where one-year-old me met brick corner when he was pushed and no grown up was sober and in the vicinity.

The mountain on the forehead, a tectonic up swelling from where head met Hillerich and Bradsby’s Louisville Slugger, a concussion hidden from adults because their anger would have hurt more than cracked skull. 

There was the Passo del Stelvio of my nose, twisting like a hundred 'S' turns through the Alps from batted balls, bats and bully's fists because I grew up never backing down. 

The viaduct below my lip was the worst one, the one I re-opened with frequency when I shaved too quickly and nicked it aggressive.

Finally, there was the open gully midway between my left-eye and my hairline. It was an ancient excavation of my brain that had somehow gone wrong.

"There are so many rivers in the desert of your face, Jorge," Karmen traced with the small of her fingers. "There are so many hurts."

She traced one softly and kissed it when she reached the end. She traveled then to my cranial Vesuvius, circling it like a military battalion then ending her encroachment with another soft kiss.

"How does one young boy have a face that looks like a fisherman's hands," she asked. "Full of knife cuts and fish bites and hooks that have stung with anger like steel wasps."

"Karmen," I answered in a whisper, turning away so she would not see the tearing of my eyes. "My life is in those scars, if it were not for those scars, I would not be here."

"Those scars were your bus ticket," she laugh-kissed.

"Those scars and the ones no one can see are what sent me here so far from everything I know."

"But how, Jorge, how come the scars?"

I turned away from more to hide from her deep brown all-seeing eyes the hurt that was in my all-revealing eyes.

"How come the scars, Jorge."

"We are all bearing scars, Karmen. We are all bearing scars. There are those you can trace with your fingertips."

I thought to myself of some words I had memorized from Richard Wright's great book, "Black Boy." Until this moment I wasn't sure why they struck me hard enough to store in my head.

"With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity...And that if men were lucky in their living on earth, they might win some redeeming meaning for the having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars."

She could not hear my silence or read my memory. No one can.

"I count six on your head."

"Six," I answered. "Five before I was three. Maybe because no one was home yet the edges of the house I was born in were sharp and fractured. They would attack."

"Six." She circumnavigated my cuts counter-clockwise counting in a simple Spanish that even I could understand. "Uno." Kiss. "Duo." Kiss. "Tres." Kiss. "Cuatro." Kiss. "Cinco." Kiss. "Seis." Kiss. 

"Let us have no more scars, Jorge. You have a life of hurt in your head already and you are just a boy."

"It's a rough game." I turned back to her. "You cannot play backing away, backing down, turning your head. I have bad hands but I am good in the field because I stop the ball with my chest and sometimes my head."

"Hector says you use your cabeza."

We for a moment laughed.

"No more scars," she said. "Because," she again kissed softly m forehead. Her mouth was warm and wet in the dry cool night. "No more scars," she repeated. "Because you have already in your head six and."

I said nothing. My eyes were ready to sleep in the cricket-quiet of the night.

"Because you have already in your head six and six-hundred more no one will ever see."

She kissed again softly and we slept with little air between us.