Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  As Maximo walked home, he at first felt depressed that he was passing up a study group at somebody’s house that night in Riverdale; the Protestant ethic, even vaccinated into tan skins, takes. Then he thought of seeing Nicki, of talking to her and adoring her body and impressing her with his conversation, which would delight her because he was probably the only one she had ever known who used his head for something more complicated than butting down doors.

  As Maximo reached his corner, he heard a high wail and he turned and saw David Robles walking swiftly down the block, calling into the air. With him was a taller kid named Pedro.

  David half ran and half loped, his body spilling in many directions.

  “Yo, Maximo,” David called.

  Maximo looked at him carefully. David’s face and the front of his hair was covered with scum.

  “Fucked up,” Pedro said.

  “Yo, Maximo, fist fight,” David said. He began flailing the air, first leading with his right hand and then turning around and leading with his left hand and then stopping in the middle of a punch and putting the right hand in front.

  “Which hand are you supposed to hold out?” Maximo said to him. “Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

  David shrugged.

  “Which hand do you eat with?” Maximo said.

  David looked at his hands for a moment, let a scream come out of his mouth and ran across the street to his doorway, an uncontrolled screech coming from him.

  “Fucked up on glue, man,” Pedro said.

  Maximo shook his head.

  “He didn’t do it by himself,” Pedro said.

  “What did he do, catch it like it’s a cold?” Maximo said.

  “These older dudes come and they say, ‘Yo, Pedro. Yo, David. Come over here.’ I was afraid to go over with them, because they bad dudes. David, he goes over to them and they take him and put his head in this bag and tell him to breathe or they kick his ass. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. They made him do it, man.”

  Maximo first thought about going over to David’s house, but then he decided he would let the mother handle it this time, although he would have to talk to her very soon about the boy’s hand confusion. If the boy didn’t know his right from a left in a fist fight, then surely he could not tell a “d” from a “b” in school, and probably had greater difficulties than that. He decided to pursue this at another time. He went up to the apartment and brought the dog down. Unleashed, the dog lunged into the free air and tore down the empty street, a tan blur. Maximo sat on the curb and each time the dog came racing back, Maximo waved him off. He wanted the dog tired for the night, so no paw would be scratching his door.

  When he opened the door for her, Nicki brushed past him, her arms wrapped about a package, and when his hand came after her, she shook her head.

  “I have to do something right away. Before we get all involved.”

  “Do what?”

  “This,” she said, opening the package and pulling out one of the orange towels.

  “Are they for here?”

  “How could you ask? With the rags you use, you think you don’t need new towels?”

  She put a couple in the bathroom and then began walking around, looking for a closet.

  “The only closet I have is in here,” Maximo said, walking into the bedroom.

  She followed him in, dropped the towels on the bed and reached up onto the closet shelf.

  “Filthy,” she said. “I got to do something about that.” She walked out to the kitchen, and Maximo looked out the window to see if by some chance David was back out on the street.

  “I can’t put new towels into a filthy place like this,” she said when she returned. Standing on her toes, she wiped the closet shelf. “What are you looking for?” she said as she dusted.

  “The boy across the street. He was obliterated when he was around before.”

  “Has he become your little charge?” she asked.

  “No. But he does live across the street from me.”

  “Stay out of it,” she said.

  “What should I do? Make believe I didn’t see him? Woman’s trying to raise him by herself.”

  “If you let one account tie you up, you won’t get the whole job done,” she said. “You could spend your lifetime on one kid. Concentrate on getting someplace. And taking care of me.

  He approached her from the back and put his arms on her shoulders and she leaned into him and craned her neck as he kissed it.

  “You walked in here without even a ‘hello,’ ” he said.

  “I want to get these towels fixed. Besides, you got your little friend across the street on your mind.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, kissing her again.

  She turned around and held up a finger. “Speaking of friends. You’re doing what I told you about the other one.”

  “Who?”

  “Who. You know who. Your marvelous friend with the beard.”

  “Teenager? I haven’t seen him in so long I forgot who you were talking about.”

