“In Damascus they cut off your hand if you steal something. They blind you if you look at another man’s wife. They cut out your tongue if you tell a lie.
“In Damascus there are people with milky gray eyes who can see into the future, and you can sit by them in the marketplace during your lunch break and ask what crimes you will commit.
“In Damascus the fortune-tellers are walled in by carpets, tall, bright carpets that vendors hang on high rods. Everywhere you turn there is a wall of carpet, and it makes you think of flying carpets, like you can pull one down, start it up, and fly away.
“In Damascus the women hide their beauty. If they are married, they wear long black sheets; if they are engaged, they wear light blue; and if they are neither married nor engaged, if they are old maids, they just wear plain white. You never see their faces in Damascus. In Damascus the only things you see on women are their eyes, dark and Chinese-looking, and this is what men fall in love with, eyes. See, this is how Damascus is different.
“And they have camels. In Damascus they have many, many camels. And the camels crowd the marketplace, chewing their gums like old men, like Willy who sells the newspapers on Leavitt Street. And they smoke, oh do they smoke—the people, not the camels—they smoke night and day, like crazy. At any time you can smell the cigarettes, burning, rich and powerful, like a fog, sweet and damp. And they sit in their doorways, the people. They sit beneath their arched doorways that lead into their deep, dark apartments, and they smoke, exhaling thick exhaust into the tiny, twisted streets.
“In Damascus, when the sun goes down, all you see are shadows. Those buildings with the arched doorways, those that are built tight into each other, those buildings that form the streets, twisting and turning—at night, in Damascus, those buildings become lit from the inside, and crescent-moon-shaped windows, star-shaped windows, cast patterns on the white walls of the buildings across the way. In Damascus at night, no one speaks, and if anyone walks, his footsteps can be heard echoing down the corridors of street, scraping and shuffling. And the streets are so narrow that someone walking miles away can be heard just as clear as someone right around the corner.
“See, this is how it is in Damascus. I know. I have been there.”
SNAKE DANCE
Papo stepped to the DJ. He cocked his arm. He had that flair in his eyes. The same flair I had seen hundreds of times when Papo was drunk and he was about to kick someone’s ass. I held Papo back. I don’t know where I had him, maybe I just pushed back on his chest. I could feel Papo’s arms—that’s it, I had him by one arm. When I pushed back I had his biceps in my hand, in my palm, his long, thin biceps, like Bruce Lee’s biceps, defined, like the contours of the fenders he Bondoed together when we crashed our cars. Papo was a mechanic.
“What are you, a fucking Indian?” Papo said over my shoulder. I took a quick glance behind me, at the DJ, hoping he wouldn’t say anything back. I’d analyzed the situation. I’d anticipated everything. When the DJ showed up, I took a look at him, judged him: Goatee, a little chubby, doesn’t look like he’d start a fight, doesn’t look like he’d back down. He won’t get drunk. I looked at the DJ again, there, later, made eye contact with him, right after Papo asked him if he was a fucking Indian. I saw a smile, a placating smile, a back-down smile, an “I don’t want any trouble” smile, a “But why do you think I’m an Indian?” smile. I wondered the same thing. Where did Papo get that?
“It’s all right, Papo,” I told him.
“But he’s not doing it right.”
“What?” I asked him. I could still feel his biceps. He was still straining. The fibers of his muscle were fine and hard. “He’s not doing what right?”
“La vibora, the snake dance, he’s supposed to do it right after the dollar dance.”
“It’s all right,” I told Papo.
“No, bro, it’s your wedding. He’s supposed to do the snake dance. Fucking Indian,” he said to the DJ, this time louder. I could hear the clink of beer bottles. Someone was tapping on the side of a glass with a knife, kiss the bride, they were saying. This was a Mexican wedding. I didn’t know where my wife was.
I turned around and looked at the DJ. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Just go on with the dance music.” The DJ nodded.
