That Cuban diner, for ropa vieja, and two guys rushed in and barricaded the door. They had guns, and it all happened at your back, then gun toter #1 said to gun toter #2, “Do you think they’ll shoot through the door?” I grabbed you by the arm and pulled you beneath the table with me. After a profuse sweat and no gunfire, they left. While you were inconvenienced by a bruised shin, I was fighting for control of my sphincter.
Jessica reaches beneath the stool to retrieve her pumps. “You’ve got time Rey. Let’s have coffee.” She stands and straightens her skirt.
“You runnin’ something here Jess or what?”
But she’s through the curtains, out to my expectant tailor, where she dumps my pinned, soaped suit in a crumpled mass on the sales counter.
“Because it’s Saturday, and teachers don’t teach on Saturday,” she responds.
“Who told you I’m teaching?”
The tailor assures her, not me, that the suit will be ready tomorrow morning. She tells him to deliver it to my mother’s address.
“Rey, darling, the quality of inconspicousness has always been absent from your portfolio.”
She forges toward a door labeled Staff Only. I stumble after her. I feel like a stray hairball caught up in her whirlwind motion, never getting close enough to glom on to her static charged skirt. My innate capacity for ruthless rationalization quickly justifies hairball status; I remember the grease-dotted notes wadded in my pocket. Over breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s Diner & Coffee-teria, where double-yolked eggs are served with hash browns and sausage out of the frying pan in which they were cooked, thus ensuring no milligram of cholesterol goes unconsumed, I outlined the next stage of my life for the lucky spelling bee winners. Sure, a chat with Jessica over coffee could bring a more objective tone to those times. Once again, I get wood.
“’Cucha, there’s an espresso bar in the mall,” I offer.
She fingers a white silk carnation pinned above the green and white “Lana” nameplate on her lapel. Lana? I don’t ask.
“Management Rey. Can’t be seen consuming upon the premises. Staff might stop believing the rumors about cybernetics.”
A freight elevator arrives and we step onboard, either side of a mobile garment rack laden with fake furs, a green, jump-suited lifer, Dino embroidered over his left nipple, capably manning it. Jessica instructs me from beyond the wall of polymer.
“We’ll have to go to my place.”
“What?”
“For coffee Rey.”
Dino shifts his weight from his left Dr. Scholl’s pillow insole to the right.
“Your place?”
“Yes, my habitat Rey. My lair, my cave, my web, my crib; the place I store shoes, linens, and diaphragm.”
Dino makes a first knuckle insertion of pinkie into left ear canal, prompting a reflex action of tongue to upper lip. I avert my eyes before given the chance to examine his findings. The doors open and Dino, after a finger wipe on his jump suit, pushes the garment rack from the elevator. The doors close and we descend alone.
“Isn’t this turning into a bit of a production number just for a cup of coffee?” I naively ask.
“I have an apartment next door, in the Hancock—”
“Naturally.”
“We don’t even have to go outside. There’s a passage through the basement.”
Why then, after five years of forcing myself not to contact the only woman I’ve ever loved, am I chasing her glen plaid butt through a warren of up-market retail, fifty feet below an ice-encrusted Chestnut Street?
Into another, this time Dino-free, freight elevator, and we emerge in a small yet tastefully marbled foyer with access to a set of elevators traveling exclusively to the residential floors.
“Why didn’t we just walk across the street like any normal human beings?”
Jessica depresses a glowing number 87. “And ruin my shoes in the snow?”
Ten seconds later we have ascended 900 feet, though my head likens the sensation to a half gainer into a vat of Malt-o-Meal. Jessica opens one of the four doors on the hallway; I’ve seen more doors on landings in three flats. We enter a foyer leading to a long, L-shaped living/dining/kitchen area with a predominantly eastward and some northward vantages. The lake, to the best of my knowledge, should be out there, but we are inside a low lying cloud, like two fireflies in a Mason jar wrapped by cotton wool. Jessica tried to de-1970s the place with a fifteen-minute rush through the Early American furniture department at uncle Marsh’s store, but the apartment has glass exterior walls and mirrored interior walls so she hasn’t quite laid to rest its glitzy spirit. It’s immaculate, nary a magazine, sock, or dirty mug to suggest any living takes place. Her shoulder blades disappear into a bedroom and I flop onto a sofa which feels as if I’m its first piece of ass.
