The nurse says,
“This child is only what you make her to be. You have to feed her, love her, take care of her. I will help you by telling you how to do it. But it is your responsibility to keep her healthy. Do you understand me?”
If I die right here it is better than to have the nurse with Josie sick in her arms lookin’ at me like I’m a criminal. I don’t know what she knows about babies. She hates me because I don’t know how Josie grew inside me, don’t know about my boobs dryin’ up, don’t know about food and love the way she says it. But I’m all alone. You can’t hate me for not being like you! We’re all just little babies, what we got in us is the only things we are, she should know that better than me. The nurse pointing fingers at Josie like I put those pimples there to watch my baby suffer.
REYNALDO MATOS
June 14, in the classroom
“Every day People hangin’ by Janey and Chico’s Bar, corner of Leavitt and Potomac. Midsummer’s night, spark that doob bro’, share da wealth. Ladies pass by, you force an industrial-strength scowl, fold your arms a little tighter to coax those skinny arms to pump. Bum a Newport off a girl, engage in light repartee. Sheeit is the operative interjection, motherfucker your all-purpose pronoun.
“Quickening cello refrain in the background, Husky approaches, a 5 mph scythe through your buzz. Thank sweet baby Jesus for your Air Jordans, makes you run down alleys faster and vault fences higher. You’re playin’ the game, again.
“Besides, Husky’s a fat and wheezy ass, like getting chased by Barry White. Adrenaline sweat, panting in a gangway with that lady, the chase breaks up the same old of a summer night. Curse Husky, give the damsel a chivalrous squeeze, easy to imagine yourself as a combination of James Bond, Sir Lancelot and Tubbs.
“Why do you run? Is this some teleplay? A seek the spic chase through the barrio to a techno-synth-tronic soundtrack, pink neon light filtered through the mist of a dry ice machine?
“Why do you run? ’Cucha, the sum total of anything you thought you needed to learn about sociology, psychiatry, biology, criminal justice, or economics: You’re supposed to be in jail.
“You know it and believe it, down to the ground, with every follicle of your gold-tinted, Latin King head.
“The first day of school Awilda questioned my stay with the federal prison system. The 1,106 days I had inside to solve this question only amounted to a perpetual summer blond at my temples. But you wanted an answer. So I tried to give you one. But as I spoke, reflected in your glassy, stoned eyes, all I ever saw was an Uncle Rey-mus, shucking and jiving. Your lack of respect has been unflagging. I didn’t aspire to be Mandela, but a peg higher than Ricky Ricardo was not undeserved.
“On Monday morning, I’ll leave you at the door of a room where for six hours you’ll have a chance to prove that you can achieve something most educators believe impossible—to pass the GED Exam. And nobody on God’s green earth gives a rat’s ass.
“Teacher Tom? His stigmata has blossomed nicely, thank you.
“Me? I’ll report the outcome of the $250,000 my funding sources invested in your education. If five of you pass, they’ll probably name a housing project for me.
“Parents? Mama’s at home with an Advent calendar, opening a little window each morning in hopes that this will be the day you move out of the house.
“Friends? Only a true partner can hone a knife and sink it as deeply into the sensitive flesh of your uppity ego.
“Hermanos? Fat chance after making them look lazy with your be cool stay in school rap for the last nine months.
“Monday morning you better decide what flavor of fear you like best. The familiar, salty sweat in your mouth when crouching in the alley, that blue light revolving from beyond the roof of the garage. Or, the fear of a #2 pencil in your hand, filling in those little holes like a dot to dot of your life, six hours to come up with a puppy dog chasing a red balloon.
“You still want some answers? Okay, bite down on this and give it a good long chew. I don’t have a record. Nope. I am probably one of the few people in this room without any form of criminal record. So how does somebody go down without a conviction? And I ain’t talkin’ about any witness protection, raised ranch on Teepee Drive, shuffling papers for the Post Office, repeating your new name to yourself bid, either.
