“Thass right, and after that the Italians weren’t so sacred. And with the big white shark outta da way, you had all these little guppies jockin’ for power.”
“And Bodega won?”
“With Nazario’s help. Yo, like, I took all your milk,” he said, getting up and placing the empty bowl in the sink.
“Thass wild, bro, Bodega won.”
“Yeah. Now, like, you ready? Cuz I got things to do and Bodega is waitin’ for you.”
As we walked out Sapo yelled toward the bedroom, loud enough to wake Blanca, “Bendición!” then he laughed.
“You crazy, bro. What the fuck, she ain’t your mother,” I said as I quickly locked the door and ran downstairs.
We got into Sapo’s car and rode down Fifth Avenue.
“Yo, Sapo, you know anyone who’s hard up to get married?”
“Girls? Plenty. Guys? None. Why you ask?”
“Blanca is trying to get some girl a green card.”
“Get the fuck.”
“Yeah, so if you know someone—”
“Well, I know this sad junkie. We can make him go cold turkey for a day or two. He’d do anythin’ for a fix.”
“No junkies, man, she’d be better off in Colombia.”
“Then what the fuck do you want? Where you think you livin’ at? You think you gonna find some gay mothafuckah who has to marry some bitch or his rich father will disown him? I don’t think so. If she wants to stay in the country, she bettah take the junkie.”
“Never mind I asked.” That was stupid. Why did I even try?
“Nazario might help, nigga knows everythin’,” Sapo advised. But I shook it off. I was already tangled up with Bodega. I didn’t want to get mixed up with Nazario, too.
•
SAPO STOPPED the car in front of El Museo Del Barrio and I got out.
“Yo, I’ll see you like layra, Chino.”
“See you, man.”
“One last thing,” Sapo said. “Like, I’m gonna ask you a fayvah.”
“So what else is new? I still got your shit in my house, you need that back?”
“Not yet, Chino. What I’ll need from ya is somethin’ small. Real small. Like the day you just wanted me to walk wi’choo cuz some niggas were eyein’ you bad, ’membah that?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, it’ll be even smaller than that.”
And Sapo took off.
I walked to the side of the building where the entrance was that month because the front entrance was being renovated. It was locked. I pounded on the door and a guard walked over and stood by the glass doors that separated us.
“The museo is not open yet,” he yelled through the glass.
“Wait, I’m s’posed to meet someone here.”
“Who?”
“Willie Bodega,” I said, and he looked around. He went back inside to check on this. I looked across toward Central Park. It was a beautiful day, the blue jays were making noise, the trees were getting back their leaves. I was thinking of maybe later taking a walk in the park with Blanca, when the guard returned.
“Sorry about that.” He had a smile on his face and started to unlock the door. “You know that I shouldn’t let anyone inside yet. But since you’re a friend of Willie, I’ll let you in, okay.” He shook my hand, nearly pulling me inside. He pointed to where I could find Bodega.
I saw Bodega standing in front of a painting by Jorge Soto, a large canvas portraying a transparent Adam and Eve, with blood running through their bodies as if they were subjects in an anatomy textbook. I stood next to Bodega. Even though he knew I was there he kept studying the painting.
He didn’t greet me, just pointed at Adam. “This man right here, he had it all. Could even talk with God. But it meant nothin’ to him without her.”
“I hear you,” I said. “So, like, Bodega, I already told you Vera is going to be here next week. I’ll be there wi’choo when she arrives. So why you wanted to meet me here today?”
“B’cause, Chino, I’m going t’ ask you for somethin’ when Vera comes and I thought you should know me. Besides, I’m gonna marry her this time, and that means we’re gonna be related. And you’re good people.”
“Wha’? You gonna wha’?”
“Marry her, of course. What’d you think I went through all this for?”
“Look, man, what you want to do with Vera is your thing, I’m just keeping my part. But, like, Vera is already married.”
“I know that,” he said, and his mood changed. He gazed at me with the confidence of someone who has marked the deck.