Funny, gut fucking splitting, how every successive gangster got us closer to the bile sac of the beast. Nobody was more surprised than Angel when Bobo and I actually graduated from high school. Not that he didn’t believe we could. Did he? It probably just never occurred to him. College was my bright idea, originally. Bobo wanted a trade, should have sent the little girl to electrician’s school. What? And deny the blanco public of Chicago its best running joke on my account?
I recall casually mentioning that I wanted to go to college and three hours later I was with six other academically ambivalent Kings staking a claim to an abandoned two-flat owned by and within the campus of St. Francis University. We christened it the Center for Latin American Studies of St. Francis University, CLASSFU, and the next day Angel told the university president that he had come up with a grant from the city for our tuition. All the university had to do was donate and maintain the building as a way of encouraging Puerto Rican students from the local community to attend St. Francis. At that point in time about 500 black and gold warriors just happened to be mau-mauing the leaders of tomorrow on a quadrangle outside El Presidente’s window. Motherfucker reached for his quill and made his mark. God things were simple back then.
I saw a baseball game, Angel saw money. I saw a degree, Angel saw even more money. That guy, like he sent away for X-ray glasses they used to advertise in the back of comic books, double your money back guarantee to see the color of a girl’s bra through her clothes. Jessica’s bra, on the other hand, appears to be a come hither tope, a strap visible through the loose weave of the sweater she’s just changed into.
“Midmorning wardrobe change?” I sneer.
“I can’t bear to be at home and wear clothes for work.”
Money. It never even occurred to me that so much of it actually existed until I went to St. Francis. Maybe Angel did read too many Richie Rich comics during his formative years. Then again, maybe I should have switched over from the Archies. Jessica fetches a tray of coffee—Marshall Field’s jam, napkins, crockery—I bet if I turn over the croissant there will be a green stamp on the bottom, “Give the Lady what she wants!” She curls her legs beneath her ass and sits on the opposite end of the couch.
“Meet any pleasant people in jail?” she asks.
But, when smiling at that university president over his desk, would I have pulled the plug? Even if I knew that the only outcome of my foray into higher education is sitting before me stirring a frothy cup of Gourmet Café Suisse?
“Not me. A dime I went in, a dime I came out.”
“A dime?” She asks.
“All kinds of folks in jail. Some are dimes, others nickels, they say Miss Sadie worked himself all the way up to a Kennedy half dollar.”
“That’s sick.”
“That’s jail.”
Somewhere in that deal Angel got city hall to issue him a car. He looked like Serpico, all eyes and hair, cruising around town in a Ford Galaxy, black walls, AM radio, the same make detectives were issued, complete with a sticker advertising his support for the policeman’s benevolent fund and a revolving cherry for the dash. Angel did 50 mph down side streets. He parked on the sidewalk. When he got a flat tire he called the Depa
rtment of Streets and Sanitation for a crew of guys making $15 an hour, time and a half overtime and double-time on Sundays, to come by the house and change it for him. Poverty pimp, trade in the platform shoes and super fly hat for a Guayabera, Hagar double knits, and a genuine imitation cowhide briefcase to hold your two packs of Vantage and personal telephone directory.
“I have to tell my students about St. Francis.”
Jessica shrugs. “Start with the first $1 million in public grants and end with the last $1 million in public grants,” she snaps.
“It wasn’t $1 million.”
Well, almost. On the back of an envelope affixed with a magnet to our fridge door, Angel scrawled his shopping list for anagram soup. An elixir to cure the ills of Lincoln Park, more potent than Ma Liebowitz’s chicken broth for whatever ails the body politic. Angel never even had a checking account before then.
LACP: The Latin American Community Patrol.
