Chango's Fire (4 page)

“But I don't really mind the Mexicans, I don't really fucking mind,” Mario takes a drag, and when he speaks, clouds of smoke escape his mouth and nostrils, making him look like a newly fired-up chimney. “What I fucking hate is you treating me like one of them!”

Just then the real owners of those names start trickling in. They drive their cars by the construction site. Out-of-towners entering Spanish Harlem, nothing new these days. Some stay in their cars, some park. The Mexican workers hand their checks over to the owners of the names, the owners of those social security numbers. And the owners of the names hand the Mexicans cash.

It's all profit, really. These union jobs pay sixteen dollars an hour, the Mexican is given five, the owner of the name takes eleven. The undocumented worker is making more money than he ever imagined, the average wage in Mexico being four bucks a day, other parts of Latin America even less. The owner of the name, the member of the union, can spend his days doing other things or nothing, the buildings gets gutted, later renovated, yuppies rent them, and everyone is happy. So everyone keeps quiet. No one asks. You don't ask. You never ask.

When I told Eddie to help me find a real job, with benefits and union, Eddie offered me this job. He told me I didn't have to show up, just get an illegal alien to front for me. They don't complain, he said to me. Besides, demolition work is brainless work, you're tearing down walls and roofs, any idiot can do that. Put your American citizenship to work, he said. It's the way New York City was built. I should relax, Puerto Ricans already put in their time, let some other sucker group build the country. He said it as if Puerto Ricans were now part of the American Dream, as if we had arrived, just because we seemed to be in more movies these days.

Still, as long as I show up, it's legitimate work, and there are very few genuine aspects in my life. So I show up and work, because I want as much legitimacy as I can get away with.

“Julio Santana,” the boss calls my name and I walk over to get my check.

“You're one of Eddie's fire bugs, right?”

“No,” I say, because I would never admit that to anyone.

“No? Don't fuck with me, the only check with a Spanish name? Don't fuck with me.”

“Don't know what you talking about,” I say for no good reason. The boss knows I'm lying.

“Listen, Julio, don't take offense when I play around with these Mexicans, okay? I mean, I don't know if you're Mexican. But I do know you must be an American cuz you got a social and all. And tell Eddie that I said hello, okay?”

“If I see him, I'll tell him.”

“Yeah, George, tell him Georgie says hello and this is all yours,” he says, handing me my check. He looks at the Mexicans trading in their checks for cash to the real owners of the names. SUV after SUV, the true owners of their American identity.

“I tell you, Julio, one day those Mexicans are going to catch hell from the blacks, like the blacks caught it from the whites.”

“Why's that?” I fold my check, put it in my back pocket.

“Because it's not that blacks won't work really, I say niggers are lazy but that's not really true. They just won't work for peanuts, like the tacos here. So, when they see Mexicans working for shit wages they'll get angrier than they already are, because now they have no bargaining power at all.”

“What makes you think the blacks will come after the Mexicans and not the whites who are using the Mexicans?” I say, looking at both parties. The undocumented workers counting their bills and their contemporary slave masters driving away with their weekly checks for doing nothing but being Americans. Both parties happy, for now.

“Because when you Porto Ricans showed up in Spanish Harlem,” the boss says, “we took it out on you and not on the Jews or Irish, or whoever the fuck was running the show.”

The boss looks at the workers happily counting their money, exchanging laughter, sun in their faces.

“Okay let's go,” the boss rains on them. “I want you working on those buildings like you were the ones who were going to live in them.” He laughs.

The boss heads back to the trailer, knowing the workers didn't understand what he said, but he's happy because he can yell at them at any time of the day and whenever he wants.

I get ready to go back to work, stripping decades-old tar off the roof. Back inside the building, there is dampness and a smell of wet wood, plaster and old paint. I climb up to the roof, and Antonio starts talking to me in Spanish as I prepare the air hose for the jack.

“Mano,
what do you do with your money?”

“I put it away,” I say, though it's none of his biz.

