Luis Alberto Urrea - The Water Museum

“My favorite song.”

We slapped hands.

“The admin’s not into classic rock,” he noted. “Think I’m…advocating substance abuse.”

We laughed.

“You like Berlin ?” he asked.

“Berlin? The old band?”

“Hell no! Lou Reed’s best album, dude!”

They summoned him.

“I’ll play it for ya,” he said, and walked into the office.

And so it began.

Tía Cuca’s house was the bomb. She was hooked up with some kind of Lebanese merchant. The whole place was cool floor tiles and suede couches. Their pool looked out on the city lights, and you could watch roadrunners on the deck cruising for rattlers at dusk. Honestly, I didn’t know why Pope wasn’t in some rich private school, but apparently his scholastic history was “spotty.” I still don’t know how he ended up at poor ol’ Camelback, but I do know it must have taken a lot of maneuvering by his family. By the time we’d graduated, we were inseparable. He went to ASU. I didn’t have that kind of money. I went to community college.

Pope’s room was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Tía Cuca had given him a detached single-car garage at the far end of the house. They’d put in a bathroom and made a bed loft on top of it. Pope had a king-size mattress up there, and a wall of CDs and the Bose iPod port, and everything was Wi-Fi’d to his laptop. There was a huge Bowie poster on the wall beside the door — in full Aladdin Sane glory, complete with the little shiny splash of come on his collarbone. It was so retro. My boy had satellite on a flat screen, and piles of DVDs around the slumpy little couch on the ground floor. I didn’t know why he was so crazy for the criminal stuff— Scarface and The Godfather. I was so sick of Tony Montana and Michael Corleone! He had an Elvis clock — you know the one — with the King’s legs dancing back and forth in place of a pendulum.

“Welcome,” Pope said on that first visit, “to Disgraceland.”

He turned me on to all that good classic stuff: Iggy, T. Rex, Roxy Music. He wasn’t really fond of new music, except for the darkwave guys. Anyway, there we’d be, blasting that glam as loud as possible, and it would get late and I’d just fall asleep on his big bed with him. No wonder they thought I was gay! Ha. We were drinking Buds and reading Chic and Hustler mags we’d stolen from his uncle Abdullah or whatever his name was. Aunt Cuca once said, “Don’t you ever go home?” But I told her, “Nah — since the divorce, my mom’s too busy to worry about it.”

One day I was puttering around his desk, looking at the Alien figures and the Godzillas, scoping out the new copy of El Topo he’d gotten by mail, checking his big crystals and his antique dagger, when I saw the picture of Amapola behind his stack of textbooks. Yes, she was a kid. But what a kid.

“Who’s this?” I said.

He took the framed picture out of my hand and put it back.

“Don’t worry about who that is,” he said.

* * *

Thanksgiving. Pope had planned a great big fiesta for all his homies and henchmen. He took the goth-gansta thing seriously, and he had actual “hit men” (he called them that) who did errands for him, carried out security at his concerts. He played guitar for the New Nouveau Nuevos — you might remember them. One of his “soldiers” was a big Irish kid who’d been booted off the football team, Andy the Tank. Andy appeared at our apartment with the invitation to the fiesta — we were to celebrate the Nuevos’ upcoming year, and chart the course of the future. I was writing lyrics for Pope, cribbed from Roxy Music and Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World album. The invite was printed out on rolled parchment and tied with a red ribbon. Pope had style.

I went over to Tía Cuca’s early, and there she was — Amapola. She’d come up from Nogales for the fiesta, since Pope was by now refusing to go home for any reason. He wanted nothing to do with his dad, who had declared that only gay boys wore long hair or makeup or played in a band that wore feather boas and silver pants. Sang in English.

I was turning eighteen, and she was fifteen, almost sixteen. She was more pale than Popo. She had a frosting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and her eyes were light brown, almost gold. Her hair was thick and straight and shone like some liquid. She was kind of shy, too, blushing when I talked to her.

The meal was righteous. They’d fixed a turkey in the Mexican style. It was stuffed not with bread or oysters, but with nuts, dried pineapple, dried papaya and mango slices, and raisins. Cuca and Amapola wore traditional Mexican dresses and, along with Cuca’s cook, served us the courses as we sat like members of the Corleone family around the long dining room table. Pope had seated Andy the Tank beside Fuckin’ Franc, the Nuevos’ drummer. Some guy I didn’t know but who apparently owned a Nine Inch Nails type synth studio in his garage sat beside Franc. I was granted the seat at the end of the table, across its length from Pope. Down the left side were the rest of the Nuevos — losers all.

I was trying to keep my roving eye hidden from The Pope. I didn’t even have to guess what he’d do if he caught me checking her out. But she was so fine. It wasn’t even my perpetual state of horniness. Yes it was. But it was more. She was like a song. Her small smiles, her graciousness. The way she swung her hair over her shoulder. The way she lowered her eyes and spoke softly…then gave you a wry look that cut sideways and made savage fun of everyone there. You just wanted to be a part of everything she was doing.

“Thank you,” I said, every time she refilled my water glass or dropped fresh tortillas by my plate. Not much, it’s true, but compared to The Tank or Fuckin’ Franc, I was as suave as Cary Grant.

“You are so welcome,” she’d say.

It started to feel like a dance. It’s in the way you say it, not what you say. We were saying more to each other than Cuca or Pope could hear.

We were down to the cinnamon coffee and the red grape juice toasts. She stood behind me, resting her hands on the top of the chair. And Amapola put out one finger, where they couldn’t see it, and ran her fingernail up and down between my shoulder blades.

Suddenly, supper was over, and we were all saying good night, and she had disappeared somewhere in the big house and never came back out.

Soon Christmas came, and Pope again refused to go home. I don’t know how Cuca took it, having the sullen King Nouveau lurking in her converted garage. He had a kitsch aluminum tree in there. Blue ornaments. “Très Warhol.” He sighed.

My mom had given me some cool stuff — a vintage Who T-shirt, things like that. Pope’s dad had sent presents — running shoes, French sunglasses, a.22 target pistol. We snickered. I was way cooler than Poppa Popo. I had been down to Tucson, and I’d hit Zia Records and brought him some obscure 70s LPs: Captain Beyond, Curved Air, Amon Duul II, the Groundhogs. Pope got me a vintage turntable and the first four Frank Zappa LPs — how cool is that?

Pope wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t blind, either. He’d arranged a better gift for me than all that. He’d arranged for Amapola to come visit for a week. I found out later she had begged him.

“Keep it in your pants,” he warned me. “I’m watching you.”

Oh my God. I was flying. We went everywhere for those six days. The three of us, unfortunately. Pope took us to that fancy art deco hotel on the west side of Phoenix. That one with the crazy neon lights on the walls outside and the dark gourmet eatery on the ground-floor front corner. We went to movie matinees, never night movies. It took two movies to wangle a spot sitting next to her, getting Pope to relinquish the middle seat to keep us apart. But he knew it was a powerful movement between us, like continental drift. She kept leaning over to watch me instead of the movies. She’d laugh at everything I said. She lagged when we walked so I would walk near her. I was trying to keep my cool, not set off the Hermano Grande alarms. Suddenly he let me sit beside her. I could smell her. She was all clean hair and sweet skin. Our arms brushed on the armrest, and we let them linger, sweat against each other. Our skin forming a thin layer of wet between us, a little of her and a little of me mixing and forming something made of both of us. I was aching. I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.