Canto CCCLXII: When a Prickly Pear Cactus Attacks

Gentle cabrones:

I might’ve said this before, but if not, here it goes: The prickly pear cactus just might be the best vegetable of them all.

It’s on the Mexican flag, for starters, sturdy enough for a mighty golden eagle to perch upon it with one talon and a snake in the other. Needs very little water. Take off one paddle, let it dry out for two weeks, then plant it in the ground and voila! New nopal.

Did I mention you can eat it?

You get the prickly pear paddles when they’re small and bright green and kinda rubbery, not the hard, dull green they’ll turn into if you let them get too big. I never understood the knock about nopales being slimy — “slimy” implies “gross,” but cactus sap is GOOD. And healthy. Prickly pear cacti is as sustainable, healthy, and bountiful a vegetable as you’ll find — and did I mention this vegetable gives fruit? What we Mexicans call tuna, which is not to be confused with the fish “tuna,” which Hispanics know as atún, or the Spanish word for olive: aceituna. And you want to know the etymology of each? Spanish, Greek, and Arabic origins.

I digress.

The actual prickly pear is incredible — a refreshing, filling sweetness that makes wonderful ice cream or an agua fresca, but is best as queso de tuna, which is basically prickly pear leather.

You should all have a prickly pear (what we zacatecanos just know as a nopal — cactus — because they’re such a part of our identity. Or a nopal de tuna if we have to be exact to others) in your collection, whether you have a yard you can plant it in, or a five-gallon bucket you can put in steady sunlight. But at a certain point, you’re going to have to get close to it.

At a certain point, it’s gonna live up to its name and, well, prick you. Like Thanos, it’s inevitable.

They grow surreptitiously slow — one day, it’s one paddle, and then a few weeks later you have a tree’s worth, and you have to prune it. You can try to chop down a paddle with a knife and run, or long clippers and stand far, but the pricking will happen. You might be afraid of the long, visible spines, but far worse are the espinitas (thorns) that grow on nopales in clumps during its teenage phase, look as thin and harmless as nose hairs, and burrow into you like velcro.

OUCH.

Getting pricked by a cactus is rarely something that’ll make you scream — they tend not to go in that far. Besides, that would be too easy a problem to solve. No, they tend to hurt like a paper cut: a surface level scrape that annoys more than wounds, but man, does it annoy.

So what do you do when the inevitable happens?

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1. Stop what you’re doing: You’re going to feel what’s like a scratch, and think you can work through it. You can, at your own peril. Keep working, and you will probably get more thorns on you, and the ones already on you will start to dig in or spread around. You don’t want that.

2. Listen to your body: A cactus prick’s pain is dull but precise, concentrated yet diffuse. It’s meant to make you go crazy, I do believe, in how seemingly inconsequential of a wound it is yet how diabolical its persistence can become. So get in tune with your body. Run your fingers across your arms, legs, chest and more until you know exactly where it is. Squint, and try to see it. Is it still standing up? Is it crushed to your skin? Are there a group of them together? Probably the latter — UGH…

3. Try to brush off the thorn: The easiest and fastest way to get rid of cactus thorns (the small, hairy ones, not the spines) is by brushing. When you pick a tuna, you put in on the ground — preferably on the lawn — and brush it with a broom. All around, thorough, and voila! If you get them on your hands or arms, you don’t even need a broom — you can brush your hands through your hair. Don’t worry! By some alchemical Mother Nature shit, the thorns easily come off your skin and don’t stick to your scalp after running them through your hair, seemingly disappearing into the ether. I’m sure one of ustedes botanist geniuses can explain the sorcery behind THAT.

   Most likely, problem solved. But in case it didn’t…

4. Keep calm, and tweezer time: If you STILL have thorns on you, that’s when you’re going to have to get more deliberate and calm, because this is where the madness sets in. A thorn that’s still sticking on you at this point is dug in more than usual, and also probably flat on your skin so that it’s even harder to spot. Touch the affected area, and repeat Step 2. Get some tweezer, find the thorn, and try to extract it. The problem is that young thorns are wispier than small hairs, so it might take a couple of attempts. Depending on where the thorn is, you might even have to get someone to do this step for you.

5. Change your clothes and beat them down: If you do get pricked, change your clothes immediately — because if you felt the thorns on your bare skin, guaranteed a few also embedded themselves. I found this out the hard way recently: After pricking myself and changing into new clothes and washing the latter, I put on my washed Dickies shorts a couple of days later. OUCH.

6. Thorns are inevitable: And then there’s sometimes where you can’t get to the thorn, where it got in deep enough where it pricks you every once in a while but doesn’t necessitate a trip to urgent care. Sorry, but you’ll just have to wait it out. Sometimes, the thorn will stick to you and eventually fall off on its own. Sometimes, your skin basically grows around the thorn and dissolves it on its own. That’s life, Jack. Sometimes, bad things happen to you, and you just can’t do anything about it.

There’s a lot of hurt in this world, in this time, in this LYFE. It’s inevitable. There are always steps to not only deal with the pain, but to beat it. And sometimes, even that just doesn’t work. But that’s the funny thing about us humans: Our capacity to absorb trauma and hurt is incredible, as is our will to recuperate. To rebound. To rally.

