A Nation of Amor

by Christopher McConnell

  “I just wanna talk to the lady. Party colors, right bro’?”

  Countdown, five four three two one. To be continued …

  Saturday night and it’s good to be the King!

  REYNALDO MATOS

  December 15, in the classroom

  “The godfather of all gangsters, Big Al, did not earn notoriety vis-à-vis an unorthodox Saint Valentine’s Day party thrown in a garage on Wells Street. Nope. It was a five feet tall, woolly-headed, Macedonian King who pioneered the concept of walking tall, carrying a big motherfucking stick, and talking volumes of shit. Capone was a five-and-dime revivalist in comparison.

  “Don’t buy the company line! Houghton Mifflin educated us to believe that even Christ’s physical make-up included blond roots and foreskin. Alexander the Great, another brother commonly misrepresented in Aryan splendor, gangstered an empire that to this day is revered by blancos whose forefathers, at the time, lived in plague-incubating hovels and worshipped shrubs.

  “When I was at school being indoctrinated, my eldest brother bequeathed to me a legacy of mediocre academia upon which to hedge bets on my grade point average. Angel obsessively saved all of his assignments from school, the years he chose to attend that is, providing a lending library of plagiarism for Bobo and me. Slim pickings, but the one A he ever received was for a research report he wrote on Alexander the Great. At age 11, I dusted it off, rescrawled it, and breezed through seventh grade social studies.

  “The premise was simple enough to hold even Angel’s limited attention span. Alexander didn’t mind fighting, he just preferred gangstering. Every caftaned, nose-ringed potentate with leasing rights over a flea-bitten patch of Asia Minor was sooner or later approached by this sawed-off monarch, a few dozen legions scratching and farting behind him. Big Al always arrived with a shoe box full of unfenced baubles to bestow upon his twitchy host. Then, over a mug of Lapsang-Suchong, Al talked biz.

  “Life expectancy 2,000 years ago averaged less than the time needed for the human body to mature sexual organs. Factor in royal inflation, a King like Al might see thirty years of life before him, a veritable made-for-TV-movie in empire-building terms. Therefore, long, drawn-out battles were prohibitive. Al offered a deal: Join the empire, hold onto your little principality, you’ll be middle management now but in a larger corporation, good fringe benefits and a top-notch health plan. Or, I’m going to have to wage war, plunder the kingdom, rape, pillage, etc. The caftaned motherfucker reached for his peacock quill and made his mark. And yea, this method pocketed a sizable chunk of what currently comprises the wealthiest oil-producing territory on earth.”

  So I broke my own rule. Mano kept the class from the next installment by his now customary crap-out on the spelling test. Well, I’d rather be rewarding than appeasing you jovenes; pride is cut like an Italian suit, pity hangs off me like a forced pant and jacket combo from the Salvation Army. Smiley was right, my market share runneth over. So what do I do? Mr. Long Range Planning enrolls 30 students expecting to whittle down to 20 soldiers who will pass the GED Exam. During a revolution, discipline is primary. If the motherfucker turns yellow before going over the top, take him out and shoot him in front of the others. Claro, you all show up, do your homework, run the last two blocks to make first period on time … So why the fuck aren’t any of you learning? I’m looking for some cream to rise and every time I open the refrigerator door I get curdled yogurt, one-half inch of misty water on the surface.

  I can’t even blame it on that punk Stolarz. Out of five subject areas, me, the Renaissance Man, chooses to teach English, history and writing skills. No grades, no report cards, keep it nice and simple, so the only criteria for assessing progress will be scores on dummy GED Exams. Almost halfway into the school year and in my classes damn near every one of you ingrates is scoring lower than when you walked through the door. The more I tell you about being Puerto Rican, the more you act like a bunch of straight up Puerto Ricans!

  Last week, Richie Colón wrote an essay on Trujillo that would’ve made John Foster Dulles’s prostrate implode, but the score on his GED pretest belies that he signed his name and played tic-tac-toe on the multiple-choice answer grid.

  How can I justify what I know you are learning when I can’t get you to prove it on the pretests? Softly, softly … I made you a supportive, Puerto Rican home, open door to hang with only impotent Uncle Rey puttering around. Nancy Ramos asked me whether she could stay on for another year if she doesn’t pass the test first time around. They actually like it here. Why not? Plenty of time to concentrate on their hormones. Two girls already dropped out because they’re pregnant. I’ll soon be put back inside for operating an unlicensed fertility clinic.

