Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Everything between his legs I would chop off.”

  Teenager’s eyes crinkled and he suddenly stood up and called out, “I am going to sing.”

  The bandstand in the ChibCha was a small circle in a corner of the dining room, and the three guitar players were nearly shoulder to shoulder and had to maneuver their instruments much as moving men do to fit a couch through a doorway. When Teenager got up and came to the bandstand, one stepped down to make room, which he knew he had to do, just as an Italian waiter would have to assign a large table on a crowded night to a lone Mafioso and his woman.

  Teenager took a microphone and said, “I am going to sing this love song I like.”

  Benny clapped loudly and the bartender at the small bar in the rear of the place also clapped.

  “Aha,” Teenager called out.

  “Sing!” Benny yelled.

  Teenager looked at the lead guitar player. He hummed the song he wanted to sing. The man nodded, told his two partners, and they started to play. The guitar player on the floor stood on tiptoes and held his guitar as high as possible in order to get its sound into the microphone. Teenager sang low, almost too low to hear, with each note perfectly off-key. The guitar players smiled and nodded their heads, as if supporting the great Chucho Avallanet. Sometimes the smiles turned to winces as Teenager hit a particularly bad note.

  Yo la quise, muchachos,

  Y la quiero,

  Y jamás yo la podré

  Olvidar

  The song was about a man getting drunk because he loved his woman and could not forget her, while at the same time the woman was experiencing no difficulty at all in doing so.

  When Teenager was finished singing, the three guitar players all applauded and the people in the dining room picked it up and Teenager proudly bowed and went back to his table.

  “Did you like my song?” he said to Luisa Maria.

  “Yes, but it is not my favorite song.”

  “This favorite song of yours is what?”

  She began to hum “Toro Mata!” Teenager laughed. “Ah hah. That is not for here. Here is for love.” As Teenager laughed, everybody at the table laughed with him and all around the room of the ChibCha restaurant people smiled in approval, for Teenager was a person of status. He was an outlaw.

  Maximo saw that it would be a mistake to say anything to Teenager that would disturb his egomania at this moment; a threat, such as the one Maximo carried, would cause Teenager to assault the messenger and then go thrashing into the night with guns waving to prove his invincibility. Even if Teenager shot Mariani and all with him and became absolute ruler of his world, Maximo knew that he would be remembered forever as the one who brought bad news. Maximo also told himself that if Teenager went after Mariani, that would end the chance of ever seeing the girl again. Maximo now wondered if he was giving these reasons to himself as an excuse for remaining silent, an emotional defense against being drawn into a matter that could only provide danger. Looking at Teenager, Maximo saw that in the gold chains and brandy and music and laughter—laughter immediately picked up by the others at the table—there could be no disturbing news, no matter how gently given. Mama, Maximo said to himself. He knew that she could give a center to his confusion.

  “Maximo is having no fun,” Teenager said.

  “I’m falling asleep,” Maximo said.

  “Wake up, then.”

  “I will. Just long enough to get me home.”

  As he left, they laughed at him as if he were still in grammar school. Pausing in the doorway, Maximo searched the street, then became irritated with himself for being dramatic. His mind had allowed a warning to grow into a shadow stalking him. He smiled at this, walked across the sidewalk and hailed a gypsy cab. When he realized that he was directly under a streetlight, he suddenly felt exposed, as if the light were coating him with typhoid, and he hopped into the shadows. She had warned him not to be around Teenager even once, he reminded himself.

  When he got to Mama’s house in the morning, she answered the door in a new blue pants suit and seemed impatient that he would be at her door at such an hour.

  “Where have you been?” Mama said. “You come now. Now I have to go out and see a new apartment.”

  “I just felt like seeing you for a couple of minutes.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t know you had a phone again,” Maximo said.

  She frowned like a duchess being asked if she owned polo ponies. “I have had this phone for many weeks now. You can come in anyway. I’ll give you coffee.” Maximo followed her into the kitchen, where she cleared dirty dishes into the sink and set two mugs of coffee on the small kitchen table.

