No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Then suddenly an idea hit her. She realized that the United States’ best export was its culture, especially its music and movies. Nathan Davenport, whose father was a film editor-she saw his name in film credits from time to time—had brought up the point. So sudden was her movement and departure from the little house that Beanbag barked loudly several times and tried jumping on her, excited by whatever it was that Vidamía was feeling. That was it, she thought, as she ran back to the house and up the stairs to her room, Beanbag panting as he followed her. She had to call Cookie.

  She could hardly talk when Cliff answered the phone and said he was on the other line. She told him to have Cookie call her back.

  “Tell her it’s urgent, Cliff,” pleaded Vidamía.

  “I can hang up and call my friend later.”

  “No, no. Everything’s okay. Just tell Cookie I gotta talk to her, please.”

  For the next twenty minutes she paced up and down her room, went downstairs three times, drank water, ate carrot sticks, turned on the radio, turned off the radio, tried reading, but nothing could take her mind off the subject. Movies. That was it. After the one on Delancey Street had collapsed, the only movie theater left on the Lower East Side was on Grand Street. When Cookie finally called back, Vidamía blurted out some question about video that Cookie didn’t understand.

  “Girl, what language are you talking?” Cookie said. “Slow down, mama.

  “A video store, Cookie? Is there one in the neighborhood?”

  “A video store?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Is there one in the neighborhood?”

  “Around here? I don’t think so.”

  “How about over in Alphabet City?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Is that why you called me?”

  “Yeah. I wanna know if there’s one around there.”

  “Why do you wanna know? You want me to check out a movie?”

  “No, I think I got an idea for opening up a store.”

  “A video store?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How? With what money, girl?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I don’t know how but I’ll be there late Friday afternoon.”

  “Good, cause I was gonna call you about a thing on Saturday.”

  “Put me on the list.”

  “Okay, I gotta go. Lover boy is telling me my time’s up. He’s got this hot thing going with some pendeja Barbie doll in the drama department. Your brother, and I stress your brother, because I don’t claim him anymore, has turned out to be a class-A traitor. He dares to date some airhead in the drama department of the La Guardia High School for the Disgusting Arts.”

  Vidamía laughed as she heard Cookie and Cliff scuffling like they were still little.

  On Friday, after she got home from school, she packed a bag, called a cab, wrote a note for her mother, kissed Mrs. Alvarez goodbye, and left for New York. She spent the weekend going into video rental stores in Manhattan, bugging the managers regarding inventory, rental fees, cards, and the minimum capital needed to open a store from scratch. Anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000 for a moderate place with an inventory of maybe 2,000 films, which, one guy told her, was not a lot of films. “You want at least five thousand films, plus someone who can get you the latest films right away,” the man said. “Clean copies, not pirated ones.” She and Cookie met Mario and Wyndell and they had Japanese food at New Tokyo on University Place. The three agreed that Vidamía seemed abstracted and wasn’t being very pleasant or communicative.

  Wyndell was going out of town, and once he realized that she was still concerned about paying the money back, he hugged her and told her not to worry, that she’d figure it out. He kissed her almost like a big brother, so that when she was on the train heading back to Tarrytown on Sunday afternoon, she worried that he’d drift away from her. He was so beautiful and open and he really liked her. But the problem of the money bothered her. What was she going to do? She already owed nine thousand dollars and in order to open the store she was going to need about twenty. She wasn’t even eighteen and she was going to be $30,000 in debt. By the time she got home she was totally depressed. When she got out of the cab, she looked in her bag for her keys to the front door and couldn’t find them. She rang the doorbell but apparently everyone had gone off somewhere. Beanbag whined at the front door and then came out through his door in the kitchen and banged himself against her leg happily. She petted his head, went around to the back, found the key to the kitchen door in the garage, and let herself in. As she turned on the light in the hall outside the kitchen, she tripped on a pile of newspapers and went tumbling, with Beanbag all over her, licking her face and bouncing up against her. She wrestled with him, feeling his hot breath as he growled and licked her face. “Oh, you’re so tough, aren’t you? Tough guy, right? Beanbag the gangster dog.” They were rolling around on the newspapers when she saw it next to her face: BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES. “Stop, stop,” she pawed at Beanbag with her hands. Beanbag thought it was part of the game until she stood up and yelled at him to stop, which startled the dog. “Sorry, Beanbag,” she said, and the New York Times classifieds section in hand, she dashed upstairs.

