Chango Crying: ONE

Prayer to The Seven African Powers

O, Seven African Powers, who are so near to our divine Creator, with great humility I kneel before thee, and implore your intercession before almighty God. Hear my petition, and grant me peace and prosperity. Please remove, forever, all of the obstacles that cause me to sin. Oh Heavenly Father, I trust in your words, “Ask and thy shall receive.”

Ashé

ONE

Standing in a stiff March wind in front of the Maryland House of Corrections in Jessup, I resist the urge to pull the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head. The breeze feels different on this side, freer. I’ve been locked up for almost five years for one last gram of cocaine. Because I wouldn’t give up my connection, they had wanted to give me twenty. I pled to eight. They paroled me after four and a half—a year too late to be there for my mother when she died. I’ve been in too long.

I turn around to catch the gate click shut behind me. It could have been worse, I think. It could have been like all the movies and television shows: a den of iniquity and violence, overflowing with criminals teaching each other how to be better criminals. It can be, if what you want is to be a criminal.

I just wanted to get out. I don’t want to remember going in, but I can’t help it. Walking into the cellblock, hearing the inmates hollering.

“¡Look at what we got here, fresh meat!”

“¡Oh Yeah! I see we got some tight virgin ass up in he’e.”

“I got dibs on the little Indian.”

The first night was the roughest. The few days I spent in lockup before making bail were bad enough. But this was a whole new monster. When you get to the pen, everyone is eyeing you up, checking you out. Some look at you with hungry eyes, as if you were meant to be their next meal. Some measure you up, as if deciding how much of a challenge it would be to take you out. It was the ones that didn’t look at you, the ones walking around with cold dead stares that scared me, most.

It seemed I knew what I could expect from the rest. With the zombies, as I called them in my own head, anything seemed possible. Make a mistake, hit their trigger and I was sure I’d find myself on a coroner’s table quicker than I hoped.

The worst was that first dinner call. I always feel lost my first time in any cafeteria. The pen was no different, except I was lost in the most inhospitable of environments. No time to stand still and get my bearings, I was shoved aside like some willowy branch hanging in between predators and their prey. Even when I got in line, I kept getting grabbed and pushed back until I realized I was in the rear with the group I had come in with that day. What was left when we finally made it to the front was cold and inedible, not that being warm would have made what we were served any better.

My plan had been to pass the time by finishing my high school diploma, catching up with some reading, and ingratiating myself to a few of the prisoners. I was no idiot, but my senior year in high school had been all about getting high and trying to get laid. I got plenty high, but never did manage to get laid. By the end of the third quarter, I had missed more days than not, so I decided to just stop going altogether. When I was sentenced, I figured I would at least have the time to finish what I had started. I’m not very good at that. I owed it to myself to at least finish high school.

I went to a few classes in the pen, and gave up. I couldn’t stand sitting in a classroom full of remedials. Anytime I heard someone trying to read at anything higher than a third grade level, stuttering and stammering through each word, I grit my teeth until my jaws ached. I never had the patience to sit through class, but that was unbearable. I think I went three times before dropping out. Again. I did spend plenty of time reading. And I managed to make a few friends by trying to be funny and useful.

My cellmate was going on trial for stabbing a panhandler who he felt got too aggressive. The state wanted Ricky to cop to six years. Ricky claimed that because he only stabbed the bum in the leg, that he wouldn’t cop to more than three. He would end up pleading out for five years, three suspended.

Ricky was seventeen, two years younger than I was. He didn’t say much the first of couple days, except to run down some things I should know. “Don’t step on nobody’s kicks!” By kicks, he meant tennis shoes. “That’s instant beef. Watch where you walk, cuz you so much as nudge some of these fools, they’ll shank yo’ ass without lookin’ at you. Get to the food line as fast as you can. Some folks are friends with the servers, or they pay ‘em fugs...”

“Fugs?” I interrupted.

“¡Fugs! Cigarettes. Where you from man? Anyway, they get what you might say is healthy servings. So if you late, you might be going to bed a little hungry. And if you ain’t looking to get fucked, don’t be nowhere where you by yo’self. They figure, if you there, you want some. And if you ain’t want some, you shouldn’ a been there.”

After a few days, once he realized I read a lot, he asked if I could write.

“I’m no writer, but I know how to write.”

“Can you help me throw some shit together for my girl? She sent me some nekkid pictures, and I wanna say something nice.”

“Did you try thank you?” I asked, realizing after I said it that I might have come across as belittling.

The sucking noise he made through his teeth told me I did, but forgivably so. “¡Yeah man! But I wanna do something nice for her. Like write a rap. You freestyle? You write rhymes?”

“You can probably freestyle a whole hell of a lot better than me,” I admitted, “but I can maybe help you write a decent poem.”

“¡Tight! Maybe I can beatbox over it. ¡Maybe we can tape it!”

We didn’t make a soundtrack for it, but I wrote a readable letter with a few verses and only had to think of three rhymes for fuck while he made sound effects with his mouth as he stood over my ear. Soon enough, I was writing or reading for fugs for almost half the block. I didn’t even smoke, at least not cigarettes. It was a dying currency, anyway. You can no longer smoke in bars and restaurants, so it won't be long before prisons make cigarettes contraband.

I never charged them, anyway. Tradition holds that I just do what is in my power for those that ask and deserve it. I’m to ask for nothing in return, but accept anything offered.

I ended up helping these kids sort through paperwork, reading the documents from the public defenders whose faces they rarely saw before their trail date, writing letters to try to get those same public defenders to visit, or filling out their parole applications. I’d listen to them for hours, telling me about problems I could rarely help with, but I’d try to offer what advice I could. I’d done the same thing in high school.

