Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  But even a Guatemalan can win a Nobel Prize, like Miguel Ángel Asturias did, or win the Boston Marathon like Doroteo Guamuch Flores, or become the Iraq invasion’s first US casualty. Though the frontline combat death of Marine Lance Corporal José Gutiérrez, an undocumented immigrant raised like Feli in a Guatemala City orphanage, was still a few years in the future on that day, about twelve years ago now, when my mother and I were in Washington, DC, because even a book by the son of a Guatemalan immigrant can become a runner-up, like my first novel was, for a national literary prize of not exactly earthshaking significance unless you win it, which I didn’t. That’s the same novel that had brought newspaper reporter Fred Tarrell out to the Congress Street Bridge. My mother had come alone to DC. The event was held in an elegant old theater, guaranteed to impress the parents of the nominated finalists and make them feel proud, and afterward, as people were filing out into the wide lobby, the director of the prize organization, a gracious lady with friendly freckles all over her face, came over to greet us. That’s when my mother, just like that, came out with probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard her say. The ceremony, she told the prize director, at which the judges had spoken so beautifully about all the finalist’s books including her son’s, had made her decide to finally become a US citizen. Mamita explained: Seeing my son honored here in the capital of this country made me feel that finally my family and I are accepted here, and that’s why I decided that I can forgive this country and can become a citizen. It was almost as if it were the prize director my mother was forgiving. Mom, this is just nuts, I said, putting my arm around her and feeling my own weird mix of embarrassment, tender pride, and a little disappointment, because I liked boasting about my mother’s stubborn refusal to become a citizen. It seemed totally unlike Mamita to have opened up like that to a stranger. That conversation in the lobby outside the theater exit was followed by cocktails and a fancy dinner in the wood-paneled hall where literary and New York publishing people mixed with the Washington, DC, political and media types for whom the prize ceremony was a springtime social event, and then it was off to get drunk in a nearby bar with the other nominated writers, including the winner, his big-clout agent, the jury, spouses, prize organizers, editors, publicists, and a critic or two all clumped around the bar on that sweltering night like glistening pork dumplings scooped from a roiling pot inside a big mesh strainer. After the dinner my mother had gone back to her hotel.

  It was only late the next morning when, hungover, I met her for lunch in the coffee shop of the boutique hotel we’d been put up in that I asked, Forgive the US for what, Ma? She clucked her teeth as if she’d already changed her mind. Ay, Frankie, people like me, from Guatemala, Hispanic people, we aren’t treated with respect in this country. But seeing my son honored, she said, her voice going dreamy again, by all those important people, I felt we are accepted now, so now I can become a US citizen.

  I thought, You know what, Mamita? Even if I’d written Don Quixote and won that prize, that wouldn’t have been enough to merit your monumental act of forgiveness. Originally my mother hadn’t been so thrilled about my book. It featured a family that resembled ours in obvious ways, except the father was earthy, kind, and nurturing, and the mother character was brassily seductive and obliviously but comically assertive about her prejudices. Of course she’s not you, Mamita, I’d explained countless times. I made her the opposite of you so that you couldn’t say I’d written about you. But now people think I’m like that! my mother insisted. She photocopied the tiny paragraph in the book’s copyright page that states: “This is a work of fiction, the product of the author’s imagination, any resemblances to any actual person is entirely coincidental.” Then she had it blown up and framed and hung it on the wall inside the front door so that it would be the first thing any visitor to our house saw.

  That afternoon in DC my mother and I sat talking, in Spanish like we do when it’s just the two of us, in the hotel coffee shop by a window with yellow daffodils growing outside, until it was time for her to take the train back to Boston. Do you think Boston has gotten better, Ma, in the way it treats people from Central America? No, she said curtly. Then she thought a moment and added, Maybe a little, because there are so many who come now and it seems like they all find work. Even our Stop and Shop, Frankie, has guatemaltecos working there now, fíjate, and all of Teddy Feinstein’s yard workers are centroamericanos. He comes to talk to me about them sometimes. Some of his workers have been deported, Frankie, she said. Even when they have little children who get left behind. How can anyone do such a thing to those children, who depend on what their fathers earn to be able to eat?

