Getting Off one THE GOOD GIRL I grew up in the early eighties in Montebello, California, Southeast LA, where teenage pregnancy was on the rise and every Mexican restaurant claimed to have the best tacos north of the border. Living rooms were adorned with framed pictures of Jesus or the Virgin, and everyone believed in heaven and hell--not as abstract ideas, but as very real places. It was the kind of place where you could pick up your holy candles with your milk and bread at the local supermarket and you always knew someone celebrating a baptism or First Communion soon--giant events requiring ornate outfits and tres leches cake and a sense of relief on everyone''s part that things were good with God, no one was going to hell just yet. I rarely met anyone who wasn''t Catholic. When it did happen, it was whispered about. Did you know Mrs. Gonzalez is a Jehovah''s Witness? Isn''t that weird? If you weren''t Catholic, to whom would you turn for help? No priest? No Bible? It was unclear how a person could distinguish right from wrong without the Commandments. And I didn''t even want to think of what happened to them after death.

I imagined babies dying before they were baptized and shuddered at their unfortunate fates. I often tell people now that I come from LA, or sometimes East LA if I want to hint at my Latino roots. LA is Hollywood glamour, money, and prestige; East LA screams danger, gangs, and irrefutable street cred. In truth, my life had neither. Montebello and all Southeast LA, home to cities like Bell Gardens, Pico Rivera, and Norwalk, were small, mediocre, boring. My dad, a mortgage broker, helped low-income Mexicans buy first homes, while my mom, a housewife, made sure our home was intact. They balanced their checkbooks, and we bought clothes at Ross, and the only place we traveled to outside of the country was Tijuana, which my mom often said "didn''t count" since it was only two hours south. My brother, Gabe, and I ran through sprinklers in the summer or laid down giant plastic trash bags for slipping and sliding.

Katie Wilkins, a white girl, lived next door to us, which was rare in a predominately Mexican neighborhood, and I''d often peer at the swimming pool in her backyard from my bedroom window with envy. Mediocrity, which I felt was directly connected to my heritage, was my first source of shame. But, in retrospect, we seem more privileged than I realized. I vacationed in Hawaii and Walt Disney World. I attended private Catholic school, from kindergarten through high school. My dad owned and ran a mortgage company for nearly twenty years until he sold it for a large sum and bought himself his dream car, a flashy Corvette that looked like the Batmobile, and a vacation condo in Maui. And by the time I entered high school we had moved into a house with a pool. I never knew what it was to go to bed hungry or face eviction, but shame has a way of being irrational.

I looked at our life and I wanted more. I simply couldn''t understand why my parents would want to live in such a boring place. There seemed to be nothing but strip malls and taco stands, nail salons and bail bonds. But to them, and to other Mexicans, Montebello was a big deal. In the late sixties and early seventies, when they were growing up, Montebello was nicknamed "the Mexican Beverly Hills." Housing prices were more expensive and the streets were safer than those in nearby East LA, where my mom spent her formative years. Tomas Benitez, the Chicano author and activist, said in an interview with LA''s KCET, "Montebello was mythic when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was the place where middle-class Mexican-Americans lived and came from.

It had that quality, if you could get out of East LA, Montebello was Nirvana, the promised land and Beverly Hills East all rolled into one location." For my dad, who was born under modest circumstances in Mexico City and whose own father was an orphan, to be able to live in the Mexican Beverly Hills as an adult was a big step up. He played golf at the city''s country club every weekend and served as an important figure in the city''s Rotary International organization. We often ran into people who knew and respected him wherever we went--restaurants, the bank, the supermarket--and they''d shake his hand with sincerity, reassuring me and my older brother, "Your dad''s a good man," in case we ever doubted it. My mom, on the other hand, was less interested in the community. She often complained about the city''s lack of good stores and its seemingly endless pavement. Sometimes she even complained about its propensity for attracting wetbacks, always laughing after this admittance, especially if my dad was around, before she''d lovingly touch his arm and coo, "Aww, I married a wetback." That term wetback, coined from those Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande to get to America, was not an accurate description of my dad, who had crossed the border legally and traveled by road, not river.