Don’t let the thorns win.

**

Enough rambling. This was the semana that was:

IMAGE OF THE WEEK: My reward for getting a “Pseuds Corner” submission into Private Eye for the second time. Never heard of the British publication? You can thank them for coining the euphemism “tired and emotional” when wanting to describe someone as “drunk,” among the many, MANY awesome things they’ve done over the decades.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “I don’t begin with a theme or even a character. I begin with a first sentence that is independent of any conscious preparation. Most often nothing comes out of it: a sentence will come to mind that doesn’t lead to a second sentence. Sometimes it will lead to thirty sentences which then come to a dead end. ” — Joseph Heller (and this is actually how I start my stories!)

LISTENING: “La Tumba Será el Final,” Chris Isaak and Silvertone with Flaco Jimenez. First sung by Los Invasores de Nuevo León, popularized by Flaco Jimenez. I had NO idea Chris Isaak, of all people, was a fan of this song, let alone that he used to play it at concerts, let alone that he played it with Flaco 30 years ago this year in Los Angeles? Isaak gives it his classic sad-boy feel, but livens it up with a ska rhythm, while Flaco does his squeezebox thing. Man, to have danced to this one…and why didn’t Isaak ever record this cover on an album?

READING: “From Fire Hazards to Family Trees”: If you’re an antiquarian like me, you’ve long wondered about the Sanborn maps, intricately drawn depictions of lots in cities during the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. They’re gorgeous, they make Thomas Guide maps look like a kid’s scribble, and here’s the definitive essa about them.

BUY MY NEW CO-BOOK! People’s Guide to Orange County tells an alternative history of OC through the scholarship and reporting of myself, Elaine Lewinnek, and Thuy Vo Dang. There’ll be signings all year — in meanwhile, buy your copy TODAY. And, yes: I’ll autograph it!

TAKE MY ORANGE COAST COLLEGE JOURNALISM CLASS! Journalism 117 — Narrative Long Fiction aka how to write long, beautiful stories that can get published. Will be in person Mondays from 6 p.m.-9:10 p.m. every Monday starting August 26 at my alma mater, Orange Coast College, in Costa Mexico. Here’s where you register.

Gustavo Events  

July 27, 4 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with author Alex Espinoza about his brilliant new novel, The Sons of El Rey, at Libromobile, 1180 S. Bristol St., SanTana. Lecture, FREE; books, BARATO.

Sept. 21, 1:30 p.m.: I’ll be in conversation with Mike Madrid, longtime GOP strategist turned Trump mega-hater and author of the new book The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy at Alta Baja Market, 201 E. 4th St., Ste. 101, SanTana. Lecture, FREE but register here.

Gustavo in the News

“Burgers, tacos, BBQ, vegan picks: Where to eat in Santa Ana”: Evan Kleiman kindly calls upon the SanTana culinary expertise of my media chica and I on her regular Press Play with Madeleine Brand appearance in anticipation of a KCRW Summer Nights extravaganza at the Bowers.

“Latinx Files: These are the best tacos in Los Angeles”: A Los Angeles Times newsletter you should subscribe to plugs a columna of mine.

“How L.A. reached peak taco”: I offered some thoughts on the intro essay to the Times’ monumental taco package…

“These are the 101 best tacos in Los Angeles“: …get cited in the taco listicle to end all taco listicles…

“Celebrities, chefs and athletes share their favorite tacos in L.A.”: …and am now apparently a celebrity fit to recommend a taco!

Gustavo Stories 

“Grítale a Guti”: Latest edition of my Tuesday night IG Live free-for-all.

“Will Latinos unfairly lose their homes due to Stanton’s redevelopment plans?”: My latest KCRW “Orange County Line” commentary talks about a city that doesn’t get enough attention.

"What the death of local news actually means”: My latest L.A. Times “Essential California” newsletter introduces a series we ran about the death of local news in the Golden State. KEY QUOTE: “It’s people like me who launched the proverbial Little Boy that destroyed too many journalism outlets to count.”

“The death of California’s Spanish-language newspapers leaves a void. ‘It gets filled with trash’”: My latest L.A. Times columna talks about what used to be a vibrant Spanish-language newspaper scene in SanTana. KEY QUOTE: “Today, the teeming newspaper racks are almost all gone. The few that remain stand as rusting witnesses to the rise and fall of a media market that needs journalistic watchdogs more than ever, at a time when presidential candidates vie for the Latino vote and illegal immigration is a hot topic yet again.”

“The lawyer who thinks he can free street vendor activist Edin Enamorado”: My next latest L.A. Times columna checks in with Damon Alimouri, who’s trying to exonerate the Internet folk hero. KEY QUOTE: ““They know that millions of people are paying attention online. Edin is a folk hero, and they want to make an example out of him.””

You made it this far down? Gracias! Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram while you’re down here by clicking on their logos down below. Don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your compadres y comadres! You can’t get me tacos anymore, but you sure as hell can give them — and more — to the O.C. Catholic Worker!