No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Two more blocks and he’d be home—and then they were upon him, silent and mean, their arms around his neck so that he couldn’t breathe; the Cantonese words of outrage and violation pouring out of his brain, but no sounds coming from his mouth, as Papo, who was the youngest but the biggest of the four, his left eye slightly crossed, squeezed his larynx with his forearm, bending his head back so that if one were watching this on celluloid, one would’ve held his breath hoping the actor upon whom this outrage was being perpetrated would be able to walk away unharmed since the back of Huang’s head was nearly touching his back. The other three had already gone through his pockets, removing forty-five dollars, two lottery tickets, some change, and his keys. But Papo, fourteen and wishing to prove himself among his partners in crime, felt a great desire to learn whether what he had seen in that spy movie was really true and was it possible to have this trashy-smelling chino acquire a permanently damaged spinal cord by forcing his head back as far as it could go. No more than thirty seconds elapsed from the time the pack struck until Papo’s desired effect took place and he heard the neck snap as if he were breaking a brittle stick across his raised knee. Huang’s body went immediately into spasmodic shock and his bladder and intestines began to emit their contents, causing Papo to immediately drop him and, at the urging of the others, take flight, hearing Pupi or Pipo or Pepe yelling not to forget the food.

  Later, when they had run along Houston, splitting up as they hit First Avenue and meeting up again in Tompkins Square Park to partake of Mai Ling’s dinner, slandering dead Huang because there was no pork fried rice or ribs, which was the extent of their knowledge of Chinese cuisine, they decided in a 4—0 landmark decision that “Da fuckin’ chino deserved it, even if Papo had kilt him, and whatnot.”

  They were genuinely mean, these four. To this day, Marcos, who saw the four defiling Pupi’s seventeen-year-old retarded cousin, Sandra, cannot talk about the experience without shuddering and cursing them. Marcos had been hit by a car while crossing Houston Street when he was nine years old. He was now forty and existed seated in a wheelchair, reading detective and science-fiction novels, the formulaic sameness of the fare narcotizing to his mind. Beneath mundane propriety Marcos lived a secret life of self-provided pleasure. Ugly and loveless, he contented himself with watching other apartments from his bedroom at his sister Lucy’s fourteenth-floor projects apartment near Thirteenth Street and Avenue D. Seated in his wheelchair, he used powerful binoculars mounted on a tripod to study the human condition, in particular, the goings and most certainly the comings in nearby Stuyvesant Town, which, having been built in the forties, was not wired for air-conditioning, such that in the summertime, residents do whatever they can to stay cool, often parading themselves in denuded splendor.

  Although a great many of the residents were too elderly to draw even the slightest glance from Marcos, there were young women and couples who, unaware of this distant but persistent observer, pleasured themselves and each other, allowing Marcos to find satisfaction in the expert use of various thick lumberjack socks filled with Noxzema—which he diligently washed and hung up nightly—no fewer than twelve to fifteen times in a twenty-four-hour period.

  Marcos didn’t limit his rounds to Stuyvesant Town, for he had access to a number of tenements in the area. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the bother, since the people in the area guarded their privacy and lowered the shades. Once in a while there was some crazy, drugged-up, white hippie girl who walked around naked, and that was cool. Most of the time it was dull as hell, except when there was a family dispute, and then he’d shift his binoculars from one room of the watched apartment to another, observing as a child was chased by a parent or a wife by a husband; enjoying the action and the culmination of the drama as the parent or husband cornered his or her prey and struck without mercy.

  One spring day around one in the afternoon he was making a cursory sweep through the tenements when he observed four young dudes undressing a girl. This was going to be a classic gang bang, something he had yet to observe in nearly twenty years of patient reconnoitering. Although the scene caused him to become thoroughly excited, what took place next made even him nauseous.

