Painted Cities

by Galaviz-Budziszewski, Alexai

  Anyway, those bullet holes in the bar—move those ashtrays—that’s what that boy did who was looking for Indio. He ran out of bullets. Had a little .25, everybody was laughing. First, because this asshole shows up with a cap gun. Second, because he’s firing away, screaming and shit, and didn’t hit nothing but the bar and a couple of stools. They beat his ass, Vincie and a couple of other guys, even Sammy. Dumped him out there for the dogs. Vincie called up Eddie. The Deluna brothers beat his ass even more, put him in the hospital.

  Most of the guys in here are Disciples. When you get sent to prison, that’s who you run with. You know the names. If you get sent to the County, you say my name and Mario’s—they’ll take care of you. If you get sent downstate, mention your uncle Big Ray—they’ll take care of you there. Only never ever mention Eddie Deluna. You’re a mark if you do. Eddie got locked up in the County two years ago for beating up some bagger at the A&P. Eddie ran with the Kings in there. He’s a phony, don’t even mess with that scum.

  Cisco too. He’s that Puerto Rican who lives on Twenty-First. He never comes in here, though—everyone’s got it out for him. He’s got no respect. He gets his ass kicked, gets all wickied up, then wants to start shit again. Same people keep beating his ass. That’s not respect, that’s stupidity. He took a cigarette from Sammy’s mouth once, snatched it right out like Sammy was some kind of punk. Sammy can’t defend himself, so Vincie beat Cisco’s ass. You’ll probably have to beat his ass too. If you don’t beat his ass, fuck it—you’re still young. If it’s just Cisco, you can shrug it off, only never step down, nowhere. If he comes up to you, you just stand there, little man. He beats his wife. She’s fine too. They got two kids. Once I was out front of Bogart’s house, on Twenty-First. Cisco lives right across the street. We’re out there having some beers, shooting the shit, and here comes Cisco’s lady, running across the street, one shoe on; Cisco following her ass, calling her a puta, a whore, all these other crazy, nasty names. She fell in the middle of the street, tripped over the sewer cover. I remember what she said too. She looks up at Cisco and says, “Cisco, I don’t know why you hit me—I love you so much and you keep on hitting me.” You know what Cisco did? He kicked her in the face. Kicked her right in the fucking face, broke her nose, blood all over. Fuck that. Me and Bogart broke Cisco’s nose. He knows not to pull that shit around us. That’s why Eddie Deluna is always talking shit. Those two are best friends, probably been fucking each other since grammar school. That’s why you’ll have trouble with them. Cisco you can handle, not Eddie. When they start calling your brother a pussy, you beat Cisco’s ass, and tell me about Eddie. Next chance I get, I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.

  You better never fuck with drugs. You can smoke a little pot—shit’s harmless—but you motherfucker better never mess with that hardcore shit. I’ll beat your ass if I ever find any on you. You can’t think right, then when you need to move fast, figure shit out, you’re on low gear, you get swallowed up. That’s what happens. That’s how it works. The neighborhood wasn’t like that before. Not when I was coming up. These boys weren’t into drugs. It was all turf. That sounds stupid to you now, but that’s because you got these idiots surrounding you. Not before, though. It was all respect.

