No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  She saw then that her grandfather and her grandmother and even her mother were all suffering from this malady, this ailment that made them act as if nothing were truly the matter. Her mother dealt with the issue of race by pretending that someday the island would be free, and then differences of skin color and hair and features wouldn’t matter. Her grandfather and grandmother dealt with it by ignoring it and yet at times making pronouncements that revealed their inbred racism. She heard them both, speaking in Spanish, stating in all innocence that so-and-so was black but was one of the good ones. Sí, el es negro, pero de los buenos.

  Racism was racism, but it seemed to come in different forms. Some was overt and some was subtle, but it was always racism. With the knowledge that she was dealing with a particularly subtle strain of racism in her mother, Vidamía now felt as if she had to completely reexamine her view concerning her own identity. Without question she was an American, but all this Puerto Rican stuff was too powerful to ignore. What was she? On her last day at the Center’s library she ran across a small history of the island by José Luis Vivas. In the back she found a collection of brief biographies and drawings of illustrious Puerto Ricans. One of them caught her attention because of his name. It was Ramón Power, and he had been born in San Juan in 1772. He was a naval captain who died very young. The name Power intrigued her. It was Irish, but both of Ramón Power’s parents were Spanish-born. She decided that there had been an Irishman involved somewhere in the lineage of Ramón Power, so there was a precedent for Puerto Ricans with Irish last names. She recalled her father talking about the link between Spain and Ireland. Vidamía Farrell wasn’t such a strange name for a Puerto Rican, then. She was definitely Puerto Rican, but was she then black, as Wyn had insinuated? Standing in front of the mirror, she examined her face and skin, looking for traces of Africa, and was disappointed to find little to connect her in appearance to black people. She thought of her grandfather and knew that her connection was through him and that was the important thing. Whatever her mother’s hang-ups she’d have to deal with them. She couldn’t wait to tell Wyn about her insight concerning her grandfather, but he wouldn’t be back for a week.

  And yet, for the first time in her life the notion of color wasn’t a curiosity but a burden and she didn’t like it. Was she in denial like her mother? Was it true that she must now consider herself black? What happened to her Irish background, her American background? What was she to her father, her grandma, her great-grandfather? While she relished her connection to Africa she didn’t understand the notion that in the United States if you had a certain percentage of African blood you were considered black by both blacks and whites. The entire thing felt uncomfortable. She recalled Wyn talking about Dizzy Gillespie and the Afro-Cuban influence in jazz. Was she an Afro-Rican? Was that an apt description of who she was? What advantage was there to being called black when your skin was white and there was hardly any trace of Africa on your face? This was a new problem, and it angered her to have to think about it.

  53. Group Therapy

  The afternoon Billy began to decipher what had happened to him in Vietnam, he was sitting with his group at the VA hospital. All the men were veterans of the Vietnam War, all of them still suffering the agony of their battlefield experiences more than twenty years later. The group was mostly army and Marine, but also one navy man who had seen a friend decapitated by the hurtling landing gear of a jet on their carrier and had stood helplessly by as two of their deck crew exploded in flames before his eyes from leaking fuel and the spark of an engine. In the therapy group there was also a guy named Rupert, a Mohawk Indian from upstate New York, who had been in an air force special counterinsurgency and intelligence unit and had seen his entire group of about a dozen men, plus about forty Rahde montagnards, wiped out by the Khmer Rouge near the Cambodian border toward the end of the war.

  Simms, a black paratrooper sitting in a wheelchair, finished talking about being shot in the spine getting out of a chopper. “Sniper got me,” he said. He told the story and then talked about how he felt, the injustices of racism, of wearing his uniform and having to hear the word “nigger,” of having young guys taunt and threaten to push his chair into the subway tracks; cursing his bad luck and the fact that as much as he wanted to fuck he couldn’t because he had no sexual feeling, the tears coming into his eyes so that it made some of the other guys pound their fists into their hands and attempt to cry, but all that came out was more and more anger.

  And then Conroy turned to Billy.

  “What about you, Farrell?” he said. “Two months in the group and all you’ve told us is your name, rank, and serial number. What happened to you? What’s your story?”

