The Empanada Brotherhood

by John Nichols

  I shook my head, embarrassed—nothing at all.

  “He brought me a fur coat, silk stockings, and a satin garter belt,” she said, grabbing a pack of cigarettes off the windowsill. “You want to see them?”

  I cocked my head, staring at her quizzically.

  The dancer lit her cigarette, then turned around, bent over, and swished up her skirt, mooning me. There were no stockings and no garter belt, only her white cotton panties and pretty legs.

  It lasted only a second before she laughed, dropping the skirt and facing me.

  “You know what Santa Claus brought Jorge?” she asked.

  By now I was confused and at her mercy.

  “He brought Jorge a big lump of coal and the rent bill,” she said, blowing smoke out her nose. “Christmas in America is crazy. Okay, muchacho, hit it.”

  Jorge started again at exactly the spot where I had interrupted. Cathy grabbed her skirt and began to pound the floor with the incongruous cigarette still in her mouth. She danced that way for five minutes with the weed between her lips like a tough little Humphrey Bogart. It never disturbed her concentration. A few times she inhaled and then exhaled smoke in huffing bursts, but she never touched the cigarette with her fingers. When it had burned down almost to a nub she spit it out and gasped loudly and finished the dance. The nub burned out on the floor.

  Cathy panted, dripping with sweat. She pulled up the hem of her skirt, tucking it into the waistband, exposing her legs from the knees down.

  She said, “In Argentina the Three Wise Men place candy in our shoes on January sixth, the day of Los Reyes. Little kids put their wish lists outside the door by their zapatos. They also leave some hay and a bowl of water for the camels. But my family never had money for presents. In fact, if any of us had ever seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer we would have slit his throat and turned him into sausage on a parrilla. Here’s a nice memory, though. When the Peronistas still held power they brought trucks to the barrio full of toys and gave them to us poor kids. One year I got a ball and a yo-yo and a notebook. That’s the last time I ever received something for nothing. In real life if you want anything good you have to kill yourself to grasp it. Isn’t that right, Jorge?”

  Jorge shrugged and smoked his cigarette like a professional actor in a gangster movie. To me, the two of them together seemed like ancient souls trapped in adolescent bodies. And for the rest of that practice session they ignored me completely.

  18. Big Tits, Blue Hair

  On New Year’s Eve I quit typing on my college romance at nine P.M. Then I walked up to the empanada stand where the cocinero was cutting cards for nickels with Gino and Carlos the Artist while he cooked. The boys squeezed over to let me in the alley. Their tattered deck of cards featured sleazy naked ladies. I put four nickels on the counter and joined the game. The great Gardel was singing his laments on the Victrola. Three inches of wet snow covered the sidewalk and it was still falling like blobs of frozen custard. Despite the cold, revelers were all over the place. Taxicabs honked loudly in the traffic jams on Bleecker and MacDougal.

  “What’s your New Year’s resolution, blondie?” Roldán scooped up three nickels for producing the queen of spades, a bosomy gal with her lips puckered in a kiss. The cook poured each of us a shot of wine from a bottle he kept under the grease bin.

  “I’m going to sell a book and get rich,” I said.

  “I’m going to get laid three hundred and sixty-five times,” Gino said, winning our nickels with the ten of diamonds, a buxom tart bent over looking backward at the camera through her legs.

  “What about you, kid?” Carlos asked me. He had little gold stars pasted all over his cheeks. “How many times do you plan to get laid next year?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said, losing my third nickel to the artist’s nine of clubs, a lewd nude wearing a top hat and high heels.

  Gino acted incredulous. “How can you not have a girl in this city? There are more women here than stars across the sky. It’s like an apple orchard with ten thousand trees and a thousand ripe apples on every tree begging to be picked. You’re young like me, you’re not bad looking, and you can speak English,” he added. “There’s no excuse not to have a novia.”

  “But I’m always broke,” I explained self-consciously. “I can’t even pay for dinner and a movie.”

  “‘Broke’?” he exclaimed, even more disbelieving as he cupped his crotch with one hand and yanked upward. “Che, blondie, all you need is this.”

