Bodega Dreams (2 page)

Junior High School 99 (aka Jailhouse 99), on 100th Street and First Avenue, became the outlet I needed. It was violently perfect and in constant turmoil within itself. It was a school that was divided by two powers, the white teachers and the Hispanic teachers. The white teachers had most of the power because they had seniority. They had been teaching before the chancellor of the Board of Education finally realized that the school was located in Spanish Harlem and practically all of the students were Latinos, and so changed the school’s name from Margaret Knox to Julia de Burgos.

To the white teachers we were all going to end up delinquents. “I get paid whether you learn or not,” they would tell us. So we figured, hey, I ain’t stealing food from your kid’s mouth, why should I do my work? The whole time I was at Julia de Burgos, I had no idea the school was named after Puerto Rico’s greatest poet, had no idea Julia de Burgos had emigrated to New York City and lived in poverty while she wrote beautiful verses. She lived in El Barrio and had died on the street. But we weren’t taught about her or any other Latin American poets, for that matter. As for history, we knew more about Italy than our own Latin American countries. To Mr. Varatollo, the social studies teacher, everything was Italy this, Italy that, Italy, Italy, Italy. Didn’t he know the history of the neighborhood? Hadn’t he ever seen
West Side Story?
We hated Italians. At least that part of
West Side Story
was correct. Some Italians from the old days of the fifties and sixties were still around. They lived on Pleasant Avenue off 116th Street, and if you were caught around there at night you’d better have been a light-skinned Latino so you could pass yourself off as Italian.

So, since we were almost convinced that our race had no culture, no smart people, we behaved even worse. It made us fight and throw books at one another, sell loose joints on the stairways, talk back to teachers, and leave classrooms whenever we wanted to. We hated the white teachers because we knew they hated their jobs. The only white teacher who actually taught us something, actually went through the hassle of
making us respect her by never taking shit from us, was the math teacher, Ms. Boorstein. She once went toe-to-toe with Sapo. He was about to walk out of her classroom because he was bored, and she said to him, “Enrique, sit back down!” Sapo kept walking and she ran toward the door and blocked his path. She dared him to push her. She said to him, “I’ll get your mother. I bet she hits harder.” And Sapo had no choice but to go back to his seat. From that day on, no one messed with her. She might have been Jewish, but to us she was still white. Ms. Boorstein could yell like a Latin woman. To us she was always “that bitch.” But we knew she cared, for the simple reason that she never called us names; she would yell but never call us names. She only wanted us to listen, and when we did well on her math tests she was all smiles.

The Hispanic teachers, on the other hand, saw themselves in our eyes and made us work hard. Most of them were young, the sons and daughters of the first wave of Puerto Ricans who immigrated to El Barrio in the late forties and the fifties. These teachers never took shit from us (especially Sapo), and they were not afraid to curse in class: “
Mira
, sit down or I’ll kick your ass down.” At times they spoke to us harshly, as if they were our parents. This somehow made us fear and listen to them. They were not Puerto Ricans who danced in empty streets, snapping their fingers and twirling their bodies. Nor were they violent, with switchblade tempers. None of them were named Maria, Bernardo, or Anita. These teachers simply taught us that our complexion was made up of many continents, Africa, Europe, and Asia. To them our self-respect was more important than passing some test, because you can’t pass a test if you already feel defeated. But the Hispanic teachers had very little say in how things were run in that school. Most of them had just graduated from a city university and couldn’t rock the boat. Any boat.

So we hated ourselves and fought every day. And finally, after a while, when I lost the fear of hitting someone else (not the fear of getting hit but of hitting someone else), I looked for fights. With Sapo watching my back, getting into fights was fun. During my three years at Julia de Burgos, I had more fights than Sapo. And since I was born with high, flat cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and straight black hair
(courtesy of my father’s Ecuadorian side of the family), and because kung fu movies were very popular at the time, when I was in the eighth grade, I was tagged Chino.