  Teddy Feinstein had been one of my father’s most devoted yard work acolytes. I never showed the least interest in the horticultural mastery behind that annual abundance that allowed Farmer Bert to give away flowers and vegetables from his garden to the neighborhood wives all summer long. Many of the neighborhood children adored my father, who’d mastered the friendly old guy role before he was even old, and every few years a new boy would replace a suddenly grown-too-old predecessor as his special yard pal. The new boy, like the one before him, rang the doorbell on weekend mornings, and whenever anyone other than my father answered, he’d ask: Can Mr. Goldberg come outside? Of all those boys, the one my father had an especially big influence on was Teddy Feinstein, who had a learning disability. His father, a hospital accountant, fretted over his son’s difficulties and what they portended without knowing what to do about it. But Bert got Teddy passionate about yard work, taught him about lawn care, trees, flowers, gardens, wormy loam piles, pesticides, and fertilizers, and eventually guided Teddy into going to a technical school instead of to our high school. Teddy, who I saw for the first time since he was a teenager at my father’s funeral four years ago, was the most openly grieving person there, his reddened eyes pouring hot liquid candle wax. He now owns, Lexi told me, one of the most successful landscaping companies in Boston’s western suburbs, his fleet of trucks filled with lawnmowers and Central Americans roaming from town to town.

  I’m standing outside the radio studio-booth door after the interview, putting on my coat, when a young woman who works at the station comes walking rapidly toward me down the carpeted corridor, such an eager expression on her face that I automatically smile and get ready to sign a book, except she isn’t carrying a book, only a neatly folded piece of yellow paper that she’s holding out like a relay baton. When she reaches me she says, voice hardly above a whisper: Mr. Goldberg, a woman from Guatemala phoned and left her number. She says she lived with you when you were a boy and that it’s urgent you phone her. From the way the radio station employee has her eyes trained on my face, I can tell she’s curious to see my reaction to the name written on the piece of paper. This must happen at radio stations like this one all the time. A listener hears an old friend or lover or even the now-adult child she helped raise being interviewed and impulsively phones and leaves her name and number, believing, at least in the moment, that she really is eager to reestablish contact with this person from her distant past. But Feli has my telephone number and email, so why would she phone a radio station? Even before unfolding the note, I check my phone, but there’s no missed call from Feli or any email from her. Though there’s one from Marianne, she’s running an hour late. “No problem,” I thumb back. It must be Carlota Sánchez Motta—that causes a surge of excitement. I haven’t seen Carlota or heard from her since the summer before I left for college, when I was working on the Boston Tea Party ship.

  I unfold the piece of yellow paper and written in pen is the name María Xum, above a phone number with a 617 area code. I must silently mouth: Wow, can you believe it, María Xum. The radio station employee’s smile widens. I put the piece of paper into my pocket. Her message is urgent. What could María urgently need to tell me now? Maybe it’s María Xum’s opinion that Guatemala needs a president like General Cara de Culo, with his law-and-order strong martial fist, an
d she wants to argue with me.

  I signal to the bartender for a refill. When I came out of the station, I had over an hour to kill before meeting Marianne, so I ducked into this joint. On the TV over the bar, a local news report on high school hockey, the South of Boston tournament, a Catholic school team, the Coyle and Cassidy Warriors, in the finals, they’re from Taunton, the very town where Weetamoo’s decapitated head was put on display. It’s just a forty-minute drive from here down I-93, not far from Mamita’s nursing home and where Lexi lives. So many Massachusetts towns have old Native American names, as do bridges, state parks, rivers, beaches, and so on. There’s a King Philip High School, but even in the town where she was martyred there’s no Weetamoo High; instead there’s a school named for the small-time Boston gangster played by Robert Mitchum in the movie based on the novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and Hopalong Cassidy, for some good reason, I’m sure.

