Anyway. After I finished at Hogg, I went to Reagan. That wasn’t too bad because most of my friends (everybody but Elías and Skinny José) passed to the ninth with me. In fact, that was probably my best year in school. They let us eat lunch outside. I got to take art, and our coach in gym was pretty cool. Besides that, I skipped most of the time. But the work was real easy, so I didn’t fail that year. Mostly I just had a good time. I even hooked up with this chick for a while. Her name was Elizabeth. She was fine, too. I found out later she was a slut, but it was okay while it lasted. Like I said, it was a pretty cool year.
I was all happy that summer. I thought tenth grade was going to be cool, too. So, of course, that’s when all the bad stuff happened.
Jesse had started hanging out with a little gang of punks he met at Hogg when I wasn’t there. I mean, these people were total criminals. They would steal cars from their own neighborhoods, then just drive them around and wreck them. They even stole from their own families. Jesse started stealing records from Tina’s room. Then, when she asked him about it, he’d just lie. I think they were on crack, too. They were always stealing money, or stealing something they could sell to get money. It’s one thing to smoke weed, but only First Ward punks smoke crack. I know they were on some shit, because one time Kiki López came to our house looking for Jesse. Kiki didn’t sell weed, but he sold everything else. So I figured either Jesse owed him money, or else he was dealing for him.
I tried to tell Jesse to cut his shit out. He just cussed me out. It was weird, because he used to always want to hang out with me and my friends, and then all of a sudden he was acting like he was too bad-ass for us. Like I said, I tried to talk to him about it. Then I tried beating the crap out of him. Nothing worked.
Like, this one time, me and him were walking downtown. For once, we were getting along okay. I remember we were talking about Bruce Lee. Then, all of a sudden, we saw my mom across the street from us. I grabbed Jesse’s arm so I could pull him into this deli we were in front of. But he thought I was screwing around with him and he pushed me.
Then, I guess my mom saw us because she started coming across the street. Cars were honking at her and stuff. I started walking fast like I didn’t see her, pulling Jesse with me. My mom was right behind us, like she was chasing us. Finally she says, “Edward? Is that you, baby?”
It was too late to play it off anymore, so I just stopped and waited by this fountain for her to catch up. Jesse said, “C’mon, man,” but it was too late and I had to just act cool while she walked up to us.
People were looking at my mom and at us. I told this one dude in a suit, “What the fuck are you staring at, man?” Then they stopped looking.
“Baby, I’ve been trying to find you,” my mom says, all out of breath. Then she starts on her usual thing. She tells us how we have to come with her to New Mexico to get away from my dad, because he’s secretly the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and he’s going to sell us into white slavery. She says she has a job waiting for her there as the manager of a hotel, and that me and Jesse and Tina can all have our own suites, as long as we work as the janitors. I told her okay, that it was a good plan.
Meanwhile, Jesse’s cracking up. I give him a look to tell him to chill out, but he keeps laughing. Then my mom takes a torn-out magazine page from her bag and writes some guy’s name on it, telling me to call this guy at the Houston Chronicle for bus fare when we’re ready to go. I say okay. I take the paper and start to walk away.
But Jesse didn’t walk away with me. He just stood there looking at her. Then he told her, “You are one fucked-up bitch, you know that?”
Man, you have no idea how humiliated I was. I was tripping out. My mom just kept tying up her trash bag like she didn’t hear, and then she picked it up and walked away. And Jesse yelled at her, “Yeah, that’s right, get the fuck out of here, you crazy bitch!”
I didn’t want to make a bigger scene than it already was, so I just didn’t say anything until we had walked all the way to the bayou. Then I told Jesse, “Man, you must have no snap at all. What the hell’s wrong with you, talking to our mom like that?”
He said why did I care how he talked to her, since she was just a crazy bitch. He was really pissing me off. I tried to tell him that even if she was crazy, she couldn’t help it and he shouldn’t talk to her like that. He told me I was fucked in the head and to shut up. I grabbed him and told him not to walk off when I was telling him something. He pushed my hand off his arm, real hard.