  “You better,” she said. “Because I like what I see when I come here. And I don’t want to see you dead.”

  She smiled and then kissed him and, controlling the kiss, moved with him to a bed which became sweet.

  Teenager’s business now started in Mexico and came to the streets of the Bronx by methods as complicated and eventful as a bus ride. His partner in Mexico, El Manillo, collected black ovals of poppy gum from Arizmendi, the farmer outside Culiacán. El Manillo drove up the federal highway to the border with the black ovals of poppy gum, double-wrapped in plastic, stuffed into the front housing of a four-wheel drive. The trip took nine hours and El Manillo drove through the border station without taking a deep breath, for he crossed only during those times when his personal American border guard, a man who believed in supplemental income, was on duty. While tourists had cameras taken apart and college students were searched internally, El Manillo and his pounds of dope were waved on. In the backyard of a grocery store in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, he was met, on schedule, by Benny or Albertito. El Manillo usually had stuffed into the front of his four-wheel drive some twenty rubbery ovals, each weighing a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. They were placed into an attaché case, sprinkled with perfume to smother any possible scent that an airport search dog might catch, and then hand-carried on a domestic commercial flight to New York. El Manillo, with twenty-five thousand dollars for himself, the farmer Arizmendi and others in the Culiacán economy, slid back into his jeep and headed for home.

  In the Bronx, the drugs were taken to a garage between factory buildings on Bruckner Boulevard, a few blocks away from Ana’s Bar. Gilberto Dones, his face covered by a surgical mask, wearing only undershorts, worked on the material under blazing arc lights and in the noise of old exhaust fans. He turned the black ovals of gum from Culiacán into heroin for the streets of the Bronx. Gilberto worked from a recipe on the wall of his garage. As Gilberto did not understand what he was doing, he did not go one breath past the recipe. He had heard about the Italians using chemists to make their heroin, which puzzled Dones for he found the process required not as much ability as baking pizzas. Dones used large drums, cheesecloth filters, hydrochloric acid and acetic anhydrite. To Dones, the chemicals he used might as well have been baking powder. But in continually filtering his mixtures through cheesecloth and drying the crystals under the arc lights, Dones was able to take twenty kilograms of black poppy gum from Culiacán and turn it into two kilograms of 90 percent pure heroin. At the completion of the day’s work, Dones, cockeyed from heroin fumes, walked around the garage and told himself that he was in a Spanish castle.

  The drugs were stored in a hundred and ninety-five dollar a month apartment on Strathmore Avenue, twenty-five blocks from Ana’s Bar. Living in the apartment was Junior Mendez, his wife Mirta, their baby Ramon, and three Doberman pinschers who were fed just enough to keep their black coats stretched across rangy bones. Each dog had a scar on his throat
from an operation that removed the voice box, this to make certain that the dogs could give no warning of their presence to an invader. A bark, a growl of anticipation, an angry whine could alert such a person and provide time for shooting the dogs, who were kept in a small windowless room with the heroin, which was in suitcases. The floor was covered with newspapers that served the same purpose as straw in a horse’s stall. When acute hunger caused the dogs to gnaw at the suitcases and thump against the door, Junior Mendez opened the door slightly and pushed in paper plates of dog food and a bucket of water.

  Junior and his wife slept on a mattress on the living room floor, a shotgun beside the mattress. The baby was in a cardboard box. The only other furniture in the apartment was a large table and a television set that Junior stared at day and night. Under the terms of his employment, he was not allowed to leave the house when dope was in it. On the few days that there was no dope, Junior would feed the dogs enough to calm them, clean out their room and take them out for silent runs through Crotona Park.

