After Delores (13 page)

Then I went over to Dino. His apron was covered with blood and he was looking old and shaking but he didn't say anything. Not even a moan or cry. He just tried to keep it all together by thinking about other things. The ambulance came and the cops came and when everything was cleaned up and settled down, Joe and me were the only ones left in the store. Eventually new customers started coming in again, looking for menus, not knowing about anything that had gone on before. So Joe and I looked each other in the eye, he heaved a sigh, and we started working again—me taking orders and him cooking them up.

18

SPRING CAN BE the
best time in the city because it's so emotional, but some years it only lasts a day. This year it rained cool and gray for two weeks, which gave everyone enough time to think something over. But as soon as the sun came out, it got hot and that was the end of that.

I woke up that morning right in the middle of spring and it was too early. The sun had already come up but no one was taking advantage of it yet. Although some kind of breeze stuck its hand in through the window every now and then, it was obviously just a matter of time before the heat became unbearable.

There was nothing in the refrigerator except a beer and the gun, freezing away on the top shelf. I brought them both back to the couch and stretched out, naked, my skin so soft. All I could let myself understand on that beautiful morning, balancing a gun on my belly, its nose nestling in my pubic hair, was a profound sadness.

Everything was in confusion. A young woman was dead with no explanation, unless Beatriz killed her to defend her honor. But, was honor reason enough to kill a sixteen-year-old? If the answer was yes, it was certainly reason enough to kill a photographer from
Vogue
. Charlotte and Beatriz held a secret for me, but I couldn't tell if their answer lay in love or violence. Whenever one was apparent, the other stirred in the shadows. I could not integrate those two feelings into my life the way they fit together so perfectly in theirs. Charlotte and Beatriz maintain their passion and brutality with each other, but I have to face all my anger alone. Before the first hour of this new day had gone, I was already angry again, punching my fists into imaginary faces and hearing the echo of old lies. Then I finished my beer.

By late morning I was agitated and sweating and decided to go outside. On the street, people were moving very slowly. Some of them ahd been drinking already too, unusually tall, warm beers in brown paper bags. They drank Colt or Bud, a dollar eighty-five a quart. I could afford rum. I was working.

It's men, for the most part, who drink outside in the morning in the park. They sit placidly on benches with shirts hanging from their belts, nipples brown like roasted coffee beans, listening to a Spanish radio station. I wanted to listen too, but they started talking to me and I couldn't hear what they were saying. I just stared because they moved slowly like branches, like movie screens as the projector breaks down. It was like the last moment of a dream when the telephone rings and you desperately want to keep sleeping because you know there's nothing at all for you out there.

This bag lady that I know was looking in the garbage for deposit bottles. She had white hair and a thousand wrinkles. Her face was like crushed velvet, like you could peel it off her and she'd be young again underneath. It's too awful to be so old and sleeping in the shelter.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “Let me tell you something.”

“All right, ma,” I said. “What is it?”

“It's awful,” she said. “It's awful when you ain't go no place to go and they put you in the street. To get a place, you gotta have a thousand dollars. How can I get that?”

She wore an old winter coat. She wore everything.

“I don't know, ma,” I said, giving her two dollars, but she didn't move on right away.

“It's awful,” she said, starting to cry from realizing the thousandth time that day how awful it really was.

“I know, ma.”

I was crying too. It was so hot. But the whole time, it was like she was on a television set and I wasn't crying for her because there are people just like her everywhere you look. I was crying for me because I didn't know how to live in this world. I had no idea.

“Let me come stay with you,” she said. “In your house.”

“No,” I said. I looked her in the eye and said no. I didn't even think of a reason why.

“Okay,” she said. We weren't crying anymore. Now it was back to business. “Okay,” she said, holding on to the dollars I gave her. She went on to the next garbage can and I had another hit of Bacardi.

19

WHEN I WOKE
up from my nap, someone had snatched the rum bottle and I had a sunburn on one-half of my face. I was grimy from head to toe plus Coco Flores was standing right over me, taking notes in her little spiral notebook.

“You make a great metaphor,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You look like a fucking wino. Get up. Come on.”

She didn't lift me from under my arms, or even offer a hand up. She just stood there and told me what to do.

“Listen,” Coco said. “Do you know that I like you?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It was embarrassing and I was still sleepy.

“Do you know why?” she asked, pointing me toward the water fountain.

“Why?”

I was really thirsty and then we washed up. I say “we” because Coco was standing there making sure I washed my neck and also my ankles, which somehow hadn't been washed in a long time.

“Because you see the world in a really individually twisted manner and so do I. If we don't stick together, one of us is going to get put away, and I don't think I'm first on that list. Do you understand? So don't lie around in the park like that. Any crazy could come along and smash a bottle over your head or spit on you.”

Her hair was streaked magenta, lavender, and some other color.

“Amethyst Smoke,” she said, fingering it playfully. “We just got it in the shop. Cute, huh? How many Puerto Ricans can you name with hair that's colors like Amethyst Smoke? Huh? That's really living.”

“Yeah.”

I felt like crying.

“Listen,” Coco said. “It doesn't matter who Dolores was, why you loved her then, and why you hate her now. Delores is a hallucination, so the facts are irrelevant. What's important is how hurt you are. You're so hurt that regardless of who or what she is, Delores has control. In other words, you lost, okay? That's the reality of the situation. Look, I'll tell you the truth. I never liked Delores anyway. She wouldn't even ask me how I was doing, you know? She's not a friendly girl. There, does that help you feel better?”