  “I’m not too clear, man,” Billy said. “Sometimes it feels like I’m making the whole thing up, and then I get flashbacks and I’m right there. I had this buddy, right? This Puerto Rican guy. Joey Santiago. We met at Pendleton before we went over. Bunked next to each other and everything and we became tight. We were both from the New York area and found out we’d been at Parris Island about the same time in boot. But we didn’t know each other then. He was like a brother to me, and me to him. I was with him when he got it. I saw him die, man. It was heavy, man. I could see his heart and everything. Still beating, man.”

  “Is that how you lost your fingers?” Simms, the black paratrooper, said.

  “It sure was, my man,” Billy said. “They put a plate in my head, too,” he added, smoothing his hair. “Right there. It was a definite mothafucka, brotha. I saw a lot of shit over there but nothing like this. Maybe because me an Joey was so tight.”

  “I hear you,” Simms said.

  Everybody nodded and some guys said “shit” and “oh, man,” and Billy went on talking, recalling all the good times he and Joey had, the raps they used to have about music, girls, baseball, football, basketball, martial arts, comics, television, movies, food, and especially New York; talking about the time when they’d come home and how they’d visit each other.

  “He was a righteous dude, man,” he said. “Bravest fuckin’ dude I ever met. You never had to worry about your back. You dig what I’m saying? It fucks me up to talk about the shit.”

  “Yeah, but it’s better if you get it out in the open so we can look at it,” said Tony Bracco, who’d been a mortar man in the Corps and had lost his right arm almost to the shoulder, always making jokes about how he was connected and was having to learn to shoot left-handed, but really he was married with three kids and working for his father-in-law as a dispatcher for a fleet of cars; and coaching a Little League team, and inspired now by the success of Jim Abbott, the one-armed pitcher of the U.S. Olympic Baseball Team and a member of the California Angels. “That’s what the Yankees need. A kid like that. Fucking guys on that team have no guts. Ever since Thurman Munson got killed and George sent Reggie packing, the Yankees are dead.” Talking a mile a minute, his eyes bright with anger and hope at the same time, laughing one minute and cursing the next. “So just let it out, man. Semper Fi. Semper Fi. I’m right here, baby. Just like we were in-country again. I got your back now.”

  “I hear you, man,” Billy said. “But it’s a bitch.”

  Everybody nodded and he told them that the attack had come rapidly and was over as quickly, so that he never knew whether it had truly been the Viet Cong or simply a fragging by three malcontents from an army unit. “Nothing personal against you army guys,” he clarified. “See, they were bad-mouthing Ricans.”

  Billy remembered how the subject of Puerto Ricans created considerable touchiness in Joey Santiago. Upon hearing the three bravos utter epithets such as “spic,” “greaser,” and “wetback,” referring not to Puerto Ricans but to Mexicans, Joey had taken up the fight and informed the three Chicago white boys that they had better lay off talking shit about Puerto Ricans and Spanish-speaking people in general if they knew what was good for them. To which one of the bad boys said, “Fuck you and your mother, you spic faggot,” which made Joey crazy, and, unstrap
ping his web belt with the bayonet and .45 and canteen, and flipping off his helmet, he began to systematically beat the three with an assortment of well-placed kicks and punches from his more than four years of training with Willie Chung at the Tae-Kwan-Do Center down by Pike Street near the Manhattan Bridge. Joey never talked about his black belt, remaining quiet and inscrutable and always speaking reverentially of his sensei. That day he left the three loudmouths bloody, sore, and embarrassed, so that Billy thought that it might have been them that killed Joey. But it wasn’t them, because he subsequently learned that they had been transferred out months before. He said that Viet Cong had been in the area, but had all been captured, so that there was doubt that it had been Viet Cong who had ripped Joey’s body apart.