  “How is everything?” she said.

  “It’s all right. I’m studying hard for this test. Then when I leave here this morning, I’m going over to see about a job.”

  “Oh, I know you do all that,” Mama said. “The rest is what is very hard for you. I told you that. You are from this world and you are in the other world too.”

  “Mama, that’s all I saw in school.”

  “You did not see everything I tell you about.”

  “Mama, the day I was in Harvard learning about wills of ten million dollars, my Aunt Ramona died and left eighty-five dollars in an envelope. So I know what two worlds is.”

  “A book cannot tell you these things I tell you about,” Mama said. “Don’t tell me about wills in a book. Tell me about how you live with the other people.”

  “I tell you, that’s why I’m here,” Maximo said. “One of these other people said something to me.”

  Mama had been looking at her coffee, about to sip it, and now her eyes, schooled in the primitive, watched Maximo for a sign, a trace of complex things that she somehow was able to see.

  “What did this person say?”

  “I have to tell you like a lawyer and client,” Maximo said. “Only between us.”

  “A lawyer? I am better than a lawyer.”

  “All right. Like a priest in the confessional.”

  “That is what I am like all the time. If I were to tell something that someone tells me, then people would pray to the seven powers and I would turn into a pile of worms in my bed.”

  “All right,” Maximo said. “One of these people from the other world told me to stay away from Teenager.”

  “Ah, that is because they don’t want you to be yourself.”

  “No, I thought that. But I was wrong. This person told me that Teenager has a man very mad at him.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “An Italian. His name is Mariani. Teenager knows him.” Immediately Maximo saw that Mama knew the name, too.

  “Who told you about this?”

  “Somebody who knows.”

  “Female,” Mama said.

  “That’s right,” Maximo said.

  “And she knows?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She told you so you could tell him?”

  “No. Not even close.”

  “She told you to protect you?”

  “No question.”

  “You must be very close to this person.”

  “I’m not. Not now, anyway. I don’t know what it is right now. I know that she doesn’t want me to get hurt. That’s obvious.”

  “And you did not tell this to Teenager?”

  “Mama. How could I do that?”

  “No, you couldn’t do such a thing,” she said. “Teenager would, oh boy, he would be so mad.”

  “So you tell him,” Maximo said.

  “Yes, I’ll tell him.”

  Maximo put his empty cup down. “So now I’ve told you. Now you can go out and get your apartment.”

  Mama smiled. “This female, does anyone see you with her?”

  “I don’t know. I had coffee with her in a restaurant.”

  “Here in the Bronx?”

  “No, not in the Bronx.”

  “Oh. Your trouble begins when Puerto Rican people
see you with this woman.”

  “I’ll worry about that when it happens.”

  “You better worry before that,” Mama said. “You played in a vacant lot. Now those who played with you in that lot will become very angry if they see you with an American girl. They will not let you help anybody. Do you tell anybody about the girl?”

  “Only you. Teenager thinks that I saw her, but he never saw us together. What am I talking about, anyway? I only saw her twice, no three times in my life.”

  “You’ll see her more,” Mama said. “If she wants you to be safe, then she wants you for her. Then you will have trouble with yourself because you cannot live both ways.”

  Mama got up and walked into the living room. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said. Maximo stood in the doorway and watched as she went into one of her jugs and began taking out seashells. She held one up for him.

  “The people die and the souls turn to rainwater and drop into the river and the ocean and become stones and seashells,” she said. “They can speak to me.”

  She spread a straw mat, an estera, on the floor and held up her shells and, praying, began to drop them on the mat. Maximo went back into the kitchen and sat down. In a few minutes, he heard the shells being collected and then Mama came back.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  Maximo followed her out of the apartment.

