Текст книги "Painted Cities"

Автор книги: Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

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It was during the time the streetlights came on that we devised our plan. This was always quiet time. The time when the traffic changed from hectic shoppers and those returning home from work, to those simply cruising or heading out to parties. From the pierogi factory roof we could see clear over to California Avenue, where the mirror-windowed court building was lit up with the orange of the setting sun, the same color orange as the streetlights, which within minutes would flood up at us, shining over the ledge.

We lay there silently, on our backs, absorbing the heat of the day as it rose off the roof.

“Hey, bro,” Buff suddenly said. “Wouldn’t it be cool to live up here?”

I took a deep breath. I had my eyes closed. I felt as if time were holding still. “Yes,” I answered.

“I was thinking maybe we could build a house up here,” Buff said. “Like no one else would know. It would just be our secret.”

I heard Buff move against the gravel, switching positions. I opened my eyes, looked up into the deepening purple sky.

“Maybe you and Letty could live up here,” I told him. “Maybe we could even put a crib up here for your baby.” I looked to Buff. He was leaning on one arm, looking down at me.

“Damn, that would be straight, right?” Buff said. “It would be like an apartment. We’d share it with you too. Like if you got a lady or something. I’d just tell Letty we had to go. You could have a dinner up here.”

“Like candles and everything, right?” I asked him.

“Yeah, bro, just like that.”

“But we’d need a table and chairs…”

“I know,” Buff said. “And a bed, maybe a small table for the living room, some carpet or linoleum.”

“Walls,” I said. “And what about a roof…?” I considered the impossibility of the idea. Buff turned and looked out over the ledge. The streetlights were full power now; his face was bright orange. I closed my eyes. I thought about the hobos who lived under the bridge on Western Avenue. I thought about their homes, built of old doors, scraps of wood, sheets of metal. I opened my eyes again, looked into the nearly starless sky, the type of lonely sky one sees only in the city.

“Maybe we could find some wood,” I said. I turned onto my side. “I know my father has a piece of metal, like a big tray. Maybe we could use that as a roof.”

“That would be perfect, bro,” Buff said. “I saw some wood the other day by the A&P.”

“I could bring nails and a hammer,” I said.

“I got some rope,” Buff said.

“Cool,” I replied, even though I wasn’t sure what we’d need the rope for.

“Tomorrow,” Buff said. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

I agreed.

That night I went home thinking of possibilities. When I walked through my door it was easily an hour and half after the streetlights had come on.

“Where the hell were you?” my father asked. His glare was familiar.

“At the park, playing basketball,” I told him.

I felt a shift in his breathing. He was trying to keep himself from exploding.

“Did you win at least?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I quickly went to my room. I felt as if that was one of the last lies I’d ever tell my father.

The next day Buff and I met in the alley behind the factory. It was so early the neighborhood was still asleep, so early that what little traffic there was had time to echo between apartment buildings. Buff was holding a coiled-up line of dirty yellow rope.

“You want to get the wood first?” he asked.

“We should get that tray,” I told him. “I don’t know when my father will wake up.”

“All right,” Buff said. He put the rope around his neck like a sling, like a mountaineer ready for a climb. We walked the block back to my house. I let Buff in through the back gate, down into my gangway. The screen door that had fallen off last winter was up against the building next door. The front gate that had rusted free two summers ago was leaning against our building’s back wall. Used tires that my father had plans to sell were stacked around the sewer cover. I unlocked the back door, then gave it a jolt with my shoulder – the only way the door would open. I led Buff down the stone steps into the basement. Led him past the furnace, past my bedroom, around the corner to where the tin sheet was.

“That’s it, bro?” Buff asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s perfect,” he said.

He grabbed one side. I grabbed the other. We carried the piece of metal through the basement, our feet occasionally knocking against a corner, making a deep gong sound that I felt sure would wake my father upstairs.

When we got to the gangway I turned to shut my door.

“You got a nice house,” Buff said. “Two floors and everything.”

“It’s not that nice,” I said. “You should see the upstairs.”

We walked the piece of metal back to the pierogi factory, leaned it against the cinder-block wall of the gangway. “I’ll let the rope down,” Buff said. And in a few minutes, above me, I heard Buff’s voice.

“Ready?” he called down. He sucked spit like he always did. He tossed the yellow rope over the ledge. I took the end and wrapped the sheet metal as best I could.

“Okay,” I told him.

