Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Alex felt like more of an imposter than Maelo. You had to be crazy to shoot a bunch of footage and hope to make sense of it later. Nevertheless, he plugged in the Nagra and said, «When I get rolling, you tell me how you got started in the Young Lords. Spanish or English, it doesn’t matter.»

  He showed Felix how to hold the boom mike, then he focused on the guard. He liked the blur of passing cars in the foreground. He switched the camera on and nodded to Maelo.

  “Hello, ladies and gentlemen,” Maelo said in English. “My name is Ismael Cienfuegos, but everybody calls me Maelo, the nickname of Ismael Rivera, who is a hero of mine, who sang with Rafael Cortijo y su conjunto in Puerto Rico, where I was born.”

  Alex stopped the camera and said, «Bueno, Maelo, you don’t have to talk like you’re onstage at a theater or something. Be casual, like we were sitting around smoking some yerba and rapping, you know?» Alex had to pay for his own film stock, thirty dollars a roll.

  «Sorry,» Maelo said. «Let me try again.»

  «Just keep it short and simple, okay? Like maybe it was the rats and garbage…»

  «Truth is, my parents had a pretty okay building, we didn’t have any rats.»

  The silence stretched uncomfortably. «So,» Alex said at last, «what made you want to join?»

  «It was because I’m such a culero, man. Can I say culero? My father is so burgués, so bourgeois, you know? I wanted to piss him off, so I joined up, thinking it was a street gang.»

  «Bueno, tell me about that, but—»

  «I know, like we’re smoking maría.»

  Alex got his focus, started the camera, nodded to Maelo.

  “Hey, primo,” Maelo said in a pinched voice. He pantomimed smoking a joint and hissed in his breath. “Some righteous shit, man.”

  Alex switched off the camera again. A crowd had gathered, teenaged kids of both sexes, a few older men who looked like they lived on the streets. A half-circle had formed on the sidewalk and they’d started to bump and jostle.

  «We can do the interview later,» Alex said. He tried to remember how he’d made “Nimbus.” The difference was that he’d had a clear vision of “Nimbus” in his head before he started filming, and he hadn’t had to shoot it on the streets of Spanish Fucking Harlem. «I’ll just get some establishing shots.» He told Felix to hold the boom mike out toward the street, and even so the crowd noise was distractingly loud.

  «¡Oye!» Miguel waved his arms, then whistled sharply. «Everybody shut the fuck up and give the man some room, right?»

  Alex zoomed in on the building entrance, panned up the three stories above it, then up and down the block. He thought that not too much of his trembling translated to the camera.

  They crossed the street and Alex set up in front of the entrance, a storefront where the windows had been completely papered over with handbills. He asked the guard to say his name and that they were in front of Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization headquarters. He needed four takes to get it loud enough for the Nagra to pick up, and then he was awkward and embarrassed. This, Alex thought, is why people use actors.

  Inside, one solemn face after another stared down at him from the walls, not just the obvious Fidel and Che, but hardcore shit like Lenin and Stalin, Ho Chi Minh and Mao, with quotes like, “Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood!” The light was too feeble for Alex to even think about shooting.

  «This room here was where we used to have daycare,» Maelo said. At one point it might have been a kitchen. At the moment it was stacked with cardboard boxes bearing logos for Pepsi and Sugar Frosted Flakes and Pampers.

  «What happened?»

  «Long story,» Maelo said. «Priorities changed.» They moved down the hall. «This is the library and classroom.» A couple of metal shelves held a few hundred beat-up paperbacks. Alex recognized the same Penguin edition of Capital Volume 1 that he’d tried to read in Austin. Sagging boxes and overflowing file cabinets lined the other walls. The two chairs in the room were both broken, and back issues of the movement newspaper, Palante, were scattered everywhere. The air smelled of moldy paper. «This is where we have the political education classes. After you take the classes you’ll be on probation for a while, and then eventually you can join up for real.»

  Across the hall was a room with a beat-up desk and a mail sorter. A handwritten sign on the wall, faded to illegibility except for the title, said, “Office Rules.” The woman behind the desk had reddish-black skin and a short, uneven Afro. “Who’s this?” she asked in English.

