Except Ma wasn’t bugging. And she did last. Her sisters loaded her up to push her right back down I-10.
Ma’s people stayed away when Javi, Jan, and I were coming up. They never got down with her husband. They’re all dark like Ma, like rust on the rim of the stove, and my father’d called them brutos and said the pack of them could fuck themselves, and that was enough for Ma at the time but then he split and it wasn’t.
During Rita, she spent the whole night on the phone. Whispering and crying. Wondering if her sisters had really stopped giving a shit. When Javi saw her huddled up, he slammed the receiver across the room, and it was another year before we got around to finding the cash to replace it.
The only other time I saw them was the night of Javi’s funeral. I don’t know how they found us. Ma’d told like seventy-two people, but twelve actually showed for the service. My aunts took the aisle behind us. This pastor stood by the windows, and he kept fucking up our names, and two niggas in the back bounced halfway through when they figured out it wasn’t their Javi.
3.
Later on, I tell one of the other waiters, Miguel, about nailing the boy. He’s wiping the same dish in the back of the restaurant, icing his table out front. It isn’t like our blancos don’t tip—they do it to keep up appearances, the Castillo’s where they come to flex—so we take our time in the rear of the house. We hold their plates until the chills creep in.
Was it good? asks Miguel, and I say the boy was regular. My usual hijo de papi.
Everyone’s somebody’s son, he says.
Some sons give it better than others.
Except you don’t take, says Miguel, and he’s starting in on some other shit when one of our cooks slams the door, cheesing like he’s already off and tipping dancers at Treasures. Teeth all yellow and busted. Spitting some dark shit in Spanish. But Miguel plays along, laughing, then rolling his eyes when the motherfucker’s gone.
Historia de mi pinche vida, he says.
Miguel is obviously a pato. Skinny and crooked and brown as bark. On a bad day he’ll talk like he’s holier than thou, enough that you have to stuff a rag in his mouth. He crossed with his parents once his sister got sick, back when they were still offing doctors in Guate, and Miguel says his father chose Houston for the hospitals. Because they help invisible folk here. Didn’t matter that they were undocumented. But then the sister died and they’d blown all their cash and now they were stuck on this side of the gulf. And they still hadn’t tried to pick up some papers, since of course they didn’t have the money to leave anyways. To start over? From nothing? Better to make a quiet life in Houston’s crevices.
Dude keeps quiet about the whole thing. Works doubles most nights. More when he can swing it. Says he eventually wants to stick his people on a plane back home; Miguel’s family’s the only thing he ever really spends any scratch on, and the one time I asked how he felt about that he said there was a lesson: don’t get sick.
Whenever I’m seating the older blancos, I give him a heads-up. They’re generous with us young guys, shaking our hands and squeezing our hips. They know nothing’s about to happen. But they still throw change our way, and we don’t throw it back, and one time I seated this nigga who said he wished all his boys talked like me.
This other time I had a table by the door dropping c-notes, this gaggle of fags flapping wings in tuxedos. One of the husbands wanted a candle from the chandeliers up close to the ceiling, and his boy tossed me a bill. He told me to go figure it out.
So when Miguel signals me from the bar, I figure he’s looking out. But all he does is cross his arms like he’s just so disappointed.
I’ve been thinking, he says.
Better if you don’t.
You keep pulling game like that, he says, you’re gonna strike out.
Like what?
Like hoods off the street, says Miguel. Like whatever puto feels like poking his head out.
You don’t think I’m safe, I ask. Out here? With these niggas?
I’m not talking about that, he says. I just don’t think you’re bulletproof.
I dodge bullets. That’s all fucking I do.
Sure, says Miguel, shaking his head. But that’s not what I’m saying.
You’re gonna screw yourself up, he says, and he pokes me in my chest.
If anyone else had done it I’d have knocked their fucking nose off. I would’ve lost my fucking job.
But Miguel has this look on his face.
So I shrug. Squeeze his shoulder. I slug him in the other one, hard.
4.
The nights I’m not lurking I spend back in East End.
With Ma gone, the house is an album. A literal Greatest Hits.
Here’s where Javi got bopped for talking big.
Here’s where I took my first steps and busted my ass.
Here’s where Javi taught me how to box, where he told me I’d never be anything, where he swore I’d end up in the tent city behind Leeland with the Jesus Freaks and cabrones struck by maldiciones.
Most of my fucks know I live here alone. It’s usually their first time east of I-90. Between the chop shops and busted laundromats and abuelas like scarecrows on every corner, there’s no reason to stick around unless you’re a kid. Or you’re broke. Or you got stuck like Ma. But one time I brought this guy back, this Peter Parker type from downtown, and he wanted to tour the block after the storm. Had his DSLR and everything, snapping all of the derelict houses. He asked why they still hadn’t been rebuilt, and I told him they were like that before we’d even heard of Harvey.
We fucked in the kitchen. I walked him down Leeland. It’d just stopped raining. Four thousand percent humidity. Some kids kicked a ball in the middle of the road while a gaggle of hoods posted up by a Cadillac. Ever since the new mayor, our block’s been mostly immune to that gang shit, but niggas knew that they still had to put in appearances.
