An Island Like You

by Judith Ortiz Cofer

  “We’ve applied for a permit from the city to build a stage on the lot behind your building, the fenced-in area. Those of you who want to do a little manual labor — you’ll be paid, of course — show up with your signed permission form tomorrow at 8:30 A.M. sharp. That’s all, folks.”

  Hanging on to Matoa’s arm, Yolanda announced that she wasn’t gonna do no physical labor, but she was interested in trying out for a starring role in the play. What she was born to do, is what she was really saying.

  “These boys give me the creeps. I ain’t staying around them for no miserable few bucks,” Matoa said, and he and Luis walked off, followed by some of the other members of the Tiburones.

  “Dontcha wanna be in the play?” Yolanda screeched at him and Luis, who were already running down the street high-kicking lids off garbage cans like crazy ninjas.

  In the end the only ones left in front of Corazon’s Café holding our permission slips in our hands were Arturo, Yolanda, and me. The others just threw them in the trash. Even Yolanda, with her big dream of being a star, was having some doubts. But, even though she and I weren’t best friends anymore, not since the shoplifting episode that had caused me grief not so long ago, I told her she should at least try it. I mean, acting comes natural to her — we’ve all seen her put on “shows” for teachers that get her out of a mess almost every time. She might as well put it to good use for once.

  I hung out after they all left. I wanted to get a closer look at these guys, see if they were for real, especially Rick Sanchez. For all his strutting tonight, there was a kind of shyness about him.

  They came out together, but it was Rick who went over to the trash can and picked up a handful of the permission forms the others had thrown out. Then he smiled at me.

  “Is yours filed in here too?”

  “No.”

  “I guess there’s not much interest in our project, is there?”

  “Let’s not give up so easily, Rick.” Martini put his hand on Rick’s shoulder. I could see how discouraged Rick felt from the way he kept looking at the papers strewn all around the garbage. Martini bent down and started picking them up. He was obviously trying hard to cheer Rick up. I helped him stuff them in the trash can.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “Doris.”

  “Well, Doris. What do you think our chances are?”

  He looked directly at me when he asked the question, and paused in what he was doing. Rick came closer. I felt that somehow my answer was important to these guys.

  “I think people need time to think about this. Some of my friends and I like the idea of a theater group. But …”

  I didn’t know exactly how to put it so it wouldn’t hurt their feelings, that I didn’t think many parents would go for two obviously gay guys organizing activities for teenagers. Rick nodded, looking pointedly at Martini, as if he had expected to hear what I couldn’t bring myself to say.

  “We understand, Doris. Your parents will say no, your teachers will say no, everyone here will have objections to us. I just thought we could get something going … you know. I grew up in this barrio.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess in a way that makes it even worse, right? The barrio doesn’t forget and the barrio doesn’t always forgive.”

  “What do you have to be forgiven for, Ricky? Being yourself?” Martini smiled at Rick.

  “For being different,” Rick said, turning to me. “You’ve heard my story, right, Doris? I’m sure they’ve been talking.”

  “Don’t answer that, Doris. Rick and I would like some good news for a change,” Martini said. “So, what do you think we should do about the theater group?”

  “Come back in a week,” I answered, surprising myself by how sure of myself I sounded. I suddenly wanted to find out for myself whether being different was really such a crime in our barrio. Were people so narrow-minded that they wouldn’t accept one of their own back just because he didn’t live his life as they did?

  So I went home and asked my mother to sign the paper without going into too much detail about it. But my father grabbed it out of her hands and lit it with his cigarette. We watched it burn in his ashtray. He said, “I don’t wanna hear no more about it,” before walking out of the living room. My mother came and sat next to me. “He’s worried about you, Doris. You know Sanchez is sick, don’t you?”

  “Everybody knows, Mami. He put it in writing, remember? Rick’s not trying to hide anything. He just wants to do something good for us.”