  «Mi primo Alejandro,» Maelo answered in Spanish. «He’s going to make a film about us.»

  «There’s already a film. Does Gloria know about this?»

  «We’re going to talk to Gloria.»

  «¿De veras? When? Does anybody on the Central Committee know about this?»

  «Don’t break my balls, Lidia.»

  «Your balls and your prick are fucking counterrevolutionary and I’m tired of hearing so much noise about something so tiny.»

  «Come on,» Maelo said. «Obviously Lidia is having la regla.»

  «Chingate, Maelo.»

  In the hall, Alex heard Lidia dial her old-fashioned rotary phone. Flipping the light switches did nothing. “Yeah, hi, Gloria,” Lidia said. “Maelo’s here and he’s got some guy with him with a camera and shit… Yeah, I thought you might want to come down and see what the fuck is going on… Okay, see you in a few minutes.”

  «Maybe we should go,» Maelo said. «I’ll meet with Gloria later, get this shit straightened out, we’ll do it another time.»

  Alex strongly doubted there would be another time. They gathered up the gear, Alex made sure they had it all, then they headed south on Madison.

  «Oye, what about my interview?» Maelo said. «The park’s a couple of blocks away, we can do it there.»

  Alex didn’t see any way out of throwing good money after bad. Clouds had massed up and the wind tugged at their sleeves. Maybe they would get rained out.

  They all sat in the grass with the rippling water of the Harlem Meer in the background and Maelo used up the rest of the roll as he meandered through his story. When Alex tried to pack up, Maelo said, «You’ve got more rolls. You need to give the other brothers their time.»

  Alex dutifully changed the canister and Felix, wide-eyed and hurrying, said, “My brother was in the Lords, so I joined too.”

  “That’s it?” Maelo said, following him into English.

  “That’s it.”

  Alex stopped the camera and got Miguel set up, thinking, not much longer. But once he got Miguel’s face in focus, he thought he saw something there, a calm authority. The clouds were really moving overhead and the light was dramatic.

  “You ready?” Miguel said.

  “Go.”

  “I have to back up some, is that okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “See, I used to jitterbug. You know what that means?”

  “Like dancing?”

  Miguel laughed. “Maybe where you come from. To us, jitterbug means run with the gangs, to fight, right? To rumble, to bop. I was a Dragon, because Loisaida was Dragon turf, the Lower East Side, you know? Sometimes we would go up to El Barrio to help our Dragon brothers kick the asses of the Red Wings, which was this Italian gang from like Jefferson Park. And sad to say we would also bop with the Viceroys, who were our Boricua brothers, but we had no consciousness at that time, we were illiterate motherfuckers who didn’t know no better.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I got initiated at 14 years old, young on top of being stupid.” He turned thoughtful and his initial momentum was fading.

  “When you would fight,” Alex prompted him, “it was, what, with fists? Switchblades? Broken bottles?”

  “Everything. Bike chains, shivs, zip guns. People got bad hurt, people died. I had this zip gun, right, a real piece of sh
it I made in shop class when the teacher wasn’t looking. Held one .22 lr cartridge, then you had to practically take it apart to reload.”

  “Did you ever use it?”

  “Shit, yeah. That’s how I ended up in the Young Lords.” He got thoughtful again, and this time Alex waited him out. “I had a beef with this cat Enrique Ramirez who was in the Viceroys. He was 17, had this greasy da haircut, this pathetic fucking skimpy-ass mustache, and he was always after my sister Lupita, who wouldn’t have nothing to do with a douchebag like him, so he put it on the street what a slut she was, and making up details and shit. So me and some of the compañeros go up to El Barrio and we jump him and some of his friends. My guys take care of the friends so it’s just me against him, and I put him on his ass because I was a mean little motherfucker in those days, and I put the zip gun right in his eye and tell him to shut the fuck up about Lupita thenceforth, right? Only he’s got more balls than brains and he starts telling me about the noises she made when he fucked her and how she was begging for more and I lost it and shot him in the eye.

