The House of Impossible Beauties

by Joseph Cassara

  The place was shoulder to shoulder, everyone swaying. And the sound. Like no other sound he had ever heard. The lows punched him straight through the heart. When the bass dropped, the entire garage thumped. Felt like they were all one giant heartbeat, giving the place life, screaming yesss. The DJ played the same deep beat over, like five or six times in a row, and some queen shouted out, “We get it, Larry. We feel you.” For the jam wasn’t just a jam. Now it was the anthem of the night. It had been decided and the dancing merely confirmed it. There was no attitude, just communication. Because they were all happy, dancing and prancing, choosing and cruising. Tyler swayed back and forth in front of him. Hector put his arms around Tyler’s waist. Snuck his hand down to grab his ass right in that sweet moment before the beat dropped, when they all knew what was about to come and the anticipation was killing them.

  * * *

  “Sorry if I shot all over you like some Jackson Pollock canvas,” Tyler said immediately after they fucked. The cum was still fresh on Hector’s torso when Tyler got up to get him a towel.

  “I don’t know what you just said,” Hector admitted. He grabbed the towel from Tyler and tried his best to wipe off the mess without smearing it into the pelitos on his chest.

  Tyler told him to hold on a sec. When he came back in the room, he had a coffee-table art book. The paintings looked like a can of paint took a giant shit on the canvas. But in a beautiful way.

  “Pollock was an abstract expressionist,” Tyler said. They both sat up in bed as Tyler slowly turned the pages. Each of the paintings looked like a different take on the same theme. Hector wondered what a dance version of one of these paintings would be like. Something intense and energetic. Uncontrollable movements, limbs that thrashed and convulsed.

  “You went to college, didn’t you?” Hector said.

  “I did,” Tyler said, sounding guilty about it. “I went to Yale.”

  “Yeah,” Hector said. “You sound like you went to college.”

  Tyler closed the book and slid it under the bed. Hector pulled the covers over the both of them.

  “I graduated last year,” Tyler said. “Still figuring things out.”

  Hector was eighteen. He knew that college wasn’t in his future. Even if he wanted to go, where was the money at? He wasn’t some Mr. Moneybags.

  “Yeah,” Hector said. “Me too. Still trying to figure things out.”

  * * *

  He had been poor his entire life. When Abuelo died, after a lifetime of rum and chicharrones, Abuela sold what few things they had and they moved to Nueva York. It was a rinky-dink walk-up on the fifth floor just off Avenue C. Hector was twelve years old, and the first night in the NYC, he missed the sound of the coquís. Manhattan was by no means silent. Eventually he would learn to be lulled to sleep by the sounds of car horns and fire-truck sirens. It would seem to him that there was an emergency happening around every corner that needed attention. But that first week, all he wanted was the sound of the coquís, so he went to the pet store in the East Village and bought a dozen crickets. He poked several holes into a cardboard box, and when he closed his eyes, he pretended that the crickets were frogs singing for him, until one by one, they each died and he became accustomed to the silence.

  Abuelita started selling numbers for an Italian bookie from the Bronx. She spent most of her time cooking or being a bochinchera with the other viejas in the neighborhood who had also made the trek from PR. One night, when Hector was scratching some math problems at the kitchen table, the landline rang. It was some cop. Deep voice. He told Hector that his abuela was being held and if he wanted to come get her at the precinct, he could post bail the next morning.

  Leave it to Abuela to get her bookie-making ass thrown in jail! Hector couldn’t believe that shit. The next morning, he brought the cash and bailed her out. “It was that bitch Montserrata,” Abuela said. “I always knew she was a malcriada, going to inform on me like she is no better.”

  Hector didn’t know who Montserrata was, and he didn’t want to push any more buttons by asking. He figured she was one of Abuela’s “friends.” A true bochinchera to the end.

  “You don’t know what they did to me in there,” Abuela said like a case of overdrama.

  He told her to sit down on the sofa, he would make her some soothing tea. The box said words like calming, chamomile, luscious notes.

