Junot Diaz - Drown

I had my eyes closed and the television was on and when the hallway door crashed open, he jumped up and I nearly cut my dick off struggling with my shorts. It’s just the neighbor, he said, laughing. He was laughing, but I was saying, Fuck this, and getting my clothes on.

I believe I see him in his father’s bottomed-out Cadillac, heading towards the turnpike, but I can’t be sure. He’s probably back in school already. I deal close to home, trooping up and down the same dead-end street where the kids drink and smoke. These punks joke with me, pat me down for taps, sometimes too hard. Now that strip malls line Route 9, a lot of folks have part-time jobs; the kids stand around smoking in their aprons, name tags dangling heavily from pockets.

When I get home, my sneakers are filthy so I take an old toothbrush to their soles, scraping the crap into the tub. My mother has thrown open the windows and propped open the door. It’s cool enough, she explains. She has prepared dinner — rice and beans, fried cheese, tostones. Look what I bought, she says, showing me two blue t-shirts. They were two for one so I bought you one. Try it on.

It fits tight but I don’t mind. She cranks up the television. A movie dubbed into Spanish, a classic, one that everyone knows. The actors throw themselves around, passionate, but their words are plain and deliberate. It’s hard to imagine anybody going through life this way. I pull out the plug of bills from my pockets. She takes it from me, her fingers soothing the creases. A man who treats his plata like this doesn’t deserve to spend it, she says.

We watch the movie and the two hours together makes us friendly. She puts her hand on mine. Near the end of the film, just as our heroes are about to fall apart under a hail of bullets, she takes off her glasses and kneads her temples, the light of the television flickering across her face. She watches another minute and then her chin lists to her chest. Almost immediately her eyelashes begin to tremble, a quiet semaphore. She is dreaming, dreaming of Boca Raton, of strolling under the jacarandas with my father. You can’t be anywhere forever, was what Beto used to say, what he said to me the day I went to see him off. He handed me a gift, a book, and after he was gone I threw it away, didn’t even bother to open it and read what he’d written.

I let her sleep until the end of the movie and when I wake her she shakes her head, grimacing. You better check those windows, she says. I promise her I will.

I should have beencareful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn’t you know, I woke up in the hallway of our building, feeling like I’d been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would have been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn’t been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake Girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, Motherfucker, I’ll give you all the space you need. I knew Boyfriend a little. I saw him at the bars and saw some of the girls he used to bring home while she was away. He just needed more space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door she got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this? They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me. By the time Boyfriend got himself into the hallway I was already in my apartment. Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor, wires and some pipes. She kept saying, Ese fucking pepetón, and washed her face over and over again. It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.

The next day I told my boy Harold what happened and he said too bad for her.

I guess so.

If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow.

She ain’t our type.

The hell she ain’t.

Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry. And her boyfriend, olvídate. That nigger could have been a model; hell, they both could have been models, which was what they probably were, considering that I never heard word one pass between them about a job or a fucking boss. People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and then transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living. What was worse was how much Spanish they shared. None of my girlfriends ever spoke Spanish, even Loretta of the Puerto Rican attitudes. The closest thing for me was this black chick who spent three years in Italy. She liked to talk that shit in bed, and said she’d gone with me because I reminded her of some of the Sicilian men she’d known, which was why I never called her again.

Boyfriend came around a couple of times that week for his things and, I guess, to finish the job. He was a confident prick. He listened to what she had to say, arguments that had taken her hours to put together, and then he would sigh and say it didn’t matter, he needed his space, punto. She let him fuck her every time, maybe hoping that it would make him stay but you know, once somebody gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving. I would listen to them going at it and I would be like, Damn, ain’t nothing more shabby than those farewell fucks. I know. Me and Loretta had enough of those to go around. Difference was, we never talked the way these two would. About our days. Not even when we were cool together. We’d lay there and listen to the world outside, to the loud boys, the cars, the pigeons. Back then I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking but now I know what to pencil into all those empty thought bubbles. Escape. Escape.

These two had a thing about the bathroom. Each one of his visits ended up there. Which was fine by me, it was where I could hear them best. I don’t know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Most of the time I thought people, even at their worst, were pretty fucking boring. I guess I wasn’t busy with anything else. Especially not women. I was taking time off, waiting for the last of my Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight.

The bathroom. Girlfriend talked a mile a minute about her day, how she saw a fistfight on the C train, how somebody liked her necklace, and Boyfriend, with his smooth Barry White voice, just kept going, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’d shower together and if she wasn’t talking she was going down on him. All you would hear down there was the water smacking the bottom of the tub and him going, Yeah. Yeah. He wasn’t sticking around, though. That was obvious. He was one of those dark-skinned smooth-faced brothers that women kill for, and I knew for a fact, having seen his ass in action at the local spots, that he liked to get over on the white-girls. She didn’t know nothing about his little Rico Suave routine. It would have wrecked her. I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out — a place we down cats weren’t supposed to go. But love teaches you. Clears your head of any rules. Loretta’s new boy was Italian, worked on Wall Street. When she told me about him we were still going out. We were on the Promenade and she said to me, I like him. He’s a hard worker.