A Nation of Amor

by Christopher McConnell

  A Nation of Amor

  Christopher McConnell

  New York

  For Mike and Donna

  MARIZA DEL RIOS

  July 24, in a Chevy

  Mano says,

  “Give it up Mariza. You know I love you.”

  Everything looks the same, but maybe this time could be different? Mano says he loves me. I push his fingers away from the top button of my jeans. So hard to breathe with him on top of me, knees between my legs, my head smooshed against the car door. Like this other time when it be Mama’s man with his knees between my legs, so I close my eyes again and listen for the difference …

  Mano says,

  “I love you, you know I love you Mariza.”

  Mano was the first time I ever saw a guy with his eyes goin’ up and down me and I felt I could want that too. Mano has a car and we cut school, didn’t even tell Mama when they kicked me out of Clemente. Hangin’ with Mano day after day, just the two of us, passin’ by the lake or tall partyin’ at his crib, kickin’ it back to Mano for real. Then he showed me his crowns.

  A Matos boy, stone Latin King gangster, but Mano never be about some crazy ass shit with guns and hangin’ tall on the corner, starin’ down cars and beatin’ his chest at Folks. One night we cruised ’til morning, Mano teaching me to scope the hood like I never seen it before, all slow and quiet with the sun comin’ up, and you could even hear the birds chirping for once. Mano turned down the jams and we didn’t even talk any shit while he drove me all around to see his tags. Every crown in Westtown be Mano’s, his hands covered with black and gold spray paint, never able to wash them clean. Mano’s trigger finger glowed gold on the steering wheel.

  He told me why he tags in the morning, to get the rising sunlight. We climbed up the steel legs of the El tracks to a brick wall right in the face of Division Street, the sun comin’ up over the skyscrapers at the lake like a big spotlight on us. We be on stage for the world, all of Westtown sleepin’ instead of watchin’ us. I carried some of the spray paint cans for him.

  Then I figured on why Mano never fights, those little balls shakin’ steel on steel be the only weapon he ever needs to use, the slow hiss of the spray paint can instead of the bang of a gun. He laid down a black curtain over the brick, darker than his eyes, then the gold, a three-pointed crown, King Love, with little baby angels holding the words up at each end, Amor de Los Reyes. And underneath arms and fists, crossed left over right, a tag so big I couldn’t believe how little, skinny Mano could paint it, a crown with enough room for us to move in and live, at the bottom a golden heart, Mano and Mariza 4 ever. Back then, Mano never said he loved me, but any people passing by Division Street will know that he does …

  Mano says,

  “You ain’t a little girl no more Mariza.”

  Now it even sounds the same! If I don’t open my eyes I won’t be able to remember this without it being like at home in my bedroom before I knew Mano. Mama’s still got that man from when I first started high school at Clemente last year, he talked shit like all the others, complainin’ that me and my sister were gettin’ too expensive with public aid and sometimes a part-time job. They fought many times about that. When I started high school Mama looked at me hard.

  Mama said,

  “You come straight home from school and stay in the house.”

  Why? I didn’t have to do that when I was in grade school? And her man be at home, like always, waitin’ on me. So I went to our room in back and got my books out, looking in them like I was doing homework. He came in anyway, tried to close the door but couldn’t with all kinds of clothes piled up on the door knob. I be chillin’, but scared underneath, then he kicked the clothes on the floor so he could slam the door.

  Mama’s man said,

  “Mariza always be a good girl doin’ her homework.”

  Feelin’ him behind my chair with beer breath all over me like I smelled many times before. I felt his body against the back of the chair, almost on top of me, so I bent down over my books to keep from touchin’ any part of him.

  Mama’s man said,

  “You been studyin’ books all day Mariza. Why don’t you take a rest?”

  Couldn’t help from lettin’ him see me shake. He grabbed me by my arms and lifted me up and turned me to face him. Then stepped back so his body ain’t touchin’ me, just his hands all over, on my waist, down over my butt feelin’ it around, fingers over the button of my jeans, then in between my legs squeezin’ me there. My eyes shut tight, tryin’ to be somewhere else, begging, Dios mío, I be someplace else. But those hands wouldn’t stop, up to my boobs and that hurt, so I stepped away, over by the door.

