Bird of Paradise Page 7

  I imagine myself doing footwork on the linoleum flooring, looking all high post and shit, when I make the same mistake on the piano.

  “If you do tha’ again, I’m going to throw you out the window,” Papi yells.

  If Papi had a tag name, it would be Trujillo215, the boogeyman Mama used to talk about.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says, “don’t say those things.”

  My hands are shaking. I try to play whatever classical piece Ms. Kaufman assigned me that week—they all start to sound the same after a while—slowly, correctly.

  I fuck up again.

  “I’m going to throw you out the window, you understan’?”

  “But Papi, I’m trying hard.”

  He springs up from my bed and punches me in the back of the neck with such force that I start seeing two of everything. I am grateful that he’s using his fists this time and not the orange metal ball hopper or the antique wooden chair that matches absolutely nothing in the apartment.

  My head is spinning faster than a windmill. My back is numb, my eyes are heavy, but I do not cry. Like the graffiti writers, the dancers, and all the other kids nobody wants, I resist tears.

  “Eduardo, please.” Alice is frowning at Papi from the kitchenette but does nothing to stop him.

  “You going to be like dose ga’bage Dominicans on welfare—like your moth’a,” he screams into my right ear, sending me further off balance.

  “But Papi, I’m—”

  “I hope one day you cry tears of blood,” he says, his eyes bulging out of the sockets. “I hate you.”

  I believe him.

  Papi gets dressed and leaves. He disappears—he jets for an hour or two almost every night—ignoring Alice when she asks where he’s going or where he’s been.

  I stop playing.

  As Papi slams the door behind him, his dental school graduation photo falls from atop the old black china cabinet onto the floor. I jump on the photo, screaming, “I HATE YOU. I fucking HATE you, you motherfuckin’ asshole!”

  “Rachel, please,” Alice says, “don’t talk like that.”

  I stop. I don’t want her to tell on me. Thankfully, she doesn’t.

  “Why do you let him hit me like that, Alice?” I ask.

  “Because he’s your father, and he can do whatever he wants with you,” she responds.

  I lie down on my twin bed and close my eyes. I continue the fall down, down, down a damp well whose bottom is endless, never reaching the bottom. The throbbing up and down my neck and back awakens me.

  I stare at the small clock-radio on the junky night table next to my bed. I’m alone, finally alone in my makeshift bedroom. I turn on the radio.

  “Ninety-eight-point-seven Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissss!” pronounces the raspy voice through the static.

  I feel electricity run through my body. I don’t move. The DJ—his name is Red Alert—is mixing the same music I hear blaring from boom boxes at the park by my school and the handball and basketball courts in Inwood Park. It’s the kind of music that sends b-boys flying through the air, taking control of their bodies as if they’re puppets suspended and controlled by magical strings. It goes BOOM-BAP, BOOM-BOOM-BAP, BOOM-BAP, BOOM-BOOM-BAP. The music is called rap.

  “God is smiling on you but he’s frowning too / Because only God knows what you’ll go through.” It’s Grandmaster Melle Mel. His voice pours out of the speaker with the force of a brujo invading my head.

  The lyrics feel like they were written for me, almost like a sound track to the movie of my life so far. The music delivers me from the suffocating darkness in here, from Papi’s fists and Alice’s indifference.

  The music sounds different here than it does outside. Out there, everybody thinks I’m stuck up because I play a “white girl’s sport,” and piano, and because I live on Seaman Avenue with a white woman. Some of the kids at school swear I think I’m better than they are and am intentionally drawing a line where I’m standing alone on one side, looking down at them. It’s worse when Papi makes me bring my medals and trophies to school to show my teachers. Up here and at tennis, I feel like no matter what, I will never be good enough or rich enough. I don’t feel like I fit in too many places. Grandmaster Melle Mel gets it.

  * * *

  Xiomara is the coolest mom at St. Thaddeus: everybody loves her. And a couple days after I spotted her laughing with Papi at a parent-teacher conference, she started paying special attention to me. One morning, Titi—she told me to call her that—brought me Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and rice and beans for lunch. I felt so special because she began treating me like she did her own son, David, for no apparent reason. I don’t know or care what Papi said to her the other night, but I don’t want to mess this up. Maybe people will finally stop making fun of me every time Alice comes to school looking crazy in her flammable polyester getups.

