‘Poor Misery Guts Ricardo,’ I said, touched yet desperate for another bump, and now I knew it was a present from his mother, I thought wryly, ‘A mother’s love is never toxic.’
His mother was a beautiful woman. ‘Sculptural’ might be a better word, always dressed in leather and sequins. All she had in the world was Ricardo and a peacock driven half mad by her son throwing stones at it. Worried at the poor grades her son was getting at school, she spent her evenings showing him slides of her trips abroad and visits to museums. ‘The Acropolis in Athens was the worst,’ Ricardo used to say. That was when he usually fell asleep and would be woken by a jugful of cold water. Eventually his mother got bored and decided to ignore him. Ricardo got up before everyone else and had breakfast alone; he’d have lunch out – a fifty-peso sandwich and a Coca-Cola – and come home late at night, terrified, to eat his dinner cold. ‘She’s the one who ignores me the most,’ he complained.
We crossed the Parque Versalles in silence, not thinking about its scabby pine trees, not breathing too deeply, but even so they made me feel nostalgic for Christmas and summer holidays. When we came out on to the street, Ricardo decided he needed music. ‘Hey, why don’t you turn on your radio?’ So I turned it on and it started blasting out this incredible hard rock. I looked at Ricardo excitedly. ‘They’re called Grand Funk Railroad,’ he informed me. He knew stuff. I was in awe of him.
‘Oh, this is going to be a great day,’ I said, a little relieved to have made it through the park without any weird thoughts, and I threw up my arms. And as I did so, I heard our music multiplied on the next corner and the next, all the way to the parking lot at Sears Department Store.
Had someone turned a radio up full blast or was there dancing? ‘Dancing? At this time of day?’ asked Ricardo, but I didn’t answer; I went wild, I rushed across the Avenida Estación and raced down to the right corner, my corner, convinced that when I got to Sears’ parking lot I’d find they’d set up ‘Centro a Go-Go’ again, my absolute favourite ’60s thing.
Just three or four more steps, and already I was imagining what it would be like to see that big canvas and nylon marquee again, thronged with people, sagging under the weight of so much music so early in the day. ‘I can start all over,’ I promised myself. ‘Start what?’ At the very least I’d get to relive two moments: first, I’d see her, the dancer in the black-and-white checked miniskirt – totally Op Art – watch her lithe, sure-footed style, her beautiful thighs, watch her win First Prize; second, I’d see him as he arrived, the boy in the pink shirt – shocking pink for the time – with hair down to his shoulders, my first long-haired guy. The crowds would part as everyone stared at him, watching him dance with the chick in the miniskirt, and he wasn’t all that good but he wasn’t embarrassed and I wasn’t embarrassed for him. ‘This is the dawn of a new era,’ I thought in exhilaration. That same night he was gunned down by the El Águila gang. The bullet went straight through his nose, his whole face was a swollen ball of blood, a huge bubble floating in the spellbound gaze of boys who’d never seen a dead man before; it floated for a moment and then suddenly burst with no noise, no spatter. The three guys who killed him got the fuck out of town (a while later I met someone in a queue who knew them). They shut down the ‘Centro a Go-Go’ the next day.
As I took the last step, I thought, ‘I have to choose, I can’t get to see both moments again: I have to choose between the dancer and the bubble.’ I made up my mind. ‘The dead guy,’ I thought, ‘the dead guy.’ And then I turned the corner.
There were only two people in the vast parking lot. No milling crowds, no dancing. Nobody but Bull and Tico, who were joined at the hip, passing between them a transistor that was even smaller than mine and blasted out music at a volume that, as Ricardito quickly pointed out, was ‘Far out! I know that model, it’s a new one from Japan.’
When they saw us and smiled, I thought, ‘They were there that night, they remember it too.’ And then I thought, ‘But they don’t remember it like I do. They’ve come here to soak up the sun on the only patch of open space in north Cali.’ A space, I might say, that no longer exists. Colombina, the company that makes sweets for export, built a thirty-storey tower block there.