  What transpired was that Pupi’s aunt Gertrudis had to go to Puerto Rico because her grandmother was sick, and so she left her oldest daughter, Marta, to take care of her sister Sandra, who was retarded. Marta, who worked at the Con Edison offices on Fourteenth Street, saw no problem with this. It was simple. Marta would come back to the apartment on her lunch hour to check on Sandra. She did this the first couple of days, but then her girlfriend Conchi, who worked for Citibank, said that this guy Robert at work really liked her, and she really liked Frank, who was the assistant manager, so why didn’t the four of them and Lillian Pacheco, who was engaged to her Italian guy, who worked for the cable company in their accounting department, go over to one of those cute restaurants on Irving Place? Anyway, Robert was cute and he looked like he was from PR. even though he was from Chile or Peru or one of those weird South American countries where they rode around on them giraffe-looking animals and wore pointy hats with the strings hanging from them. Since her cousin Pupi was just hanging out and not going to school, she asked him if he could kind of keep an eye on Sandra and gave him a set of keys, and started hanging out with Conchi and her crew at lunch time, never suspecting that Pupi was part of this twisted quartet of perverted junior executives of evil.

  Sandra was retarded but she wasn’t no Mongolian boba, as the double-negative parlance of the people went. She was just slow, couldn’t read, and always wanted to talk about dopey things like songs, singing a couple of lines, then going on to something else, repeating things like “Michael Landon is so cute” or “Kojak es muy feo. He’s too ugly.” She could take a bath, comb her hair, get dressed, and fix herself cold cereal, except that she put too much sugar in the cereal and her teeth were rotting because she didn’t like brushing them; and she could make sandwiches and pour herself a glass of soda, but beyond that she was useless, barely able to remember anything from one minute to the next. If you told her to clear the dishes from the table and put them in the sink, she would put one dish in the sink and when you turned around she was looking out the window, or turning the pages of a magazine. One thing she liked doing was playing games, especially made-up games that didn’t have too many rules and didn’t require her to remember much, like “Let’s pretend we’re a train, so put your hands on my hips and here we go.”

  Cross-eyed Papo’s brother, who dealt a little bit of coca, had a Doberman to watch the house, but since he was up half the night hanging out, he slept in the daytime and paid Papo twenty dollars every day to walk Simbad twice, because if Simbad wasn’t walked he wouldn’t go in the apartment, but he would bark and bark until you took him outside. Simbad was a monster Dobie, not mean but big and crazy-looking, so that just to see him coming in your general direction made you scared.

  So one day the homeboys were hanging out on the stoop of Pupi’s aunt Gertrudis’s building when here comes Papo with Simbad and they all start messing around and talking about the flick they had seen with this guy that came all over the chick’s face and:

  “Wasn’t that a bitch?”

  “All in her face and whatnot.”

  High-five, high-five, high-five, slap-slap-slap-slap, goof, goof, goof, slap-slap-slap.

  “Man, all in her face and shit.”

  “Word, man.”

  So talking about all this stuff and remembering the film made the four horny. As usual, they talked about sticking it to that one or the other, but since none of them had ever done it with a woman, except for Pipo, who hit on his mother regularly, the only thing they did was brag about having done it, which they individually knew was bull while collectively they upheld having made it with at least a hundred bitches each.

  When Pupi saw Simbad resting on the sidewalk, his tongue hanging out and his pointy pink pingo sticking out, he said he had heard about horses doing it to women. />
  “You crazy, man,” Pipo said. “What da fuck are you talking about? A horse? Did you ever see a horse’s dick? I was up by Central Park one time with my cousin, Agustín, looking to bust somebody and get some cash for shit, and these bitches were riding horses and they got off and this horse took a piss and he had a pingo da size of your arm. How in da fuck is a horse gonna do it to some bitch, homeboy? Da shit come out of da bitch’s mouth and whatnot, man.”

  “Some dude tole me,” Pupi said. “It was a little horse, not them big police mothafuckas.”

  “Oh, you fulla shit, homeboy,” Papo said. “No woman can take a big ole horse’s pingo. They be having trouble with mine, man, so how they gonna fuck a horse?”