  “It’s never made sense to me,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, and as if a curtain of darkness had descended on his mind, he shut off. Conroy’s voice and that of the others receded as if he were on a chopper and were watching the ground fly away from him, the hooches and trees, the equipment and figures growing progressively smaller until they were dots and squares with no definition and no substance. Billy listened to the other men, trying to pay attention to their stories, wanting to contribute something, but he was gone, flat, seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing, there but not there, existing and dead at the same time, staring at a future with no landscape, no next moment, no tomorrows. He knew that he had to fight the condition and wondered whether it would last as long as it had previously when he’d spent days staring off into space.

  When the session was over Conroy called him into his office and introduced him to someone by the name of Johnny Castillo. At first Billy didn’t recognize Castillo, but he began putting things together and finally he nodded, and they threw their arms around each other and sat down and talked for a while. Castillo told him what he’d heard had happened with Joey back in Nam. Billy listened, not quite taking in the whole thing. Everything Castillo said made sense but the knowledge made him feel queasy and unbalanced. He said goodbye to Castillo and then Conroy stuck out his hand and told him he had done great that day.

  “You’re beginning to put your life back together, Farrell. That’s great. You’re playing music again, and that’s what you wanted to do all along, right?”

  “Yeah, man. Thanks,” he said.

  Billy went outside and walked in the late-afternoon light. He headed west along Twenty-third Street until he got to Broadway and turned downtown to go and pick up some forms for Pop Butterworth to sign at the hospital. He couldn’t help admiring the pretty young girls looking so confident. Just like Cookie and Vidamía, he thought. Something had happened with this generation of girls, but he couldn’t yet understand what it was. They seemed more sure of themselves, braver, less prone to going around trying to get boys to say they were okay. They seemed to know they were all right, and if their attitude didn’t sit well with somebody, too bad. He worried about Fawn, but he guessed she’d come around.

  He stopped and watched people setting up their trucks for the next day’s farmers’ market in Union Square Park, ran into a fellow he knew who asked him if he wanted to go and chant nam myoho renge kyo at the Buddhist center nearby. Billy shook his head and said he was cool. “Maybe some other time,” he said. The guy said: “That’s what you always say, man. Why don’t you come up. It can’t hurt. You need to change your karma.” “You’re probably right, man,” Billy said. “I’ll check it out one of these days.” He thanked the young man and went on. On University Place he bought a slice of pizza and a Coke and then continued walking to Washington Square Park, where he sat on a bench and watched people roller-skating, playing Frisbee, juggling, playing the guitar and singing. Some guys were making like they were playing soccer with a little beanbag-type ball, bouncing it off their feet over and over again. After he finished eating he lit a cigarette and smoked for a while before picking up the forms at the administrative offices.

  Watching the students outside of NYU and recalling the year he’d spent going there sometimes two or three afternoons a week to practice the piano for hours, he wondered what it would have been like if he’d gone to school like Pop Butterworth had suggested back then when Pop was working and had gotten Wayne Shorter to see if Miles would hear him play. Now Pop Butterworth was in the hospital with throat cancer and the doctors were telling him that it was starting to spread to his brain. Thinking about it began to work on Billy’s mind and he told himself to be positive, to think about the things he had to do, about what he was going to play the following night at the Cornelia Street Café. He had even heard his name announced on WBGO’s Jazz Calendar. “At the Cornelia Street Café, Billy Farrell solo piano.” He smiled but his mind kept returning to what Castillo had said.

  He walked down St. Marks Place to Tompkins Square Park and then through it, looking at the makeshift shelters of the homeless, identifying with them and feeling like they, too, were victims of the Vietnam War. Kevin Tracy, who had been a clerk and hadn’t been up front much was almost finished with his Ph.D. in history at Fordham, but he still suffered from recurring nightmares and chemical poisoning, and had said the war had cost the United States nearly five hundred billion dollars. “That money could have provided jobs and could have housed, fed, educated, and kept millions of people under doctors’ care for a long time,” Kevin had said.

  Billy turned south on Avenue B, his mind working, turning things over. On Sixth Street he turned east, and when he got to Avenue C he stopped by the store and said hello to Cookie and Vidamía. He couldn’t believe that they had pulled off this stunt. When they’d told him the whole story he couldn’t stop shaking his head. And the sign above the store window, COMÍA VIDCO, which Cookie’s friend had painted with the Rican girl eating in front of the TV set, made him laugh each time he saw it. Vidamía and Cookie had both come out and draped themselves over him as they always did. God, they were gorgeous, he thought, admiringly. And inseparable.