  “You heard your father. I don’t wanna talk anymore about this Rick Sanchez.”

  In spite of my parents’ objections, or maybe because I thought it was unfair of them to reject Rick when they didn’t even really know him, I felt a need to take his side. I guess I could identify with him as an outsider. The barrio wanted him to disappear — something I knew how to do: fading into the background was a talent I’d also developed. So I called Arturo. I told him I planned to talk to Rick and Martini some more, see if I could get at least my mother to come around. He said his mother had practically gotten hysterical when he asked her to sign the form. She had threatened to call the police if she saw Arturo hanging out with Sanchez and his boyfriend. But he wasn’t giving up either. He said Yolanda’s mother had signed the paper without even looking at it. Her mother was always in the clouds anyway, or talking to the dead at some barrio séance. So Yolanda got to do pretty much what she wanted. That meant at least three of us would be involved in the project.

  In a week they were back. I ran down when I saw the BMW parked in front of the lot. Martini was standing at the gate watching Rick, who was talking on a public phone outside Mario’s drugstore. He seemed to be having an argument. When Martini saw me, he shook his head in Rick’s direction.

  “What happened?”

  “The man who owns the lot now says that he can’t let us use it. He’s gotten some threatening phone calls.” Martini spoke softly, but I could tell he was upset by how he kept glancing at Rick. “This meant a lot to him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, Doris, maybe you can keep some things going. What do you think about trying to do a play yourselves?” Martini’s voice sounded a little strange when he said this. Like he was trying real hard not to sound desperate.

  “I don’t think it’ll work. Nobody’s going to listen to me. You saw what happened the other night after the meeting. Most of the others think this is a stupid idea.”

  “Do you, Doris?”

  He really seemed to care what I answered. Most adults will ask you a question, but then they don’t listen when you say something. It’s like they already know the answer and who cares what you think. But Martini was looking right into my eyes, and he seemed to be waiting for what I would say. Besides, I felt that Martini really saw me when he looked at me. He listened to what I said and answered my questions as if we were equals. He had my vote. But I played it cool when I answered him. I didn’t want to get in over my head before I had all the facts. “I guess not. Arturo doesn’t either, and Yolanda wants to be an actress….”

  “So you see?” Martini took my hands in his big ones. I thought that if any of the parents saw me and told my father, I was going to get in trouble big time. But he looked like he was drowning or something, and he seemed to think I could help him. I’ve never even learned to swim, is what I wanted to tell him. But he had tears in his eyes. So I just let him talk.

  “Listen, Doris, Rick doesn’t, you know, have much time left….” He stopped for a minute as if saying those words was too much for him. “What if I tell him that you’ll keep trying to do this? You can call us occasionally and tell us how things are going. I’ll pay for whatever you need. Hey! You’ve just been promoted to producer! How do you like that!” He kept talking the whole time Rick was on the phone, making plans for me while big tears rolled down his cheeks. I had never seen a grown man cry like that and smile at the same time. Actors can do things that most of us can’t, I guess.
Anyway, at the same time we saw Rick slam down the receiver and start to cross the street toward us, Martini squeezed my hands and said in an emergency voice, “Please say yes, sweet Doris.”

  “Okay. I’ll try.” What else could I do?

  Rick’s angry face softened as Martini talked fast about how I was going to get the kids together and try to do the barrio theater on my own, with their secret help, of course. I could see that Rick didn’t totally buy this fairy tale. After all, he grew up in this neighborhood. It ain’t Disney World. But he kept nodding his head as Martini talked like he wanted him to believe that he believed. Man, things get complicated when adults get in the act. They hardly ever say what they really think to each other. It’s not like when one of my friends gets mad at me. First words out of her mouth are “Drop dead, shithead,” or worse. Same thing if we like each other, we don’t go around trying to hide it, we just stay close. Does something happen to your brain as you get older, so it takes three times as long to get around to saying something? Anyway, I stood there watching Rick and Martini trying to make things seem fine when it was really all over. Finally Rick turned to me.

