Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  Myles jumped as a hand touched him.

  “The button,” Mama said.

  “What button?” Myles said nervously.

  “This one.” She touched a button that was hanging from the cuff of his checked polyester jacket.

  Myles looked down at it. “Oh, that one.”

  “Can I fix it for you?” Mama said.

  Black face shining, eyes unblinking, red and white beads around her neck, the dark people everywhere about him shrieking. When Myles did not answer or move, Mama reached for the button.

  “I fix this button,” she said. Her fingers pulled the button off the jacket. She stared directly into his eyes as one hand went into a straw purse and brought out a black cloth. She held the cloth in the palm of one hand and muttered a prayer in African. She dropped the button onto the cloth, then her hand closed on the cloth and placed it back into the straw bag. Her chin came up in a gesture of triumph.

  “I take this button and fix it in the cemetery.”

  She turned and walked down the aisle between the rows of writhing, chanting dark people.

  16

  THE DAY FLIGHT FROM New York arrived at midafternoon in Mexico City, where Gonzales, whom Teenager knew from the whorehouse in Belgica, the black section of Ponce, picked him up in a yellow BMW. As there is a 100 percent tax on imported cars in Mexico, Gonzales could not be a figure of importance unless he drove such a car for all to see and immediately respect. It was one of three he owned, the others being kept in Tampico, a tough dock town on the Gulf of Mexico where he did most of his trading business, and Culiacán, the city in the mountains of the West Coast where farmers could see no difference between growing poppy and cauliflower. Both required the same bent back, except that poppy was more valuable and therefore until such time as cauliflower similarly excited purchasers, the farmer’s landscapes, hidden in ravines, would consist of as much poppy as the earth could hold.

  At the section of Mexico City to which Gonzales drove Teenager, Zona Rosa, there was an outdoor cafe amidst the splendor of the Calle Genoa where a man of perhaps an inch over five feet directed a dancing bear through what seemed like a cheerful routine. On hind legs, the bear was at least two feet higher than the master, who held the bear by chain with one hand and poked a short heavy stick into the bear’s body with the other. Alongside the animal, the man looked like an active tree stump. “Jabealo,” young men at tables called. The short man sunk the stick into the bear’s flank. The pain caused the bear to grunt and sway his hips. The young men at the tables laughed and called for more.

  The bear should eat the little man in front of these maricons at the table, Teenager thought. He found his next thought more important: The realization that this was the first time in his life he had been with Hispanic people when they were customers of a place such as this, sitting in indolence, being as obnoxious as any white person with money, not chasing around as busboys. There were blinding white tablecloths and a sidewalk of dark pink lava stone, and art galleries and silver shops lined the cosmopolitan street, whose traffic consisted mainly of BMW’s and Mercedes cars.

  In Ponce, there had been rich families, the Serralles, Mayorals, Carbones and Vassallos, but never once had Teenager been in the same place with them. Here in Mexico City, everyone spoke Spanish and had skin of color and most had high cheekbones, but because they were of some wealth they were seated at tables with expensive drinks and demanding that the short man jab the bear with his stick.

  We do not have to live like dogs in the Bronx, either, Teenager told himself. Someday, all my people in the Bronx will be living like this, with waiters who bow because there will be much tips if they provide the feeling of importance. My business will accomplish all this; the only reason they try to stop me from doing my business is that I pay no taxes. Someday, they will realize that all the people want dope and someone has to sell it to them, so the government might as well collect taxes. Then I will pay them taxes and sit at any table in New York City, with rich white women at the very next table, and I will be treated better than the white women because the waiter knows where the best tip comes from.

  On his second drink, when he felt lazy enough to sleep at the table, he shook himself and said to Gonzales, “Tell me, brother, what do we do?”

  “Fly to Culiacán on the seven o’clock plane. It only takes an hour and forty-five minutes.”

  “Who do we see there?”

  “The man I do business with.”

  “Will he do a business with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why should he do this when he doesn’t know me?”

