Nuyorican Obituary

That was also the summer our cousin Javier, from my mother’s side, came to stay with us. He was from PR and had a wife and baby girl back there. He was in New York to find a job and a place to live, then he would send for them. He wore U-shirts and was as thin as Jesus and had afro hair and a chiba on his chin. And he preferred to speak Spanish. When he spoke in English we could barely understand him. Right away my brother and sister and I hated him.

“Estos no tienen respeto,” he said. “They ain’t got no respect.”

Respect was my mother’s favorite virtue. You were no good if didn’t have respect — for your elders, for the priests and the nuns, for teachers, for the landlord. You had to have respect! She agreed completely with Javier.

“Si,” she said, between puffs of her cigarette, and who could blame her? My father was around, but only in the afternoon. For the most part, there was no man in the house, no one to discipline us. So she agreed with him, even when he focused on me, the youngest.

“These kids don’t know how to behave,” he would say, in his thick accent, “and Jimmy he’s the freshest one.”

“Si,” I would hear my mother say, in her own thick accent. “He’s a fresh one.”

I admit that at nine I was a little firecracker. I broke my mother’s plaster panther statue, her plaster unicorn statue, and her plaster clown set. My hair was always a mess, and I could never keep my shirt inside my pants. Every time I went down the stairs of our second story walk-up it was at a run.

Continuing a fictional memoir.

We were poor, but we did have a bar. Where we got it from I don’t know. It was one of those pieces of furniture that was just always there. It stood about four feet high and came with two black stools. It was white, with gold-colored buttons in the padding around its body, and it had a formica top with speckled gold and a matching formica shelf for resting your feet at the bottom. There was also a gold formica shelf system, filled with highball glasses and bottles of rum and whiskey and sour mix, that went on the wall behind it. My father and I would work on glue-together models there. He kept the glue behind the bar, next to a shaker set and more bottles of margarita mix and brandy. He would sip his grapefruit juice and gin and I my milk. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t want me to smell the glue too much or because he didn’t want me to make a mess, but my father ended up doing most of the work. I would open the box and lay out the pieces and the instructions. Then I would take them off the plastic grid and hand them to him as he asked for them. I remember the summer we were doing the glow-in-the-dark Phantom of the Opera set. I was nine. The set featured the Lon Chaney-version of the Phantom proudly ripping his mask while behind him a prisoner wailed from behind bars.

That was the summer our dog Barbie was sick. My sister Evie named the dog—I didn’t! After the doll. Barbie was a white poodle mutt, but she always looked gray maybe because we didn’t give her a bath that much. She was a good dog, a smart dog, with dark brown eyes and sharp, pointy teeth she flashed when she was angry. We knew Barbie was sick she began racing back and forth between rooms all day long. You could hear her uncut nails skittering on the linoleum. Sometimes you could hear her in the middle of the night, back and forth, back and forth. I was scared because it didn’t make sense for the dog to be doing that, and a dog always made sense.

“We’re going to have to do something about that dog,” my father said.

“Are you gonna take it to the doctor?” I asked.

He laughed, a quick quick laugh. I didn’t know what that meant then.

I had a fun time signing copies of Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery along with my fellow Hit List writers Carlos Hernandez and Sergio Troncoso. This was at Book Expo at the Javits Center. Very overstimulating in there. But it was great to meet the very sweet Marina Tristan and Carmen Peña Abrego of Arte Publico as well as a some nice fans and some people who didn’t know me from an empanada but who were curious about the book.

“Stay still!”

I had always been impossible to dress. As if shirts and my pants were opposite sides of a magnet. My mother would tuck in my shirt and seconds after she turned around the shirt would be hanging out of my pants.

“When are we going home?” I said, as she tried once again to make me presentable.

She buttoned my shirt to the top and brushed my hair, parting it to neatly the side. The neat part never last very long either.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“What are we doing today?”

“Today we going to see my mother.”

“Who’s your mother?”

“You’ll see.”

Titi Evelyn drove, not very far from her house. Where we stopped, the houses were laid out in a row, and there was a concrete curb. Except, instead of apartment houses, there were old wooden houses set back from concrete curbs. Our mother’s mother lived near the end of the street, in a house that sat on stilts. Underneath the house chickens ran around and there was a big white bird that stood and honked at us.

“What is that?” Evie said.

“An ostrich,” I guessed.

Mami said the word in Spanish but struggled to remember how to say it in English.

“A goose,” Rafael said. “Like Mother Goose.”

Inside there was one sink and an electric bulb hanging from a wire. The bathroom was an outhouse out back. There was no TV.

My grandmother’s name was America (like the country), and she had a halo of very white hair around her head. Her skin was the color of my mother’s coffee. She touched each of us in turn with her velvet soft hands and said something to their mother.  She only spoke Spanish, so I had no idea what she was saying.

Evie and their mother stayed in the kitchen while Fever and I ran outside to play with some younger cousins who came by and their friends. These were kids, our age and younger. They were strangers but their faces looked like ours. We chased each other around and under the house. We had been told not to bother the goose so of course we bothered it. I got hot and sweaty but didn’t notice and didn’t care. I liked this better than anything.

After running after the chickens, I got bored.