“You know there is talk you are homesexual,” Antonio says, laughing.

“Who's saying it?” I ask, not really happy to know this.

“Everybody. We all have families back home, and you who live here freely do not. Your friend, the
santero,
is gay.”

“Maybe I don't want to get married. Maybe I like being alone. And the
santero
you're talking about, yeah he's gay,” I say in Spanish. “But he's my friend not yours.”

“I am just asking,
mano,
just asking.” Antonio steps back a bit, like he is excusing himself. “Still,” he says in Spanish, “you always keep to yourself and never talk to nobody. In my country a man like you is always a homosexual.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good.”

“I mean, I wish I was like you,” Antonio says in Spanish, “only not a homosexual.”

“Yeah, why's that?” I say, not wanting to cut him off, but I'm ready to crank up the jack and start cutting up the tar from the roof.

“What money I would make,
mano”
he says, rubbing thumb and forefinger together, as though he is starting a fire in his hand, “what money, if I had no wife, no children, no debt. I would be a big man and then I would buy a big house and then a big—”

I start the jack and begin cutting the roofs tar.

Antonio's face slams shuts like a storefront gate. I have insulted him but I don't care. I don't really know him and he has no bearing on how I live my life. Antonio curses something at me but I don't pay him any mind.

Cutting up tar, I ask myself what is with this marriage thing? Why is it so important, as if being alone is worthless? Mom and Pops, now this guy? Please. I don't exactly like my life the way it is, but it's better than some people's. Yes I'd like to meet a nice girl, have nice children. Problem is, my recent past isn't all that nice. What will I say to her when she asks me how I managed to buy an apartment? What do you do for a living? I'd have to lie. I am getting tired of lying. But, hopefully, I am slowly getting out. I have severed my ties with Eddie and am attending night school and slowly setting my life back on track. I am righting my wrongs. So I leave at that and continue my job.

A
fter work, I walk to the check-cashing place. I carry all these secrets with me, and so I don't want a real bank account, because I figure the less paper trail the better. Afterwards I walk home with a wad of cash in my pocket and, like most other days, when I reach my street, I stop and stare at my building, at the third floor, carefully. See that floor, I own it, I tell myself. It's twilight, and a yellow-orange sun is hitting the window of my room. I see Mami's silhouette pass by the window in my parents' bedroom, and I smile, thinking they must have been fighting and she moved herself to the living room. On the first floor, I see a brother from Maritza's crazy church fighting with the entrance gate that is stuck. Tonight they have service, and though Maritza keeps inviting me, I never go. I also see Helen walking into the building, coming back from work? I think. Her petite figure is elegant and curvy. Her hair is in a ponytail that bounces with each step. I forget about her making me ring the other night, because she looks so vulnerable, so small and fragile.

Next door, at the botanica, Papelito comes out to empty yesterday's glass of water. He delicately tosses the old water onto the street, getting rid of the impurities in his botanica.

“Julio,
mi amor,”
he spots me and shouts from across the street, “watchoo doing there,
hijo de
Chango, uh?”

“I got this month's,” I yell back. Papelito waits for the cars to go by so he can join me across the street and, soon, drivers who know him brake so he can pass.

Black as tar, with no trace of Spaniard blood in his lineage, at sixty-eight, Papelito is a man made up of rumors. It is said he can kill with prayers. Papelito is the only gay man who can walk the streets of Spanish Harlem swaying his hips like a cable-suspended bridge and not be ridiculed. Frail and delicate as if the wind could sweep him away, he has a certain flamboyant arrogance, a confidence, because he is protected by a religion that is as beautiful, as misunderstood and as feared as he is. As a high priest, a
babalawo,
of Regla Lukumi, better known as Santeria, Papelito is feared and loved by many.

“Mira, lindo,
Trompo Loco is looking for you.”

“I heard. What does he want?”

“He didn't say but when I told him I hadn't seen you, he got mad. You know and began twirling himself like a top until he fell to the floor. I said to him,
mijo,
you want some tea?”

