With those tones, something awakens within her. This ain’t no damned borracho in a work shirt, standing around kissing six packs with his compadres. This here is a gentleman.
Rosa wipes the fright from her face. With the innate grace native of her foremothers, she inclines her head, giving him permission to plead his case.
“Night after night, I send the subjects of my kingdom to see you—to spy on you, I admit, Señora Villarosa. I reach toward you, through them, so that I may see you dance.”
Rosa nods as if she knew it all along, was used to this sort of thing, and was compassionate enough to give pardon to such impertinence.
The king continued, “Do you think that we come to you in order to steal the crumbs of your tortillas, wholesomely exquisite as they may be? Do we come to sip drops of Kool-Aid stirred so gracefully by your slender hand? No . . . No, Señora. I send my people to your sparkling kitchen so that, through their many eyes, I might see you dance. It is a sight for which I would gladly risk my entire kingdom. Through their antennae, I feel your dance’s rhythm. Yes, I have sent many soldiers as close as I dared to the volcano of your anger. Many suffered the swift punishment of your broom. But I never wanted to frighten you. I never wanted to make you unhappy.”
Rosa doesn’t know what to say. Certainly, far in the back of her mind, she always knew that someone was watching her, appreciating her lonely skill with the wooden partner. (She even let the broom think he was the one in the lead.) Certainly, sometimes in the night, she had fantasized that these faithful rituals might bring her notice. This, however . . . this was far more than she had ever dreamed. Why, she wondered suddenly, had this monarch come to her now? What did he want?
“Señora, I now risk everything. I have revealed myself to you tonight in order to promise that my people will never trouble you again. The only thing I ask, what I humbly beg in return is simply this: one dance.”
Ah, ha, thought Señora Rosa Villarosa. So this was it. And was it not understandable? Was it all for nothing that she had very nearly been chosen Corn Maiden in her youth?
Repressing any triumphant smirks or conceited head tosses, Rosa draws herself up and, with another demure nod, extends her hand.
From behind the walls, the music swells. Trumpets and marimbas sound as the King gallantly skitters forward. Reverently, he enfolds her in four arms and they begin to sway.
“Oh!” she says as he moves her in ways that the broom never could. The many black hairs on his feelers transmit his excited sensitivity to her, and she comes alive, melting into one turn, flashing to the next.
“Ah,” she sighs, closing her eyes to feel it all better.
Roaches skitter in from every corner of the room. In the blinding speed with which she whips around, they look like fairy dust.
There goes the box of Ritz crackers. There goes the toaster and all the bacon fat for the week. If she opened her eyes to see, would she even care? Shining like a comet, she shoots around, sparks around, pouts hair mouth legs flings around.
His chuckle is rough. His enclosing arms push a little sharper now. But he spins, spins, spins her, so it’s all right. She won’t think about what happens when it’s over.
Her heart is fluttering. Her work is undone, but there’s no one to see. No cares as to what the neighbors would say. Her future is forgotten and her back hurts a little, too. But, oh . . . It’s so, so romantic.
Eddie
Since I have to be in this room for an hour and a half every day, with nothing to do for the last hour, I figure I may as well write my memoirs or whatever. Kind of like that book, The Catcher in the Rye, except this is real, and you wouldn’t catch any pimps beating up on my ass.
We’re supposed to be in here to learn how to read and write. It’s part of some new literacy thing they’re doing, supposedly to make us better people . . . to give us “an alternative to crime.” Me and this other dude in here already know how to read and write. So for the first thirty minutes they wanted us to help the other guys with their stuff, but as you can imagine, the other guys didn’t want our help. So now, I do whatever I want in this room, which isn’t much. I wrote to my sister and my dad a few days ago, but they haven’t answered. So now I’m writing this to kill time. I figure maybe it’ll help people to see why I don’t belong here.
First, let me go back to my childhood. I used to be a good kid. I had a normal family—a mom, a dad, a sister, a brother. We had a nice house. We were doing pretty good. I don’t remember that part too well.
