by Achy Obejas
“I don’t ever want to get to Santa Fe,” I say after much effort, and Rogelio shakes his head. He can’t hear me above the mechanical noises. The Asians across from us shift in their seats, and Rogelio sits as far away from me as space allows. “I don’t want to go to Santa Fe,” I repeat, but I can’t feel my lips move.
When the elevator doors part, we tumble out to a steep, narrow stairway. We’re all crushed together, the Asians, Rogelio, and me, and traffic keeps going around us. I feel Rogelio’s hands on my hips, secretly guiding me up toward the fresh-faced student at the top of the stairs, a red-haired girl with a walkie-talkie strapped to her belt. She’s on the lookout for trouble, or troublemakers, and it feels like Rogelio’s turning me in. I jerk him loose, pushing my way through the crowd. It’s cold up here, and the air feels thin.
At the top, the observation deck is a small room that resembles a space capsule. There are no windows to speak of, just horizontal slits maybe a yard wide and ten inches deep. To get a peek you lean over, resting your body against the incline of the walls. On the east side, there’s no lake, just the Mississippi River looking muddy and small. On the west, there’s no city, just generic St. Louis. Straight down, I can see the kidney-shaped pond next to the Arch and the walkway to the parking lot. I’m nauseous.
“Rogelio?” I whisper. I don’t see him anywhere. A couple of kids are running between adult legs, but none belong to Rogelio. I try to find him by stretching up above the crowd, but I can’t seem to muster the strength. I lean my back against the wall and feel my throat with my hand. My fingers seem to be working again, and my glands aren’t as tender. I lick my lips, but there’s something salty on them. I turn away from the crowd, which keeps brushing against me, and flap my sleeve up to my mouth. My lips feel sore.
It’s then I hear unmistakable laughter behind me: high-pitched, kind of girlish. I turn to find it, but whole family groups keep coming and going by me as quickly and enthusiastically as if we were at a political rally. Everybody’s got souvenir tee-shirts. There’s a grandmother with a Confederate flag sewn on the back of her jacket. Teenage girls cackle with disappointment over the Arch’s antiquated futurism. They smack their gum and sigh, barely noticing me. They’re so close, I can smell their shampoo and cigarettes.
“St. Louis used to have another baseball team, before the Cardinals,” someone is saying; it’s a voice I could recognize in the dark. “But the St. Louis Browns left the city and became the Baltimore Orioles in 1954.” There’s a man with a cowboy hat in front of me, and as the hat dances away, I see Rogelio, cocky, giving away no secrets. He’s talking to another man, propped casually against the wall on the other side.
“Well, it’s karma then,” the man says. He’s big and white and wearing a cap with the logo from Rogelio’s union local. “You know, Baltimore had a team sneak out on ’em a couple of years ago—the Colts.”
“Yes, the football team,” Rogelio says. “They’re in Indianapolis now.”
The man, who’s about fifty and graying, hunches forward to look out one of the little windows. I can’t keep them in my line of vision because the tourist flow is constant. But I hear them both laugh. Then I see the man slap Rogelio’s shoulder in a friendly, manly sort of way. They’re obviously friends, and when a small woman in a pair of yellow cotton pants comes up to them, the man goes through a series of introductory motions. Rogelio shakes her hand.
I’m watching from across the way, but he has no idea I’m here. So many people have bumped into me, I feel raw and beaten. I want to leave now; I want to collect my lover and go. “Rogelio,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me. A girl walking inches in front of me focuses my way. She’s not sure if I’m talking to her. “I’m just trying to get my boyfriend’s attention,” I tell her, nodding in Rogelio’s direction. The girl looks frightened, and I feel something wet on my shirt. Someone says something to her over her shoulder, but her eyes are wary and still on me.
I try to get away, but my knees wobble, and I quickly lean back against the wall. I touch my uneasy stomach, rubbing it with my hand. When I reach up to my pounding heart, I find a puddle and follow the trail of saliva up to my chin. I shove my wrist up to my mouth, rubbing my sleeve against it. I turn around slowly, facing the wall, and swallow hard. My forehead throbs. I tell myself it’s not a good idea to panic. I remind myself the St. Louis Arch is not accessible, and I’m going to have to walk back to one of those little Nazi elevators. But I don’t want to move, I don’t want anything to happen now. I want to close my eyes and open them up to the aftermath of a simple dizzy spell in a normal world, where Rogelio comes up from behind me while I’m doing the dishes and wraps me up, nuzzling against my neck.