Every street level lieutenant on the city payroll, King cops polishing stolen apples on leather jacket sleeves. No more beat officers on Halsted Street. No more squad cars trawling through the hood.
SELY: Summer Employment for Latino Youth.
Full employment for the Kings, 750 summer internships at two bucks over minimum wage, tax-free.
CLASSFU: Center for Latin American Studies of St. Francis University.
Do-it-yourself major for precorporate Kings. Tuition, room and board for students, plus a salary for the chair of a department of one. We imported an alcoholic poet from San Juan who added color to the faculty wine and cheese parties.
PRALG: Puerto Rican Advocacy and Liaison Group.
Lourdes and her Bustelo-swilling, pillow-assed girlfriends poring over the social services manuals, parting the sea of bureaucracy and guiding their fertile sisters to the promised land by squeezing every last shekel out of public aid.
CRH: Committee for Racial Harmony.
Bobo’s cadre of half-baked school kids. Their mission: to chain themselves to the front doors of Illinois Gas, Commonwealth Edison, Illinois Bell, etc., until a few PRs were given a locker and a pension plan.
Angel annually changed the letterhead and logo for each organization. His father-in-law, Paco the printer, kicked back a fortune for all the new business.
The eye at the peak of the pyramid was Angel’s. Executive Director of all he surveyed, his car parked illegally next to the Picasso on Daley Plaza while he got his shoes shined by an Uncle Tom on the ground floor of city hall.
“Take off your coat Rey?”
“I’m fine.”
“The way I see it you have a choice. You could blame it all on either Trotsky or OPEC,” Jessica says.
A truly chilling vision of myself, passing out Socialist Workers Party leaflets in front of the factory gates like some dickhead who wandered off the set of Dr. Zhivago, flutters from my brain’s closed file of Candid Camera outtakes.
“You know we were set up Jess.”
“By OPEC?”
And we laugh the baby boomer chuckle, gee weren’t we cute back then …
A flash point’s worth of Marxist ideology is most dangerous when introduced to the stagnant minds of college students who have never had to pay the rent on time. Top off this cocktail with three bong hits and a cup of herbal tea for breakfast every morning and the thumbnail sketch of what I should portray as myself to the students would be complete.
Why is Jessica always so accommodating? Her green eyes energetically take in my moist features as if she had dropped a coin into a nickelodeon. But these images aren’t streaming through your mind, are they? Sure, once in a while you recount them at a cocktail party to garner a little shock value. While your friends were graduating from Pine Manor you were sleeping with a spic at CLASSFU. Where’s your guilt? Not a worry line etched into that Lancome-tended face.
Fascist, that was my word. Might as well have paraded through campus wearing a sandwich board that read, “If you don’t agree with me you are a fascist.” How could I have taken myself so seriously? As if the weekly splintering of political groups on campus had any bearing on the price of beans and rice. The Stalinist debate was never resolved, Jessica and I Jack and Jilled down an ideological ravine, and as all my uncles got laid off from the last full-time jobs any Puerto Rican men would have, Angel fiddled to the tune of his $1 million a year of public funds. By my junior year, CLASSFU was down to me and Bobo, nobody else could afford to keep from helping to support their families. But by that time they couldn’t even find jobs baking bread.
Then, one fine day that crystal bullet hit us right between the eyes. Three cold Miller shorties in our fists, Guayaberas draped over our naked torsos, my shades reflecting Labor Day sun off Angel’s, reflecting off Bobo’s, while we malingered on Dayton Street.
We knew whitey enjoyed living beside spies as much as he enjoyed living beside niggers. Only blancos we ever saw in the hood were the aged and infirm, the kind that the game warden picks off to trim the herd and keep them from dying in front of the tourists.
The lentil heads had been running incense and candle shops near us for years. But they lived in apartments even we wouldn’t live in and tie-dye ain’t exactly an indicator of imminent gentrification. But when that newlywed couple, blancos no older than Angel, bought a house on Dayton Street where two Puerto Rican families had lived, although we could see the mushroom cloud on the horizon, we had no idea that money was to be made in personalized concrete bunkers.