Then, after my mom left, things started to suck. This was when I was about five. We had to move. We lived in some apartments for a while, then we moved in with my grandma so she could take care of my little brother while my dad was at work. My messed-up uncle and his messed-up son moved in, too. Things were okay for a few years, until my dad lost his job and we had to get on welfare. Then, a few years after that, when I was around sixteen, my grandma died, and it was just us and my dad. But I already knew how to steal way before any of that.
I remember one time, when I was just a little kid, my mom had taken us to Eckerd’s. She used to like to take us places and just look at stuff. This time, though, I saw a toy that I wanted. It was one of those little Play-Doh factories. I remember I asked my mom if I could have it and she said she didn’t have any money, so I started to cry. She told me to be a big strong boy and not to cry. Then she put the toy in Jesse’s diaper bag. I stopped crying. We kept on looking at stuff, and Tina, my sister, saw a little plastic necklace with a unicorn on it. She asked my mom if she could have it. My mom told her to be a big girl and not to whine. Then we just kept walking.
I’m not saying that one incident made me become a thief. I’m just telling you about my life. Sometimes I remember my mom would want stuff for us, but she wouldn’t steal . . . she’d beg. Like, once, when she took us to the park. There was a guy loading up Mountain Dew in the vending machines. My mom went up to the guy and asked him for a six-pack, saying it was real hot. The guy told her she would have to wait and buy it from the machine. My mom started begging him to please give us a six-pack. She said we were poor and hadn’t eaten all day. She pointed to us and said she didn’t have any money to buy us food or clothes. The guy looked at us and then he gave my mom the sodas. I always thought that was weird when I remember it, because my dad made good money back then. I don’t know why the Mountain Dew guy believed my mom. Now I’ve figured out that he probably just thought she was hot and was hoping she’d give him something back. But, anyway, all I know is it was a pretty humiliating experience, and, since then, I’ve always preferred stealing to begging.
It’s time to go to the laundry room now, so I’ll write some more later.
I didn’t start stealing hardcore until we got on welfare. Before that, it was just candy and toys and stuff. It was always easy because we look white like my mom, and everyone was always keeping their eyes on the all-Mexican kids instead of me. Me and Jesse used to get all kinds of stuff. Tina never wanted to, though. She had a real guilty conscience. It’d make her real nervous and she was always scared to get caught. In fact, she did get caught a few times. I remember one day during summer vacation, me and Jesse took her with us on our daily rounds. She was going to be our thief apprentice, like. We took her to Level One, the bakery. All she had to do was go in, pretend to look at stuff for a while, and then go out, grabbing a bag of chips from the rack by the door. Child’s play. So what does she do? First she goes in all nervous, looking around in a real suspicious way. Me and Jesse were standing outside the door watching.
Then she takes forever, trying to work up her nerve. Then, real fast, she runs to the rack, grabs a bag of Funions, and turns to the door. That’s when she slips on the greasy wood floor and falls on her knees. Everybody in the store looks to see what all the noise is. My sister is so humiliated, she just leaves the chips there on the floor and walks out with her jeans torn and her knee all bloody. Defeated. Me and Jesse cracked up. After that, when we went places, she wo
uld just point to what she wanted and I would get it for her.
By now you’re probably thinking, “Man, this guy is a punk.” But it’s not like that. Let me explain. It’s one thing for kids to steal candy. That’s just natural. But after a while, they get old enough to know better. You know, old enough to know right from wrong. I mean . . . everybody knows it’s wrong to steal from people, right? Like, if I were to go to someone’s house and steal their stuff, that would be wrong. Or, like, I knew this one guy who stole money from a teacher’s purse. She was a real nice teacher, too. She never hassled you when you were tardy or you didn’t have your homework. She just marked you tardy or gave you a zero, and that was it. I always thought she was pretty cool. But this guy just stole from her purse. And all she had was ten bucks. So he was a real punk. You wouldn’t catch me acting like that.
On the other hand, sometimes a person has to steal. Food, for instance. Everybody knows it’s okay to steal food—as long as you’re really starving and you steal it from a big store and not somebody’s house or anything. And not from, like, a neighborhood store where the people running it only have that store and that’s how they’re making their living. I know that now. I mean, the 7-11 is one thing. But I stopped taking stuff from the bakery and the Vietnamese store. Those people were always cool with me.
