To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (15 page)

Once again, Tina has managed to avoid her own home for most of the weekend. But now it’s Monday night and she’s back in the kitchen, washing the dishes made dirty by all the men in the house.

Rudy pops out of his room like a stoned jack-in-the box, as if he’s been waiting for her to show up the whole time.

“Leave me alone,” she says before he can say anything. But he doesn’t hear. The words he was planning are already coming out of his mouth.

“I bet you though that was funny, huh, having your faggot boyfriend’s brother start shit with me right there in front of Grandma, where I couldn’t do nothing. I bet you and your little friend liked that shit, huh?”

Tina is standing at the cutting board. She feels heat run from the space behind her eyes all the way down her arm to her fingers, which twitch. There’s a big fork somewhere under them in the water. Also, a big knife.

“I told you, leave me alone.”

“I told him you were like that, you were just a little slut . . .”

“Shut the hell up, Rudy.”

“. . . Always trying to get the guys to whistle at you on the street. . . .”

That is it. Tina is pissed off now.

Why is she always a slut? The girls at school, the men on the street, the old ladies in front of the church—all whispering or even just yelling slut, tramp, bitch. Her own father getting drunk and crying that she’s a whore.

There’s Crazy Tina. She was a slut and it scrambled her brains.

Tina laughs.

She turns around, looks Rudy right in the face. “That’s right, man. Now you better take off before I tell him to come kick your ass again.”

“Yeah, I bet you would, you little bitch . . . Hey, man . . . What the . . . ?”

She pulls a little fork out of the water and holds it up like a dagger, with water dripping from her fist.

“Get out of here, Rudy, before I kill your ugly ass. I don’t play that shit anymore. I’ll stab you with this fork.”

“What the hell? What are you, crazy?”

Their grandmother comes through the sheet, just waking up.

“What’s going on here?”

“Nothing, Grandma. Rudy’s trying to mess with me, but I told him to let me do my work.”

“Leave her alone, Rudy. Go take out the trash.” “Aw, man. . . .” He’s gone.

Tina sighs. “He’s always messing with me. I’m tired of it.”

“Well . . .Well, don’t let him,
m’ija.
Tell him to quit.”

Her grandmother searches her pocket for her cigarettes. Tina takes the pack off the butcher block and hands it to her.

“Grandma, can I go to a dance next weekend? At the school, with Melissa and Adriana?”

“A dance? With boys?”

“Yes.”

Her grandmother studies her critically.

Tina waits, fork hidden in her hands, eyes on her grandmother’s slippers.

The old woman lights her cigarette with a deep drag.

“Well . . . okay.” She blows smoke into the air, fakes a casual cough. “Okay . . . I guess it’s about time you got yourself a boyfriend.”

Tony’s on his way down Washington Avenue. He’s heading to Happy Land to have a beer with the guys. Now that Rudy’s gone back to jail—breaking and entering—it’s a mellow place to hang out again.

The Number 50 bus pulls up alongside him. The doors open and out comes Tina, pushing her hair back with a hand as she steps down onto the curb. She looks up and sees him there.

“Tony! Hi.”

“Hey,” he tells her. “How’s it going.”

The bus pulls away. She looks at him and laughs. “It’s going good.”

Tony looks at the cars and billboards around them, but can’t think of anything else to say. She’s still smiling. And staring at him.

Then she laughs again. What the hell’s so funny?

She smiles at him harder and stares into his face with a weird look in her eyes and one of her eyebrows kind of sticking up. Tony doesn’t want to stare back. Maybe she has a tic. Then . . .

“Bye,” she says in a weird kind of high-pitched voice. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

She waves at him over her shoulder as she walks out into the avenue, cutting around the cars. He watches her make her way into the neighborhood, smiling, singing to herself, tossing her head.

Crazy.

He puts his hands in his pockets and goes on following the street.

