Tiger, Tiger (25 page)

As I went to the refrigerator, he continued: “Well, those parking spaces are spreading like the Dutch elm disease. And the Chevy was a big car. You remember it, Keesy? A long car, strong, like the way they used to make cars. Now, if I had one of these Hondas or Toyotas, my bumper wouldn’t have been sticking over her line. By two inches. Two inches! She could still park with me there.”

“And they were able to tow you?”

“Yes, because it’s the law! She was a faker, but on paper,
I
broke the law! Yet I knew she was the criminal, not me! She was breaking the law through corruption! So I would make sure she paid the price. It cost me a couple hundred dollars, but it cost her ten times more.”

“What did you do?”

“About six months after I had finished my civil duty by paying the ticket and the towing charges, I went to La Popular and I bought a half dozen eggs. Then I drove to Sears and bought a can of red paint. And I took an ice pick and pierced a hole in each egg. I drained out as much of the guts as I could in the kitchen sink. Then I took a funnel.” He made the motions as he talked. “And slowly, with my loupe on, I managed to fill each egg with bright red paint. At three in the morning, I drove past her house, checked that no one was around, and threw the eggs at her car! Then I waited a couple of months. When I noticed she had gotten a new paint job, I went back and did exactly the same thing. Because she had broken a law! Not
the
law! My law!” he said, jabbing his finger into his chest. “Anyway, another month or so and I run into Eduardo at the bar. He tells me the story of that woman. He doesn’t like her any more than I do and he says, in a low voice, ‘Louie, do you have any idea who would do that? What kind of a person?’ Do you know what I said to him, Keesy?”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I don’t know who would pick on a poor handicapped woman like that. Whoever does something like that must have a criminal mind! He must be a real psychopath!’ ”

Ever since my mother had been hospitalized I had gone to Peter’s house alone. During the walk, guys were constantly hitting on me; they whistled and hissed out of windows, told me I had nice boobs or a good butt, gave me beeper numbers on slips of paper or tried to get me to ride in cars with them. There were teenage boys everywhere when the weather got warm, hanging out on porches or car hoods or fire escapes, riding bikes and skateboards. These were boys with backwards-turned baseball caps, boys with loud, macho dogs, mostly Rottweilers or pit bulls.

Even after my mother returned from the hospital, I insisted on continuing to walk to Peter’s by myself. Poppa seemed to understand that I had a phobia about her creating another scene in the street. She was on much higher dosages of Thorazine and Seroquel that really zonked her out, so she didn’t mind staying home. Besides, I felt like I’d gotten addicted to the catcallers’ attention even if it made me uncomfortable. Like I needed to be constantly reassured that boys liked me even if all they wanted was sex. Peter said all teenage boys were immature and just wanted to use me for one thing.

Once, I had my white denim jacket tied around my waist and a boy in a do-rag accompanied by his friends called out, “Show that ass, baby! I’m sure it’s beautiful like the rest of you!” Blushing, I took the jacket from my waist and all the boys clapped. “You’re pretty, mami!” another boy from the group shouted. “Don’t hide that fine-looking face in your hair, girl! Don’t look down! Smile a little, honey! It’s spring!”

The boys were right; I should smile more. It was late May; another horrific school year was ending, and I was totally free now. And Peter treasured me more than ever; he now wrote me a daily four-page love letter, which he’d read to me as soon as I was safely inside his room with the door shut. He’d go over all the events of the previous day, emphasizing how much fun we’d had. Around this time, he had me write a journal chronicling our lives together, reminding me over and over again not to write anything even slightly negative in it. Sometimes if we fought or if I felt sad, he insisted I read the book to him.

Something I didn’t understand was happening to me. I noticed my thoughts and feelings were drastically different depending on the day. One afternoon Miguel and four guys were gathered on the stairway leading to the second floor. I, who could normally barely utter the word “hi” to Miguel, tossed my hair and sneered at him,“Haven’t you and your friends got anything better to do than to crowd these steps? It’s a wonder anyone can get by at all.” Miguel told Peter, who insisted that I call the house to say I was sorry (I was too mortified to apologize in person). “Don’t worry about it,” Miguel said, and even though he forgave me, I remained so disgusted with myself that I found thinking about that day unbearable.

