He does this in front of Segis and Didi, who have been standing in the doorway watching this happen from the beginning but have said or done nothing. We all seem to relax a bit.
“So we’re cool?” I ask.
“Yeah, we’re alright,” he says. “Just don’t ever be mean to my kids again, Junior.”
“Like I said, if I knew it was JP, it wouldn’t have happened; why don’t you come in and have some beers with us?”
We go back into the house and resume our evening at the now-cleared dinner table, the atmosphere much relaxed. With Richard at the table with us, we feel an odd sense of gratitude, like we’re being graced by barrio royalty. We all feel this, I can tell.
It’s Richard, after all, who had taken me to my first bar for a drink, when I was fifteen. I don’t really remember how it happened, but I had come home after skipping school all day with Tony and found Richard drinking beer in our driveway. So I sat out with him, sneaking the occasional beer, when around ten o’clock or so he suddenly wanted to look up a certain floozy who had caught his fancy some days before. He decided right there that she needed finding.
To this day—and I mean this sincerely—that has to have been the toughest, most dangerous bar I’ve ever visited. It made the bar scene in Star Wars look like a daycare for vegan children. It was constructed from plywood planks and erected illegally in an uncleared lot near the Port of Brownsville, snug in the still-unrecognized projects, and the beer was served in bottles from an Igloo cooler, on the ground, for a dollar apiece.
Because he had decided to visit on impulse, Richard was simply in shorts: no shirt or shoes, which was obviously no problem.
The place was hopping, with a jukebox in the sagging corner of the one room playing corridos loudly. We got a table and sat, with Richard ordering a round of Miller High Lifes with no hassle at me being at the table. He threw a $5 bill on the table, and the waitress didn’t blink, just set the bottles down and wandered off with her $3 tip. Richard spent his time questioning the other bar girls about his particular interest, and I took in the scene around me, transfixed by the people there, the lowest of the working class, people with absolutely nothing, and totally enjoying themselves in a horrible penny opera. They fascinated me.
“Junior, quit staring,” Richard hissed at me, bringing me out of my reverie.
I was riveted by this one little fella across the bar, wondering about his backstory, how he had gotten that scar on his arm, what he did for a living, and where he lived. Would he stab me? Where was his knife? Gramma used to tell me stories about Grampa and his cousins drinking in bars such as this, and one night in particular when his best friend Mariano had been stabbed in the belly, split open like a melon, and how he’d clutched both sides of his stomach to bring it together to keep the beer from spilling out, bemoaning how much he’d spent on beer that night, and how they all had laughed about it later. . . .
These were those people, I was understanding.
“Hey, he’s gonna get pissed!” Richard had said and smacked my arm, and then I realized I had been staring, so I smiled and waved, and the guy just sorta waved back, in a way that wasn’t friendly.
The girl Richard had been looking for had already fucked off back to Mexico, and so we ended the night by going swimming in a pool at an apartment “complex” where Richard knew someone, at two in the morning. It had been a really great night.
Another time, he came home drunk the night before Mother’s Day with a Grammy-nominated accordionist, and they set up a party in the driveway. They had made quite a ruckus arriving, had awoken me and I’d wandered out like a cranky neighbor. Richard was the first one to notice me.
“Hey, June. Don’t tell your mom. That’s a famous guy, on the accordion. I don’t know his name. You want a beer? Don’t be an asshole.”
It was Esteban Jordan, or Steve Jordan, who had been in a movie by David Byrne, True Stories. I recognized him right away because of the one-eye thing. Holy shit: This guy had been in a movie with John Goodman and David fricken Byrne! No one would believe me, I thought.
This was my first brush with someone famous, besides Freddy Fender, who had knocked up my Aunt Diana in 1969, who had apparently brushed up against Freddy more than once.
I said, “Hey, you’re that guy in that movie with David Byrne! In that scene, at the Mexican bar, with the red lighting, with John Goodman!” Steve didn’t acknowledge me. He looked away.
