Coke Is It!

I’m sitting around a small kitchen table with my friend Nicky, Roberto, the drug dealer I’d just met, and twenty-eight grams of powder cocaine. There is a pot of coke on the stove, mixed with water and baking soda, boiling down to crack rock. That isn’t for us. Ricky and I decided to go half on an ounce of dust. It was easier to sell without having to piss off the dealers in the projects and poorer neighborhoods. Pissed off ghetto dealers will shoot you. Powder sells to anyone.

I’m not happy doing this. My mother died a little over six months ago. AIDS. I had sworn never to use hard drugs after watching heroin annihilate her. Selling them is just as bad. Worse. I feel like I’m about to enable chaos for dozens of people.

I’ve justified it to myself. I told myself that it was my only choice, my last option. If this didn’t work... I have two children, two beautiful boys. Fernando, my oldest, had turned two in October. We call him Boo because he looked so scared when he was born. Cristiano, born thirteen months later, had just turned one. He came out looking like Leonard Nimoy, so we call him Spock. I had just spoken to their mother, Maria, and she had nothing to offer.

Maria and I split up a few weeks ago. It was a long time in coming. She was barely sixteen when we met, and I was just some horny, nineteen year old virgin. It wasn't long before she had the baby she’d chosen me for. Cristiano, our second child, was no one’s choice.

When Cris was born, Maria went despondent. She paid a minimal amount of attention to Cris. I spent more time with him, and I was working forty hours a week, selling camera equipment for Ritz. When she had recuperated from labor, a very easy labor where she practically shot Cris out of her womb like a cannon, Maria started to let me know that she felt as if she’d wasted her childhood.

I had warned her when we first started dating that we were too young to start a family. My mother had her first child at sixteen, and I was witness to the disasters that can befall the family of a single, teenaged mother. I don’t recommend it. But it was exactly what Maria wanted, and she had chosen me to father her child. I had done my part. I could hang around or go away. The choice was mine.

I chose to stay. I had never had a father around, even though I was the first child my mother had in wedlock. My father had spent some time in jail, and once he got out, my parents just couldn’t pick up the pieces, mostly because mom had started using again, mostly because dad had been in jail. I was eight the last time I saw my dad. There was no fucking way I was going to be that father.

I stayed. I stayed even though I suspected that it wouldn’t be long before this maternal instinct gave way to a need to be young and free. I stayed through three years of pointless arguments, futile fights, and painful cheating. The last six months were the worst. Maria would be waiting for me to get home from work so she could flee for the night. What started out as a little partying on the weekends had become a nightly celebration of her youth. I’d spend the night tossing, turning, and crying until the sun began creeping out and I would finally hear her key in the door. There was no doubt she was fucking anyone but me, in the end.

I was buying my first home, a small rowhouse on the four hundred block of North Rose Street. It was during the height of The Great White Flight from Baltimore. What I didn’t know was that the drug area that had once started closer to North East Market was creeping down to our block. The neighborhood seemed like it was falling apart, and Maria having gotten her jaw broken by some thug that summer was proof of that.

I felt lucky to have found a place on the south end of Patterson Park, right on Eastern Ave. It was three stories tall, had four bedrooms, big enough for us, the kids, and my younger sister and brother, who had gravitated to me after we’d lost our mom. It looked like the perfect place to make a fresh start.

I had even convinced Maria that it was the best thing for the children, the best thing to save our relationship. The friends she made on Rose Street only enabled her bad behavior. But on the last day of September, the day before we were supposed to move, Maria decided she was going to stay. Her friend Tammy—they were both dancing at the Golden Nugget on The Block—was going to move in, and together they would cover the mortgage. At least that was the plan. ...until it wasn't.

Like anything else in her life, Maria was unable to remain committed to even that. It only took a couple weeks before she decided to try her hand (or is that her ass?) at dancing for more money in New York. With her stretchmarks, I doubted she could pull it off, but I was still left with a house I would soon lose and two children I could barely take care of. But I had to try.