“That doesn’t matter to you at all?” I asked. “What if she doesn’t want to leave her husband?”
“Of course she’ll leave that pendejo. She never wanted to marry him in the first place. It was her fucken mother who pushed her.” He slowly walked away from me to stand in front of another painting. It was titled Despierta Boricua and depicted a Taino Indian tied to a New York City fire hydrant.
“So much was promised to us when we left our island,” he said softly as he looked at the painting. “They gave us citizenship and then sent us to the garment district. I’m going to make sure they make good on their promises.”
“Did you ever meet Vera’s husband, Willie?” I asked.
“Meet him, no. But I knew his family was one of the people that escaped Castro in fifty-eight. No shame in that. But his family was rich ’cause they had supported Batista with a shitload of money they had siphoned off the people of Cuba.” His eyes left the painting and looked at the floor. The tiles were beautiful, new. El Museo del Barrio had just gotten a face-lift. The floors were shining, the walls a cool, soothing white, and the titles of the paintings were written in Spanish, with the English translation as a secondary thing. It felt good to be there. El Museo del Barrio was the only museum where I could look at the paintings without having a guard follow me from wing to wing. At the Met I got suspicious looks. First the guards checked my shoes to see if they were once alligators. When they saw my worn sneakers, they treated me like I might pull a knife from my back pocket and go slashing Goyas.
“See, Chino, back then, politics was all I knew. I tried to explain to Veronica who this guy she was gonna marry was, the reason he was rich. I was telling her he was not a friend of the people right up to the night before the wedding. Do you know what she said?”
“Wha’?”
“She said she loved me. She said that she didn’t care if I didn’t have any money. The problem was, she said, I didn’t have any vision of how to get it. She said she wouldn’t mind being poor for a few years, but since I only had a vision for political stuff, I was going to be poor for the rest of my life. And then her mother came out and yelled for her to get back inside. Her mother looked at me like I had leprosy. So I left thinking, Shit, that bitch don’t deserve me. I thought the Young Lords were gonna succeed and that she had missed her chance at history. But a couple hours later, Chino, I was in tears and not that much mattered.”
I didn’t say anything and silence overtook us. I guess if I had been old enough back then I would have felt the same way he did. Back then when Bodega was a teenager, the Young Lords were an urban guerrilla group that had its origins in Chicago, but they made all their noise in El Barrio. They wrote up a manifesto called the “Thirteen Point Program and Platform.” The first point was to free Puerto Rico from the United States. The second point was for all Latin countries to have self-determination. They wanted better neighborhood programs. They launched food drives, clothing drives, health-inspection drives, door-to-door clinics. They were many, they were young, they were educated, and they were armed. They took over a redbrick Methodist church at 111th and Lexington and made it a conference center by declaring it the People’s Church. The Young Lords party was also ahead of its time; point number five of the manifesto stated, “Down with Machismo and Male Chauvinism!” This was due in part to the fact that half of the central committee was composed of women who, along with the men, developed strategies
and carried guns.
I listened as Bodega described how he would preach these points to Vera. Telling her that Latin women were undergoing a revolution and that this would force the Latin man to change his ways and reinvent himself. Bodega wouldn’t preach these points eloquently but he would speak of them with so much passion and street intellect that Vera fell madly in love with him. She liked his ideas, his conviction, his optimism. Bodega would invite her to rallies, to the Lords’ headquarters at 202 East 117th, to Marxist education classes, to urban military tactics classes, to food drives. Veronica would attend and at times even help out with breakfast programs and clothing drives, but what Veronica really wanted was for Bodega to find a real job and marry her.
“How old were you back then?” It was the only thing I could think of saying.
“I don’t know, let me think. Seventeen, I was seventeen.”
“So you left Veronica. You were angry at her and everybody. Then what happened?” We both began to walk around El Museo.
“Crazy shit. Some crazy shit. It was, like, three in the morning. I climbed up the fire escape to her room. I tried opening the window but there was a gate. So I tapped on the glass and Veronica woke up thinking it was a thief and I scared her half to death.”