“I'll go find him,” I say to Papelito and hand him this month's mortgage in cash with an extra hundred for him.

Because it was Papelito who I came to for help when I needed to have someone else's name on the deed of my mortgage. I had saved a lot of money setting fires for Eddie, and I knew the IRS would ask how did I buy that apartment on my demolition job salary and wasn't I a part-time student? I knew I'd be caught. So I had to find someone who could explain the money. But in Spanish Harlem everyone is poor and it was hard to find a front. I knew Papelito owned the largest botanica in the neighborhood and when I asked him for help he looked at me like I was asking him to commit murder. He gave me those
brujo
stares that all the men in this neighborhood are scared of him for. I didn't blame Papelito. What I was asking was risky, and what if I faulted on my mortgage, it would be him who'd be taking the fall, maybe lose his botanica. So he said to me the best he could do was consult the Orishas, the black gods, for advice.

The next time he saw me, he tenderly and excitedly kissed my cheek.
“Mira payah!
How can I refuse a favor to a son of Chango!” A happy Papelito told me that if I get initiated into Santeria, that it would be the Orisha, the god, Chango, a representation of fire and lightning, who would claim me as his son. So that's what he calls me,
“Hijo de
Chango,” and because Papelito believes that Chango is always watching over his children, to deny me a favor would be to insult one of his gods.

Don't know whether that's true, I only know that because of his religion's secretive and silent rituals, Papelito is trustworthy and I'd be safe from neighborhood gossip and, more important, the IRS. So I have to keep it all low and under.

“Mira
Julio,
mi amor,”
Papelito takes the money from my hand with the grace of a dolphin, “I had this dream.” Papelito elegantly tucks the money inside a pocket of his yellow-white dresslike gown. He will write a check to the bank in his name and keep the extra hundred as a gift to the Orishas.

“Please, Papelito, you always have a dream,” I say.

“No mijo,
I'm serious, I had this dream, that you were getting married—”

“Coño,
not you too. What is this?”

“I'm serious,
papi.”
He brings out two fingers, then they go limp, “Take a consultation
lindo,
ask the Orishas themselves?”

“Some other day. I got to go, Papelito,” I say, yawning.

It's as if I said nothing, because all of a sudden Papelito loses interest in telling me about his dream. For some reason he begins staring at a deep and wide oil slick on the side of the curb. A parked car has been dripping all this oil, and the gutter is covered in multicolored fluid. Greens, purples, blues, and red swirls are coiling around each other all over the gutter before slowly slithering and disappearing down a drain. I think Papelito is caught in the moment. In all that beauty flowing in that filthy water. Papelito can see beauty in anything. When this happens to him he can be as single-minded as Eddie is in setting his fires. If I had time, I'd ask Papelito how an oil slick on a dirty street corner, flowing over cigarette butts, dead leaves, and the torn-off sole of someone's sneaker can consume all his attention? And if I ask, he'll tell me something about the meaning of life being contained in all our throwaways. How leaves die more beautiful and colorful than when they were just born. Something along those lines, count on it. But I don't have time. I have to find out what's bothering my friend Trompo Loco, and later I have class.

Trompo
Loco's place is a squatted walk-up, one of the few pockets left in El Barrio of a time when the neighborhood was cheap, burned, but beautiful, because all you needed was imagination, guts and healthy amount of perseverance, and the place was yours.

When I enter the broken down walk-up, the activist squatters open their doors to see who it is. Some of them have bats, others knives. They don't joke. They play for keeps. These people are going to take what they feel is rightfully theirs. I understand where they are coming from, so I leave them alone and don't ask. I never ask.

“Hey, man, sorry were you asleep?” I say to Trompo when he opens his door. He looks like he just got out of bed, wearing a ripped-up T-shirt and no pants.

“Nah, nah bro',” he says, with the swollen face of an abused son of a mother with past addictions and an entire geography of failed suicides. “It's all right, come in. I been out looking for you.”