Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (16 page)

“Amen,” I said. I closed my eyes and took the host on my tongue. Like a true penitent. He hadn’t known it was me, the guy who’d walked out of confession. He hadn’t known. I was just another young man, another communicant, another face. Another animal.

All that Lent, I avoided going to confession. I lied to my father, told him I was going. But I didn’t. But I didn’t eat any more Paydays or drink any more Pepsis. I’d stop in at church on my way home. I prayed. Mostly I just sat there. My heart didn’t feel any more alive than the wood pews I was
sitting on. I thought maybe I was losing my faith or whatever was left of it. Maybe it had left when Juliana was killed. I don’t know. I don’t. I’d heard people talk about that, about people who’d lost their faith. I thought about my dream. When you lost your faith, you lost heaven. I didn’t want to lose heaven. My mom was there. And Juliana, too.

I thought about all the lost souls I knew. That’s how Mrs. Apodaca put it. And she wasn’t wrong. “They just wander about. Almas perdidas. Es una tristeza.” I hated to agree with her, but she was right. So many people walking around the world, lost. And it was sad. And I was becoming one of them. I didn’t want that. But I didn’t know what to do about myself. If I thought about what Father Fallon had said, I would get angry. I’d have to smoke a cigarette or two before I calmed down. But I’d turned my back on a sacrament. My mom had told me that a man never turned his back on a sacrament. Maybe she was watching. Maybe she knew. Or maybe she had better things to do than watch me.

That day, after I’d tried to pray at the church, I stopped by to see Larry on the way home. He was watching television. The house was loud and crowded with all his older brothers. Everyone fighting. They liked to fight in that family. “Let’s go buy a Coke,” he said.

“A Pepsi,” I said.

“A Coke,” he said.

We just had to fight. About everything.

On the way back from the store, I asked him. “Did you ever go to confession again?” I asked. “After that day?”

“Hell no,” he said. “And I’m never going back.”

“You’re not afraid?”

“Of what?”

I nodded. I realized that I’d never been afraid of anything. And now I
was afraid of everything. I was afraid something would happen to my Dad or that something would happen to my sister. Hadn’t something happened to Juliana? Didn’t bad things happen to the people of Hollywood all the time? And I was afraid of Father Fallon. Afraid he had the power to take heaven away from me. Maybe he had the power. Maybe he didn’t. I wasn’t sure. But I was afraid. I wasn’t so fearless anymore.

“Of what?” Larry asked again. “Afraid of fucking what?”

“Nada,” I said, “never mind.”

“You’re too serious, ¿sabes? Pifas says you have to learn how to relax. ¿Entiendes, Méndez?”

“Yeah, yeah. Como chingan.”

“God doesn’t give a rat’s ass about confession, anyway.” This from the theologian who thought that masturbation was the same thing as having an abortion.

“What if he does?”

“Then we’re completely screwed. ¿Sabes?”

“Yeah, yeah.” I said. Talking to Larry never made me feel any better.

It was a sad Lent. I was sad about everything. On Holy Saturday, my dad thought it would be a good idea if we all went to confession together. Me and him and Elena. Shit. Shit. “Okay,” I said.

There were two confessional lines that Saturday. One line for Father Francis and one line for Father Fallon. Father Francis definitely had the longest line. Dad got in the shorter line. He didn’t seem to care if he was in Father Fallon’s line or not. What sins did he have, anyway? Me, I got in Father Francis’ line. Maybe it would all work out. Why do we always hope? I saw Father Fallon’s line get shorter and shorter. And then there was no one left on his side of the church. He came out of the
confessional. He walked up to the row where I was sitting. “Over here,” he whispered. All of us in that row looked at each other. He waited. We nodded. It was over for all of us. We who’d had such hope.

My heart was pounding. God. It was really pounding.

I took a breath. I went first. What good would it do to sit there and listen to my heart thumping against my chest. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . “I stopped. “The last time I came to confession, I walked out.” There. I’d said it.

