“No Olmo here,” the man said, reading Teenager’s note.
“My uncle,” Teenager said.
The man handed him back the slip of paper. “Not here, pal.”
“We are to stay with him,” Teenager said.
“Not here, pal, because he’s not here. I never heard of the guy.”
Teenager caught enough of the English words to know what the superintendent meant. But before he could say something else, the superintendent shut the door. Teenager then walked up to the stoop and tried the glass doors, but they were locked. He shaded his eyes and looked in at the mailboxes, but he could not read the names. He and Lydia sat on the stoop and waited for people to come, so they could be asked where Luis Olmo, his uncle, could be found. Over the hours, people came to the house and each looked at the slip of paper and shook his head and went into the building.
Late afternoon shadows chilled the street. Lydia first tried to tuck her bare feet under her skirt. She then tried wrapping the cardigan sweater about them, but this made the rest of her cold. So she put the sweater back on, opened the suitcase and thrust her feet into it. Teenager took out another shirt and put it on over the one he was wearing, but he still had to keep moving his arms. By 8:00 P.M. the suitcase was as cold as the wind and Lydia’s feet could stand it no more. They walked to Broadway and went to 89th Street, where he was sure that he would see somebody from Ponce who could help him. The steamed glass of the hot dog stand on the corner drew them in. The moment Lydia put her feet into the warm air the pain went out of her face. The stand was empty except for a Puerto Rican with a pencil mustache who was behind the counter.
“I was supposed to stay with my uncle,” Teenager told him in Spanish.
“Everybody has an uncle someplace,” the counterman said.
“I can’t find him,” Teenager said.
“Do you see him here?” the counterman said.
“Where is there a place to stay?” Teenager asked.
“I do not rent rooms, I sell hot dogs,” the counterman said.
“Why are you bringing your troubles to me? Go walk down Broadway, there are hotels. You just look and you see them with your own eyes.”
The counterman walked away from them and began to wipe the griddle. Lydia started to leave, but Teenager remained motionless. He smiled at the counterman. The smile became a laugh. He saw his wife outside, changed expression and walked out.
At 79th Street there was a sign for the Hotel Orleans, a block over on Amsterdam Avenue. They went there and rented a room for a week at twenty-one dollars. The room had a bed, a night table, closet, toilet, hot plate with a dirty pot atop it and virtually no breathable air. The window, covered with soot, looked out at the brick wall of the next building and could not be opened. Teenager left his wife in the room and went out to a bodega on Columbus Avenue and bought one egg for a nickel and a box of rice for fifteen cents. He brought it back to the room and Lydia boiled the egg and rice. There was no fork or spoon, so Teenager went back to Columbus Avenue, walked into a Chinese restaurant, nodded at the hostess, watched her turn to lead him to a table, whipped up the nearest napkin wrapped about silverware and was out the door.
At 8:00 A.M. the next morning, Teenager walked into a candy store and asked if the man needed any help. The man pointed to his wife. “She is my staff.”
Teenager went to the French cleaners next door. The owner, who had just opened for the day, locked the lock as he saw Teenager walking up. He motioned Teenager away. Teenager walked to 89th and Broadway and found the hot dog stand crowded with people drinking morning coffee. Two Jews, the owners, not the counterman he intended to smash, were working.
“What’ll it be?” one of the Jews said to him.
“Nothing,” Teenager said.
“Have your nothing outside,” the Jew said.
For the next hour, Teenager stood on the corner and asked every Puerto Rican if they knew Fernando Lebron or Aros Blanco, Junior Quiñones. They shook their heads and kept hurrying to the subway. Teenager started walking. He went into coffee shops and supermarkets asking for jobs and then began climbing stairs to a dress factory and a novelty manufacturer and an upholstery place. The day became a man shaking his head and returning to his work and leaving Teenager standing in the doorway. He returned to the hotel at 4:00 P.M., with another nickel egg. Lydia had remained in the room all day, as Teenager had ordered. After eating, Teenager fell on the bed and was asleep immediately. At eight o’clock, he awoke and said he wanted to go out to the hot dog stand. The cold night air on her feet caused her to whimper at first. On Broadway, seeing all the other people with shoes, she became ashamed of the thongs she was wearing. They went home. In the morning, Lydia spent nine dollars on a pair of shoes, leaving them six dollars and change.