  She went up and down the column several times until her eyes fixed on a certain little ad. “Entire inventory of video rental store, $10,000. Computer already programmed with inventory; 4,000 titles, shelves, etc.” And a telephone number somewhere on Long Island. Her heart was pounding violently. There it was. This was their store. But how?

  Two weeks went by and she was going crazy trying to figure out how she was going to pull this off. And then on Monday of the third week as she was walking from social studies, where they had been discussing the economic system of capitalist countries, to go to English, it hit her. Barry. She’d get a loan from Barry or maybe ask him to go into business with her until she could pay all the money back. That night she waited until her mother had gone to bed and Barry was still downstairs watching a television program.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Barry. I have to ask you something.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  “Barry, could I come and see you tomorrow in your office?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. I just need to talk to you. But not in the house.”

  “I can’t this week. I’m going out of town. I’ll be back Sunday evening late. But next week is fine. Let me check.” He went to his desk and looked at his calendar and nodded. “Tuesday is fine. Sure, come on down. Around twelve. We can have lunch.”

  “Please don’t tell mami, okay? I’ll have to miss school.”

  The weekend that Barry was away she came down to Billy and Lurleen’s, and during Saturday and part of Sunday before she returned home, she and Cookie spent nearly the entire time looking at storefronts in the East Village and calling numbers to speak to brokers and landlords. Cookie was not convinced that opening a store was a good idea. After a while, seeing Vidamía’s determination, she began to feel the same enthusiasm, but they came up with nothing. On Monday, Cookie called early in the morning and said she’d found a place and could she skip school to come and see it. Cookie suggested they meet at the Odessa on Avenue A, at around ten a.m. When Vidamía was dropped off by Elsa at school, she waited until her mother was gone, placed her books in her locker, left school, and took the train into Manhattan. They looked at the store on Avenue C. It was perfect. It had been a clothing store that went nearly eighty feet from front to back.

  The following morning, Barry and Elsa were gone by seven-thirty and Vidamía was to be picked up by a friend. She called her friend and told her she wasn’t feeling well. Instead of going to school, she called a cab and got on the train. She was at Barry’s office around eleven-thirty, dressed very elegantly in a pants suit and a long black coat with matching black shoes and bag. To the unstudied eye she could have been an executive in her early twenties. Her voice was strong but her manner extremely polite, firm without being demanding and se
ductive without being sexual.

  When she walked into Barry’s new offices she told the receptionist her name and said she was there to see her father. As she waited for the okay to go in, she hoped she’d be able to explain her idea clearly. The young woman smiled and said, “Please go in, Mr. López-Ferrer is waiting for you.” She opened the door and stepped inside. His office was huge, the view overlooking Midtown Manhattan from the forty-fifth floor spectacular. To the west, she could see the Hudson River and its piers. In the distance, the anchored ships looked like toy boats. One wall of the office was covered with awards and plaques. Another wall was devoted to pictures of Barry with Governor Cuomo, Mayor Koch, and one where he stood flanked by Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer on one side and Congressman José Serrano on the other. There were pictures with Ruben Blades, Reggie Jackson, Gloria Estefan, Andy Garcia, and a dozen other celebrities, all of them personally autographed to him.

  On another wall there were pictures of his family depicting different scenes from her childhood: birthday parties; trips on the cabin cruiser; camping in Canada; bullfights in Sevilla; riding bicycles in the Netherlands.

  “You look great, Vidamía,” he said, standing up as she entered.