“What do
you
do to keep it together, Coco?”

“I'm busy right now experiencing life.”

“What's the difference between living it and experiencing it?”

“Now I'm seeing it with the narrative eye, you jerk. Take a look around. It's all there.”

I started checking out the park with Coco, and it gave me so many memories of all kinds of people. There were winners and losers and gays and straights and me and Delores. There were too many dogs, though, and the whole place smelled of piss.

“Hey, look.”

Coco pointed through the busted-up playground, next to the art gallery over by the condos where Cher was supposedly moving in soon. Two white women had been stopped by two white cops in one police car.

“Busted,” Coco said. “Come on.”

I followed her closer and closer until we were practically on top of the whole procedure. The cops were going though one of the women's pocketbook, taking out her personal things, and laying them on the hood of the car.

“Let's get closer,” Coco said. “If they know that someone is watching, the cops won't try any brutality. They hate it when someone watches them do a bust. They lose their cool.”

The woman being searched was definitely a junkie and couldn't keep a straight face. When he found a little piece of aluminum foil, she started jabbering away with half-baked explanations, as if talking as fast as you could would keep him from opening it. She was freaked out, scared, like she'd been inside ten times before and could not stand the idea of going in again.

Me and Coco were staring at the cop's fingers as he slowly unfolded the foil. He looked up once, looked right at us like he was nervous as hell. That's how close we were. He unfolded the first fold and he unfolded the second and then the third and then it was open. But there was no dope inside. No white powder, nothing. He couldn't believe it. He turned it over and over in his hand but there was nothing there. Then the woman remembered something. She started laughing and laughing. She remembered that she had gotten straight an hour ago and put the foil wrapper back in her purse. It was inside her, so he couldn't get his piggy paws on it or her. She was laughing really loud too. Then me and Coco were laughing and laughing. We all laughed until the cops drove away.

“Come on,” Coco said. “It's time for the Hard Core matinee.”

And still smiling, I followed her to the club.

20

SOME GUY WITH
an Iron Maiden tattoo vomited in our direction as Coco led me past all the new condominiums and few remaining flophouses left on the Bowery. We passed the shelter for homeless men, the lobster place with singing waitresses, putrid Phebe's, and walked through the grimy doorway of CBGB's, the punk palace. The people inside were loud and overwhelmingly ugly. Each one had processed their hair into such an advanced state of artificiality that they deprived everyone else close to them of touching it soft or smelling it sweet. It was teased up, stiffed into spikes, shaved, extended, and always dyed, in a procedure utterly boring and out of date. Didn't they know that Sid Vicious was the stuff of Hollywood movies and they too would soon be petrified in their hard-core status if they didn't get hip to a new thing real soon?

Everywhere there were kids and the kids were making deals, or imitating what they saw as the rough-and-tumble world of deal-making. Deals for bands, for gigs, for dope and sex. Deals that were nothing but big talk and small return. Deals because there was nothing else to talk about and the music was usually too loud to discuss anything substantial.

Also too many boys. Dirty boys trying to look mean, in training not to give a shit. Lots of boys in black boots, not a single one was pretty. The girls who hung onto them disappeared, but the girls who came in with each other were cute, chubby fourteen-year-olds with fake IDs, one shock of dyed black hair hanging over one eye. They were young enough to still be giggling from behind one cupped hand. Just like I used to do.

“See that girl?” said the sceevy boy standing next to his greasy friend. “She's an awesome fuck.”

Then the band blasted again.

CBGB's walls were covered with remnants of torn-off posters. Thousands of little corners still Scotch-taped to the wall, and then some larger scraps advertising the Nihilistics, False Prophets, and the Spineless Yesmen. The air-conditioning worked.

Napalm was the band that afternoon. They all had the same haircut, shaved frontal lobes with backside shags that made them look like moles coming up through Astroturf. Their other common denominator was big, dirty fingernails that no woman should ever let near her body. Three of them had old underwear sticking out of the backs of their pants, which had been bought at a fancy Saint Mark's Place boutique years earlier when they were still NYU students. Now, though, the asses sagged, the colors faded, and their entire wardrobes were stained from Stromboli's pizza and puking. Phone numbers scribbled on torn Marlboro packs, learning how to smoke and drink, not enough love, just rock-and-roll bands with no personality, filled that room that afternoon. Two rums for me and then an oblivion of noise.

Coco and I stumbled out of there both drunk, since Coco was susceptible to influence and my influence was a bad one.

“Hey Coke, do you mind if I call you Coke?”

“Only if you let me call you asshole.”

“Listen, Coco, there's Daniel, Beatriz's son.”

“Who?” “My friend's son Daniel.”

He was leaning against a car, looking as cool as a sweating teenager can look at four in the afternoon, deep in conversation with some white guy with dyed black hair.

“That's no Daniel,” Coco said, leaning on my arm a little bit. It was one thing to be drunk in the air-conditioning, but out there in the sun it really took its toll.

“That's Juan Colon. Last year he was Juan Colon, at any rate. This year he changed his name to Johnny. He's from PR.”

“That's no Juan Colon, I'm telling you.” I really wanted a cigarette and started feeling up all my pockets and casing the crowd for a good person to grub from. “His name is Daniel Piazzola. He's from Argentina.”

“No, man.” Coco was looking for cigarettes too and pulled out two crumpled Virginia Slims from the bottom of her bag. “I know him. He's from PR.”

Now we had to find matches.