Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood (2 page)

Juliana letting me pry open her fist. That was a lie. Maybe it was a good lie. I think it was.

I told her once that she collected secrets like some people collected stamps.

“You’re full of shit,” she said. “Where do you get that crap? You’re so full of shit.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “everyone needs to collect something.”

“Collect something else,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Books.”

“No, I don’t like them. That’s
your
thing, Sammy. Did you know everyone calls you ‘the Librarian’?” She looked at me. I pretended
I knew. I didn’t. But I pretended. And she let me. “And besides,” she said, “only gringos can afford books. But secrets don’t cost a damn thing.”

She was wrong about that. Secrets cost plenty.

I used to write her notes in class that said, “Stop collecting.”

“Not yet,” she’d write back.

“Then tell me one. Just one secret.” What did I think she was going to tell me?

The first time she told me what she was thinking, I found myself trembling. “I’ve always wanted to smoke a cigarette.” That’s what she whispered. I pictured her wearing a backless dress in some smoky bar with a cigarette between her lips. A drink in her hand. I pictured my hand on her bare back—that’s what made me tremble. And that song came into my head
you’d be like
. . . I almost offered to buy her a pack, buy her two packs, buy her a carton. But I was sixteen and could never talk when I needed to—and my pockets were empty. So I just stood there trying to figure out what to do with my hands. I wanted to die.

That night, I decided to be a man. I was tired of sitting there like a chair. That was me. Sammy Santos. A chair. Sitting there. Thinking. As if thinking ever did any good. To hell with everything. After dinner, I walked out of the house, borrowed Paco’s bike and stole two cases of Dr. Pepper bottles from Mrs. Franco. She had a nice house. She didn’t live in Hollywood. She didn’t need the bottles. I cashed them in at the Pic Quick on Solano—and bought my first pack of cigarettes. My dad wanted to know where I was. “Just taking a walk,” I said.

Dad’s smile almost broke me. “You’re like your mom,” he said. “She’d walk and think. You take after her.” He looked so happy. If you can be happy and sad at the same time. That’s how he looked when he talked about her.

I hated to lie to him. But I couldn’t tell him I was stealing Dr. Pepper bottles from Mrs. Franco. I couldn’t. He thought I was some kind of altar boy. He never went a week without telling me I was good. Good? What’s that? Sometimes I wanted to yell, “You don’t know, Dad. You don’t know these things.” I wanted to yell that. It would have broken his heart.

Later, in bed, I held the red pack of Marlboro’s and studied it like I was going to be tested on what it looked like. I smelled the cigarettes through the cellophane—and it was then that I fell in love with the smell of tobacco. The next day, during lunch, I offered Juliana the pack of cigarettes. She stared at my hand, that trembling hand of mine, holding out the pack of cigarettes. She took them. Real casual. But there was something in her eyes. Something. She put them in her purse. Then she stared into my palm. “You work,” she said. It was true. I got up at four to clean seedy bars for Speed Sweep Janitor Service. “We can sweep anything you can own.” That was our motto. Every day from 4:30 to 7:00, I worked. Worked, came home, showered—then fixed breakfast for me and my sister. “Everyone works,” I said.

She was going to say something. Then changed her mind. I hated that. It was like knowing a secret was there. And the secret was about you. Knowing it was there, well, it hurt. “You’re nice,” she finally said. Nice, I thought. There were better compliments. She smiled. “Someone’s gonna hurt you. And you’re gonna wish you never had a heart.”

I wanted to tell her that my mom had died, and that I already knew about hurt. I didn’t say that, didn’t say anything. Nothing. I just watched her walk away, my eyes following her until she disappeared like a sun taking a slow dive into the earth.

Everything was darker when she was gone.

She knew something about hurt, too. But she knew how to fight back, and she could scare you into silence with just a look. It wasn’t that she
was ugly or mean—it’s just that she’d learned certain ways. The world wasn’t all that good to her, and she wanted to remind everyone around her—but mostly herself, I think—that she was worth something. That the air was hers, too. That the ground she walked on was as much hers as it was anybody else’s. She was so afraid of being beaten down. I think that came from having a father who wanted to crush her until she turned into powder. So the wind could blow her away. Then she’d be nothing.