They kept their eyes on us the whole way down. When I nodded, one pendejo literally spat on the concrete.
My whiteboy kept mouthing Wow.
Wow wow wow wow wow.
He told me I was lucky, I was living in a piece of history, and I said if I was so fucking blessed he should’ve grown up here himself.
5.
Every now and again I catch one of my boys at the Castillo. Doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened before. They come through in the morning, brunching in tables of four, and a few nod my way but mostly you’d think I was ghosting.
It’s trickier in the evenings. They’re either working or with the fam. I do my best to stay out the way but you know how that shit goes. And when it happens tonight with this whiteboy, stuffed between two shmucks in a bow tie—blond and pale and heavy, he’d cried when he popped—the puto actually signals our manager from his post by the bar.
The manager is this guy, Diego, a Salvadoran with an invisible accent. He stands with my whiteboy for a solid minute, until he finally waves Miguel from across the room.
I don’t have time for it. I hide out in the back. The Castillo’s all business out front, all flash and new money, but the walls beyond the bar are flimsy as fuck. Stepping through the kitchen you cross border after border.
The cooks are huddled around a TV. Some busted box from the nineties. Soccer’s on and everyone’s tossed their change onto the table.
No matter where you put them, niggas hold on to their vices. Thousands of miles, a whole new climate, and a language away from home, but here they were, dropping scratch for a ball in the grass of some mold-smothered stadium.
* * *
• • •
I’ve just caught the announcer’s cadence when Diego yells my name.
He’s nearly purple. His whole fucking face.
He asks what the fuck just happened.
Must’ve been an accident, I say.
It’s the angriest
I’ve seen him, but I know it’ll pass. Diego’s used to worse. He grew up in San Miguel. Dude didn’t come from money, and he’s worked the Castillo for like five years, but he only pulled the top job after the owner’s son OD’d in Midtown. Happened at this glitzy whiteboy bar, and no one knew the story for days, but I heard it after Miguel heard it from this kid he’d been seeing at Rice.
After he’s torn my asshole open, Diego sighs. Shakes his head. Says he didn’t mean to pop, it’s just that our guests expect better, you know?
I tell him I do.
He kneads my shoulder. Right after I flinch, Diego says he only wants what’s best for everyone.
* * *
• • •
In the parking lot after closing, Miguel is beaming. The blanquito de chingao tipped him a pair of twenties. It’s another addition to the black hole of his parents’ travel fund, and I congratulate him for it, and he tells me not to be an ass.
Maybe I’m not fucking with you, I say.
All you do is fuck with people, says Miguel. Like that whiteboy, he says.
So you say.
So you told me.
Obviously it worked out for you.
Miguel shrugs. He’s glowing a little, fists stuffed in his pockets. Even this late, the heat’s got us both squinting.
It’s how you cope, he says.
You think I’m depressed.
I think you screw out your problems, says Miguel. Sí.
Sounds like you’re jealous.
Joking won’t make it better, says Miguel, and he tugs at the end of his belt.
What’s even keeping you here, he asks. In this fucking fishbowl city.
It’s actually a bayou.
Mierde, you know what I mean, says Miguel. You told me your mami’s left you. It’s not like you’re waiting on fam. You can’t stand anyone for longer than a fuck so I know that’s not what’s keeping you around. I think you’re scared.
You don’t know shit, I say.
Also, I say, why the fuck do you even care?
Calm down, says Miguel. You sound like the fucking gringas. All I’m saying’s that you can do better. People leave every day.
But you’re still here, I say, and it’s like I’ve just kneed him in the balls. Like I’ve kicked a goddam newborn.
Some whitelady in heels tiptoes around us. She’s skipping through the lot with her valet in tow. Leaning all over the nigga like he’s a fucking life jacket, and he’s eating it up, but it’s not like I can blame him.
Yo, I say, after they’ve passed. Sorry.
Don’t be, says Miguel. You didn’t bring them here.
I mean I was wrong.
You’re not wrong.
That wasn’t fair.
Nothing is fair.
The back door cracks open. We get a cheer from the kitchen. Probably from the huevons bullshitting around the game. But Miguel slumps in the light, and the glow is gone, and I feel like I should say something, and I know the moment’s passing, but then the door shuts and the epiphany’s gone and we’re stuck facing Montrose in the dark on the curb.
6.
Houston is molting. The city sheds all over the concrete. We’ve got bike shares in the Third Ward, motherfucking coffee shops way out on Griggs. We’ve got like four different shacks with niggas hawking tacos, right next to this barber charging sixty for a trim. The white folks cleared out the garden Miss Contreras set her herbs in—she’s got three sons but they’re all away: two in jail, one nigga at Princeton—and they dug up the tomatoes and cemented over the seeds and now you’ve got these trucks selling duck foot sandwiches on potato bread. But after the storm, they pushed the rest of us out, too: if you couldn’t afford to rebuild, then you had to go. If you broke the bank rebuilding, then you couldn’t stay. If you couldn’t afford to leave, and you couldn’t afford to fix your life, then what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you.