“What’s the matter?” my brother said.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Me, too, Jimmy. Me, too.”

The next day we went home.

My story “Rough Night in Toronto” is now up at Plots with Guns. The editors of this normally noir site (in which, natch, every story involves a gun) this issue decided to venture into the future — 500 years into the future — to see what pistol-packing pieces of prose would be produced. Thanks to editor Anthony Neil Smith for giving my story a nod. “Rough Night” involves killer androids, terrorists, and a sap with a weapon. The title and a couple character names reference an old Dean Martin movie for no reason at all and without any impact at all on the plot or enjoyment of the story; that was just to help me get started on writing it. Having said that, I think it could be a movie on its own starring, ummm, anyone but Will Smith. But, Will, baby, if you’re interested, let’s have lunch. Let me know what you think.

That night we stayed at my father’s parents’ finca. My mother and sister slept in one room, our father and my brother and I right next door. Although there were no doors. There were no screens in the windows and mosquitoes filled the air. Popi showed us a big piece of material tied above the bed — he said this was mosquito netting and that it would protect us. I had seen them in movies and was eager to see how they worked. My father told us to get under it quickly and not let any mosquitoes inside, or else they would bother us all night. It was hot and uncomfortable in the room, under that net, and some mosquitoes had for sure gotten in with this. They came at me, biting one after the other, for what seemed like hours. Still, in the heat and discomfort, I realized this was the first time I had ever seen my father sleeping.

Eventually, the long day of traveling, of cows and chickens and banana and mango trees and the rhythmic song of the coqui, all combined to rock me to deep sleep.

Then in the middle of the night I woke up because I had to pee.

I tried to make it go away. I had never seen my father angry and was scared of how he would be when he was angry and I thought he would get angry if I opened the net and let in more mosquitoes but then I thought he would get even angrier if I wet the bed, which I had been known to do, so I waited and waited. And soon I had no choice.

My father had taken the edge of the bed, which made me feel protected. But it was meant that I had to climb over him. I moved slowly, crawling over his belly, and he did not react. I slid out of the net. And was immediately attacked.

When I came back, I saw my father was awake, and about to get out of the net. “C’mon, the mosquitoes are going to get you.” He did not seem angry, just sleepy, so I was happy and got back under the net as fast as I could.

That night, for the rest of that night, we all sleep close together, like a family. In the morning, Popi drove us back to Ponce, and then he flew back to New York alone.

On May 21, the well-named Mysterious Bookshop, located near City Hall, hosted a reading by authors from the  anthology Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery. Clever Carlos Hernandez, Sunny Sergio Troncoso, and myself as well as co-editors Sagacious Sarah Cortez and Literary Liz Martinez were there.

There were some great guava bars served. And wine! Thanks to all those who came by, from far and wide and a few blocks away.

Just after twilight, my father insisted on taking us for a walk. “I want to show you something. Where my father used to take us to this creek to fish.”

We walked behind Pop and could tell  he was drunk by the wobbly way he walked and talked. Only my sister could hold his hand because in his other hand he had a drink.

It was scary out there in the dark. No streetlamps. No cars. The only light was a soft moonlight shining through the dense trees. Still, I was anxious to see the creek where my father used to play.

I expected a rio like the one Mami told us was a pool. Here instead was a trickle, a tiny stream of water with tiny fish in there. My fish in my fish tank at home were bigger.

My father seemed disappointed as well. He said it used to be a deep stream. Then he said, “Do you hear that?” All around us were weird sounds, something like a whistle, but almost like a word repeated again and again.

My brother said, “Those are crickets, right?”

“No,” Popi corrected him, “That’s the coqui. You hear, that’s what it’s singing. ‘Co-qui. Co-qui.’”

“What is it, an insect?” I asked.

“It’s a little brown frog.”

“Where is it?” we all asked.

“There’s millions of them, but they’re impossible to see.”

We stopped to look around. It was dark and we could barely see the farmhouse. But all around them the coquis kept singing.

“You know, nature is amazing,” my father said. “The coquis won’t sing anywhere else. They take them to Florida, to Mexico and they’ll live but they only sing in Puerto Rico.”

Pop walked around the side into a clearing. In the moonlight, the saw the cows, dumb and standing still.

“They’re just going to stay there all night?” my sister said.

The clearing was hilly and hard to walk on. My father slipped from my sister’s grip and stumbled and disappeared into the dark.

“Popi!” my sister screamed.
For a moment it was as if my father was suddenly dead, as if he had rolled off the edge of the world and no longer existed.

She told my brother to get help, but then Pop stood up, his drink now empty. “I’m all right. I’m all right,” he said, sounding angry and brushing himself off.

I had the pleasure of reading from my story “In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino” from Hit List at the East Harlem Cafe, at Lex and 104th Street last night. I read with (left to right) Carlos Hernandez, Liz Martinez, and Sergio Troncoso. Great little place, terrific audience. The event was sponsored by the good people at La Casa Azul Bookstore. Buy their books! People actually bought books — so we must be doing something right. Thanks to everyone who showed. And to those of you who didn’t, you have been de-friended from my Facebook list. Cheers! I think you can see my haircut here. Photo supplied by Aurora Anaya-Cerda. Thanks, Aurora!