I guess the New York Giants must have felt the same way when the Chicago Bears left their cleats in the locker room and tiptoed onto an ice-covered field in sneakers for the second half of the championship game. Hey, you can’t do that, it’s never been done before! So? Because you, you two blancos moving onto Dayton Street, you’re supposed to be thirty miles away in Dupage County.
Those fucking white people, before they even put up curtains, were slow dancing in the front room to a Carpenters song. We saw our world slipping away, no more open hydrants, no more working on the car in the street all night … Cold beer turned to castor oil in my mouth.
“What will you tell them Rey?”
“Oh … That we took a $1 million a year in hush money while passively watching the manufacturing industry drain away. Then, when city hall got us good and hooked on government junk, the jefes threatened to take it away unless we got back in our circus caravans and moved to Westtown so the blancos could have Lincoln Park.”
“Circus caravans?”
“Nevermind Jess …”
“And you believe all that?” She giggles.
“That’s what happened.”
“You’re sure?”
“That’s the truth Jessica.”
“That’s America, Rey.”
And every tax-paying Croat laughed down his sleeve when the advertising account managers lined up to bid for grandma’s old place in Lincoln Park. The one where the spies were always late with the rent and now I don’t have to drive down to that sewer once a month to pick up a wad of greasy bills. The silence of Angel’s beeper became deafening, there was nobody at city hall to call. Because ever since that first visit to the fifth floor, Niagara Falls, Niagara Falls … The Mayor, the subsequent mayor, and every mutton-chopped flunky from the Department of Health and Human Services had peered into Angel’s gangstering eyes and read the machinations of my brother’s feeble, febrile mind as if they were ripping pages from a Teletype machine. If we give this kid unlimited access to French fries and chocolate malteds, sooner or later he’s gonna get zits. And without a single alabaster finger on the money, when the fickle finger of fate stopped spinning and pointed to the blamee, there would only be Angel’s pigmented features. Historical contextualization was on their side, after all, didn’t those bago fucking Indians sell Manhattan for the equivalent of a bump and grab outside Woolworth’s?
“Tell your students, Rev, that when the writing was on the wall, every one of Angel’s projects kicked back money so Angel could finance his seat on
Chicago’s cocaine exchange.”
“Jessica …”
“Then tell them how you and I set up the most lucrative network of distribution on all the college campuses in northern Illinois.”
“It’s not that simple!”
“Angel’s alternative economy. If the system disenfranchises Puerto Ricans, Puerto Ricans will establish their own economy free of the system. How did we rationalize that one Rey? Yes, I remember, poisoning the fruit of the bourgeoisie.”
“And you wonder why I haven’t called.”
“Oh Rey … Put it behind you. If it wasn’t you or Angel it just would’ve been somebody else.”
“But it was me. It was Angel.”
So what am I to tell the kids? That thanks to me they’ve been stuffing their noses for years? And Jessica, right here, lips dangerously accessible. I suppose it’s easier to love somebody with whom you share no true common denominator; resort to prejudice whenever faith kicks you in the cajones.
“You must be hungry Rey. You’re always hungry.”
“I had a big breakfast.”
“I was thinking of dinner.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“What time?”
“No, stay.”
Make way for the new premature ejaculation poster boy.
MANO MATOS
March 18, in the classroom
Can’t seem to stay awake … Must try and concentrate … Got to regain strength …
One fluorescent light in this classroom won’t make up its mind. And it’s on top of me. Kryptonite green beams blinking on and off on my head, coughing, like it’s running on fumes.
Battle-scarred and exhausted. The fight never ends. Sometimes I wonder what life is like for the average American. But that’s a life I’ll never know. When I swore to avenge my father’s death I was …
I can’t take this shit no more. Plop goes a drop, the sweat pours from my forehead to the algebra book on my desk. Cheap print blurs, numbers vanish, fading away like a movie caught in the projector. I’m meeelting, I’m meeelting!
A Nation of Amor Page 11