Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

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  Forsaking All Others

  Jimmy Breslin

  With the Cooperation of Team C Homicide

  for rosemary

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the assistance of:

  Thomas Davis

  Kevin Hallinan

  Alfred Howard

  Ronald Marsenison

  John McCann

  Michael McTigue

  John Meda

  Richard Paul

  Charles Summers Team C, Bronx Homicide

  Contents

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  A Biography of Jimmy Breslin

  TITO SOLIVAN TOOK A pint bottle of whiskey out of the hip pocket of his baggy brown pants, swigged it and then spoke while his lips still glistened with drink.

  “In Texas, most men become rich,” he said.

  He took another drink from the bottle, which was pitorro, a moonshine. Solivan was a man of local olive drab skin, but with the blue eyes, snub nose and perpetual thirst of his grandfather, Michael Sullivan, a United States army soldier stationed in Ponce in 1916. Sullivan married a local black Indian and his name was refined over the years to conform to community standards: at death, he was listed as Colon Solivan.

  “In Mississippi, you get jobs and money,” Sullivan’s grandson, Tito Solivan, now said.

  “Maybe I’ll go to America,” Teenager said to him.

  “In Seattle, Washington, it should be a sin for people to live,” Solivan said. “The life is so easy it makes God mad.”

  Solivan stood in front of his shack, which was built high off the ground in an attempt to make dampness keep its distance. Chickens kept appearing at the top of the high wooden stoop and then turning to go back inside the shack. A couple of hundred yards away, the orderly spacing of streetlights and phone lines came to an end, with sneakers and tin cans hanging from the wires. Solivan was the town lecturer on the riches of America, and people came to him for advice even though Solivan had been born in this shack and had spent his entire life standing under the ceaseless sun on these mudflats running to the Caribbean. That his grandfather had been American, New York Irish, was qualification enough for Solivan to inform everyone of the life awaiting them on the other side of the land and sea from this town of shacks, La Playa de Ponce in Puerto Rico.

  “Where is the best place?” Teenager asked Solivan, who was his cousin on his father’s side. He had asked Solivan this many times, but Teenager had a need to hear it again, for then he could walk away knowing that his future was assured.

  “In New York, the priests are ashamed when they find out how poor the Pope lives,” Solivan said.

  Teenager, however, was not yet ready. He stood holding the hand of a beautiful, vacant fourteen-year-old named Lydia, but there were so many others in the town whose hands he held and did not want to relinquish. Teenager’s life was in the town square, a place of cement walks and low tropical oaks called robles trees. The tree trunks were painted white and the walkways were lined with globe lights on tall posts. A bandstand was in the center and each evening the girls walked counterclockwise about the square and the boys went clockwise. In their strollings, boys and girls always would be face to face and the boys would be able to make remarks to the girls. Not remarks about the beauty or great charms of the girls, but rather boasts of how strong they were, of how easily they would destroy anybody who came near the girls, of how much they would like to have sex with the girls.

  Teenager at seventeen walked the square, shoulders swinging, voice declaring to the night sky that all this belonged to him, that all the girls there were to be his pleasure. Rising out of a blank life, he found his identity depended upon his level of violence. Therefore he told his women in the square not of flowers, but of whom he beat up. His search was for domination, his basic urge was to destroy; sexual conquest for the sake of humiliating a woman was the first duty of a man to himself.

  “You see that bus over there?” Teenager one night said to three men who had come over from the larger town of Ponce to capture women in the square. The three looked at the old bus and nodded.

  “You have five minutes to get out of this square and onto this bus,” Teenager told them.

  “What are you saying to us?” one of the three from Ponce said.

  “I am telling you that you have five minutes to get out of this square and go onto the bus. If you are here in five minutes I will kill you.”

  Teenager walked over to the El Cacique Bar, at the corner of the square nearest the water. It was a shed, with a thin bartender dozing on a high stool. The people drank Corona beer and Zorro rum and shot pool. Outside the open rear of the bar was a muddy path that ran through the weeds to the start of the sea, ten yards away. Teenager stood in the bar, stared at a pool game and guessed time in his head. He looked at the clock over the bar and saw that four minutes and forty-five seconds had passed. He looked out of the door of the El Cacique and saw the three from Ponce standing under a light in the square. Nonchalantly, staring at the ground, he walked out of the bar. The grass plots of the square had wire strung around them knee-high, held up by metal pipes driven deep in the ground. The wire went through holes at the top of the pipes. Passing one plot of grass, Teenager suddenly reached for a pipe. The wire did not go through this particular pipe; it was simply looped around, and when Teenager tugged, his special pipe slid quickly out of the ground and up through the wire loop.

  When the three from Ponce saw the pipe in Teenager’s hand they began to run. Teenager caught the tallest between the shoulder blades. The tall one stumbled and started to go down. Teenager brought the pipe onto the back of his head and the tall guy lay there, stunned, the blood matting his black hair. Teenager said to him, “Now you get up and get onto the bus or I am saying to you that I am going to kill you.” The tall guy pulled himself up and wobbled across to the bus stop. Teenager took the pipe back to its spot, stuck it back into the ground, looped the wire over it and, taking a deep breath, looked around the square to see which girl he wanted to own.