  Mama’s man said,

  “You ain’t such a little girl no more Mariza.”

  Friendly and smiling, but before the words was done the grin fell off his face to leave only yellow teeth crunched together. He mashed his hand on my nose and threw me on the bed, his thing on top of my stomach goin’ up and down, knees between my legs, fingers at the top of my pants. He had to get off of me for a second to undo my jeans so I bent my legs both at once, kicked his chest and knocked him back on the bed. The door slammed outside and I couldn’t even scream because if it be Mama I got some even taller heartache. Footsteps in the kitchen, I pulled my pants up runnin’ away, but no person, not even a baby, could run across that little room. I remember running as fast as I could with him on the end of the bed, bolting scared like that door was blocks away, but in a closed room with no place to go and it seemed like forever to get out. Then only to see not Mama but my little sister, which was still bad because I didn’t want nobody to see me. I knew it was no good and you don’t tell people shit, just look like you don’t understand and hope they’ll let it be with some yellin’ and not any face slappin’…

  Mano says,

  “I love you Mariza.”

  This must be different, so happy to be on my own now with Mano takin’ care of everything. My eyes lookin’ back at him the way he wants me to, but still, the same scared inside my head, always tryin’ to imagine slippin’ with Mano bein’ different from Mama’s man on top of me. This time there is something right about it. It’s love.

  Mano says,

  “You know I love you, you know I love you.”

  Not like a punk on the street, but alone with me, without pride, opening himself so that his lips are soft, begging like a child for it. The more I won’t give it up the nicer he is. It’s love because he isn’t getting mad, he’s kissing me even more.

  Mano says,

  “I wanna be with you always.”

  The times before, Mano was like a dog on top of me, I’d turn away and laugh my laugh to myself, knowin’ I got something to make him crazy. Then there was this big spot on his pants, like a child even more with the stuff comin’ out in his drawers. Happy and calm for a while, I got to like it when he rubbed it on top of me with the spot. So when he passed by I just took off my shirt and let him rub it until he was done and then we’d go to the drive-in with everybody, real nice and friendly. But it don’t work like that no more and if I open my eyes what will I see? I even let him tell his friends I was givin’ it up, I don’t care about them talkin’ shit, Mano and me still together.

  Mano says,

  “Let’s get married and always be together.”

  The two of us could be together in love all the time with our own car. A little baby, that I can love all for my own, who will love only me back, a love I’ll never have to share, that won’t come with orders, a love where I won’t always feel like I’m paying back an IOU. I’ll have a stroller, to wake up early in the morning and go to the park, go shopping and visiting through the day to show off the baby. No more men looking at me on the street and grabbin
g at it. Because I will have my baby, my baby to love me back, like all the other women, my man driving me to places, a little house of our own, no beatings from Mama and out of that shit with her man. Nobody will tell us what to do anymore. Mano will fight for me and never do me dirt, married for better or worse until death and with babies. That’s what men be willing to give up for this, now Mano’s gonna give it up for real too. So I make my legs straight and he slips my pants down, it hurts, but that’s love. It’s love now with him inside me so I love this feeling, it’s all mine, the blood means we both gave it up. Whose blood is coming out, is it him or me?

  Mano says,

  “I love you Mariza.”

  When Mama found out about her man in my room she stripped me naked and beat me with a piece of race car track from my little cousin’s toy box.

  Mama said,

  “Putita!”

  Whap on my head.

  Mama said,

  “Slutty bitch!”

  Slap on my butt.

  Mama said,

  “You stay away from mens!”

  I never did bleed from that beating, woke up late at night stinging all over. In the bathroom mirror my skin was red and purple, blood underneath and not comin’ out. When she hit me on the head it was on my hair so you couldn’t see no marks. I laughed, a toy, and I laughed again but it hurt when my skin shook, a toy that my little cousin runs his cars on with spit drooling down his baby face.

