“Es una maravilla que Marilyn está cocinando (It’s a miracle that Marilyn is cooking),” she said. Marilyn glanced my way and rolled her eyes as if to say, “oh boy, here we go.” I told Marilyn’s mother that I was hoping not to be poisoned. That got her laughing. Then I struck up a conversation about a can of Puerto Rican coffee she had sitting on the counter. I asked if there was any coffee in it and if she had gotten it from Puerto Rico. This was my way of changing the subject. “Este café se vende en cualquier tienda (This coffee is sold at any store),” she responded. “¿Quieres una taza? (Do you want a cup)?” “Seguro (Sure),” I said.
As it turned out, I found out a few things about Marilyn over dinner that I hadn’t even thought about. The first thing I noticed was that Marilyn was a lousy cook. Basically all she knew how to make was rice; everything else was an adventure. Luckily her mother hung around the kitchen talking to me and having a cup of coffee long enough to make sure Marilyn didn’t burn the house down. Then, as we were eating, I realized how naïve Marilyn was about things that didn’t require extensive research and scientific discussion. She told me that she ate any type of meat except pork—only what she had made for dinner was rice with pork chops. Marilyn knew the cuts of meat she had prepared by their Spanish name, “chuletas,” but she had no clue that pork chops and chuletas were one and the same. “OK, well, I eat one type of pork,” Marilyn laughed in her own defense.
Marilyn’s little sister joined us in the living room after dinner. She was a very attractive seventeen-year-old with a quick wit. She was graduating from high school at the top of her class and was following in Marilyn’s footsteps by going to college right after high school. There was no discussion about where I was from and what my background was. In fact, other than Marilyn’s mother asking me what part of Puerto Rico my family was from, the subject of my life never came up. I was wondering when Marilyn’s mother or sister would ask about our late nights out together, but that never happened. It was as if they went out of their way to make me feel comfortable by not bringing up certain subjects. After a little while Marilyn and I decided to go somewhere where we could have some privacy.
We ended up at my apartment, where we talked about Tish and what was going on in her life. It was the first time Marilyn had agreed to go to my apartment. She seemed very comfortable there. Tish’s parents had gotten serious about her moving out, and she was practically begging Marilyn to move in with her. Marilyn told me that during one discussion they had, the idea of moving out of the city came up. They had decided to move to either San Francisco or New York City. They were going to meet sometime during the week to get their finances together and to start setting dates.
Marilyn’s news saddened me. My mental turmoil about women, which had just about disappeared with Marilyn, suddenly reoccupied my mind. I asked myself why I had such bad luck around women. Here I was thinking that I had finally done everything right—allowing a woman to know me and know everything about me so that I could have a long-lasting loving relationship—just to be abandoned again. I turned to Marilyn and asked why she was abandoning me.
“You’re reading too much into it, Rey, you silly goose. I’m not abandoning you; I want you to come along with us. I wanted to talk to you first before I tell Tish,” she told me, cradling my face. “I don’t like it here in Chicago,” she continued, “but I’ll stay if you don’t go with us.”
I told Marilyn that getting out of Chicago would probably be good for me, but that I didn’t have the freedom to just get up and move that she had. She had a master’s degree that pretty much guaranteed her employment anywhere she went. Me? Well, I had the experience of working at UIC and nothing more. Marilyn assured me that she had thought about that, and that she wanted me to concentrate on going to school and getting the college diploma I wanted so badly. Her words made my face light up with joy. I could not believe that I was being offered financial support while I went to school. I was filled with happiness like I’d never felt before. I immediately agreed to make the move.
The decision to move out of Chicago was a relatively simple one for me to make. Although I had family members who lived in Chicago, I had no family. Marilyn was my only source of encouragement and support. I needed to be with her; I wanted to be wherever she was.
Marilyn was the first woman I had ever had a relationship with where sex wasn’t the most important part of our lives. She was a beautiful and sexy woman, yet I longed for her opinions and insights more than I did her passion. I know now that it was because I was getting doses of something I hadn’t even known existed before.
