“They hated him,” Dolores said. “He was so dirty, they said he had grease in his teeth. I didn’t really like him, but it was exciting, you know, when you are so young, and he wasn’t really from the neighborhood, and he spent a lot of money on me real fast, like we saw movies in Manhattan and he brought me these little bracelets, and then one night he said let’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and it was very late, I guess I remember that, and it was very romantic and I was tired and then he sort of threw me down, like, and the next thing I know I’m looking up at all those cables and wires and stuff and he’s raping me, with all these cars and trucks going by underneath. Humming, right? I’m like a virgin and he’s doing it hard, my head is going bang bang bang on those boards where you walk, and all the time, his armpit is in my face, just shoved into his armpit, and I’m thinking my aunts are going to kill me, they are going to tell everybody, scream and run around and everything . . . so it happened, he kept explaining and I remember he threw my underwear off the bridge because it was torn up and then took me home and let me off in front of my building, and he was going to say, like, don’t tell anybody, but I already knew I wasn’t going to do that. I knew I was okay . . .” Dolores looked into the distance. The far skyscrapers of Manhattan and night air were somehow conducive to remembrance. “I was fourteen years old and I was going to be okay. I don’t know. I didn’t have anybody anymore, no brothers or sisters, no parents, right? So I got pretty wild after that, I starting hanging out, you know, everybody kind of knew me, I did some things with some boys, but I kept doing my homework and everything, I remember that, but then it started to change. My aunts started getting sick. And we didn’t have any money. The guy that ran the bodega said he couldn’t keep giving me credit ’cause my tías hadn’t paid him anything on it in like two months. Somebody from the church, a young priest, came and talked to us. The whole thing was just, you know, falling apart.”
At eighteen, now understanding the economics of necessity, Dolores found a job at a unisex hair salon at Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn; she liked to cut hair but didn’t have the money to go to beauty school in Manhattan and so she asked Carmella Quintano, the owner of the salon, if she could do the wash and pick up a few customers when it got busy. Carmella, a heavyset woman who enjoyed her movie magazines from Puerto Rico more than she did cutting hair, would get a larger cut than she did from her licensed beauticians. Carmella needed male customers if the place was going to make any money, and realized that an attractive eighteen-year-old like Dolores could be useful. So Dolores was hired to wash hair, and she sat on a stool in the back of the salon until a customer came in; then she would have the customer sit back in a special sliding chair next to the sink, and she would first rinse, then lather, then rinse the hair, careful always to get the soap out and not get the faces of the clients wet—especially the women, who didn’t like to have their makeup smudged. The salon was a busy, noisy place with Spanish-language soap operas on the television and people talking loudly over the sound of the blow dryers. She was often alone in the back corner, such that she was almost forgotten by the other hairdressers much of the time, who were more interested in the next drag on their cigarette or with chatting up the customers for a better tip than with talking to young Dolores. But she had some money coming in—with tips she was able to make seventy-five or a hundred dollars a week. Sometimes the older women, those who plucked their eyebrows too thinly, Puerto Rican and Cuban women whose sense of fashion was frozen in the fifties and who plastered too much rouge and makeup over their eyes, complained that she had pulled their hair or left soap in. The older men who were vain enough to have their hair styled told her she reminded them of their daughters or granddaughters and apologized that they didn’t have much hair left. Sometimes they dared to look up at her as she leaned close to rinse their hair and she saw their sentimental lust for her. They tipped her directly, for her beauty. They were the same age as her father would have been if he had lived and she would whisper a Hail Mary under her breath for them when their eyes were closed, the mask of exhaustion most evident.
It was one afternoon, Dolores went on, that she was sitting reading one of Carmella’s movie magazines when she realized a customer was waiting; he was young and a bit short, but his body was muscular in a slender way. He was Puerto Rican. “Please sit yourself here,” she said in Spanish.
He slid into the chair and tipped his head back. His eyes were clear and dark and she realized while looking at him that she had not turned on the water.
“Today I got some big things goin’ on,” he began in English, as if they had already been talking and without seeming to care whether she wanted to listen, “so I’m getting an important haircut.”
“Yes?” Dolores said.