I found someone to live in the house on Rose Street, although I never did get much more than the first month’s rent from her. As far as childcare was concerned, I had this girl named Kim move in. We had flirted on a few occasions, and as was often the case, I was her go-to guy to call whenever she had boy problems. Kim would sleep in my bed, as long as I understood that she wasn’t really ready to start a relationship. That was cool. I was a gentleman. I just needed her to watch the boys when I went to work. She wasn’t really ready for that either, though.

I would get home, and the boys would be wearing the same diapers they wore when I had left. I wasn’t sure that they’d been fed. I wasn’t sure that they’d even spent any time out of their playpen. It was miserable. But there was nothing better I could afford selling cameras for $6.50 an hour. I had yet to learn the art of the sale, so commissions were still light. I had to do something.

I went to Social Services, sat in their grungy, stank sitting room for hours just to get a bunch of dirty looks and to be told that I didn’t qualify for help. I might qualify for childcare, but the waiting list was six months long. So yeah, when the chance came up to make a small investment for my children’s future, illegal as it might be, distasteful as I found it, I went for it.

Nicky was a DJ. He came from a large Filipino family that were all into music and dancing. We would all pile into a couple of cars and head down to Traxx Nightclub in D.C. on teen night, and because I was twenty-one, I could buy pitchers of beer and get everyone drunk. They loved me.

Nicky came to me with the proposition, and I had just gotten my Christmas bonus, not to mention Christmas commissions. If you can’t sell cameras at Christmas, you don’t belong in the business. Nicky had the connection. It would already be vialed into individual grams. All I had to do was put in my half and drive up with him. I would even see Maria, who had been dodging me on sending money to help with the kids. It felt right.

Granted, when I did see Maria, when I figured out she had nothing to offer, everything suddenly felt very wrong.

***

I’m a terrible drug dealer. Nicky’s already sold his, and I’m still stuck with most of mine. I’m too nice. I immediately start selling on credit to friends who promise to pay me on payday. Payday comes and goes, and I never see the money. If it wasn’t for my little brother, Joe, selling some at the supermarket where he stocked shelves, the whole ordeal would have been a disaster. Nicky ends up buying a lot of my stake, at cost of course.

It doesn’t take me very long to realize that this isn’t going to work out. And after only four short months, the family was falling apart. My sister’s fallen in love. She’s practically living with the guy, and it isn’t going to be long before she stays with him for good. Joe and I are constantly fighting about the noise he and his friends make when I’m trying to sleep after a long day’s work. I’m tired of listening to Kim talk about all the boys she’s interested in, none of them me. My poor sons are still suffering.

If my mother were still around...

Eventually, the desperation eats at me. I go to Maria’s father, Jupiter. It’s not my mother, but if anyone has an interest in seeing Boo and Spock thrive, it should be their grandfather. Maybe once he understands the situation, he’ll at least agree to help pay for childcare. Not so.

However, his new wife Karen, formerly his daughter’s babysitter, has been bugging him to have his vasectomy reversed because she wants a kid of her own. His offer? He’s willing to take Boo off my hands, if only to show Karen that the experience of parenthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His ex-wife, Martha, would take Spock. Those are my options: give away the children I fought so hard for, or think of myself and allow them to continue living a squalid, meager existence.

Of course, when word reaches Maria, she’s back in Baltimore within days, in my face, raving about how dare I give up her children. As always, she has no real solutions. Maria’s return to Baltimore, especially her insistence on staying at the new house with me and the gang, hastens the inevitable. For however bad things were, Maria’s manic energy makes matters worse. My sister moves in with her new beau. My brother moves in with his girlfriend and her mother. Kim, my ersatz nanny, also moves back home.

I find a couple of rooms to rent across the street from my old middle school, the former Hampstead Hill Junior High, whose name changes with every infamous atrocity that occurs within its walls. Within weeks of handing over Boo & Spock to my in-laws, the house that was supposed to save us, keep our little family together, is just another abandoned, empty shell in the neighborhood. For the first time in my life I am totally, utterly alone.