  “They threw me in the jail cell with all the putas,” she said, doing the sign of the cross. “Ave María y los santos.”

  “¿Las prostitutas?” he said. He tried to imagine a little old lady in a cement cell with all the streetwalkers who weren’t discreet enough to get by.

  “¡Ay!” she gasped. “Que sí.”

  As the tea was steeping, he handed her the mug and brought her a roll of Goya Maria Cookies for dunking. He asked if she wanted milk and she said of course she wanted milk, had he ever seen her drink tea without milk before.

  “If you only saw what I saw,” she said. “They speak such vulgar words. I tell them that if they don’t stop, I will take soap and wash out their mouths, and then their chochos!”

  * * *

  “Tell me about her,” Tyler said one night in bed. He had seen a picture of Hector with his abuela, and another of his abuelo and abuela right after their wedding day. In the foto, they were sitting in chairs somewhere in the campo of San Germán. They faced the camera, unsmiling. “Must have been a crazy wedding party,” Tyler had said and Hector laughed.

  “What do you wanna know?” Hector said. He didn’t know how to answer. No one had asked him before. He didn’t think anyone around his own age was interested. “Why do you wanna know?”

  Tyler ran his fingers up and down Hector’s spine. “Do I need a reason to learn more about you?” Tyler said.

  “No,” he said. “I guess not. But you never told me about your family in Dallas.”

  “We don’t speak,” Tyler said. “They think it’s a phase. Like Tyler goes to New York and goes through one of his phases. Fuck them.”

  Hector leaned in closer to nibble on Tyler’s lip. “Can we go back to sleep?” Hector said. “I’m not ready to face the day.”

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, he startled awake. He readjusted the blanket over the both of them and rubbed his foot against Tyler’s foot. Tyler nuzzled his nose against Hector’s cheek, and they both fell back asleep like this, wrapped around each other.

  * * *

  The next Saturday Mass at the Garage, the grooves were coming out at a hot pace. Some bitch couldn’t take the heat and passed the fuck out. Had to be dragged out, but that only stopped a few people from dancing for about a minute. “Give her some air,” his lover screamed. Hector and Tyler went to refill their punch cups.

  When the MC introduced a black queen as the mother of such-and-such house, and would everyone give up a round of applause for her legendary children in the audience, Hector clapped. The legends slayed their moves. “Amaze,” a bald queen screamed. He did a cobra snap, then walked away in the other direction.

  Later, Tyler had to give Hector the 411. “So the white queens have their balls out on Long Island,” Tyler said. “And the black queens have theirs up in Harlem.”

  “What about the Puerto Ricans?” Hector said. They were walking up Varick, looking to get a slice of pizza. He lit a cigarette.

  “The mira-miras?” Tyler said. He took a cig from Hector’s pack. “What about them?”

  “Where their balls at?” Hector said. “Don’t say mira-miras.”

  “Oh,” Tyler said, as if he hadn’t thought about it. “I guess they just have to join either side.”

  Hector sucked his teeth.

  “Yeah,” Tyler said. “Looks like you’re gonna have to start your own house then, Mister Boricua.” Tyler couldn’t pronounce Spanish syllables to save his life.

  “Don’t tempt me,” Hector said, neck back to exhale his smoke. He watched Tyler do the same, and how erotic it was to watch a man breathe out cigarette sm
oke.

  “I can just see the marquee lights now,” Tyler said. “Hector Valle: House Father.”

  * * *

  On a scale of One to Betty Ford Blackout, his level of drunk was, say, Half-Finished Martini Glass at Liza Minelli’s. He thought it would be a good idea if he and Tyler went to the tattoo parlor. He wanted to get a / , and Tyler would get a . Together, their / would equal an X. If overlapped. Apart, the slashes would symbolize a separation of two halves. As he explained this aloud, he wondered if it made sense. How many rum and Cokes had he had? He felt like he was rambling, but what he was trying to say, Tyler, is that there was a meaning. He thought that tattoos should have that: meanings.

  “I’m going to get mine on my side,” Hector said.