I was happy with the name. Chino was a cool name,
qué chévere.
There were many guys named Chino in East Harlem but it wasn’t a name that was just given to you. First, you had to look a bit Chinese, and second, you had to fight. It was an honor to be called Chino. But there were other honorable names in the neighborhood: Indio, if you had straight black hair, tan skin, and looked like a Taino; Batuka, if you liked Santana music and played the congas real good; Biscocho, if you were fat but told good jokes; and so on. Then there were names that were added to your name because of who you were, what you were known for, or what was said about you. Like a guy I knew named Junior, of 109th and Madison. Junior not only carried a knife, a
jiga
, in his back pocket, he had used it to cut someone’s face. It was no big deal to carry a knife in your back pocket. Everyone did and everyone knew that 80 percent of it was just for show,
puro aguaje.
The other 20 percent you hoped would never come your way. But Junior was notorious for going straight for his
jiga
when he got into a fight. He didn’t waste any time. It was Junior who introduced the phrase “Kool-Aid smile” when he cut a guy’s face so bad, from ear to ear, that he was left looking like the chubby, smiling cartoon logo from Kool-Aid packets. Soon this term caught on and it became a street phrase: “Shut the fuck up or I’ll give you a Kool-Aid smile.” Junior was no longer just Junior, but sometimes Junior Jiga of 109th Street.

Then there were the names your parents had called you since you were a kid, bullshit names like Papito, Tato, Chave, Junito, Googie, Butchy, Tito. Those names meant shit around school, around the block, around the neighborhood. They carried no weight and it was usually guys stuck with those names that were always getting their asses kicked.

•

SAPO WAS
the same around everybody, it didn’t matter if it was the president of the United States or some junkie, Sapo was himself. He was that way around any girl, too. See, there were girls in the neighborhood
that you could curse around, act stupid, and all that, and then there were girls that you just didn’t. Sapo couldn’t care less.

Nancy Saldivia was the second type. First, she was a Pentecostal girl. More important, she was fine. All the guys from the neighborhood liked Nancy Saldivia. Her face could envelop you, almost convert you. She had light tan skin, hazel eyes, and a beautiful mane of semibrown, semiblond hair. Nancy exuded a purity rarely found among the church girls. She was as genuine as a statue of a saint you want to light candles to, steal flowers for, or pray in front of. When she’d say,
“Gloria a Dios!”
she meant it. She was intelligent, polite, and friendly, and since she never cursed everyone called her Blanca.

Blanca wasn’t allowed to wear jeans but she made up for it by wearing tight, short skirts. She always carried a Bible with her and never talked bad about anybody and at school she only hung around with her Pentecostal friend, Lucy. Lucy was a hairy girl who never shaved her legs because it was against her religion. Blanca had hairy legs as well, but Lucy’s legs were so hairy that everyone called her Chewbacca. As if that wasn’t enough, Lucy also had huge breasts. Because of them she was at times tagged Chewbacca
la vaca.
When the cruelty toward Lucy became too much for Blanca, she’d punish the boys by being the coldest, most serious person in school. Only Blanca could get away with this because she had an angelic face that almost made you want to sing Alleluia. Made you want to pick up a tambourine and join her one night in her church. Make a joyful noise to the Lord so she would begin to jump up and down to all that religious salsa. And maybe you’d be lucky enough to cop a cheap feel as the Holy Ghost took over her body.

All the guys felt this need to be nice to Blanca, to protect her in any way they could, even though she was a church girl and all they’d ever get would be a peck on the cheek. All the guys, I mean, except Sapo.

“Shit, man, she ain’t gold. She ain’t the fucken Virgin Mary.”

“Blanca’s Pentecostal, bro. Not Catholic.”

“Whatevah the fuck she is. All the guys really want is to fuck her, so why do they keep her in some fucken glass case?”

“Yo, respect that shit, Sapo.”

“Wha’ for? She ain’t no angel. Yo, my aunt was Pentecostal and she, bro, she has fucked half the men in her congregation.
Esa ha cojido mas huevos que una sartén.
”

“Respect, Sapo. Blanca believes in that shit, so—” Sapo would cut me off.