I remember what she told me. I remember exactly. “When I was four, I fell off a swing at a park. I dirtied my dress. My father just kinda looked at me. Like I was dirty. And I knew right then he didn’t care if I sat in that dirt for the rest of my life. I think he was disappointed when I didn’t cry. I got up, dusted myself off and got back on the swing. But I never forgot that look. He hated me. And there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to make him change his mind about me, but nothing worked. I served him tea, I shined his shoes, I cooked meals for him. Once, I ironed his favorite shirt, and it was perfect. He grabbed it from my hands and wadded it up like a piece of paper. So I just gave up. I was twelve. When I was in the eighth grade, I read a story. The teacher made us look up words we didn’t know. The word I was looking up was ‘disdain.’ And when I read the definition, I said to myself, ‘Yeah, I know that word.’” That night, when she was telling me these things, we were smoking cigarettes in my dad’s Chevy Impala. We were at the Aggie Drive-In Theater off Valley Drive. We’d turned down the speakers because we’d both already seen
The Odd Couple.
There was nothing real or interesting about that movie—watching it made us tired. It was supposed to be funny. I guess so. But it wasn’t. Not to Juliana. Not to me. And Juliana said it was weird, the kind of movies gringos went mad for. “But you can’t do anything about gringos,” she said, “just like you can’t do anything about fathers.” And then she kept talking about her dad, and how he made sure
he put everyone down. “If I’d have been born a bird, he’d have cut off my wings.”

I wanted to tell her that I would kill myself if my father hated me. Every day, when my father came home from work, the first thing he did was rub my hair and tell me supper smelled good. I tried to cook like Mom. I did okay. And Dad always thanked me. That’s the way he was, a thanker, always thanking people for the things they did. And damnit, I hated Juliana’s father. I did. For not being like my father. For not knowing what he had. I did hate him. And finally, that’s what I told her. “I hate him. I really hate him.” That’s what I said. And that was the first time she kissed me. She tasted like cotton candy. Not sticky, but sweet, as if something inside her was making up for the something she didn’t have in the house where she lived.

“You’re nice,” she said. “Someone’s gonna hurt you.”

“Yeah. You’ve said that before.”

“It’s true.” She kissed me again.

I kissed her back, hard as I could, and when she stopped she looked at me. “You were born to get hurt.”

“Nope,” I said. And then we just went back to kissing. We sat on the hood of the car and smoked all night. And kissed some more. I still remember her smell. She didn’t wear perfume or jewelry like all the other girls. I liked that about her. She talked about how her mother would sometimes leave, but always come back, and she wondered why her mother wouldn’t take them all with her when she left. “She just leaves us there—with him.” I listened. I liked listening to her. I didn’t care if the stories she told weren’t soft or beautiful or nice. The barrio we lived in wasn’t soft or beautiful or nice. It didn’t matter that someone had named the barrio where we lived “Hollywood.” Maybe it was a joke.
Maybe it was a prayer. Didn’t matter. Nice stories were hard to come by in Hollywood. So I just listened. Juliana said her aunt told her that she didn’t have to worry about anything because she was born beautiful. But another aunt told her that she had to pay for her looks because nothing was free—not even good looks.

“Someday,” Juliana said, “I swear I’m gonna kill my father. I’m gonna watch him bleed like he’s a dog someone ran over in the middle of a busy street.” It scared me to hear her talk like that. I knew she was picturing the scene in her mind.

And then, after she said that, it was me who kissed her. I wanted to make her forget. I thought that a guy’s kisses could make a girl forget all the bad stuff. Sixteen-year-old boys don’t know shit. How could a tongue down a girl’s throat make her forget?