  “Because of me,” Gonzales said.

  “I haven’t seen you in years,” Teenager said.

  “You have a city,” Gonzales said. “If I don’t see you for a century, I want to do a business with you immediately because you come from a city.”

  At Culiacán, a shabby pastel city surrounded by dark mountains, they were met at the airport by a man introduced as El Manillo who was about twenty-five and had sullen lips and a thin neck laden with enough gold chains to approximate a medical brace. He drove a Mercedes that had no license plates. Beside El Manillo on the front seat was a fourteen-shot Browning .9 millimeter High-Power pistol. El Manillo, saying nothing, drove to a parking lot across the street from the side entrance to the Hotel Ejecutivo, then led Teenager and Gonzales into the bar, where he slid into a booth alongside an older man who sat heavy-eyed, a bottle of beer in his hands.

  “Wake up,” El Manillo said to the man.

  “The beer puts him to sleep,” Teenager said.

  “He is to farm … he is a farmer,” El Manillo said. “Arizmendi, say hello.”

  When Arizmendi only nodded, Teenager said, “Wake up. We must wake up Arizmendi. Here, Arizmendi, something to drink for Arizmendi. Two, brandy.”

  “Ah, enough, ah, I don’t need anything,” Arizmendi said.

  “He’s all right,” El Manillo said. He looked hard at Teenager. “My friend here,” he said, touching Gonzales, “says that you are from a city. What city?”

  “All the cities,” Teenager said.

  “Detroit City?”

  “Just one city. Soon I will live in all the cities in America.”

  “But you live now in New York City?”

  “Why do you ask if you know?” Teenager said.

  “Because Gonzales tells me. I just wanted to see what you told me.”

  “Do you know where Detroit City is?” Teenager asked.

  “No. They make cars, that’s all I know.”

  Teenager laughed. “Someday I will own New York City and Detroit. I will be like Rockefeller.”

  “The best poppy is in his ground,” El Manillo said, indicating Arizmendi.

  “This will make me Rockefeller,” Teenager said.

  “I know this name,” El Manillo said.

  “This is the man who owns my city,” Teenager said. “Maybe he owns this city of yours too. What we are discussing from now on, brother, is exactly how Rockefeller started. All the storybooks tell this to you. The grandfather of Rockefeller brought in opium. The government yelled at him. It was too late, man. The grandfather had all the money. He was bringing opium in, stepping on it himself, selling it himself. Top to bottom, man. Just what I’m going to do. It was easy for the grandfather to go into oil. He had all the money from dope, brother.”

  “With a farm you could do this?” El Manillo said.

  “I have to try to do it all by myself. Rockefeller will try to put me in jail for all of my life. He knows that I am starting just the way he did. He is afraid that I will become as big as he is. I will have all this money. I am not a white man. The Arabs will like me. If I have money they will give me some of Rockefeller’s oil. Then I will be as important as Rockefeller.”

  As Arizmendi now was asleep, El Manillo said they would meet at noon the next day in the hotel. Teenager and Gonzales remained in the bar for an hour and then took rooms for the night. The next day, El Manillo ca
lled and said he could not be there because of a birthday party for the aunt of his wife. He reset the date for the following day, at which time he arrived with a wide-awake Arizmendi. El Manillo also had five thousand grams of brown heroin as a sample of the quality of the farmer’s crop. Teenager reached into the bag El Manillo had on the chair alongside him and put some of the heroin on the tip of his tongue. He looked upward as he judged the bitterness.

  “I will have to try this in New York,” he said.

  “I used to use some of it for food,” Arizmendi said. “The seeds are very good for children.”

  “All the people eat the seeds,” El Manillo said.

  “Because of the good oil,” Arizmendi said.

  “Not this year,” Teenager said.

  “This year I take the rubber from every plant,” Arizmendi said.

  “Good rubber. Dope rubber,” El Manillo said.

