Nilda and Virginia, two Puerto Rican ladies in their forties, are the matriarchs of the place, keeping the real nasty riffraff out and a campfire going on the roof. They cook up rice and beans and homemade sofrito in a little cement penthouse, a mortar and pestle in one hand and a can of Budweiser in the other.
We go up there and play the drums and soccer and throw balls around with abandon because the roof is enclosed by a huge, high black metal fence that bends in over us, so we can never lose the balls over the edge.
Because there’s no electricity it gets gnarly at night in the hallways. When you have to take a piss, you just wander into one of the rooms and find a corner and let it go. Trying to find the bathroom could get you killed, tripping over a sleeping punk or drunk and tumbling down the pitch-black stairs.
The parking lot out front is a big, nasty mud pit with some plywood boards thrown down to make pathways for walking on. It’s overflowing with the crowds from the parade, piles of drums, the start of a BBQ in a metal trash can, and the popping bottle sounds that signal the end of a long day.
The street is clogged with the makeshift floats, parked akimbo half on the sidewalk, coming in to dock and be dismantled once the sun goes down and everyone is drunk enough not to give a fuck.
I’m holding a piece of chicken, slathered in BBQ sauce, that Virginia gave me. Half the sauce is smeared across my face, and I am absolutely fine with that. Ma is discussing something with the baiana ladies. Everyone has been preparing for the parade for weeks, building the floats and making the costumes, so we all know each other, and it’s no surprise when purple sequin guy appears again at Ma’s elbow.
He has a strong, fine jawbone, like a jaguar or a puma or something, and deep caramel skin. A scar cuts across his forehead, which, I will later find out, he got from climbing barbed-wire fences to pick mangoes straight from the tree in Brazil.
Flashing his blinding white teeth, he smiles, and says, “Ey . . .”
The baiana lady looks at him and in her big, beautiful, rolling Brazilian accent says, “Ohh, Fernando. Honna, this is Fernando. Fernando, Honna,” and moves away into the crowd to leave them to work fate. Fernando, smooth as chocolate, in a thick accent, says, “Ey, Honna. We go to another parade in Wash D.C. Why don’t you come?”
She looks him straight in the eye, points to me with one lazy finger, and says, “Hey, Fernando, I got a tiny child right heres. We’re not going to Washington, D.C.”
The way they smile at each other is loaded, and they are both still eletrified from their dance marathon, but they only exchange a few more little pleasantries and he ambles away, resigned to her unattainability.
It’s a year before they see each other again. We’re walking up Broadway toward Fourteenth Street, and suddenly there he is, with some young buck Brazilian friend of his, taping signs to lampposts for house-painting services. They catch sight of each other and that’s it. She brings him home and he never leaves.
OVER TIME I LEARN THIS: Fernando is from Belo Horizonte. He went to futbol boot camp growing up, a place where they keep young men in a fenced-in encampment, training and training relentlessly, to become professional soccer players. He ended up playing for the national teams of Brazil, Portugal, and France, until the French stiffed him out of twenty-five grand and he came to New York to be with his brothers. His legs are considered lethal weapons.
He told us that his uncle had shot his wife, in public, at a café in Brazil, and that the police turned their cheek to crimes of passion there. I watched my ma react to that story, and later that night she said to me, “Ah hell, I am never going to Brah-zil!”
But we knew then that he had the violent gene of jealousy. Ma told me Billy had had it, too. That thing where something comes into people’s eyes and they turn into an animal. Over on Twelfth Street, in his new apartment, my father had already started fending off Rita’s incinerating jealousy, her X-ray eyes that saw a thousand things that weren’t there.
Fernando lives with us now. I like him a lot. He brings home pasta cooked in tomato oil, from the restaurant where he works in the kitchen. He takes me out on his shoulders when he goes selling shit, and he’s teaching me the tricks of the trade—how to hustle people into spending more than they know they should on stuff they don’t need, just by being charming. He’s also teaching me how to be a master soccer player. We get along like gangbusters, and from his shoulders I get a commanding view of the mercantile chaos of the Midtown streets.