  One night, Teenager decreed that Lydia would take her clothes off only for him, and that if she ever did it for another he would kill both her and the male. Early one Saturday, Teenager’s mother and stepfather left for the shopping boat to Saint Thomas, and an hour later Lydia was in Teenager’s bed in his house. In midmorning, tropical rain crashing on the tin roof gave to the couple the feeling of being protected by castle walls, causing them to burrow deeper into drowsy privacy. They heard only the sound of rain, not the dripping hair of Teenager’s mother, who had returned from a swamping at sea. On Monday morning, she took Teenager and Lydia to the judge in the city of Ponce and had them married. As they were not in a state of grace, they could not be married in the Catholic Church. Nor would the mother allow time for confession and other regulations necessary to the sacrament of matrimony, because she wanted the young people married immediately so that if one of the beauties of their Saturday was pregnancy,
the child would be legal from first cell onward.

  Teenager had a job in a car repair shop owned by El Negro Bobo—Black Bobo—in the Belgica section of Ponce, the part of town for those with skin color running from bitter chocolate to blue coal. In this setting, Teenager appeared as pale as paper. People with his color, faded khaki, lived primarily on the West Side of Ponce. On the hills rising sharply at the edge of the town there lived the Castilians, or people who pretended to be, and they would not allow their skin to be touched by the light from a heavy candle.

  With no car, Teenager went to his job by bus. While he loved cars, and thirsted for the day he would own one, he despised working on them. His huge arms and great back muscles could lift up a car engine, but if he awoke with a stuffed nose, he said to himself that he had pneumonia and remained at home in bed. On days Teenager did show up, he was late, and he often went out to lunch and did not return. He was paid fifty-five dollars for a six-day week. Black Bobo thought it was cheap, as long as Teenager showed up for Saturdays, when at day’s end Black Bobo always went to a whorehouse in Belgica run by Mirta La Negron—Black Mirta. Black Bobo would get drunk at the bar and have Teenager, who sipped only a beer or two all evening, stand guard.

  One night, a month or so after Teenager was married, he was at the whorehouse bar when his boss got into an argument with a man named Ralphie, who worked at the ironworks. Black Bobo slapped Ralphie in the face. As Ralphie picked up a beer bottle, Teenager reached out and got a hand on Ralphie.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  “You go away and I’ll fix this bastard,” Ralphie said.

  “That’s all right,” Teenager said.

  “I come back here with a gun and I shoot him,” Ralphie said.

  Black Bobo laughed and returned to his drink. Thirty minutes later, Ralphie walked through the door with a pistol in his right hand. Ralphie walked down the bar toward Black Bobo. Teenager dived for Ralphie’s gun hand. Teenager’s left hand clamped onto Ralphie’s right wrist and Teenager’s arm muscles rippled as he pushed Ralphie’s gun hand out, as if opening a door. Teenager took a step to his own right, moving his body away from the wavering gun. Suddenly, Ralphie found himself with his right arm held far out to the side and with the entire front of his body open to Teenager, who was off to the left. Ten thousand years of male instinct caused Ralphie’s knees to clap shut in front of his groin.

  Teenager’s right elbow rose and his right side moved in one piece. The elbow hit Ralphie like an iron bar on the bridge of his nose. Ralphie did not go down. He simply doubled up, hands over his face, the blood running out from beneath the palms.

  Black Bobo threw his arms around Teenager. “The champion of this whole whorehouse!” he yelled. He banged his glass on the bar for another drink.

  Black Mirta, watching Ralphie shuffle out, said, “I don’t like this. It is not the end.”

  “Bullshit,” Black Bobo said.

  “You’re the one who is bullshit,” Black Mirta said.

  Teenager was bored. He had to stand at the bar with a beer that was warm and listen to Black Bobo boast and babble. When is this man going to have sex with some girl and let me go home to sleep, Teenager kept saying to himself. After 1:00 A.M., with Black Bobo still at the bar, Teenager was in the bathroom just starting to piss when he heard a shout that drowned out the juke box. He came out of the bathroom on the run. He saw Black Bobo scurrying out the whorehouse door. Behind him, a gun in his hand, was Steve Alvarez, Ralphie’s brother. Steve had on a yellow shirt. Teenager ran for the yellow shirt. He could not get through the people in time. The yellow shirt was out the door and running over the rutted dirt of the whorehouse parking lot. Up ahead, racing for his car in the corner of the lot, was Black Bobo.

  “I get my gun in my car and I kill you,” Black Bobo yelled at the yellow shirt. The yellow shirt did not stop chasing him. Black Bobo ran up to his car and pulled the door open and put his head into the front and shrieked, “Now I have my gun, you mother-fucker.” Steve Alvarez stood in his yellow shirt directly over Black Bobo. He fired the pistol. It sounded like a tray falling on the floor. Teenager’s hands went out for Steve Alvarez’ yellow shirt. The tray kept falling. By the time Teenager pounded on the yellow shirt, Steve Alvarez had emptied his gun into Black Bobo. Steve Alvarez walked backward. Teenager did not touch him again. Teenager looked into the car and saw the blood in the darkness and Black Bobo down on his left ear on the floor of the car.

