“You know, I don’t ever wonder what you and Raquel look like when you two make love because you’re both too pretty, so boring,” Raquel says to Angel. I’m red with embarrassment, hoping she leaves soon. Angel looks at her and smiles. He doesn’t respond.
“My baby son doesn’t do that,” Maria says. “Come on, Raquel, stop.” Blackie doesn’t look up from his second plate. Raquel giggles while standing up and reaching for her Gucci bag on the floor next to the dog. “Gracias for the food, Maria, I don’t want my baby to shit all over your new kitchen floor,” she says. “I’m taking the bitch for a walk downstairs before I drop her off for good with you.”
“Raquel is so weird,” I say after she leaves.
“But she sure does have a fine ass,” Blackie says. “She’s almost as hot as my wife.”
Charo walks through the front door, knowing Maria’s apartment is locked only on weekend mornings to keep the Jehovah’s Witnesses from inviting themselves in. A bit ruffled, she appears in the doorway of the kitchen.
“I knew I’d fucking find you here, lambón—did it occur to you that I’d be hungry by the time I got home from doing real work?” she says to Blackie. “Hi, Maria, kids.” We nod. Blackie’s head hangs low, weighted down by humiliation.
“Here, Charo, I saved you un plato,” Maria says. “Raquel, set a place for her over here.”
“Thank God for Maria, or I’d starve to death.”
“Please, Charo. Relax,” Blackie says, almost whispering.
“Maria, I think I saw Casimiro down the block going into the building on the corner.”
“Shut up, Charo,” Blackie says. “Mind your fucking business.”
Maria doesn’t say another word for the rest of the night, retreating to her bedroom to read through the latest edition of Sucesos before Charo and Blackie leave. Maria’s hung up on Sucesos, a weekly tabloid for those obsessed with all things macabre, detailing all the crazy shit that goes on in rural D.R. with headlines like “Woman Sets Husband’s Mistress and Their Children on Fire” and “Man Machetes His Girlfriend and Lover to Death in a Jealous Rage,” with accompanying color photos. She stockpiles them underneath her side of the bed.
“Dominican men will only lead you down a path of self-destruction and death,” Maria says, showing me an article she’s reading, which, like the rest, ends badly.
“Haitians, too,” I say. “The whole island is full of cursed men.”
“No, it’s us that are cursed,” she says. “We are stupid enough to fall for their mierda.”
* * *
Now that it’s springtime, we’re no longer forced to wait for the bus in the cramped lobby of Apple Bank with other high school kids. I spend most mornings, afternoons, and evenings thinking about Angel and little else now that he’s been accepted to Temple University, all the way in Philadelphia. I try to imagine life without him here and whether or not Maria or Casimiro will lose interest in me once Angel leaves the city.
I’m so distracted that I can’t listen to Frankie Ruiz’s Más Grande Que Nunca without getting emotional. Casimiro and Maria tried to teach us how to dance salsa to that record, but we couldn’t get it together. I can’t listen to Bobby Brown records, either. If I even think of how sweet Angel sounded, his voice cracking, singing: “She’ll make the toughest homeboy / Fall deep in love,” I get misty-eyed and have to rush to the girls’ bathroom before totally breaking down.
This school year has been really tense so far. It happened right before school started at the end of last summer, but the Yusef Hawkins murder in Bensonhurst at the hands of a crew of Italian-American wild cowboys is still a fresh, open wound on my mind. I try to keep it together as long as I can. I don’t say a word when some white boy jokes about how Mayor Dinkins should stay away from his ’hood or risk catching a bad one like “that other monkey” in Bensonhurst. It doesn’t take long, however, for something in me to snap.
It’s on my way to Maria’s that I hear someone yell, “You better keep walking, you fucking bitch.” I turn around and see Danielle, a redhead from St. Catherine’s who I thought was my friend, standing with a large group of white boys. Some of them are carrying stickball bats.
“What did you say?” I ask her, smiling.
“I said you better keep walking, you fucking dirty spic,” she says.