His flunkie answered, though: “He was in three movies, mang! But two of them didn’t get released yet. He’s a pro, mang!”
Steve was elusive, aloof, wouldn’t really engage except to play the accordion that night.
I slipped back into my house and found my microcassette recorder, which I had because I was still working for the Brownsville Herald as a stringer at this time, and then I slipped back out to the party to record the rest of the evening. I needed proof that he’d been there; proof for whom, I’m not exactly sure.
Apparently Mr. Jordan was releasing a new album, and all these songs he was playing were “bootleg, mang!” When he found out I worked for the Herald, he was reluctant to continue, worried that I might write a bad review, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, besides the fact that I didn’t write record reviews, all Spanish songs sounded exactly alike to me, and no one would really care about his new album. But please: Play on.
And, as predicted, no one really cared about the chance meeting with Steve Jordan in my driveway, in the middle of the night, on Mother’s Day, except for Basilio, my mentor at the Herald. “No shit?” he asked.
“Yeah, no shit. He even played a couple songs for my Gramma, at her window, for Mother’s Day,” I said.
“No shit?” He asked again, impressed.
“No shit. I think he was there for the coke.”
“Hunh,” he said. “Can I listen to it?”
‘Sure,” I said, and handed him the “bootleg, mang!” microcassette tape and then heard Basilio chuckling for the next two hours.
“You’re a hoot, Domingo,” he said, afterward.
Basilio had taken a liking to me the year before, when we originally started working together and I had shown myself to be very much a part of the Hunter Thompson school of journalism, when I came in half drunk from a night out on South Padre Island during spring break, while all the other high schoolers reeled in horror at my terrible state, dressed in a camouflage jacket and matted hair, then managed to write a six-hundred-word feature that made the front page, while their high school stuff had ended up as paragraphs in the H section, if used at all. Basilio had bought me a Dr Pepper, and copyedited my story himself, had been very much impressed. We became fast friends.
But this? Steve Jordan in my driveway, coked up and playing Mother’s Day songs while I niggled and prodded him and his entourage? I was creating a legacy here. All thanks to Richard.
That had been our friendship, up until this night. I always felt safe with him, protected. Had no reason ever to fear that the mask he wore with other people could be turned to face me.
When I invite him inside that night, the danger is over. It will then be a good and happy night, drinking with Segis, like equals. I feel it.
We sit around the kitchen table, trading stories and laughing as usual, and the mood has changed since the unpleasantness of earlier.
But then the hour has grown later, and I have grown weary of the bad music, weary of the company, and I’m looking for bed, suddenly.
I say, “Hey, guys, I hate to do this, but I’m really kind of tired and I have stuff to do tomorrow; can we call it a night?”
This doesn’t go over at all well with the boys drinking at the table.
Segis makes an attempt to keep me from retiring, as he’s not done with the drinking, and I resist, saying that I’m done, and Richard pipes in, says, “They can stay. They’re drinking with me.”
I don’t take this in the least as usurping; in fact, I feel better that he takes the responsibility of host. The hou
se will be safe. “Great,” I say. “Just please make sure the door is locked when you guys go.”
“Don’t worry about the fucking door,” Richard barks, and the whole room sort of goes quiet, even though Ozzy is playing on the stereo.
I hadn’t noticed, but he has been steadily fuming since joining us at the table. When I said I had something to do tomorrow, he had decided to take it badly. He had taken it as me posturing. Perhaps he had been right. I really can’t be sure.
I say goodnight, empty my final beer, and then retire to my parents’ room. This is the only room in the house with an air-conditioning window unit. They have a queen sized bed, a recliner, and a TV. It’s like being in a hotel room, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in it that night. The door closed behind me; I undress down to my Y-fronts with the window unit turned to high.
The drone it makes cancels any noise coming from the kitchen. The room is dark, pitch black with the curtains drawn, and I very quickly drop off into a heavy sleep.
What happens next is a long time coming, but completely unexpected.