Another example would be that it’s okay to steal from Goodwill or the Salvation Army. One time I went to the Goodwill and saw this real nice Polo shirt. I wanted to get it, but it was $3.99. All I had was four bucks, and I still hadn’t eaten. So I found another shirt that said $2.99, and I switched the tags. When I take it up there, the lady tells me, “I’m sorry, sir,” (being, like, sarcastic), “but we can’t sell this shirt. This tag has been tampered with.” I told her could she just give it to me anyway, because there were a lot of shirts that said $2.99. She kept on saying no. She was being real shitty about it, too. I finally told her, “Damn, y’all get the shit for free. It’s not like one dollar’s gonna make a big difference.” She just turned around like she didn’t hear me and I walked out with the shirt in my hand. Fuck her. I figured she probably just wanted to keep it for her boyfriend or something.
So, anyway, I guess my point is: under some circumstances it’s okay to steal. But not from other poor people. Because, I mean . . . if poor people start stealing from each other, how can you trust anybody?
It was a little while before my grandma died that Tina started working. Partly because we could use the money, and partly, probably, to get out of the house. I know it was pretty crappy for her, living there, because she had to do most of the cooking and cleaning and my dad was always yelling at her when he got drunk. Sometimes he even slapped her around a little. He was okay when he was sober . . . it was just on the weekends that he drank and got all tripped-out on Vietnam and stuff. But you could hardly blame him. He kept trying to get jobs at new places, but they kept telling him he was over-qualified. Then he had that job at the grocery store, which sucked. So the weekend was his only time to relax. Except, like I said, he didn’t really relax too much.
Anyway, so my sister had gotten this job at the church. She went after school and did typing and filing and some cleaning up in the office. It was a pretty good job, considering that they probably didn’t really need anyone to do that stuff. But they liked my sister at the church, so I guess they felt sorry for her. Plus, she knew how to type, and I don’t think the regular secretary did. Plus, she spoke more Spanish than the regular secretary spoke English, so that probably helped, too.
Meanwhile, we were all still going to school. I hated school. Nothing but a bunch of punks. Me and Tina had been in this “gifted and talented” program since second grade. That meant we had to take the bus to schools on the other side of town, while everyone else in the neighborhood got to walk. At first I liked it okay. That was when I was too young to know better. The year that I failed, they took me out of the gifted and talented program. I stayed at that junior high for a semester, in the regular program, until they could get me transferred out to our neighborhood school.
Man, I was glad when I got transferred. There was nothing but a bunch of rich fags and snobby bitches at that other place. All they did was look down on people. Like, I had this one friend named Gabriel. He was the smartest dude in the whole school. I’m not just saying that, he was. He always scored the highest on the tests they gave us. Plus he was real cool, too. Real funny. The only thing was, he was real poor. He only had this one pair of shoes, and they had holes. I could tell he got his stuff from Goodwill, because it was stuff I had seen there myself.
One week, he wore the same outfit three days in a row. I didn’t say anything to him about it . . . you never know what somebody else is going through. But a bunch of the other kids started teasing him about it, saying he must have been retarded because he’d bought three of the same outfit. They wanted to know if it was his new school uniform. Gabriel was real cool about it; he just laughed it off. But they kept on. Besides being poor, Gabriel was real skinny and he had a limp, like one leg was longer than the other. So these guys started in on him about that, too, calling him Gimpy and shit. They all got around him and just kept messing with him, like a gang of punks. So Gabriel just told one of them, Scott Jenowski, something about how he was stupid. I can’t remember what exactly he told him, but it was a real good put-down, and it pissed Scott off real bad and shut him up. So Gabriel turned around to go. But that punk Scott, he pushed Gabriel and made him fall, and him and all his friends started laughing. Man, that was just too much for me. I went up to that asshole and punched him right in the face. I mean hard, too. Busted his lip. He sure as hell wasn’t laughing after that. Then he hit me back, and one of his friends jumped in, and I was just swinging and kicking as hard as I could. I messed both those guys up bad. Then one of the cafeteria monitors came and broke it up.