  “Doris, I am very grateful that you will be running the show. You won’t regret it. Will you meet us in August for the matinee? It’s the day before my birthday and I’d like to celebrate. See how many of the others will come too, okay?”

  “Sure.” It was only June and I couldn’t think that far ahead. Besides, I didn’t believe that I could do any of these things these guys were expecting me to do. But I did want to go to a real play. Maybe I could talk my mother into that, at least. So I promised Rick that I’d be there.

  In the weeks that followed, I tried my best to get people interested in Rick’s project, which Arturo and I were calling the Barrio Players Group now. So far, it was just he and I and Yolanda writing a play about two people who fall in love in the barrio, but their families hate each other and won’t let them get married, and one of them dies. Arturo knew the Romeo and Juliet story real well, and we were reading the West Side Story script, but ours was going to be different — more like real life. But the three of us were taking all the parts ourselves, and it wasn’t working out. So we made fliers announcing an audition, and mailed them to Rick, and he made copies and mailed them back to me. Luckily, my parents are musicians and sleep late, so I was always the one to pick up our mail. We got Teresa and Sandi (who dragged her boyfriend, Paco, in with her) to at least help distribute the fliers around the neighborhood, so I was able to tell Rick over the phone that more people were showing interest. But Arturo and I knew it was not going to be easy. People have more important things to do with their time than stage plays, like helping their families put food on the table and buying clothes for themselves before school started. But every day a new person called just to ask what we were doing, and my mother even offered to talk to her boss at the Caribbean Moon nightclub about letting us use their stage on Saturday mornings to have our auditions. Once in a while, I felt something like excitement creep into my heart.

  I had long talks with Rick on the phone. It bothered me to hear him trying to sound normal, even though sometimes he could hardly catch his breath from coughing so hard and he would have to let Martini hold the phone. But his questions were all about me and the other kids. It takes guts to care about other people’s lives when you’re dying. You have to respect somebody for that. After a while I started thinking of him as an older brother, somebody I could trust with any secret, no matter how stupid it might sound. I confessed to him that I had always thought I could make myself invisible. I was not pretty enough for anyone to notice me much, and I didn’t have a great personality or any talent that I knew about like my mother and father, who could sing and play musical instruments.

  “You and I are a lot alike, Doris,” Rick once said to me. “While I was growing up, I wanted to be invisible because I knew that I was different from the other kids, and because I knew my parents were ashamed of me. But later I found out that not everyone felt that way about me. Acting gave me a chance to try being all those other people I thought that I could be.”

  “Who did you like being the most?” I asked him. Although I knew what he would say, I wanted to hear him say it.

  “I’m okay just being me. I have to work hard at being somebody else. You have to feel comfortable in a gorilla suit. You know what I mean? Doris, are you invisible now?”

  I had to think about this. To me, being invisible meant feeling unnoticed, like a piece of furniture: there but not there. Something you only think about when you need it. When I was talking to Rick, I felt fully three-dimensional.

  “I think I’m all here,” I said, feeling a little bit silly about the whole “invisible” thing. “But I’m scared that people will blame me if things don’t go right.”

  “Well, if they don’t maybe you can disappear again.”

  “I think I’ve lost that talent,” I said, knowing that he was teasing me.

  “But you have discovered a new one?”

  Rick never lectured. He just asked questions mainly; or said things that I thought about for days. Like this quote from Don Quixote that he told me was his motto: “I know who I am, and who I may be if I choose.”

  It was funny to get to know someone on the telephone. It was like talking to yourself, or having a voice in your head that knew more than you did about things. But by July Rick was not coming to the phone at all. Martini and I talked every day, though, and I was even able to tell him that a big audition was already scheduled and we expected to get a crowd, since a nun from St. Mary’s, a drama teacher, had found a flier and “volunteered” one of her classes to try out. Catholic kids in beanies and school uniforms were not exactly what we’d expected to see line up in front of the Caribbean Moon. It was going to be interesting.