  Titi looks more Puerto Rican than Dominican. I’m not sure where she comes from; her accent doesn’t give her away. David is a jabao version of Titi, with light skin and coarse hair. They live on Academy Street, near Post Avenue. I can see the 1 train zoom by their second-floor apartment window.

  I fall in love with everything about her, even her bottled strawberry-blond hair, cut short in a pristine DA. She wears a lot of makeup and tight-ass jeans that look really good on her except for the perpetual pan de agua she rocks between her legs. I don’t dare ask Titi her age, but she must have had David really young, like they do in D.R., because she had it going on. And she cooked so well I didn’t want to eat out anymore.

  I feel like a duck living on Seaman Avenue, away from Titi and life east of Broadway. I love going to her apartment. From Titi’s window, I can see young guys rocking DAs and tight Caesar haircuts and girls wearing long mullets. In the summer, couples dress in matching two-toned Lees and Le Tigre shirts and leather bomber jackets, sheepskin hats and coats in the winter.

  I overhear women bochinchando in front of Titi’s building. I hear there’s a brothel in the old lady’s apartment with the black window curtains in the basement. We all know something weird is going on in there because these creepy-looking guys, almost always blancitos, come and go like they’re giving away free money and crack at all hours of the day and night. I never see any women enter or leave the apartment, but I hear these sucios in there are fucking girls of all ages.

  I start noticing something else: more and more adults who look out of place, walking around with big cameras filming and taking pictures on the block. One day it happens when we’re running back to Titi’s apartment because I have to use the bathroom. People with big cameras and colossal attitudes won’t allow us onto Titi’s side of the street. They have a permit, so we have to wait until they finish filming a scene of a movie they are calling Body Rock. A bunch of kids from the area are recruited to walk behind the movie’s star, pretending to be a part of his posse. I’ve seen the dude before on The Love Boat, but now he’s dressed in a long black leather trench coat with a wickedy-wack piece on the back that reads CHILLY D in fluorescent colors.

  Chilly D is wearing a girl’s spike bracelet on his wrist with a pair of matching black boots and high-waisted stonewashed jeans. Take after take, Lorenzo “Chilly D” Llamas is acting like he thinks he is the coolest guy to ever step foot in the ’hood. It’s so crazy funny, I forget I have to pee.

  * * *

  Good things happen when I win. For one, Papi does nice things for me even when he isn’t trying to show off in front of Titi. Papi is hanging out more frequently with us while Alice holds down a nine-to-six. Work must be slow for Papi right now, because he always manages to make early appearances when Titi, David, and I are hanging out at the park or her place.

  I’m playing so well these days that I become part of the Reebok Junior Tennis Academy, where they lace me with eight pairs of sneakers and a big tennis bag full of clothing to represent them. It’s too bad that Reebok sneakers, except the high-top classics, are strictly for toys.

  For my eleve
nth birthday, Papi takes me to see Beat Street at the Alpine on Dyckman. I’m wearing the gray Lees he and Alice bought me from the huge habibi Supermundo store. It’s my favorite one in the ’hood because they sell BVD shirts and Lee jeans for just $11.99. I’m so nervous. I wonder if Freeze is going to be at the Alpine tonight, or any of the writers from the Manhattan Subway Kings. I hope Papi doesn’t embarrass me.

  It’s love at first sight. This time it’s with the man on the large screen, RAMO, who I think should audition for Menudo as soon as possible because he’s almost too old. They should have replaced Ricky Meléndez with RAMO: His long black DA and those high cheekbones make him look like an indio, as if he moved from Puerto Rico to New York City just to conquer the trains. I look over at Papi, who fell asleep soon after we sat down, and I completely lose myself at the Roxy.

  “What are you doin’?” Papi says, half awake. “Why are you crying?”

  I don’t answer him. RAMO just died, electrocuted on the third rail of the train tracks.

  “What happened?” Papi asks me again.

  “Be-be-cause RAMO died on the third rail and, and—” I whisper.