“No sir, I do not have a criminal record. Takin’ off the shirt here boss in La Tuna, in Rayford, in Marion. My fine young butt with all the bank robbers, drug dealers, kidnappers, and the DC posse. That’s everybody who makes the cut for the federal prison system A-team.
“A Thursday night in August, six years ago, my index finger tracing the Cubs annual descension into the untouchable caste of the NL East on the sports page. In the next room, my mother was unwinding in a hyacinth and honeysuckle bubble bath after a long day at the factory.
“The kitchen phone rang. Normally I wouldn’t have answered it. Drug dealers don’t answer the telephone unless they know who’s on the other end of the line. But, not wanting to disturb my mother, I lifted the receiver.
“A familiar voice boomed the hale ‘Como estás Rey!’ of somebody you walk right by in the street so the motherfucker can’t get his hand in your pocket. I replied, ‘Yeah?’ Then heard a click. Only after I had accidentally set my coffee mug on the panic button did I hang up the receiver. One second too late.
“On particularly hot nights, my mother was in the habit of soaking with an electric fan perched over the tub, reading a juicy novella to moderate the chill. Above my mother’s bathtub is a small dormer window. That night, the metal strips of the Venetian blinds were privacy tilted against the tall, easily climbed pine tree directly outside.
“At 6:33 p.m., one of a twenty-man-strong SWAT team gently poked the barrel of a rifle through those Venetian blinds and pointed it at my mother’s head. She screamed.
“Before I could move, that revolving blue light broke in through every open window. All at once, the doorbell rang, then the telephone rang again, then a hand-held battering ram pounded through the front door. I froze like soon to be road kill in the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler.
“Cops poured through the door, through every window, I heard boots on the roof, walkie-talkie static echoed from the concrete floor of the garage below us. From the phone to the bathroom door is, say, mother-may-I take three giant steps, or mother-may-I take five scissors steps. I didn’t manage a baby step.
“Men wearing black jumpsuits and teardrop shades got me in a full nelson on the floor, face to the pine-scented linoleum, a boot heel to my neck, rifle at my temple. Six more yanked my sudsy mother from the bath and handcuffed her.
“I heard my mother’s sobs ringing off the bathroom tiles. They didn’t even let her put a robe on. After about ten minutes, an ambulance driver wandered in and casually threw a blanket over her like she was a dog in the street that had been hit by a car.
“Eight cops hoisted my body and gave me a sedan chair ride to the van, set me inside like I was some gold vase found buried with Tut. Jostling along to the Logan Square Police Station, which was far enough from Lincoln Park to give the cops home court advantage, we might have been six preachers and a sinner, knee to knee, off to Sunday prayer meeting.
“You ever play this game? I know, that you know, that I know, that you know if I suffer so much as a paper cut en route to the station, Oprah and Donohue will be inviting me along for a televised bonding session with the great American public.
“So I talked shit. I called those cops little girls, I asked them if they were at My Lai, I threatened, cajoled, busted out on, and challenged each one to a fight. I kicked, screamed, spit all over them, and pissed my pants to try and fuck them up.
“But all I drew was sweat. Poker faces staring at three aces. And I fucking well dealt them the fourth.
“Once inside the station I said, ‘You boys fucked it up this time,’ slapping my keys and wallet down on the counter. ‘We’re gonna sell T-shirts with my mug on the front after this one,’
out came the comb from my back pocket. ‘Yessiree bub, the racist cop pitch gonna be a ten-inch dance remix of the greatest hits from 1968. Gonna be some boring press unless you insult my dignity as a human being pretty soon!’
“I reached into my pocket to retrieve what I thought were a few crumpled singletons. No such luck. A creased magazine page, retaining sufficient traces to become exhibit 37B: $1.50 street value’s worth of cocaine. It dropped from my hand onto the counter like I was leaving the desk sergeant a tip.
“Cop smiled at me and said, ‘That was stone fucking stupid, Rey’ For the first time in my life I had to agree with a cop.
“You see, a group of people, at one time a political movement now merely an acid flashback, once worked toward the hazy objective of Freedom for Latin American Peoples, FLAP. I joined this group because I wanted to help dissolve Puerto Rico’s vivisectional relationship with the United States.