  Wonder what Marianne’s going to want to talk about after all these years. Besides Ian Brown, I mean. In reality, not much happened between us, hardly anything, during the short time in tenth grade we were close. Yet that very little was a lot. Does she remember our almost nightly telephone conversations, that last one especially? Later, when I beat up my father, did she ever hear about that? By then she was so deep into her relationship with Jimmy Gleason that Lana Gatto predicted they’d get married before graduation. Marianne and I had even stopped talking just before Christmas. Yet it was how I still felt about Marianne months later that triggered the horrible event that made what finally happened between me and Bert seem inevitable.

  It must have been a springtime Friday, because the high school dance in the rich town next to ours would have happened on a Friday night. On my way to school that morning I walked past Sarah Hancock Pond and the small dirt lot overlooking Mulberry Cove and the benches for skaters to change into and out of their ice skates, and down on the shore, I saw Marianne making out with Jimmy Gleason. Dangling from her hand pressed to his broad back was a colorfully shiny piece of gift wrapping paper, and just like that I remembered it was her birthday. Back then, I knew the date of Marianne’s birthday. April, it must have been, maybe early May. The world was wet, muddy, bright green, profuse with sweet pollens, inciting that adolescent hormonal buzzing under my skin that every spring made me feel like a walking Van Gogh painting, always breaking out in hives without warning or apparent cause. I don’t think Marianne and Gleason even noticed me as I went past.

  That night we drank beer in the swampy woods behind the brick rubber factory that was across the street from the pond. Bonks was the only one of us old enough for a driver’s license because in elementary school he’d been held back, maybe even twice, and he could afford his own car because he worked, before and after school most days, for Hank Riggio and Sons, the contractors. You wouldn’t think someone with the name Bonks would have a nickname, too, but he did. At work his morning chore was to pick up building-site trash and debris and carry it over to the dumpsters, and because one day Hank Riggio decided it would be funny to call him Mickey Dumps, the name stuck. Bonks used to drive us around in his car, but only whenever and wherever Joe “Hose” Botto, son of the master carpenter, wanted him to. We’ll get Mickey Dumps to take us, Hose was always saying. That night in the swamp, Bonks was especially feeling his oats, showing off the new cobalt-blue suede jacket that he’d bought through some shady Hank Riggio connection. But he was especially excited because not only our usual crew was there but Paul Rizza, the varsity football star, was with us too. With his braying laughter, jerky gestures, and squinty grinning around, it was like Bonks thought this was his chance to really get in with the Sinatra Rat Pack now, but only if he could show Rizza he wasn’t just Joe Botto’s chauffeur. It all started when Joe said, What’s a matter, Sleepless, no sleep last night? I suppose he’d noticed I was in a glum mood. Ordinarily even I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to expose anything that personal in front of any of those kids, not even Joe, but I let down my guard and told them about seeing Marianne and Gleason making out that morning and that it was Marianne’s birthday. Typically, I would have finished describing this scene with a fatalistic shrug, but it was still a sorry sad-sack story to have told, and Bonks, seizing the chance to shine at my expense, turned on me and said, Aww Monkey Boy, don’t fucking get started with the Marianne Lucas bullshit again. And he made his idiotic crack about what she’d already done with Ian Brown’s dick, was doing with Gleason’s now, and was never going to do with mine. So just shut the fuck up and crack me open a brewski, he said, grinning around, practically strutting in place. Bonks was lowest on the totem pole among us but knew I was just above him, and this was obviously a ploy to reverse our positions. It being Bonks, I understood that if I didn’t respond, my high school life was basically over, though the possibility of this sort of violence always made me feel nauseous with fear. I stepped toward Bonks with my fist cocked, and he reflexively lifted his arms in front of his face, and though I should have punched him anyway, I shoved him hard with both hands in the chest and he fell backward into the brush, where he thrashed around a bit. When he got back up, he made a show of carefully inspecting and brushing off the muddied sleeves of his suede jacket and said, Fucking Monkey Boy, can’t take a joke. I said, You call me that again, I’ll fucking kill you. Rizza made a sarcastic oooh sound. He couldn’t have cared less about either Bonks or me. Bonks stepped past me toward the cooler and stooped to get a beer, and with his back turned to me, he stood up and opened it. It was a surrender. At least I’d shoved him, and in our unspoken rules and rites of aggression, a shove like that was a challenge to fight.