  “Thank you,” she replied, smiling at him and going back behind the desk to kiss him.

  They ate lunch at a Spanish restaurant in the fifties. She ordered shrimp and a salad and had mineral water, speaking Spanish very correctly as her mother and Mrs. Alvarez had taught her, not imitating Spaniards, but pronouncing all her R’s. She explained the idea to Barry, showed him the ad for the video-store equipment; it had appeared again that past Sunday. She said that they could open the store right away and Cookie and Cliff could begin working there after school. When summer came they’d work extra hard and the way she figured it, they could pay the nine thousand dollars within a year and the other ten from the loan the following year.

  “I heard you say once at dinner that if you made adequate preparations, had a good product, advertised, and subsequently worked hard, anybody could be a success, and that’s what we’re determined to do.”

  “Do you have a place?” Barry inquired.

  “Yes, and the owner says he can hold it for us for a month. The rent’s only a thousand, but we have to do the renovation. Mickey Fuentes’s father said he could do all the work—the floor and everything—for less than a thousand, including materials. All he’s really gotta do is put up a wall and cover the other walls with masonite. That’s what he said. Mickey’s one of Cookie’s girlfriends. An investment,” she said, calmly. “You put up the capital and share the profits.”

  “I’m the major investor,” he said, slightly amused by the conversation.

  “That’s correct,” she said.

  “My initial outlay is going to be twenty thousand dollars.”

  “We only need ten.”

  “By the time we get certificates, permits, fire and theft insurance, and create the business it’ll be twenty, maybe a little more. But what are you offering me besides a tax write-off?”

  “Does that mean, if the business fails, you get to declare a loss?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, it won’t,” she said, firmly, smiling at him. “Cookie and I talked about it and you can have fifty percent of all profits after expenses.

  “Fifty?” Barry said, laughing.

  “That’s not enough?” she said nervously.

  “No, no,” Barry said, putting up his hands. “I’ll take the fifty. Whose name will the store be under? You’re too young.”

  “Cookie’s mother’s,” Vidamía said quickly.

  “Have you discussed it with her?” Barry asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Vidamía said confidently, lying through her teeth.

  “Where do we have to go to get the equipment?” Barry said, chuckling.

  “New Hyde Park on Long Island,” she said, showing him the ad again.

  “Okay, next Saturday. I’ll call him up. I’ll have to invent something for your mother, but you have to promise to be nice to her. She’s a wreck these days. She’s got a lot on her mind.”

  “You have my word, Barry,” she said.

  “Good. You make your plans. I’ll announce that I’m going in, and you ask for a ride. We’ll go to Long Island and look at the stock, and then check out the place in the East Village. I have a friend who knows about this kind of equipment so he can help us out.”

  She went back to Tarrytown on a cloud and that night called Cookie to tell her it was done.

  “Get ready for the big time, homeslice,” she said. “We’re gonna do it.”

  Everything went according to schedule, except that one of Barry’s friends told him that the entire stock was worth at best six thousand dollars and not the ten the owner was asking. Barry offered five. The guy said forget it, that they were trying to rob him. Barry looked at him, put out his hand and said he was sorry to have taken up his time. He turned to go and the guy said seven. Barry stopped and came back.

  “Listen, you seem pretty honest,” he said. “I’ll give you fifty-seven hundred and that’s it.”

  “C’mon, buddy. You’re ripping out my heart. Six thousand.”

  Barry said he should prepare a bill of sale. He wrote a check to be cashed in thirty days.

  “By that time we’ll have the place ready. We’ll come up and get the items,” Barry said, extending his hand. “It could be sooner. If so, we’ll call you. I can write you out a new check.”

  They returned to New York, looked at the prospective store, Barry spoke with Mickey Fuentes’s father, Ray, and explained what he should do, telling him he wanted nothing but the best materials and a new floor put in, pointing out a couple of places that needed reinforcement.

  “I don’t want any lawsuits,” Barry said.

  “No lawsuits,” Ray Fuentes said. “Who’s gonna run the store?” he asked.