  “A nun! No kidding.” Martini laughed. “Rick will love hearing that. Thank you, Doris.”

  I was busier than ever, and before I knew it, it was the end of July, and I called Martini to make plans to meet him with Yolanda and Arturo for the matinee of Cats in the city. He said he’d be there. He said Rick sent his love; then there was a moment of silence when I didn’t ask if he would be there with him, and Martini did not answer my unspoken question. We both knew that he wouldn’t.

  The three of us walked to the bus station downtown. It was a hot and humid day, and I felt like I was walking underwater. Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about Rick, how alone he must feel without his family as he got sicker. Arturo was quieter than usual too. But Yolanda talked the whole way there. She couldn’t believe how many people had signed up for next week’s audition. She was also worried that the Tiburones would scare off the few boys who were trying out. Luis had promised through Naomi, his girlfriend, who wanted a part, that he’d stay away; but Matoa saw it as a good chance to make trouble. I had decided to worry about audition problems later. I had other things to think about.

  Both Arturo and I had had to argue with our parents to let us go to the matinee. We had to swear on everything they could come up with that Rick Sanchez was not going to be anywhere near us, and if we didn’t get home at the time we agreed on, they would send out the National Guard. It wasn’t so much Mami. She knew what was going on — I mean, I was keeping pretty busy these days and not complaining too much at home. She was helping me out by keeping Papi out of my business with the Barrio Players and arranging to let us use the Caribbean Moon for auditions. She had a good laugh over what the nun from St. Mary’s was going to do about bringing her class to the nightclub for auditions. But she made a point of letting me know that her support would end if I had anything personal to do with “el pobrecito Rick Sanchez,” poor little Rick Sanchez, whom she pitied but also feared. Our parents thought of Rick sort of like a time bomb that might explode, killing us all with the sickness inside.

  Martini was in front of the theater when we walked up after getting off the bus a few blocks away. He looked like a movie star in a dark suit and sunglasses. Everyo
ne in line stared at us when he led us to the window where they had an envelope of tickets with my name typed on it. We had great seats. Martini sat next to me and told me that Rick had once played one of the cats in the show.

  “Which one?” I asked, but he told me to first see it, then guess.

  It was one of the most awesome experiences of my life. The cats ran in with their eyes shining in the dark, and one of them rubbed my head. The singing put chicken flesh all over my body, and my scalp prickled when they sang to the moon. I saw Yolanda leaning forward until she was practically standing up. I had to yank her back to the seat so I could see. Arturo just sat there as quiet as ever, but I could tell that he was holding his breath and sighing a lot. I cried when the show ended. I thought I knew which cat Rick had played: it was the wise one, the one who says that there’s a better world beyond the dangerous alley and the grimy junkyard.

  After the show, Martini handed me an envelope.

  “It’s from Rick. It’s a good-bye letter to the Barrio Players and a check for a cast party. It’s his birthday tomorrow, Doris.” Joe’s voice was ragged, like someone who had talked for hours and hours, and now had to force words out. “Rick never had a birthday party in your barrio.” It was the first time I had heard him sound bitter. It started me thinking about how little things like a birthday party you never got mean so much to people.

  I called Rick as soon as I got home to thank him for the tickets and the check. That’s when I got the message on his machine. I couldn’t believe it: Rick had died and Joe Martini hadn’t said a word. I tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for him at the end. Without his family to comfort him. Someone should’ve said I love you in Spanish to him, to remind him that he had been born a Puerto Rican, a barrio kid like us. I cried for Rick, and I said the words into the phone that I thought he should have heard. I said his name in Spanish, Ricardo. Adiós, Ricardo. I hung up and thought about something I could do for Rick, in his memory. I decided to make it more than Rick could have ever expected from us in the barrio.