Teenager looked for a job in a fifteen-block radius of the hotel, in order not to spend carfare. He found that people had the same reaction to itinerant Puerto Ricans as they did to palsy victims. Even more disappointing to Teenager was his inability to find anybody on the corner of 89th Street who knew him, and who would give the respect and adulation he needed. He had been in New York for four days, and he found the disdain more alien than the climate. He did see one person who thought she remembered him. Her name was Mendez, and she came up the block with her child, went into an apartment house where the superintendent’s mother babysits days and then came hurrying out to get the subway to work. Teenager walked with her for a half block. She was going to work in a belt factory.
“Is hard here,” she said. “But it’s way better, man, than Ponce.”
Lydia dozed or looked out the window all day. Teenager would not allow her as much as to open the door without his being there. By Thursday, Lydia was in a haze from solitary confinement. Teenager came home early and after their egg and rice took her to the Manhattan Theater on Broadway, which cost a dollar and a quarter before 5:00 P.M. The movie was The Victors and they sat in the last row and whatever dialogue Teenager caught he explained to Lydia. When they walked out, the manager, standing by the ticket booth, nodded to them.
The next day, on Friday, Teenager was on Broadway because a man in the Daitch Shopwell had told him that he had heard that there was an A&P in the sixties that needed a delivery boy. As he walked past the theater, Teenager saw the manager and they nodded to each other. He walked to the A&P, found no job and was trudging back when he saw the manager again.
“Eat?” the manager said.
“Not yet,” Teenager said.
“You look like you can eat something,” the manager said.
He spoke slowly, and gestured with his hands, and Teenager was able to follow him. The manager took Teenager to a coffee shop on the next corner. When his hamburger arrived, Teenager nearly bit his own fingers as he snapped it into his mouth.
The manager’s name was John Cohalan and Teenager called him Pedroito.
“Last night that was your wife?” Pedroito said.
“Si.”
“Where is she now?”
“Hotel.”
“Get her here tonight and I will buy her food,” Cohalan said.
At 7:00 P.M., Teenager was back with Lydia. The manager bought them roast beef sandwiches. He said Teenager was a strong kid and would get work someplace. In the meantime, he made Teenager understand that he was to come to the theater whenever he and his wife felt hungry.
“You pay me back when you get a job,” Cohalan told them.
Cohalan’s eyes grew misty. This is how this country was built, he told himself, giving food, drink and shelter to some dust-caked, emaciated man walking out of the desert. The desert man’s stomach eased, his body clean, he goes out and starts as a porter and winds up an international banker. God bless America, Cohalan said to himself.
“If I could find a job this weekend,” Teenager said.
Cohalan smiled. “You keep on looking. You’ll find something.” Cohalan slipped back into his lovely haze.
“I must get a job on this weekend.
I have no money and the hotel money I must have on Monday. Twenty-one dollar.”
Cohalan was shaken out of his dreams by a fact that missionaries before him had known for centuries: when the natives light a fire under the pot, the water scalds. Cohalan focused in terror on these people who had grown, over a sandwich, into tormentors.
“I don’t know about that,” Cohalan said.
“I would never ask you for such a thing as money,” Teenager said.
This made Cohalan sick.
“Just if you hear of a job this weekend, you could tell me,” Teenager said.
In the mail on Saturday morning, Teenager received a letter from his mother with thirty-four dollars enclosed. When he and Lydia saw Cohalan for lunch, Teenager did not mention that he had any money. Cohalan was tight about the mouth. One loan of twenty-one dollars to Teenager, he knew, would begin a trend that would end with him eating out of garbage cans.
I thought all my relatives were dead, Cohalan said to himself.