  “Stap crying,” he snaps, “you are so ri-di-culous with your monkey business.”

  Papi falls asleep until the final scene, where Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five rush the stage at the Roxy to perform the film’s title track. Papi is jolted awake by the music. “What is this?” he asks me, pointing at Melle Mel, one of the few people who could roll up into any ’hood wearing tight leather pants and boots.

  “That’s—”

  “What, is he—a nice-looking boy dressed like that?” he asks.

  “He’s not gay, Papi, that’s—”

  “What time is it? We have to wake up early for tennis tomorrow.”

  I don’t respond. I won’t let Papi ruin the celebration of RAMO’s life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An Awakening

  It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

  —ADRIENNE RICH

  I BEG PAPI AND ALICE FOR A SHEEPSKIN IN THE WINTER OF 1984. I’m playing the shit-brown piano really well. A few months ago, I ran through Clementi’s “Sonatina Op. 36, No. 1” like it was nothing during a recital at the Wellington Hotel. I’m also winning more tennis matches and tournaments and learning how to pretend that I don’t hate every second on the court. And on the nights that don’t end violently, I use my dance routines to make Papi and Alice laugh. I throw myself from my bed to the floor and do the worm across the living room. The worm, for some reason, makes Papi laugh hysterically every single time I do it.

  “Ask her what she wan’s to be when she grows up, dah’ling,” Papi says to Alice.

  “A breakdancer, I’m going to be a b-girl. And I’m going to write rap songs for Rakim and Roxanne Shanté,” I respond.

  “She wan’s to be so Black,” Papi says, laughing.

  “Eduardo, please,” Alice says, “you know that it’s not only Black kids who are doing that dancing.”

  I want a sheepskin so badly I don’t challenge Papi’s hip-hop miseducation. He promises that we’ll go to Delancey and pick one up before it gets cold, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, Alice comes back from visiting her sister upstate with a shopping bag that contains the ugliest coat I’ve ever seen. It looks like a dead polar bear.

  “Look what Anni gave me to give to you,” Alice says to me, holding up the dark blue fur coat in front of my face.

  “But that thing isn’t a sheepskin. You promised—”

  “Rachel, please, it’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I say. Tears are beginning to rush down my cheeks. I wish Titi were my stepmother. She’d never let me look like such a campesina at school.

  “Nobody will know the difference, Rachel,” Alice says. “It’s a perfectly good coat.”

  “Stap with that monkey-business crying,” Papi says.

  We’ve been enjoying a rather warm winter. For a while I can get away with wearing layers of clothing under my uniform and Reebok jacket instead of the blue polar bear, but I dread the inevitable. First I became the laughingstock at school when the other kids started calling me “Steel Back” because of the bulky-ass brace Papi made me wear under my uniform, when I could have just worn it to sleep, after I was diagnosed with scoliosis. Then, things went from bad to worse when I came to school with bad graho after forgetting to put on deodorant after tennis one morning.

  The first time I’m forced to wear the polar bear to school, everyone does poke fun of me except my best friend, Claudine Jean-Baptiste. She lives in the Dyckman Houses with her mother, a nurse born in Port-au-Prince whose English I pretend to understand.

  “It’s not that bad,” Claudine says. She’s trying hard not to laugh while consoling me in the girls’ bathroom.

  “I look like a fat-ass fucking polar bear,” I say, staring at myself in the mirror from every angle. “Everyone is fucking with me again.”

  “Well, at least it’s different, Raquel. Everybody already thinks you’re on some other shit anyway, right?”

  * * *

  Something happens that makes my polar-bear coat take a backseat. The conversation shifts to an entirely different topic, one that will consume every adult in my building and teacher at school, the tennis players in the park, Papi, and even a few kids I know for months and months.

  “Venga aqu’á loco, did you hear what happened to those dudes on the steel horse?” I hear someone say as I’m leaving school a couple days before Christmas break.

  “Yeah, someone shot those motherfuckers right there in front of everybody like nothing,” says another dude. I only halfway pay attention, thankful that there are no rumored gang fights preventing us from leaving school again. New York City reported dozens of robberies and assaults on the train every day this year, so the drama rang like any other story at first. It becomes real when I see the kids on FOX News appearing from the station on stretchers. Adding to the mounting suspense, the shooter is incognito for days.