Her eyes were always half on fire, lightning about to strike—and beautiful in the way that fires and lightning are beautiful, a kind of natural and graceful rage that made all living things stand back in awe. Or maybe just fear. Sometimes, she could look at you and you could see what she was trying to tell you
don’t screw with me because I’ve been through things, and you don’t know a damn thing about what it’s cost me to be here, right here, right here on this worthless piece of ground, so don’t treat me like I’m some crack on a sidewalk because if you step on me, you’ll never take another step without thinking of me. I swear to God you won’t.
I saw that look a hundred times. I took that look home with me. I studied it. I never understood. Not back then. How is that we can look at something every day, and still not know what we’re looking at?

One time, she was walking out of the gym door and some guy looked at her and said, “Ayyyyy muñeca!” And then he made this motion thing with
both his arms and body as if he was having sex with her against a wall. She walked up to him, got real close, then kneed him right in the place that made him a man. He bent down in pain, screaming like a boy. She stood there. Watched. When he was breathing right again, she smiled at him. “Now you can tell everyone what it was like to be with a girl from Hollywood.”

Another time, this guy asked her out. It wasn’t as if she belonged to me. It wasn’t that way. Boyfriend, girlfriend, that kind of thing didn’t mean that much. Not to her. It meant more to me, I think, but I was always a little soft, like my father. Manzito, my father used to say about himself. Tame. As in the opposite of wild. As in a dog that would never bite.

Sometimes, I wanted to tell Juliana that I was hers. She would’ve laughed.

So this guy asks her out, this good lookin’ gringo basketball player who always walked around Las Cruces High like he’d bought and paid for the gym and the parking lot. He just walked up to Juliana in the hallway and said, “So what time should I pick you up on Friday?”

Juliana looked at him. “You asking me out?”

“Guess so,” he said.

She looked at him. “What’s your name?”

“Everybody knows my name,” he said.

“I don’t.” Then she walked away from him.

“Where you going?” he yelled.

“To class,” she said. “It’s a school, you know.”

He ran after her and grabbed her arm. “I asked you what time I should pick you up?”

All she did was look at him. She stared into his blue eyes, wanting him to see. She could be that way. When she wanted you to, she could
make you see everything she felt. I saw the way she looked at him, and I knew what she was telling him, and I knew that she wanted him to remember what she was telling him for the rest of his worthless life:
You think I should be grateful because you’d drive into Hollywood to pick me up for a night, spread my legs for you, that’s what you think, that’s what you’ve made up in your head—and if you don’t take your hand off me, I’ll break it clean off your arm and feed it to the pit bull that lives next door to me—and I won’t feel a thing, not for you, not for your worthless hand, are you getting all this
? She said all those things in the look she gave him—and I swear his jaw dropped. For the first time in his entitled life that sonofabitch understood that the world was a helluva lot bigger than he’d ever dreamed it was. His coach had lied to him. Life wasn’t a basketball game. The spring was gone from his steps as he walked away. God, that made me smile.

I remember almost everything about her. It was as if I was born to be her biographer, and knowing that, I began to take notes from the very beginning. Mostly I wrote those notes somewhere inside my head and my head became a chalkboard. I couldn’t bring myself to erase anything I wrote there about her. And now I think I need to empty everything out—so I can have my body back. The thing is this, I know she’ll always be inside me. Well, maybe it’s not her that’s inside me, but there’s something. I can feel that something. I feel wings, sometimes. And it’s like those wings are all caged up. And I’m the cage, and the wings are trying to find a way to get out. I don’t know. It’s confusing.

“Everyone’s been seeing you with that girl.”

“What girl, Dad?” I always pretended I didn’t know what the hell was going on. That trick always worked for me.

“Tú sabes a cual muchacha,” my father said, “no te hagas tonto.”

“You should see all the girls that are after me,” I said.

“Really?” my little sister said, completely astonished. She was half my age and was addicted to other people’s conversations. “Lots of girls are after you, Sammy?”

“Seguro,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” my father said, “but I know how many girls you’re after. Ya te conozco. You’re only after one. And her name’s Juliana Ríos.”