I want to stop and fight, but something tells me the smart thing to do is ignore her if I want to arrive at Maria’s in one piece. One of the guys in her crew yells, “Why don’t you fuck that nigga spic up, we got your back, Dani.” They laugh as I pick up the pace and almost jog down Isham Street with tears streaming down my face.
The next weekend, I see Danielle in the park during tennis practice. Angel is playing basketball when she enters the court and starts flirting with him. “I’m a nigga spic, Danielle, right?” I ask, walking toward her with my tennis racket in hand. I don’t give her a chance to answer before hitting her knees with my racket and wrapping my hands around her neck. She falls forward, and her face has started to turn blue when Angel yells, “That’s enough!” One of the regular ballplayers grabs my legs, another my waist, and yet another starts punching my wrists until I let go of Danielle’s neck. One of the tennis players tells me to go home before the cops come.
A few hours later, Papi bolts through the door, panting. “I hear that you were fighting like one of those street ga’bage,” he yells. “Why are you starting with people?” He doesn’t let me answer before smacking me across the face. I don’t cry. “You’re going to be a nobody, like your lousy madre.” He leaves me sitting on my bed, stroking my cheek.
* * *
The taunting of this new Black Muslim girl named Amina at school is especially irritating because the ringleader is a guidette named Anastasia Perillo. She looks like a blowfish, with hair that’s teased to the ceiling and brown eyes that are too small for her huge face, set on either side of a pointy noise. Anastasia never went anywhere without a bottle of Aqua Net and a tube of vaginal itch cream sticking out of her leather purse.
One morning I hear Anastasia referring to Amina as a monkey before class. “Did you see how hairy that bitch’s legs and arms are?” she jokes within earshot of the girl. “Don’t those people believe in Nair?” I’m not sure if Amina hears, but I don’t care. I calmly walk over to Anastasia’s desk, pick her up from her chair with my left hand, and slap her several times with my right before a teacher pulls me off her and sends me to Dean Kelly’s office. I don’t understand what a Muslim girl is doing attending a Catholic high school, but it doesn’t give anyone the right to make fun of her for not shaving her legs or hiking up her skirt to thigh-level. Dean Kelly isn’t hearing it, and I receive my first warning.
The only other thing that matters to me right now is A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. Nothing is as creative as what comes out of the Native Tongues. I press play and rewind dozens of times to listen to “Bonita Applebum” on my Sony Walkman every morning on the bus to school, full blast until my ears start ringing, followed by “Can I Kick It?,” which I like because I just met Mayor Dinkins at the tennis courts in Inwood Park. I memorize all the lyrics on the album and write verses for Queen Latifah, Monie Love, and MC Lyte in my notebooks instead of doing any work at school. Writing keeps my soaring temper in check and my fists from pounding some girl harder than Papi does me.
Soon after slapping Anastasia, I see Dean Kelly again. An angry and obese chick named Yesenia, whose parents fled Cuba, begins popping shit because she thinks I’m crazy for calling her “my sister.” She let me know it every chance she got. I let it go for the first two years of school, but all of a sudden I begin to see Papi in Yesenia’s fat brown face.
“You’re so fucking stupid with that ‘my sister’ shit,” she says one morning in the girls’ bathroom.
“Why does it have to be like that?” I ask the fatty.
“Because I fucking hate you, you fake Dominican bitch,” she says, laughing as the crowd s
tarts amassing around us.
“You’re acting like one of those savages we learn about for no fucking reason,” I say. “And you were born here, just like I was, and you call yourself Cuban.”
“Oh shit, Yesenia, you’re going to let that bitch talk to you like that?” yells a voice in the crowd.
“You better get out of here with that Different World shit before I smack that played-out ‘We Are the World’ taste out yo’ mouth.”
“Please, don’t force me,” I say, making my way out of the bathroom and back to typing class. I think of Papi slamming the orange metal ball hopper into my back and sides. I think of Alice standing there, watching. I think of my strong hands around Danielle’s long neck, her face turning shades of blue. I think of the Dominican hick Fredericka from Aquinas, who lives by the 1 on Dyckman and of beating her up so badly I was sorry for it. She accused me of making moves on her nerdy boyfriend when I never even noticed him before.