14 A New Plan
AT THE BEGINNING of April I notified my sister about my plans to leave Chicago. I told her that I wanted to save as much money as possible, and I asked her if I could move in with her so that I wouldn’t have to pay rent. I would, of course, help out with her rent and bills, but that would still allow me to save some money. Her boyfriend readily agreed since this would give him someone to care for his daughter while he went and hung out. My sister had a job and was going to a vocational school to learn computer skills at night, so he had been a full-time babysitter.
I thought about the temptations that being around my sister’s boyfriend would create for me, but took it as a challenge to my willpower. I knew there would be marijuana and alcohol around me at all times, and I knew that the gang lifestyle would be flaunted before me. I challenged myself to overcome those vices and decided that if I couldn’t resist the temptations before me, then I had no right to think about leaving Chicago. My sister agreed to let me move in and we set May 1 as the date.
MARILYN AND I drove to Tish’s house to tell her about my joining the move. Her reaction was not what Marilyn expected. Tish seemed angry that Marilyn had asked me to come along without her knowledge. “That wasn’t the plan,” Tish told Marilyn. “You and I have to talk.” Tish’s words were loud and abrasive. Her attitude took Marilyn by complete surprise. Marilyn asked her to come take a walk along the lakefront with us so they could talk. “Oh, no,” Tish told Marilyn. “This conversation has to be between us, just me and you.”
Marilyn and I left Tish’s house confused about her reaction. My conclusion was that as a bisexual female she must be attracted to Marilyn, and this was why she wanted any move made to be only the two of them. Marilyn didn’t totally dismiss my claim, but said that Tish had absolutely no reason to think of her as anything other than a friend. I personally couldn’t see any other reason for Tish’s attitude, and I teased Marilyn about it. “You know once you go black you won’t come back,” I teased Marilyn. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” she laughed. “I’ll come back.” I teasingly asked her, “so you have given it a thought, huh?” “No, not with Tish,” she answered. Then she dropped a bomb of a question. “You had sex with a man—did it leave you with gay tendencies?”
That question blew my mind. All at once the things I had shared with Marilyn rushed into my head. I knew I didn’t have any desires to be with a man, and I thought I had been clear about why I had done it to begin with, but for some reason I didn’t know how to answer her question. I wondered what other questions Marilyn would ask about information I had entrusted her with. The anxiety I felt at that moment was overwhelming. Because I was unable to answer the question quickly and with conviction, I began to question my own sexuality. Did I in one way or another have gay tendencies, as Marilyn put it? “No, I’m not a fag!” I finally said angrily.
Marilyn took my answer for what it was worth. My tone of voice must have alerted her that she was pursuing a sensitive issue, and in fact she was. I was not at all proud of having had sex with a man, and shuddered at the notion that I ever would have done it had I not been in a desperate situation. The way I finally responded to Marilyn’s question created a silence that lasted until we got back to her place.
At her request, we pulled over and parked before we got to her house. As soon as I turned off the engine, Marilyn reached over and kissed me. I asked her how sh
e felt about Tish’s reaction. She admitted that she was surprised, but she was sure Tish would come around and change her mind. I told her that I would be moving into my sister’s apartment at the end of the month, but only because I wanted to save money for our relocation. I wanted Marilyn to assure me that we would be going through with our plans before I turned in the keys to my apartment. “What if it’s just you and me?” she asked. “I don’t know Tish that well, so it wouldn’t make any difference to me if she joins us or not,” I responded. “OK, then, do what you have to do to get prepared,” Marilyn said. We kissed each other for a long time. And then Marilyn rekindled the sensitive subject.
“Well, do you?” Marilyn asked as she stared out into the streets of Chicago. I watched her, waiting for her to make eye contact, but she never looked my way. It was as if she were waiting for some kind of revelation from me. “No, Marilyn,” I responded. “I have no desire to be with a man. What I did, I did only because I was out on the street, cold, hungry, and half-dead—otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.” Marilyn finally made eye contact with me and kissed me.