  There was this boy named Jap. I used to run with him when we lived over on May Street. We used to hang over at Dvorak Park, where they had the sprinkler and shit, all the kids running through there. Remember, I used to take you? Anyway, Jap had this fine lady. And I’ll tell you, you don’t know fine until you seen this girl. You probably think you do, that little chicken girlfriend you got, nipples like raisins, but this girl was fine. She was probably sixteen or so, long hair. She wasn’t fucked up, like most of these girls that hang around. No, this girl was from a hardcore family, stone Mexican, traditional. Her name was Elsie or something, maybe Laura, but everyone was after her. So there was this other boy, Junebug, a Latin Count, fat dude, stinky, nobody liked him because he was always starting shit, and Junebug decides to have this party. It’s a Saturday night, everyone from the neighborhood’s there—everything’s cool. Then Junebug starts rapping to Jap’s lady, asking her if she wants to have his babies, if she’s still a virgin, stupid shit like that. Jap’s standing right there, so he steps up to Junebug and warns him. He says to Junebug, “You mess with my lady again and I’ll kill you.” Damn if that wasn’t some badass shit. Said it just like Clint Eastwood too. You mess with my lady again and I’ll kill you. See? That’s how it was. You could talk shit. You had time to be cool. Well, Junebug didn’t care. He figured Jap was just a young stud, full of shit. So Junebug wanders around the party some more, gets a little more juiced up, then rides up behind Jap’s lady and just grabs her ass. Mean motherfucker. Reaches around and starts fondling her chest, ripping at her clothes. Next thing you know Jap runs out the door and comes back in about three minutes with his old man’s .38. Jacked that motherfucker up. Shot Junebug six times right in the chest. Dead on arrival. No chance. Jap got fifteen years. Served four. He’s out in Aurora now, married that girl. Elsie I think her name was, maybe Laura.

  That’s how it was when I came up. People would give warnings. It was almost fun, like a story. Like if you were to write the damn thing out you would say, ‘and the motherfucker said it just like Clint Eastwood.’ Now people don’t give a shit. You know why all these girls get knocked up? Because at one time it meant something. A few boys would skip out on their old ladies, but most of the time when you had a kid, that was your family. Everybody would talk shit. “Damn, you’re with her forever now, bro.” And the boy would smile and say all proud, “Yeah, I know.” Then we’d talk about it. Ask him, “When’s the wedding?” and “Is her old man pissed off?” That’s how it was. That’s when people were stand-up. Defend what’s in their heart, not what they can sell. You got a good friend, that means you do anything for them. That’s being stand-up. If he’s broke, you give him a handout, you never ask for it back. If he gets into some shit with some boys out front, you step out there and back him up, even when he’s the one who’s wrong. A friend’s all you got, they’re family, and once you don’t got family, tell me, motherfucker, what do you got?

  BLUE MAGIC

  THE EDGE

  For one summer I lived on the edge of the earth. This was when I was small, like six or seven. I lived with my aunt, across the street from a huge gravel park. Across the park there were houses, and then a water tower, and then who knows what, the edge of the earth—I never went any farther.

  There was a river there. I could smell it, especially in the morning, or early in the evening, a strong fishy smell, the way a penny tastes. I stayed indoors during those times. The rest of the time I walked.

  The edge of the earth was strange. There were highways up on stilts. There were empty churches. There were foghorns. There was the constant hum of traffic, like a swarm of bees hovering just around the corner. After a while the sound was comforting, and when I finally moved back with my parents, after they got back together, it took weeks before I could actually sleep a night the whole way through.

  My aunt used to walk with me. She was young. She was very pretty. When we walked men whistled at her. I shot them dirty looks. They paid me no mind. My aunt didn’t seem to care one way or another.

  Our trips happened at night, after dinner, after the river smell had passed, or receded back into the river as I imagined it did.

  “Where does that smell come from?” I asked her.

  “The fish,” she said. “Didn’t you ever see the fish floating on top?”

  “No.”

  “We should come out in the day sometime. You’ll see the dead fish, how they float on the top.”

  “Do you think the group KISS are really devil worshippers?”

  “No, I don’t think they worship the devil. But I think maybe they know some kind of magic.”

  “Do you think they ever take off their makeup?”

  “No. They do everything with their makeup on. They even sleep
with it on. They never take it off.”

  My aunt and I had conversations like this as we walked down the broken streets of our neighborhood. We always moved along the same route, starting out toward downtown, the big buildings of the Loop, then turning up and over the railway viaduct, then moving down by the shrimp store, then over the river. We were always on the edge, skirting the lines, the boundaries. I often felt that one step too far to the left would cause the earth to crumble beneath my feet, and off I would tumble into darkness, nothingness, my aunt looking down at me, her hair blowing in the wind, a look on her face like she’d seen things like this happen before.