They were happy to see me. They didn’t try to hide it, they bobbed straight over, whereas I’d have preferred to meet them in the middle. Bull hung back slightly, I noticed. Was he tired of seeing me so much? I’d been really close to him in the summer of ’66 on the Carretera al Mar, then he joined forces with Tico and after that the truth is I never saw him hanging out with girls any more. Tico, yes.
‘Hey, guys,’ they said. ‘Cool sounds … Great minds …’
‘Why don’t we chill together for a bit, yeah? How many rumbas are going down today?’
‘Three,’ they told me. ‘One at Pretty Patricia’s [who was a complete bitch when it came to guys], one over at Skinny Flores’s – he’s just come back from the States with a shitload of records; no one knows where the third one’s going to be. Everyone’s meeting up in the park by the Teatro Bolívar and we’ll wing it from there.’
‘The one at Flores’s place sounds cool,’ I said, and they thought so too. ‘So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go …?’ I said, all charm.
We headed off, but not before some snide compliments about Ricardo’s shirt, who reacted viciously to their disparaging comments about the colour and fabric.
We walked slowly across the parking lot and I was sorry I hadn’t worn thick-soled shoes. The ground was sizzling. At Avenida Sexta, we reached the mimosa trees and their fragrant pools of shadow.
At the time, I lived in the most representative, most riotous area of El Nortecito, the triangle defined by Avenida Squibb, Parque Versalles and Deiri Frost. This was true north, the place where people topped themselves. The rest – Viperas, La Flora, etc – are just grubby, vulgar suburbs. My north was tragic, cruel and depraved. My window overlooked the Parque Versalles. I was friends with the youngest of the Castro kids, the one who put a bullet through his head in shame, after being humiliated by some cop in Felidia. I was the only friend of the oldest boy in the Higgins clan, an enigmatic, asthmatic, English family. He died of insanity, starvation (he never felt hungry) and insomnia (he never felt tired); the other brothers – there were three of them – are still around somewhere; I think they grew up to be delinquents.
This was the north where twelve-year-old kids grew up learning the solitary vices eighteen-year-olds had only just discovered and were enthusiastically promoting; the north of magnificent dancers and airgun snipers. I don’t go back much these days, but when I do the people who know me are pleased to see me. Really I’m just waiting for them to come down to the corner of Calle Quince and Avenida Quinta where I live now, to lose themselves, come slum it with the sleazy plebs. And being a good comrade, I take good care of them and send them stumbling home late, struggling to forget me, swearing to themselves they won’t be back, won’t come back next Saturday, because those who come do come back, never go home again. And there’s not one of them who has the strength, the stamina, the wit and the know-how that I have when it comes to living this twilight existence.
On the corner of Sexta and Squibb we ran into Pedro Miguel Fernández, the guy who would later poison his three sisters, Carlos Phileas, an H. G. Wells fanatic, and Lucio del Balón, who I’m convinced will one day be a famous doctor. All three were carrying stacks of books. They’d been revising for some exam or other, they said, but needed a break, so they joined our gang and we headed south.
The pavement wasn’t wide enough for all of us, and Ricardito had to walk on the verge. I walked in the middle and since they’d all heard rumours about how I spent my nights these days, they had questions and I didn’t interrupt any of them; I answered everyone slowly and succinctly – I remember how they craned their necks, how their faces lit up wit
h each flick of my hair, because what people said was true, it was refreshing, it cooled the day – and as we came closer to the south it was obvious from the heads that popped out of bus windows, from the two guys who tagged along with the group, that my reign had begun. And how terrible for a queen, newly crowned by the sun, to find there was already a hotbed of treason in the person of none other than Ricardito Sevilla, Misery Guts, the Sempiternal Malcontent. He hadn’t said a word for a while now, just stared at the ground, watching where he walked, as though expecting to fall on his face at any moment.
I began to worry that he’d defect, which would have been terrible, first because his hallucinogenic shirt suited my colouring, secondly because he translated beautiful English lyrics for me when I asked and thirdly because for three or four blocks now I’d been dying to suggest we duck behind a tree – I didn’t care if the others thought we were a couple – so he could give me another hit of coke.