  “The eye popped like a raw egg and all this goo ran out of it, and the bullet went right into his brain and killed that motherfucker stone dead. And I was so happy about it, I wanted to kill him five or six more times, but the compañeros pulled me off and we ran like hell.”

  “You killed him?” Alex said.

  “Are you listening, or what? Fuck yes I killed the scumbag. Now, the gangs, we settled our own scores, right? The cops came around and asked a lot of questions and nobody told them nothing. It didn’t matter, I knew I was a dead man. Enrique had a brother Vicente who was 15 and a hardass, not as hard as me, maybe, but he would bring help. My options were basically leave the country or get ready to die. But that life, the jitterbug life, it makes you crazy. You’re all into honor and loyalty and shit, and you don’t care if you live or die. I mean, nobody gets into a gang in the first place if they got anything to live for, right?”

  Alex nodded, waited on Miguel again. Maelo and Felix seemed hypnotized and didn’t try to interrupt.

  “This was in April that I killed Enrique, so I stopped going to school, and if I went out of the house to buy a Yoo-hoo I had three or four compas with me, packing heat. Then I fucked up. This was in June, the middle of June, I went to church on Sunday with my moms, because church was off limits, right, only as we were coming out this chica I knew from school, Diana, she was fully developed at 14, you know what I mean? And beautiful. She says, ‘Mikey, where you been? I been worried about you,’ and all like that. And like an idiota I let my moms go on ahead so I can talk to Diana, and of course she was a decoy and the Viceroys jumped my ass. I fought but there were five of them and they handcuffed me and tied up my legs and the last thing I saw before they put the blindfold on me was Vicente, so I knew I was well and truly fucked.

  “They threw me in the back of a car and they took me uptown and dragged me up a bunch of stairs and into an apartment, and I’m still fighting, because it’s machismo, right, you do not go gentle into that goodnight. And they are like punching me a little to keep me under control, nothing like they could have been doing, and then they tie me to a chair and take the blindfold off and I’m facing a couch where this middle-aged lady is sitting, wearing a black dress and a hat and a veil, like she just got back from church, which she had. The only light in the room is this table lamp next to her, it’s sitting on this doily and it’s got a fringed lampshade. I’m noticing all this shit because I figure it’s the last shit I will ever see. The Viceroys, they’re all standing behind me and I still haven’t seen any of them except Vicente. ‘Do you know who I am?’ this lady says. They’ve tied a rag in my mouth so I can’t talk, so I shake my head and she says, ‘I’m Enrique’s mother. That was my son you killed.’ Then she snaps her fingers and Vicente goes over to her, and she says, ‘This is Vicente, Enrique’s brother,’ like I don’t already know that. And Vicente is fucking crying, man, I can’t believe it.

  “She says, ‘Vicente was the one who had to tell me that Enrique was dead. He had to listen to my screams. And he told me they knew who did it, and they were going to kill you to make it right. For a few days I tried to take comfort from that. But even to a foolish old woman like me it was obvious that the next thing that would happen is that your friends would have to kill Vicente, and back and forth and back and forth. So I started to think about what it would take to truly make it right, as close to right as anything could. And the only thing I could think of was that you would have to give me your life. Not your death. Your life.’”

  Miguel was fully into it now, and all Alex had to do was keep nodding.

  “My first thought is, holy shit. They’re not going to kill me? What a bunch of fucking pussies. But then she starts to run it down, all the shit she expects me to do. First, I have to quit the Dragons. Second, I have to go back to school and make up the tests I missed and stay there and graduate high school. Third, I have to report to her and Vicente once a month, like probation, right, and explain to them what I’m doing to ‘make something of myself.’ Because Enrique will never get the chance to be a doctor or a priest or a senator, so now I have to. It’s a good thing there was a gag in my mouth or I would not have been able to keep from saying that the only thing Enrique was going to be was a fucking welfare-cheating junkie pimp, if he lived that long.