  El Manillo paid the check and took the group out to a black vinyl-top red Ford LTD. As they were getting into the car, a man in a yellow shirt walked over and started talking to El Manillo.

  “We are going for a ride,” El Manillo said.

  “I want to do a business,” the yellow shirt said.

  “Get in,” El Manillo said.

  El Manillo drove to a rundown section called Tierra Blanca, which had narrow streets, one of which was blocked by a man riding a barebacked farm horse. They stopped at a two-story green wood building that had been cut up into apartments. El Manillo opened a first-floor apartment, that had two stained mattresses on the floor and a table and a couple of broken chairs.

  Teenager put twenty-nine thousand dollars in fives, tens and twentys on the table as payment for part ownership in Arizmendi’s poppy farm. When it was counted, it was El Manillo who took the money.

  “Do you want to see the farm?” Teenager’s friend Gonzales said.

  “Of course.”

  El Manillo and Arizmendi sat in the front seat and Teenager, Gonzales and the man in the yellow shirt sat in the back. As the car drove out of Culiacán, the man in the yellow shirt asked Teenager, “What is your name again?”

  “Teenager.”

  “Joven,” the yellow shirt said to himself, in Spanish, in order to help memorize the name.

  “And you are from New York City?”

  “Yes,” Teenager said. He said it uneasily, and he was sure that he was going to get the yellow shirt alone sometime during the day and choke him and ask him why he asked so many questions. Just then, El Manillo said to the yellow shirt, “Why did you want to come on this ride with us?”

  “I just want to do a business with you. I have nothing else to do.”

  El Manillo nodded. He drove on Federal Highway 6 and then to Autopista De Culiacán Litoral. After an hour on the highway, he drove up to a restaurant called the Barba Azul. He said that from this point on, the drive was into the mountains and could only be made with a four-wheel-drive jeep. Sometime in the next few hours, he said, a man from Arizmendi’s farm would come to the restaurant in such a vehicle.

  El Manillo took Teenager off to the side. “This guy with us, I don’t like him,” he said. The man in the yellow shirt sat and drank beer with Arizmendi.

  “Why do you keep him with you?” Teenager said.

  “So he won’t be around to bother me some other day,” El Manillo said.

  “Do what you have to do, brother,” Teenager said.

  “I wish we didn’t have to wait here all day,” El Manillo said.

  “So we won’t wait,” Teenager said.

  “It’s just a farm,” Teenager’s friend Gonzales said. “It grows from the ground, brother, I guarantee you that.”

  Teenager shook hands with Arizmendi and said he couldn’t wait for the trip to the farm.

  A shadow of disappointment appeared on yellow shirt’s eyes and just as quickly went away. Yellow shirt got into the front seat with El Manillo and they drove back to Culiacán. El Manillo drove the car onto an empty street and stopped in front of the church of Nuestra Senore De Guadalupe.

  “You get out now,” he told yellow shirt.

  “Why?”

  “Because we are going someplace and you cannot come.”

  As the man got out of the car, El Manillo shot him four times in the back of the yellow shirt, pulled the car door shut and drove back to the Tierra Blanca, where Teenager and Gonzales left in a taxicab for the airport and the evening plane back to Mexico City.

  The dead man in the yellow shirt was identified later as Rafael Torres-Cruz, Mexican Federal Judicial Police informant number 7-376-4532. He became the 976th homicide in Culiacán from the period, 1 January 1977 until 14 August 1977. The local police, State of Sinaola Police Department, announced that it would investigate the death. The Mexican Federal Judicial Police in charge said that his investigation was hampered because any legitimate inquiry would have to be done in the area known as Tierra Blanca, and no police agents of any sort were allowed in that section by the people who reside there.

  Back in Mexico City, watching the dancing bear at night, Teenager felt highly prosperous.

  He no longer had to beg for dope, he reminded himself. Now he grew it.

  17

  WHEN SHE HEARD HER mother caterwauling somewhere in the back of the house, Nicki called from the kitchen.

