The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (21 page)

The score was 20 to 12. The redcaps had become bored and sat in the aisles kibitzing with their clients. The guards, instead of standing straight up, were lounging on the very net that bounded the court. And the sharks filed their teeth or counted their fistfuls of wagers on short odds or nonchalantly cracked sunflower seeds. That was when we bet most of the money credited to us for a month of studies and livelihood on the underdog at 80 to 1000. The sharks were glad to take our money. “No lo hagan,” a concerned bourgeois gentilhomme advised us. “You're just going to make a tiburón happy. ¡Qué el partido se va de calle!”

A portentous occurrence. The jai alai became like the opera buffa. The old artistes made two points and there was an ominous silence. The redcaps got up from the aisles but called out a few odds. There was almost no betting. They were waiting—the galleries and the short money, seven, eight thousand strong—for another mysterium. The intereses creados squirmed up in their chairs like weasels. This point—it was taking too long, too many volleys! The great and turning point came in like high tide and the redcaps quieted no scuffles no coughs, but the poke of the rubber and rocklike sphere impacted and spread upon the front wall and the long, retrograde arc of the orb obfuscating in spotlights, the skim of wrists along the green middling, and the crack of stone's conjunction with straw. Rolando, the stiff yet still graceful elder, scooped up the ball on the short hop and propelled it swan's neck thick on the middle so it angled sinuously on the low, wide front, bounced within the far outside wood, and spiraled into the netting. The galleries were ripped wide open with Amerindian joie de vivre. The men or beasts within tore asunder their poses and stepped outside themselves. The promised sign! I
turned to Felipe. He glowed with cherubic ecstasy. I held his head like a son. The redcaps called out odds: 40 to 100, make it 45, no, 50 to 100. Red and blue tickets passed countless brown hands. The aisles writhed like serpents. We bore the manic coaster to allegorical heaven.

It was like the Westerns, too. The well-off villains in their business suits and gold pocket watches presenced their reserved finale. They put away their pepitas and pistachios, and their eyes popped and their jaws hung awry. “Cover!” they begged the redcaps. They wanted to cover, to hedge. The Godfearing rested easy. None of us doubted the outcome. Social and poetic justice would be done.

Rolando was all about, luxuriating in his renaissance, his regained nerve.

Soon we were winning! The young bucks leaned against the wall and slowly sank to the floor, their innards chafing, their tongues flapping. Holding his wicker high above him like a torch, Rolando traversed the court with the stately mockery of a ceremonious bullfighter. Caught up in the euphoria I began to scream a confused litany of mythic templates; the eagle, the serpent, the nopal, the thunderbird, the “¡Sí se puede!,” la MECHA [Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán], el Anáhuac, Aztlán, all jumbled in the same olla. Felipe and I embraced. “¡Vamos a ganar! ¡Venceremos!”

Then, an inexplicable alteration of events. The elders loosened up—¡qué se aflojaran!—got tired, and permitted the youngsters to come back. The game tied up at 29. The ultimate metaphysic! Pee pee was drawn from the caved-in bladders of many. The galleries lost their nerve and hastened to hedge their spleens. The sharks and businessmen, anxious to reduce their losses, covered the Indians, and bet all the Rolando they could. The redcaps shrieked out the odds: 100 even, 100 pesos, pick 'em.

I grabbed Felipe. “Los indios have lost their nerve and are seeking insurance. ¡Tienen los huevos en la garganta!”

“Me too!”

“Let's cover! If we do, we win either way!”

“No way,” Felipe said, “let us ride!”

I was in a swoon. “Oh, God! All that pastel!”

“Are you with me?”

I squeezed his hand. My knees were buckling. His face was mauve and bloated. “God, yes!”

I am an innocent, I thought. The ingenuous fanatic. For the moment I loved him so, I could have given him my life.

The ultimate point began.

Rolando served the ball, a giveaway straight to the opposing front man. We should have lost, instead the ball dribbled obscenely out of the unnerved wicker.

“We won!”

The young buck climbed and clawed the net in a twist of fury. Futile as Bergman's squire.

I turned to Felipe. “You won! You knew the old boy'd do it!”

