Papi

by Rita Indiana

  The cigarette smoke, however, doesn’t come from Boque Sopa but from my tía Leysi, who won’t go into Pepe’s apartment when the brothers and sisters from the church are over smacking their palms in the name of Jesus Christ. Tía Leysi stays just outside the threshold of Pepe’s door, where the hallelujahs get lost in the “one more, one more night, one more” coming from the speakers at the Turk’s.

  As soon as the brothers and sisters from church leave, Tía Leysi goes in Pepe’s apartment and Pepe sends out for the first three beers, which they down right there, their rockers going, back and forth and back and forth, until Leysi—the phone in her lap—starts dialing numbers real fast without breaking her long and purple nails and then, with the phone between her shoulder and chin, she proceeds to tell whomever answers that their daughters, sisters, granddaughters, or wives are a bunch of sluts, prostitutes, dykes, and bad seeds. While she’s talking Leysi pokes a finger through the circle she’s made with the thumb and index finger of her other hand. Then, relaxed, she and Pepe take the rockers outside, where someone immediately offers them their next beers, and Moise, Zequi, and I play vitilla in the parking lot, which is pretty much just playing baseball, except that instead of a bat and ball we use a stick and a water-bottle cap.

  I saw when Tía Leysi, who’d just said somebody was a bastard, a cocksucker, and a dyke, rested her head on the back of her rocker and felt the blow. I saw the blow. I felt it too. I saw Boque Sopa come out of the shadows with his cap on backwards as if he were gonna ask if someone could just pour a couple of fingers’ worth of beer in his Carnation can. He lifted the open shears and hit the back of the rocker where Leysi’s head had been resting with one of the blades.

  And Leysi—in her bubblegum stretch pants, and her shiny pink-sequin strapless blouse, her thick socks with pom-pom balls at the ankle, her white patent-leather heels, her fake gold rings, the naughtiest mouth in the neighborhood, and a braid of hair that’s been bleached, ironed, colored, dried, and colored again a thousand times, and which was now a shade that could have passed for blond in a black-and-white movie—felt the blow of Boque Sopa’s shears reflecting the light of the lamppost on Avenida Independencia as they fell right smack between her braid and her head, cutting the long tail of hair from her scalp where it originated and the mocha-colored braid curled like a lizard’s tail in a parking lot, and Tía Leysi in her rocker immediately cringed while the braid took off like a carnival rocket hurling towards the drunks who don’t get out of the way in time, hitting their cheeks, ripping off their ears and fingers, and crashing into chairs, headlights, and spilled foam. Leysi begins to melt and her bubblegum Lycras melt with her, and her sequin strapless blouse (which we call baja-y-mama) also melts with her, until all that’s left of Leysi on the rocker is a puddle that looks like pistachio ice-cream barf while a new Leysi has grown from the braid, this one wearing a skirt that reaches her ankles, a blouse with sleeves to her wrists, and a pair of black loafers. She carries a little packet of pamphlets about the end of the world, and her Bible.

  At Cilí’s house there are so many people the toilet paper only lasts about fifteen minutes, and then a hand emerges from the bathroom door, followed by a real stink of shit, asking for another roll. People come from everywhere, in buses and on trucks, to get a visa, an apartment, a meeting with Papi, and sometimes they stay at Cilí’s indefinitely. Milly makes pillows and cushions with the remnants of a mat someone gave her. She spends all her time on the roof cutting up the mat into smaller and smaller pieces, filling up fabric bags under the sizzling sun. Later, she tests them with her own head, putting the cushions down on the floor of the roof at high noon and falling asleep. I have to go wake her up so she won’t burn to a crisp. Ever since Puchy got a visa and she didn’t, the only thing Milly will do is go down to the grocery, buy herself a packet of Constanzas, and smoke them one by one while she cuts up the mat. Sometimes I help her. I also help her clean the house cuz Leysi is at church praying for a brother who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and China is at the border. Cilí makes sure we’re all fed, even though there’s about ten thousand of us and new people just keep coming, saying, Hey, they’re family, and they tell stories about Vale Juanchi or Vale Apolinai. But Cilí herself doesn’t know who the hell they’re talking about.