We all go to the beach together, and they make out while I build sand castles and make friends with the old people. We eat mangoes together and we dig the salt water. They are really in love, and I like that.
They created a samba act together, Fernando and my ma. At first it was a duet act, and then they expanded it to include other girls, in costumes and headdresses, and then the musicians from the samba school joined them, then eventually the capoeiristas. The whole Carioca cachaça klatsch. It was impressive and became a sensation for a little while. They’d do gigs at public schools during the day and club shows at night.
Fernando’s jealousy has been getting worse, though. After one of the parties they came home in a cab and apparently he really threw a shit fit with one of the other girls there. It turned into a screaming match on the street, with him yelling nasty things at my ma. When they exploded into the house, I was pretending to sleep, but I listened to them tear into each other, him accusing her of all kinds of things I know she’d never do. My friend Badu was sleeping over, and eventually we got up and watched them yelling in the kitchen, until Fernando reared back and socked Ma square in the face.
I yelped, loud, but I couldn’t move. I felt glued to the spot, but Badu ran straight for him and started wailing on his waist. Fernando, in the heat of the moment, kicked him in the shin and my tiny friend crumpled into a crying pile on the kitchen floor. That was a disaster, him kicking a little kid, and Fernando stormed out.
Then things changed, one night when I wasn’t there. I was having a sleepover with my poppa and when I came back, something was different. Fernando wasn’t warm anymore.
He started shouting Ma down in the street, saying mean things to sink her self-confidence. He gets real insecure and has started accusing her of more and more outlandish shit. She just grabs my hand and keeps walking, but I can always see her holding back tears about it.
Ma has worked out a signal with me that involves a hand behind her back. I’m supposed to slip out and find the cops if she ever gives it.
One night, coming home from the beach, we see a cop car parked right outside our door, two officers in the front seat doing their paperwork by the light of the dashboard. It’s a hot night, and the air between Fernando and my ma is thick with heat and tension. Ma starts cooking when we get upstairs, but something lights Fernando’s fuse. He starts yelling, his eyes like black fire, and when he hauls off and kicks a cabinet, denting the wooden door, Ma throws me the signal.
I take the stairs two at a time, almost tumbling down, throw open the heavy front door, and wave the cops up.
“Hey! Hey! My ma needs help! Come on!”
A lady cop and her fat partner come in and assess the situation: a burly man panting with aggression, a woman shielding her small child.
The lady cop says to my ma, “What do you want to do with him?”
Heavy in the heart but looking Fernando straight in the face, Ma says, “Just get him outta here. There will be no violence around my little daughter or myself.”
So the cops drag him out, and we pack a suitcase with all his shit, including his passport, and drop it down in a neighbor’s apartment so he doesn’t have any excuse to come breaking the door down.
A few weeks later we’re coming home late one night, just Ma and me. We went out to a bar and she had two glasses of wine for the first time in a real long time. As we’re coming up to the building, she starts to cry. She’s holding my hand and letting out these long, wailing, weeping sobs. It’s disorienting to see my rock crumble
. I don’t know what to do.
We climb the front steps and suddenly she pulls back and puts her fist through the small square pane of glass in the thick metal door. It smashes on impact. This scares me. I’ve never seen my ma get violent. When I look up into her eyes, she’s gone, and there is a new creature there, eyes black with fire.
This sinister force will eventually creep into every crevice of our world. It will corrode our treasured bond, destroy my trust, and cripple my mother. It is the great equalizer, indiscriminate, brutal, and swift in its recruitment, and I will watch as it nimbly swallows my fiercest protectors and leaves all of our lives forever stained.
Chapter 4
Turning Five
The Bowery, September 2, 1990
OUR APARTMENT IS LIKE A RIVERBOAT. BIG WINDOWS OPEN out onto the howling street four stories below, and sunlight floats in on the steady breeze. The shifting sky turns our house into a Pantone kaleidoscope, bathing the rooms in dramatic moods and colors, revolving with the weather and the hour. Bright blue, deep orange, burnt red, purple, and rippling swathes of gold. Sunbeams bounce off the licorice-black fire escape, slick from a rain just passed. They hover high above and then plunge into the chaotic street that grumbles and creaks under poverty’s aching, struggling ass.