“You?” he said. “You turned your back on a sacrament.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am heartily sorry. I am, Father.” I wasn’t sorry. Why was I lying? And my dumb heart just kept pounding as if my body was a locked door and my heart was a fist. Pounding and pounding. And I thought maybe the wings had come back. Those wings, they came and went, came alive, then went dead. I couldn’t think. I don’t remember anything else. I know I was in there for a long time. I kept saying, “Yes, sir, yes, Father, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sometimes, you find yourself in the middle of a storm and you don’t know anything, you’re just scared and confused and everything around you is chaos and turmoil and you don’t know what to do, so you don’t do anything, just close your eyes, and when you finally open them, you don’t know how it is that you’re still standing there. The storm gone—and you’re standing there. In all that calmness. I heard myself reciting the Act of Contrition.
Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. But most of all because I offended thee my God who art all good and deserving of all my love . . .
Fallon gave me a severe penance, an entire rosary. He lectured me. I didn’t listen. Then I heard the words of absolution. And his final words “Go and sin no more.” When I walked out of the confessional, I didn’t feel clean. Not clean, dirtier than before. Dirtier than I’d ever
been. Even after praying the rosary. Even after completing my penance. I wasn’t clean.

I watched Elena as she looked for eggs on Easter Sunday. My dad had bought her a new dress. Blue and pink. And new shoes. White. She was clean. My dad had bought me a new shirt, too. I didn’t feel any better, any cleaner, any purer because I was wearing something new.

I kept watching Elena. She laughed every time she found an egg. “Look!” she yelled. “Look, Sammy!” I wanted to be her voice. I wanted to be her laughter. She was eight, almost nine, and yet she seemed to be younger than that. I wondered if I had ever been like her. I didn’t think so. I had never been that pure.

I didn’t go to confession for a long time after that. When I thought about going, I remembered I’d never confessed that Juliana and I had had sex. But what was the point? What was the point in telling the priest you had sex with a girl who was dead?

One afternoon, I was walking to the store to get a Pepsi. The sun was setting, and the light was beautiful, like there was a halo around the earth. I saw Father Fallon walking down the street, walking toward me. Maybe it was just a dream. But he kept walking. He was real. He was there. Walking. I guess he was just enjoying the evening. Who knows? I didn’t know anything about what priests did when they weren’t on duty. As he came nearer and nearer, I could hear my heart pounding again. I took a breath. And then he was four feet away. “Hello, Father,” I said.

He looked at me. He didn’t say anything. He just kept walking. I turned around and watched him. “Hey!” I said. Then ran after him. “Father. Father.”

He turned around. I caught up to him. “Yes?” He looked at me. He wanted to know why I was bothering him. I wasn’t anything to him, a fly on a plate.

“Father.” I looked at him. “Why do you hate us?” The question just came out. Like it had been there on my tongue all this time, just waiting for a chance to escape.

“What?” he said. I could see it in his eyes. He did hate us.

“Why do you hate us?”

He was going to say something. But he saw something in my eyes. My heart had stopped pounding. I wasn’t afraid. I don’t know why. I just wasn’t. I think it was him—he was afraid. Of me. Of Sammy Santos. I could see that. He turned. And started to walk away. Then he turned back and looked at me. “I don’t,” he whispered. “I don’t.” But there was no conviction in his voice. No hope of being believed. He turned away again. I watched him until he disappeared. I just stood there.

As I walked back home, I got to thinking. And then I knew what I’d been afraid of all those months. I hadn’t been afraid of confession. I hadn’t been afraid of Father Fallon. I was afraid of what I had inside. That I was bad. But I wasn’t. What I had in there, it wasn’t all bad. There was some good there. I knew that.

A part of me had believed Father Fallon when he’d called me animal. I’d believed him. Why had I believed him? And then I kept thinking and thinking and then it occurred to me that I should run after him. Because I’d said the wrong thing.
Why do you hate us
? That wasn’t it. I should’ve called him what he was.
You’re a damned liar.
And then I shook my head and thought.
Hell, Sammy, let the poor man alone.
Let him alone.