“That bit of coke was merely a cipher, H & R Block reason number 23 to fuck with me. I had the most shit hot blanco lawyer; baronial manor on the lake, politically correct, six-figure bonuses, and a blond clerk who couldn’t type. He walked. FLAP, and socio/political causes were one thing. But representing an accused drug dealer was another. Funny coincidence, how as soon as that shit hot lawyer left me, the state dropped the possession charge.
“As FLAP’S PR, PR Director, I was the shill who conned the blanco press into legitimizing our aims. I submitted articles, held a few press conferences, overall, did a lazy fan dance to shield the scars and cellulite of FLAP’S uglier flesh.
“My gangster teeter tottered on syntax and inflection. Yet for years, hovering beyond my rose-tinted lenses, was the fact that language is only a delivery boy for action. My associates at FLAP assumed I knew what they took for granted.
“The Umkhonto We Sizwe arm of FLAP was comprised of the same sort of people with which an aging Don Corleone refused to drink Sambucca. Even Angel considered them dangerously reckless. But I was rebellious, called Angel a sellout for the first time in my life, and threw in my lot with FLAP.
“The morning of my arrest, in an apartment a few hundred yards from this classroom, a FLAP member was constructing a bomb. Muddled logic dictated to portions of our group that a revolution was imminent. All the opiated masses required were a few well-placed Semtex alarm clocks to spark a chain relinquishing reaction.
“Among this bomber’s personal effects was a disarray of post-its, telephone numbers, addresses, guns, explosives, and anarchic literature sufficient enough to prompt even the most cement-headed of chief detectives to hypothesize a violent political conspiracy.
“When the police arrived, they found a singed revolutionary hunched over the toilet. The toilet didn’t work. So he was chewing some documents while shredding others with his bloody stumps.
“What the cops did find in the tissue splattered mess was a recurrence of a theme—the date of August 12, and a place, Northwestern University in Evanston.
“What alarmed the keystone kops was essentially the sum total of all street-level jurisprudence. They discovered references to Puerto Ricans administering our genetic tendency for anti-social behavior where we should not be doing so. Namely, on the campus of an institution of pre-wealth gathering located in an affluent, white community.
“A detail of county troopers, Chicago light infantry, and a few bulletless Barney Fifes from the Evanston force were dispatched. They soon discovered a half dozen FLAP members unloading a van of Uzis, Kalyshnakov rifles, explosives, detonating devices, and, I shit you not, a rocket launcher, into the trunks of some Chevies.
“Back then, my primary source of income often called me to the rich market of Northwestern University. This movement had been recorded numerous times and filed in triplicate somewhere. The sum total of public safety racial theory would assume that a band of Puerto Rican thugs would never surmise that a summer break deserted university campus was the most attractive distribution point for a terrorist arms shipment. Personally, I would have to agree. Publicly, I didn’t.
“Miles of unpatrolled alleyways and thousands of square feet of abandoned warehouse space in Westtown, and those fucking idiots choose a parking lot where brown skin is on a conspicuousness level with a Soviet landing party.
“The severity of this affront drew FBI personnel off of Dunkin’ Donut stools from Gallup to Chagrin Falls. The bureau belched a theory. The only Puerto Rican capable of infiltrating such knowledge of the white domain must be the mastermind. Evanston could have been Salt Lake City for all my gun freak compadres knew. Said mastermind was identified, Reynaldo Matos, the Puerto Rican Patty Hearst.
“So, the fighting young law advocates of the ACLU got a piece of me. A platoon of bearded pipe smokers dressed in corduroy jackets with patches at the elbows. I thought I was being represented by the English Department of NYU.
“As far as my lawyers were concerned, guilt, innocence, and punishment had nothing to do with the law. A court views cases with the same sensibilities of a vacuum-sealed gaggle of fringe-headed, medieval barbers: What they don’t see can’t be proven.
“Which would have been fine if I had blue eyes. Because when my face glared from the pages of the Chicago Tribune I knew that every reader affirmed my guilt and forecasted my punishment rather than assumed my innocence and considered my defense.