I bury myself in my work. I learn the art of the sale: You’re selling yourself, not the camera. I start taking cameras home, and shooting during long walks on my way to work, from Highlandtown to Harborplace, and back. The store manager begins displaying my pictures. Apparently, I have a good eye. I even start getting work shooting weddings and other events. It feels good.

I’d failed as a husband. I’d failed as a father. I’d certainly failed as a drug dealer. I’d failed at keeping a house or even my family together. I needed this, something I could feel good at, feel good about. Having nothing finally gives me the space to make something of myself.

Originally published by Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore

Candelario

Another from the hoard. This one chose me. I came across an old schedule book from 1993, the year my uncle, Andres Candelario, died. I grabbed the book, and it opened to my original, handwritten version of this poem which I composed after visiting him in the hospital during his last days, as his body gave in to AIDS complications. His last name derives from candela, the Spanish word for flame, also related to candle, chandelier & lamplighter. Uncle Andy's last days are also chronicled in my short story, The Handsome Man.

Candelario

Yea, though your candles glow dimly—
stubs to the towers I once saw—
and yea, though you walk through
the shadow of a death you deserve,
I come to your bedside,
not to blow out your puny, pungent flames,
but to watch them die
out on their own, perhaps
even stoke them a bit,
with forgiveness.

No, I don’t forget
the days we had nothing,
yet you took it all,
anyway, to sell for a few days'
euphoria. But I also remember
holding your hand through the streets
of Manhattan, your friends laughing
as you put the dice in my hand,
shouting every time I rolled sevens.

I don’t forget the tears
abuelita shed
every time you were caught
in the act, or after the fact,
not knowing which of you would survive
this incarceration. But I also remember
walking through schoolyards
with you, my friends asking,
“Is that your dad?”
the temptation, not knowing
my real father, to simply say,
“yes!”

I don’t forget the peace
you broke, showing your face,
waving your carrots
in mami’s face, pulling
her off her wagon
by her teeth. But I also remember
the tears you crying at my bedside
as I lay on the brink
of death, again—the porno
mags you gave me working
as well as any medicine.

I owe you no debt,
Candelario—
the days I basked
in your glow are equal
to the days I wished
to spit your flame out—
tears & smiles flowed
concurrently. Yet,
one last request,
since you are incapable
of making one: please
tell mami I said, “hello.”

Life with Mom: My Hero, My Heroin Addict

Artwork inspired by my mom & Mary Janes, her favorite candy

It’s odd having been raised by a mother who remembered being at Woodstock, but who didn’t remember where I, her six-week-old son, was that weekend. However, odd barely begins to explain my childhood and my mother.

Miriam Esther Figueroa, my mother, left home when she was 15. The story Mom told me was that her mother had caught her kissing a man on the fire escape during her Quinceañera, her 15th birthday party. She dragged my mother by her hair, through the window, back into the party, and proceeded to beat her in front of her guests. When the man who kissed her, her first kiss, offered to take her away from her abusive mother a few days later, my mom jumped at the chance.

She didn’t know this man. She didn’t know he was much older than she was or what he even did for a living. She definitely didn’t know he was a heroin addict. One evening, enticing her with the idea that it would make sex more interesting, he injected mom with a dose. Not very long after that, my mom found out she was expecting a child. The man soon abandoned my mother—pregnant, addicted to heroin.

She struggled during her pregnancy, eating at diners in New York and sneaking out when it came time to pay the bill, doing whatever it took to survive and maintain her habit. Carlos, my older brother, was born addicted to heroin and had to go through detox. My mother, frustrated that her child didn’t even have a crib—he slept in the bottom drawer of a dresser stuffed with a blanket—finally went to her mother, pleading with her to take her back. My grandmother turned her away, but offered to take Carlos. Having little choice, mom obliged.

I was not born addicted to heroin. When I came along, in the summer of 1969, my mother was happily married and clean. However, her criminal past eventually caught up with her. I was still an infant when my parents’ apartment was raided. The cops claimed to have found illegal drugs in the medicine cabinet. My father came home just as they were about to arrest Mom and I was about to be carted off by Child Protective Services. She was pregnant with my younger sister, Kyra. My dad claimed the drugs were his and let them arrest him, instead.