We all got suspended . . . even Gabriel. And the worst part was, after that, I never really talked to him anymore after that. I think he was too embarrassed. But, anyway, you see what I mean about that school. It was like, if you weren’t rich, they treated you like crap. I couldn’t hang with that. Tina, though . . . she loved it. She hung out with all those white girls. Then she went on with them to the gifted and talented high school. I think that’s why she really got that job, so she could buy nice clothes like her friends. Sometimes she would even steal stuff from Foley’s, but usually she was too scared. Anyway, me and Jesse got away from those people as soon as we could.
When me and Jesse first went to Hogg Middle School, I spent the first week beating the crap out of everyone who called us bolillos and honkies and stuff. After that, it was cool. That’s where I made some of my best friends. There were six of us: Elías, Chuy, Fat José, Skinny José, and Huicho. Plus me. And Jesse. He was always tagging along. Sometimes it got on my nerves, because Jesse could really be a punk . . . but I figured, if I didn’t show him how to act, who would?
Mostly we would just mess around. We’d skip class about two or three times a week. Sometimes we’d walk downtown or take the bus to the dollar movies and sneak in. Sometimes we’d go to Chuy’s dad’s and listen to records and maybe smoke a joint. The night time was best, though. For some reason, there’s more good stuff to do at night. We’d go to the mall and scope out the girls. Then we’d go to the clubs on Richmond. Either we’d sneak in, or we’d just wait for the rich punks to come out so we could take their gold chains or whatever. A couple of times we went to concerts. Once in a while, Huicho would get a car and we’d cruise around at Memorial Park.
I remember this one time me and Chuy had gotten a ride to Westheimer and we were walking around seeing the sights. There were a bunch of hookers that night, and even a couple of transvestites. Right when we passed that restaurant called the Purple Buddha, this guy comes up to us. I could tell he was a fag and I guess he thought we were queer-baits or something. I was about to tell him to take off, but he got real close to us and whispered, “Help me.”
He h
ad this real weird look on his face, and for a second I thought maybe he was having a heart attack or something. “What’s up, man?” I told him.
He said could we please help him. I asked him what he needed. He said, “I need you to choke me.”
First I freaked out. Then I just laughed. Chuy laughed, too. We started to walk away, but the guy said, “Please! I need someone to choke me!” He grabbed Chuy’s hand, and Chuy told him, “I’ll choke your ass, man.” He grabbed the guy’s neck for real and started choking him. I was tripping out, but I was laughing, too. Chuy kept on until the guy turned red and stopped breathing. Then he let go and said, “There. Now quit fucking with us.”
I expected the guy to run. But instead, he says thank you! He wiped the tears out of his eyes, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. He gave Chuy twenty bucks for choking him! Chuy tripped out. He just said, “Thanks, you fucking freak.”
Then the guy looks at me all coy, and asks if I would choke him, too. I was like, man, for twenty bucks I’ll choke you and your mama. So I did it. And he was saying, “Harder.” And I did.
After he paid me, the guy asked if he could call us sometime. Chuy just kicked him in the balls and we took off.
Couldn’t write too much last time ‘cause these two dudes started having a fight in here. They’re gone now. Then today the warden came in to talk to us. But anyway, like I was saying . . . Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I hate fags. As a matter of fact, there are some fags in our neighborhood who are pretty cool. They’ve been trying to fix stuff up. I don’t mess with them. It’s only when they mess with me that I have to kick their asses.
Like there’s this one who lives over in First Ward. Every time you walk by, he says stuff to you. Not to me, though, because I told him I don’t play that shit. But I know this dude named Danny. Danny would always say stuff back to this old fag guy. Then, later on, I heard that Danny and a couple of other dudes were going to the fag’s house and letting him do stuff to them. You know . . . like giving them head. Then the fag would give them beer and pills and stuff. I mean, they did it for beer, man. All I know is, if Danny or one of them ever tries to talk to me, I’ll kick his ass.
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Page 10