The seat on the bus next to mine was always empty for anyone wanting to share their pain. Actually, most of the time Krissy sat there. She couldn’t stop sleeping with her brother, or any other boy that asked nicely enough, except me. She walked over to me during lunch one day, her only complaint being that she was horny as hell. I offered to help her out if she’d just sneak behind our school’s little stadium with me. She thought about it for maybe five seconds before saying no.

I don’t think anything I said ever made a difference. My schoolmates would always go back to doing the same things that ended up hurting them—problems they would bother me with sooner or later. After I left high school, I heard Krissy went down on two guys at once in the walk-in freezer of the Hardee’s they all worked in. But I never let that stop me from trying to get in her pants every time I ran into her, to no avail.

Most of the inmates in my cellblock were young like Ricky. They were awaiting trial and couldn’t afford bail. There was no room left in the Juvenile pre-trial facilities. The rest were juveniles convicted as adults. I supposed the powers-that-be either thought I wasn’t particularly dangerous, or they thought a small, nerdy guy like me might have some trouble in genpop.

Not being forced to serve my time in general population suited me fine. Here the kids tried to act like adults, but could never shake that childlike demeanor. I never could either, really. At twenty two, I wasn’t much older.

Not everyone was friendly, though. Even in the juvie block, there were some crazies who’d snap your neck just to break the boredom. But my little crew of reprobates—they even had a name, Dyin’ Tryin’—protected me.

As young as they were, some of the kids broke six feet and two hundred pounds. I almost caught some trouble a few times, but I was always able to talk my way out of it. Those conversations generally involved me shoving a fistful of cigarettes into someone’s hands, albeit a bit bent and slightly stale. Still, better than none at all. I had plenty and wasn’t using them.

All of that was on the other side of the gate, now. I need to forget about that—leave it behind. On this side, I have nearly nothing. I gave my stash of fugs to Ricky. You would’ve thought he was eight years old and I’d given him a bike for Christmas. All I have now are the clothes on my back, $40 cash and an 8X10 picture of my mother lying dead on a coroner’s table in New Jersey. She’s been dead for nearly a year, now. They wouldn’t let me see her, wouldn’t give me a furlough to go to the funeral. I got the photo last October, five months after she died, and I had to write a few letters just to get that.

On a bus headed to Baltimore, I slip the picture out of its manila envelope and stare at it. It doesn’t even look like her, face bloated like a fish left out in the hot sun too long. I trace the scars on each of her shoulders with a finger. Perhaps it’s a trick of the camera, but they seem to glow. Why wouldn’t they? The scar on each shoulder, along with the one on each foot, the one on each palm and the one over her heart represent the power she once believed she wielded.

Las Siete Potencias, The Seven African Powers, which her scars represent, are supposed to be our connection to the energy of our ancestors which anyone is supposed to have access to. Los Siete Rayos, The Seven Slashes, two of which seem to glow more as I stare at my mother’s bare shoulders, mean that she was Palo Mayombe, Keeper of the Mysteries of the Spirits, a high priestess privy to the power of the ancestors to aid those in need. I reach under my shirt collar to feel one of the scars on my own shoulder. It seems inert, dead. Mine will never glow.

I slide the picture back into its envelope. I can feel tears starting to well. Inside, I could never cry for my mother. I couldn’t afford to. Like in the wild, a sign of weakness is seen as an opportunity to strike. But I’m not inside anymore. As I finally head home, I pull my hood up over my head and let the previously dammed tears flow.

Chango Crying Pitch

Pedro Santos has lost everything. He lost his freedom when he was sent to prison, lost his wife, his kids. Pedro lost his mother, who died while he was locked up, without ever getting a chance to say goodbye. Ultimately, Pedro even lost his faith. That doesn’t stop his mother’s followers from turning to him for help once he gets out. Pedro’s mother, Paloma, was a powerful Santeria priestess, dedicating herself to using the mystical mesh of Catholicism and African Yoruba religion that rose out of slavery to aid anyone who came to her. Pedro wants to help, but can’t understand why anyone would look to a faithless loser, like him. Yet, all they see is El Milagrito, the “little miracle” that beat death twice by the time he was nine, and must therefore be destined to be a healer. If only he could heal himself...

In my novel, Chango Crying, we meet Pedro as he’s released after four years of incarceration near Baltimore for selling cocaine to help support his own young children after his wife abandoned their family to try to make it as a stripper in New York. Having nowhere else to go, Pedro returns to his mother’s tiny apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. When people hear that El Milagrito has come home, they flock to Pedro. Despite no longer believing in the magic promised by Santeria and its rituals, he is obligated to help. Paloma only had two rules: turn no one away, and ask nothing in return. Saying no would dishonor his mom’s memory.

It’s not long before Pedro finds himself in way over his head. A desperate Manhattan socialite turns to him for help in finding her son, who disappeared in Mexico during Spring Break. Reluctantly, Pedro fulfills his obligation to 'turn no one away' and risks his newfound freedom by leaving the country while on probation. Pedro is able to track the socialite’s son to a pair of brujos, evil Santeria practitioners who sacrifice humans in dark, brutal rituals designed to protect a powerful Mexican drug cartel, and is soon caught in the midst of a violent drug war. He suspects the socialite’s son is already dead. Once the brujos discover his presence, Pedro needs to find his faith, fast, just to stay alive. Otherwise, he's going to need another miracle.

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

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.