  Every one of you could breeze through high school, now, I’m giving you a school to breeze through and Richie’s got a strand of Christmas garland around his head while he laughingly compares his failing test score to Awilda’s. It was simple in jail, like when somebody got done while on parole and came back. Pass by the punk and say something like, ‘you must like guys, huh?’ So fuck me if I ain’t like a warden now, state legislature pencil necks pushing my buttons to get some people through the doors, but none of the inmates want any trim.

  “Many of the original Latin Kings got jobs, as in paid, legal employment, with the Gonnella Bread factory up near Ashland and Addison, not far from Wrigley Field. The big, bad bakers had to ride the Halsted bus every day dressed all in white with little paper caps in their pockets. Every gang for sixteen blocks busted out on them. Nobody knew them as the Latin Kings, everybody called them the Dayton Street Dough Boys, a moniker which strikes fear in nobody’s heart. Problema, every gangbanger along that sixteen-block bus ride turned out to be a homeboy. The Kings discovered that Dayton Street was merely the southernmost outpost of the Puerto Rican tribe.

  “Now, the Latin Kings were started to protect Puerto Ricans, not fight them. Angel turned to Big Al for an answer to this dilemma. Why risk a busted head? Angel reread his own book report while rubbing his palms together going, oh boy oh boy oh boy!

  “The first night of Angel’s big Macedonian campaign, my brother led the no longer doughy but transformed to natty dozen one block north to Armitage Street. They looked like a Puerto Rican bowling team. Only the lack of a nomer along the lines of Los Pin Spinners embroidered on the backs of their shirts saved them from complete ignominy. They wore black, billowing, 100 percent acetate blousons with gold short sleeves, black sans-a-belts, and, driving home the ensemble, twelve pairs of patent leather, Guinea fence climbers ringing on the pavement.

  “The first gang to the north was the Yugoslavia of Lincoln Park. An amalgam of leftovers from the Insane Unknowns, Midget Princes, and Spanish Popes, unable to agree on a name for the strongly federalist union, compromise arose in the form of the Insane Midget Popes.

  “Spoil-less bakers possess little in the way of honoraria for the street corner potentate they seek to usurp. Angel had Bobo and me. The treasure Big Al offered diverted his prey’s attention and got Al’s sandal in the door. Because my mother worked the night shift and Angel couldn’t afford a babysitter, Bobo and I played the beard. Angel reckoned that even somebody dozy enough to lead the Insane Midget Popes would flinch at the prospect of attacking anyone, even Angel dressed as Rita Moreno’s cousin, who approached with two chicos in tow. My pre-adolescent innocence got Angel’s Cuban heel in the door.

  “But Angel, unlike Alexander the Great, had no violent credibility to precede him and few veterans of plunder in the ranks behind him. So, without provocation, and technically still baby-sitting, Angel blind-sided the leader of the Insane Midget Popes with a brass-knuckled fist, christening an unprovoked guerrilla attack to ruthlessly kick each mentally deviant, growth-impaired, infallible ass on Armitage Street. At the post-mortem, Angel looked down at the eight panting, bleeding bodies.

  “Angel said, ‘We spreadin’ King Love. Get up! Ain’t no Insane Midget whatevers … We all gonna be People. A Nation of Amor. Puerto Ricans
don’t fight Puerto Ricans no more.’ The next day he marched them down to the AMF store and they donned the Black and Gold.

  “The following night Angel made me wear short pants and suck on a Tootsie Pop. He approached the Eagles with twenty black and gold Earl Anthonys behind him. Angel shuffled up and put his arm around the leader of the Eagles as if he were trying to coax a girl into the back seat of a Pontiac. His renown quickly spread, when Angel whispered in this guy’s ear, ‘A Nation of Amor.’ He might as well have been speaking to every gang up and down Halsted Street, Angel said, “Puerto Ricans don’t fight Puerto Ricans no more.”