After the kiss, Marilyn went on about how she would understand if I was attracted to men. She said that my sexual orientation wasn’t important to her because she would be just as hurt if I ever did her wrong with a man or woman. It wasn’t sexual orientation that mattered, Marilyn pointed out. It was whether or not one was faithful to the person one was with. I didn’t know how to interpret her comments. It crossed my mind that maybe she thought I was lying and that she thought deep down that I was bisexual. Only the fact that she was caressing my face while she talked kept me from blowing up in anger. Then I posed the same question to her.
Marilyn sat back on her seat and sidestepped the question by telling me that I had not answered her. I told her again that had I not been in a desperate situation, I never would have gone through with the act of homosexuality. I told her that, because of that act, I lived in fear of being found positive for the HIV virus. Marilyn took exception to that remark. She used it to lead the conversation away from my question about her sexuality.
For the first time since I met Marilyn, words were coming out of her mouth with anger. She looked me in the eye only at the end of a sentence, and went right into another before I had a chance to respond. She told me it was the drug-induced, unprotected sex that I’d had with promiscuous females that I should be worried about. She informed me about HIV not being a homosexual disease, and that she couldn’t believe how many ignorant people still believed that. “That man was probably the cleanest piece you have ever gotten,” she finally said.
For a long time I sat there quietly, not knowing how to respond to Marilyn’s barrage. I knew she was right about the danger I had put myself into by being so promiscuous with so many women. I wanted to make her understand that I knew she was right, but that she should understand how I felt living with the knowledge that I had had sex with a man. I wanted her to see how the whole notion of having sex with a man made me sick to my stomach. I also wanted her to know that the feeling didn’t come from hatred of homosexuals, it came from anger I had with myself for doing things I didn’t want to do, even if only for survival.
“I think you’re the cleanest piece I’ve ever had,” I said as I started the car and began driving toward Marilyn’s house. Not another word was said. She got out of the car in front of her house and left without ever looking at me. I waited until she was safely inside as I always did. Just as she was walking in, she turned to me and gave me a shy smile as if to tell me that everything was great between us.
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Marilyn and I saw each other sparingly as we allowed the changes to take place that would eventually lead to our departure from Chicago. I moved in with my sister and put my car up for sale. The money from the car would be the bulk of the funds we would use for our move. Marilyn acknowledged that she realized Tish was sexually attracted to her, and therefore Trish was not part of our moving plans. It would be just the two of us, and we were dazzled by the whole idea.
At my sister’s, I slowly began to open a dialogue with her about our lost time together. I asked about what she did in Puerto Rico while I was in Chicago. She painted a picture of having a lot of friends and good times. She told me how she and my other sisters had become part of a group of people that went to parties, to the beaches of the island, and to nearby lakes. She said that they had become very popular and wished that my mother would have stayed there instead of coming back to Chicago. I nodded and smiled like a robot.
As I sat there listening to story after story about how good Puerto Rico had been to my family, my anger grew and grew. The very few times that I started to tell her about my life while they were in paradise I was interrupted by her boyfriend. I didn’t like the guy, or trust him. He represented everything I hated about my life and wanted to change. He, on the hand, was perfectly comfortable being a gangbanging, drug-using bum who was supported by a woman. I talked very little to him and often heard him complain to my sister about my animosity toward him. She always shut him up by reminding him of the financial assistance I represented.
Marilyn and I did research to figure out where we wanted to move. We both agreed that the Bay Area of San Francisco would be a great place to go, but the unemployment rate and high cost of living there made that plan unaffordable for us. Our second choice, New York City, presented the same challenges. Although we knew that Marilyn would probably be able to find gainful employment, thanks to her master’s degree, I did not want to be financially dependent on her. Marilyn was sweet in saying that it was OK as long as I was going to school, but I still declined. She understood that I was grappling with having wasted most of my life on the streets and that I felt that I had too much to make up for.