And slowly, very slowly, the sheet of metal began to rise. I ran around the back, climbed the roof, and helped Buff pull it the rest of the way. We got the sheet to the top. We reached out and yanked the piece over the ledge. We sat on the gravel roof and breathed. A breeze was blowing now. Real traffic had started up on Twenty-Second Street. I looked at the rusted piece of metal and then looked to Buff. He was smiling, smiling the way he had that first time I met him. I smiled back. We were building a house now. It was only a matter of time.

The rest came easy. The wood Buff had found was really stacks of discarded truck pallets. We pulled them apart, pried off the healthy planks, scraped off the pieces of wilted lettuce and rotting tomato. We carried the planks three or four at a time back to the pierogi factory. After we tired of carrying, we hoisted them up to the roof and began construction.

After a few days the work became habit. In a week or so we had a solid frame. In another week the metal roof was in place, built of the tin sheet we had found in my basement and a piece of corrugated metal we’d discovered in a warehouse dumpster on Rockwell Avenue. Next we built the walls.

The room was small, maybe five by five. It was short, but tall enough for either of us to stand up in. Over the weeks of construction, the idea of having a separate living room and dining room had given way to what we were actually capable of: one single room. But really, that one room was enough. It was all ours.

The crowning achievement had been the mattress. Buff had located it one morning while walking to the factory – to “work,” as we had started to call it. He didn’t even bother climbing the roof. Instead, from the alley, he called up to me.

“I found a bed,” he said. “Hurry before someone takes it.”

Quickly, I slid down the air ducts. I walked the fence and then jumped down to the alley. Together we ran the few blocks to where Buff had spotted the mattress.

It was small. The mattress was from a cot or a child’s bed. It was sitting folded over in a dirt patch off the cement of the alley. I pulled it open. It was stained in the middle, soiled like the mattresses in the attic of my house, old mattresses left over from whoever had lived there before, kids not potty-trained, old people unable to get up, drunks. Buff must’ve seen the look on my face.

“This side it’s not that bad,” he said. He twisted the mattress so I could see the back side.

He was right. The other side wascleaner.

We carried the mattress through the alleys of the neighborhood. Every half block or so we set it down to adjust our grip. Other kids from the neighborhood stopped their baseball games, their football games, to let us pass.

Finally, we were home. We dropped the mattress in the gangway of the pierogi factory. We rolled it up like a thick sausage. The mattress smelled dank, sweet almost, like weeds in the sun, like an alley in the summer.

Buff climbed the roof and let the rope down. I wrapped it around the mattress. “Okay!” I called up to Buff. The yellow line went taut.

The bed was actually easier to lift than the piece of tin or even the wood had been. The bed seemed to bounce right up the wall, and when it got to the ledge, another strong jerk popped it right over onto the gravel roof. Immediately, we carried it into the house. We undid the knot and let it flop onto the floor. It was a perfect fit. The mattress lay snug against the rear wall, snug between the two side walls. Along the wall that held the doorway, there was enough space to walk in, enough space to put a table in if we wanted. Buff paced the small gap. He flapped his arms in and out as if doing the chicken dance.

“See, bro,” he said. “In case we have parties.”

I sat down on the bed. I sank down to the gravel. I forgot about the pee stains on the other side. The whole room took on the sweet smell of the dirty mattress. I leaned back and rested my head against the wall, our wall. Along the opposite side, sunlight piped in through cracks and nail holes in the planks. The wall looked like what I thought a nighttime sky in the country might look like, busy, crowded. I searched for constellations, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, ones I’d heard about in school. I closed my eyes.

“This is awesome, bro,” Buff said.

“Yes,” I said. “Awesome.”

The fantasy lasted three days. Each night I was the one who called “time” and said we had to go. Each night got longer. I’m afraid of what might have happened had Buff never thrown that rock, the one that brought everything down. We were so close already, another day and maybe we would’ve stayed forever. Maybe we would’ve disappeared, like I wanted to back then, when I was young. Of course, things never work out the way you want them to. And then all you do, the rest of your life, is dream about what would’ve happened, or could’ve happened, had you done what you wanted to do in the first place.

In his defense, that rock was probably the biggest the gravel roof had to offer. In his defense, we should’ve hurled that rock months earlier, when the summer had first started, when I first met Buff. In his defense, no rock had ever glanced off a windshield, not like that, and really, what an odd set of circumstances, to have that little girl rounding third base in the park across the street at just the right time for the rock to go sailing into her temple, breaking her little head open, sending her chest-first into the concrete, her feet kicking up behind her, one lone white shoe cartwheeling over her body, landing somewhere up near her head, which had already begun to spout blood.