I gently pushed Papo back toward the tables, toward the bar packed with people I hadn’t seen in years, friends I’d felt obligated to invite, people I could never not love.
“I just want it to be right,” Papo said. It sounded as if he was about to cry. I thought of Papo’s little girl, Crystal, his wife, Bernadette, who’d left him two years before, the cocaine habit that had him running to the restroom every hour, the .25 automatic he kept tucked under the armrest of his Cadillac Brougham.
“I want it to be right for you,” he said.
Papo turned and headed toward the bar. I put my arm around his shoulder.
“It is right, bro,” I told him. “It is right.”
Hours later I was in the banquet hall parking lot saying my last goodbyes. Most of the party guests had left, my in-laws, my father, my uncles. Only Papo was there, in the dim light of the streetlamps, and two other friends, Danny Boy and Mario, friends from many years past. Just to my left, sitting in the passenger seat of the car I had rented, was my wife. I could see her silhouette, the outline of her hair, the white shoulder of her wedding dress. I was anxious to leave, to start my new life.
“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said. He was smiling, he shook my hand. “Good luck,” Mario said. Danny Boy gave me a hug like I was leaving forever.
“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said, this time a little louder. “Motherfucker.”
He was standing behind me. I could feel him there. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look.
Danny Boy pulled at Papo’s arm.
“Motherfucker!” Papo said. He stepped toward me.
Mario got in front of Papo.
“Just go, bro,” Danny said.
“Motherfucker!”
I climbed into the rental car and shut the door. I could smell my wife. All night she had smelled beautiful.
“What was that?” she asked me.
“That was Papo,” I answered.
In the rearview mirror Danny Boy and Mario were struggling to hold Papo back. I turned onto Damen Avenue. The three of them started fighting, there in an empty parking lot, on the South Side of Chicago.
MAXIMILIAN
I want to tell you three memories of my cousin Maximilian. Two of them involve his fists.
My cousin was a short man. He was, however, like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, built like a brick two-flat. Maximilian was heavy and hard. He was a cannonball, the way my grandmother on my mother’s side was a cannonball, the way my uncle Blas was a cannonball. They were all skull, they were impossible to hug, but they were warm-blooded, steaming, like just standing next to them could get you through a winter’s day. My mother was like this. I miss her terribly.
But Max, my cousin, Maximilian, was young. He was sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. It was at his sister Irene’s cotillion, in the basement of Saint Procopius church on Eighteenth Street and Allport. I don’t know much about the planning. I was eight years old. But I know my sister, Delia, stood up in it. She was a dama, and my cousin on my father’s side, Little David, was her chambelán. They were off doing their own thing, dancing, waltzing, the way they had been practicing for weeks, my sister constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more queda than the rest of us darkies.
That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people-watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, was at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa was dancing with my uncle Bernardo. My aunt Lola was on the floor dancing with her only son, my cousin Maximilian. The music fit the moment, balladas, slow, sentimental. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney
showed up.
I am not sure my uncle Blas would’ve allowed any boyfriend of Irene’s to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn’t have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said ALMIGHTY AMBROSE.
No one had been at the door, not at that moment. So Stoney and his four partners simply burst into the basement. They had to be high. My father and Moe walked up to the four. There was wrestling, chair throwing, screaming. There were two gunshots, pops that sang off the basement’s polished cement floor, the massive concrete support columns. Then the police showed up. Arrests were made—three paddy wagons’ worth. But the moment I remember most, right before my mother pulled me under the table, was catching sight of my cousin Max, on his knees, his fist jackhammering over and over straight down into Stoney’s limp head. I couldn’t see Maximilian’s face, his head was bowed, but I could see his thick shoulders, his biceps bulging within his dress shirt. Behind him my aunt Lola was pulling at Irene, my uncle Bernardo was reaching for Max, and my father had one of the gangbangers up by his collar. All of them were staring down at Max. All of them had looks of horror.