  “You gonna play tomorrow, right, Daddy?” Cookie said.

  “On Cornelia Street? Sure, baby.”

  “We were gonna come, but I’m trying out for a part as a mermaid in a play. Anyway, I gotta go. When I get the part you have to see it, Daddy.”

  “Sure, let me know.”

  “We’ll come hear you play next week,” Vidamía said. “I gotta close up the store tonight.”

  He said he had to go, and just wanted to stop by to see if they were all right. They said they were and pointed to the activity in the store, which had a couple of game machines and the usual crowd of kids hanging around, talking music and movies and joking around, but keeping the place too busy for anyone to get strange. If anyone did, all they had to do was go and talk to Julio at the candy store. He ran a numbers operation, so he wanted things nice and quiet on the block.

  Billy continued walking, his mind far away, going over the events, seeing Joey ripped open again but now feeling disconnected from the emotions. By the time he got home, he felt disoriented, as if something were not quite right. He ate supper in virtual silence. Cliff came in, said hello, and hurried through supper before running out to relieve Cookie, so she could go to her rehearsal. After Cliff left, Billy finished eating and then went to his rocker and sat looking out at the Manhattan skyline, the setting sun making the buildings shimmer silver in the distance.

  When darkness fell once again on the city, Lurleen came over with the newspapers and the mail and turned on the lamp. Billy read until he fell asleep. He dreamt that he was sitting atop a hill of the greenest grass one could imagine. Below the hill there was a valley of equally green splendor, and here and there he could see stone huts with smoke rising from the chimneys and sheep grazing in the fields. He heard a flute playing an Irish tune, and then he was near a stream, his hand half-submerged in the clear, cool water. And then he saw the tiny chocolatedark man dancing to the music of the flute, his dark suit and vest spotless and the creases of his trousers like
razors, the red carnation in his buttonhole matching the red tie behind the matching vest of his suit. His shoes were shiny and he was chomping on half of an unlit stogie. The tiny man was wearing a derby which he removed to reveal shiny, patentleather-like processed hair, parted neatly.

  “You gonna sleep the rest of your life or you gonna get with it?” said the impish little man.

  It was Mr. McQuinlan, the black leprechaun. He skipped up and landed next to Billy. Billy sat up quickly on his knees.

  “Watch it, man,” Mr. McQuinlan said. “You trying to mess up my threads?”

  “No, Mr. McQuinlan,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Traveling,” Mr. McQuinlan said haughtily. “You didn’t expect me to stick around while you was crying in your beer, did you?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’ve been looking for you. I’m playing again.”

  “Well, it’s about time, cause I’d about given up on your sorry butt.”

  “How do you like my playing, then?”

  “Fair to middling, but you’re getting there.”

  “Thank you. My kids got me a piano.”

  “I saw that. Well, time’s a wasting. I’ll see you around.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “Sure, kid, anytime,” Mr. McQuinlan said, reaching into his vest pocket. “Here’s my card. No collect calls.”

  “Same one for fax?”

  “No fax.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know how some people don’t believe in leprechauns?” Mr. McQuinlan said.

  “Yeah …” Billy said.

  “Well, I don’t believe in faxes,” said the leprechaun, laughing, then he donned his derby and patted it with his cane. “Be seeing you, my man.”

  Billy reached for the card but the card turned into a gold shamrock and then a dove flew away with it and he woke up yawning in his chair. He asked what time it was. Lurleen said it was nearly eleven. He got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and drank it and then another before returning to his rocker. So Mr. McQuinlan was back. He wondered if that was good or bad, but the dream had been strangely pleasant, not like the nightmares he was used to. Caitlin and Fawn came to say goodnight and he kissed them both and hugged them, looking at their faces as if for the first time. He felt like telling them that they had grown so much, but he knew that was stupid. He must have looked strange because Caitlin asked him what the matter was.