Chango's Fire (16 page)

I close the door behind me and kiss her. The cat jumps down from her shoulder.

“Don't you also have church?” I ask her.

“Yes, I have real church,
me' entiendes,”
she says. “I have to wake up your father so he can get ready,” and she slows her delivery, “for … real … church.”

“Good,” I say, “bring the cat with you.”

“Oh you're funny, did you swallow a clown for lunch?”

The
lounge is located on 101st Street and First Avenue. It's one of the new, trendy bars that have opened since the face of the neighborhood started to change. I walk in to find all sorts of people, but mostly white professionals. Residents of Spanish Harlem drink outside, paper-bagging their cans of Budweisers, playing dominoes under a street lamp or a tree. During winter, they go to each other's houses and drink in the kitchen. Lounges are alien to Spanish Harlem. Even during El Barrio's glory years of the fifties, when there seemed to be a bar on every street corner, they were always dives, not places with paintings, sofas, cushions and curtains.

I enter, and the music is loud, but not so loud that one can't talk or hear anything else. I see Helen sitting next to this real geeky-looking white guy with glasses. He constantly pushes away a lock of hair that falls below his eyes. I wonder who
the
guy is. They're playing Monopoly, and I look around some more and realize this place is a haven for people like Helen. It's equal to finding an American bar in Paris, the expat bar that few of the native residents ever patronize. The crowd is young, and as I make my way toward Helen, a young guy in a suit and tie accosts me.

“Hey,
amigo,”
he says, “you know where I can find some?”

“Outside,” I say, “pick a corner.”

“Can you do that for me?” he says and tries to underhand me two twenties. “You know, I'm new here.”

“Sorry, man,” I say, not taking his money, “I don't do that.”

“You know who does? A friend of yours, maybe? I mean I don't mean to be rude or imply anything. Hey I just want to unwind,” he says in the friendliest of tones, and I do believe him.

“You need a drink?” he asks me. I say no thank you. So he turns around and walks back to the bar.

A Latin guy, who was sitting by the pool table and probably heard everything, walks over to me. He is wearing a guayabera, a short-sleeved shirt with colorful embroidered patterns running down the sides. A fedora hat sits on his head, and his ears are plugged with headphones from a Walkman he must have at low volume.

“My friend, I tell you,” he talks like he just took a deep drag on a joint and he's not trying to exhale. “They see a Latino walk in here and right away he's got to be dealing.” I nod in agreement. “Yes my friend, but the worst,” he says after he takes a sip of his beer, “is they want it right here, in the bar. Like delivered Chinese food, shit. They don't have the balls to go and cop on the corner like everybody else. Unless they're true addicts, they won't do that. They want takeout. Wass your name?”

“Julio,” I say.

Helen hasn't seen me yet. But I can tell she's already a bit lit, because when she rolls the dice, she throws them too hard and they slide off the board and onto the floor.

“I'm Raul. You play pool?”

“Not really,” I say as I see both Helen and that guy she's with on their knees, searching for the dice.

“Yeah, well, that's too bad. I'm looking for a partner. I'm next on the table and, you know, that's the only reason I'm here. I'm here to play pool, thass it. I'm getting tired of them always asking me if I'm holding shit.” I see them laughing as they fumble through a green carpet looking for a glimpse of white dice.

“This place, is no good. It's like a fucking living room. But they have a brand-new pool table. And you know those tables in social clubs are whack. All lopsided. The balls chipped. The cues are more crooked than a crack whore's teeth.” They find the dice under the very sofa they had been sitting on. They plant themselves back on the sofa and continue their game. “This pool table is nice, bro'. Best table in the neighborhood. I like pool, you like pool?”

“Yeah, listen man, it was nice meeting you,” I say to him.

“Same here, my brother. If you change your mind, I got next.”

I leave Raul and go over to the sofa where Helen and that guy are playing. Helen sees me. Her small face lights up as she leaves the game to come over and hug me. Even in this bar her hair still smells of almonds, like she just got out of the shower. Her black clothes are prim and crisp, like she just bought them.