Reina Cucaracha

R
osa Villarosa dances through the kitchen with her broom. The dishes, floors, stove, counters, walls, sink, table, chairs are all clean. Before moving on to the floors, tables, couches, curtains, windows, shelves, knick-knacks, and mirrors in the other rooms, there’s a little time to dance.

The broom is a dashing
salsadero,
a pretty merengue man. He twirls Rosa around the floor. Her housedress swirls against her knees like silk, and the balls of her feet click-click in
chanclas
that, for all their light adeptness, might be the finest Italian leather.

Then—
ay
—another one runs across the counter. Up comes the broom. Down goes the broom.

Chihuahua,
another on the floor. Down, hard down goes the broom.

Chinelas,
these roaches! Whack, whack! goes the broom.

“Why must they bother me?” sighs Señora Villarosa. Didn’t she just clean this kitchen? What will Jaime say, if he ever comes home tonight? How clean can a kitchen possibly be and still have roaches running and flying around?

With a spanking white dishtowel to her temple, Rosa Villarosa turns around and— ¡
Dios mío!
—sees the hugest roach of all. The hugest roach she’s ever seen in her whole entire life, standing right there in her kitchen, looking her right in the face.

“Ay” she says. Her eyes roll up to the Virgin, and she hopes her broom will catch her when she faints.

“No, Señora. Don’t go away from me,” says his voice. It’s big and deep, mellifluous like Ricardo Montalbán yet shining like a chainsaw, this big, big cockroach’s voice. “Señora Villarosa, don’t go away so soon. I have come a long way to see you.”

“Ah,” she suddenly knows, “he is the King of the Roaches.”

Looking again, she sees the extreme brilliance of his wing cloak, the bronze strength in his many appendages, and the royal, authoritative carriage of his—his head, that must be. Are those his eyes? Yes, that part there is moving with the voice—must be his face.

“Señora, put down your weapon. My minions have withdrawn and will bother you no more. Please, Doña Rosa, I ask that you tolerate my unworthy presence and grant me the gift of a few moments of your time.”

With those tones, something awakens within her. This ain’t no damned
borracho
in a work shirt, standing around kissing six packs with his
compadres.
This here is a gentleman.

Rosa wipes the fright from her face. With the innate grace native of her foremothers, she inclines her head, giving him permission to plead his case.

“Night after night, I send the subjects of my kingdom to see you—to spy on you, I admit, Señora Villarosa. I reach toward you, through them, so that I may see you dance.”

Rosa nods as if she knew it all along, was used to this sort of thing, and was compassionate enough to give pardon to such impertinence.

The king continued, “Do you think that we come to you in order to steal the crumbs of your tortillas, wholesomely exquisite as they may be? Do we come to sip drops of Kool-Aid stirred so gracefully by your slender hand? No . . . No, Señora. I send my people to your sparkling kitchen so that, through their many eyes, I might see you dance. It is a sight for which I would gladly risk my entire kingdom. Through their antennae, I feel your dance’s rhythm. Yes, I have sent many soldiers as close as I dared to the volcano of your anger. Many suffered the swift punishment of your broom. But I never wanted to frighten you. I never wanted to make you unhappy.”

Rosa doesn’t know what to say. Certainly, far in the back of her mind, she always knew that someone was watching her, appreciating her lonely skill with the wooden partner. (She even let the broom think he was the one in the lead.) Certainly, sometimes in the night, she had fantasized that these faithful rituals might bring her notice. This, however . . . this was far more than she had ever dreamed. Why, she wondered suddenly, had this monarch come to her now? What did he want?

“Señora, I now risk everything. I have revealed myself to you tonight in order to promise that my people will never trouble you again. The only thing I ask, what I humbly beg in return is simply this: one dance.”

Ah, ha, thought Señora Rosa Villarosa. So this was it. And was it not understandable? Was it all for nothing that she had very nearly been chosen Corn Maiden in her youth?

Repressing any triumphant smirks or conceited head tosses, Rosa draws herself up and, with another demure nod, extends her hand.

