Mama Ricky is back with a fall fashion book and a hip shaking look!

Oh yes, yes, and more yes! I saw all this controversy lately with my little hoochie boytoy, Soopie who gets lost in the stars the way I get lost in the upcoming fashion tops from GAP. You do too? Do you see me in stripes? Honey, I'm not going to prison for your love or for this top. You know Soopie? He's got a boa for every night of the week and never repeats a performance! jajaja! He was dancing into the night and kissing and telling so much that two of my girlfriends had to wrap him up in his own boas and promise no more episodes of Six Feet Under until he shut up about a romance with...

Yes, I'm not telling. You know me.

Oh now wait a minute, baby girl. Hold your hand up and stop me like a Madonna Vogue traffic signal, I have decided to kiss and tell after all. Read the beginning of my little book, Queen Me! It's not perfect, but then, neither is fashion. I love you all! Now run to me and I'll hold you, and you, and you! Why? Because you deserve to know!


Queen me!
A novella by Enrique Fuentes, Queen of the Downtown Fur

The barnyard chickens looked like they’d been dipped in lumpy chocolate. That’s all I can say because they were all running out of the coup grandma had made out of two old mattresses and an unknown number of soggy Pampers boxes that had been stacked on the back porch since 1978. It was now 1986. Those dirty chickens. They were all covered in mud because my big brother Jaime had done his naughty deed, again. He wanted to make these precious white chickens into Chicanos. Stupid big brother. What did he ever know about identity? I swear on my Lilac Armani power suit that he’ll never learn the difference.

I should have been so glamorous then. I could have helped him out! Jajaja! Oh god those mattresses were as disgusting as my brother’s muddy fingers. Yes honeys they still had the stains. You know, the yellow ones when Jaime pissed on them all summer long back when he was three? Yes, those.

And then there were the cardboard Pampers boxes that Grandma had been stacking up outside for so many years. I remember her building the coup thinking bailing wire was all she needed, and her common sense; and then she would have a coup where she could raise her hoochie chickens. Grandpa, now, his hair was as blue-blue Puerto Rican as you ever saw, because he tried to die it gray. He was so cute when he got mad. He would always get that sexy little crinkle above his nose. You know the kind. He would puff himself up like he were Rock Hudson before we knew he was never a man’s man, and scream, “Mama! You don’t know what you’re doing with these boxes. Throw them all away!”

And then she would yell back, “I’m making a chicken coup, you old goat. You touch them and you’ll wake up tomorrow bald like your great nephew, Jefe! He’s got a head like those little pits on that thing you call a peach tree!”

That was just the way they loved each other. What can you do? You’re growing up in hoochie Delano. You have to love the people you’re with. They’re your family. And don’t you forget it! Now run to me I have a story to tell you about my life. It begins the day after the chicken coup fell apart, the day after all those muddy chickens went running around our yard like crazy farmworkers running from pesticides. Oh, you don’t like what mama makes fun of? Well take two snaps of my fingers because I have seen people run from the poison rain. It’s not nice. It’s as unfashionable as Harrison Ford’s latest date. You ever notice how his taste is as bad as walking into a Chinese food restaurant and ordering Oreo cookies? Double stuff. It’s just that bad. Now let me hold you for one moment because there’s a lot more to this story. It begins when I was eight and then jumps around the way my faboo thoughts do.

It was the day after the muddy chickens ran from my stupid older brother. He looked like a chicken himself he was so sickly with his big buggy eyes and sunken chest, his arms flapping and coated in mud. His chin looks like a beak to this day I swear. My brother Jaime. He’s got a head as big as a cow’s with that chicken beak chin.

“Say moo for me,” I giggled. Like I said, it was the day after he set all the chickens free.

“Leave me alone, Baby Ricky. You’re just going to make fun of me.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone. Say moo for me, Jaime.”

“I said leave me alone. Mama!”

“Oh shush. You don’t know what’s good for you. I’ll leave you alone you muddy little dog.”