I remember this all as individual events. In my mind I can freeze each frame. Like when Buff and I turned to look at each other. Like when I saw Buff, not smiling but somehow shrugging, like he’d known this was going to happen, like he’d known something was going to happen to spoil everything.

They hadn’t even seen us yet, the family of the little girl, the gangbangers across the street. They hadn’t even called out like I remember them doing, “ Hey, up there! Look, there they are! There’s those little fuckers!” None of this had even happened yet when Buff turned to me and said, “Sorry.” I wonder what he saw in my face. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t just hisfault, that we were accomplices, friends.

In another moment the gangbangers were on the roof. I was punched in the stomach hard enough to make my back ache.

“ Who threw the rock?” one of them asked me.

I looked to Buff. “Me,” he said. I am aware now that the noble thing would’ve been for me to say that I had done it, that Ihad thrown the rock. And I can see the nobility in Buff speaking up – even though he haddone it, he didn’t have to sayhe had done it. At the time, though, the thought of taking the blame didn’t even cross my mind. I just watched one of the gangbangers approach Buff and without any warning, a windup, a step, a twist of the body, punch Buff square in the side of the face.

Buff didn’t make a sound. His knees buckled. He looked down. The side of his face was red. But he didn’t whimper or cry. When the kid who punched Buff turned, I saw that it was Junebug, the kid Buff had claimed was his cousin, the ugly kid.

They tore our house apart. They kicked in the flimsy walls. I hadn’t realized how weak the structure actually was. We’d sat in the house during rain, but we’d never have survived any kind of strong wind. It was only a matter of time.

I was dragged across the roof, handed down the air-conditioning ducts. Once on the ground I heard sirens, saw the flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks. Police officers were pulling up. They saw Buff and me being led down the street in opposite directions. They saw that we’d been roughed over, beaten. They didn’t stop any of the gangbangers to ask questions. We were on our own then, and for a split second I had a flashback to when Buff had first suggested that we could build a house, a flashback to when I’d first called up to Buff, “ Hey, how’d you get up there?” And, as I was presented to my father and yanked by my collar into the house, I longed for that feeling again. The feeling that I was all alone, that I was entirely free.

I’ve had other moments, since then. When I graduated college, for about five seconds I felt free. Or when I rode my first motorcycle down the alley behind my house, for about ten seconds I felt free. Then I realized I had to turn. But up there on the roof, when I was alone with Buff, I knew it, that it was all us; our lives were what we made of them. Never again have I felt as free as I did then.

Years after the pierogi factory incident I heard that Buff had been shot dead. This was in high school, my sophomore year. I was hanging out with friends in Barrett Park, where we played ball and drank beer. Ramiro said it. He always had the neighborhood news: “Hey, did you guys hear Buffster from the Latin Counts got killed? A drive-by, bro, right there on Wood Street. Got blasted in the head. Dead on arrival.”

“You mean bald-headed Buff?” I asked. “Short guy, blue eyes?”

“Yeah,” Ramiro said. “You knew him?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We grew up together.”

“No you didn’t, bullshitter,” Alex, another in our group, said.

“No, I did,” I told them. “One summer me and him, we built a house. Over there on top of the old pierogi factory. You should’ve seen it. We were going to live there.”

CHILDHOOD

Igrew up on Eighteenth Street and Throop, in the heart of Chicago. To the east, beyond the Dan Ryan Expressway, beyond the steeple of Providence of God Church, and beyond the no-man’s land that was the “darkside,” a stretch of neighborhood laced with forgotten Illinois-Continental railroad tracks and collapsing smokestacks, a place said to be inhabited by the most ruthless Mexican street gang in Chicago, the Villa Lobos, was the lake. To the north were the Puerto Ricans, who were rumored to surpass the Villa Lobos in ruthlessness, said to be willing to shoot you in front of a church or in front of family, sins the Mexican gangs swore against. And then beyond them, farther north, were the whites, in a dreamland accessible only by the Chicago L, and even at that a place you glimpsed momentarily – redbrick houses, wrought-iron fences, tree-lined streets – then left, swallowed by the subway if you were on the Douglas-Park B, or forced to watch it all fade from view if you rode the elevated Ravenswood A.