“It’s got to be good. I’m going to get a job, in Manhattan, so do a good job.”
“I always do,” Dolores sang back at him.
“I coulda gone to a fucking barber shop but they don’t know how to cut it right. Those guys’re too old, you know?”
“Do you have the job or do you think you have it?”
“I have it,” he said, looking up at her coolly, stretching his muscular neck. “I have it.”
She wet his hair then, feeling its thickness, and she bent a little closer to him than usual. She washed his head slowly, massaging the scalp, and he shut his eyes but kept talking.
“This job is excellent. I’m going to make eleven, maybe twelve dollars an hour, get my car fixed up, and save that money for something, then maybe I’m going to go into business for myself—” And Dolores thought to herself that for someone so young—he looked twenty at the most—he was awfully confident. Her eye fixed on a tiny gold crucifix among the dark hairs of his chest below his open shirt collar. So many people in the neighborhood did not have any real confidence, especially the men, and as she began to rinse his hair the first time, she suddenly felt his hand brush her calf. She was standing between the wall and the wash chair and so none of the other people in the shop could see and besides, she wasn’t the type to scream, but then the hand crept under her skirt and up her leg with warmth and firmness, all the while as the young man kept talking. “ . . . so I’m gonna hire a lot of people and get my businesses going, you know, make me some really big money—” The hand expertly stroked her thigh. She wasn’t scared but excited, and she leaned forward so that her skirt billowed slightly and hid the arm beneath it, and with this, her subtle permission, the hand continued upward until it found the elastic border of her underpants and with serpentine ease slipped up beneath the fabric, stroking there with a middle finger. The young man’s closed eyes opened then and he stopped talking. They looked at one another. His finger twitched and a shiver went through her. Then, fast as it had come, his hand went down.
She swung her fist hard at his face. But he grabbed it. She swung her other fist and it caught him flush in the mouth. He didn’t flinch, and a squint of amusement ran through his eyes.
“I have been watching you for almost three days, Dolores Martinez.” Then he pulled her toward him slowly, pulled her close, and whispered in an older, more serious voice, the voice of Catholic mass given in rehearsed formal Spanish, his tongue moving between his teeth. “I knew you worked here, I asked your name. Forgive me if I have offended you. It is because I desire you above all women.”
Dolores’s romance with Hector Salcines moved very quickly after that, for she was drawn, she said, to his confidence in himself. He assured her that with him her life would be better. After all, she told herself, she was an orphan, and there was nobody to take care of her. Her aunts were useless and the elder, Tía Maria, was living on a respirator in a Catholic charity nursing home, too sick to stand, with a suppurating bedsore as big around as a saucer on her rear end, licking her mouth constantly as a side effect from the medication. How Dolores hated to visit there, all the halfdead people slumped over in their wheelchairs. On one visit her aunt was asleep with a paper straw stuck in her mouth
like an elongated cigarette, the pint carton of milk spilled in her lap . . . And so he, this boy, was life. La vida. After what had happened with Micky on the Brooklyn Bridge, she had slept with eight or nine boys, in the hurried and fumbling way of teenagers, and so it was not that she offered her virginity to Hector Salcines, it was something much more important—she offered him herself, her future to him, and soon they were fucking in his small apartment every night, Hector vigorous in the way of twenty-year-olds, fucking repeatedly, telling her how best to give him blowjobs by putting a firm hand behind her head, forcing her all the way down, all of it making her feel suddenly older with the understanding that of course this was forbidden by the church because it was muy fuerte, so strong. She did not care that her aunts saw her with Hector; they held no sway over her, they were old already, their bodies dropped and ruined. Soon they would be dead, she knew, and soon they were.
“Me and Hector used to just lay on the bed telling everything to each other,” Dolores said, her voice thick with remembrance. “He said he wished he could meet my papi. He never really got loved by his own dad much. His father and mother, they were scared, you know? They came here from San Juan in like the fifties before Hector was born and just worked. That’s all Hector did since he was fourteen. He just worked. He believed everything everybody said that if you work you can be rich. He always said he was going to get rich and retire his dad and moms. But his dad died when his car got hit by a garbage truck and his moms lives somewhere in Queens, she had to move, I guess. He used to go see her on Sundays with Maria. Not so much in the last couple of years . . . she was going back to San Juan and staying there a lot, I guess. Hector always loved his moms.”