  My little cousin Tito said,

  “Brooom, brooom, brooom …”

  His hand on top of his toy car. I touched those marks and it hurt but that’s how you find what’s the worst and what only looks bad. My hands were all over me rubbing the marks, looked like somebody else’s hands, big and white like a man’s hands, grabbing it between my legs, the pain squeezed hard. I had it all too. Trying to think, give it up and make it hurt, see it in my eyes, men wanting to stick it in my body, smiling and hoping, men’s faces and voices, always yellin’ at me on the street, wanting to see me scared. Mama wanted to beat a fear into me so I would see men as all cold gangsters. Some man in a car drives by, slows his cruise to offer me money or he wants to party, don’t even know my name, I could be his daughter or cousin or sister, only that I have it to give up. Ain’t such a little girl no more. When I was done makin’ it hurt I cried into the sink, raised my head, through my tangled hair, I saw mama’s face in the mirror …

  Mano says,

  “We’ll have our own things and nobody to tell us what to do. When I get that Dodge fixed I’ll sell it for some more money.”

  REYNALDO MATOS

  September 5, at Roberto Clemente High School

  Our high school is named after a baseball player, a mother-fucking professional athlete. Not even a politician, and this is Chicago! Then again, Roberto Clemente was the greatest right fielder of all time. Sure … Anyway, other kids attend high schools named after composers or scholars. In West-town, Puerto Ricans go to a school named after a Pittsburgh Pirate. What’s next? Hector “Macho” Comacho Community College?

  There it goes, the three o’clock bell signals an all clear for the blanco teachers. Urban pioneers rush for the Corollas in the staff parking lot as if they are catching the last helicopter off the embassy roof. In less than ten minutes, every Conostoga will be hitched, then nose from within the barbed wire security fence and beat hell outta Fort Clemente. Wagon Train Ho!

  Gangster and ye shall receive. To Gangster, the verb: to achieve ends by threatening the use of force. My sole vestige of the civil rights movement is an inalienable privilege to gangster via the community demand; traditionally orchestrated by chaining compadres to the doors of public institutions and raving for the mini-cams, thereby inducing hordes of City bureaucrats to reach for their checkbooks. Those were the days. Now, a guy can’t even work up a good lather. After only cursory protestations, a guidance counselor at Clemente agreed, undoubtedly against his better judgement, to stay after school and grant me an audience this afternoon.

  Over 1,000 kids begin every freshman class and the guidance and placement department of Roberto Clemente Public High School consists of four teachers working overtime for $800 a year. Same pay for coaching the sophomore wrestling team. By graduation, I figure that same freshman class must weigh in at about 200 kids; a scant few will receive anything that even remotely resembles college guidance or placement. These counselors are misnamed, should call them guidance ghouls; all they really do is formally withdraw those 800 dropouts from school.

  Look at that! A glass and steel visitation on the corner of Division Street and Western Boulevard that we call school. One mile west of the other motherfucking alien spaceships that landed on this town while I was in jail. But this ice blue, reflecting behemoth went off course and touched down amidst a bunch of crazy Puerto Ricans. We promptly attacked it with spray paint cans and baseball bats.

  On the planning board those blanco idiots at city hall thought they were doing Westtown some favor by bestowing us this architectural wonder. Big, bright, ideas; like the glass skywalk that passes over Division Street so kids can get from classes to the gym without obstructing traffic. The day Clemente opened, the Latin Kings staged a public V-Out for the benefit of the motorists passing beneath them. Gang culture has its own code of justice. You don’t wanna be a King no more? V-Out. Latin Kings style translates into a handgun shot through the fat of your upper arm. You’ll live, be a tad self-conscious about wearing a dago-T from then on, but you’ll live. After that V-Out the city council funded a feasibility study for the installation of metal detectors at entrances to public high schools. Qué drama, Latin Kings style.