The blacks were to the south. They were unfathomables. Things we didn’t understand went on down there. Killings were indiscriminate. And to the west was the sunset, that’s all I ever knew about the west, when evening would come and the sun would hit that point at the horizon where it flared up the long neon glass corridor of Eighteenth Street as if each panaderia, taco joint, and tavern had caught fire. Then, minutes later, the miracle would disappear, and up and down Eighteenth Street the kids who had lined up for blocks were left to wonder if the sun’s sole purpose was to torture them with a paradise they would never reach.

We called this the Revelation. We’d named the event as kids, when Rogelio Ramirez, who grew up with the rest of us on Throop Street, began reading the Bible and reciting from the Book of Revelation as the sun set. He’d stand on the corner stoop of Trebol’s tavern, Bible open in his left hand, drawing exclamation points in the air with his right. “The Woman and the Dragon!” Rogelio would say. “The Fall of Babylon!” Occasionally, the men going into the tavern would stop and listen, as if contemplating the passages Rogelio read, but something in them always snapped, and they’d break into laughter and call Rogelio “The Pope” or “The Saint of Throop Street.” Rogelio never cared. He’d simply raise his voice even higher, bring his arm down even harder. Eventually, the men would retreat into the smoky darkness of Trebol’s, the thick black door sweeping shut behind them. The small diamond of mirrored glass at its center staring down at us as if a horde of curious drunks were peering out from behind it. When the sun dropped below the horizon, Rogelio would snap his Bible shut, turn on his heels, and march back down Throop Street, like a leader into flames.

When we were in the sixth grade, Rogelio’s mother began sleeping with Rowdy, an old Racine-Boy who lived above Sergio and Jorge Naveretté, two brothers in our group and expert spies who had devised an ingenious method by which to hear the sex going on above them.

“Check it out, bro,” Sergio said the morning after he revealed the secret to me. He turned and began walking up his apartment building’s stairs. That morning I had met him early for school, looking to hear Ms. Ramirez’s lovemaking for myself.

Sergio stepped into his living room, past his kitchen whose boiling pots of water always made that side of the house seem more like a rainforest than a place where people lived and ate. He led me around the corner into the small bedroom he shared with his brother. There on the bed, lying on his side, was Jorge, holding a long row of paper-towel rolls taped end-to-end to his ear. The other end was up on the ceiling, inserted through a hole for a missing light fixture.

“Jorge,” Sergio said. “Let Jesse see.” Jorge’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows raised in soft arches. He was ten at the time, a year younger than Sergio and me, but with his head to the side, his eyes closed the way they were, he seemed even younger, like the Christmas ornaments my mother had of baby angels sleeping.

“Jorge,” Sergio said again. And Jorge opened his eyes but made no move to get up. Instead, he continued to listen to the cardboard contraption, alternating his gaze between our faces as if what he saw was beyond us, beyond the walls of the tiny bedroom he and his brother shared.

“Jorge!” Sergio said again. And Jorge snapped out of whatever spell he was under. He leaped from the bed. “Damn, bro!” he said. “They’re doing it doggie-style!” He sounded out of breath, excited. I took the tube and nodded, knowing from the Penthouses Sergio and Jorge kept beneath their dresser exactly what “doggie-style” was.

On the other side of the small apartment, amid the cloud of humidity I had seen swirling when I passed, were Sergio and Jorge’s parents. Though I lived just across the street, I had really seen Sergio and Jorge’s parents only twice in my life, once at our confirmation, at our grammar school, Providence of God, and once when a disgruntled former tenant set their apartment building on fire. Otherwise their parents hardly seemed to exist at all, disappearing into doorways, driving off in their green pickup, always slipping just out of view. Whenever I walked into Sergio and Jorge’s apartment and saw the swirling steam of their kitchen, I wondered if their parents were actually in there, or if they hid from their children the way they seemed to hide from everyone else.

Love affairs were a fact of life in my neighborhood. What Ms. Ramirez was doing was not that extraordinary. Stories abounded of mothers who had left their families to live with truck drivers from Texas or journeyman housepainters. And Mr. Gomez, downstairs in my building, had been seeing a barmaid at Trebol’s tavern for years. Everyone knew about it, knew Mrs. Gomez knew about it. She would send her youngest son, Peter, to fetch his father from the barmaid’s apartment atop the tavern. No one ever said anything.