Maximilian ruptured something. His arm and fist were in a cast for months. I don’t know what got worked out, but Irene kept seeing Stoney. Eventually they married. Stoney never had a cross word for Max, not that I ever heard.
Memory number two happens a few years later, when I was eleven. By that time Maximilian was eighteen and he had just graduated from Juarez High School. He had joined the army and we were having a going-away party for him in the yard behind his father’s house.
I had lived in this house, back when my parents were split up over my father’s cheating. I had spent nearly a whole summer there, holidays included. I had my own bed, the bunk over Maximilian’s. Where other houses were hard to find, my uncle Blas’s house was simply forgotten. The Kennedy Expressway rumbled within yards of the back door. Out the front door the South Branch of the Chicago River turned. There were neighbors to either side, but still my uncle’s house was lost.
His party was a year or two after I had moved back in with my parents, and though I had seen Maximilian nearly every weekend since I’d left his house, at the party he seemed aged. He had grown a thin mustache. He had on shorts and a Dago-T. His muscles looked thicker than usual. His skin was dark, worn even.
Maximilian was never a big talker. But as the afternoon progressed and he continued to draw from the keg, he spoke more freely, eventually calling out my name like I was a friend of his from the street. “Jes-se!” he would say. “I love you, bro.” And then he would start laughing.
Late into the party, the adults were drunk and I remember Maximilian putting his head under the tapper and chugging beer right from the keg. He was smiling, laughing as he gulped. He came up choking, spitting suds. He stumbled around the gravel yard trying to catch his footing. He seemed momentarily blind, lost in his spinning head. We were laughing. My mother had her arm around my shoulder. My father had his arm around my uncle. When Maximilian fell on his ass we doubled over in laughter. We were roaring. And at that moment we seemed really together, my father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins Irene and Chefa, Stoney, my sister, even my cousin’s dog, Princess. For a moment there, we were a real family. Behind us traffic droned on the Kennedy Expressway. And just out the front door, the South Branch flowed.
My last memory of Maximilian is from a couple of years later. I was thirteen. Maximilian was in his twenties. He was home from Germany, on leave because his mother, my aunt Lola, had died.
As sick as my aunt Lola had been, her death was mostly unexpected. In just a few weeks her cancer had gone from manageable to terminal. The last time I saw her was two days before she died. She was back in St. Luke’s Hospital and when I said hi to her she could only look in my eyes. Her look scared me. It was the kind of look that needed a voice to explain itself.
My aunt Lola was a generous woman. The months I lived with her she always had a steaming bowl of frijoles waiting for me when I came home from school, two or three thick tortillas waiting to be dipped and sucked from like summertime paletas. My aunt’s most remarkable feature was her bridge, which she would pull from her mouth and set on the armrest of her La-Z-Boy as she sat and watched TV. When she dozed off I would try to put the bridge in my own mouth. As my months of living there wore on, I used to steal her bridge and move it to some other location, in her bedroom or on the kitchen table, then wait for her to wake and be forced to speak, her pink gums showing through her fingers as she asked if anyone knew where her bridge was.
Her wake was held at Zefran Funeral Home, on Damen and Twenty-Second Street. There were masses of people there, cousins I didn’t know I had. Though I loved my aunt, and loved the frijoles she used to leave me, at the wake I felt no need to cry. Flowers were placed on her chest, blessings delivered to her open casket. At one point a boy standing next to me, a boy who had been introduced to me as my cousin, began to cry. He turned and gave me a hug. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I patted his back. “I know,” I said to him. “She was a good woman.” The kid raised his head and looked at me like I was at the wrong wake.
After the viewing we packed into cars and lined up for the funeral. The procession was long, too long for our family. My uncle and his daughters were behind the hearse, riding with my father in his black, windowless work van. A few cars back, Maximilian and I rode alone in his Chevy Celebrity.