To Teenager he said, “I’m looking all over.”
On Sunday morning, Teenager and Lydia were asleep when Cohalan, pounding on the door with both fists, woke them with the news that he had met the man in charge of maintenance at the Parkview Towers apartment house, and the man needed a handyman immediately. Cohalan gave Teenager a piece of paper with the address, on Central Park West, and instructions on how to walk there.
“Pedroito!” Teenager said. He threw a headlock on Cohalan.
Cohalan left with the lightened stride of a man who has just felt a gun removed from his back.
When Teenager got to the apartment house on Monday, the maintenance boss had him fill out forms. He also handed Teenager twenty-one dollars and had him sign a voucher for it.
The boss, a white Cuban, spoke in Spanish to Teenager. “Cohalan said that you needed the hotel rent this morning. Take an early lunch and go to the hotel and give them the money for your room. I am doing this for Cohalan. He lets my children into the movies free all the time.”
At 11:30, Teenager pretended to be going to his hotel. He already had paid for the room. He went into Central Park, had a hot dog and thought of how wonderful a person Pedroito was. He felt like running up to the theater and kissing Pedroito, but he thought that would be too sloppy, that it would make him appear too weak. You can be grateful without licking someone’s hands like a dog, Teenager decided.
The job paid Teenager a hundred and eighteen dollars and he cleared eighty-seven. Whenever he was alone in the hallway, chipping paint, he prayed aloud to Changó. “Please let my friend Cohalan have sex with any woman he sees who he wants when she comes into his movie house.” His days became the same. He and Lydia had breakfast in their room, then he left for work and Lydia returned to bed. Teenager was home for lunch and directly after work, when he took a nap, woke up to eat and then took out Lydia, his caged animal, for a walk. Each night, they stopped at the Manhattan Theater and saw Cohalan. Teenager always said the same thing, “Pedroito, I pray that you should have great luck in your life every day. I hope you have sex with all the women.”
He had been on the job for three weeks when Teenager found himself one day in an eight-room apartment being painted for new tenants. The apartment had picture windows and a large terrace overlooking Central Park. At quitting time, Teenager stayed alone in the apartment and watched Central Park dissolve into dusk. The rich, lighted apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, over on the far side of the park, started visions in his head. He gazed at the lights and imagined the money that was somewhere in the rooms with the lights. As far as he could see, left to right, there were these lights. There was money in baskets right next to the lamps, he thought. He shook his head and shoulders rapidly, a dog coming out of the water, and caused all those beautiful lights to swirl. He walked slowly about the dark, empty apartment. He kicked canvas off the floor so his feet would be on the fine old Central Park chestnut floors. The squeak of the wood and the lights on the dark sky on the other side of the park made him feel so good that he supposed he was at this moment very close to God, to Changó.
“I am living here,” he announced. “I am here with my wife and now I have three children. I have great rugs from Persia in the middle of the floor, but I have no rugs right here where I stand because I like the sound of this wood. I have everything I need. If I want a drink, I have a nigger working for me who runs into the kitchen and gets it for me. If my wife wants anything, there is a nigger maid who runs when she hears her name called. I am very gentle in my house, but the niggers know to run because they can see that Teenager gets mad. Where is my wife? She is in the bedroom putting on her fur coat. We are going out tonight. To a place where they play Bugaloo music. I will go to this place with my wife and we will show to the people our clothes and our jewelry and Wilfredo’s band will play. But I won’t stay there for so long. Because I like my house so much that I come back to here and I send my wife to bed and I stand here and look out the window and then the doorbell rings and I go in and let in the door my girlfriend. We go to my hideaway room, on the other side of the apartment, and we love till I am tired of her. Nobody bothers us. My wife knows that she is never to leave her bedroom at night. Then when I am finished with my girlfriend, I send her home. She can go home alone because she does not have far to go. She lives in the apartment on the next floor. I am so rich that I have two apartments in this very same building.”