“OK. But I’m going outside. Do you want to go with me and play in the orchards, or we can build a fort in the vineyards again?”

“No. I’m going to play GI Joes.”

“You are? With my GI Joes? I want to…”

“No. I don’t want you to play with me. Your big head might get in the way.”

“Mama!”

And so it went until Jaime finally went outside, pouting and complaining about me playing with my toys. I wasn’t worried. I could beat him up and he knew it. He never had the Rosie Perez attitude, not like I acquired at such a young pretty age. My sister Margaret I called her Margarita Mix, Strawberry Margarita Mix when I made her mad, well she had a fashionable assortment of Barbies from the Facts of Life series. You know, that old TV show from the 80s with the great ratings but the horrible reviews? It was some promotion. Don’t ask. This hateful big sister of mine was as non-negotiable as Jaime and never appreciated Baby Ricky’s humor. Because when Jaime came back inside from dancing among the pesticide-laced grape vineyards he started screaming for mama like he’d just been kissed by a gopher snake. “Mama mama mama mama! Look what Baby Ricky’s done!”

“Oh my… godohmygodohmygod what is it, baby girl?!” Mama came running. She was so dramatic. It’s where I get it…

“It’s Jaime screaming, not Strawberry Margarita Mix,” I said. “Jaime just screams like a big-headed girl.” Mama always overreacted. She was like my uncle who always acted like he was dying every time he ate some of mama’s best salsa. Pushover.

“Mama!”

Now you tell me, baby kitties, my hoochie readers, was it so bad that I not only had the GI Joe in Natalie’s best sweater, but Ken dressed conservatively like a Mrs. Garrett? Ken was always so overrated and so was she. I didn’t watch the show for her libido anyways. I watched it for the fashion. Yes, even at a young darling age I wanted to be Blair Warner, because why shouldn’t a girl always get her way? Why shouldn’t’ a girl be so spoiled that little boys like I was wanted to be her? Oh she’s not the most ravishing. I can tell that now. But when I was eight and watching the Facts of Life reruns who else should I have wanted to be? Remember season four, episode 70? It was called ‘Magnificent Obsession’ and was about Blair in love, and Blair almost losing her friends… Whenever I could I would act out the entire episode with Margarita Mixes’ Facts of Life dolls. There was so much dress-up after that crazy chicken coup episode I don’t know what came over me. Maybe there’s omething about what Jaime did that freed me too. In my own way I would act out that fabulous episode 70 and make the girls at the boarding school never be friends again. In fact, they would all hate each other, and while Blair Barbie would make Ken-Mrs. Garrett get on her knees and beg for forgiveness, the rest of the dressed up GI Joes would all give up and go to battle, yelling for their guns while Blair would hold them all and say, “It must be tough going through what you’re going through. It must be hard to be such ugly little soldiers. It must be so difficult to be you and you and you…” Three kisses for Blair. Mama still loves her. There was still a little bit of boy in me then. Although hateful he was…

When I was ten I still looked like I did when I was eight. I swear mama hasn’t changed at all since then. I’m not lying! Kiss me now and keep the secret. OK, I’m lying but girls have to shout or they’re never heard! Let me describe my young self: not yet fashionable, lost in TV-land, staring and staring, in love with Johnny Depp and the Facts of Life, and Quantum Leap—more on Jeffy B. later—and other shows to be named, wishing upon stars like I was some hoochie girl hoping that I would fall in love. But all the while wearing T-shirts and jeans. I still looked like one of the boys though I didn’t play like one.

The world of Delano then was somewhere you would just go and wander. I wandered home like a lost lamb in the big wilderness of agriculture in the evenings from my friend’s house. That was everyday. That was Delano. Your Baby Ricky lived a different life then. I had my friends. Back when I was such a baby I even told my friends they were my ‘catty feline princesses of the daytime growl.’ You know what I mean? You’ve got to growl a little bit if you’re catty enough to hang around a bitch like me. Jajaja! So hateful. I know.