  “We played dominoes all the way up Halsted, increasing our legions, hopelessly outnumbering our dwindling foes. It all ended at Sheridan Road, where the lake cuts into the city. As far as we were concerned the flat earth stopped there, the point at which Puerto Ricans no longer lived. A Nation of Amor stretched for twenty-two blocks north from our apartment and eight blocks west on a line from Halsted Street, three square miles of Chicago. For me, victory was only as sweet as the bribe Angel dangled as I followed him around all summer. He promised me that as soon as Wrigley Field was within the Nation of Amor, he’d take me to see Roberto Clemente play right field against the Cubs. I was 11, Angel was 17 years old.

  “Fiesta! The Pittsburgh Pirates are in town. Puerto Rican men phone in sick to work in numbers which could only be explained by an outbreak of salmonella found solely in bottles of Bacardi. By 9 a.m. a snake of shirtless torsos wound for two blocks down Sheffield Avenue, all clamoring for bleacher seats, Angel, Bobo, Tío Ramón, Tío Geraldo, and myself in attendance. It was the Caribbean equivalent of a homecoming game at Notre Dame. Some tear away kid you hadn’t seen because his family sentenced him back to PR for a year, he was gonna be there standin’ in line. A cousin you thought was still in jail, he’d be there. And all the old men carrying drums or timbales to beat on when Clemente made a play.

  “Inside, Bobo and I ran to save seats. Entering Wrigley Field in the sunshine is still a holy experience. Outside, the hood, same old same old, but once you turned the corner at the top of the ramp the sun hit you, glaring off that eye-jolting expanse of more real grass than I’d ever seen. Past the vending stands that smelled of tromped-down peanut shells and stale beer, mustard-smeared hot dog wrappers swirling around, guys selling programs, hats, felt pennants that fell off the doll rods by the fourth inning and became a wooden epee when the game got dull. Thousands of Puerto Rican men streaming through the turnstiles and every one of us would rather refuse a date with Iris Chacón before sitting in the left field bleachers. You see, Clemente played right field.

  “Bobo and I laid down flat on the bench seats, mixing bowl haircut to Keds soles, making certain our short bodies reserved enough room for the asses of Angel and our gold-toothed uncles. When they finally joined us, we sprang up to let the old men spread their shirts on the bench, anxiously waiting for them to slip us a quarter for a hot dog, some popcorn, or if we were lucky, a little oval carton of ice cream to scarf with a wooden spoon before it melted.

  “When Clement came to bat; reverence. We were there to watch the man work and nobody, especially a compadre, impedes a man from making a living. That day he smacked a ball right toward us, sky high, the drum beating and flag waving were frenzied. I lunged toward the front rows hoping to at least get beaned by a ball Clemente hit. Angel fished me out of the catwalk, shook me back to life, slapped a buck in my hand, socked me in the arm, and sent me for some more ice cream and a beer for tío.

  “Back in right field I felt as if I could see everything Angel had fought for, sitting with a hot dog in one hand and a Puerto Rican flag in the other, watching the great American pastime. I felt at home and in my place within the community of Chicago. Like we made something, owned something. Yellow hard-hatted construction workers pressed against grubby hippies in the left field bleachers. Business men in the box seats wore shirt sleeves and loosened ties, pale foreheads blistering in the afternoon sun. Up a few rows, gramps with the kids in from the suburbs, he had grown up in the city, packed the niños in the station wagon for the game, and gave himself an extra hour on the way home to show’em around the old neighborhood and tell embarrassing stories about their parents. All along the rim, in grandstand seats which were cheap, but not as rowdy as the bleachers, were the Polackos from the Northwest side, who took the Irving Park bus in from Milwaukee Avenue, hairy guys in dago-Ts keeping an immaculate scorecard. Down the row, the boys who pregamed at Murphy’s bar, ruddy Irishmen with farmer’s tans, buying beers two at a time.”

  And where the fuck do I live now? Above a garage with my mother, sleeping in the same room where I first beat off to an Ohio Players album cover, on Dayton Street, where last week the vacant lot across the street sold for $250,000. Mother doesn’t like Westtown. Can I blame her? She refuses to visit Bobo and his family, only invites them around often enough to dole out Christmas and birthday presents. She never speaks of Lourdes, Mano, or Flaco, smokes two packs of Benson & Hedges a day, has played pinochle with the same crones from the factory twice a week for the past 15 years. When I come home at night she feeds me and stares, her black, assured eyes challenging me, “Reynaldito! What do you care so much for people who act like animales?”