I am light-headed in class, overcome with a sinking feeling that something awful is about to happen. Casimiro told me that these heavy feelings are our Indigenous and African spiritual guides intervening, warning us of danger. “Intuition is everything,” he always says. “Listen to her.” I start rapping “Bonita Applebum” to myself. The bell rings.
We pour out of class quietly because the chapel across the hall may be in use, and the dean’s office is only feet away. There, Yesenia rushes me with Yoanka, a friend from St. Thaddeus, and a third girl I’ve seen around school.
“You wanna act tough now, bitch, right?” Yesenia yells. She tries to rip my skirt off, revealing a sliver of the red shorts I’m wearing underneath.
“Wow, you, too, Yoanka?” I ask, punching her with my right fist, snapping her head back. I turn around and grab Yesenia by the back of the head, landing a right in her face. The other girl starts crying and rethinks jumping in. “Yo, Rachel got pretty legs,” I hear my friend Freddy yell in the background.
I start dragging Yesenia toward the chapel door, where I intend to slam the door on her neck. I figure she’s brainwashed, anyway.
The assistant dean runs over as I’m about to open the chapel door, alerted by the cries of a few girls yelling for me to stop and guys encouraging me to finish what I started. Blood covers sections of the floor and our clothing like sweat during a basketball game.
“I’ve had enough, Ms. Cepeda,” the assistant dean yells, pulling us apart. I don’t explain who started it or that I was just defending myself. “I’m calling both your parents to deal with this.”
The next morning Yesenia and her mother and Papi and I are sitting in Dean Kelly’s office, waiting for her to finish making the morning’s announcements.
“We are going to put you in a pot with Yemaya,” Yesenia’s mother whispers to us. “You’re going to see.”
“I think you’re crazy, lady,” Papi says loudly. “You don’t want to make empty threats.”
Dean Kelly walks in and hears Papi responding to Yesenia’s mother. “What’s going on in here?” she asks.
“Ay, I don’t know why he is being so rude,” Yesenia’s mother says.
Papi and I decide not to explain the situation. Yesenia is off, dismissed back to class. Dean Kelly asks us to stay behind.
“I think it’s best if you don’t return next year,” Dean Kelly says to me. “I heard about the girl from St. Catherine’s and an incident with someone from Aquinas, then the poor Perillo girl, and now this.” She doesn’t allow me to respond. “And did you know that Rachel wrote a pro-choice paper in English class at this school?” she asks Papi. He doesn’t understand what Dean Kelly is talking about. I shrug. “You start too much trouble. Why are you so angry?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
God Bodies and Indios
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM”
ANGEL MOVED TO PHILLY AT THE END OF THAT SUMMER.
Maria submerged into an abysmal depression months later when Casimiro ran off with Charo. Nobody, not even the ancestors and spiritual guides, could have known to tap me on the shoulder beforehand and whisper in my ear that this tidal wave of betrayal would come to strike Maria down.
I walk into 1B and find Maria having another ataque de nervios at the dinner table. Natalie is sitting next to her, and Blackie is making coffee.
“Maria, he was good for nothing, don’t cry over that guy,” Natalie says, reaching over the table to hold her hand.
“I was so good to him,” Maria sobs.
“Too good,” she says. “He didn’t contribute a penny to the house, never gave you anything.”
“But I loved him, was so loyal,” Maria says, crying hysterically.
“He is an ordinary man who isn’t worth it, and that woman was never your friend,” Natalie says.
“Ay, Maria,” Blackie says, “we’re better off not wasting time with people who don’t give a shit about us.”
Only Blackie looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. He comes by almost every night after work to comfort Maria over dinner with stories about the articles he read in National Geographic. Maria is usually unresponsive.
* * *
I start senior year at the same impossibly large high school in the Bronx that Angel went to. I feel like I’m entering a prison every morning. Thousands of other kids in the yard are cluster-fucked into cliques by ethnicity or sport.