When I saw that dark look on his face, saw he wasn’t walking but dragging his feet and, worst of all, that he’d started glancing over his shoulder, I said, ‘Are you feeling what I’m feeling?’
I swear he did a double take, he stopped dead in his tracks and the whole gang had to slow down to wait for him. This was my way of reminding him about the psychedelic connection between us, but he didn’t get it, or if he did, the smug bastard just thought, ‘Yeah, what the fuck do I care?’
But this setback couldn’t quash the effect of my joyful mood or my smile. The fickle radio segued from hard rock into the cheesy ballad ‘Llegó borracho el borracho’, which I immediately nixed (as did Tico), setting off a symphony of static and squeals in search of the best station, of consensus. ‘There’s no music,’ I thought in desperation. Tico looked to me for help but I couldn’t find anything either so I handed the radio to Misery Guts Ricardito, tossing it to him like a hot brick.
‘Found something,’ said Tico and I stared at Misery Guts Ricardo, waiting to see if he’d agree. He vented his misery, his deep unhappiness, by tuning to a station and blasting out: ‘In the faraway mountains there’s a horseman who’s riding; he’s alone in this world and for death he is biding.’ You should have heard the racket. The glorious ‘House of the Rising Sun’ (an oldie but a classic) clashing with ‘A Horseman’, to say nothing of the fact that we were strolling beneath rain trees and ceibas at exactly the time of day the cicadas were chirping. Tico angrily cranked up the volume on his tiny, powerful transistor. I gave Ricardito a dirty look and said: ‘Come on, please, tune to the same station, we’re a gang.’ By now at least one of the guys was itching to beat him up. ‘Put on something English or I’ll thump you.’ He took the path of least resistance: he turned off the radio.
In the silence, Tico’s transistor sounded magnificent, the lead guitar shrieked, the bass boomed and Eric Burdon’s wail (I knew the Spanish cover version by Los Speakers, so I understood the lyrics) seemed to draw a blanket of shadow from the mountains, a square blanket that moved quickly towards the city, drawn by this purring, and for the first time that Saturday, we had complete shade. And with it came the sea breeze.
‘Tico,’ I said, ‘that radio of yours is wild,’ and he flicked up his collar as Bull gave a jealous cough. ‘With music like this,’ I said, looking at the boys, ‘I’m all yours.’
I didn’t really know what I was saying.
‘But you’re not mine,’ protested Ricardito, and then said, ‘I’m off, I’m out of here.’ He looked daggers. I grabbed him by the shoulder. It wasn’t a hug and he could feel that, but he just looked at me even more arrogantly. The other guys probably thought it was a lovers’ tiff.
I took him aside leaving – God forgive me – a gaping hole in that group of gorgeous guys, who understood and waited. A Simca drove past and Pedro Miguel Fernández, the future poisoner, recognized two girls he knew waving to him and preening like peahens; the car pulled over.
‘Why are you leaving?’ I asked Ricardito.
‘Sorry,’ he said quickly, coldly. ‘Too many people. It’s making me jittery.’
‘Yeah, I noticed.’
I made a decision; shelving those scruples that plague me these days, I said, ‘Before you go, you couldn’t … leave me a little something?’ I looked him straight in the eye, he couldn’t resist.
He didn’t resist, but he got his own back: ‘That’s the only reason you like me. Here …’
He handed me the whole wrap. I was astonished by the whiteness of his hands, by his veins. To tell the truth, I didn’t care if the gift was intended as an insult. I thought about Mariángela. I blessed him.
‘You take care,’ I said finally.
I enjoyed seeing him turn his back, hating me. It always freaked him out when people tell him to take care. ‘It’s like there’s an ambush waiting down the road,’ he’d say, ‘and the person telling me to take care knows where and when it’ll happen, but they won’t tell me because they’re too scared and too selfish.’ I watched him as he quickly lolloped away. He’d never been a pack animal. He could never dig groups.
As I turned round, the Simca was just moving off and Pedro Miguel was running back to the group.
‘Another rumba,’ he announced. ‘That makes four. A bonfire on a farm down by the River: toasted marshmallows and Latino rock.’
‘Sounds shit,’ I thought. ‘Latino rock and no one with a word of English to understand it.’