The loss of my father, convicted & sentenced to five years, sent my mother into a dark spiral. She began using, again. Kyra was also born addicted to heroin.

As you might imagine, mine was not the easiest of childhoods. I was a fairly aware child, and it didn’t take me long to realize there was something wrong with Mom. Everything came into focus, though, during fifth grade. We had a unit about illegal drugs. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had the all the information I needed to understand Mom, to help her.

I could hardly contain my excitement. I ran all the way home. I’d barely stepped through the door of our apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, when I started telling Mom everything I’d learned, and that I finally understood what was wrong, and that I could help her stay off drugs. She looked at me, unmoved, and said, “What do you know? You don’t know shit! You kids are the reason I use drugs.”

I never mentioned her habit again, unprompted.

It wasn’t always bad. My mother was actually a very loving woman. She had an open door policy, willing to help anyone she could with their problems. After we moved to Baltimore in 1984, she did a lot of work helping to establish Baltimore’s Hispanic community. She helped families who arrived here find housing, employment and social services—whatever they needed to help make Baltimore home. She even translated for them and helped them get into English classes.

She was a strict mother, sometimes too strict. She put an emphasis on education and expected her children to achieve their potential, and she didn’t accept excuses. Most importantly, she believed in us. Mom always told us to believe in ourselves. She supported my desire to be a writer from a very early age, making me promise only that I would one day tell her story. But she also taught us that it didn’t matter what we became. “Fernando,” she told me once, “I don’t care if you’re a garbageman, as long as you’re a happy garbageman. As long as that’s what you want to do with your life, I’ll be proud of you.”

That’s perhaps what was oddest about my mother, that she could have such a profound understanding of life, but had to struggle so mightily to shake an addiction that wasn’t even really her choice. She did, eventually. Then, in 1989, she went through some training programs and got her first job working for the Census Bureau. We worked there together for a bit, in an office in Towson, Maryland. For the first time in my memory, I got to see my mother walk through life as if on a feather. She finally had purpose. She had drive.

Tragically, that all stopped when she was diagnosed with AIDS. She’d unknowingly had it for some time, and it was already at an advanced stage. She died of AIDS-related complications in 1991. She was 41 years old. AIDS would also take the life of her brother, Andres, whom she deeply regretted introducing to heroin. Uncle Andy, as I knew him, was the closest thing I had to a consistent father figure growing up. My little brother, Joe, who was not quite 16 when mom passed away, would end up fighting his own vicious struggle with addiction. He eventually contracted AIDS, as well. We lost him on the day after Christmas, 2006.

It was an incredibly odd feeling when I made it to my 42nd birthday. I was happy to have made it, but outliving my own mother bothered me. She had warned us that she didn’t expect to reach old age. Mom constantly told me the story of how, after Woodstock, she’d brought Janis Joplin over to our place, how Janice had cuddled, even fed me. My mother was shocked to hear of Janis’ death, just a little over a year later. She also realized that, considering they shared the same habit, she might not be too far behind.

When my sons each turned 13, I took them out for a fancy dinner. We discussed girls over appetizers. They each proclaimed to know much; I reinforced the need to treat women with dignity and respect, and to protect against starting a family before being ready, something my mother and I had both failed at. Over dinner, we discussed the perils of alcoholism and addiction. I told them my mother’s story, the grandmother they met only as infants, and I was honest about my own struggles with alcohol during my early teens. Over dessert, I let them know that they could become anything they dreamed of. But I also let them know that I’d always be proud of them, even if they became garbagemen, as long as they were happy doing it.

Originally published in Baltimore Fishbowl, November 16, 2011

In Memoriam: Joseph Anthony Soto

My little brother, we called him Jojo, would have turned 46 today (May 1, 2020). Below is the obituary I wrote for him, followed by a poem/rap we collaborated on back in the 90s. Happy Birthday, Joe. You are profoundly missed.