He didn't seem terribly happy, though. He pointed at Rolando leaving for the dressing room, wiping his brow amid hosannas. “It took a lot out of him.”

I felt funny. Felipe and I split the money, 50-50. The devalued pastel wad of Mexican money barely entered my pocket. I had more in the wallet; there were bills in my shirt pocket. Child supplicants stood willfully at the exit next to the Palacio. I emptied coins into each calloused hand.

“Don't do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It's bad form. It makes you look like a gringo.”

“I know that. It's only because tonight I've scored big.”

“No, never. You'll spoil them.”

To win money: that was not enough. Felipe was still angry, knotted up by the match, and slowly I became angry too. It was not enough on the eve of the Virgin's day, despite the magnificent catharsis. Why? No más por no más.

Felipe had been silent while we lined up and collected our bets. Now he almost whined. “Now we must go and fuck some woman. I know a brothel, not too far.”

“I don't want to fuck some woman! I'm too buoyant. I want to keep my money. Not tonight, Felipe. I'm too worn.”

“Pues sí, compis. That's the way we do things here. The night won't be complete. El rito del jai alai se lo exige.”

“I thought you were a poet, a mystic, and a left-leaning intellectual.”

Felipe cursed a lot about shitting in the milk of the Virgin and all that folklore. “If you win, you've got to go. Don't leave me to my designs.”

“What's this brothel like?”

“Perverse! What güero can claim to have known México without having visited its muchachas?”

“What do you mean, perverse?” I asked him hostilely.

He grinned. “Authentically perverse.”

La Madama Lulú's was not perverse. It was repulsive, y me pareció muy típico. Two grenaderos sat on the sidewalk in front of the brothel. Some político or máximo chingón was fucking his brains out. Their carbines lay on the pavement at their sides. They winked at us as we went in. The brothel bureaucrats sat us on an overstuffed Louis XVI and the whores lined up and flaunted us all petite soirée fête in stained miniskirts. “¡Vamos a hacer beibis!”

I didn't have the huevos to choose, so the most entrepreneurial of their lot plopped on my thighs and fondled my member. Soon, having been kneaded like a croissant, it began to acquire that mauve, belligerent feel. “Ven aquí,”
she coaxed. She took some of my salmon and sandía-colored money and gave it to the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper gave me a red poker chip. Then I had to give the poker chip to the porter, who meticulously opened the door to a broom closet cubicle and handed me a roll of toilet paper. We went inside. I didn't give a shit anymore. ¡Qué carajos! I was resolved. Yet suddenly I realized I was fucking a perfect stranger.

Later we were famished. The high was worn and it had turned cold and raw. There were pilgrims wandering the street, like strays. Felipe and I went into an all-night estancia where they cut newspapers into napkins. We had steaming hot caldo tlalpeño. We had machitos, finely minced tacos of bull testicles sprinkled with aguacate and cilantro in piquante sauce—sympathetic cannibalism. We washed it down with Carta Blanca. Felipe was quiet and grave. He looked frightened. I couldn't fathom what he was thinking.

I kept drinking. After a while I asked him, “Why don't men and women do anything or go anywhere together in this country? Why are the men in the plaza and the women en casa?”

“They do go out together,” he protested.

“Sure, to a té danzante at five in the afternoon.”

“Those are appropriate hours. I'm sorry that we are not as advanced as your civilization.”

“I've told you before, Felipe, it's not my civilization. Shit, I just live there. Don't blame me you sent out a fuck-up like Santa Anna to do an hombre's job.”

“Here we still believe in the novia santa.”

“You do?”

“Sure.”

“I mean you, Felipe Espinoso from Quintana Roo.”

“Why not?”

“It seems muy raro I bet. The novia santa. It goes well with la casa chica.”

“Don't insult me.”

“I'm sorry. You have a novia waiting for you?”

“Sure!”

“Where?”

“In Tulúm. It's small.”

“Sure, I know it. There are ruins there. Hay presencia del pasado.”

“Tienes razón.”

“And how long since you've seen her?”

“The six years I've been here at the university. I take a course and a course and a course. Como tu work-study, right?”

“Not quite. You're going to marry her?”

“As soon as I graduate.”