The Hernandez twins are gone. Tatiana’s son is gone. Larissa is gone, Santiago is gone, the Garcias are gone, and the Pham family, too. Then there’s Griselda’s place, this dance studio she runs with her moms. But instead of selling, or letting someone come in and flip it, she lets yuppies from wherever host their yoga in the back. She’s in there every morning, checking them in, and every other night she’s posted up to kick them out.
Sometimes I’ll drop in to talk shit. I’ll catch her hunched over, staring at nothing, pissed.
7.
A few nights later, Miguel is beaming. Dude’s got a bruise smearing his whole left eye.
I don’t ask.
The Castillo’s at half-capacity, but Diego’s still buzzing around. We’re hosting a big to-do soon. Some circle-jerk conference. Diego says that every day, every day, is a rehearsal for the larger picture, because we are cementing our reputation, which is to say his legacy. You practice how you play. When one of the cooks announces that he hasn’t gotten play in decades, Diego breaks character, tells him broke niggas have all day to fuck.
So we’re smoothing our ties when I corner Miguel. I tell him it’s subtle, whatever he’s got going on with his face.
He doesn’t laugh or bitch or crack on me.
He says he’ll explain over drinks.
I ask who the fuck has money for those.
And also, I say, since when does the son of god get fucked up.
Don’t worry about it, says Miguel.
I’m not asking for me, I say. You’re the one who’s saving up.
Sometimes beggars strike gold, he says, and I’m about to press him when Diego finds us.
He’s fanning his face, pointing at an overstuffed table of blancos, like, What the fuck are you doing? He tells me I’ve been pushing it lately, that I should get my shit together, and he’s winding up for more but then Miguel grabs his elbow.
He says we’re just clearing receipts. It’s been a long day. I was helping him tally his tips.
Of course Diego doesn’t buy it. But he grabs Miguel’s hand anyways. He squeezes it for a beat.
Then he looks at me and says, So what the fuck are you still doing here.
* * *
• • •
Miguel drives a Peugeot. It’s busted as fuck. His father scored the thing to ferry the family around the city. You can hear popcorn cooking once he flips the ignition, and the tires feel like they’re rolling on air, but once we actually start moving the engine gives a little shudder and we’re cruising down Montrose, past Alabama, toward Elgin.
The bar isn’t far. It’s this shack with some benches. Miguel’s friendly with the owner, a black lady in an apron. The place is all local, all browns and tans, and when Miguel takes his seat he’s got a couple of Shiners already in hand.
He says he’s bought two plane tickets. Didn’t think it would happen but then it did.
They fly back in a week, he says. Two stops.
One connection in Miami, he says, then they’re back in the capital by midnight.
Wow, I say.
I hope you found some decent seats, I say.
Puto, says Miguel.
Then he sighs.
They’re going back home, he says.
We take long sips from our bottles.
Felicidades, I say.
When I ask how he pulled it off, Miguel only shrugs.
Opportunity, he says, and I remember his viejos on the side.
Los papis must have paid you well.
I didn’t complain.
The sun settles into a muddy purple. It’s still hot as shit. But not entirely unbearable. Some crows fly overhead. The road behind us is full of fronds, shading the porches and the yards and their cars, and when I reach for the fresh bruise sitting under Miguel’s eye, he jumps before he softens.
It feels a little shallow. A little smooth around the edges
.
You cleaned this? I ask.
Cálmate, he says. We’re celebrating.
Niggas lose their eyes for less.
Drink with me. That’s what we’re doing.
I tell Miguel we’ll get faded later, that there will never not be time to get trashed, and before he can protest I’m jogging to the pharmacy across the street.
When the doors slide open, there’s a pregnant lady behind the counter. She’s got this little girl in dreadlocks pulling on the back of her jeans.
I ask where the alcohol is, and she eyes me, and then my uniform, and for a second I think she’ll smile but she says, Nigga you ain’t even looked.
* * *
• • •
I make it back with swabs.
Miguel doesn’t bitch. He sulks on the curb, flinching, but he still lets me work.
Once we’re drinking again, he says, You don’t suck at that.
My brother showed me how.
He must’ve been better.
It was his job, I say, and when I’m done I toss the bottle. It clatters on the concrete, adding rubble to the pile.
Let me guess, says Miguel, your brother’s a vet.
Javi’s an Army medic. Or he was. Now he’s dead.
We don’t look at each other. We sit and watch the action on Elgin. Miguel downs his Shiner and tosses that too and we pass the last one back and forth.
Hey, says Miguel.
Qué, I say.
Tell me something about you I don’t already know.
You’re fucking with me.
I look him in the face to see if he’s for real.
Anything, says Miguel.
Shit, I say.
You sort of remind me of this kid I knew, I say. Back when I was little.
Weird, says Miguel.
Yeah. He lived next door. Got evicted and everything.
Lot Page 15