That’s when I just couldn’t cope with it anymore and I hit him. We had a fight right there at the Sabine Street Bridge. We probably would have killed each other if it hadn’t been for the cop car coming our way. We saw it, and Jesse jumped up and took off. So I just walked home real slow, looking at the sun go behind the buildings and wondering how I let Jesse turn out the way he did.
Meanwhile, my dad had started getting drunk all the time. He had been fired from the grocery store after he got arrested for DWI and missed two days. So he just stayed at home and watched TV and drank beer. We all just tried to stay away from him. Jesse and me hung out all night, and Tina slept over at her friends’ houses whenever she could.
The weekend after that stuff happened with Jesse, I was at the Utotem playing video games with Elías and Chuy. All of a sudden, I hear my dad saying, “There he is. There’s my son, the neighborhood badass.” I look up and see him with one of the local drunks, some guy everybody calls the Captain. I finished my game, entered my initials for the high score, and told my dad, “What’s up?”
“Hey, bad-ass, why don’t you buy your old man a beer?” He’s already holding one in his hand, and I tell him that. He just turns to the Captain and says, “See? He’s not only a bad ass, he’s a smart-ass, too. See what happens when you have kids?” He laughs. The Captain nods and laughs, too, not knowing what the hell my dad’s talking about.
My dad keeps laughing, louder and louder, real phony, like he’s going to die laughing. Then, suddenly, he stops laughing and gets this real pissed-off look on his face. He starts yelling then. “Do you see what happens when you BUST your ASS, trying to raise your children to be DECENT HUMAN BEINGS?” He throws his bottle of beer at a Corn-Nuts display, and it knocks stuff all over the place and breaks on the floor. “You search for the PERFECT WOMAN to plant your SEED into . . . trying to produce PERFECT, DECENT CHILDREN . . .” The Iranian guy comes out from behind the counter and starts waving his hands, telling us to leave. “And WHAT do you get? This . . . this PIECE of SHIT . . . this NEIGHBORHOOD BAD ASS . . .”
My friends are real cool. They just kept playing Galaga like nothing was happening. The Captain had gone out to the dumpster to hang with the other drunks there. The Iranian was getting really freaked out, so I told my dad I would buy him a beer and made him follow me out the door. He kept on yelling as he handed me his keys and got in the car. By the time we got home, he had chilled out a little and was just talking loud instead of yelling.
I started trying to get him in the house, but he stopped in the middle of the yard and pushed me away. “Get your fucking hands off me!” he says. “I don’t need help from a sorry piece of shit like you.” I just stood there and didn’t say anything. He kept on. “Do you know how ashamed of you I am? Do you know what you are? You’re just a punk. A criminal. You’re worthless. You’re NOTHING.” Then he starts with the laughing again. “Just another neighborhood bad-ass. Come on, bad-ass. Kick my ass. Why don’t you kick your old man’s ass? You know you want to.” He raised his hands like he was a boxer. He took a swing. He fell forward and landed on his face in some old flowers my grandma had planted. I just left him there and started walking back to the store.
About two blocks down from our house, there’s this really nice place, like a little mansion. It’s one of those Victorian kinds of houses with all different colors of wood and a big porch and real big windows. It even has two little dog statues on the top of the steps. Real cool. Nobody lives there. It’s supposed to be
a historical landmark, just for show. I was walking by that house on the way to the store and I saw a pick up parked in front of it. Not one of those funky yellow or orange two-tones like everybody in the neighborhood drives . . . a real nice black Ford with custom paint, dual wheels, an extended cab and everything. I was wondering who would be on our street with a truck like that. I knew it wasn’t one of the fags, because they always drive Saabs or Volkswagen bugs.
I was thinking that whoever it belonged to must have been stupid to leave it there like that, and then the engine started up. I couldn’t see who was in it because the windows were tinted. But then the passenger door opened and a girl got out. It was my sister. I stopped where I was and took out a cigarette, being real casual. She leaned over to kiss whoever was in the driver’s seat. I took a few steps closer and saw it was this faggot-ass white dude, probably from her school. Tina shut the door and went into the yard of the historical house. She stopped on the steps, turned around and waved bye. The guy honked the horn and took off, peeling out real loud just like a fucking punk.