“You got to help me,” she says, “I'm in so much debt.”

We join the guy on the sofa who gives me the weakest of handshakes. He is wearing khakis and a white shirt. His red tie is loosened and his blazer neatly folded on the sofa next to him. She introduces him to me as Greg. He talks to me like we are long-lost friends.

“So, Helen tells me you two are good friends—” Helen elbows him, and I get uncomfortable. They must be really close. Like Helen is his fag hag. Not that Greg is gay or anything. Who knows, who cares. But at that instant, when Helen elbowed him out of embarrassment, I could picture me and Papelito doing the same thing.

“Okay,” Helen says, tucking her hair behind her ear, “back to the game.”

“It's over, Helen,” he says, pointing at all his property. I look at what he owns. He has hotels on Mediterranean, Baltic, Connecticut, Vermont, all the cheap avenues. Every time Helen passed Go and collected her two hundred dollars she was bound to land on his slum and fork over the same money she had just collected.

“It's over,” Helen says, rolling the dice, “when I'm out of money. I still have fifty dollars.” Helen lands on Community Chest. She picks up her card, and it reads, “Bank error. Collect $200 dollars.” She sticks her tongue out at Greg, and he gives her the money from the bank.

“Aren't you going to give that back?” I half jokingly ask her.

“No way, it's the bank's fault.”

“But it's still wrong. That's not your money,” I say to her.

“Why should she give it back, Julio?” he interjects like he is the authority, “that's the rules of the game. If the game says it's fine, then it's fine.”

“So you are saying,” I say, “that it's okay to steal if the rules let you—”

“Of course it isn't,” Greg snaps and Helen gets up.

“Anybody need another one?” she says and Greg and I say yes, please. Helen leaves, walking unsteadily toward the bar. I hear someone yell Raul's name. His turn at the pool table must be up.

“This game,” Greg pushes up his glasses, “is wonderful. Growing up, I used to play Monopoly with my family all the time. Didn't you?”

“We're a Scrabble family,” I say.

“Yeah, I like that, too. But in Monopoly my father taught me that it's the cheap places that are worth investing in.” I notice Greg is a bit lit as well. I was supposed to meet up with Helen here, and she must have been here awhile, drinking with Greg. “They don't cost much and people land on them constantly.” He leans toward me and says, “Helen can't play. She's busy trying to land on Boardwalk and Park Place. What a waste of time. It's so goddamned expensive that unless you have an incredible amount of cash you can't build hotels there.” He says it with pride, like he is the master at this game.

“Listen, are you a Democrat?”

“I vote,” I say, looking around the walls. The place is nice, like a nightclub where no one dances, just drinks and kicks back on the sofas.

“Well, how ‘bout contributing to next year's presidential ticket?”

He brushes away the lock of hair that has fallen over his eyes, covering his glasses.

“Hey, I'm broke,” I say. “Greg, right? How'd you and Helen meet?”

“We went to college together,” Greg tells me. “I just bought an old townhouse in Harlem. See, we're neighbors now, see?” he says tome.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, remembering that Helen had spoken to me about this guy before. “You're the one that got those bomb threats in your mailbox.”

“Hey,” Greg says, “I understand their anger.”

When Helen returns with our drinks, she also gives up playing.

“I don't get those threats anymore. I think the people of Harlem have accepted us now. Don't you think so, Helen?”

“What?” Helen says. She begins to put the game away by placing all pieces and the board inside the coffee table drawer.

“The people of these neighborhoods, you know, they have accepted us.” He pushes up his glasses, which have slipped again, and a lock of hair falls down over his eyes. He brushes it away again, freeing his vision.

“Yeah,” Helen says, looking my way. “I know one has.” And she winks at me.

We talk.

Mostly about junk.
Seinfeld
episodes that I never saw. Helen and Greg talk about college. About friends they knew at Cornell when they were students there.

“I hear she works for Schumer,” Greg says.

“No way,” Helen says.

