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Authors: Ernesto B. Quinonez

Bodega Dreams

BOOK: Bodega Dreams
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ERNESTO QUIÑONEZ

BODEGA DREAMS

Ernesto Quiñonez studied writing at The City College of New York. He currently teaches bilingual fourth grade in the New York public school system and is at work on his second novel. He lives in New York City.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, locations, and organizations are used solely to lend the fiction a sense of authenticity and irony. All other characters and all actions, events, motivations, thoughts, and conversations portrayed in this story are entirely the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.

A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, MARCH 2000
FIRST EDITION

Copyright © 2000 by Ernesto Quiñonez

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Arte Publico Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from “La Bodega Sold Dreams” from
La Bodega Sold Dreams
by Miguel Pinero (Houston: Arte Publico Press—University of Houston, 1980).

A portion of this work was originally published, in somewhat different form, in
Bomb
magazine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Quiñonez, Ernesto. Bodega dreams / Ernesto Quiñonez.
p.    cm.
ISBN 0-375-70589-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5405-5
1. Puerto Ricans—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. I. Title PS3567.U3618L3 2000
813′.54—dc21            99-33380

Author photograph
©
Joyce Ravid

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

Contents

All died

hating the grocery stores

that sold them make-believe steak and bullet-proof rice and beans

All died waiting dreaming and hating

P
EDRO
P
IETRI
                    

—“Puerto Rican Obituary”

ROUND 1
Spanish for “Toad”

S
APO
was different.

Sapo was always Sapo, and no one messed with him because he had a reputation for biting. “When I’m in a fight,” Sapo would spit, “whass close to my mouth is mine by right and my teeth ain’t no fucken pawnshop.”

I loved Sapo. I loved Sapo because he loved himself. And I wanted to be able to do that, to rely on myself for my own happiness.

Sapo, he relied on himself. He’d been this way since we met back in the fourth grade when he threw a book at Lisa Rivera’s face because she had started to make fun of his looks by calling out, “ribbit, ribbit.” But in truth, Sapo did look like a toad. He was strong, squatty, with a huge mouth framed by fat lips, freaking
bembas
that could almost swallow you. His eyes bulged in their sockets and when he laughed there was no denying the resemblance. It was like one huge, happy toad laughing right in front of you.

As far back as I could remember Sapo had always been called Sapo and no one called him by his real name, Enrique. Usually Enriques are nicknamed Kiko or Kique. But Sapo didn’t look like an Enrique anyway, whatever an Enrique is supposed to look like. Sapo could only be Sapo. And that’s what everyone called him. It was rumored around the neighborhood that when Sapo came out, the nurses cleaned him
up and brought him over to his father. His father saw the baby and said, “
Coño
, he looks like a frog,” and quickly handed the baby to the mother. “Here, you take him.” I think this story is true. But Sapo never bitched, as if he had said, “Fuck that shit. I’ll love myself.” And that’s how I wanted to be.

To have a name other than the one your parents had given you meant you had status in school, had status on your block. You were somebody. If anyone called you by your real name you were
un mamao
, a useless, meaningless thing. It meant that you hadn’t proved yourself, it was open season for anybody who wanted to kick your ass. It was Sapo who taught me that it didn’t matter if you lost the fight, only that you never backed down. The more guys that saw you lose fights without ever backing down, the better. This didn’t mean you were home free, it simply meant bigger guys would think twice before starting something with you.

Getting a name meant I had to fight. There was no way out of it. I got beat up a few times, but I never backed down. “You back down once,” Sapo had told me, “and you’ll be backin’ down f’ the res’ of your life. It’s a Timex world, everyone takes a lickin’ but you got to keep on tickin’. Know what I’m sayin’,
papi?
” Sapo was one of those guys who went around beating other kids up, but Sapo was different. Sapo loved himself. He didn’t need teachers or anyone else telling him this. The meanest and ugliest kid on the block loved himself and not only that, he was my
pana
, my friend. This gave me hope, and getting a name seemed possible. So I decided that I no longer wanted to be called by the name my parents had given me, Julio. I wanted a name like Sapo had and so I looked for fights.

It was always easy to get into fights if you hated yourself. So what if you fought a guy bigger than you who would kick your ass? So what if you got stabbed with a 007 in the back and never walked again? So what if someone broke your nose in a fight? You were ugly anyway. Your life meant shit from the start. It was as if you had given up on the war and decided to charge the tanks with your bare fists. Nothing brave in it, you just didn’t give a shit anymore. It was easy to be big and bad when you hated your life and felt meaningless. You lived in projects with pissed-up elevators, junkies on the stairs, posters of the rapist of
the month, and whores you never knew were whores until you saw men go in and out of their apartments like through revolving doors. You lived in a place where vacant lots grew like wild grass does in Kansas. Kansas? What does a kid from Spanish Harlem know about Kansas? All you knew was that one day a block would have people, the next day it would be erased by a fire. The burned-down buildings would then house junkies who made them into shooting galleries or become playgrounds for kids like me and Sapo to explore. After a few months, the City of New York would send a crane with a ball and chain to wreck the gutted tenements. A few weeks later a bulldozer would arrive and turn the block into a vacant lot. The vacant lot would now become a graveyard for stolen cars. Sapo and I played in those cars with no doors, tires, windows, or steering wheels, where mice had made their nests inside the slashed seats. Sapo loved killing the little mice in different ways. I liked to take a big piece of glass and tear open what was left of the seat. I always hoped to find something the car thieves had hidden inside but had forgotten to take when they ditched the car. But I never found anything except foam and sometimes more mice.

Fires, junkies dying, shootouts, holdups, babies falling out of windows were things you took as part of life. If you were a graffiti artist and people knew you were a good one, death meant an opportunity to make a few bucks. Someone close to the deceased, usually a woman, would knock on your door. “
Mira
, my cousin Freddy just passed away. Can you do him a R.I.P.?” You would bemoan Freddy’s death whether you knew him or not, say you were sorry and ask what had happened, like you really cared. “Freddy? Freddy was shot by mistake. He wasn’t stealin’ not’en.” You’d nod and then ask the person on what wall she wanted the R.I.P. and what to paint on it. “On the wall of P.S. 101’s schoolyard. The back wall. The one that faces 111th Street. Freddy would hang there all night. I want it to say, ‘Freddy the best of 109th Street, R.I.P.’ And then I want the flag of Borinquen and a big conga with Freddy’s face on it, can you paint that?” You would say, “Yeah, I can paint that” and never ask for the money up front, because then you wouldn’t get tipped.

I painted dozens of R.I.P.s for guys in El Barrio who felt small and needed something violent to jump-start their lives and at the same time
end them. It was guys like these who on any given day were looking to beat someone up, so it was up to me to either become like them or get the shit kicked out of me.

BOOK: Bodega Dreams
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