  “The shells told me the proverb for Teenager,” Mama said. “The shells told me, ‘You are defeated through your own fault’ That is the proverb of Changó, Oya, Yewa. I will tell this to Teenager and he will be safe from this Mariani.”

  Outside, Maximo said, “Now tell me something else, where is this new apartment you’re going to get?”

  “Mosholu Parkway.”

  “Hey, that’s pretty good.” He had a dark notion of where her fresh money was from.

  Mama’s chin came out proudly. “Soon I will not have to walk to a subway.”

  When Maximo left Mama at the El steps, he had a feeling of accomplishment. He had done his duty to Teenager and from now on would please Nicki and try not to see him anymore.

  Two days later, Maximo was at the Bronx Legal Services, which were one flight over the Santurce cuchifritos stand on Cortlandt Street. The director of the Bronx Legal Services sat in a large cubicle decorated with a poster for the Puerto Rican Day parade. The director’s gray pinstriped suit was an attempt at being that of a successful lawyer’s, but was so wrinkled from belt-line to knee that the quality of material had to be more suspect than his fat legs. His name was Arthur Lefkind, and in a droning voice he explained that the office was federally funded and that it was allowed to deal only in civil matters for clients who either were on government assistance or whose earnings were under one hundred dollars a week.

  “I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t use you,” Lefkind said, studying Maximo’s résumé, “as long as there’s nothing that isn’t kosher here.”

  “If my name goes on anything, it has to be absolutely proper,” Maximo said.

  “It’s like I get Harvard people walking in here every day,” Lefkind said.

  “I am here because I am going to spend my life here,” Maximo said.

  “Don’t say a thing like that,” Lefkind said. “Nobody ever did anything so bad that they had to spend their whole life in the Bronx.” He scrawled something on a memo pad, ripped the page off and handed it to Maximo. “Go over and see Luis Jimenez. You know him? You don’t? Well, you better. He’s at the Bronx All Services Center. On Westchester Avenue. I put the address down.”

  “What do I tell him?” Maximo asked.

  “It isn’t what you say to him, it’s what he says to me,” Lefkind said.

  As Maximo walked down the street, he imagined that Nicki was walking in front of him. There was no purpose for her being on such alien flagstones, yet she walked as if the surroundings were hers; she slowed as she approached a candy store, a hand going into her pocket to find if she had enough cigarettes. Yes, she did. Her graceful step resumed. Maximo kept looking at her hair, which was untied, unclasped, and moved just enough to cause the light to skip across it. Once he allowed himself to draw even with her. At first he felt her attitude of dominance over anybody who would dare step into the flight area about her body. As she saw it was Maximo, an intensity came into her eyes and the air about her softened. He could not believe that she would allow him to be this close, to let his hand reach out and touch her hair. She sighed inside.

  A moment later, when he was alone again, he felt foolish with the memo paper in his hand, the note a child carries to the grocer, or, more disturbing, the slips that cheap employment agencies hand to someone being sent out for a restaurant porter’s job. He crumpled the note and threw it in a garbage can. The note, Maximo thought, would have caused his father to expire on the spot.

  Now, with his father dead nearly six years, Maximo walked under the El, looking for the Bronx All Services Center, musing over what he felt were the differences in life between the times of his father and now. It was no longer a matter of how far down you bent in order to receive something. Today it was wine and cheese parties, as long as you kept your personal life away from the party; no one wanted to subject himself to some plump, Puerto Rican woman shrieking and kissing people, as if equal with them. Of course nothing else but personal survival for the few invited to the parties could be accomplished. Maximo believed that if he did it the other way, if he took the jobs no one wanted, worked to advance the people everybody shunned, carried the causes that others found too heavy, he could accomplish things for all that would last forever. Teenager tried his way and Puerto Rican pain only increased. Maximo would accomplish so much more with the mere rustle of paper; he loved Seigelman, the high school teacher who had forced him to say “present” instead of “yo.”