“By reading my press clippings I learned that I was the nexus of a drug-financed, Puerto Rican, urban terrorist network bent on forcing a retraction of the Monroe Doctrine by snagging the Dacron sheen of American life as we know it. I was accused as the cocinero responsible for half-baking the mess.
“Contrary to the well-oiled violence machine portrayed in the rushes, FLAP was such a loose group of tow-headed per-ma-students, zombie class war actuaries, and microwaved 1960s militants that there existed very little proof we knew each other, let alone were part of the same organization. Or, that any organization existed within our organization.
“For months, FBI agents combed and parted Chicago in search of a way to prove that we had even met, let alone hatched a plan. They couldn’t, because we hadn’t, and I didn’t! At one point I wished I had done all those things they claimed, the pastele franchising rights alone would’ve set my mother for life.
“Look at it this way. Say Disciple X loses two teeth and four ounces of blood on the corner of Oakley and Grand. You and a homey spark a doob on the corner of Hoyne and Augusta. Equidistant from these two parties, in an alley behind Erie Street, is a tire iron with Disciple X’s blood at one end, your ripe Latin King fingerprint at the other. Can I prove you bashed him?
“I took the fifth. On the day my charges were to be dropped, I giggled up the courthouse steps. In a photograph taken outside, I’m standing beneath an example of Chicago’s inexplicable taste in public sculpture, orange girders are joined in a vortex above my head. I looked as if I’m about to be urinated upon by a massive irradiated grasshopper.
“As the bulb flashed, Boom! The windows of my second floor courtroom rained down in pieces. Three video cameras, eight bug-eyed reporters, twelve ACLU lawyers, and my mother swerved their attention from me to the crater that was supposed to be the vessel of my just acquittal.
“Some fuckhead, in the name of FLAP, and me, bombed the courthouse.
“Fácil! You let the cop strut, accept a perfunctory hassle, say you know nothing about no smashed-up Disciple X, and walk. No, no, some motherfucker believed that there is no way a Puerto Rican man can leave a courtroom via the front door. He believed that I should be in jail.
“Which is the sum total of why I went to jail.
“I know that you call me ‘the preacher’ behind my back. If it were true, I’d be barefoot and repentant, hallelujah for the salvation that is secondary education. Pass the GED and your prayers will be answered. Accept the love of Jesus in your heart and be rewarded with a diploma.
“If you pass the GED Exam, you pass nobody. There won’t be time to check your rear view mirror for the traffic jam of th
e life opened up to you. So why buck the system for bigger headaches?
“Not to prove them wrong, whoever ‘them’ may be. But to prove to yourselves that it can be done, that you are worth more than a bid at Stateville. Because that man who was not on trial persisted in decimating courts of law. He refused to believe that I didn’t belong in jail.
“The same way that a reporter can be jailed for holding the court in contempt by refusing to reveal a source, I was jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury who wanted me to tell them the name of a mad bomber I didn’t know. So, without being convicted, I was remanded to the federal prison system for no longer than thirty-six months. Reynaldito, go stand in the corner for three years.
“As I boarded a bus, a chain joining manacles to leg irons, I momentarily agreed with the idiot that was never going to allow me a hearing in an unoxidized courtroom. I may have been in jail for three years, but I was imprisoned from the second that SWAT team came a courtin’. Sometimes I roll up my sleeve, consider my skin. Maybe I’ve spent thirty-five years in jail?
“Have you ever tried to take a leak while handcuffed? After a twenty-four-hour drive to a prison in New York State, they let all the convicts off the bus and handed me, El Inocente, a bologna sandwich and drove me a bonus sixteen hours to a prison in North Carolina. There, I was allowed a shit, shower, and shave, then back on the road for the two-day trip to La Tuna, in Texas.
“I debussed straight to solitary confinement. Get this. It is legal for a prisoner of conscience, e.g., me, to be jailed for refusing to testify, but some lunkhead of a judge once ruled that it would be cruel and inhuman punishment to keep me in solitary during any part of my three-year stay.
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