  “And then Vicente says, ‘I hope you say no. I hope you go back to the Dragons and drop out of school and keep going the way you’re going, because then I will kill you with my mother’s blessing.’ And I remember thinking this might be a good campaign for Mayor Lindsay, ‘Stay in school or I will personally kill your ass.’ Because once I had glimpsed the idea that I might actually live through this shit, suddenly it was much harder to not care whether I lived or died.”

  Alex, nodding, checked the film gauge. Still half a reel.

  “They put the blindfold back on me and untied me from the chair and drove me back to Loisaida. They took the handcuffs off and untied my legs, and when they dumped me on the street in front of my apartment I still had the blindfold on and by the time I got it off and got on my feet the car was gone.

  “I didn’t sleep for a couple three nights, and when some of the guys came around and wanted me to bop I told them not this time. After this happened a few times some of the Dragons said I’d turned pussy, but after I whipped their asses they decided then again maybe not. I told myself I was just trying to give myself time to decide, but when the middle of July rolled around, there’s a note under my door with a date and time and directions to Vicente’s apartment, and I went.”

  “Were you afraid?” Alex asked.

  “Fuck yes I was afraid. I don’t know who in El Barrio knows my deal with Vicente and who doesn’t. I see Viceroys on the sidewalk, I cross the fucking street. And they’re all watching me, right? Like one false move, I’m hamburger.

  “Vicente answers the door, and when he sees it’s me he walks away without saying nothing, because he clearly does not dig this any more than I do. His mother has made dinner, mofongo relleno de camarones, sorullitos de maiz, yuca con cebollas, holy Mary mother of God. My moms, I love her always, can’t cook for shit and the smell coming out of that kitchen, well, that was pretty much the end of my resistance.

  “I go back to ps 188 and I take some makeup tests and shit, and in September I start eighth grade. Meanwhile Vicente, his mother has made him quit the Viceroys, which as you can imagine brought a world of shit down on him from his former compañeros, calling him mama’s boy and all like that. Me and Vicente were going through the same thing, because for both of us the gang was our family, our friends, our sports, our chess club, everything. So that was like this unspoken bond we had that was starting to get stronger, in spite of everything.

  “One day I was there having dinner—carne guisada, habichuelas guisadas, ay cabrón—and after, Vicente says, ‘I want you to come meet somebody.’

  “I look at his mother, because this is not part of th
e deal, and she says, ‘Vicente has told me about this. I want you to do it.’

  “We walk over to the Young Lords Party headquarters, same place we were at this afternoon, and on the way Vicente tells me about this guy Georgie, he used to bop with the Viceroys, he’s been in the Youth House, the Children’s Village, the Tombs, Riker’s Island, he’s one serious motherfucker. Vicente knew him from back then, and a couple of months ago he ran into him on the street and Georgie told him about the Lords. Now, I heard of the Lords, and I thought they were just another gang, right, so I’m thinking chévere, I’m down with this.

  “Georgie turns out to be this little guy, like me, with a thick mustache and these big-ass sideburns, and he’s got this purple beret with all the pins on it, and there’s this way about him. No macho bullshit, not trying to prove nothing, talks so quiet you have to listen up hard to hear. He wants to know what I did with the Dragons and it feels weird in a way I never felt before when I tell him I killed Vicente’s brother, telling him right there in front of Vicente.”

  “Weird like how?” Alex asked.

  “It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’m trying to find other words to make it sound like it just happened instead of being something I did. You know? To make it something I can look away from and not this humongous big deal, which it has suddenly turned into.

  “Then I tell him how Vicente’s mother made us both stop jitterbugging, and I say, ‘Which is why I don’t understand what we’re doing here.’

  “And Georgie smiles this big beautiful smile and says, ‘This is not a gang, chico. This is the Revolution.’

  “He gives me this book and tells me to read something called ‘El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba’ by Che Guevara, and I’m thinking, yeah, right. It’s like pages and pages, I’m really going to read that. But walking to the bus stop after, Vicente says, ‘This is now part of the deal. Next month, when you come for dinner, you need to have read that and be asking me questions.’