Chango's Fire

The
house I'm about to set on fire stands alone on a hill.

In this Westchester darkness, it resembles a lonely house Hopper might paint. A driveway wide enough for a truck. A lawn with trees and wide-open space you can picture Kennedy kids playing touch football—their smiles perfect, the knees of their khakis stained with grass. No ocean though, but a wooden porch does wrap itself around the house as if hugging it. Large windows and spacious bedrooms, an American house new immigrants dream of. The type of house America promises can be yours if you work hard, save your pennies and salute the flag.

I open the screen door, punch in the alarm code and I'm in. It's my house, really. The owner doesn't want it. It's my house for these precious few minutes. I can indulge myself in snooping through someone else's life. Walk through wooden floors that I hope to inhabit someday.

When I was first hired, I used to enter these houses with my tin gallons filled with kerosene and quickly set to work at wetting the beds, couches and curtains. Light it all up with a flick of a match and quickly take off. Now I look around, wondering why, besides the money, does this person want his house taken out? I pace around. I pick up pictures, stare at the loved ones. I see childhood secrets that were never known to me, secrets of horses and country homes, of summer vacations. I open drawers. Sift through clothes. Read the spines of books and try to find clues about this person's life. Once I burned a house where an entire set of cheerleader outfits sat in an attic closet, nicely folded. Was his wife the coach? Did he kill these girls? Who knows?

I walk around. This house is beautiful but the furniture is outdated, the lamps, doors and closets have old, yellow glows. In the living room, there's a television with knobs, a stereo with a turntable. Nailed to the wall is a black rotary telephone that hangs like an extinct breed. In the kitchen, there is not so much as a toaster. The wooden chairs in the dining room are chipped, and the walls are crowded with portraits of Catholic saints, of fruits and landscapes. But it is the faded sunflower curtains and dead plants by the windows that pretty much indicates an old woman lived here. Now that she's been put away, or is dead, this house seems to be used only as storage space, like a huge empty room where broken toys or unused objects from a previous life or a failed marriage sit lifeless. There's sadness in this house. It feels like its children deserted it many years ago and not so much as even cared to look back. Not a single tear. All around, everything carries such sorrow. A darkness attaches itself to the walls, as if no light had ever shone, even when tiny feet ran around these floors. There's a sense of neglected space in these halls. I'm stepping on unwanted family history. Nothing in this house has been deemed worthy to be saved or treasured. Everything has been condemned to be erased by fire.

But I can't really say for sure what happened here years ago that has made this house so bleak. But bleak it is. And now that the last of the old folks are gone, their grown children will light a match to unwanted memories. The house gets lit, the neighborhood stays the same color, and the property gets rebuilt with funneled insurance money.

Just as well. It's not my house, nor my memories. Even less, it's not my place to ask.

I don't ask.

I never ask.

The people I work for don't know me. I only deal with Eddie, and Eddie deals with them, and I don't know who they deal with or how the insurance is fixed, all I know is that the bread gets passed around in that order. Me getting the last of the crumbs.

I've been working for Eddie for some time now. The crumbs I get are large enough that I mortgaged an apartment floor in this old, battered, three-story walk-up. On the first floor, my friend Maritza has set up her crazy church, and the second floor is owned by a white woman I barely know. Though she seems nice, she rarely makes eye contact and is always on the go. She leaves the building early in the morning and I can usually hear her come back late at night when I'm reading in bed. She doesn't spend much time in her house or on fixing up her floor like I do.

I've been upgrading my floor slowly, because it's so goddamn expensive. But I'm happy there. At times and for no reason, I go outside and cross the street and stare at my building. I smile. See the third floor? I own it, I tell myself. I see the windows a little crooked, not exactly fitting in their frames. Got to fix that. I smile. I see the paint chipping on all sides. Got to fix that. I like the gray shadow my building casts when the sun hits it from the west side of 103rd Street and Lexington Avenue, and how it's sandwiched between Papelito's botanica and a barber shop. I tell myself, I've come a long way from the clubhouse I built as a little kid. I had gathered refrigerator boxes, painted them, cut open windows and doors, and placed my clubhouse on a vacant lot full of rats, charred bricks and thrown-out diapers. I called it the Brown House, home to the president of Spanish Harlem.

What I was too young to know back then was that it was during the decade of my childhood that my future boss, Eddie, and guys like him were hired. Eddie burned down half of El Barrio and most of the South Bronx. He got a cut of the insurance money from the property owners, including the city, which was also in on it by cutting down half of the fire services in neighborhoods like mine. It was a free-for-all. Everyone was on the take. Everyone saw it coming. As the influx of Puerto Ricans in the fifties and sixties became more intense, many Italians sold their businesses and split town. Many Jews followed suit, as did the Irish real estate owners who witnessed the neighborhood shift to a darker color and, most of them, turned to people like Eddie.