But Ms. Ramirez was religious. Her husband had left her the year before and she had turned to the church, Rogelio in tow. When the Virgin Mary processions came singing up the street, carting the porcelain three-foot statue of La Virgento the sin-afflicted apartments of the neighborhood, Ms. Ramirez was in the lead. She had inherited from the most devout before her the task of deciding how long the Virgin was to sit in the various accursed households; sometimes it stayed for weeks on end. And behind her, carrying the candles and crucifixes of the procession, the fifteen or so other neighborhood women followed like apostles. They had all lost something – sons to drive-bys, unwed daughters to pregnancies and flight-of-fancy elopements – but Ms. Ramirez had lost a husband. And though the list of things-to-weather went on for miles in my neighborhood, deserting husbands sat at the top.

“All right,” Jorge instructed. “Now push it up till you hit the floor.” I raised my head as Jorge worked the other end of the tube deeper into the hole. Sprinkles of dry plaster cascaded down upon the side of my face, into my eye, as I held the tube to my ear. Abruptly the tube hit flush. Sergio and Jorge looked to me. I wasn’t sure what to listen for. What did doggie-style sound like? Then, without warning, unmistakable sounds began pouring down the tube. I heard the squeak of old bedsprings. I heard the scrape of bedposts against wood flooring. Most remarkable of all, I heard the voice of Rogelio’s mother, who just the day before had asked me how I was doing in school but who was now moaning out “Rowdy,”softly, quietly, as if sorry for something, grateful for something else.

I looked to Sergio.

“I told you, bro!” he said. “I told you she was up there!” I didn’t say a word. Instead, I listened more closely, able now to pick up even fainter sounds, the rocking of an off-kilter night table, the groans of Rowdy himself, whose voice here was smooth and easy, different from when he was out front drinking, cursing in ways we remembered and used on our own.

I couldn’t tell whether they were doing it doggie-style or any style. I only pictured in motion the Penthousescenes Sergio had begun flashing before me like cue cards. I closed my eyes.

The heaves of Rogelio’s mother began closing in on each other. The groans of Rowdy got louder. I imagined Ms. Ramirez sweating, her mouth open, her tongue pushed against her upper teeth like the women in the magazines. I imagined her nude but for the red heels she often wore to work. And in my imagination her shoes glowed red, radiating as if with heat in the steam-filled room.

“ Ohh,” Ms. Ramirez suddenly gasped. I opened my eyes.

“Let me see!” Sergio said. I didn’t respond. Sergio put his magazine on the dresser and sat next to me. He placed his ear close to mine at the end of the tube. On my right side, Jorge did the same, a triangle of eavesdroppers.

“All right,” Sergio said. “He’s about to climax.”

And then there was a quick trade of punches. Ms. Ramirez called out to God; Rowdy grunted; the rocking turned to a rumble, the scrapes to digs. Then there was a yell, and in that split second Rowdy’s voice was thick and heavy, the way it sounded out front when he called someone a punk-ass motherfuckerand was about to prove it. Silence followed, then a soft thump. I held tight to the tube, listening for any aftermath. Sergio rose from the bed and bowed like a matador to the four corners of the tiny bedroom. Jorge whistled softly in applause.

“Man,” Sergio said as we walked to the corner of Eighteenth and Throop, our notebooks in hand, “they were all over today. Usually they’re just quiet.”

“Must’ve been horny,” I said. “She always yell for God like that?”

“All the time,” Sergio said. “She’s going to hell.” He blessed himself and laughed.

At the corner Jorge took a seat on Trebol’s stoop as Sergio and I looked up the block for Rogelio and Marcitos. Up and down Eighteenth Street, the morning delivery trucks worked their horns to announce their backing into docks. The early mist had not yet burned off the neighborhood. The smell of yesterday’s fried food, tacos, gorditas, chicharon, hung in the air. Soon the sun would burn the haze away and allow a fresh day’s worth of fried-food smell to settle over the neighborhood. Up the block, Rogelio and Marcitos came out of their buildings. Marcitos, carrying a single spiral notebook like the rest of us; Rogelio, carrying his books and Bible in a small brown briefcase. Marcitos crossed Throop and met Rogelio. They approached us.