“Yes, she's his assistant. Though her title is fancy—”

“That airhead?” Helen says incredulously, “at Cornell she was always stoned. Stoned Joan, we'd call her.”

“Well, Stoned Joan is now ‘Special Liaison Stoned Joan.' “

I'm getting a buzz and I'm thinking about telling Helen everything. About me and what trouble I got myself in. But then I look at her smile as she talks, and all of a sudden I get overwhelmed with happiness. Like I am going to be saved at the last minute. Dostoyevsky at the firing squad. Somewhere, somehow, something would intervene and I would not go through with what I had to do. There was no way I could pay Eddie back all that money and I wasn't about to go to D.C. Seeing her laugh and get all silly with her friend gives me hope that I can find a solution to all this. So I laugh along with them as they continue talking. Helen tells me, someday she'll take me to her favorite student bar at Cornell. “The Chapter House, Julio,” she says, taking a deep sigh.

Outside.

Greg just sticks his skinny white arm out and cabs flock to him. He kisses Helen good-bye and shakes my hand, saying something I can't make out but I know it's friendly. When the cab speeds away, Helen embraces me and says she needs to go inside a bodega to buy water. As we enter the store, Helen trips a little, and I hold her up. The corner boys who had been eyeing us start laughing.

“Yo, you can't control your woman?” they shout and laugh at us from just a few feet away from the entrance to the bodega.

Helen hears that and faces them.

“Excuse me?” she says to them, “control… your … woman …?”

The four corner boys don't move from their spots but do turn their faces away from her.

“I'm no one's woman,” she says, moving her body so that they can see her. The corner boys want nothing to do with her or anybody. They are working and don't want anyone calling attention toward them. So, they look at me.

“Can you take your woman home, okay?”

This irritates Helen, who seems to get brave when she's lit. Reminds me of the first time she talked to me.

“Listen, you—” I don't let her finish. From behind her, I pick her up by the waist and take her away.

“Hey what are you doing?”

“You're drunk, Helen,” I say. “Just leave them alone.”

A few feet away I put her down and let her break free of my loose hold. She's not having any of it.

“Don't you ever grab me like that,” she warns me and starts walking back toward the corner boys who curse in Spanish when they see she's back,
“Coño, esta blanca no aprende,
” one of them says. “Go home, lady,” they say to her but their eyes focus on me. “Go home.”

“Hey, look at me when you say that,” she says, but they don't listen to her and start getting angry.

“You don't take this midget away we're going to have to hurt you,” they say to me, pointing out how small Helen is.

“Midget!” Helen shouts. For a second I thought she was going to kick that guy in the shin.

“Hey, man,” I say, trying to see if I recognize any one of them. Knowing just one of them could put an end to this scene. But I don't recognize anyone. “She's drunk, okay? What you want?”

“I'ma fuck you ups, is what I'm going to do if you don't take that bitch home.”

“Threaten me!” Helen's so angry she's almost yelling. “I'm not invisible, your problem is with me!”

The corner boys no longer think it's funny, they consider me pathetic. Like I have no authority. They give up on a peaceful solution.

“That's it, I don't care.” One of them moves toward me, making fists. I get ready to take him but I know I can't win.

“I know that guy.” Raul appears. He must have just walked out of the bar and witnessed all this. “He's all right.”

“You know him?” The guy lets his fists become palms again. “Raul you know him?”

“Yeah, I got this,” Raul reassures them. “I got this.”

Helen directs her hurt and anger toward me. “What, you think I'm your woman now?” she yells at me. “All of a sudden I belong to you?”

“You sure you got this, Raul?” they say, knowing that Helen and I are still there, causing a scene. Raul nods.

They shake their heads. They aren't going anywhere. It's their corner, and I'm sure they are paying whoever owns that corner to peddle there. It's an underground economy that Helen is disturbing. But because she is lit, she thinks she is back at Cornell, back in the classroom, and can confront sexist remarks at will.

“Mira,
you got to go home,” Raul says to us. Helen is huffing and puffing like the day she stormed out of my house, but this time she storms into the bodega.