“Mister, are you all right?”
The red-haired girl with the walkie-talkie is standing next to me. She is all business, and her look is firm. I’d tell her I’m fine, but I’m not. And besides, I could never fool her.
“Do you need help?” she asks, and it’s obvious I do. “Here,” she says, offering her shoulder as a crutch. She uses a free hand to unhook the walkie-talkie from her belt and gives emergency instructions across the air waves. Then she efficiently snaps it back on her belt and turns to me, holding me with strong, muscular arms. I push slowly off the wall and turn.
The entire observation deck is quiet now, and the crowd has created a space for me. The only sounds are the elevators in the distance and the shuffling of feet. The red-haired girl walks with me, and I hear whispers behind me. As we head toward the stairway, the noise level returns to normal. I hear Rogelio’s voice again, and my head jerks toward it. The red-haired girl turns with me.
“Rogelio—”
His back is to us, and he stabs the air with his finger to make a point in an argument. The gray-haired man with whom he’s talking sees us and juts his chin our way. Rogelio turns quickly, registering everything with a shiver. Suddenly, he looks just like any other South Side greaser—the too-tight blue jeans and black tee-shirt, his hands rough and calloused. His chest moves up and down with heavy breathing.
My eyelids drop against my will, and the red-haired girl shifts under me. I hear her say something, and Rogelio responds, but when I finally look up all I see is his shoulder turning back to the gray-haired man and the woman in the yellow pants, their voices unnaturally bright. I hear him say something about his son, about football, about his wife. I don’t know, I don’t know.
I want to throw up. Both Rogelio and I have keys to the car, but I know neither one of us would leave the other. The thing is, I’ve seen him turn now, and I’ve heard his voice bob and sink away from me. That means something.
When the red-haired girl leads me away, I look over her shoulder, wanting by sheer force, by the volume of both my love and hatred, to make Rogelio look at me. When he finally does, just this side of the heterosexual couple pretending not to notice our intensity, he’s terrified. He sticks his hands in his jeans pockets and balls them up, causing the jeans themselves to hike up an inch or so. He looks at me, then looks away. Then he looks back again, his eyes pleading for understanding. But my heart is pounding its thin walls, and I don’t understand. I want to ask him how much he expects me to take.
Special thanks to Gabor and Rex Wockner.
Man Oh Man
Man oh man, Ice is dead, as cold and white as shrimp. I’m telling you this because I want it to make sense, you know? I want you to understand that I knew nothing about it, other than that I was there, or rather, here, and that at one point I noticed the stuff that I thought was just beer on the floor was his blood, still gooey, still red in the middle and black around the edges of each puddle. I was sitting right in the big one, right in the one where he died, the one that killed him. It ruined my jacket, the one with all the zippers and patches. It’ll never come off, not really, not ever.
Man oh man, it’s tough to believe because just last night Ice was standing in the middle of my kitchen, flapping his arms around like a bird, talking about spring, talking abo
ut going to Florida or California or maybe New York City. He was saying we could have a kid, such a pretty kid, and smart, too, and wise, like us.
Ice, I said, man oh man, you’re crazy, and he laughed and laughed, and then I laughed, too. That’s all you can do sometimes, you know, laugh. And since we found out from the public health clinic, when we called up and got our little anonymous numbers checked, and the nurse on the phone wouldn’t tell either one us if we were positive or negative but wanted us to come in and be counseled—counseled, can you imagine that?—well, we just knew, and so we’d been laughing lately even more than usual.
We were still laughing when we got in his car and drove over here, where Luis had promised us some stuff. Luis owed it to us. We’d helped him last month, not just about dope but with a coat, ’cause it was still really cold then. It’s hard to get a coat for a guy Luis’s size. I don’t know where Ice got it—it fit perfect even though Luis is big and scaly like a dinosaur—and Ice kept teasing him that he’d had it tailor-made. Funny, huh?