  STREETLIGHT

  We stole the ladder from Fat Javy’s house. It was in his gangway. He should’ve had it locked up.

  Sergio was more drunk than me. We laughed as we walked down Javy’s gangway. I remember Javy opening his window and saying something. I remember Sergio saying something back. I wish I could remember what it was now. It was funny as hell.

  We walked down Twenty-First Place. Sergio was in the front. I was in the back. The streets were empty. It was late. We had school the next morning.

  I remember now. I remember Little Joseph opened his screen door. It was warm that night, like close to the end of the school year. Little Joseph, who was eight or nine at the time, opened his screen door and asked us: “What are you guys doing?”

  “Shhhh,” Sergio told him. “We’re breaking into Yesenia’s house.” We started laughing again. Little Joseph looked at me and smiled, then he closed his screen door. When Little Joseph was fourteen he was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, a girl who everyone said “loved him too much.” It’s funny how you remember things, a word or two, a scene you carry with you for the rest of your life. What are you guys doing? I remember Little Joseph.

  We got to Yesenia’s building. Sergio said he knew where her bedroom was. “Right here,” he said. “It’s this one. I’m positive.”

  We placed the ladder up against the wall. She lived on the second floor. The top of the ladder rested just below the window ledge.

  “Hold on to it tight,” I said to Sergio.

  “All right,” he said.

  I began to climb.

  It was a long climb, longer than I’d expected. Halfway up I stopped to rest my arms. I looked up the block. Streetlamp poles sliced long, thin shadows across the orange-tinted sidewalk. An L train rumbled over Hoyne Avenue then disappeared behind the Lutheran church. I looked down to Sergio. His face was bright orange with streetlight.

  “Hey, bro,” he whispered loudly to me. “Tell her you love her.” He started to laugh.

  “Fuck you,” I said down to him.

  And then I turned and continued to climb.

  BLUE MAGIC

  She made me dance. It was her. I never wanted to.

  She was drunk. I knew she was when she started to smoke the Kools she bummed off my aunt Stephanie, or my father’s Winstons when Stephanie had run out. She’d hold the cigarette between two fingers and with her remaining fingers hold on to my small hand. In those days I was just barely tall enough to stare at her breasts, but I didn’t. I looked down at our feet, my dirty white socks, her bare, dark toes. She was a natural barefooter. It was in her blood.

  “No, no,” she corrected. “Like this, Mm, mm—mm, mm.” She moved to the Chi-Lites, the Delfonics. She swung her hips, stepped in a way that appeared entirely light. I followed her movements. “Listen to the song,” she corrected. “There… there you go… right… that’s it.” At this point I closed my eyes.

  I don’t remember much after that, at our parties. The feeling I remember after closing my eyes is something similar to what I felt as a drunk teenager, cruising with my partners, time and distance nonexistent.

  For me, our parties always ended up this way. I remember small things, people laughing, cursing. I remember my aunt Chefa cackling, that laugh she used to have. I remember my cousin Bobby fistfighting with my aunt Bernice’s boyfriend, Fabian. I remember bottles of wine, clinks of glasses. I remember the Stylistics, Blue Magic. I remember death being something that happened to people I didn’t even know, ancient, gray people from Mexico or Poland, places I’d never seen, places I could only imagine. And I remember a song called “I Do Love You.” And if I could, I would take my mother in my arms again, and I would dance with her to that song, which went, “I do love you, Ooo-oo-o, yes I do, girl.”

  GROWING PAINS

  They sat at the edge of the sprinkler pool, the two of them, a boy who spoke no Spanish and his grandmother just in from Mexico. He reached for his shoes, Daniel. He reached down to take off his shoes and immediately his grandmother moved to help. She untied the left, then the right, then paired them up and placed them between her and her grandson. She patted them as if they were alive.