Now that we had a bit of shade, we walked more slowly. I’m sure you, gentle reader, are familiar with the frantic scurrying of a man walking in the blazing sun, looking around for any wall that casts a two-inch strip of shadow where he can shelter, shivering, till nightfall.
Ricardito stalked off, convinced that everyone would be talking about him, asking me questions about him. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Carlos Phileas talked about getting state funding to develop Cavorite8 and a drug that would make it invisible. He came up with an apposite simile – ‘Invisible as cicadas that die from too much singing’ – because now we were in the shade, all the trees fell silent as we passed. Everyone knows sunshine irritates cicadas and they sing to forget. When they’re not singing, they’re fast asleep and when they sing too much, they explode.
I tried to describe melodically what the night might bring now that all of us were together, assigning each guy a role, an attitude; they would all share me. If they stuck around. As we passed Deiri Frost we were listening to Santana and two blocks later to a Beatles medley some imaginative presenter had put together.
Just then came the fateful meeting, though actually it was more of a damp squib. Distracted by the mountain peaks that were like mirrors, I was thinking, ‘Here comes the sun,’ steeling myself and reassuring myself ‘my face will stay fresh’, staring straight ahead, counting the number of blocks before we arrived at Oasis. As I finished counting, I noticed two guys in thick work boots carrying piles of books as high as their heads, trudging along exhausted, bow-legged and shy: Armando the Cricket and Antonio Manríquez.
‘The Marxists,’ I thought, feeling the urge to peel off from my gang of groovy youths and go over to them, because, like I said, I had – still have – a lot of respect for their minds.
But I did what I had to do. I thought, ‘It’s not like I’m going to run into these loners tonight or any other night, and anyway I don’t fancy either of them. If I go over and explain, they won’t believe my reasons for not showing up this morning and I’ll just wind up offending the guys I’m with.’ So I kept on walking, chatting to everyone, smiling at everyone. By now, we were two pavements wide; numerically speaking, we were a force to be reckoned with.
All the more intimidated, the Cricket and Manríquez ducked behind the stacks of books, flashing their titles. I stopped because we’d reached Oasis. They stopped to bitch at me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘There was a proble
m, you know what my mother’s like. Did you get much reading done?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ said the Cricket.
‘Oh my God, yes – unwashed, unshaven, bags under your eyes – I’m really sorry. You know how committed I am to the struggle. Why don’t we meet up Monday?’
‘Same time,’ said the Cricket and they walked on, crushed by the sun as it flattened the world.
I turned away quickly so as not to get a downer. It was a brilliant move because leaning against the wall a block away, looking like she’d seen it all and didn’t much care for any of it, stunningly beautiful and staring straight at me, was Mariángela. With her was Prometheus himself, flaming red hair and all, chained to a huge guitar case. ‘She’s brought music,’ I thought, skipping over to them. And she rewarded me with a smile, which, I’m sure, was her first of the day.
‘Quiay, pelada,’ we greeted each other and she introduced me to her way-cool escort, Leopoldo Brook, who was just back from the USA and played rock. I thought, ‘I need an interpreter,’ and cursed Ricardito for abandoning me. ‘I’ll die of embarrassment tonight if this guy sees me getting all emotional over lyrics I don’t even understand.’
They’d already heard about the four rumbas, and had decided to go to Flores’s place.
I went back to round up my handsome boys, who, as soon as we arrived at Oasis, had scattered to the three corners of the block – but not the fourth, where Mariángela was; they were in awe of her but afraid of her too. So began the wait for night, but it was an enjoyable wait since there was no chance of being stood up; it was a date and everyone had turned up early. But it’s never easy, spending the whole afternoon in south Cali: you had to constantly dodge the negative vibes of relatives and enemies; you had to deal with the fact that all these guys were psychedelic – some of them were coming down when they showed up, hoping that hanging out with a crowd of beautiful people would take the edge off the sudden slowness of things, the terrible weight in the stomach that somehow heaves into the throat … There were always long queues for the gents’ toilet, guys trying to make themselves lighter and calmer by taking a shit after their trip.
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