I was halfway over there when Tina looked around and saw me. For a second she looked surprised, then she just looked casual like nothing had happened.
“What the fuck was that?” I told her. She said “What?” like she didn’t know what I was talking about. I told her why was she in that guy’s truck and why did he drop her off here. She said Josh was her friend, and he had taken her to dinner. “Dinner my ass,”
I told her. “Then why were y’all parked here all that time?”
She got this snotty look on her face and told me she didn’t need me getting in her business. I told her she had made it my business when she drove around the neighborhood acting like a slut for everybody to see.
She said I didn’t have any right to talk to her like that because I didn’t know anything. She said I needed to follow her example, to get off drugs and start doing better in school. I told her to shut up, that at least I wasn’t fucking some white guy for money. She got all pissed off. She said for me to shut up, that she was tired of lazy drug addicts telling her what to do when she was the only one in the family who wasn’t a complete waste.
I told her “Fuck you, slut.” Then I spit on her.
That made her seriously mad. She slapped me, but not real hard because I saw it coming. Then I hit her. I just couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t mean to do it hard, but I guess I did because there was blood on her face when I took off. I remember she was crying and yelling, “You stupid punk! You broke my nose! You stupid fucking asshole!”
After that, I lived with Chuy for a while at his dad’s place. His dad had gone to Mexico. I just needed to chill out for a while. Really, I only spent the nights there. During the day I walked around downtown and stuff. I liked to go to the library because they had air conditioning and nice little couches you could sit on while you looked at stuff. Sometimes I went to the Park because they had a lot of gourmet stores and cappuccino places there that would give out free samples. If I woke up early or stayed out real late, I would go to the Seven-Eleven and get some of the donuts they were throwing out from the day before. On Wednesdays, if I was around Tranquility Park, I would go there and watch the old people play checkers and backgammon. They always had coffee and some donated cookies, and they were pretty cool about sharing.
One day I went back to my neighborhood, just to see if anything was going on. I was walking by old Mr. Santos’s house. It was one of those houses that old Mexican people always live in, painted pink or peach with flowers and Virgin Mary’s all over the place. Mr. Santos was sitting there on the porch in one of his white iron chairs. I looked at him and nodded, and he told me, “M’ijo, ven.”
For a second I tripped out. Mr. Santos had never talked to me before. I had never even heard him talk to anybody. I was thinking maybe he was a fag and he was getting me confused with Danny or somebody. But I went through his gate and up to the steps to see what he wanted.
“Hijo, you see that grass?” He pointed to his yard. “I got a lawn mower in the back. I’ll give you ten dollars to mow that grass.”
He only had the kind of mower that you push, with no gas, but that was cool. His yard was real small, so it was easy. After I finished, he told me I could sit on the porch and rest. I thought, aw, man, now the faggot stuff’s going to start. But it didn’t. I just sat there and Mr. Santos started telling me stuff. Not lecturing me, like you would expect, but just stuff about his life and everything. I figured he was just bored living there all by himself and wanted to talk to somebody. So I chilled out for a while and listened. He was kind of religious, but I didn’t mind. All in all, it wasn’t too bad.
The next day I was walking around that area again. Across the street from Mr. Santos’s, Mrs. López was in her yard with her walker. She called out in a little crackly voice, “M’ijo . . . could you come here, please?” So I went.
She said she saw how I did such a good job on Mr. Santos’s yard, and could I please do her yard, too. I said okay. I had to go borrow the mower from Mr. Santos. Her lawn was even smaller than his, and while I mowed it she just scooted around on her walker, scoping out her plants and stuff. When I was finished, she told me, “God bless you, m’ijo.” She only had five dollars, but that was cool.