  If God above ever shared the secret of successfully debating my mother then the task of producing twenty GEDs would worry me about as much as choosing socks in the morning. All the Puerto Rican community has ever done for mother is to standardize her lone parenthood, make a political prostitute of one son, an ex-con of another, a corpse of the last. In ten days she’ll give me a new suit for Christmas, proper executive attire. She wants for nothing, the factory has a good pension plan, an amiable old doctor and his family renovated her apartment and haven’t raised the rent since 1975. “Vete,” she told me, “go live with your people and your community in Westtown.” That was three months ago.

  When I looked around that standing room only crowd within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, I wanted to believe that through the Latin Kings we had finally earned our place. Years later, in jail, it dawned on me that there weren’t any black people in the stands, and us, we only attended when Clemente was in town.

  Our place, sure. And mother would say, “Check your own underpants first. You see any white people selling drugs to the children at Clemente?” Right before me, Mano masquerades through his last months of what was ever only a semblance of a childhood. When my mother heard she was to be a great-grandma she shrugged and turned on the Wheel of Fortune. Mano can barely read, Mariza can count on at least one more baby before she can legally buy beer. I’ve got about as much chance of getting Mano to pass the GED as he has of sleeping in his own bed after his eighteenth birthday.

  When we reviewed Mano’s first GED pretest score, Stolarz shot me a look. Yeah, conozco pero, what can I do? Tell the kid he’s finished? Tell his PO he’s back on the street? Here? At Rey’s Last Chance Resort? What time do I have for pride, the poor kid’s girlfriend is five months along.

  “Angel wasn’t as interested in the game as much as the parking. Few parking lots grace the area around the ball park, and from April through September thousands of blanco suburbanites drove to Wrigley Field and parked the Delta 88 in front of an apartment building where Puerto Rican families lived, on a street within a Nation of Amor.

  “With the same zeal the Latin Kings would later apply to the distribution of narcotics, Angel figured that the local inhabitants had dibbies on the streets over those who drove in a few times each summer for games.

  “In a business move that would please Ray Kroc down to his corns, Angel franchised a parking consortium. On his bedroom wall was the map, all the territories around Wrigley Field equally divided among People gangs. As the sons of Puerto Rican car owners, the task was simple, sublime, profitable, and, brace yourselves, technically legal.

  “At 7 a.m. on the morning of every home game, People lieutenants sent forth People soldiers to every car-owning Puert
o Rican household and paid said owners $5 to park on the street. When the blancos showed up for the game, People sergeants leased local garage, alley and yard space to the nervous, non-Spanish-speaking pilgrims. Each gang had an equal amount of territory, each gang paid Angel a straight tariff of $50 per game for the privilege of franchising his personal power base. Meanwhile, Angel and the original Latin Kings got in line at 6 o’clock and bought all the day of game tickets they could afford. Bobo and I were in charge of the underage recruits who scalped the tickets. Too young to be arrested and guarded by the watchful, protective eyes of our black and gold older brothers, we safely peddled our merchandise. During an August home stand against the Cardinals, Angel personally netted over $1,000. Twenty years ago that was serious cash.

  “If you pay your staff well, give management autonomy and responsibility, if standing in line for a couple of hours with your buddies earns you more bread than slaving over an oven baking it, Simon and Shuster will soon be banging down your door for the rights to your business autobiography. But, rather than sycophantic agents, Angel started attracting cops. Pero, this is Chicago, not Danville, and the police saw Angel as somebody who was making their job easier.

  “Huh? Believe it. You see, a cop doesn’t want to risk the pension and the boat on Fox Lake running some spic down a dark alley in Lincoln Park. And since the Latin Kings founded a Nation of Amor, everybody be gettin’ along jest fahnnn. For the first time in any pig’s long memory, Lincoln Park was bereft of violence. We had disinfected our toilet of a neighborhood for them. Besides, there weren’t any black or Hispanic cops back then, and although plenty of neighborhoods brimmed with color, the police force felt no compulsion to serve and protect the pigmented. So, as our business grew, the police cast a benign, ice blue Boer eye on the cordoned off township we had formed within the city.