  Popeye chose that moment to stop at the stand with a woman named Martha on his arm. She had jumped right out of the deck of cards we were playing with. At least twice the sailor man’s size, she had blue hair and a butterfly tattoo on one cheek. She was missing two front teeth and wore lipstick the color of Nehi orange soda pop.

  “I love this guy,” Martha shouted in English, pounding Popeye on the back. “He’s the peppiest pup I ever met. Dumber than a bucket of hair, I’ll admit. But still, I haven’t had this much fun since the pigs ate my baby brother.”

  In Spanish, to Roldán, Popeye gasped, “Her tetas alone weigh more than you do, patrón.”

  “What’d he say?” Martha asked me. “You talk their lingo, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “A bit. But I don’t understand when they speak slang.”

  “‘Slang’?” Martha blustered. “Slang my ass. This little critter is an Einstein with his prick. Come on, sailor boy, let’s go home, I’m hungry.”

  With a grunt, Martha picked Popeye up in a bear hug, backed out of the alley onto the sidewalk, put him down, lovingly cuffed the back of his head, and barked at us: “This bubba don’t know the meaning of quit.”

  “Hey, Popeye,” Carlos called hilariously in Spanish, “don’t fall in and drown.”

  Martha must have caught the drift because she bent over and fashioned a snowball the size of a grapefruit. She fired it through the half-open window at the artist but missed, nailing Roldán on the temple instead. He stumbled backward against the coffee percolator while large chunks of ice splashed and hissed as steam puffed up from the grease bin.

  “Auxilio!” the boss cried. “Martians are attacking us!”

  19. Men Without Women

  Everything was quiet on January first. I felt antsy. From nine until noon I wrote a maudlin short story about a blind teenage guitarist visiting from Spain who got hit by a New York taxi and wound up in a hospital suffering from amnesia. The nurse who took care of him was practicing to be a flamenco dancer. She was beautiful but of course he couldn’t see her. I didn’t know how to end the story so it went into a pile on top of half a dozen other incomplete stories.

  Time for a little break. Dressed extra-warm, I traipsed downstairs and said “Buon giorno” to Rocco, the super, who was hauling garbage cans out from the boiler room to the sidewalk. I offered to help but he grunted me off. “Vada via.”

  So I walked north on West Broadway to Washington Square. All around the dreary park, tree branches were spindly naked, very black, icy cold. The dirty snow was pockmarked by a million footprints. Somebody had built seven snowpeople inside the fountain, which gurgled water only in summertime.

  A bus carried me up to Forty-seventh Street. My heart started beating faster six blocks before I got off. Nevertheless, I mustered the courage to walk west past the diamond exchange and a camera store to El Parrillón and found it closed. I was relieved and disappointed. Peering through the window, all I could see was a bar and many round tables covered by clean white linen. Where did Cathy and her parents live and what were they doing right now?

  On my way back to Fifth Avenue I stopped at a pay phone, making a collect call to my folks to wish them a happy New Year. We didn’t talk long because it was too chilly not to be in motion.

  I took a bus south from Forty-seventh Street to Madison Square where I got off and hiked the rest of the way downtown feeling excited, desperate, and hungry for more in life. I wanted Fame, Fortune, Sex, Love, and plenty of delicious
food and high-class alcohol. I wanted to be married and fly around the world, visiting Paris, Rome, and Istanbul, maybe even Manila. Too bad the holiday season had ended.

  Lo and behold, I bumped into Alfonso, Eduardo, and Luigi scurrying miserably north along MacDougal Street and we walked together up to the park. “Happy New Year,” I said. “How are tricks with Adriana, La Petisa, Renata, and Sofía?” That was supposed to be a joke.

  Eduardo didn’t think so. He thought Adriana should have a scarlet A branded on the center of her forehead prior to being deported from this country for hooking without a license. The night before he had tried to pick up a girl at the Ninth Circle and she told him to “bug off.” What did that mean? “I can hear Adriana cackling, the witch.”

  Alfonso explained, “It isn’t her fault. It’s just a puerile fixation inside your own adolescent head.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Eduardo grumbled. “The mugwump who can’t decide whether to marry the sexpot devil or a humdrum saint.”