I whistled as I walked back home. Lent was over.

I wasn’t thinking
about love. That’s the last thing I was thinking of. I’d already learned that lots of things could kill the bruise in my heart I called love. Cancer, that would do it. A bullet, that would do it. I suppose that other, more subtle poisons could kill it, too. But there was nothing subtle about the world I lived in, nothing subtle about cancer. Or a bullet blasting out of a gun. Or the barrio I lived in.

But at school, everybody was obsessed with finding some love. The end of October—1968—and people went around desperate. Passing notes. Investigating who might be interested in going out with them on weekends. As if being alone was a sickness. Like the flu that was going around. There was a lot of talk about who was going out with who, and who put out and who was a good kisser and who wouldn’t let you touch her. Guys like to talk. About girls they wanted—but would never have.

People went around looking at people from a distance, observing them. Are you the one? What made most of us so desperate? I hated desperate. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with all that note-passing, please-look-at-me stuff that was going around. No thanks, no, not a good time. Not me. Love, not what I was looking for. René told me my bad attitude was all because of Juliana. I just told him to shut up. I told him high school kids didn’t know crap about love, and to just shut the hell up. He just kinda looked at me like I was having a bad day. I hate when
people look at me that way. And I wasn’t gonna let him have the last word with that look of his, so I just yelled, “René, you piece of shit, what do you know? The summer of love just passed us by, shithead—didn’t you know that? It just passed us by. It’s over.” I didn’t know why I was yelling. And old René, he just flipped me the bird and kept walking.

That September, I’d gotten a job working at the Dairy Queen on Saturdays. One day a week and sometimes I’d substitute. Dad said no more working during the week. Plenty of time for working when I got older. Okay, I said. The Dairy Queen job was the compromise. I needed to work. But I didn’t need love. Sometimes I’d flirt. Not much. Just some. It depended on the girl, but I’d stop if she did something that reminded of Juliana. And I hated all that, thinking about her and seeing her in other girls even though that was impossible, because those girls were alive and Juliana was dead. But still I tried to flirt as if everything inside me was normal. It depended on my mood. If I had a lot of homework on my mind, I’d be in my head. I didn’t mind thinking about my homework. Better than thinking about Juliana.

Gigi would come by the Dairy Queen on Saturday afternoons. With her friends. She wanted me to flirt with her in front of the whole world. I never did. I knew her game. She was starting to give me those looks again, those you’re-a-shit looks. Those looks—I wanted to run from them.

Yeah, yeah. She lost her bid for the presidency of the Senior class. Maybe so, but I didn’t feel so sorry for her after a while. She’d become a celebrity for that speech of hers. Gigi Carmona had made it big at Las Cruces High. Free Speech Queen. She’d made the principal blush—in front of everybody. Everything was Gigi this and Gigi that. The whole thing was getting on my nerves. Gigi, Gigi. The Mexicans loved
her—especially the Mexicans from Hollywood and Chiva Town. The first Mexican-American princess Hollywood ever produced. Gringos loved her, too. Radical chic. Gigi Gigi. She got invited to all the parties, wanted me to go with her. No thanks. Never went. She’d get mad at me. I’d bring her back to earth by whispering her real name. Ramona Carmona. Ramona Carmona. “You’re a real pinche,” that’s what she’d say.

She even went out on a date with this gringo named Adam. No comment. “How was the date?”

“How was what date?” I didn’t like coy. She’d told half of Hollywood.

I didn’t say anything. I looked at Angel who was standing right next to her.

“You mean Adam?”

“Did you have a good time?” I smiled. At Angel.

“He’s got blue eyes.”

“My pen’s got blue ink.”

Angel laughed. Gigi gave her a look. You know which look.

“He’s got a Camaro.”

“His father paid for it.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Did he pick you up?”

“Yes.”

“Met your mom and dad?”

“Yes. He’s a nice boy.”

“You step out of Hollywood, the world’s full of nice boys. Glad he’s one of ‘em.”