  Cilí’s spoon has a way of scooping out exactly the same amount from the pot for everyone. It doesn’t matter how the spoon goes in, everyone gets the same amount of rice and pigeon peas, chicken in wine sauce, green plantains, and then, on top of the plantains, chicken sauce. The only person who gets less is Leysi, cuz she has bleeding ulcers and can only rarely get anything down. Leysi looks skinnier all the time in that huge skirt that’s like a cape. In the morning when she opens her eyes, and even before she brushes her teeth, she grabs her Bible and, using a Paper Mate pen, jots down on a piece of paper the revelations she had during the night. What I see is a skeleton picking up the pen and writing.

  The portion that Cilí doesn’t serve Leysi she gives to China, or more precisely, she saves it in the fridge for whenever China wants it. When Tía Leysi sees the food covered with a second plate in the fridge, she says, Lucifer! Apparently, he lives with us as well. But it’s just that there are so many of us, no one knows who’s who. That’s without counting the twenty or so additional souls who live in China and eat like crazy; they stick their heads out and talk through China while you’re eating, asking if they can have the steak on your plate. It infuriates me. Cilí told me we have to give it to them cuz we can’t act with ill will towards the spirits, that these are beings in China and they walk around inside her as if they were on a bus or elevator. That’s why I eat my steak before I even get to the table, cuz riding a skateboard on an empty stomach is very dangerous and the first thing I do after eating is go to the corner and wait for the other kids, for Soti, for Danny-p, and Batichica, who come with one foot on their skates and the other rowing like an oar. They grab on to the back of the bus and I join them going up Calle Churchill, sucking up all that black smoke the bus farts out its ass, until the driver realizes we’re there and stops the bus. Another driver has let him know we’re back there, and when he gets off the bus he’s carrying a machete to use on us as if we were leeches, but we’ve already hooked on to another bus or a truck or a van that will take us to World on Wheels.

  Besides the skate park, at World on Wheels there’s a skating rink where there are frequent birthday parties. The guest tickets have three square stickers, one says beverage and two say pizza and these are equivalent to three beverages and two pizzas or two ice creams if the birthday kid’s mom bought the right package. We don’t get anything cuz we’re there for another reason but we steal a ticket from a kid in the bathroom or we beg the birthday kid’s mom to please get us a ticket in exchange for a photo with the birthday kid and the first person injured at the skate park.

  Soti, Batichica, and the others get in line at the skate park and go down the ramp one by one, reflecting on the use of safety helmets as they drop headfirst into the cement. I position myself with my skateboard at the end of the line but I cede my turn to whomever comes up, extending my arm and saying, You first, After you. Some of them say: Hey you, lend me your deck and I lend it to them so they can lose some teeth while I stay at the end of the line. Some go down five or six times before I finally step out of line.

  Soti and Batichica aren’t friends of mine at all, and neither is Oche, or Danny-p, but I wait for them behind the jabilla tree at Independencia and Churchill until they show up, pushing their skateboards with one leg and drying their sweat with a Minor Threat or Dead Kennedys T-shirt. They grab on to buses and trucks and leap over walls, stairs, and slide on their tips down the handrails of the new metros, leaping around the building abandoned by Dominicana de Aviación until a watchman takes a shot at them.

  I didn’t get it. No matter how much I tried, I didn’t get it. And then one day, Soti told me: Keep it loose, girlfriend, loose. But I didn’t understand. Then one day I was riding
on the edge of a little wall in a mall parking lot and I pushed the back end of the skateboard with my foot and bent forward in midair and I finally opened my fists and my fingers turned to spaghetti, noodles, a fork spiking spaghetti, zazzz. What I like most is the sound of broken bones when the skateboard lands and all those wheels drop and the trucks and then the sound of all those wheels going round a million miles an hour when we grab on to a bus en route to Bandera Plaza. Sometimes there’s five of us in back and six to seven on each side hanging like oars off that bus, talking a million miles an hour with a million things going on in our heads. Then the mob in the bus pounds our fingers with rocks and hammers so we’ll let go of the windowsills. But sometimes they give us friqui-taquis and quipes, as if we were African animals too close to the jeep during a safari. In this way you can see how many people fit in a bus, inside and out and even underneath, like in the movies, when they hang on to the axel with their teeth.