  “You better,” her mother shrieked.

  “Better what?”

  “You just better.” Her mother was in the hallway.

  “You better tell me what these are doing in your closet,” the mother said, carrying in the three boxes of towels that Nicki had bought for Maximo.

  Nicki’s answer was to sip her coffee.

  The top of her mother’s blue quilted housecoat expanded as she took a deep, angry breath. A wind shear came from her mouth. “I’m looking for a place on your shelf to put your pocketbook and I find these boxes and I say, ‘What the hell is this?’ So I open them up and look what I find. We got no orange towels in this house. We got every color in the world, we got no orange towels in this house.” She took the top off a box to show good, heavy Martex orange towels.

  “They’re a shower gift,” Nicki said.

  “Yeah? For who?”

  Nicki looked up from her fingernails and into her mother’s eyes. There was no way that she could lie to the woman; the mother felt that anyone who could state an untruth to her was insulting her very being. How could she, the mother made it plain, who in her own life kept truth in captivity and regarded a lie as a statement of strength and superiority over the person being spoken to, allow herself to be manipulated by the lie of another? And for her own daughter to attempt even elementary deceit was utter betrayal.

  “For nobody,” Nicki said.

  “Well,” the mother said, putting the boxes on the table.

  “Ma, it was either this or go crazy.”

  “But you go to see him.”

  “Ma.”

  “I guess so. But you were so good for so long.”

  “And I’ve been going crazy for so long.”

  “He’ll get paroled.”

  “Ma, this got nothing to do with him. The minute he comes out, I live my life out to the end with him. This thing now has got to do with me. I can’t last anymore.”

  “Only to the parole,” the mother said.

  “The minute I hear he’s getting out.”

  “This guy now, he’s not Italian,” the mother said.

  “Of course not,” Nicki said. “Then the whole world would know.”

  “Swear on God.”

  “I swear.”

  “Oh, if your father ever knew. That would be the end of everything.”

  “Don’t I know that! Ma, he’ll never know anything.”

  “Does that mean this guy is Irish?” No.

  “At least I could be thankful for that.”

  “He’s Puerto Rican.”

  The mother gathered the boxes and stood up. “Don’t make no jokes with me. You’re playing with our lives here.”


  “It’s the truth, Ma.”

  The mother, paying no attention to this, said, “There’s ways that these things are supposed to be done. The women have to wait for the men. So all right. A little something goes on that nobody has to know about. But don’t make no jokes about it. Because if we ever got caught, believe me, it would be no joke.”

  “What do you mean we got caught?”

  “Because even if I don’t want to know nothing more about it, which I don’t, I’ll still get blamed for it.”

  “By Ronnie?”

  “Ronnie. He better not say anything to me about anything or I’ll slap him like a fag. Your father is the one I’m worried about. He’ll blame me.”

  “Ma, he’ll never know.”

  “He better not.”

  The mother left the kitchen with the towel boxes and Nicki sat with coffee and thought of how Maximo would look with the bright orange towel wrapped around his waist. Standing in the bedroom, the towel knotted at the side and hanging up on its own because the waist was so beautifully proportioned. Looking for something on the bureau. While I’m in his bed looking at his back, Nicki thought.

  She had made a date to bring the towels to his house on a Saturday, a day Maximo had spent in the red brick library on Southern Boulevard, a small building that sat amid the ruins that ran for so many blocks that to concentrate on them was to strain the vision. Bleached by the sun, the ruins took on the quality of a desert, the library becoming a French outpost in the sand. Two dogs, outcasts from an Arab alley, were on the sidewalk in front of the library, gnawing at fleas on their flanks. When the library closed at four o’clock, Maximo walked past the dogs, along with the only two people who had been in the reading room with him, an old woman, who had gone through a book on Thomas Jefferson, and a boy of about twelve, whose afternoon had been spent taking notes from a picture-and-text book about iron forging in Colonial times.