But that didn''t stop my mom from muttering the word whenever she was feeling playful, or worse, when she was feeling wicked. Even though she has Mexican roots herself, I always thought that her teasing meant she considered natural-born citizens superior to those who had been naturalized. She would have likely picked this idea up from her own dad, a WWII veteran whose own parents were immigrants, and whose dark skin made him feel inferior in a country that was even harsher toward Mexicans than it is today. The problem, for me, was that my neighborhood and my place inside it didn''t resemble my preconceived notions of power. It didn''t matter that my classmates at school shared the same Spanish-sounding last names and most of their grandmas didn''t speak English either. I took note of the Mexican guy selling oranges on the corner, and the busboy picking up our dishes topped with messes of ketchup and crumbs, and I thought, No, that''s not me. I even convinced myself now and again that I was superior to those kinds of Mexicans because my parents hadn''t taught me Spanish. We were outgrowing our Mexican-ness, I thought to myself.

Pretty soon it would be gone completely, forgotten like a dream. My feelings of superiority never lasted long. I knew my classmates and I were part of a minority, and I didn''t like the sound of that word, sitting heavy in my mouth and mind. I wanted to be like the blond-haired, blue-eyed Tanner girls on Full House. I wanted the calm, sensible family talks like the Seavers had on Growing Pains. I wanted a family tree that stretched back to Europe. Maybe England or Ireland, France even. But not Spain.

I got hooked on TV at a young age, marking the beginning of my intense bond with screens, and TV served as a window into the exciting world out there. I became obsessed with the families and neighborhoods I saw that were different from my own--which is to say, white. There was no George Lopez on TV then, no Sofia Vergara or America Ferrera. And I deemed the world "out there," on the TV screen and in the heart of glittering Hollywood, to be far superior to the Mexican Beverly Hills with its baldheaded gangsters, its teenage mothers, and its paleta men making their living selling sweet treats to kids on clean, suburban pavement. Unlike my dad, who seemed perfectly content with his roots and his chosen city of Montebello, I leaned more toward my mom''s chronic dissatisfaction and her fondness for escape. Like me, my mom also found herself captivated by screens. She loved foreign films--Cinema Paradiso, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Shirley Valentine--and I''d cuddle up with her on the couch for countless cinematic escapes, placing myself in the films and imagining the adventures waiting for me in adulthood. Sometimes I would imagine taking trips with my mom.

It''s not that I didn''t love my dad or that I wanted her to leave him forever, but maybe a few months? A year? I picked up on the tension that arose between my parents if my dad was working late again or on another client call. He usually returned from the office when we were already tucked into bed and was gone in the morning before we''d had a chance to get up, always trying to get ahead at the expense of my mom''s growing resentment. My brother and I got used to having my dad around only on the weekends. But even then there were always more phone calls, more stacked files in front of him, and my mom found this difficult to accept, alternating between giving him the silent treatment and erupting in angry outbursts, depending on her mood. My mom''s moodiness became more pronounced as I grew older. Some days she''d park herself in front of the TV, bored eyes glazed over by some daytime talk show or murder mystery. Other days she''d take me to the mall to try on clothes and feast at the food court, deep-fried corn dogs with mustard and curly french fries. And yet other days she''d be annoyed by everything--the dirty dishes, the piles of laundry, her lazy children--and I''d think to myself, She just needs a break.

If we go away for a little while, she''ll feel better. When my mom was upset, I sought solace in playing video games with Gabe, who was three years my senior. We spent hours toting machine guns in Contra, gobbling up mushrooms in Super Mario Bros., and scouring mythic lands for Zelda. I became obsessed with trying to beat him, frantically studying video-game magazines to learn the latest cheats, training myself not to blink, lest I miss a bullet or fireball and lose. When I wasn''t playing, I was thinking of playing. Wh.