The golden shimmer splashes over the men’s shelter and the bedlam slithering around its entrance; a school of bottom feeders in leather vests, torn overcoats, bubble jackets, and bright do-rags; a zigzag of gray jail buses, yellow trees, and sidewalks littered with cigarette butts smoked to the filter.
On warm weekends, the beautiful trannies come down from the Bronx to entertain the shelter boys, get high, and soak the bums for their nickels. There is a heightened pitch across the street right now, because they’re here. Sandy, a bombshell with the high cheekbones of a fashion model, is splayed across a picnic table in their fenced-in yard, fawning and fanning herself, sunning and showing off the lavish outfit she sewed, from looks pulled from the pages of Vogue. She wears a high ponytail and kind of resembles my ma.
Car horns, distant sirens, Sandy’s laughter, and the hissing of a bus all commingle with the sad, honey wail of a saxophone next to my ear. My body is curled around my godfather, James, who is sitting cross-legged on our lacquered wood floor practicing his instrument. I’m wearing a powder-blue dress made of lace and lipstick-red cowboy boots. My long braid is resting on the floor next to me like a sleeping cat.
James is practically my ma’s brother. He looks out for her. When she showed up here strung out on Johnnie Walker and grief at the murder of her one great love, James gave her comfort, shelter, safety. He swung his detective cape over her spirit and made sure everybody knew she was under his mayoral protection.
They’re a tall, slender breed, with majestic profiles. They look like brother and sister. James slides onto the stages of local hot spots and commands audiences, leading his famous band, playing the sax in his house slippers. Chicks faint like flies for his big pouty lips and his sharp suits. Even practicing around the house he looks like an old Hollywood detective with a jazz fetish. He has a tuft of chest hair that barely peeks out of his wifebeaters and it causes a frenzy.
We are having a party in the community garden on Sixth Street today to celebrate my turning five, and James is on cohosting duty.
Walking there, arms laden with decorations and food, we sidestep split concrete, scurrying rats, and little boys playing stickball across the pavement. The pink ball thwacks into a wall, then a car, then a storefront window, and everybody scatters.
A hydrant is shooting water across Avenue B, and screaming children are pushing each other in and out of the spray. Spanish women with asses overflowing from cheap plastic beach chairs cluck at me and moan, “Que linda! Que linda!” This makes me feel embarrassed. I put my head down and frown, making a mental note not to ever wear this dumb dress again.
Ma and James set the party up while I swing my boots back and forth from a big white metal chair. They string chili lights that we found at the ninety-nine-cent store from some high branches over to a rickety shack plastered with concert posters. A cowgirl piñata is hanging from a branch, its ankles swinging a few inches above a broomstick that leans against the trunk, waiting to demolish it.
On a dusty strip of concrete I show off my tap moves to our friends: tall, handsome French Chris who Ma says is “a dead ringer for Alain Delon.” He wears a pack of Camels rolled into the sleeve of his black T-shirt. Hammerhead, my dad’s giant of a friend who earned his name using construction tools to set people straight on debts. Trixie, with her bright orange hair and kooky Texan outfits, who used to crush pennies into tourist medallions at the top of the Empire State Building. She has a store on Ninth and A called LSD—“Live, Shop, Die.” My two beloved aunts, Alice and Olivia.
Alice is my ma’s little sister. She moved here a couple of years ago from China, where she went after law school. She’s a badass and speaks fluent Mandarin. She’s so nice and calming. When Alice comes around you just feel like you can relax because everything is gonna be taken care of. Ma spends hours on the phone with her. They call each other “baby.” Alice is always giving me jars of pickles and delicious shit she makes in her little house in Brooklyn.
Alice is elbow to elbow with my pop’s sister, Olivia. Seeing them next to each other, you realize they’re the same petite, black-haired, shit-together kind of breed. Olivia chain-smokes and is working toward her nine millionth master’s degree. She’s basically a walking brain with huge eyes and a huger smile. Sometimes she closes her big pillowed eyelids when she’s talking to you so she can gather her elegant thoughts in peace. She will own a company one day, with her name engraved in a brass plaque on the building outside.