  “At least he has a choice.” Luigi flicked his cigarette butt into the gutter. “La Petisa hates my face. She cooks, she keeps the apartment clean, but she won’t even dole out kisses. I am treated like a eunuch in my own house. If I had a Sofía I’d be ecstatic.”

  “Stop.” Alfonso held up one hand. “I feel so desperate I don’t even want to talk about my novias.”

  But while we were circling the fountain like hamsters in an exercise wheel he said: “In her last letter Renata implied that she might start dating other men if I don’t agree to marry her. My heart freezes when I think of that. It isn’t fair. Why don’t women play by the rules?”

  And Eduardo still never mentioned the ten bucks he owed me.

  20. I Am Beautiful

  Though I wore a knitted cap, gloves, and my kapok jacket to the dance studio I half froze to death anyway. Jorge had on his porkpie hat and scarf and overcoat. Between numbers he shoved his hands into his crotch. Cathy started out wearing a sweater and a cap but shed them quickly. Even though our breath was visible in the chill air she became soaked from the dancing. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Certain moves within a bulerías or a solear were special. I sat far away and kept my mouth shut.

  After the practice session Cathy said, “Let’s go for coffee.” We three walked through dirty snow to the Downtown Café and slipped into a booth. Jorge had a six-word vocabulary, even in his native Spanish. He came from Sevilla, Spain, and was now studying flamenco guitar with an exiled maestro named Alejandro Cárdenas.

  The waitress brought over some coffees.

  “Here you go,” she said, taking them off her tray. “Three cups of ordinary joe brewed in our cool kitchen especially for you good people by little elves from Brazil.”

  Cathy said, “When I am a star I want to buy a house in Andalucía and another one in Buenos Aires. I’ll keep a New York apartment but I don’t like the United States.”

  She chain-smoked cigarettes. I said, “Isn’t that bad for you?”

  “No me importa. I’m young. They don’t kill you for a while.”

  She ordered two glazed doughnuts with her coffee. I said, “Don’t you have to watch your diet?”

  “Not me, vos. I still have my girlish figure. But flamenco doesn’t worry what size or shape you are as long as you have duende. Some of the greatest stars are elephants.”

  Her smile was dazzling, her bravado seductive. One minute she exuded a little-girl innocence, the next minute she could withdraw, suddenly haughty and professional.

  “To be an artist you can’t care about anyone except yourself,” Cathy told me. “I can get away with murder because right now I am so beautiful.”

  Then she leaned forward and whispered: “Maybe I don’t have a drop of gypsy blood, but my soul was born in Granada.”

  She drank one coffee and ordered a refill. Her skin was pale and her hair as shiny as wet coal. She wore bright red lipstick and thick mascara and her eyes had that mischievous sparkle. After practice she had donned an old sweatshirt and replaced the flamenco shoes with a dirty pair of fur-lined boots from Argentina. She had reapplied her makeup before leaving the dance studio. Now she clicked open a compact and checked her face again and then put on fresh lipstick. She fixed it by pressing her lips on a napkin and gave the napkin to me.

  I asked her to sign the lipstick print and she wrote: Con cariño, Catalina María Escudero.

  “Do you dream about me?” she teased. “I bet all you boys dream about me. I am a femme fatale. Before I am twenty-three I will make a Hollywood movie. Do you think I’m gorgeous?”

  How could any man say no?

  Cathy laughed and put a fresh cigarette between her lips. She snapped her fingers. “Give me fire, baby.” She said baby in English.

  With pleasure I struck a match.

  When he wasn’t playing guitar, Jorge seemed half asleep. He never said anything. Cathy talked to me about herself, her native Argentina, her spangled dancing. I listened, bewitched. Cathy prattled on. And Jorge tuned us out like an indifferent dumb animal basking in tropical sunshine.

  21. Party Poopers

  During the second week of January an Argentine boxer was slated to fight in Madison Square Garden. Roldán pasted a cartel of the bout on the brick wall beside the empanada stand. The Latin heavyweight was undefeated down south, having won six knockouts in a row since turning professional. He was going to battle an unknown American and no one doubted that he would clobber the bum. All the muchachos declared it would be “no contest.”