You know, Ice was in a really good mood last night, like if he’d had anything, he would have definitely given it away by the end of the night. You know what I mean?
Well, we got here and Luis had the lights off and a bunch of candles lit. He introduced us to a girl named Daisy, whose face looked all punched in, not from fists or anything like that, but just as if she were born that way—punched in, squashed. Her hair was real long and fine and didn’t fit with the rest of her. I thought it might be a wig, except that there wasn’t much of it, and you could see the roots coming out of her scalp. Luis seemed proud of her one minute, then disgusted the next, like he just couldn’t make up his mind.
She did what he said, though, like putting all the stuff right in front of Ice, like he was the high priest or something. You know, I can do it better than Ice, except when there’s other people around, he just has to do it—it’s his trip, his macho thing. I fought with him about it a couple of times, but after the call to the clinic it just seemed silly. Who cares, really? Let’s just get on with it, that’s what I say.
Ice set the spoon on Luis’s coffee table, the one that looks like a wagon wheel, and pressed his thumb on the handle to hold it down tight. You wouldn’t think a spoon could move on its own, but sometimes, I swear, they get electric or something. Then he held one of the little bags up between the thumb and index finger of his other hand and tapped some of the powder with the back of his middle finger.
He’s real slow, you know. He likes to take his time, to watch every little movement. He says it’s a sacrament. I’ve never seen him even a little desperate. Sometimes I catch a little bit of sweat glistening there under his moustache, but that’s it, that’s the closest he gets to nervous. Luis likes to watch him, too, like Ice’s an artist or a great chef. Daisy, on the other hand, she was bitchy. It’s not that she said anything, but she kept smoking cigarettes, pulling them from her squashed-in face with jerky little movements, then sucking them up again.
But Ice was cool, telling stories, humming while he watched the drop of water fall from his fingertip to the top of the white powder in the spoon, then lifting the spoon up like it was holy wine and lighting his Graceland lighter under it.
He really bought that damn thing at Graceland, in Memphis, when he and Luis went one day just because they were on the interstate with a full tank of gas and enough money to get there and back. You didn’t want me to die without ever having been to Graceland, did you? he asked when he got back, grinning and exhausted, wet and shaking. And I said, well, what about me, huh?
But he never answered, just talked about the Jungle Room and how Elvis’s middle name is misspelled on his tombstone. Make sure my name is spelled right, he said. If they can do that to Elvis, man oh man, they can do that to me. And I told him I wanted to be cremated, so nobody ever had to worry about me again, and besides, it seemed fitting to become dust. I asked Ice if you could smoke ashes or melt them and shoot them up, but he just got angry, really, really angry, so I let it go. I don’t like fighting with him.
Well, after we were all ready, after Ice had pulled his needle from his boot and had the plunger in and was ready to load, Daisy says, No. She says she’s not using his needle. He asked her if she’d fucked Luis yet, and she told him it was none of his goddamn business.
Well, Ice just looks over at Luis, who’s baring his little yellow prehistoric teeth. But Ice didn’t care. You didn’t tell her, man? he asks. And Luis nods and shrugs and says, Yeah, but they’re practicing safe sex. Well, that’s cool, Ice tells him, except we’re all going to die anyway. And then he puts the needle in the stuff, fills it up good, squirts the bubbles out, and says, Who’s first?
When nobody volunteered, I volunteered. Besides being a natural ice-breaker (ha ha), I was starting to need it, too. I was getting cold. So Ice says, Okay, and he gives me the needle and comes over and holds my arm.
We don’t tie off because, well, you don’t really need to anyway, but Ice thinks it’s kind of sick, like S/M or something, and he prefers to just squeeze my arm. It’s a connection we make, something like sex, only warmer.
Actually, I don’t need his help. And he doesn’t need mine either, although I squeeze his arm, too. We’ve both got blue thumb marks around our biceps from all that gripping. But the fact is, all four of our arms—do we sound like an octopus? —are thin enough where they need to be, and our veins are out there enough that all we really need to do is point, shoot, and fold up.
Then Ice turned to Daisy and said, You’re next. She nodded, but instead of putting her arm out she turns to Luis and asks him something in Spanish, and he nods his head yes.