Women liked Peter. Richard’s other girlfriend, Linda, had flirted with him and invited him to her apartment a couple of times, though he didn’t go. Jessenia, the first-floor tenant, often touched Peter’s arm whenever she talked to him, usually to tell him about things that had broken in the apartment. Peter had said that overall, these tenants were a mistake. They were dirty and their place was overrun with roaches, starting an infestation in the second-floor apartment as well. Peter said that he had gone in there to fix a broken pipe and saw Jessenia’s three kids, aged seven, five, and four, merrily keeping score of the roaches they smashed as a game. Jessenia was about twenty-six or -seven, beautiful with wavy black hair, a wide mouth, and very white, almost vampirelike skin. She moved nervously and chatted nonstop in repetitious yet endearing patterns. Peter was convinced that she was on coke, like Richard, and that she was having an affair with her eighteen-year-old nephew, who split the rent with them.

Everyone was having affairs with everyone else. Jessenia and her graveyard-silent lover with his black schoolboy curls, perpetual white T-shirt, and tattoo of a coqui frog on his knuckle; Richard with Inès (he still periodically moved in and out); Poppa with a pretty twenty-eight-year-old woman named Xiomara. After she had gotten back from the hospital, my mother said that she met Xiomara when Poppa brought her over once for dinner. I asked my mother what she was like, and she said Xiomara was extremely nice and cheerful, immediately making me think of Jessenia; and then I thought of the equally ingratiating Vanessa and Amber, whom Peter had taken to calling the “attic wenches.”

All these women, despite their crappy lives, were always so sweet, so easy to get along with. This was the way of sexy women, I thought. They laughed without making a sound, just opening their mouths as though they were laughing, clasping a limp hand over their lips; they complimented and touched you carelessly, as though you were a dog or cat that they could pet at will. They showed girls the same affection they heaped on older men; there was no difference in their minds between young girls who looked up to them with wonder and older men who viewed them as goddesses. To be a sex goddess you had to view the world coldly yet treat it with overabundant affection; you had to be brashly childlike yet clearly womanly; you had to pretend you expected nothing, but in reality accept nothing less than everything; you had to tease and charm and flirt and whimper and coo and goad everyone you met.

Most men liked this kind of treatment, but not Peter. Sometimes it seemed like he thought everything about most women was false and crude. He hated long nails, particularly press-ons, mascara, and brightly colored lipstick. He hated fishnet stockings, perms, fake eyelashes, gaudy necklaces. He hated dangling earrings, hoop earrings, any earring that wasn’t little and plain. He hated any bra that wasn’t pink or white. He hated sports bras. He hated lingerie. He didn’t like the color red. He couldn’t stand shoes with fluff on them like the kind they sold in the East Village. He especially loathed high heels.

“Sneakers,” he said. “That’s what’s sexy. Or bare feet. Not something you could use to stab a guy in the throat.”

He didn’t like big breasts. He said mine were a good size and that he hoped they wouldn’t grow any more. I think he secretly wished they were smaller. He wanted me to keep my pubic area completely shaved. He let me use his electric razor. He didn’t understand girls who had triangle patches or made other designs with their pubic hair. He couldn’t understand piercings or tattoos of any kind, on males or females. He wondered why anyone would want to mark up God’s most exquisite creation: the human body. Especially girls. Why did girls dye their hair? Why did some girls paint on their eyebrows? He didn’t understand women who wore their hair short. Nor could he fathom the latest fashion of women wearing men’s shirts and ties.

He’d developed a weird habit of judging girls and women he saw passing by, whispering numbers at random: “There’s an eight. There’s a six walking that collie. Two fives over by the mailbox.” He wouldn’t bother to rate women over thirty, but would rate girls as young as four. Every time he’d rate some stranger, he’d mention that I was a perfect ten, which should have made me happy but didn’t always, because I worried that one day I would slip to a lower score. I could gain weight, or my breasts could get bigger, or what if my height increased? No, no, I reassured myself, that wouldn’t happen. I’d developed early and I’d already grown to my full height. Hopefully, everything that could lessen me in his eyes was over and done with.