But those were the days me and my catty sisters would prowl on the boys, not because we loved them, but because we were out to make the A-list girls jealous of us B-list girls who only hung with the A-list boys. Are you following? You better follow or I’ll shout. But you can shake it at me later, listen… these girls were the prettiest little Filipino, white, and Chinese beauties you ever saw; the one’s I hung out with were anyways. The rest were all bitches. My girls could fight like mean little mamas; and that’s with crowns of clovers and daisies in their hands; that’s right! That’s what I mean, to love is to fight and to fight is to love. Just ask Paulo. More on him later. I am kissing and telling all here in this book. See, when you grow up in a little town like Delano, it’s just what you learn to do. You fight. Don’t think mama can’t rough you up in the bathroom for touching her sugar. That’s what you should be talking about. Shout it! And don’t go thinking I’m Nutri-sweet either.

But then, what am I doing, this isn’t really the story of me growing up in the Delano Hoochie Barrio when I used to walk down High Street and wonder if Grannie made me her sweetest green tomales for me after school. This is a story of Enrique Fuentes, Queen of the Downtown Fur, Baby Ricky, Hoochie of your Dreams, catty hateful bitch of Bakersfield fashion, and lover of everyone in tight jeans. This is me in the downtown Bakersfield scene, during the brief time I interviewed local celebrities and talked the gossip with my old sisters. Yes, I still talk to those catty girls, only now they’re ‘the catty chatty princesses of the daytime growl’. We’re just a bunch of sisters who like to talk about whatever while showing it off too. Can you hear that? It’s me waving my boa to you and you and you because I’m so tickled I can talk to you; I love that I can rant to you in this long piece of artwork that fabulous Nicky Belardes calls a novella. And why? Because you deserve to hear me roar about all kinds of faboo topics.


Just before the Padre closed I experienced an evening I wanted to forget. When I’m a little bit saucy, and I don’t mean I’m raving like a ravishing Katherine Hepburne screaming at the world; you know where she’s talking faster than a Rototiller and looking sexy at the same time, but a little too drunk off martinis? I love olives, don’t you? They’re like little explosions in my mouth, not quite sweet, and with starry sunshine in the middle... But you know what I mean; when I’m not fully functional like this hoochie mama should be then I just cannot walk in my Guiliana patented leather platforms. I fall all over myself my little sweet babies, and it’s not pretty at all. If it’s winter then I trip and throw my scarf back up over my left shoulder as if I were saying, “How dare that sidewalk trip me! Mama is so offended! Huff!” You would do the same thing. Now run to me because I want to tell you about the night at the piano bar just before it closed.

You remember the piano bar in the Padre? Yes, with the martini tiles along the sidewalk teasing you like Angelina Jolie’s hand on the Nicholas Cage gearshift in the Fast-and-the-baby-hoochie Furious? Those little glasses on the walls are just so tempting. I love them. All of them, even the cracked tiles. So yes, that’s a lovely walk, tripping and falling and still smiling because I’m Enrique and I was fabulously lucky to have parked my Mercedes to walk the downtown scene in my fur growl, Rowr! But that isn’t what you want to hear, is it my baby girls? But let me tell you what I saw. I walked into the old decrepit hallway of the Padre, where the paint is all chipped on the ceiling. It’s just like bad make-up, you never ever put on a generic foundation when you want to build your face into the Sistine Chapel. These boys who design buildings in Bakersfield just never get it. I knew that old man, the owner who for years could be seen wandering through the Padre’s hallways, laughing at the city because he wasn’t going to put some hoochie sprinklers in his big cement hotel. I was just a baby then. I loved him like a dear grandfather and he would always pick up my hankie when it fell. That ravishing old fool. He knew how to be a doll. He would sit lonely nights at the piano, tinkering with it and singing Frank Sinatra in barely a whisper, “I snore in my sleep, I'm always late for dinner, And my table cloth doodling is notorious, Ah but lovely one, keep this matter glorious And love me as I am.” He could sing Frankie I’m telling you. That silly old fool. I’m crying.


stay tuned honie hoochies, mama Ricky will share more!