Walking home, he thought of finding money or stealing some, so he would no longer have to dream of two apartments. Suddenly he let out a shout. Fernando Lebron, whom he knew from Puerto Rico, was standing on the street corner. His girlfriend Leonida was with him. She now was fifteen and she stood proudly on Broadway with her second baby pushing her stomach wall out.
“I deliver drugs,” Fernando said.
“How much money do you make?” Teenager asked.
“Not so much money as you think. I do not own the drugs. I only deliver them.”
“Whose drugs are they?”
“Guineas. Guineas own everything.”
“Why don’t Puerto Ricans own some drugs?”
“The Puerto Ricans own the jails,” Lebron said.
“That’s bullshit,” Teenager said.
“If I could make a living, do you think to my mind would come something like doing what I do?” Lebron said.
Lebron had his girlfriend write out Mama’s address, on Southern Boulevard in the South Bronx. Fernando never was able to read or write. In Playa, his mother took him once a week to San Pedro for psychiatric assistance. They found the part of his brain having to do with erections in sensational condition and the rest badly clogged. New York air had not changed this: his girl was pregnant and he was illiterate in two languages now.
“Where do you live?” Teenager asked Lebron.
“On 138th Street. We are three blocks from Mama. You should come. Many people from Playa are at 138th Street. You remember Maximo? He lives in my building.”
“Little Maximo?”
“He goes to school.”
Fernando Lebron and his girl went down the street and got into a Mercedes car that was double-parked. He had a car like this, Teenager reasoned, and he only delivered drugs, and he needed his pregnant girlfriend to ride around with him so she could read for him and help deliver drugs. What kind of car, then, could a man drive if he owned all the drugs instead of just delivering them?
The next night, Teenager and his wife walked through Central Park to the East Side and took the train up to the South Bronx. It was the first time they had left the West Side and they missed the stop and did not arrive at Mama’s until nearly 10 P.M. Mama was in her bathrobe and did not want to let them in. When Teenager told her where he was from, and that he had just found out that his wife had a fatal disease, Mama let them in.
“I will cure the disease,” Mama said.
“First I need money,” Teenager said. “When I have money, I can give the money to you and then for sure you’ll cure the disease.�
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Mama took out statues of Ochibia, the saint of all saints, and Changó, listened to seashells, read from the Bible, then moaned and shook with tremors.
“Soon you will have money,” she announced.
Within a week, Teenager and Lydia were in a three-room apartment in the building over Ana’s Bar on 138th Street and Sycamore Avenue in the South Bronx. They had a bed and television set and Teenager was standing in the evening outside Ana’s Bar with Fernando Lebron, who handed him twenty-five dollars and a dozen bags of heroin: white powder in glassine envelopes used to keep stamps in. Teenager took them to 119th Street and Third Avenue and handed them to a fat man in a leather cap. Teenager did this for Fernando a couple of more times, and then one night Fernando took him into Ana’s and introduced him to Ricardo who was shivering inside a gray overcoat. “I hope for the summer to come,” Ricardo said. He handed Teenager thirty dollars and a pocketful of envelopes to deliver to a guy in a red Plymouth on the corner of East Tremont and Sheridan Avenue. The trip took twenty minutes. Teenager earned another twenty-five dollars later in the evening for bringing envelopes over to Minerva Avenue in the Hunts Point section.
“Where do you get the envelopes from?” he asked Ricardo.
“This is my business. Your business is to carry them,” Ricardo said.
Teenager averaged four trips a week for Ricardo. One evening, Ricardo took Teenager through a door at the back of the room that led to a short staircase, at the top of which was a storeroom. He gave Teenager a paper bag. “Take this to a man and I will give you a hundred dollars,” Ricardo said.
“How much is in this bag?” Teenager said.
“A quarter key.”
“How much sentence do I get if they catch me?”
“Nothing,” Ricardo said. “They don’t bother little guys. They only want the big people.”
Outside, Teenager asked Lebron about this bag he was carrying.
“If you get busted with this amount they will give you years like they are days,” Lebron said.
Forsaking All Others Page 10