  He found the office entrances to the Bronx All Services Center, double glass doors opening onto a flight of stairs that were covered with linoleum and led up to what once was a ballroom or bowling alley. A uniformed security guard and a black Hispanic woman sat at desks in a reception area, with the woman busy at a monitor board that kept buzzing and lighting each time she attempted to talk.

  Finally, she said to Maximo, “You must lead a very good life. He has a few minutes to see you now.”

  The security man opened a door and directed Maximo down a hall to a secretary, who indicated an office behind her. Sitting at a large desk, the wall behind covered with plaques, was Luis Jimenez, his skin of perfect color, light enough not to unsettle a white and yet dark enough to satisfy even Hispanics most black. He was about forty-five, with black curly hair and a smile that had pretensions to warmth. The face was round, and reminded Maximo of pork.

  “Oh, you’re a smart boy,” Jimenez said, reading Maximo’s résumé. “Oh, a very smart boy.”

  “Maybe someday,” Maximo said. “Right now I’m still learning.”

  “Oh, you are much smarter than anyone already. This I can see.”

  “Do you run the Legal Services office?” Maximo asked.

  “Oh, no. I have nothing to do with them. I am not a lawyer. I am the one who helps all the people in the Bronx who are poor. I help welfare people, I help drug addicts, I help sick people. I help all the poor. All the government money comes to me.”

  “What am I supposed to talk to you about?” Maximo said.

  “About the job,” Jimenez said. “In the Bronx, if somebody is Hispanic and he is to get some sort of job, they usually ask me to see that the person is an honest person, and a smart person, so that he will not embarrass the Puerto Rican people in this job.”

  “I see.”

  “But this does not concern you, for you are so smart that we know you are honest, too. So you will get this job.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There is one thing you must do,” Jimenez said. “When there is an election, you must come and help us get the man elected. A smart boy like you could do such tremendous things for us in an election.”
/>   “Oh, I intend to work in politics,” Maximo said.

  “That’s good. Then in an election, you will work with us.”

  “Of course,” Maximo said, “I would have to know the man running and the issues. I just wouldn’t back anybody I did not think was good.”

  Jimenez threw back his head and laughed. “Ah, you are so smart. That’s wonderful to be like this. I can see that you are not a sheep who would follow everybody else.”

  “Never,” Maximo said. “I’ve heard about our people being sold out too many times for me to just go along.”

  “You’re so smart!” Jimenez said. He came out from behind the desk and put an arm around Maximo’s shoulders and walked him to the door. “Yes, the Legal Services. That would be a good job for you.” Smiling, he walked back toward his desk. “Call me tomorrow,” he said.

  In the morning, Ana’s Bar was not yet open at 9:30, so Maximo leaned on a car by the phone booths on the other side of the street, took a breath and went to the phone and dialed Luis Jimenez. The secretary that answered said he would not be there until ten. At 10:05, Maximo called again. Jimenez would be in at eleven, the secretary said. Maximo went for coffee, read a paper and talked to Ralph at the newsstand; when there is no phone in the house, there is a cost to each missed phone connection. At 11:15, Luis Jimenez’s voice came on the phone.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. But we just gave this job to this other guy. You were very smart, but everybody wanted this other guy so we just gave him the job.”

  “You told me yesterday that I had the job,” Maximo said.

  “No, I never said such a thing to you,” Jimenez said.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I remember exactly what I said,” Jimenez said. “You didn’t listen to me. I said that the Bronx Legal Services would be a good job for you. I didn’t say you had it. I just said it would be a good job for you. Maybe you don’t listen to everything. Maybe you are not so smart.”

  Maximo hung up with the anger rising in him.

  Over the next four days, Maximo applied for work at the Bronx Legal Aid Society, the New York State Substance Abuse Center, the New York City Department of Buildings and the district offices of State Senator Antonio Flores, where a woman named Sarita Velazquez looked up from her desk and said, “You have not seen Mr. Luis Jimenez before coming here?”