“That was smart, bro. Couldn’t you wait till morning or something?”
“Nah, I couldn’t, b’cause she was getting married the next day and if her mother had woken up, you know, it would have been over. So I almost gave Veronica a heart attack until she realized it was me. She knew I could never hurt her. And she was a little scared, but it wasn’t because I was there, it was cuz she was marrying some guy she didn’t love.”
“You sure she didn’t at least like his money?”
“Didn’t I just tell you, she said she didn’t care that I didn’t have money, what bothered her was that I had no vision of how to get it.”
“Yeah, thass right, you told me she said she didn’t care that you didn’t have any money, but you didn’t say that she said she didn’t like the Cuban’s money. See the difference, bro?”
“Nah, I don’t,” he barked, “and what the fuck do you know anyway?”
“Look, bro, like you said, we are going to be related, right? So, like, do you want me to lie to you or do you want me to tell you what I really think?” My voice was respectful but loud. “All I’m telling you is that Veronica never said she didn’t want this guy’s money.”
Bodega left my words hanging and walked away toward a small wing that had an exhibition of wooden religious figures. The Three Kings on horseback on their way to meet El Niño, with everything and everyone made of wood and colored with house paint. The wood was old and the paint was cracking, giving the Nativity scene a poignant look of absolute poverty.
“You understand me?” I walked over to him and realized that all this time we had been talking, never had we looked each other in the eyes. All this time, when we’d spoken we’d looked at the artwork. It was a good way to relieve tension and just talk.
“When you moving?” Bodega asked me. I had hit a nerve. Veronica was something sacred.
“Tomorrow.”
“Thass good.”
“Look, Willie, you said you wanted to ask me something. What is it you want to ask me?”
“Not yet, Chino, not yet.” And Bodega finally faced me and looked in my eyes. “But it’s something good. Don’t worry.”
•
THE NEXT day Blanca and I rented a U-Haul van and got family and friends to help us move. Negra and Victor pitched in. Victor had recovered but was still weak so, like Blanca, helped only with the light stuff. During the move Negra and Victor were acting as if they were on their second honeymoon, all kissie-kissie and lovey-dovey.
“Victor, honey, watch it with that, don’t hurt yourself.”
“Negra, querida, be careful. Let me help you with that, baby.”
For two days Blanca and I lived out of boxes until we had the time to fix things up and put everything in order. Then, just two days before Vera would arrive in New York, I got home late and tired. The house was dark. I figured Blanca must be with Negra or one of her friends or still at church. I fried myself a burger and got a malta from the fridge. After I ate, I decided to study and flipped on the television for background noise. That’s when I heard about the dead body. The English news channels didn’t make a big deal out of it, to them Alberto Salazar was just a Latin reporter for a small newspaper. Just another dead Latino tonight. It only got a blurb. But I needed to find out more, in case Alberto Salazar was the same guy I had heard Bodega and Nazario talk about that night at the Taino Towers.
So I finished my drink and switched to channel 47, hoping they would give one of their own more news time. I wasn’t disappointed.
The report said Salazar’s body was found in the East River. He had been a reporter for El Diario/La Prensa working on an investigation of a drug lord in East Harlem. Salazar had been a big man, six feet two, 260 pounds. As the camera panned an empty pier, still wet from the afternoon rain, the Spanish newscaster reported that there was evidence of a struggle. In addition to the gunshot wound, Salazar had suffered a serious bite to the shoulder. That’s when I knew who had killed him.
These dreams
These empty dreams
from the make-believe bedrooms
their parents left them
PEDRO PIETRI
—“Puerto Rican Obituary”
ROUND 1
My Growing Up and All That Piri Thomas Kinda Crap
SAPO was different.
Sapo was always Sapo, and no one messed with him because he had a reputation for biting. “When I’m in a fight,” Sapo would spit, “whass close to my mouth is mine by right and my teeth ain’t no fucken pawnshop.”