  “My daughter,” Barry said, pointing his chin at Vidamía and winking at her.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ray said. “She’s friends with my kid, Migdalia—Mickey. She and the blond kid. That’s her half sister, right?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” Barry said.

  When they were done with the details for the store’s renovation, they went to a diner. Vidamía called Cookie at work, told her where she and Barry were. As they were ordering, Cookie, who’d gotten off from work, came in. The girls kissed and embraced and high-fived and squealed. Cookie was ecstatic and thanked Barry effusively, throwing her arms around him and kissing him, leaving a big red imprint of her lips on his cheek.

  “We’re going to make you proud of us,” she said.

  “I hope so,” Barry said.

  “Don’t worry. There isn’t a video store for blocks and people are going to come to the place cause everybody’s gonna know our store.”

  “Do you have a name?” Barry asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s a secret,” Vidamía said. “When you come to the opening you’ll see.”

  “I need to know for the official paperwork,” Barry said.

  “Okay, okay, but it’s a secret,” Cookie said, and told him.

  They explained that they had two names, one that began with Vidamía’s name and the other with Cookie’s, and then they told him what they were.

  “Why not use them both?” he said.

  “Vidco Comía?” Vidamía said.

  “No, the other way around,” Barry said.

  “Comía Vidco,” Cookie said. “I get it. It sounds like a place you go to eat. Comía, like we say down here, even though it’s comida. Food. Wow.”

  “Wait, wait,” Vidamía said. “Couldn’t we put soda machines and one of those machines for selling potato chips and peanuts?”

  “Sure,” Barry said. “You could also put in game machines. They can bring in cash.”

  So it was done. In early November, they opened the store. Vidamía and Cookie cut the ribbon, and Barry was in attendance. He even brought one of the New York Giants
football players, and although everybody made a big deal out of his being there, Vidamía had no idea who he was. There were two photographers taking pictures.

  The sign above the store was tremendous—bright colors in the day and well illuminated at night. Comía Vidco. Cookie and Vidamía. Vidamía and Cookie.

  “It sounds like a video-store restaurant,” Gloria Marcano had said when Cookie asked her to paint the blank sign sitting inside the store two weeks before it opened.

  “Draw a real deft homegirl watching TV and eating, mama.”

  “I don’t know,” Gloria said.

  “How much we paying Gloria, Vee?”

  Vidamía held up two fingers, shook her head, then held up three.

  “Three hundred cocos, mama. I’m sure you can paint us a real heavy sign for three bills. It ain’t like you Frida Kahlo yet. And I ain’t saying you ain’t gonna be the most incredible artist ever. Notice I didn’t say nothing about woman artist. Or Rican artist. We ain’t trying to exploit your talent and whatnot. You down, mama?”

  “I guess so,” Gloria said, smiling sheepishly.

  Gloria went to work and quickly made a preliminary sketch. She spent most of the day painting so that not until the light began to disappear did she step back to admire her work. In very brilliant blues, yellows, oranges, and greens she had painted this busty Rican homegirl watching TV and eating an enormous plate of rice and beans with chuletas y tostones. The TV screen had a good cartoon likeness of Cookie and Vidamía handing the viewer a videotape. Mickey drew up a flyer, which they got printed at a copy store for another fifty dollars and then paid a couple of squatters to paste up all over the neighborhood.

  For the next two weeks, as Thanksgiving approached, both sisters poured themselves into the work. When it was obvious that the business was taking off, Cookie quit her waitressing job and with some of her friends from the neighborhood helping her, began to spend more time at the store. They worked long hours and people were constantly in and out, renting videos. So exhausting was the routine that, after finishing Thanksgiving dinner, when she lay on the floor to watch television at the Farrells’, Vidamía fell asleep and didn’t wake up until ten in the evening. She ate a slice of pumpkin pie, drank a glass of milk, brushed her teeth, and went to bed. It was like she had been hit on the head. Within seconds she was asleep again.