This was how Nina came about: from watching women like Jessenia, Linda, Amber, and Vanessa—all the while keeping in mind what Peter liked and didn’t like. I put together a composite of those women along with the ones I had seen Poppa flirt with in bars over the years, every time my mother had gotten sick and we’d gone out on the town. I made Nina everything my mother wasn’t. Coy and tough and pleasing to men, not “bad” but “naughty,” not “cold” but “wicked.” She was a hot coal; she was butter. A real sex goddess. Nina was a bitch. If she wasn’t a bitch, Peter might feel bad about some of the things he did. He might feel guilty.

So, the summer I was thirteen I put Nina together—my masterwork of womanness. She was so cool, she was bored. She was a paper doll. She was glue. She had nothing inside her. She was so beautiful. She was younger than me, older than me. Fresh as a cornfield yet ancient as rain. She was me. She was not. Her hair was completely black, like Jessenia’s, like Justine’s. She was made out of stuffing. She was a wishbone. You could pull her in any direction and she’d be hard to snap. That’s how tough she was. One tough cookie. No love inside her, but infinite sweetness. Patience. Light and witty. And careless. Most careless about herself. Her body didn’t matter because she was outside of it. It was so beautiful, that tight, hot, perfect-ten body; she could watch that body from across the room. She was so sassy. So blah. She wore her nothing like it was something.

Nina lived to make Peter happy. To be happy, he needed a lot of intimacy. Intimacy meant hand jobs (which he called massages) or blow jobs.

Nina’s crash course in how to please a man consisted of watching random porn movies in addition to Peter’s homemade movie: a compilation of various X, double-X or triple-X clips of women doing whatever men wanted. He’d mute the porn so anyone who came into the kitchen to get food wouldn’t be able to hear the moans through his thin door. He particularly liked to see women down on their knees, giving blow jobs, and men coming on a woman’s face; the penetration was interesting for him only to a point, and after a while he’d fast-forward. Some porn actresses had big fluffy perms, others had straight white-blond hair; another woman had purple eye shadow in streaks to make her eyes catlike, and another girl was naked except for pink leg warmers. There was one tanned, slender blond girl with a tattoo of a hummingbird on her shoulder. Every time the man put his penis in her doggy-style, the bird seemed to fly; I looked forward to this scene every time and imagined that the actress allowed the director to film her only from behind, so she could showcase her pretty tattoo.

Sometimes porn could get boring, but I still found comfort in it, knowing that what we did together was no big deal.

What was happening to my mother at home was also happening to me, just in a different way. I could feel myself recede into the distance, but I didn’t completely care. How could I care about someone who was so stupid, so unpopular? A girl who was weak, who had abandoned her mother in the street. Sometimes when I had nothing to occupy me I would imagine what my mother looked like the day of her nervous breakdown: sprawled in the street like the body of a chicken sacrificed in a Santeria ritual that I had once seen discarded on the curb. I would wonder if her fate was my fate, too. I was powerless to help her feel less depressed and I couldn’t bear to think about her lying in bed despondent.

With Peter, I didn’t have to think about my mother at all. He was always telling me I had to live in the now. Not the past or the future. Only by staying in the present moment and avoiding negative thoughts could a person ever hope to be happy, he’d say over and over. So whenever I had an uneasy thought about Peter, I’d seek to banish it as quickly as it appeared. Because he was being so well compensated, Peter finally stopped complaining about my compulsion to talk about the Story for hours on end. The problems of the characters became my sole focus. I was so blissful whenever we were in the Story world that the sexual favors Nina provided seemed worth it. We even started recording the Story on cassette tapes, and together we completed a novel version entitled
The Beast Within
. I watched the old Story evolve into a new Story with a different cast of characters, one that included Nina. And this new Story was an arena for her to act out her sexual fantasies toward boys her age. There was one boy who was forced to wear an electric collar that she controlled by remote, demanding oral pleasure from him every day. I played both characters—the boy and Nina. Occasionally I would insist on giving Peter his sex in the role of a boy pretending to be a girl. When I was playing this character, I experienced the same sense of freedom I used to get when riding the Ferris wheel with my mother as we reached the top. As a boy, I was further away from my own life than ever.