We were silent as we drove down Pershing Road. Maximilian had placed our orange FUNERAL sticker on the top of the passenger-side windshield, and for me it was like a sun visor even though the day was overcast. The tick of the Celebrity’s hazards matched our engine speed, lagging as we braked, then racing when we sped to catch the car in front.
At Oak Park Avenue we slowed for a red light. Our hazards were on. Our orange sticker displayed. We followed the car in front of us into the intersection. Suddenly a red pickup took off from the crosswalk. The pickup broke through the procession just in front of us, then continued south down Oak Park. There was a short pause. Long enough for me to consider what an asshole the pickup driver was for cutting off the procession. We were on our way to a funeral. I had that much in my head when Max threw the Celebrity into a left-hand turn so sharp my temple knocked against the passenger-side window.
We chased the truck for three blocks, the Celebrity’s hazards clacking so loud they seemed about to explode right through the dash. Finally the driver of the pickup pulled to the curb.
Through the rear window of the cab I could see the man jerking around. He looked out of his mind, yelling to himself. As we pulled up behind him his shoulder heaved and he threw the truck into park. His taillights flashed to full red. He kicked open his door.
We were in front of a bank parking lot. It was the middle of the day but the lot was empty. Black screens covered the plateglass windows as if the bank was closed for good. Trees lined the street. I felt a million miles from home.
The truck driver slammed his door shut as Maximilian was stepping out of the Celebrity. The truck driver yelled something. He was a big man, white, potbellied. He was wearing a flannel shirt. His neck seemed like one big chin and his jeans seemed too tight at the waist. Each one of his steps had a little bounce to it, as if he had learned to walk on his toes.
The man continued yelling as Max moved forward. Maximilian didn’t say a word. He simply continued to close in, his feet looking small, his shoulders broad, his tight waist neat with his tucked-in dress shirt. His tie was draped over his shoulder.
As Max got within arm’s reach the truck driver raised his hand and pointed to my cousin’s face. The man’s mouth was still going. He was looking down at my cousin. He was giving him a deep, mean look, eyebrows pointed in, teeth showing as he screamed. I think he thought Max was going to stop and start yelling himself. Max simply kept on moving, and just as the man was ending a word, drawing his mouth shut, my cousin lit into him with a flush right hand that sent the man staggering backward. Even in the c
ar, over the now practically dead heartbeat of the blinkers, I heard something snap, the man’s jaw, his neck, my cousin’s wrist. The man fell to a seated position and Maximilian bent over him and hit him three more times, solid, deep-looking punches to the left side of the man’s face. The man fell sideways and was out cold. His short arm flopped over his thick side and landed palm up on the street. Maximilian turned and started walking back to the car. His face was red now, swollen. He was crying. He looked like he wanted to yell, to scream, but couldn’t get anything out. The Celebrity’s hazards had stopped dead. The car had died. I wished we were back in the procession. I wished there was somewhere, anywhere, for us to go.
GOD’S COUNTRY
Ask him where he learned to do that stuff and he’d say, “Sonora, God’s Country.” Chuey had never been to Sonora. He spent every day of his life right there in Pilsen, just like the rest of us, playing ball, jumping the freights. We thought maybe he’d resurrected some witch doctor’s memories of being in Sonora. I mean, he resurrected everything else: dead cats, dogs, finally a human being. So when people asked us how he learned to do the things he did, we said, “He learned it all in Sonora, God’s Country.” There seemed to be no other explanation.
He was fifteen when he found out he had the gift of life. It was one of those mornings we skipped school. It was early, right around the end of first period.
“Poor fucks,” Alfonzo said, looking to the high school, the kids transferring classes. “I’d be in algebra right now.”
“English,” I said.
“I’d be in gym,” Marcus said.
“Booo,” me and Alfonzo answered.
“No, man,” Marcus said. “Gym this early is a drag. All sweaty afterward. All sweaty for Brenda Gamino second period.”
Painted Cities Page 7
