Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

Greg loved him like a father, in the good sense and in the bad. He spoiled Joe and put up with too much of his crap. At the same time he was always preaching to him wherever they’d happen to be as if he were a kid. I remember the craziness that came over Greg as we returned from Mass one Sunday and found Sleepy Joe seated at the kitchen table and playing with the meat knife, holding it with his right hand and stabbing the spaces between the fingers of his left hand, faster, faster, pricking holes in the table, and right when Greg said to stop the fucking game, Joe misjudged a move and stabbed one of his fingers. Not badly, but enough so that blood splattered on the table. And Greg screamed out, “You idiot, you moron.” What didn’t he call Joe? “You’ve ruined my kitchen table, you asshole,” he said. “Look what you’ve done, it’s full of marks.” But Joe took it and remained silent, sucking on the wound between his ring finger and pinkie.

They fought a lot because they’re a lot alike, I used to think and still think; I imagine that Greg became a cop just as simply as he could have become a criminal. And that Joe became a good-for-nothing just as simply as he could have become a cop. But perhaps I’m not being fair to Greg, who was a peaceful sort of guy, whereas Sleepy Joe had a rage inside him that was eating him alive and making steam come out of his ears. I have always thought that he never became a serial killer simply because he was too lazy. He told us he was a truck driver, and although I had never seen a truck, there was no reason to doubt his word, except for the sleepiness. If it were true that he was a truck driver, he’d have long before wrecked a vehicle by falling asleep at the steering wheel. After we were married and Greg moved into my place, Sleepy Joe began to visit us frequently, dining with us and sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He usually slept straight through the day. He had his beers, burped loudly and resoundingly, like a sated baby, lay spread-eagled on the sofa to watch TV, and fell asleep so deeply and for so long that it seemed he had died. An amazing corpse, if the truth be told. I took advantage of this to watch him, his face half-hidden by his folded arm and his powerful body on display, barely stirred by a breath. A young lion in docile rest. Greg, of course, saw it differently. He thought that since childhood Joe was in a rage and cursing the world, fast asleep, or silently hatching some malicious plan. Deep down, I knew the truth about Sleepy Joe. It would be a lie to say I didn’t, but I never put it in words, and if I had, Greg would have jumped to his brother’s defense.

“Let him be, he’s young,” he’d have argued, “he can take life calmly.”

After the prayers at six, Sleepy Joe slept the entire morning. He’d wake up briefly to devour whatever was in the refrigerator, sleep again till midafternoon, and then he’d remain awake until the morning light, because, as he put it, a cautious man doesn’t sleep in the dark. I always thought it was something physical. In the darkness, his heart froze and he’d not dare close his eyes to confront whatever phantoms haunted him. I told him once, “Joe, you kill the nighttime hours with the sound of the television so you don’t feel lonely.” More than likely he responded with one of the filthy obscenities that came out of his purple mouth. I’m not making that up. His gums and his lips were of a purplish hue, identical to Greg’s. The brothers were those types of people with visible gums and thick purplish lips, or I should say with too much mouth in the paleness of the face, mouths that insist you look at them against your will. I can see the two of them as children back in Colorado, sharing a bed with the other siblings like sardines in a can, Greg sleeping like an angel, but Joe wickedly awake, a little Slovak punk with his eyes wide open under the coarse scratchy bedsheets, counting the thousands of minutes and millions of seconds that must remain till morning, not daring, in his need, to scream for his mother, that woman who never bathed them and who, as soon as morning came, sent them out to play in the backyard, whether it was winter or summer, and whether they were still dressed or in their underwear, so that they accompanied her in reciting the Angelus. Or maybe she was the source of the panic, the mother, it could be. I, for one, am glad we never met, and I’m heartbroken that I had to use her wedding band.

When Sleepy Joe was in my house he’d prepare for this nighttime sleeplessness by stocking up on Coors, Marlboro Lights, and the spicy Mexican candies he ate all the time, according to him so he could stop smoking. They were called Pica Limón and they were packaged in red-and-green wrappers; when I returned from work, it wasn’t hard to see if Sleepy Joe had come by, all I had to do is look for the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the Pica Limón wrappers scattered on the floor.

“You eat hundreds of those to stop smoking,” I told him, “but you still smoke like a demon.”

“I eat the candy to stop smoking, and smoke to stop eating the candy,” he responded sarcastically, giving one of those looks he used to give me, one of those slow, pasty looks that would stick to my body.