  She wasn’t much taller than him. As they sat there together it seemed in fact that Daniel was taller than his grandmother. But she was wide. Not fat or even heavyset, just wide, like a tank or a bulldozer is wide. Daniel looked at her arm. She wore a dark flannel long-sleeve shirt. She’d worn long-sleeves for the past week, ever since she’d arrived in the States. It was mid-August in Chicago, hot, humid. Still, Daniel thought, she was from Mexico. Chicago summers were just too cold for her.

  He looked up and noticed his grandmother was staring at his feet. He was wearing dirty socks. Daniel had known that they would end up at the sprinkler pool today. He had known his grandmother would ask him if he wanted to go in: she’d done the same thing every day since she’d arrived. But he’d put on dirty socks anyway. There were cleaner ones in the dirty pile, Daniel knew. But he’d simply grabbed the first pair he found, a pair lying on the floor next to the dirty basket. Now he hesitated before reaching to pull them off.

  His grandmother sighed. She looked up across the park, focusing her beady eyes on something far away. She looked back to him. “Pues,” she said. “Andale.” She clapped her hands. “Andale, andale.” She reached down, grabbed the toe of his left sock and yanked it off. Then she went for the right. She held the socks up in front of her. For a moment Daniel thought she might bring them to her nose for a smell. But she only sighed again, then flapped them out. She folded the socks neatly, dirtiest sides in, then tucked them into his shoes. She looked back to him. “Pues, que tienes?” she asked. Her voice was squeaky, witchy, like there was a cackle in there somewhere, waiting to come out.

  “Nada,” Daniel answered. But the word came out wrong, the d sharp and heavy, the way the word sounded in English. He got to his feet and walked slowly toward the sprinkler. Na-tha he told himself. Na-tha.

  The trip to pick up his grandmother had been only slightly eventful. It could’ve been worse. He and his mother had made the long trip to the airport in their silver 1978 Ford Granada, the one with the thermostat problem. Daniel didn’t understand what the thermostat was and he doubted that his mother did, yet every time the car started smoking and wheezing and eventually stalled, his mother mumbled “Fucking thermostat” as if she knew exactly why it had stopped the car from moving.

  His grandmother’s flight was to arrive at 1:25 a.m. That night the air was cool and damp, the type of heavy night that forecasted the end of summer, the coming school year. It was the type of weather that gave Daniel his aches, or rumas, as his mother called them: the “Mexican pains.”

  “Good thing it’s cool out tonight,” his mother said as they pulled onto the expressway. “Fucking thermostat might actually work.” Daniel moaned. Above them long rows of streetlamps stretched off into the distance. Shadows from each light pole flickered through the car’s interior, strobing what little light there was. Down below, to either side of the expressway, the lamps at street level held wide orange halos of humidity.

  They approached Eighteenth Street, Providence of God Church. Just around the corner lived his great-uncle Max, whom he hadn’t seen in two years, who’d raised his mother when she first moved to Chicago. When Daniel was younger, his cousins, Max’s daughters, had bab
ysat him. They were more like aunts back then, more like sisters to his mother, the way she had lived with them. They used to take him on long walks around the neighborhood and he remembered how the expressway sounded from underneath, the high whine of tires, the low drone of truck engines, the shudder of engine brakes. Where he and his mother lived now, Twenty-Second Street, was in the same neighborhood, just farther away from the expressway. Still, on clear nights the sound of travel could be heard through Daniel’s window and it helped him get to sleep.

  They passed the Sears Tower, the city skyline. He looked out to the Morton Salt factory, its blue corrugated roof lit up bright, M-O-R-T-O-N spelled out in large white block letters. A wave of pain shot through his knees. He flinched.

  “What, you got your rumas again?” his mother asked. At the steering wheel, between two fingers, his mother held a Newport 100. The embers glowed a bright red, pulsing with the air rushing in through her open window.

  “Maybe it’s time to take you back to the doctor,” she said.

  “I don’t need to go the doctor,” Daniel replied. “It’ll go away.” He reached down and began massaging his knees.

  “It’s up to you,” his mother said. “I’d go, though.” She brought the cigarette to her mouth.