From behind the walls, the music swells. Trumpets and marimbas sound as the King gallantly skitters forward. Reverently, he enfolds her in four arms and they begin to sway.

“Oh!” she says as he moves her in ways that the broom never could. The many black hairs on his feelers transmit his excited sensitivity to her, and she comes alive, melting into one turn, flashing to the next.

“Ah,” she sighs, closing her eyes to feel it all better.

Roaches skitter in from every corner of the room. In the blinding speed with which she whips around, they look like fairy dust.

There goes the box of Ritz crackers. There goes the toaster and all the bacon fat for the week. If she opened her eyes to see, would she even care? Shining like a comet, she shoots around, sparks around, pouts hair mouth legs flings around.

His chuckle is rough. His enclosing arms push a little sharper now. But he spins, spins, spins her, so it’s all right. She won’t think about what happens when it’s over.

Her heart is fluttering. Her work is undone, but there’s no one to see. No cares as to what the neighbors would say. Her future is forgotten and her back hurts a little, too. But, oh . . . It’s so, so romantic.

Eddie

S
ince I have to be in this room for an hour and a half every day, with nothing to do for the last hour, I figure I may as well write my memoirs or whatever. Kind of like that book,
The Catcher in the Rye,
except this is real, and you wouldn’t catch any pimps beating up on
my
ass.

We’re supposed to be in here to learn how to read and write. It’s part of some new literacy thing they’re doing, supposedly to make us better people . . . to give us “an alternative to crime.” Me and this other dude in here already know how to read and write. So for the first thirty minutes they wanted us to help the other guys with their stuff, but as you can imagine, the other guys didn’t want our help. So now, I do whatever I want in this room, which isn’t much. I wrote to my sister and my dad a few days ago, but they haven’t answered. So now I’m writing this to kill time. I figure maybe it’ll help people to see why I don’t belong here.

First, let me go back to my childhood. I used to be a good kid. I had a normal family—a mom, a dad, a sister, a brother. We had a nice house. We were doing pretty good. I don’t remember that part too well.

Then, after my mom left, things started to suck. This was when I was about five. We had to move. We lived in some apartments for a while, then we moved in with my grandma so she could take care of my little brother while my dad was at work. My messed-up uncle and his messed-up son moved in, too. Things were okay for a few years, until my dad lost his job and we had to get on welfare. Then, a few years after that, when I was around sixteen, my grandma died, and it was just us and my dad. But I already knew how to steal way before any of that.

I remember one time, when I was just a little kid, my mom had taken us to Eckerd’s. She used to like to take us places and just look at stuff. This time, though, I saw a toy that I wanted. It was one of those little Play-Doh factories. I remember I asked my mom if I could have it and she said she didn’t have any money, so I started to cry. She told me to be a big strong boy and not to cry. Then she put the toy in Jesse’s diaper bag. I stopped crying. We kept on looking at stuff, and Tina, my sister, saw a little plastic necklace with a unicorn on it. She asked my mom if she could have it. My mom told her to be a big girl and not to whine. Then we just kept walking.

I’m not saying that one incident made me become a thief. I’m just telling you about my life. Sometimes I remember my mom would want stuff for us, but she wouldn’t steal . . . she’d beg. Like, once, when she took us to the park. There was a guy loading up Mountain Dew in the vending machines. My mom went up to the guy and asked him for a six-pack, saying it was real hot. The guy told her she would have to wait and buy it from the machine. My mom started begging him to please give us a six-pack. She said we were poor and hadn’t eaten all day. She pointed to us and said she didn’t have any money to buy us food or clothes. The guy looked at us and then he gave my mom the sodas. I always thought that was weird when I remember it, because my dad made good money back then. I don’t know why the Mountain Dew guy believed my mom. Now I’ve figured out that he probably just thought she was hot and was hoping she’d give him something back. But, anyway, all I know is it was a pretty humiliating experience, and, since then, I’ve always preferred stealing to begging.