Hector, Dolores went on, had grown up in an apartment building in Queens, within the tangle of highways near John F. Kennedy International Airport. His father ran the crew of men who cut the hundreds of acres of grass surrounding the runways. The grass had to be cut more or less continuously during the summer months, kept low in case emergency venicles needed to race across it and to discourage the flocks of sea gulls who would use it to nest. They repainted runway markings during the winter. And there were always innumerable cracks and patches in the runways that needed repair. Hector worked one of the gang mowers one summer, wearing protective earphones against the low roar of the jets. He and the other boys would have push-up contests on their breaks. There was nothing in Hector’s boyhood that Dolores remembered to me that suggested obvious damage. He was a bright, good Puerto Rican kid with a handsome face who loved the Yankees and thought maybe he’d go into the army. Dolores remembered Hector’s father as a kindly, worn-out man whose health had failed after being sprayed by jet-fuel. Hector’s mother had never learned English very well and her only passion was for raising turtles and listening to Puerto Rican mambo crooners. Hector’s parents were quiet people who wanted no trouble, Dolores said, and I was given to understand that Hector had been wounded by their inconse-quentiality. His father’s dreams had reached only as far as the small tile patio in the cramped yard in the back of the house.
But there is nothing that gives a young man hope like catching a smart, good-looking woman. The world has revealed one possibility and thus more might follow. By the time Dolores and Hector had married in 1985, he had a plan, she said. There was a real estate boom on. The market value of everything was rising—the huge brownstones in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, where the young whites with money lived, four-story homes that ran half a million easy; the squat three-story brick row homes the Italians lived in; the twelve-family apartment buildings like the one he and Dolores lived in. The banks were giving away credit cards. There was money everywhere, snaking through the neighborhoods. Speculators were all over Brooklyn, buying and reselling buildings even in marginal neighborhoods like Sunset Park. The eight-family units were up to 230, 240. Hector had been watching this. He wanted to make some real money. He didn’t have enough to buy a property, to become a player. But he saw that every time a building turned over, the new owners put some money into it. You could see it by the stuff that ended up in the dumpsters outside the buildings, most of which needed work. New owners needed floors sanded, new roofs, new windows, tools, paints, all the materials for renovation. Hector had worked in a flooring store while in high school. He knew the products; he had installed ceramic tile, linoleum, glue-down wood floors, peel-away, all kinds. This, he told Dolores, was his idea: He’d rent a store that fronted Fifth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Streets in Sunset Park. Three thousand usable square feet on the first floor and five hundred in the basement, enough to store inventory. New 220 wiring that could power display lights. There was a subway stop three blocks away and plenty of walk-by business. And as for the traffic pattern, the avenue was choked with cars, practically a goddamned parking lot on Saturday afternoons. The place had an off-street loading dock in the back, perfect for receiving deliveries during business hours without disrupting the customers. The owner was a nice old Jewish guy who simply wanted to ride the rent for a couple of years before selling out and retiring, and he was willing to give a young guy a break. The old guy wanted two thousand a month, which was just below market price, plus three months’ security. Hector would need to hire two guys to sell to customers and do the installations, and a girl to run the register. With utilities, insurance, and payroll, his monthly costs would be five grand a month. Add to that the fifteen thousand he would need for start-up inventory. To make a go of it for six months would require forty-five, fifty thousand cash to start up. Hector had nine thousand of his own money saved. He was only twenty-four, without any kind of track record with repaying loans, no education, no collateral. Even with credit so easy, the banks wouldn’t touch him.
But with Dolores worried about how they would repay the money, Hector pleaded his case to a Chinese businessman who figured his sums with an abacus. Why a Chinese man would even consider lending outside his own people was a mystery—perhaps he figures, said Hector, that he’s gonna buy the business cheaply if I fuck it up. But I never saw a Chinese flooring store, responded Dolores. It didn’t seem to stand to reason but the businessman loaned Hector the thirty thousand, which left him six thousand short, and he worried constantly to Dolores that the store space would be rented out to someone else at any time. He didn’t want to go into it without the proper amount of money. Most small businesses failed because they were undercapitalized, Hector told her. The landlord couldn’t lower the rent, the old Chinese businessman wouldn’t cough up any more cash, and besides, Hector didn’t want to borrow another dime if he could help it; he was paying the Chinese businessman 21 percent interest—blood money.