I loved Sapo. I loved Sapo because he loved himself. But by now you know it was never about Sapo. It was always about Bodega. And to this day it continues to be about Bodega. Bodega had an unforgettable blend of nobility and street, as if God never made up his mind whether to have Bodega be born a leader or a hood. Bodega did something to the neighborhood, something with staying power, like a song that no one could possibly like but you, because you heard it at a time when your heart was breaking.
But after Alberto Salazar was found dead no songs were played. No one thought of love or anything. The neighborhood became a tomb. Mute as an Egyptian. Every member of the street wire from the pimp to the junkie to the hooker talked like an Italian: “I ain’t see not’en’.”
Blanca had seen the news on TV. My guess is that at first Blanca thought that what had happened was a terrible thing. Then later, when things were going around about Salazar knowing things he shouldn’t about some drug king, I figured she must have felt even worse, that Salazar was a good man, God be with him. At some point she no doubt heard that Salazar was investigating Spanish Harlem. I figure it was then she really got suspicious. And when the newscasters mentioned the chunk of flesh missing from Salazar’s shoulder, memories must have rained down on Blanca like parachutes. She’d been an eyewitness to one of Sapo’s bites. It had been a gruesome display of hate and anger and Sapo, as only Sapo could, presented it with showmanship.
•
BACK IN Julia de Burgos Junior High, back in the days of my growing up and all that Piri Thomas kinda crap that I will spare you from, there was the English teacher, Mr. Blessington. He kept telling us boys we were all going to end up in jail and that all the girls were going to end up hooking. He would say these things right out loud and the administration wouldn’t do anything. I hated Blessington and he knew it. He looked at Blanca with the eyes of a repressed rapist. He thought he was smooth but what he came out looking was creepy. He’d come to school in a suit and tell us that a man with a suit is a man that is valuable and that a man without a suit has no worth. He always did Robert Frost poems with us, which were all right, but after a while we started to hate Robert Frost. Blessington thought he was doing us a service, and that was his error. H
e was one of those upper-middle-class people who think highly of themselves because they could be making money or something, but no, they have taken the high road and have chosen to “help” poor kids from the ghetto.
On the other hand the science teacher, Jose Tapia, was always lecturing us on how fortunate we were because we were young and Latin. His speeches were at times so fiery and full of passion that every year the principal would try to make Tapia the gym teacher, in hopes of cutting down Tapia’s influence over us. But as a science teacher Tapia was state certified and was appointed to our school so there was no way for the principal to get rid of him.
And he didn’t want to be called Mr. Tapia, simply Tapia.
One day when Sapo and me were in the eighth grade, Tapia told us, “You speak two languages, you are worth two people.” Sapo retorted, “What about the pope? He speaks like a hundred languages, but he ain’t worth jack.” The class was rolled.
“Sapo, do you think the pope would be the pope if he didn’t know his hundred languages?” Tapia asked after the laughter died down.
“Nah, if he didn’t speak a hundred languages he’d still be pope, because he’s white. All popes are white. I ain’t never seen no black pope. I ain’t seen a Spanish pope, either.”
“Hey, Tapia,” I said, “I never even seen a black nun.” Of course we were just stalling. The truth was we hadn’t done our homework and wanted to kill time.
“Or a Chinese nun. All I’ve ever seen are white nuns,” Edwin jumped in, so I figured he hadn’t done his homework either. “You can’t have a black pope if there are no black nuns.” I hated Edwin. When he borrowed a pencil he never gave it back and when school was almost over, he always borrowed loose-leaf paper because he didn’t see the point of buying a new notebook.
“Yeah, a black nun!” Sapo shouted in agreement.
“Julio, can you shut him up?” Blanca whispered to me. I always sat next to Blanca. I would leave my science book at home on purpose so I could use the excuse of sharing hers. Tapia understood this and, even though we had assigned seats, would always let me move.
Bodega Dreams Page 9