It’s easy to tell which Dominicans are campesinos—the newest arrivals. The guys yell instead of speaking to each other, and sport Jheri curls. Many of them speak in dialects I barely understand and say words I can’t begin to try and spell. They sport shoes and sneakers with no socks, even in winter. And the girls usually wear their hair fried so severely straight they smell as if they’re on fire, even more so than Socorro did, when you pass them in the hallway or yard. With several notable exceptions, Asian kids stick together, as do white and Black-American kids.
Then there are the Latinos born in New York City, who don’t give a fuck about the plátanos as much as they don’t care about us. To many of the tens of thousands flooding the city, we’re gringos, fake-ass Dominicans, though they are just a few years away from becoming as American as they perceive us being. In the time in between, the rift between “us” and “them” has become more volatile than standing on a fault line during an earthquake. Many of us born in New York City who feel like we have nothing in common with the campesinos, and assume they’ve come straight out of the farms and shantytowns of rural D.R., began choosing sides.
Some of my classmates from the Caribbean, West Indies, and Central and South America are tipsy off of the American Dream Tang that their parents served them daily. Teachers like mine, who force-feed us more misinformation about our history than we can process, further ingrain the idea that white friends and hardcore mainstream assimilation will bring us a step closer to realizing our parents’ sueños.
I don’t quite see it that way. Yusef Hawkins, Bernhard Goetz, that poor old crazy lady Eleanor Bumpurs, Simon Mandel, Papi—realizing the American Dream for some means a living nightmare for others. In my world, the bogeymen usually get away with murder.
A couple of weeks before I start working at a clothing store downtown after school, I try to hang out with the Dominican campesinos.
“Yo, you look so stupid, hanging out those hicks,” points out one of my friends whose mom is Puerto Rican and dad is Black-American. “It’s so obvious that they don’t even like you. Plus, you’re blacker than me, beeyatch, and they don’t like that shit.”
“But I’m trying to connect with them,” I say. “Maybe I can talk to them about knowledge of self. You know, like ‘a supreme mind will take you out of your paralysis’?”
“Wow, you’re really weirder than people think,” she says, “if you think quoting Lord Jamar is going to get you anywhere with those hicks. They scream over each other too loudly to even hear what you’re saying.”
“T
hose people are ours, too, you know,” I say.
“No, they’re not. They may be yours, but they ain’t mine.”
Soon I give up. Maybe homegirl is right. Besides, the campesinos don’t even notice when I stop hanging out with them.
* * *
Angel was born again in Philadelphia. He changed his name to Infinite Reality, and with his new name came a totally new identity, one I only vaguely recognized as that of my first love.
“Yo, why are you working for those devils?” he asks me. He’s sitting next to me in the kitchen, eating concón with red beans and rice. Maria sets down a fresh plate of fried maduros in the middle of the table. This is the first time Infinite doesn’t reach over to lick the sweeter slices, burnt on the edges and oozing grease, only to put them back on the plate before anyone else can take a few.
“They don’t have knowledge of self. They don’t understand that we are the Nation of Gods and Earths, so they treat us like slaves,” he says.
“De que tú ’ta hablando, Angelito?” Maria asks. “You no God.”
“No, Ma, God is right here in all of us.”
“Well, I work because I need the money, and your mother buys things for you using my store discount,” I say. “Maria needs all the extra money she can spare right now, especially with her ‘cancer’—”
“But you and I and everyone else knows there’s nothing wrong with her,” he says. We all knew Maria’s a hypochondriac, but it’s gotten worse since Casimiro split and Angel left for college. “Ma, what’s wrong with you now?”
“I used to had un cancer in my right seno,” she says, “and then my doctor say it go away, and now it might be in my left. Ay, Dios libre me.”
“You know, the other day when Natalie was here for dinner, your mother heard us talking about SIDA, and she told us she had it in her left middle finger but it went away,” I tell Angel.
“So she’s the first woman to have AIDS in one finger, and then just like that, it went away?” he says. “You know, Ma, you have to stop listening to what the white devil doctor fills your head up with.”
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