  Teenager and Benny Velez came to the apartment in the middle of the morning to work on the drugs. Using a window pole, Junior slid the suitcases out of the dogs’ room. On the table in the living room Teenager stacked packages of quinine, which he had bought for five hundred dollars a pound. Measuring with a gram scale, he put together two packages, each containing an eighth of a kilo of the 90 percent heroin. These were for customers willing to pay six thousand dollars for each eighth. He also measured several one-ounce bags of pure heroin that would be sold in bars in the grisly nights. Teenager took the remaining heroin, spilled it onto the table, and doubled its size by adding quinine. Then he and Benny, using tin quarter-inch pastry spoons, measured six spoons of quinine to each of heroin, packaged the mixture—got it “decked up”—in envelopes that were of the same size and paper as used for postage stamps. These envelopes were the spinal cord of the drug trade and at this time, 1976, could be bought for two dollars a bag from one of Teenager’s dealers.

  “It is very good,” Teenager said to one of his dealers, Indio, at the bar in the afternoon.

  “Let me find out,” Indio said.

  “Give it to everyone to see that it is the best,” Teenager said.

  Indio went to the back of the place and stood at a door alongside the one to the men’s room. Luisa Maria reached under the bar, pressed a buzzer and the door unlocked. Indio went up a short flight of stairs to a heavy metal door that had a two-way mirror as a window. A slot in the door opened. “What did he say?” Benny Velez’ voice called out.

  “Enough to test it with everyone on the street.”

  Benny stuck five bags through the slot. Indio took them with him to St. Anselm’s Avenue.

  “Shake hands with me,” he said to Chino, who stood by the newsstand. Chino’s face brightened as he felt the heroin decks.

  “Share with your friends,” Indio said.

  Indio stood by the newsstand and read the Spanish paper, El Diario.

  Twenty minutes later, Chino walked back to the newsstand. He was yawning, his hands clawing the sides of his face.

  “Where did you cop?” a guy asked him.

  “Indio.”

  “That’s good stuff, man,” the guy said. “Where is Indio?”

  Chino gave a great yawn and pointed to Indio.

  “Indio,” the guy said.

  “You come later,” Indio said.

  Indio went back to the bar and told Teenager he would handle the new dope from Mexico. He asked for forty half loads—“half los.” A half lo is a set of fifteen packets that cost Indio twenty dollars to buy from Teenager and which, sold on the streets for two dollars each, would give Indio a profit of ten dollars. Indio’s order of forty half loads, six hundred doses of heroin for street junkies, would bring Teenager eight hundred dollars and Indio four hundred dollars, if all money was faithfully paid.

  “Write it down,” Teenager said to Albertito, who sat at the bar.

  “Give me a pencil,” Albertito said.

  “I have none,” Teenager said.

  Luisa Maria looked around the bar and found a ballpoint pen.

  “Now give me paper,” Albertito said.

  Luisa went through her purse and came out with a bill from a boutique. Albertito made a note on the back of it.

  “Indio has four days to pay for the forty half los,” Teenager said.

  “I pay in two days,” Indio said. “Then I want forty more half los.”

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, Indio heard knocking on his door. Through his peephole he saw two junkies.

  “What?”

  “A half lo.”

  “You got to be crazy.”

  “We got some dudes waitin’.” He ran a hand over a pockmarked face.

  “Show me the money,” Indio said.

  The pockmarked face held a fist up to the peephole and opened it. Indio looked at the crumpled bills.

  “How much is there?”

  “Twenty-four dollar, man.”

  “A half lo is thirty dollar.”

  “I promise you on my mother I be back at eleven-thirty with the money. Then I bring you even more business.”

  “Let me see the money again.”

  The hand held the money up to the peephole. Sixteen, Indio said to himself.

  A door opened at the end of the hall and the junkies, startled, looked at it. The door at the end of the hall closed. The girl, Indio thought.

  He went to his bedroom, which was a room without doors between the kitchen and the living room. His wife and boys, both under ten, sat in pajamas on the living room couch and watched the Flintstone cartoon. Indio reached under his shirts in the dresser and brought out nine bags of heroin. They want a half lo, they must think my brain died, he thought. He went back to the door, which was spangled with locks and draped with chains. Indio took a .357 Magnum out of his belt, held it in his right hand and opened the door with his left. The three chains allowed the door to open just wide enough for the fingertips of a hand to stick through.