  Tyler said he was going to get his on his right calf.

  “All it takes is a T-shirt,” he said, “to hide it from my abuela.”

  “Yeah?” Tyler said. “Are you hiding me from her too?”

  It wasn’t even a fair question. He pretended to ignore it as the tattoo artist pricked his skin. It burned him more than he thought it would.

  The next morning, when they woke up, Hector looked at his new ink, right below his left rib cage. “Well,” he said. “I don’t regret it.”

  He needed water and an ibuprofen or two.

  “Good,” Tyler said, smiling. “I don’t regret it either.”

  * * *

  “What can I tell you about her? Soon after they got hitched and that foto was taken, he went out for work but didn’t come back home for dinner. She waited up for him. No phone call, nothing. Can’t even imagine what that had to be like. All the worrying. She lit an extra candle for Jesus. When he got home, it was mad dark and he smelled like a bottle of rum. She said, Where’d you go tonight? He said, Don’t you ask me questions like that. And he hit her. Well she wasn’t gonna take none of that shit. She said, If you know what’s good for you, you’re not gonna go to sleep in our bed tonight, hijo de puta. But he was tired and drunk, so of course he fell asleep on their bed that night. She took out her chancletas and she popped him real good in both eye sockets. Gave him two black eyes. He never touched her like that again in all his life. It was like she showed him who ran shit. She was not to be fucked with.”

  * * *

  He lost them both that year.

  First, his abuela. Died on the toilet seat like Elvis Presley. Massive heart attack, Hector would later learn, but when he first saw her, he didn’t know what the hell had happened. Her face made the pain of death look complicated. And that scared him, to think that pain wasn’t simple. He called Tyler and said, What do I do now? Tyler came over and took care of things: called the ambulance, the funeral home, ordered a bouquet of yellow flowers so that Hector could have some kind of life in the house.

  Then, Tyler. Only two days after he had left to visit family in Dallas, the call came. Hector had been napping. The woman said her name was Karen. She was Tyler’s sister. He had been in a fight. Was Hector sitting? No, but he could sit if that’s what she was instructing. Two men had slashed Tyler’s face, then beat him with a crowbar in the alley behind the bar. Karen was whispering. They were having the burial in two days. Yes, he had heard her correctly. She was sorry. Thought that Hector would want to know. “But please don’t call back at this number,” she said. “My father doesn’t know I’m calling you.”

  * * *

  For days, he wandered the streets thinking, A crowbar? How many slashes? Did they destroy his beautiful face? How can I call back if you don’t give me the number?

  * * *

  A graduate student at Teachers College gave him counseling for free, as part of her degree studies. She looked almost thirty, with a severe jet-black bob. Her trousers were wide-legged and pleated. She spoke very slowly with him, and he wondered if this was her counseling voice or her everyday voice. Did she order bagels with cream cheese in this same lullaby voice? It soothed him to the point where he craved a nap after each session.

  The first day, he cried the entire hour and said nothing of substance. She asked him to keep a journal. To write letters. To make a list of accomplishments throughout his day, like when he cooked a meal, showered, got out of bed on time. He did these things.

  Week three, he told her a memory. When he was six, Abuelo took them out for a drive around the city in his new Chevy. They drove around, Abuelo and Abuela in the front seats, Hector in the back. Nose only an inch from the glass window, he watched the painted buildings in Viejo San Juan pass by. Pinks and yellows and blues. The tiny balconies with clothes hanging to dry. When they stopped for gas at the Esso station outside the city limits, he saw a homeless man and woman sleeping under an overpass. “Who’re they?” he asked Abuela.

  “People,” she said. “No mires así. It’s rude to stare.”

  But for whatever reason, he was convinced that those people were his mother and father. Even though he had no memory of his mother and father, the feeling was real. “You can’t ever tell a boy that that’s not his mother if that’s what he’s stuck on believing,” Hector told the counselor.

  “But she wasn’t your mother,” she said, writing notes. “The man wasn’t your father either.”