I’m dead asleep when I hear the door to Mom and Dad’s room explode open and slam into the wall behind it, the doorknob burying itself into the wood paneling.
I sit up and twist in bed and can see the door frame illuminated by the hallway light behind it, and just barely make out a figure rushing into the room before I’m punched violently in the back of the head and then once in the clavicle, just under my throat, as I’m grabbed by my hair and yanked forward. I have enough sense to grab the hands that are grabbing at my hair. I’m pulled sprawling out of the bed, and I fall to the floor, in a crumple, at the base of the bed, where suddenly I’m being kicked in the neck and torso by something that feels and smells like a cowboy boot.
This is all in the dark, and I have not had time to consider or think about what might be happening, and I think I might have caught a voice—sounding like Richard’s—when I feel the hard sharp thumps of pointed cowboy boots kicking me in the chest, the stomach, the chest. I roll up with my arms up around my head and figure out where the kicks are coming from, and so I roll into the kicks instinctively. The lights suddenly go on, and I jump up and see Richard standing in front of me at the end of the boots, and it doesn’t make any sense to me what’s happening.
His cowboy hat is off and his face is a mask of venom, his green eyes wide and dilated behind his glasses and his balding head covered in perspiration. He is breathing heavily from the beating he’s just given me.
The light going on has shocked him into stopping for a heartbeat, and I’m standing there, my body stinging and red from all the shots I’ve just taken in my underwear, and I hear Segis shouting, “Richard! Richard! No! Stop it! Stop it! I didn’t mean nothing!”
It had been Segis who had run in here, had snapped on the lights behind Richard, and who was now trying to get between Richard and me. The shock of the light now gone, Richard suddenly resumes his assault, this time on both me and Segis.
Segis tries to get in Richard’s way, but is leveled quickly with a single hard kick to the balls, and he falls to the side while Richard charges at me. I lean back into a window and curtains and just sort of thrust my hands forward to try to stifle his punches before they come, and it seems to work, seems to keep him from summoning too much power, and I can take what blows he’s mustering. Richard doesn’t seem to be much of a fighter if you fight back, I’m understanding, even here. He’s swinging fat, wide haymakers at my head and arms, and I’m able to keep the full force of the blows from hitting me by flaring my elbows and ducking my head, which is the only way I’m able to survive the second onslaught.
Still, I’m scared out of my mind at this point. A stout little fucker, Richard could generate a lot of gravity behind a punch, if he did it right.
I was a skinny boy, weighing about 140 pounds at this point. and aside from the few scraps a male gets into in high school and the ones Richard himself had arranged against Joe and the kids across the street, I’d never been in a real fight, never been hit like this. Richard, on the other hand, weighs about 250, and makes his living slapping people around. He throws his weight around, so to speak, and he has a lot of weight to throw.
Finally, I’m able to yell out, “Richard! Richard! What the hell are you doing, man? You’re my fucking uncle! You’re not supposed to be doing this!!”
I say this as the last wave of blows glances off my head, and I use my arms to entangle his and keep it from being too easy to hit my head again. Already I can feel that a few of them have gotten through and my left eye is starting to swell, starting to throb deeply in a way that I know far too well now. He then changes tactics and grabs me and swings me around and shoves me against the dresser.
“Shut up! Shut up!” he yells, pointing at me, “Stop your talking! You think you’re so fucking smart, you and all your fucking family! You think you’re so much better than us because you got psychology and school and you read all those books! I don’t care, Junior! I don’t fucking care! I’ll fucking kill you and your fucking father, Junior! You can’t just make us feel like we’re nothing and then just leave! I don’t give a shit! Your sisters are up there in that college just fucking around! They’re just putas! You’re not better than us because we’re fucking Mexicans! You think you’re fucking white people! You’re not white! You’re just like the rest of us! And don’t you fucking think I won’t kill your father, Junior; I’ll kill him! I don’t care! I’ll go to fucking prison! I’ll fucking do it! I’ll fucking shoot him!”