Providence was marooned on the darkside, forgotten among abandoned factories, outmoded railroad lines, and dilapidated wood-frame houses. I’m sure those in the neighborhood who didn’t know Providence of God was back there – it was small, like any other three-flat – wondered every morning where all the kids were going, disappearing into the maze of decaying brick buildings, following the train tracks as if we were ghosts of a life that might once have existed there. We even felt like ghosts sometimes, in the winter, when the sound of our footsteps was muffled by snow, when even our breathing seemed swallowed by the thick air. In the spring, when it rained, we huddled beneath the train docks and examined the vast innards of the factories – the huge chutes that hung like descending missile silos, the conveyers that led off into distances we never had guts enough to explore. When the rain stopped, we crossed back over the railroad lines and became real again, our walks like transformations.

“Hey, bro,” Sergio said as Rogelio passed us, assuming his usual position at the head of the pack. “Your mom leave for work early this morning?”

I cringed.

“She goes to work early now,” Rogelio said, not turning around to look, his briefcase bouncing off his skinny leg. “I told you last week.” Behind us Jorge and Marcitos, who were the same age, settled into their morning discussion about the previous day’s episode of Spectreman. Marcitos still had a black-and-white TV and it was Jorge’s duty to update him on anything he might have missed.

His blood is blue, bro. Everyone knows that.

For real, damn, I thought I saw some orange coming through.

Sergio stroked his chin.

“She must like working, huh?” he asked. Sergio elbowed me in the arm. Rogelio didn’t answer.

We neared Saint Procopius, our school’s competing parish. Morning sunlight exploded through the church, casting the reds and blues of the stained-glass windows onto the sidewalk below. As Rogelio passed the front doors, he blessed himself, forming a cross with his thumb and forefinger and tracing miniature crucifixes on his forehead, mouth, and chest. He kissed his thumb to heaven. In imitation, we all did the same.

“Hey,” Sergio said. “How about if your mother was seeing some other guy?”

“She wouldn’t see another guy,” Rogelio said. “She’s got the Lord.” He raised a finger to heaven.

“I know, I know,” Sergio said. “Everyone’s got the Lord, but say you found out she was with some other guy. Maybe you came home and found her on the floor, maybe in bed—” Sergio was looking to the sky, imagining scenarios, sexual positions. He didn’t see Rogelio whirl around, his briefcase flaring out at his side.

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Rogelio said. He pointed a finger in Sergio’s face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t know about.” Rogelio was much shorter and skinnier than Sergio, but he held his finger right off the tip of Sergio’s nose. Sergio didn’t move. Rogelio turned and began walking again.

“Damn, cuz,” Sergio called out after Rogelio. “Don’t worry about me. I know what I’mtalking about.” Rogelio simply continued walking.

Sergio laughed and brushed himself off. He blessed himself, held up a cross of forefingers, then marched forward.

We turned down Sangamon Street. Sets of railroad tracks, the dividing line between the darkside and the realside, ran down the center. More kids had begun filling in our side of the sidewalk, all of us waiting until we got to Eighteenth Place, the street our school was on, to cross over. Our school bully, Gustavo Rivera, a large kid with sweat glands that poured like waterfalls, walked on our side as well, torturing smaller kids with “the wedge,” what he called the Saturday-afternoon-wrestling move with which he crushed tiny first-grader heads between his chunky hands.

Across the tracks, only Pepe Ordoñez, Paco Martinez, and Jeremy Witek walked the darkside. We called them the Lost Boys. They had been walking the darkside for as long as anyone could remember, breaking factory windows, smoking, spray-painting unfamiliar gang signs on the crumbling railroad docks. Rumor had it they were orphans, that they lived among the ruins of the darkside like animals, like the Villa Lobos, who for some reason, maybe respect, never seemed to mind the Lost Boys on their territory. The Lost Boys were eighth-graders. They had been held back two years or more and were actually old enough to be in high school.

“I heard Paco and Pepe were in the Audy Home for stealing cars,” Marcitos said from behind us. “That they got butt-raped in there and that’s why they went crazy.”

“Who told you that?” Sergio asked.

“Mona Colón, downstairs,” Marcitos said. Mona was a high-school girl who lived beneath him, one whom we collectively lusted after because at her age she didn’t seem that far out of reach. Paco was said to have gone out with Mona. Some even said that he had had sex with her. And at the time this seemed to have something to do with his ability to walk the darkside. We figured Jeremy and Pepe had had sex with Mona as well, or with the other high-school girls who stood on the corners smoking cigarettes, wearing tight black pants and thick black eyeliner and purple lipstick. The older we got, the more we wanted to be with them, have them hanging off our shoulders the way girlfriends in our neighborhood did. We imagined French-kissing them among the collapsed rafters of the burned-out factories we had always been so afraid of.