So he called his friend Alberto, who had been arrested sixteen times since high school, and they worked out something, a little deal between you and me and who will know anythin’ about it ? Hector agreed to mule coke to make the last six thousand, Dolores said. The coke was moving from Philly to New York, five hundred per trip. After the first round-trip Hector realized that the undercover cops had to catch a few people every day, a quota, and that they were tired and lazy and content only to catch the stupidest people. So Hector figured he would play it safe and make the trip via Pittsburgh. New York to Pittsburgh to Philly back to Pittsburgh and back to New York. It took a lot longer but the odds of getting caught were much lower. He did it twelve times. You simply tied the waterproof bundle of coke with fishing line to the deodorant holder wired to the underside of the toilet bowl in the bus toilet. Then you jam a lot of toilet paper in the bowl. Then you take a shit. Nobody looked very closely. He took a differently scheduled trip each time. Get out at the Port Authority terminal, meet the guy a block north of the station. Twelve round-trips . . . six thousand, the last six thousand.
And when he opened the store, Dolores explained to me proudly, Hector began to make money. He worked fifteen hours seven days a week, killing himself, doing everything he could, the inventory by himself, washing the outside windows, wiping down the samples so that they
would gleam, stacking boxes of silicone sealer and floor wax, buckets of tile adhesive, squares of self-stick linoleum. Whoever said Puerto Ricans were lazy had never seen Hector work. He would collapse at home at the kitchen table, worriedly figuring the day’s gross against the expenses. And when he had made the break-even amount and seen that there was more cash left over, he’d begin excitedly: “Dolores, everybody and their mother came to my store today. The goddamn world came to my store today. My daddy use to say that Brooklyn was dead. All the wops and paddies moving to Staten Island, out the Long Island Expressway. So what? Let them fucking leave, I got five guys from Bangladesh come in today, they got the contract on nineteen bathrooms in a office building somewhere and they want to buy low as possible. I gave them a good price. Why not? I move the product, make a little profit, and they’ll be back. They bought two thousand square feet. And some old Russian guy came in, with his son to translate. You shoulda seen him droolin’ over some of the urethane-gloss tile. The son translated and said the father never saw that kind of shit in Russia. And a couple of women from Haiti. Some fat bitches, all they did was look at this sample, look at that sample. One of their kids pissed the floor. We’re going to make some money, Dolores. I know it. It’s going to work, I can feel it. It’s the location. There’s Frankel’s up the block across the avenue. People come knowing they can get hardware there and pick out flooring here. And not have to park again. Some of them Koreans came in looking for a remnant that was twenty-two by twenty-six. That’s too big to be a remnant. They didn’t care about a pattern. I sold them three pieces of Congoleum Valuflor 03691 that didn’t match. Everybody comes in, you got a apartment, you gotta get new linoleum for the kitchen,’ cause your mother is going to see the kitchen and scream about how dirty it is. Even if you’re just renting. I was on the phone and this yuppie bitch come up and buys a sheet of Armstrong Solarian Supreme, most expensive stuff I got, four-fifteen per yard, light blue geometric pattern for her bathroom. She drove out here all the way from the Heights because she was looking for a special pattern. She asks me how much is next-day installation and I say a hundred bucks,’cause my crew is backed up. Make it sound like we’re real busy. I’m thinking, like, no way she’s going to go for that, but I said it to see. It’s going to take Manny and Luiz maybe forty minutes tops to bang that piece of shit in there, maybe take an hour total what with the travel. And I’m paying them eight an hour under the table, Dolores, I’m gonna clear maybe eighty bucks on the installation alone. The lady she says put it on the Visa and goes off to look for some bathroom tile. It’s workin’, Dolores, it’s workin’.”
Bodies Electric Page 26