Joseph Anthony Soto, Sr. of 1439 Rennert Road, Lumberton, North Carolina, was born in Jersey City, NJ, on May 1, 1974.He finally found peace on December 26, 2006, after a long battle with AIDS, at the age of 32. He was preceded in death by his mother, Miriam Esther Figueroa.

Joe gained the love and respect of almost everyone he met, and although he didn't always show it, he greatly apprecated all the love and care he received from the generous people of Lumberton.

Joe is survived by the love of his life, Sabrina Jones, his three children, Joseph Anthony Soto, Jr., Jada Miriam Soto and Jarren Evan Soto, his brothers, Carlos Carmona and Fernando Quijano III, his sister, Kyra Quijano, and a host of other friends and relatives. He will be sorely missed.

I've written three obituaries in my life, and that had to have been the saddest one so far, not just because he was my baby brother, not just because he died so young, nor just because he is the third member of my family (My mother died in 1991, my uncle Andy a few years later) to succumb to AIDS. Yes, it's sad because he leaves behind a wife and three young kids, but what makes it even sadder is the lost potential of a young man  whose power was never truly tapped.

Yes, there are lessons we can still take away from the loss of my baby brother. Always a "man," he would have us believe that he acquired HIV via unprotected sex, but as he was also a drug addict, could have almost as likely gotten it shooting up heroin. The irony that he died of the same disease that killed my mother and uncle, and that he likely started using drugs as a method of coping with my mother's death (Joe was only 16) doesn't elude me. And I'm sure we all need the occassional reminder that AIDS is still virulent here in the U.S.

Nevertheless, I will miss him and his stories. He had many to tell, all entertaining, many I will never hear. Below is a poem, a rap, that Jojo started, and that I helped to polish. It's neither the best example of Hip Hop nor poetry, but it reflected a moment in our lives when we used our grief to create something together. Something we were both proud of. After all, isn't good art merely an honest attempt at expressing our deepest emotions?

Rocked by Ages

You think you had it rough?
Well I think I had it rougher
Mommy was a dope fiend
Daddy was a puffer

Five years old and learning how to suffer
watching Mommy jump from one man to another
Daddy disappeared when I turned Seven 

He's in jail or hell... know he ain't in heaven

Nine years old, livin' off cheese & Kix 

Mommy sold the foodstamps so she could get her next fix

Eleven years old, first time I saw the needle in her arm 

Imagine my confusion, imagine my alarm

Just that day, I learned about drugs in school

They said it was for losers, they said it was for fools

Tryin' to get her to stop, I laid down some law

She just laughed in my face, said it was my fault

& I crashed

Thirteen years old, hitting rock bottom

The disadvantages of life, yeah I got 'em

so I hit the bottle and the joint to set me free

Started off slow, but soon nothing could stop me

'til I looked in the mirror, and all I saw was Mommy

Fifteen, time to quit while ahead

Before I was too deep, before I was dead

while at it, I'd get Mommy out too

Get her in rehab, start our lives brand new

But for Mommy things would never be the same

Cuz she'd caught that big disease with the itty bitty name

Sixteen years old, at the hospital to say goodbye

But I couldn't say shit, I just watched Mommy die

& I crashed...

Easter Snapshot

snapshot
Staring
at the only photograph
I have left, Easter—your head
wrapped neatly in a paisley
scarf, alabaster skin set
off by the scarlet of your top,
all 5’ nothing of you dwarfing
over the 3 of us, [how small
we were, and how as big
as the world you seemed to us
back then] holding JoJo’s fragile
little hand—JoJo, in his blue denim
overalls with a strap dangling
off his shoulder and his Buster
Brown do, free hand gripping
one link of the chain link—your other
arm held hard against KiKi’s heart—
KiKi, with her baby doll dress & her baby doll
smile & her white knee highs— and
there I am, the Little Man all grown
up at 8 or 9 or whatever, hair,
as always, waving wildly in the wind,
stylin’ in my plaid polyester belted lounge
lizard jacket, with matching bell
bottom bottom, foot propped
up, arms spread like I owned
the world like I knew I did;
all of us there, at the base
of Lady Liberty, Manhattan &
its now extinct towers barely
bursting through the fog, celebrating,
not God, not Jesus, not life, nor liberty,
nor the pursuit of happiness, but
love: the love that we could squeeze
out of this fucked up family that we
shared, that we accepted for better
of for worse, or for worse than that
because how can we forget those times?