  But Bonks drove us in his sedan anyway—there were five of us apart from Bonks—to crash that dance in the next town’s high school, where in the men’s room Rizza and Joe started a fight right away, Rizza with one of those rich boys in a headlock and pounding his face, splatter of blood on white enamel like a Catholic miracle and it was the sink that was bleeding. Everyone else, except for Bonks, was punching and grappling. Even I grabbed the shirt of a skinny blond boy who grabbed mine and we theatrically pushed and pulled on each other. Suddenly kids were shouting about police and we fled into the crowded gymnasium dance floor, where it seemed like everyone was drunk or drugged. I ran and dodged past couples holding each other up to keep from falling, saw a kid stumble forward with windmilling arms and land on his face; he lifted his head, blood sloshing from his nose as if from a tipped-over bottle. Rizza was tossing kids out of his way as he went for the exit, police charging in right past him. As far I was able to figure out later, the police must have grabbed hold of Bonks, slower than the rest of us, and warned him that we’d better go back to our town right away or else. I don’t think any other of us knew that as we piled into the car, waiting for Bonks to catch up and get in, and when he did, we yelled go, go, go, and he peeled out of the parking lot like in a movie. Flashing blue lights, a police car zoomed up alongside us, Bonks hit the brakes. A policeman, not the one driving, got out of the cruiser and stalked over, shouting at Bonks through his lowered window that he’d cut us a break letting us go, but then someone yelled “fuck the pigs” and gave the finger. I couldn’t see the policeman’s face, only his wide uniformed torso, his knuckly hands grabbing the bottom of Bonks’s window frame like he was about to lift the car over his head and hurl it as he shouted: So which one of you was it? Come on punk, own up, or I’m taking you all in! I hadn’t shouted anything out the window or given the finger. I hadn’t heard anyone else shout those words through the commotion inside the car, but if someone had shouted “fuck the pigs” and given the finger, it was probably Joe Botto, sitting up front. Did Bonks hold the cop’s eye and slightly jerk his head back at me? I’d bet anything. The back door was yanked opened, and the policeman, face looking about to burst, roared at me to get out. It wasn’t me, I pleaded. Don’t make me tell you again, punk, get out of the car! I got out, body filling with the helium gas of terror and disbelief. The policeman too
k me by the arm and walked me through the glare of the cruiser’s headlights, opened the back door, and guided me into the back seat with a firm shove. Another policeman was sitting at the wheel. But officers, I begged. It wasn’t me. The policeman, now in the front passenger seat, barked, Shut up you little jerk! I saw you give us the finger. You think I’m blind? The policeman driving said, You stink like a brewery. You’re stinking up the whole car. Don’t even think about throwing up back there. If you wanna throw up we’ll pull over and you get out and do it. You need to throw up? Punk, shouted the other policeman, you heard him. Are you going to puke? I had the idea of answering yes, getting out, staggering toward some bushes as if to vomit, and taking off running. No, I’m not going to puke, I said. The drive to the police station didn’t even seem to take two minutes. It was the first time in my life I’d even been inside a police station. Gray, chocolate, and custard-yellow-hued floor. I’ll never forget that floor, I feel like I even remember how it tasted. I answered questions, date of birth, address, home phone. Year after year, a policemen said, we have kids from your town coming over here to make trouble. It doesn’t happen the other way around, said another policeman behind the main desk, an Asian man with a long, melancholy face. With an air of concerned curiosity, that policeman asked, What do you kids have against this town? Nothing, sir, I answered. You kids are jealous of this town, he said flatly. Your town is not so good as this town. I was put alone in a small room, a door with a wire mesh window, like a classroom for only one student. I sat on the edge of a high wooden bench that must also have been where I was supposed to sleep.