Victor Villaseñor: Likeness (page 2)

“My heart was beat, beat, beating. No one, except my mother, had ever looked at me or spoken to me like this. “You are the most sensitive and beautiful man I’ve ever met,” she said with tears coming to her eyes. I took a big, deep breath. This was just too much. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been called stupid and ugly for so long that this was really tough to hear. Once, I’ll never forget, two seniors at the Academy had stopped me and ordered me to attention, and I’d snapped to, as we underclassmen were supposed to do. They’d walked around me, carefully inspecting my uniform, and one of them then said, “Is this the cadet?””

Victor Villaseñor

“Yes,” said the other one. “I agree with you; you’re right,” said the first one. “This is the ugliest cadet in the school!”
Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Stupidity , School , Beauty , Tear

“His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.”

Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Way , Grass

“Oh, I loved Mr. Moffet! He was WONDERFUL! He’d given me hope! I felt fearless once again, and I could clearly see it had always been fear that had kept me dammed up all these years. Fear of sin, fear of hell, fear of what people might think of me, fear of … of … I didn’t quite know how to say or even think all these thoughts I was having, and yet… it was like I was now so excited with all these thoughts racing around inside my brain that I was on fire. Maybe I wasn’t really stupid after all. Maybe I’d just been misled all these years from the very beginning. OH, A FIRE FOR WANTING TO LEARN ALL I COULD LEARN WAS NOW BURNING INSIDE ME!”

Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Love , People , Stupidity , Fear

““Mundo, you start paying closer attention to our mama and papa. They didn’t get this far in life because their eyes are closed.” I nodded. I’d never had a conversation like this before with my brother Joseph”

Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Life

“The years passed, and sometimes just before I … I awoke, I’d hear music going on inside my head. I’d lie perfectly still, not moving, not waking, and the music would spread all through my body, just as it had done at the pyramids outside Mexico City. Finally I’d leap out of bed and start writing like a madman. Ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day. It was just pouring out of me. It was limitless!”

Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Music , Lie

“A few months back Major Terry and his pet student, Drosen, had brought in a guy from San Diego to play chess with me. I’d had no idea that he was rated and was really good, so I’d beaten his ass real fast. He’d gotten all mad at Major Terry and Drosen for not telling him that I was as good as I was. He’d accused them of setting him up to publicly embarrass him. I’d had no idea what the big fuss was all about. I hadn’t even realized that there was such a thing as tournaments and championships for chess just like we had in wrestling. I’d quit playing chess at school after that incident. Now I only played at home with my dad’s older friends, Roberto and Salvador Montoya, who’d both been very good chess players in Mexico City. I beat Roberto almost all the time, but his older brother Salvador beat me pretty regularly. And I’d recently been told that Salvador had been so good that he’d once gone to Cuba to play and that he’d come in third among some of the best international players in the world.”

Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School , Home , Time , World

“Then the next morning Captain Moffet, my English teacher, gave me the test. I got such a headache, just trying to think carefully so I wouldn’t make any mistakes, that my test score dropped to 96. I couldn’t breathe. This meant that I was mentally slow, that I’d been lucky to even get into high school. My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know what to do. I asked Captain Moffet if my parents needed to know this. I felt so ashamed. I should’ve been the one to die, not my brother, Joseph. He’d been smart, just like my little sister Linda, who at six years old could read better than me.”

Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School , Reading , Making love , Teachers

“I began to worship pubic hair, to touch it, to smell it, to lick it. This was when I came to realize that pubic hair wasn’t at all like the hair we had on our heads. No, pubic hair was tougher, coarse, and sharp. You could cut your tongue on it if you licked it too hard. The hair on our heads wasn’t just finer but also round, and our pubic hair was thicker and flat, and so this was why it could cut you if you weren’t careful.”

Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!”

Victor Villaseñor

Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God , Dead

“And she slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times, but still Ramón continued speaking in Spanish, telling us not to fear, that we were Mexicanos, and that we weren’t their slaves! I quit crying, just like that. My God, I couldn’t believe it, this boy Ramón had to be the bravest human being I’d ever seen. And the huge teacher, she just kept right on slapping him until his face was covered with blood.”

Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God , Time , Boy , Teachers

“And my God, Ramón was just a little five-year-old kid like the rest of us.”

Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God