I stare
at this, the only
photograph I have
left, & I imagine
the others, the ones
I don’t have, the ones
lost, the ones destroyed, even
the ones that never existed,
like the picture I never
took of you during one
of your dazed for days days,
lounging & lost in your
euphoria, hiding from problems
I didn’t, still don’t quite,
understand, like the picture
I never took of you bruised,
battered & beaten by
whatever flavor of the month
macho-sick monster you were
sampling, like the picture I never
took the day you cashed your
first paycheck, leaving the drugs,
the drink, the drunks & the drama
packed away neatly with your past,
or like the picture I never took
of you bloated, bleeding & bleached
on that hospital bed, your past
unpacking itself to prevent
your progress,
your present,
your presence…
your life briefed
down to vital signs & bad
mistakes you had already paid for
with interest.

Staring
as I tend to
do quite often, more
often than I like to admit,
at the only photograph
I have left, I am left
wanting more:
more than these faded
foggy fucked up fragments
that I can’t quite feel,
these pieces of memory
that float around in my head,
incomplete & inane,
that I can’t touch
or hold or strum
like a stringless guitar,
or cry on; they don’t
have the power
of this picture,
this one picture
this one last picture
where life was set
aside one Easter Sunday
just so
that we could remember
that even the fog
could not hide
the love captured
at the base
of Lady Liberty.

Gone Daddy, Gone

So, in case you haven't heard, I found out yesterday that my long lost dad, the father I haven't seen since I was seven or eight, is dead. He's been dead, since 1997. Funny thing is, I half expected it. After all, my mom died in 1991, and my uncle died a few years later—both from AIDS after years of heroin abuse. Granted, from what I've always understood, my father didn't use, but it's not like I was around him often enough to know for sure. That said, according to my sister our father died of cancer, not AIDS. I suppose that's a relief, however small.

Still, as I searched for signs of my father all these years, I always clung to the hope that I would have a chance to catch up with him, to get to ask the questions that remain in my head after so many years of non-communication. Before I go on, I should make it perfectly clear that I don't blame my father for losing touch. If anything, my mother deserves a lot of the blame. It was, after all, her idea to pick us up and move us from New Jersey to Maryland in 1982 without so much as a goodbye, not just for my dad, but for all our friends—a clean break. Sometimes a clean break is very messy.

So I'm left mourning, not for a father I barely knew, but for the now-dashed hope that we would get another chance. All I have is a couple of poems (they're coming, I have to re-type them), a scant few memories, and the stories I heard from my mom so long ago that I don't remember what's true, what she made up and what I added to fill the gaps in my head. I'll share a few.

The first memory I have of my father was when I was about seven. I was hanging out with my uncle Andy, and he took me into a bar. There, he introduced me to a man he said was my dad. I recognized him because of a picture my mom kept from when she was pregnant with me—a short man (¿What else?) with a hitleresque haircut and a big, bushy mustache. He was very nice, and bought me a Coke. We chatted a bit, but I can't really recall what about. I remember that my mother invited him over for a party soon after, but her boyfriend at the time got very drunk and very jealous one night, shut off the lights, proclaiming the party to be "¡over!" My mom broke up with her boyfriend at the time, and my parents made a brief go at a relationship again, but I suppose things had changed—they had changed—too much. In the end, she got back together with John O'Connor, the man who had made an ass of himself at the party, and they married shortly thereafter.

But what happened the first time around. The story I remember, a story my mother shared frequently with her closest friends, happened in 1970. My mother met my father a couple of years after she'd had to give up my oldest brother to her mother. Apparently, after a terrible bout with heroin addiction (My older brother was born having to be detoxed.) mom had finally gotten clean, perhaps partly due to my dad's influence. They conceived me, got married, had me, and conceived my sister Kyra. All was well in the world, until the cops came bursting through the door of the apartment we all lived in.