  They kept arguing and getting more excited till one thing led to another and who knows which of the four thought of it but they ended up in Pupi’s aunt Gertrudis’s apartment, and Sandra was there eating Sugar Pops with gobs of sugar and she said, “Hi, boys,” and asked if that was their dog, even though she had seen Simbad a hundred times. They laughed and said yeah, this was their dog and did she want to play a game.

  Sandra said yeah and glommed the last of her Sugar Pops and stood up. She said she was ready, so they told her she should come out into the living room. When she got there Pupi explained to his cousin Sandra that they had to play like babies and they had to take their clothes off. Sandra shook her head, but Pupi said if she didn’t want to play then they’d have to go. Sandra got all sad and said okay but not in the living room because people don’t get undressed in the living room. They asked where and she said the bedroom. So in they went, and when she was undressed they scoped on her and she was fine and whatnot with big tetas and her bollo, her crica all hairy and black and shiny and they all wanted to touch her but there was something that kept them from doing so.

  Finally one thing led to another and Papo, Pepe, and Pipo agreed that since Sandra was Pupi’s cousin, he was the one that’s got to get Simbad ready. Pupi said no fucking way, so Pipo, who knew what was going to happen when the whole thing got started and he wasn’t about to take out his own pingo for these mothafuckas to laugh at when nothing came out, said they was punk faggots and he’d do it and he grabbed Simbad down there and started stroking and Simbad’s pingo got tremendous and it had a güevo, a knot, in it. When Sandra saw this she started to laugh and asked if the dog had two tongues. They said it was like a lollipop and did she want to lick it. She shook her head. But then they told her that Simbad liked playing horsey and did she want to play that. She said yeah, so they held Simbad and she got on him and they held her up and they walked her around with her titties bouncing around and everything.

  This went on for a little bit and then they said that Simbad wanted to play horsey and could he get on her, so she got down on her knees and put her hands on the floor and they helped Simbad up on her and before you knew it Pipo had Simbad’s thing in Sandra and now Simbad was going at it and poor, retarded Sandra, felt what was going on but she was having so much fun watching the other three boys with their red things out like the doggie and going back and forth over them with their hands and then they were over her and she could feel stuff falling on her face and on her back and then the doggie was really grabbing her and she felt this pain in her stomach that made tears come to her eyes but she wasn’t crying.

  When they were done they made her take a shower and get dressed and said it was all part of the game. They mopped everything up and everything was fine except for the fact that Simbad’s thing wouldn’t go down and it just hung there and Simbad looked all confused and whatnot so Pipo said he heard that it took a dog’s pingo about two hours to go down so they turned on the television and watched cartoons on cable and Sandra came out of the shower and got dressed and ate some more cereal and then came and sat down with them to watch cartoons until Simbad’s pingo went down.

  Marcos watched the whole thing, but even he couldn’t enjoy what he had seen. Worse off, he didn’t know what to do about it. He thought he should call the police, but he was ashamed of having them find out he was a peeping Tom. He also recognized one of the boys and knew that his brother was a drug dealer and there was no telling what they would do to him if he ratted them out. It wasn’t like the time the man had been threatening a woman with a knife. He had called the police then, but by the time the police came the guy had calmed down and nothing happened.

  When Simbad was back to normal, the Posse of the Pingo, as they would now call themselves, went back downstairs like nothing happened. When Papo brought Simbad back, his brother, Frankie Cabeza, who had a really big head, thus the name, was up and feeling nasty as a mothertrucker. He did a line, fixed himself some café con leche and bread and butter, and began calling his boys on the cellular. Cabeza, when he saw Papo walk in with Simbad, wanted to know where the fuck you been, you fucking retard. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. And Papo said that Simbad didn’t want to go, so he’d had to walk him all the way down to Houston and the Drive. Simbad went and sniffed around his food dish, drank water from the toilet bowl, and then sat on the couch, licking his red, pointy pingo.