  Roldán seized on the event as an excuse for a party. He contacted a friend who had a pal who knew some people at the Garden who could sell us tickets for a reduced price. “And we’ll have a dinner at my place before the knockout,” he said. “I’ll make sangría. And chicken in a spicy stew with pigs’ knuckles and niños envueltos and papas rellenas.”

  “Dale,” Carlos the Artist cried. “We’ll get pissed to the gills and they’ll have to carry us to the Garden! Better yet, we’ll go in Popeye’s diaper truck.”

  Everybody wanted a ticket.

  Gino paid first and I followed suit because I had extra cash from unloading a furniture truck on Broome Street. Alfonso was next in line and promptly bet five dollars with Gino against his own countryman, whom he claimed had a glass chin. Luigi forked over the price of a ticket, as did Carlos the Artist. La Petisa refused to participate, calling us “barbarians.” When we pressed Popeye to join us he said that nylons were not as profitable as advertised: He was broke. But Chuy sprang for four tickets, one for himself, one for Popeye, and two extras for as yet unselected women. Looking gaunt and deranged, Luigi’s long-haired weight-lifting pal, El Coco, gave Roldán a dirty sock filled with pennies for his entrance fee.

  Six nights before the bout Eduardo visited the empanada stand apoplectic because through binoculars he’d seen his ex-wife making out with her fat boyfriend near the window of her apartment without the shades drawn … and he also plunked down the price of admission.

  On the day of the fight I only worked lunch at the Night Owl. Then I went to Roldán’s messy digs and helped the fat man prepare our meal. His Christmas tree was still up, the little lights blinking. It was cold outside, the temperature not far above zero. By four o’clock we had two large kettles on the stove simmering and awaiting the onslaught. We made a sangría of red wine, sugar, and slices of melon, with oranges and also lemons. By five o’clock, when guests should have arrived, everything was ready. I lay down on the rumpled bed in Roldán’s room and watched television for a spell and soon fell asleep to snowflakes ticking against the window. At six the cook’s pudgy hand shook me awake.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Only Chuy has come. But he brought two minas.”

  I sat up. Chuy was seated at the kitchen table facing a pair of teenagers, Angela and Adelita. He was preening and leaning close to their faces, murmuring sweet nothings.

  “We might as well eat now,” Roldán said. “Everything is ready a
nd we won’t reach the Garden on time if we delay any longer.”

  He lifted a lid and stirred with his serving spoon. We ate hearty and drank sangría, getting bloated and tipsy. Chuy described in gory detail the operations on his stump that were preparing it for a prosthetic hand. Angela and Adelita giggled, smoking cigarettes while they ate. Their funny off-color jokes caught us by surprise and we had a good dinner. A number 9 train carried us up to Madison Square Garden in plenty of time to see the Bull of the Pampas lose his first American showdown by a fourth-round TKO.

  “That will ruin his career,” Roldán said, disgusted.

  Over the following days everyone stopped by the empanada stand with a brazen excuse—a girl, a last-minute job, an urgent obligation. Eduardo had worked overtime editing a newsreel about Cuba and the Soviet Union. El Coco got lost on the subway. Popeye couldn’t make it because the diaper truck had a flat tire. Luigi had a fight with La Petisa because she declined to screw him. And Alfonso had spent all night typing a twelve-page letter to Renata thanking her for the gauche jester cap (that he’d already lost), followed by a two-paragraph bread-and-butter note to Sofía for the gloves (which he treasured).

  The muchachos turned over their unused tickets, begging the fat man to obtain refunds. Roldán promised that he would try. Meanwhile, he brought the leftover food down from his apartment to the kiosk, and during the next week he dished out the vittles and sangría free to whoever was hungry. “It would have tasted better on Friday but it’s still palatable,” he insisted.

  Gino refused to pay off the bet with Alfonso because “If you had lost you wouldn’t have paid me, either. Just like everyone else in the patota.”

  “Not true,” Alfonso said. “I’m the only honorable guy, besides Roldán, in our gang.”

  Gino said, “But you’re always broke, profe. You never even give me a tip when I’m working here on the maestro’s night off.”