The night was cool and Mexican. Stars appeared like wishes. It was very still, soon it would be early. We walked with our hands in our pockets and our faces down, steadfast in the drunken ambience. We came to a park. The coconuts and the palms were still and etched. Some campesinos with no place to go were trying to sleep on the benches that they had arrogated. There was suddenly a clump of grass in front of me. I plopped on it. The grass tickled my nostrils. I giggled. “Get up!” Felipe sounded alarmed. He pulled me. It seemed like someone else's arm.

“¡Viva la revolución!”

“Be quiet, won't you!”

“What do you mean, quiet? Is this a police state? ¡Viva la revo lución! ¡Viva la Virgen de Tepeyac! ¡Viva Tontantzín! Let every good fellow now join in this song: vive la companie. Good health to each other and pass it along, vive la companie.”

“Get up!”

“No, you come down. Down to my level.”

“All right. If you quiet down.”

I laughed. “Where I live they say Mexicans—that means Chica nos of course, not you real Mexicans—were made to pizcar tomates because they're built low to the ground. What do you think about that?”

He flashed his winning grin. “I'm curious about your Chicano ways.”

“Well. When are you going to graduate?”

“Soon, if you keep quiet so no one steals my money tonight.”

“Did you walk to Mexico City from Tulúm?”

“Well, no. Actually, I got an aventón.”

“And were you like the indios that come streaming in from the picos and the valles around registration time?”

“Most assuredly.”

“And did you live like them, begging, and hustling, and working?”

He smiled. “Well, nobody gets to find much work in this city.”

“So then?”

“So I'm still hustling. Only I'm an advanced student now, senior class.”

“¿Qué me dices?”

“I'm sorry, güero. We were playing only with your pastel money.”

“Only my money? But I saw you pitch in your share.”

“That was merely sleight of hand.”

“I see. So then, at 29 up, you weren't really that nervous.”

“Oh, I was very nervous.”

“Yeah, but not as nervous as me.”

“No, I wouldn't think so.”

“No, you wouldn't think so. After all, for you it was win or tie.”

“Something like that.”

“And you don't feel bad?”

“I feel very bad. I need for you to know how bad I feel, even now, after winning, despite winning. Not only the money, but my life's dream, enough to live on so that I can take a full course of study and graduate. Porque, compis, tú eres mi cuate, ¿sabes? O, como dicen los tuyos, soy tu carnal.”

“How can you say this shit to me now? Do you know I'm debating whether or not to kick your fucking head in?”

“Pues, ponte chango, carnal. Pa' la próxima más aguzao, vato. Porque ya aprendiste. That's what Buñuel meant in
Los olvidados
. Like they say in these parts, más cornadas da el hambre que el toro.”

“Don't hand me that pestilent shit. You simply hustled me. I'm just as poor as you. You knew if I lost that match I would probably have had to drop out and return home. Either that or starve.”

“And you're not used to starving. Sure you're poor—I realize that. But you work. As a stock boy, at Taco Bell, as a piss-pot polisher. Lo que sea, entran los chavitos, haga cola para el financial aid. You're poor like Cheech and Chong. We use the same word, poor, but we don't mean the same referent. I mean devastated, a nullity without the remotest identity.”

“Why are you telling me all this stuff now? You won your ticket. Why couldn't you have just let me keep on thinking you were a fucking prince?”

“Pues, por pura vergüenza. You may not believe it: allí en la casa de putas, where much profound Mexican thought takes form, I thought about it long and hard. But you deserve more. You are a fine fellow, very young, ingenuo, and my sense of shame and your need to know, they joined forces. It may not be as pretty as pastel illusions or the half-breed Virgin who showed herself to the cosmic race, but I felt I owed you the truth. Por eso bajaste al Anáhuac, ¿no?”

“And besides, you have enough money now, ¿verdad? You've got your graduation ticket and you can give up your contingency pigeon, right?”

He looked crestfallen. “I'm sorry. Los malos hábitos are difficult to overcome. I want to go to school intensively now and graduate and no longer do what I used to have to do.”

“Well, I guess the course is over. It's been … well, it's definitely been a learning experience.”

“Get up, güero, please.”

“Why should I? I want to sleep. Here, entre las palmas.”