  Around the corner, almost at Cilí’s house, it’s almost dark and some little girls sitting on a stoop shout at me: You with the long hair, you with the long hair, are you a girl or what? I turn around and lift my skateboard to smash their heads but the girls take off, their flip-flops flip-flopping up the stairs. In the dark I scream out all the skateboard tricks I don’t know how to do yet (noseslide, three-sixty kickflips . . .), and as I say each trick I get bigger and bigger and bigger, until I can look in the window on the fourth floor, which is where those jerks live. They’ve hidden themselves under the bed but I stick my hand in through the window and with one quick knuckle sandwich I decapitate the little jerks’ mom. I pull them out of their hideout and eat their bed and then I eat them, quickly, before China gets here.

  Cilí told me that maybe I had the spirit too so I concentrated really hard to see if that was the case but it just made my head hurt. The spirits come over China now and again, and sometimes, at dawn, we have to get up to laugh at their jokes; sometimes there’s more than one.

  If a spirit has escaped from inside China, then you see her making faces, shaking her head, drooling, eating her own shit, hanging over the balcony half-dressed. The people who loiter out in the parking lot look up and say, Don’t do it, don’t do it. Then they open a sheet like a net, moving left and right depending on China’s signals. When Boque Sopa sighs and says, Man, those spirits sure are mean, then the spirits leave China’s body and run to the transformer on the corner, which explodes and splits the lamppost in two.

  If the spirits are inside China, then you can see them chatting and drinking coffee in little paper cups and waiting until the elevator stops at the right floor. One day I even found Val Kilmer and Barry White and they thought they were on their way to the dentist, who apparently has an office in the same building. When the elevator opens, a spirit comes out and talks through China’s voice. It looks, sniffs, holds on. But sometimes there are five or six of them at a time and so they divvy China up as much as they can: Changó speaks through her mouth; Ogún through her hands; Caonabo through her eyes and so on. When it’s my turn I pretend I’m a spirit, Saint Santiago, the bull and Metresilí—I know them by heart—but the one I like most is Saint Santiago cuz, otherwise, when I’m being Caonabo, I have to drink liters of a golden cream punch Cilí offers me and which Caonabo and China love.

  I have China in me all the time, especially when my fingers turn to spaghetti while I’m doing skateboarding tricks. From the moment I hit the back of the skate and bend in the air and my fingers turn into zazzz, I disappear, I turn into a cloud, I leave my body, and when I land the kids congratulate me cuz I just slid down a five-meter handrail and jumped twelve steps but the only thing I can remember is that I opened my eyes and I was at Cilí’s house and Cilí was squeezing my feet (my tía China’s feet) and saying: Who lives? When I spoke, it was in the voice of Caonabo, which is my voice mixed with China’s voice, and Cilí was asking about the family and I responded and then, since there was no punch left, she brought me a little glass of rum I drank as best I could. I take advantage of the situation and tell her she has to give me more money, that this little girl deserves it.

  When I go home without a scratch on me, Cilí pulls me aside and opens her closet, the one with the door that has a Juan Marichal baseball card tacked on it and a photo of Papi. Stick your hand in there, she says, and I stick my arm in a hole in the ceiling and pull out a bag I hand to Cilí. She extracts a wad of bills and gives me one, two, three hundred pesos. The next day at about seven in the morning I’m waiting for the skateboard shop to open so I can buy a Slayer T-shirt featuring a Nazi helmet with a vampire skull over an inverted pentagram and, below, the tour dates in bloody letters against a black background. What I like most is to hang out with Soti and the kids. It’s not riding my skateboard, not at all, what I like most is hanging out wearing our black Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Sepultura T-shirts with sweat dried in whitish stains on the back and armpits. I wear my hair long so it’ll cover my eyes and the only thing you can see is my mouth, which I twist, so when people see us they say: satanists, shit stinkers, and throw lemons and sour milk cartons at us and sometime even rocks but we don’t say anything, with our T-shirts and twisted mouths, walking together with our skateboards in hand. Sometimes we throw back the rocks and lemons but we never hit them cuz they’ve already fled back to their homes.