  Suddenly, the nerdiest white man the city has ever seen in handcuffs, with thick glasses and a detached gaze, turns himself in. In the beginning, Bernhard Goetz is lionized as a working-class hero for carrying out what many straphangers who’ve been terrorized on the train have only fantasized about. He confesses to shooting the four Black teens in the seventh car of a number 2 subway train on Fourteenth Street because he felt like they were about to jack him. Goetz had had enough. He was mugged by Black kids before, and the police, he felt, did shit to help him. The guy is dubbed a subway vigilante, a modern-day David, an avenger with the blood of these street toughs, four Goliaths, splattered on his face and hands. Many people feel that by shooting the boys, Goetz somehow took back the streets of New York City from the public’s most bloodthirsty enemies.

  Throughout, the man remained as cool as Clint Eastwood in a Western flick. “You seem to be doing all right,” he allegedly told one of his victims, “here’s another,” before pumping a second bullet from his Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver into a nineteen-year-old moreno’s back, paralyzing him.

  At the bodegas around the way, folks start playing 14, 7, 38, 1, 9, 8, 4, and every imaginable combination of numbers associated with the incident. Goetz is on TV every night and on the cover of every daily newspaper for a long-ass time. The Guardian Angels, a group of mostly Black and Latino unarmed citizen crime patrollers in their teens, raise thousands of dollars for his defense. Even after he gets off on attempted-murder charges—Goetz was saying all kinds of crazy shit a lot of people were thinking, after all—people still show him love. Papi does too, though he’s never gotten mugged and rarely takes the train. Papi drives to his job in the Bronx.

  I stop complaining about the polar-bear coat. I have—we have—bigger issues to worry about. Bernhard Goetz has convinced me that everybody in the city, not just Papi, feels that Black and Latino kids are no better than subway
tunnel rats. Around our way, the resentment we feel encourages kids who may not have otherwise fucked with each other to form alliances. Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca.

  * * *

  Papi’s mother, Ercilia Rabassa, starts visiting us from Newport every summer, breaking the monotony of my life, which revolves around tennis and piano. On the surface, she’s the dullest woman I’ve ever met, with the strangest Dominican apellido I’ve ever heard.

  She doesn’t speak a lick of English except for “t’sank you” every once in a while, and Alice’s Dominican Spanish is wack, so they communicate by smiling. When Papi translates, he repeats everything in broken English and Spanish, filling in the many awkward moments of silence. Alice enjoys Ercilia’s visits even if she doesn’t understand everything that is said because Papi won’t leave them alone as much to go on his nightly diligencias.

  Ercilia sleeps on the pullout bed stored beneath mine. I make her bed nightly and store it away every morning as she sits with her back to me, praying and reading her Bible. She sleeps with her back to me too, having conversations with God until she falls asleep. Ercilia sometimes smiles in my direction but never asks me to call her “Mama.” Come to think of it, I can’t remember one single time when she’s spoken directly to me. The only reason why I know she isn’t muda is because I can hear her praying. Her voice is faint and supplicant, her Dominican accent thicker than a stack of pancakes at IHOP. I listen closely for her to break out into the strange language Papi says she knows, hoping she’ll say something that will clue me in to who she really is. It never happens.

  I stare at the back of her head, trying to imagine what lead Ercilia to her holy-rolling present. I try to picture her as a child, walking beside her parents in the Dominican Republic, though I’ve never seen a photo of her parents or anyone on her side of the family. When Papi talks about her, the stories always contradict each other. In some she wasn’t adopted, and in others a wealthy couple took her in from San Pedro de Macorís, where she was born. I’ve heard Mama and Papa say that people in Santo Domingo referred to Ercilia’s mother as la prieta Francisca because she was darker than the night sky; she supposedly stood in stark contrast to her white husband, Don Pedro Rabassa. The only consistent thread in Ercilia’s story was how badly her mother and siblings treated her. I think it had something to do with the abiding sadness Papi’s mother shouldered. I promise, listening to Ercilia snore the night away, that I’ll never allow myself to become a dejected church lady.