Spanish Harlem was worthless property in the seventies and early eighties. Many property owners burned their own buildings down and handed the new immigrants a neighborhood filled with hollow walls and vacant lots. Urban Swiss cheese. The city would then place many of us in the projects, creating Latino reservations. These city blocks, full of project buildings on each corner, were built not so much to house us as to corral us. To keep us in one place. We were being slowly but surely relocated, as many who owned real estate burned the neighborhood, collected the insurance, sat on the dilapidated property and waited for better days.

Today, the wait is over, Spanish Harlem's burned out buildings are gold mines. Many of the same landlords who burned their tenements are now rebuilding. Empowerment zoning has changed the face of the neighborhood. Chain stores rise like monsters from a lake. Gap. Starbucks. Blockbuster Video. Old Navy. Like the new Berlin, El Barrio is being rebuilt from its ashes. The rents are absurdly high, and it breaks my heart, because Spanish Harlem had always been a springboard. A place where immigrants came to better themselves and, when they had reached the next plateau, they'd leave traces of their culture, a bit of themselves behind, and move on. A melting pot of past success stories—Dutch, Jews, Irish, Italians. When it came our turn to inherit these blocks, East Harlem was still a magical neighborhood made up of families dreaming of their sons hiring the men their fathers worked for. Dreaming of their daughters sleeping in the houses their mothers cleaned. And then, the bottom fell out. Yet Eddie sticks around, he grows old, seeing the neighborhood change, and he laughs, “Wha' for? Who can afford these rents? Better when the city let it burn.”

Eddie has a son. I actually knew his son first, Trompo Loco, Crazy Top. He's this wonderful guy I grew up with. He was never the brightest of people, probably borderline slow. But there's a beauty to him. An imperfect beauty, like one you can detect when looking for shells at Orchard Beach. A happiness you feel when finding a shell that's chipped yet it has markings like you've never seen before. Trompo Loco is like that. He is really skinny, making him look taller than he really is. Trompo Loco is so skinny that he would have been nicknamed Flaco, except that when he gets mad he starts twirling himself round and round until he falls to the ground. Sometimes he passes out from the dizziness. He's done this since we were kids, and because back then we all played with wooden tops, he got the name Trompo Loco. I always felt bad for him, because all the kids from the block would make fun of him. “Yo, retardo,” they'd say, “why you gotta look so stupid?” Though at times—and this I hate to admit—to prove myself to the other kids, I made fun of him as well. But later on I was always defending Trompo Loco and trying to keep others from picking on him. I didn't know what was happening in his house but I knew it was something really awful, because he'd rather be outside, where all the kids made fun of him, than go upstairs. We became friends and he'd spend a lot of time in my house. So much time that my parents would bring him to church with us. It was at church that I found out the truth about Trompo Loco's crazy mother. I then understood why he'd rather be ridiculed by the kids outside than be upstairs with a woman who yelled threats to him and to herself. It was also at church that I heard the rumors that this big Italian guy was Trompo Loco's father. How that man had driven Trompo Loco's mother crazy. Then one day Trompo Loco took me to 118th Street and Pleasant Avenue, the last remnants of the Italian part of East Harlem. From a distance, Trompo Loco pointed at this coffee shop on the corner. I saw this tall man who first helped this old Latin woman and her shopping cart cross the street before he himself went inside the coffee shop. It was the first time I saw Eddie. Years later I wasn't just looking out for his illegitimate son. I was working for him.

W
hen I started working for Eddie and was ready to set my first house on fire, he came along. He told me I was a JAFO, Just Another Fucking Observer, to stay out of his way and watch. “These new houses? Ga'bage. You can burn them with firecrackers.” And he spilled kerosene all over the bedrooms, like he was about to mop the floors and was getting them ready. “But you know mattresses are fire eaters. The very thing we sleep on is a box of matches.” I saw Eddie take no delight in setting fires; I did see youth and longing in his eyes when he talked about his early days. “In the old days now those houses were made to withstand air raids.”

That first time, when I was being schooled, I spotted a Rolex watch on top of a dresser. My heart jumped and I was about to grab it and put it in my pocket. Eddie caught my eye. “Never take anything,” he said, “never even take the ice cream from the fridge. The adjuster is going to look for every valuable thing in this house, and it better be burned. You know, it's gotta look good. I have people working for me, but it gotta look good. It's my name at the end of the day.” And Eddie spilled more kerosene all over the floors. I asked Eddie if the firemen would know that this was deliberate. Eddie didn't answer me. I never asked him again. I learned t that first day, you never ask. So I just listened.