I’m reeling backward at this hatred, this gestalt of the entire barrio gushing out of Richard’s mouth, like a spigot of vitriol, a toxic explosion of gossip, envy, and anger convulsing out of this poor, stupid dumb beast who suddenly became a vehicle for the sentiments that the whole barrio had wanted to tell the Martinezes, that we didn’t belong here, on Oklahoma Avenue, in their barrio, by using the only other outsider, who had nothing, and so much to prove.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Richard; listen to what you’re saying. What the hell brought this on?” I’m legitimately confused, and I make my way to the mirror in my mom’s bedroom, moving past Segis, who’s sitting on the floor, holding his testicles, and I see that my eye is red and white and swelling, will soon be deeply bruised, the blood vessels in the white totally burst. Lots of punches got through to that side. My lips are ripped open on the inside and I have to spit out a lot of blood, but not a single hit to the nose, I notice. Richard can’t throw a straight punch.
The betrayal of it, the hostility coming from so close within the family, and then bared so openly at me, I just can’t get my mind around it.
“What did you say about your Gramma?” Richard demands from me suddenly.
“What?”
“What did you say? Did you call her a bitch or not? Did you call your Gramma a bitch?”
I feel caught here; I’m not sure what I’ve said, what this means.
Here, Segis calls out from the floor, “No, Richard! He didn’t! He said it a long time ago! He didn’t mean it like that!”
“You shut up!” Richard spits at Segis, who complies readily. “Did you say it or not?”
“He . . . He . . . ” stammers Segis, “ . . . it wasn’t like that.”
“What the fuck are you two talking about?” I yell, my mouth filling with blood again. I spit it out, on the carpet. It makes a puddle.
“Junior! Did you call your Gramma a bitch or not?” he demands, furious again.
“I . . . I don’t know! I say a lot of shit!” I yell, trying to tell the truth. “Maybe! Probably! I don’t remember! Why do you people listen to me? I say a lot of shit!”
And then he charges at me again.
His first punch this time hits me clear on the mouth, and I feel something click, in the architecture of my skull. The next few punches, I see coming, and I block them mostly with my arms and elbows. I start to get the hang of it, at this point.
Richard’s not a trained fighter, jus
t an average brawler, only has two swings and a planted right kick in him, if he can get his leg up.
In fact, the one time Richard went up against a trained fighter—a black belt from a tae kwon do school near the airport—Richard didn’t do so well. One morning I was lurking near his door, trying to determine if he was home or asleep, and thinking of possibly risking entering and pillaging a fresh skin magazine, when he called out: “Quien esta alli?” (“Who’s there?”)
I held back, then said, “Oh, it’s just June.”
“Help me out of bed, please,” he said, almost inaudibly. I entered and saw that he was still in bed, having trouble putting his feet on the floor.
“What happened to you?”
“Oh, I went up against Benavidez last night, at a club.”
“The guy from the tae kwon do school?” I asked, intrigued.
“Yeah, he kicked my ass. I said something about his girlfriend in the parking lot, and he kicked the shit out of me. I’d never been hit like that before. I ended up under my truck. I stayed under there until he went inside.”
“Hunh,” I thought. This was news indeed; it was like Jackie Chan fighting Godzilla, with Jackie winning. But this also created a perfect snapshot of the barrio boy kings: pretending to be tough guys, but having no discipline or training. They were just cock-strong field hands talking shit.
But this night, I’ve still never been in a real fight, not in the life or death way it seems, and Richard outweighs me by one hundred pounds and a ton of anger. My best way out of it is to talk my way out, I decide.
“Richard, you’ve got to stop this,” I say, and something is wrong with my mouth. My jaw doesn’t align, I realize. And something is wrong with my teeth. I run my tongue over my front teeth and can feel one of the incisors split in two, cracked down the middle. Richard is wearing a ring, just for this purpose.
I spit out a bit of tooth, and it hits the dresser with a click. Fuck. “Jesus, look at what you did, you fucking bastard,” I say.
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