I was walking around, wondering what I should spend my money on. I was thinking maybe I could get some ham and cheese from the Vietnamese store and take it to the house. Maybe my dad would want some, too.
All of a sudden, this guy I know, Crazy Tony, comes up to me saying “Hey, Eddie, man, got some tickets here. I’ll sell you two Metallica tickets for a hundred each.”
I told him to get his lying ass away from me. He said okay, he’d sell them for fifty. I just laughed. He started begging, saying he really needed the money. So I played along, saying, “All right, man, but all I got is fifteen bucks.” He looked at me for a long time, like he was thinking about it. He was blinking real hard and the side of his mouth kept going up like it does sometimes. Finally he said, “Okay, man, but hurry up before I change my mind.”
I took the money out of my pocket because I wanted to see what he had that he thought was two Metallica tickets. I figured I’d wait until the last minute and then tell him I wanted Air Supply tickets instead. He reached in his pocket and took out . . . Damn! I thought. He took out two Metallica tickets! And not old stubs, either. Real tickets, for the show the next night. I grabbed them, gave him the money, told him thanks, and took off. I was going to go find Chuy and tell him so he could go with me to the concert.
But on the way to Chuy’s dad’s, I saw Jesse and two of his friends going down Washington. I was going to just play it off and not say anything, but he told me “What’s up,” so I stopped.
He was just talking to me real normal, like that stuff with our mom hadn’t happened the other day. I could tell he felt bad about it. I did, too. So all of a sudden I told him that I had two tickets to Metallica and asked him if he wanted to go.
There isn’t a lot to tell after that. We went to the concert. Fifteen minutes into the show, Jesse tried to yank a chain off this white chick’s neck. She started cussing him out and scratching him. He hit her. Then her boyfriend and two of his friends jumped in. What else could I do but jump too? They would have beat the shit out of Jesse. When the security guards got there, everybody had taken off except me and the chick’s boyfriend. I was the only one who got arrested.
I had some prior arrests so I thought they’d try me as an adult. But since I was young and it was mostly just minor stuff, they ended up putting me here.
It’s not too bad. I’m one of the oldest ones, so nobody messes with me. I only have a few months to go. I figure, with Jesse’s record, they would have had to give him the electric chair if they’d caught him. Not really . . . I’m just kidding about that. But he definitely would have gotten a lot longer sentence than I did.
So maybe it’s better this way. I know you’re probably thinking that I should be real pissed off a
t him. At first I was. But now I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I realize that he’s just a kid. A lot of fucked-up shit happened to him in his life, and he just wasn’t old enough to cope with it. So that’s why he’s the way he is. He can’t help it.
Anyway. I got a letter from my dad the other day. He got a new job at some kind of organization. He says he likes it there. It sounds like he’s doing okay. He said Tina got married to some guy from the church. I figure that’s why she hasn’t written. She probably doesn’t want this guy to know she has a brother in jail. I can understand that, so I won’t mess it up for her. My dad didn’t say anything about Jesse, so I’m taking that to mean he’s okay, too. I guess they’re all doing good.
See, like I said . . . I’ve had a lot of time to think in here. I figure, our family just had some bad luck. We were going through a phase or whatever, and I happened to get the worst part of the deal. But that’s all right. Stuff like that happens to people all the time. In a few months I’ll be out of here, and everything will go back to normal, like it used to be.
Meanwhile, I’m just going to kick back for a while. I may as well, right? I’ve been needing a vacation, anyway.
Alexandra and Me
Iknow it’s evil, but we stole the midget. Sorry—the little person. Or is she a dwarf? All I know for sure is that it was Alexandra’s idea. Sure, I said that I wanted to carry the tiny woman around by the waist, holding her high and far from my body like a trophy or a doll, taking her higher and lower on the balls of my feet. But it was Alexandra who wanted to steal her, to finger her tiny barrettes and rings. To question her. To ignore her answers and drape her in the Indian fabric we bought on Interstate 59. And I went along with it. Alexandra is awfully gorgeous in her constant anger, and I can’t deny her anything.
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Page 11