We concluded that we needed to find a place that would allow both of us to be employed. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to come close to making the type of money Marilyn would make, and I was OK with that as long as I had a fair chance to contribute. With that in mind, we started to do research on cities based on cost of living and unemployment rates. We decided on Dallas, Texas, as the place we would call home. When we looked through a copy of the Dallas newspaper at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, we found dozens of job ads offering decent pay that asked for no experience other than being bilingual (Spanish/English). We made plans to leave for Dallas at the beginning of June.
I sold my car and notified my coworkers at UIC about my plans to resign my position. Marilyn and I spent our remaining days in the city trying to tie up loose ends and getting to know each other still more deeply. We often walked the lakefront for hours, or wandered around Lakeview. Marilyn told me that her family worried about our plans, and I told her about my anger in discovering that my family seemed to have lived in joy and happiness without me.
On the same day I resigned my position at UIC and accompanied Marilyn to purchase two one-way Amtrak tickets to Dallas, I finally asked my sister about her feelings regarding our upbringing. I asked her if she remembered how Pedro would beat me, and how our mother would relieve her anger toward him by beating me more. I asked her if she remembered how our mother’s way of dealing with Pedro pulling a gun on me was slapping me and scratching my neck. Then I asked if they ever thought about me or talked about me while they were having fun in Puerto Rico. My sister’s recollection of our upbringing was much different than my own. She became angry.
“Mom protected us!” she yelled. “Don’t you go blaming her for screwing up your own fuckin’ life!” Her face turned red in anger. Her boyfriend, sensing a violent confrontation, positioned himself to step between us but didn’t say a word. “I don’t know how she protected you but she protected me by hitting me with an extension cord!” I yelled in response. “She loved me so much that she sent me to live in the home of a fuckin’ drug dealer. She protected me so well that to this day she hasn’t bothered to ask how my life was while all of you were in Puerto Rico running around with all your fuckin’ little frien
ds!” I screamed in anger before she had a chance to say anything.
My sister suddenly came at me with her hands balled into fists. I took a couple of steps back and allowed her boyfriend to step between us and grab her. “Let me go! That ungrateful son of a bitch doesn’t deserve my mother! You fuckin’ asshole! After all Mom went through to make sure we were all OK, this is the kind of shit you come up with?” my sister screamed as her boyfriend released her. “I was an abused child! Maybe you weren’t, but I was!” I stomped my right foot on the floor as if I were kicking someone to death. “I just want to know why me, why fuckin’ me!” I yelled as I began crying uncontrollably. My sister was now in tears also. She looked directly into my eyes. For the first and only time in my life I felt that my thoughts were totally in sync with those of one of my sisters. Unfortunately, that feeling only lasted a couple of seconds. “Don’t blame Mom, don’t blame Mom,” my sister said in a low voice as she made her way toward her bedroom, still crying. I turned and headed for the streets.
IT WAS A warm May afternoon in Chicago. It was fifteen miles to Marilyn’s from my sister’s, but I decided to walk anyway. The danger of being recognized as I walked in and out of ganginfested streets and past corners where known rivals to the Latin Kings gathered didn’t even cross my mind. Gang signs were flashed from cars and from guys standing on the sidewalk as I walked by, but no action was taken. I guess they didn’t find a man walking down the street in tears a threat. I made it to Marilyn’s and sat on the steps with my head in my hands, trying to collect myself before I knocked on the door. Before I could do that, Marilyn came out. We went for a walk.
We walked up the street to North Avenue and hopped on the bus to the lakefront. My face was flushed from crying. Not many words were spoken on the bus ride because I didn’t want to break down again. In the time it took us to get to the lakefront I calmed down and got my emotions and thoughts together enough to be able to talk about what I was feeling without crying again.
Once a King, Always a King: The Unmaking of a Latin King Page 17