  “What happened?” somebody shouted from the door of the whorehouse bar.

  “I just lost my job,” Teenager said.

  At four the next morning, Teenager and Lydia left in a pickup truck that Teenager had taken from Black Bobo’s auto repair shop. They drove across the mountains to San Pedro. Teenager was not yet eighteen and Lydia was not yet fifteen. Teenager had with him the address of a brother of his late father. The brother lived in Manhattan and would do anything to help, Teenager’s mother told him.

  Two hours later, as Teenager was about to turn into the airport, he swerved out of the line of traffic and rode alongside the airport until the road turned to dirt and ran under coconut palms. He remained on the dirt road, which became even more rutted. Vegetation brushed against the sides of the truck. People and cows walked in the road in front of the car and it was futile to blow the horn because there was no room for anyone to stand on the side of the road.

  All the people on the road were quite black, descendants, the mixture undisturbed, of the slaves brought by the Spanish to Puerto Rico to work in the sugar fields. Upon being freed, this group of slaves left the fields and moved to the coast, where they were shunned by the Taino Indians, who felt no need of any deeper shade of skin. Nor would the white Spanish do more than glare at them. Perhaps out in the mountains nobody cared. And in America’s South the white farmers, born of Irish and English sheep violators, had no inhibitions about rolling among cornstalks with a field nigger. But in this particular spot along the Atlantic Ocean, the Castilians were truly afraid that it would rub off. An Indian or so was all right; high cheekbones were not catching. But black was untouchable. So now, two centuries or so later, those living in this jungle area were as dark as the day their ancestors had the chains taken from their necks.

  Teenager drove to the village of Loiza Aldea, consisting of a street, then an old gray fort of a Roman Catholic church, St. Patricio’s, a town square, a shed with a Corona beer advertisement and, two blocks from the church, a green wooden house with an old sign on the front porch: “Templo Espiritual de Sanidad Divina.” The person inside practiced positive witchcraft; if Teenager had wanted anyone hurt he would not have come here, to Loiza Aldea, but instead would have driven along the other coast, from Ponce directly to Guyamo, which is where the evil voodoo people live.

  A plump woman on the porch motioned Teenager and Lydia into a dim living room, where Teenager sat on a straight chair which was under a large cloth banner of Jesus, whose garments were held apart to display the Sacred Heart. Another banner was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, a third showed Christ being attended to by St. Michael the Archangel.

  An inordinately short woman, a measure away from being a pygmy, looked out of a bedroom that had a curtain as a door. The woman smiled, displaying top front teeth missing.

  “I soon be out,” she said.

  A few moments later she appeared, full set of white teeth gleaming. She carried a glass of water. The spirits drink the water, although you cannot see the level of water go down even if you leave the glass out for an entire day. After settling their thirst, the saints talk to her through the water. She placed the glass of water on a saucer on the small table and sat on the opposite side from Teenager, who pulled his chair up to the table. Lydia remained against the wall.

  “You require a session?” the woman said. She yawned. “You are the earliest today.”

  She rubbed her eyes and stared at the glass of water. There was no conflict in her mind between her glass of water and the banner
s of Jesus and the Virgin Mary hanging on the walls. The Spanish priests, trained and sharpened at Salamanca until the edges of their faith sparkled and could cut through the thickest jungle, still found the beliefs of slaves in Puerto Rico to be unsplittable. Therefore, over the centuries, mergers were allowed, and people prayed to Christ and listened to water, as the woman was now doing.

  There were two ways for the spirits to speak to Teenager: they could whisper to the woman and she would relate it to Teenager, or the particular spirit could overtake the woman and begin speaking out of the woman’s mouth, and thus directly to Teenager. The spirit the woman was talking to was Changó, the saint of war, power, prisoners and sex. After several minutes, the small woman shivered. Teenager sat forward. He knew the woman’s body was tingling with the presence of the spirit who spoke to her.

  The little woman, watching the water, said, “Soon you will make very much money. There is a person you admire most in the world who made very much money and soon you will make this money too. That is what you want. Do you remember the day you first admired this man? You were at a place where children play and you admired this man. You cannot make the money here. You must make it in the city in America. The man you admire most is there.”

  Teenager knew that the woman was speaking to the proper spirit. His hero was Rockefeller. Once, in the yard behind the school, Teenager sat on a bench with a book from the library about Rockefeller. The other students were playing softball; Teenager read over and over one passage about John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It said that early in Rockefeller’s life he imported more opium than the law allowed. Rockefeller, the book said, was using the opium for a patent medicine. Teenager decided it was for pure drug selling. Rockefeller, Teenager believed, made his fortune with opium and then caused all the laws to be passed against it in order to prevent anybody from becoming rich that way. Teenager remembered sitting in the schoolyard for a long time and thinking about how smart Rockefeller was.