Apparently, my mother had developed a brief, but bad history with law enforcement, and that was coming back to bite her in the ass. Although she was squeaky clean at the time, they (allegedly—but planting evidence was common in those days) planted drugs in our medicine cabinet. They had my pregnant mother in handcuffs and were about to drag her to jail, and me to foster care when my father came home. He took the rap. He claimed that the drugs were his. They took my father instead.

It should be no surprise to anyone that while my dad languished behind bars, my mother started using again. Hence, when Kyra was born, like my older brother, she had to be detoxed, too. Who knows what our lives would have been like had the police not held a personal vendetta against my mother.

But what's past is past. It's the one thing we cannot change. And there is great consolation in all this grief. Although I'm officially an orphan now, I found out I have family I never knew I had. I have three Aunts—Margie, Eva and Paula— and a slew of cousins—one of which, Marisol, I got to chat with at length. So while the much longed for reunion with dad is now gone, I do have a link to many of the stories that will help fill that gap. Even better, I have family with which I can make wonderful new memories with. If there's one thing I learned, it's more important to look forward to the fluidity of the future than to dwell on a past that's already etched in stone. RIP Papi.

A Tree Grows Nowhere

It’s the first weekend of the month, a cause for celebration. Mom gets her welfare check the first of every month and throws a sort of party come the weekend. I’m not invited. The only people allowed to celebrate are her and whatever Flavor of the Month 
motherfucker whose arm she’s hanging on to. This one’s on his fifth month, a bit of a record. Of course, the fact that he just moved us out of New York and into Nowhere, Baltimore County, Maryland improves his chances. It means Mom won’t be meeting any new Flavors any time soon. Anyway, it doesn’t bother me not to be invited—her little parties have a way of getting out of hand.

   I haven’t had a chance to make any new friends, yet. I don’t go to school my first week here. Besides helping unpack and settle the only pair of my shoes that made the trip are some snow boots. The weather here in Nowhere is spring-like compared to the frigid city, and I’m too embarrassed to wear them. Thankfully Mom springs for a pair of Sikes, kind of like Nikes but with the swoop going the wrong way.

The next two weeks are awkward—teaching people how to pronounce my name, clarifying my race. Nobody in Nowhere has ever met a Porto Reekin before, or anything remotely close to one. They’re curious to hear me speak some Porto Reekin until I tell them it’s no different from the Spanish class we all take every day during fifth period, except for the teacher’s grammatical mistakes. I’m seen as a true oddity.

I’m used to moving—lucky to complete an entire year at one school—but never to a place where I’m watched curiously, like some ape in a cage expected to start throwing its shit at any moment. I’m not sure whether to resent these kids or be flattered by the attention. I am, however, one very pissed of Porto Reekin. We left New York on a spur of the moment, practically on impulse—no chance to say goodbye to my friends, never to learn the results of my audition to the School for Performing Arts—the so-called Fame school. I spent the first few nights in Nowhere crying myself to sleep. I felt stranded.

Tonight, I’m still stranded. I watch The Flavor carry in a case of Red White & Blue, and I shake my head. Mom comes in behind him carrying a brown bag, Bacardi—Ron Rico if she’s pinching her pennies. The winter sun’s going down already, my cue to retreat to my room. As they begin playing cards, or dominoes, I start reading Thomas Covenant, a novel about a modern day leper who gets transported to a dying land where he is the only one who can restore its magic. I envy him, leprosy and all.

I don’t know how longs it’s been, but I hear shouting from the other side of my door. I stop being Thomas Covenant and listen. Mom and The Flavor have started to argue, if you can call it that. The neighbors would call it screaming, and the police would call it disturbing the peace. I’m used to it. As a matter of fact I won’t even leave my room unless—¡¡¡FUCK!!!