  “Money,” Indio said.

  The hand came in and Indio snatched the money, then passed out the nine bags of heroin.

  “All right, man,” the pockmark said. “If it’s good we tell everybody we know.”

  In the apartment at the end of the hallway, Francisca Perez leaned against the door she had just closed.

  “Didn’t you leave?” her sister called from the bedroom.

  “I’m still here,” Francisca said.

  “You’ll be late for your job.”

  “I cannot help this.”

  “They will take out of your pay.”

  “I won’t go out while those bad men are standing there.”

  “They are just buying dope. That is none of your business.” Her sister, body bulging with an imminent child, shuffled out of the bedroom. “Just walk past them and go to work.”

  Francisca shut her eyes and did not move. She was fourteen. The sister, Gloria, was eighteen. In June, Francisca came to New York from Santurce because her sister, who had been in New York for three years, had promised to find her a good high school for science. Francisca came to New York on a Sunday night to find her sister pregnant and without a husband. On Monday morning, the sister took Francisca to the top floor of a factory building on Bruckner Boulevard. The sister told the foreman that she was quitting and that Francisca would take her place. Gloria went home to bed and Francisca sat at a sewing machine and worked on quilted robes for a salary of seventy dollars and fifty cents a week, thirty dollars under the federal minimum wage. The factory windows were kept closed for the summer, and there were no fans inside, because any breeze would disturb the material on the sewing machines. Francisca cried as she worked. In September, when it was time for Francisca to go to school, the sister still would call out from the bedroom each morning, “Time to go to work.”

  At fourteen, Francisca became a sparrow surrounded by iron, and
as the first fall chill came through her summer clothes and caused her body to flinch, she realized that she no longer could comply with the rules of her life. Now, as she leaned against the door in the morning and waited for the junkies to leave the hallway, she once again tried to think, of reasons that would make her suicide acceptable to God.

  Three days later, Indio was in the hallway when Francisca passed. He smiled. When she got home from work, he was standing outside the apartment for a rare breath of air. He smiled and held the door for her. “Thank you,” she said. The next morning, when Francisca gloomily left her apartment to go to work, Indio was in the hallway.

  “You like your job?”

  “I hate it.”

  “How much do you make?”

  “Seventy-nine dollar.”

  “I pay you a hundred and fifty to stay in my apartment.”

  “Sex?” Francisca said.

  “How could you ask me such a thing when you know that I am the father of children who live in the house with me? I just want you to stay in my house and give out dope at the door.”

  Under this new arrangement, with Francisca at home, Indio could go outside his apartment and enlarge his business through personal contacts. In Bronx County jail he had become known as the humorist of 6W, a prominent wing of the jail. He once fashioned a dummy in Gilberto Perez’ bed by using a black cap, overcoat and shoes. He then ran into the dayroom and told Perez, “There’s some big colored guy in your bed.” Perez went into his shoe for a shiv and tip-toed up to the bed and attacked the dummy. Because of stories such as these, junkies smiled when they saw Indio. His trade grew even larger as he showed a persistence rarely seen: he would sell a “bundle” of ten bags for fifteen dollars to a junkie and then stand outside an abandoned building until the junkie had gone into the shooting gallery, sold everything and came out with the fifteen dollars.

  18

  CHRISTMAS EVE, WHICH SUPERSEDES Christmas Day in religious and family significance to Puerto Ricans, fell on a Thursday that year. On Monday of that week, Teenager was aggravated to find himself in the same defensive circumstances as some pendejito sent out to the store by his wife. He knew of his situation immediately that morning, when he arose to find his wife moving briskly about a kitchen whose surfaces were covered with the white yucca vegetable and plantains that would be formed into pasteles, meat pies, for the Christmas Eve feast. Usually, Teenager’s appearances at home were sporadic, with arrivals and departures made without as much as a nod to the kitchen. This time, arising into eleven o’clock activity rather than midafternoon emptiness, he was attracted and then trapped by his wife’s preparations.