Olivia is reaching to top off Alice’s rosé when a commotion pulls our attention to the garden entrance. My godmother has arrived. She comes bustling through the gate, leading with her bosoms, two cameras around her neck, barking something at the cabdriver over her shoulder. I squeal and run to be picked up and smothered in her ample chest.
My godmother, Nan, is a bodacious, luscious, curvy, cabs-only type person. Her hair bounces in big red curls, and the only makeup she wears is a greasy smear of red lipstick.
Ma says Nan is touched. She says she’s got the magical lucky gold pyramid on her shoulder, because everything she touches turns to gold. Currently that theory is holding because in her embrace I’m turning to melted precious metal.
Nan’s a night person, so she’s pale like bones. We went to visit her in Sicily when I was one, and there she was, the most unlikely person on a beach, spilling out of her black bathing suit, snapping photos of her weirdo friends draped over the volcanic rocks.
Nan and my ma met when Ma was in a movie and Nan was the set photographer. Nan was nuts about Ma and they started chatting. She asked my ma if she would do a lingerie shoot for the first-ever color spread in the Village Voice, and Ma ended up, eight months pregnant, laid out on the stone benches at the Russian & Turkish Baths in a swimsuit, being warned not to boil her baby.
Nan was the one who told Ma to start swimming. She asked Nan to be my godmother because Nan was real, and she had the lucky pyramid.
I love Nan, who breezes in, hugs me, gets herself a drink, and goes to say hello to my father and my new baby brother, who’s perched on his lap.
Pop is sitting with his wife, Rita, who is spooning some kind of mush into my brother’s mouth. Rita is bad news. She eyes Nan and her big tits when she bends over and kisses my pop on the cheek, because Rita is psycho jealous. She came from nothing, so she’s sharp, razor-eyed, protecting what she’s got, and I know how mean she can be. Rita would eviscerate a woman for crossing the line. The problem is just figuring out where the line is in her garbled brain.
Rita is a beauty, with thick raven hair, full eyebrows, and a gleaming, deceptive smile. She’s moody as hell and she’s got that Catholic thing, like she’s got spirits running around behind her eyes when her mind is quiet.
Crispy is the one who first introduced Ma and Pop, in the middle of Ninth Street when she was running to a dance class. She was in short shorts and Poppa was in a trench coat. Crispy introduced her as “the flame that cannot be extinguished,” even though he’s the one that can’t be put out by the hose of a million people telling him to shut the hell up all the time. The veins in his neck pop out because he’ll get so incensed, telling you stories, correcting history.
Nan kisses Crispy’s curls, blowing past, and he grabs my pop’s elbow, leaning in and saying, “Listen, man, this is the real shit, the way it really went down, okay?”
Across the garden is my poppa’s best friend, Yanik, and his wife, Esther, who are the Hungarian John and Yoko of a tribe of expats who escaped from Communist Budapest with the clothes on their backs. They had to literally walk out of the country. They made it to Paris, in their black coats and long beards, then skipped to New York, where a fan gave them a building on Twenty-third Street to build their theater company. They painted the ceilings gold and the entire tribe lives and creates there, next to the Chelsea Hotel, all the children bathing in the one tub in the living room, Colombian coke dealers sneaking in and out to do business with Yanik.
Yanik is tall, angular, and thin, with thick black brows and cavernous eyes that are simultaneously dark and sparkling. He speaks through a lush Hungarian accent, in a voice that should be narrating a twisted movie of Little Red Riding Hood. His jaw is bold and defined, and his nose is like a broad landing strip. His perfectly round head looks like nature made it bald so that his mind could be closer to his audience. When he speaks through his full lips and strong teeth, people sit forward and listen.
Yanik and Esther have a daughter, Mira, who I consider my sister. She’s the baby vampire of their tribe. Once Ma walked into their family hotel room and Yanik and Esther were sleeping in separate twin beds like coffins, and Yanik was talking and laughing in his sleep.
Darling Days Page 3