  One day Cilí wakes me up and says: Your dad, your dad. I run to the phone at Cilí’s house, which is one of those ancient heavy black things, but Cilí pulls on my wrists and points to China, who’s sitting in the dining room with her hand between her legs like Papi. I ask myself where this is gonna go. There’s Papi with his long black hair, tits like melons, leather sandals, a silver ring on his little finger. I play with his curls and say, Papi, how you’ve changed. Then Papi, in a voice that could be Caonabo mixed with China, Saint Michael mixed with Val Kilmer, the voice of Ozzy Osborne in Spanish, says: Comb your hair. That very night Huchi Lora, the most famous rhymer in the country, is on TV saying he has proof there’s a narco-satanic cult operating in the Dominican Republic, trafficking in virgin blood, devouring fetuses, fist fucking, taking drugs, making human sacrifices, and that to identify those involved all you had to do was look at their T-shirts. That’s when the cameras at Color Visión’s Studio B do a close-up on an Ozzy record cover and Ozzy, like always, has a mouth full of blood.

  Huchi had other evidence: record covers by Judas Priest, Megadeth, and Bob Marley with a marijuana leaf. The camera immediately scoured the criminal body and Freddy Beras-Goico, the host, took live calls from specialists (the head of the civil defensive, Doña Chucha, the spider clown) who recommended prayer and immediate intervention by the authorities. I covered up from head to toe, imagining groups of robed beings stealing babies from hospitals so they can make meat and plantain sandwiches, thinking about Ozzy and the taste of the fake blood he uses in the photos, about pig blood and blood in general. I didn’t sleep a wink. Before the sun was up, I heard them coming up the stairs, the crashing of broken doors, the fucking chaos of their lasers cutting through the darkness in my room. I didn’t understand a thing. They took me from the bed and lit my face with their lasers, then they illuminated my T-shirt and laughed and hit me on the head as they turned the house inside out. All you could hear was wood breaking and the glass shattering on Cilí’s china cabinet. I screamed at Leysi: traitor, asshole, motherfucking bitch. She responded to the demon in me by hitting her head with a Bible, trembling with joy. Milly defended me from the black helmets as much she could but she could only do so much cuz they hit her with flashlights and lasers.

  They shoved me, they cuffed me, they cut my hair right there and then, and they made me wear a yellow linen pleated skirt and blue patent-leather heels. Then they went on with their raid, which lasted forty days and forty nights of mattress tossing, closet emptying, breaking neck and clavicle bones under T-shirts, a poster, an Alpha Blondy keychain. If they find you on the streets wearing a black T-shirt—be it Mötley Crüe, the Misfits, or Sherwin-W
illiams—they confiscate it and throw you in jail for going shirtless in public. They cut your hair and give you a white T-shirt and buzz you right there with an electric razor so that on every corner and bus stop there are bunches of terrified kids wearing white T-shirts, their hair in clumps around their feet. And also piles of T-shirts, records, stripped cassettes, and posters on fire.

  TEN

  The guy from Poison eats a whole box of Froot Loops before he goes on stage so he can get his dick up, so his dick will look bigger in that fuchsia Lycra when he’s singing, his eyes made up and mouth painted as he grips the mic. The girls in the audience climb on each other’s shoulders and lift their T-shirts and show off their little nips so they’ll appear in the video and then stretch their arms like Elastic Man to grab his mic. The whole time he’s singing, his makeup blending with sweat and the girls’ spit and running all the way down to his dick, he’s thinking about the beak on the Froot Loops toucan and he nods his head so hard his ropey hair swings back.