  Actually, I could make a good case for the erection of this school as merely an out-of-court settlement in return for the cops killing my brother Angel during the riots. And my other brother, fucking Bobo Matos, the first Puerto Rican alderman in Chicago. Bobo looked so slick when this high school was built. Never mind the fact that Westtown had the most overcrowded classrooms in the city and was due a new school. Oh no, this was Alderman Bobo’s pork chop for the community. I bet the motherfucker promised the mayor we wouldn’t try to kill any more cops. Hecho de hecho.

  That first autumn, every pane of glass fell. Latin Kings were putting brick shots up to the third floor windows. Then, the blancos wised up and installed unbreakable plexiglass. Kids discovered that with a key they could scratch gang tags into the tough plastic. Now, five years on, I can’t see through the opaque film left from a generation of Latin Kings tags.

  Could be Anytown USA, classes are over, kids are out on the street; girls sharing cigarettes at the bus stop, boys in idling cars lined up in the no parking zones. At the Division Street entrance I make out a silhouette beyond the frosty, gang scarred window. I pound my fist against a handleless metal door and an amplified, blanco voice cracks from a cheap intercom. Goddamm security, might as well be back in jail.

  “Name?”

  “I’m Reynaldo Matos from El Cuarto Año Alternative High School. I have an appointment with Mr. Smiley.”

  Motherfucker takes his time. Kids laugh and point at me from the street.

  “Do you have any identification?”

  I pull a card from my wallet.

  “Hey asshole, you want me to read this to you or what?”

  “Slip it under the door,” the voice orders.

  Except that in Anytown USA the spinster schoolmarm asks you to take a load off and stokes up the tea and cookies. A minute later the latch snaps, doors blow open and some muscleman school narc yanks me inside. He quickly shuts the door behind me, a big metal bolt clicking into the door jam.

  This pig weighs about 250 pounds and can bench press twice that. He has a beeper, check that, two beepers and a walkie-talkie. He hands me a clipboard.

  “Sign in,” he says.

  “You want my shoelaces and belt?”

  I make for the escalators and notice the blood. Must have been some fight. The down escalator is stopped. Blood, collected from w
here the steps fold into the floor, is smeared along the black belted handrail. At the top of the escalator are two kids, Latin Kings dressed in black and gold, cleaning the handrail with buckets and rags. Behind the narc is a cluster of more Latin Kings.

  Looks like the Kings are telling the freshman class exactly what time it is. Anybody with an enterprising notion has been clearly informed of just who controls the local drug turf. Maybe I could get a research grant to explain how street gangs in Chicago are delineated on superpower, cold war terms? There’s Folks, the Disciples and all of their allied gangs, and there’s People, the Latin Kings and all of their allied gangs. Clemente is a People school. A Folk cousin by marriage fails the first week of school, Latin Kings security clearance. You’re an aberration, waiting for an accident, soon to be an example.

  I rise on the stairs and the narc bellows at the kids. “Move!”

  As if rehearsed, they walk straight for the red puddle and form a circle around it.

  “Drop!” The narc orders.

  Five of the kids fall into a push-up position, eyes a foot above the blood. All but one. He poses, throwin’ down a representation for the Kings: arms folded left over right, thumb, index finger and pinky extended from his fist to form the three-pronged crown. Dios mío, it’s my fucking nephew, Mano, one of Angel’s boys.

  Synchronized, the others count out repetitions, each time they descend dotting their noses in the blood. The narc grabs Mano by the back of the neck and forces him to a crouch.

  The escalator is going up and I’m trying to run down, every step forward I’m carried back. From his knees, Mano tries to get his fists at the narc’s face, swinging at the hulk like something out of a cartoon. None of his punches land.

  My feets fail me, the transition from treadmill to lino is too abrupt. By the time I get up Mano is cuffed and the narc is barking into his walkie-talkie. I rush the pig, but then I stop, frozen, and Mano is staring up at me.

  The others have quit the push-ups, puffing and panting, wiping the blood from their faces with shirt sleeves. They look so small, like tots, blood dripping from their noses instead of snot, smears like tears on hard cheeks. The stares of twelve unblinking brown eyes will me to clip the narc. I don’t swing and Mano drops his head. No crimson tears of bloody snot on his face, but his hands are cuffed behind his back.