  “They weren’t,” he said. “But I swear to god, in that moment, you couldn’t tell me otherwise.”

  She asked him how he felt about that. He didn’t know how he felt about that though. He brought it up because something similar happened to him the other day. He was doing some compra in the Gristedes when he saw a guy that was Tyler. He didn’t just look like Tyler. He was Tyler.

  “A doppelgänger?” she asked.

  “A huh-what?” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Go on.”

  “He was holding a bag of almonds and I went up to him and said, ‘But you’re allergic to almonds,’” he said. “And he looked at me and said, ‘No, I’m not.’”

  She wrote this down and told him to go on, but there was nothing else to the story. He asked her if this was how it was going to be from now on. Was he going to see Tyler everywhere?

  “Perhaps,” she said, looking up from her notepad. “Until you meet someone new.”

  SISTERHOOD

  (1984)

  VENUS

  She smoked her pre-bed cigarette behind the Dumpster where the nuns and the girls couldn’t shoot their words. She closed her eyes, thought about how to furnish her dream house. It would be out in the suburbs: Catskills, Hamptons, the country. It would all be white, even the fence. The kitchen counters would be clean, and her man would wear a suit. Dior, naturally. He would come home every day at five o’clock. They would have sex before dinner, and she would serve him salmon and he would say, Baby, I love you.

  Now she was nineteen and home was nothing more than the Serenity House shelter because she was tired of sleeping on benches around Central Park. She figured she could sneak behind the Dumpster on the side of the building to smoke her cigs without having to deal with any of the nuns.

  The shelter was in Brooklyn near Prospect Park, but not where all those fancy houses were at. It was far enough from Jersey City where she felt she had finally left her mother behind, but close enough to Manhattan where she could feel close to her people, her sisters.

  The nuns were no joke, and it was hard to find one any younger than sixty. They gave her a scratchy wool blanket, three bland meals a day, and a roof. No air conditioning, but a girl ain’t gonna complain about that. It’s not like her mother had AC in Jersey.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. “You got a light?” the guy said.

  He was a total butch queen decked out with a tank and chest hair that was curling over the top of it. His pecs were bulging and, as Venus offered her light, she stared at his moustache. He said his name was Jonny, but people called him Sugar Cookie, and would she like some nose candy.

  “Nah,” she said. “I’m not into that.”

  “Really?” he said. “You look like the type of girl who likes blow.” He sniffe
d and wiped his nose with the side of his wrist and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “You sure you don’t want a little bump?”

  “For real though,” she said. “Coke ain’t my thing.”

  She watched him dip a key into the little plastic baggie. “I heard of your name before,” Venus said. “You’re Loca’s boyfriend, right?”

  La Loca was Venus’s roommate. Emphasis on the was. La Loca had given herself that name because, as she said, some bitch from history was named Juana la Loca and she liked the sound of it. She proudly told every girl that she would go loca-crazy on their ass if they tried to pull any shit. Even some of the nuns were intimidated.

  On Venus’s third night in the place, Sister Milagros, the short Dominican nun who was full of Ay Dios míos and Ay benditos, told Venus to move to a room in the East Quarters. So Venus carried what few things she had with her—a blow-dryer, pink plastic curlers, some clothes—to the new room when La Loca walked in.

  “Oh no,” she said to Venus, having the audacity to wave a finger all up in Venus’s face like she ran shit. “No, no, hell to the no. Get out.”

  “What’s bugging you?” Venus dropped her favorite sequin camisole on the bed.

  “You ain’t Sugar Cookie,” La Loca said. Her neck rolled and she clapped between each word to emphasize her anger. “I told that bitch Milagros that I need to be with Sugar Cookie. And you are not Sugar Cookie.”

  “You mean Sister Milagros?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You gonna call the nun a bitch like that?”

  “Did I stutter, bitch?”

  Venus stared at La Loca and tried to contain every ounce of impulse that made her want to slap the fake lashes off her eyelids. “Well,” Venus said, “I don’t know what to tell you. She told me this was my new room.”