   He starts hitting her. ¡Motherfucker! I storm out of my room and try to come between them. “¡Please, stop! Don’t hit my mother,” a line I’ve been practicing since I was five. There are cards all over the floor. One of the beer cans is spilled over leaving some of the cards in a bubbly, pale yellow puddle. He has the collar of her blouse in one fist, smacks hers in the face with his free hand. He stops for a moment to shove me away.

My mother stops wailing enough to yell at him in Spanish. “¡Don’t touch my son you sonofabitch! ¡¡I’ll kill you!! She swipes at his head, catches his face with her long scarlet nails. He winces, puts his free hand to his face, feels the blood starting to trickle.

“You fucking whore,” he shouts as he throws her to the floor, redoubles his efforts to beat the shit out her. I jump on his shoulders, try to yank him off her. He shakes me off, whips around and cracks me in the head. Had I not tried to duck the blow, if he were any less drunk, he would have caught my ear.

My head’s reeling. I’m in shock. Not one of my mother’s flavors had ever tried to hit me for protecting her. There have been some who, in their effort to play Daddy, have swung a belt at me. This—this is unheard of. He’s stops hitting her, starts to drag her into their bedroom by her hair. Mom’s hanging onto his fists, kicking as she slides across the floor. I go out the front door.

One big difference between Nowhere, Maryland and New York is trees. While New York is not known for its fauna, at least not in the neighborhoods I came up in, I’m able to step out the door and in little time I have a branch I can barely lift. I storm back in, straight into their bedroom. He has her pinned against the bed. His back is to me. He’s wielding a pair of utility scissors, the ones with the big orange handles, and he’s trying to cut her nails off. “You want to scratch me?” he shouts, “I’ll teach you not to scratch!” My mother, like many Puerto Rican women of her generation, takes great pride in her nails, always keeping them long and painted—complains for hours if she breaks one. He’s managed to cut off three of them.

With tears in my eyes, I raise the branch as high over my head as I can get it and swing it down across his back. I’m about to strike him again when he turns to look at me. He has this look of pure hatred on his face, enough to fill me with fear. I drop the branch. He rises, I turn around and start running. He’s too drunk to catch me, but I can’t run forever. He’s also too drunk to know when to stop chasing. Trees. Again they come to good use as I choose a particularly tall one and climb.

He makes a few attempts to climb up after me, but I don’t think he would have been able to even if he were sober. On his last attempt he makes it about three feet up and falls onto his back. Mom’s outside by now. She runs to him. “¡Oh my God! ¿Papi, are you okay? ¿Can you get up?” She helps him to his feet, walks him back to the apartment.

I stay in my tree for another ten minutes or so when mom comes back out. “¡Ricardo, get back in the fucking house!” she orders. I follow her in. I can hear The Flavor snoring from their bedroom. Mom locks the door behind us, stands in front of me, and smacks me. “Don’t you ever do that shit again,” she tells me, “¡What me and him do is none of your fucking business! ¡Stay out of it!” With that said, she strolls into her bedroom and slams the door closed behind her.

   Stunned, I go into my own room and get undressed. The irony of it all makes me dizzy as what just happened swims about in my head. I flop face down onto the bed. I can’t hold back the tears anymore. It means something that, until recently, I didn’t even wait to get hit before I started crying. Then again, everything that happened tonight probably means something. I’m too tired to figure it out, too tired to even dig Thomas Covenant out of my ribs. I spend another night in Nowhere, Maryland crying myself to sleep.

***

A month later, I still haven’t made any friends. I have, however, made a contact that can get me some pot. This month, I have my own private party. I lift ten bucks from Mom’s pocketbook, and I’m able to get a nickel bag of some decent weed, a pint of Jack Daniels, and a pack of rolling papers. I don’t have enough for a Coke, so I learn to drink it straight.

When Mom and The Flavor start their little party, I sit in my windowsill and enjoy mine. When it gets out of hand, I barely notice—I don’t care. I’m deep in the middle of somewhere not even Thomas Covenant can guide me through. No matter what tears are shed tonight none of them would be mine.