I was starting to warm up by then. I was starting to feel the syrup-thing—that’s what we call it—when you feel your feet like they’re an Aunt Jemima bottle filling up with maple syrup, only it’s hot and sugary, and you can smell it, too—that is, you can feel it inside you, like at knee-level, and smell it at the same time. Does that make sense? Anyway, that’s where I was at.
The next thing I know, Daisy’s got a metal salad bowl full of cloudy white bleach, and she’s ripping a package of Handi-Wipes open with her teeth. She’s really struggling, you know, tugging on the damn plastic wrapping until it finally stretches too far, and she pokes a finger into a little hole in the stretch and just rips it open with one big jerk. Man oh man, I felt sorry for her.
Ice handed her the needle, and she put it in the bowl, filled it up and emptied it a bunch of times, and then, finally, she said she was ready. Ice was trying not to laugh, I could tell. The whole time she’s talking about how a social worker from the University of Illinois taught her that. Luis just kept looking at her, one minute fascinated, the next minute repulsed. I didn’t blame him, not really.
Then she tied off, as you might expect, and Luis did it for her. What surprised me was that then she started doing all that washing again for Luis like it would make a difference after all the times he’s been with us, or like he couldn’t do it for himself. The thing is, the stuff hit her pretty hard and pretty fast. You could tell: her hands looked like little balls of uncooked dough, threatening to crumble and fall apart. And Ice, who doesn’t believe in the bleach, was getting impatient with her.
Didn’t you ever work as a busboy? he asked Luis, who didn’t say anything as he rolled up his sleeve. Dishwasher? Ice asked. Hey, are those rubbers in your pocket, man? Ice kept teasing him. What about you, Daisy? Ever been a masseuse? A switchboard operator?
The way Daisy was working in that bowl, you’d think she was doing the laundry for a whole Indian tribe. I kept waiting for her to hit the needle against the bowl like it was dirty clothes getting knocked on a rock at a riverside, and to scrub, scrub, scrub, then hang that syringe out to dry before letting the guys use it. Ice sighed one of his long sighs and dropped back on the couch.
Hell, I was pretty much syrup by then, just dripping down there to the floor. I remember getting there and putting my head down. I could smell Lui
s’s dirty old dog on the rug, all mildewy and black. I don’t know where the dog was, or where it went to, or even what kind of dog it is. I couldn’t tell you that stuff, only that it was shaggy. And that it left its smell on the rug. Can you still smell it, or has Ice’s blood overpowered it? It’d have to be strong blood, but I guess he had that, no matter what those folks at the clinic said.
I woke up just a couple of hours ago, I guess. I looked up, and there was that wooden beam on Luis’s ceiling. I do remember Luis and Ice arguing, their voices going up and bumping against that beam, but I don’t know what they were talking about. I really don’t. I was one warm, gooey puddle by then.
All I know is I woke up with my head on Ice’s stomach. He felt flabby, you know, like all his muscle had been loosened up. His back was leaning up against Luis’s couch. I felt around, and everything was sticky on the floor and on my jacket and jeans. I remember I heard music and stuff, and I kept thinking maybe I’d been out of it, and we’d had a party or something. I didn’t know. Who knows these things?
I thought Ice was still passed out, so I got up real slow. I saw what looked like a refrigerator light coming from the other room, but it turned out to be a night light in the bathroom—in the shape of a cow, no less. I found this out when I got to the bathroom and decided to wash my face, to freshen up, maybe take a bath. The little cow light was all aglow. I didn’t really want to wash up, but it’s like when I was doing LSD. See, I knew I had to eat after crashing, or I’d have stomach pains all the next day from the speed, so I made myself eat whether I was hungry or not. Since I do junk—I’m no fool, you know, I had junkie friends before, and I knew they slunk—I make myself get clean. I mean, I nearly drown sometimes, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be avoided on the subway. You know what I mean?
Well, I’m scrubbing off the soap into a sink full of pinkish water when I look up and see myself in the mirror that’s the medicine cabinet, and I think, shit, I look like Daisy. I mean, suddenly my face is all caved in, too; my cheeks are concave, my bones, everything. I get all the soap off and rip a towel off the rack and rub, and I’m still all punched in, even my mouth is.