From midafternoon till dawn, Sleepy Joe abandoned the sofa, which according to him he was keeping warm the rest of the time, to settle down in the best chair in the apartment, one of those Reclinomatics with faux leather that gave massages. He turned on the television and never took off his boots when he set his big old feet on the little glass coffee table I had bought for the living room.

“You’re going to break that, you pig,” Greg scolded him. “At least take off your boots, and throw them out while you’re at it. Crocodile-skin boots are for mafiosos.”

I, on the other hand, never said anything, not to be rude; I wanted Greg to think that I did everything possible to keep a peaceful home environment. I put up with almost everything Sleepy Joe did; the only thing that drove me crazy was when he fed Pica Limón pieces to Hero. The poor little mutt began to cough, drool, and grimace like a vampire, curling his lips and showing his teeth. I hastily went for a piece of bread to give him to quench the spiciness, while Sleepy Joe was bent over in laughter.

“What has that animal done to you for you to torture him like that?” I demanded.

“What has he done to me?” he responded, his eyes still teary from laughing so hard. “What has he done? Well, track that fucking cart all over your white rug. You have forbidden him to soil your rug and he pays you no fucking mind, so I’m punishing him for it, like he deserves. And besides, I get to laugh at him for a while, why can’t I laugh about a rat?”

“You’re afraid of dogs and that’s why you harm them, that’s what’s happening. You’re a shit, nothing more than a scared little boy. Even Hero terrifies you.”

“I’m not afraid of that filth of a half dog, I despise it. That thing should be dead. It pisses me off, you understand? The way it carries himself around with half a body bores me to no end. Who do you guys think you are? Good Samaritans? Can’t you see how absurd this is, you trying to save this thing, when the poor thing just wants to be dead? When that animal looks at you like that, straight in the eyes, it is begging to die with that half that remained alive by mistake. One of these days, I’m just going to do it in with a swipe.”

The worst part was that Sleepy Joe wasn’t bluffing. There was something in his tone of voice or expression that made you think he really did believe all that crap. His hatred for the most vulnerable always caught my attention. He simply abhorred them, maybe because they held up some kind of mirror to his life.

I met Sleepy Joe at the restaurant where Greg had invited him to meet his girlfriend who would soon be his wife, in other words, me. On first impression, he was ravishingly handsome but a bit dull. The guy who according to my husband was going to be my brother-in-law was a boring show-off. I didn’t like his habit of looking this way and that like someone who doesn’t plan to stay long enough to take off his hat, or when he made the bold assertion that he could swallow us all and spit out the seeds. And to finish it off, he barely spoke, and when he did, only to his brother in Slovak. He did not make a good first impression on me. A handsome man with holes in the head, nothing else. And that’s where it would have remained had I not seen a completely different side of his personality as the three of us left the restaurant. At the time, the streets were overrun with homeless people, a wave of epidemic proportions, homeless folk sleeping on the sidewalks, homeless drunks, homeless and playing a harmonica and begging for change. As we came out a particularly disheveled homeless person approached us, toothless, fetid, someone stripped of any dignity and barely alive, or I should say a scrap, someone who had been trampled upon by life and left in tatters. The wretch played the clown and had a sign hung around his neck that said, “Kick my ass for one dollar.” Greg and I passed by, trying not to look at him, but Sleepy Joe went right up to him to negotiate the kick in the ass for half a dollar. “I’ll give you fifty cents. You don’t deserve more, you piece of garbage.” That’s what Joe told him. The poor man accepted the deal, took the coins, and crouched, still laughing, or pretending to laugh. And then Joe delivered a brutal kick to the man’s hind end, a blow so outrageous it sent him face first into the asphalt. Greg and I were half a block ahead by the time it happened, but were still able to witness the scene. I started trembling. But not even then did it sink in what a pearl of a brother-in-law fate had handed me. Later, he began to come around our place, but in a more tranquil mode, with his A-game behavior plan, which wasn’t much, as noted above, but at least he restrained himself from assaulting the helpless. Although not without his words; he didn’t hold those back. He’d let out torrents of monstrosities, generally couched in threats against anyone who seemed vulnerable, or ignorant, or down-and-out, or poor, or crippled. “That guy has the face of a victim,” he said of an obese neighbor who could barely get up the stairs of the building.