  So this was the nature of these four, except that not having a go at a real woman was beginning to annoy them, and one day as they were roaming the neighborhood, Papo, the young man who had snapped Huang’s neck, spotted Fawn Singleton Farrell, now blossoming into a delicate young woman, too shy and frightened of herself, and recalled that he had been in the fourth grade with her and she lived down by Eldridge in some big old factory building where hippie white people lived and wasn’t she a fine-looking little bitch.

  44. Economics

  One afternoon, exhausted by the problem of her credit-card debt, and her resolve to find a way of repaying it, which in the end was a matter of pride more than necessity, Vidamía stepped away from the obsession and called her sister to ask what else was going on. Cookie was relieved that Vidamía had stopped focusing on the problem. She told Vidamía she didn’t even feel like going to school anymore since she had announced to everybody at the school that she was going to reaudition to get into the drama department but hadn’t made it, and now going to school every day and having to face them all felt like hell. Vidamía said she was sure the drama department had made one huge mistake in turning her down.

  Cookie said she was taking acting classes right there in the East Village, at a place called Medicine Show on Second Street. They had workshops and maybe she’d do a small part as a mermaid in this thing they were putting together about a nun and a clown. It was super funny and very sexy. The role called for her to seduce the main character, who had this big coso that whistled.

  “She’s a mermaid. Una sirena. And that’s like an omen. Cause you know I’m gonna become a movie siren. I’ma make me some movies.”

  “Are you really serious about acting?”

  “Damn right I’m serious.”

  “I’m glad you changed your mind. What about your music?”

  “I can keep doing that, but I wanna be an actress. I know I can do it. I met someone who has a cousin at NYU Film School and he’s gonna ask the guy if he has a part for me.”

  They went on talking a little longer and then said goodbye. After Vidamía hung up the phone, she turned the radio back up, lay back on the bed, closed her eyes, and listened to the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” What was made in the U.S.A.? The people? He? Mr. Fox, her history teacher, said the U.S. had fallen back in almost every aspect of manufacturing and that the Japanese had an edge in automobile and electronic-equipment manufacturing because the people cared about their work. Valerie Perkins, whose father was a lawyer down on Wall Street, backed up the teacher and said the U.S. was in decline because it had been built on the basis of crisis and that in its history of 213 years, from 1776 to the present, it had engaged in over 160 wars, conflicts, and skirmishes within and without its own borders and that whenever there was war the U.S. did fine, but that it didn’t seem to handle a peace economy too well. Valerie’s m
other was an antiwar activist and had chained herself to a fence when they began building nuclear submarines in Groton, Connecticut, when she was a student at Smith.

  When Springsteen’s song was over, Vidamía turned off the radio and sat up. What was it about that discussion of products made in the U.S.A. that kept bothering her? She went downstairs, put on her down jacket, retrieved a flashlight from the pantry, and told Mrs. Alvarez that she was going for a walk. Mrs. Alvarez told her she shouldn’t go far. Vidamía said she was just going to walk to the edge of the property and back. She zipped up her jacket and let herself out by the back door with Beanbag, the family’s golden retriever, following her.

  It was cold for September. Her hands stuck deep into her pockets, she walked down the path away from the backyard to the small replica of the house which her mother had a carpenter build for Vidamía, explaining that well-off families in Puerto Rico built such structures on the property for the young daughters to play in. She went there whenever she needed to think things out. These days she could reach the top of the roof if she stood on tiptoes. Inside it was just one room with a little table and chairs where she and her friends used to play. She opened the door, heard a bit of scurrying, and thought perhaps she was disturbing a chipmunk or a squirrel family nesting there. She shined the light into the house and sat on one of the small chairs. Beanbag sniffed around and lay down next to her. She had played office with her friends. She wouldn’t permit them to play house. And no boys were ever allowed in her office. She was very silent, listening to the early evening.