“So you like her, thass all. Because it’s really bullshit. But you like her so you riding that shit, bro. But you know it’s all bullshit. Yo, check this out, my moms prays to her saint, Santa Clara, every day at Saint Cecilia’s. She lights all these fucken candles so the Virgin will give her the numbers. When that bitch saint tells my moms the Lotto numbers, then I’ll believe. Yo, I’ll believe. Yo, I’ll believe so bad I’ll buy Santa Clara a fucken wax museum.”

•

MY MOTHER
hated Sapo. “I don’t want to see you hanging around with that
demonio
,” she’d say to me. But I never listened, because Sapo meant adventure. Sapo meant we could steal beer and drink it together. He meant flying kites on the roof of a tenement building, both high on his weed. We loved flying kites but it wasn’t the pot that made the flying adventurous, it was the Gillette blades. We would buy one pack of those thin blades and glue razors onto the edges of our kites. Now we had flying weapons, kites able to cut the strings of other people’s kites in midair. It was aerial warfare. We would look up at the sky and see a kite and then maneuver our kites toward it. Sapo was brilliant at this. He didn’t really have to get that close or as high, all he had to do was get his kite with its blade edges to brush up against the string of the other kite. Then, without that person knowing it, his string would go limp and he’d think that it had just snapped, but no, Sapo had cut it. Then I would run downstairs and track the kite, which would soon come crashing to the ground or on some rooftop or somewhere. I would collect our spoils of war, which we would sell to some kid and split the money.

My father understood where we were living. He knew, and when I would come home with bruises or a black eye he never lost his cool. I liked my father, and my father liked Sapo. He knew the importance of having someone there to watch your back. It was important to have a
pana
, a
broqui.
But my mother didn’t get it. And like my mother, that’s
what Blanca could never understand. Sapo was important to me. Sapo had arrived at a time when I needed someone there, next to me, so I could feel valuable. My childhood and adolescent life had been made up of times with him, as I later wanted my adult life to be made up of times with Blanca. It was hard to split the two.

“You know, Sapo,” I said to him one day as we were preparing to fly kites on the roof of a project, “if we could ride on top of these things, we could get out of here. You know?”

“Why would you wanna fucken leave this place?” he said with his Sapo smile, showing all his teeth as he glued some razors to his kite. “This neighborhood is beautiful, bro.”

“Yeah, you’re right,
pana
,” I said to him, but knew I didn’t mean it. I gave my kite to the wind, which took it with a hiss, and I thought of Blanca and let out more string.

I
N
the eighth grade I applied to the High School of Art and Design on Fifty-seventh Street and Second Avenue. When I was accepted a lot of things seemed possible. I now left East Harlem every day and without my quite knowing it, the world became new.

Little by little the neighborhood’s petty street politics became less important. I started to hang out less with Sapo, who had already dropped out. When we did meet on the street it was like we were long-lost brothers who hadn’t seen each other in years. Regardless of the distance created, I did know that he was still my
pana
, my main-mellow-man. I knew that if I went to Sapo and said some guys wanted to jump me, he’d round up a crew for me, a clique from 112th and Lex or from another block. Sapo knew a lot of blocks. He knew just about all the guys that lived in the neighborhood. Most of them owed Sapo one thing or another, or were just scared of him and would do as he said, no questions asked.

In my senior year at Art and Design, I learned about the Futurists. I wanted to do something like they had done. The Futurists had been a malcontent group of artists at the beginning of the century who loved speed and thought war was good, the “hygiene of humanity.” To them it was important to begin again. Culture was dead and it was time for something new. Burn all the museums! Burn all the libraries! Let’s
begin from scratch! were some of their battle cries, and although most of them were, like their leader, Marinetti, from upper-middle-class backgrounds and not from the slums like myself, I liked them because I could relate to their anger. I realized that by reinventing culture, they were reinventing themselves. I wanted to reinvent myself too. I no longer wanted the world to be just my neighborhood anymore. Blanca thought the same, and when we started going out we would talk about this all the time.

“Julio, don’t you hate it when people from the neighborhood who somehow manage to leave change their names? Instead of Juan, they want to be called John.”

“I see your point. But what’s in a name, anyway? A Rivera from Spanish Harlem by any other name would still be from Spanish Harlem.”