Mundo Cruel (2 page)

THE VAMPIRE OF MOCA

Let's put this story in context. Santurce, Puerto Rico, once known as Cangrejos, meaning Crabs, but no longer. Santurce. Blocks and blocks full of doctor's offices and temples—Catholic, Evangelical, Mormon, Rosicrucian, Espiritista, Jewish, and yoga-ist, if that's what you call it. The stench of sewers 24/7. Unbearable heat. Reggaeton, old school salsa, boleros, bachatas, jukeboxes, pool halls, slot machines. Topless bars, Dominican bars, gay bars. Catholic schools, beauty schools, vocational schools, and schools where you get a professional degree in just one year and without much homework. Fabric stores, arts and crafts stores, no-prescription drugstores, barbershops and hair salons. But the mecca is the 7-Eleven, which is like saying Santurce's Plaza las Américas. That's where I met him.

I look out the window and in my mind I still see him coming. His loose, low-hanging jeans showing quite a bit of those boxer shorts that didn't fall off thanks to those beautiful buttocks guarding his back. His sneakers, always neat and clean, not a thread in his shoelaces out of place, not the slightest stain on the sides of his soles. His striped polo shirts, his silvery watchband dangling on his wrist: I sigh because that's all I can do. His place, the 7-Eleven, I tell myself.

Let's go to the beginning of the story because I'm in no mood for games. I have a house in Santurce, behind the old General Committee Headquarters of the Pro-Statehood Party. (I should explain that it's by pure chance that I live there since, like almost all the protagonists of Puerto Rican literature, I question the US presence.) At the rear of my house I rent out a studio. It's little, but very comfortable. A year ago I rented it out to a couple of lesbians. I'll admit this was a bit sudden on my part, since when I agreed to it the gay parade had just happened and I felt a sense of solidarity. Horrible mistake. Every Saturday, without fail, there was an endless line of women entering my house. They'd begin by turning on the barbecue and playing Ana Gabriel and Shakira, and then pay-per-view boxing, and finally, being folkloric like they were, they'd bring out the tambourines and cowbells to sing along to Lucecita's
plenas
CD. As soon as the lease was over I told them I needed the apartment empty. “No problem, man,” one of them said to me, and they moved.

It was then that I made little signs announcing the apartment for rent. Naturally I stuck them in the gyms and near the pretty boy bars with the hope of renting out the studio and landing a hunk at the same time. And as the saying goes: “Be careful what you wish for; it might come true.” That same night I got a call from a guy who worked at the 7-Eleven and was looking for an apartment. I liked his voice. It sounded real macho. No slouch myself, I went right over to Fernández Juncos to meet him. When I saw him I was almost struck dumb. He asked me how much the rent was and I managed to answer him as best I could after giving him a substantial discount. He asked me about the deposit and I told him to forget about it. I didn't give him the key right then and there because I didn't have a copy. We arranged to see each other the next day.

When I got out of there, Santurce was suddenly transformed into the dream of every urban planner: an Eden with Adam standing behind the counter of a store that—like me after that day—never sleeps.

The next day I didn't go to work. With the help of a Dominican boy, who by the way was also a hunk, I devoted myself to cleaning and painting the studio. I put in an air conditioner, a television, and even an illegal connection to my cable TV, which costs me almost fifty bucks a month. I put new sheets in there and a radio Mami left behind when she went with my sister to Orlando. I mean, what didn't I do.

He arrived around 9:00
pm
and when he went in and saw the place he said to me:

“Damn papi, this is nice. With AC and everything.”

He took it right away and told me that if it was okay with me he'd move in the next day. And that's what he did.

The night of the move—two plastic bags full of clothes, a box filled with sneakers, and a videogame system—I made him a delicious dinner. The poor thing, he brought beers from work and a box of cigarettes for each of us. He told me that he came to the city because he couldn't find any work in Moca, his hometown, and that a guy he met in Isabela offered to pull some strings and get him a job in a store. The guy brought him home but then wanted to fuck and he—and I quote—“had respect for everyone but wasn't into that shit.” I felt so embarrassed for the other guy that I blushed, but he immediately added, “Bro, no worries, I know not all of you are like that. You've done right by me and you're not gonna regret it.” Good God, he saw right through me! But how could he not? I'd put curtains in the studio for him for heaven's sake. I excused myself at that point and went to my room thinking that it was time to develop a little self-respect and to stop acting like a '60s fag, that we were now in the twenty-first century and love wasn't something you bought.

I was so alert to the silence coming from the studio I almost didn't fall asleep.

The next day, determined to stop all the tricks and shenanigans, I went over to bring the boy some breakfast, not to take him to bed, but to feed a human being. The night before I had said to myself, “Enough of this, going nuts for a man.” I knocked on the metallic door and he opened right away. Good God. He was in boxer shorts that were all snug around his thighs and he had a hard-on. He had a bit of a beer belly from standing on that corner so much and drinking cold beers, adjusting his package every time a hot mami passed by. He had a tattoo of the name Yomaira crossing his chest and sticking out from his armpits were some blond hairs, which really turn me on. I forgot my plan, called in sick at work for the second day in a row, and invited him to the Plaza Mall to buy him whatever he needed.

And so the days passed. My friends in the bar gave me up for dead. Then la Carlos came by to visit. I was with the boy on the balcony when I see him park across the street. He gets out, opening the door and looking at the young hunk and looking at me says as fruity as she can be:

“Can I come in, or are you busy?”

The boy excused himself and the queen looked me up and down with a straight face and said to me: “Girl, what are you doing with that macho?”

La Carlos never changes, I thought and was happy to see him. We laughed our heads off that night and he convinced me to go with him to Tía María.

Tía María, my second home. And I say this honestly. I love that bar. The two pool tables, the jukebox playing Lissette, Lucecita, Yolandita, and la Lupe. I hadn't gone back there since the boy had moved into the studio. It was really good to see the usual queens, especially since I hadn't been there for a while. I felt like fresh meat and in that trade that was a plus. Everyone found me thinner.

And then a little macho hustler, a bit like my tenant, came by and la Carlos looks at me and says:

“And the kid? Does he fuck?”

I said no—real serious-like—that I had rented the apartment to him, that he was from Moca, that he had a daughter named Yomaira and was easygoing and a hard worker. I said besides that he didn't interest me as a man. La Carlos, who doesn't waste any time, interrupted me:

“So then, I have carte blanche, right?”

“I don't care. . .” I lied, shrugging my shoulders and feeling that icy sensation in my bones that we call “jealousy.”

One night I was on double shift and when I get home I see, parked right in front of the house, Carlos's car. I go and peek in the studio and there was Carlos with the guy, eating pizza and smoking pot. Fucking queen, I thought, but I put on a serious face and said to the kid:

“Dude, I don't want any trouble with the neighbors. If you're going to smoke, fine, but with the door closed.”

The motherfuckers laughed right in my face, high as kites. La Carlos hugged me around the neck and said:

“You jealous, papi? Look, he's yours, no worries, right, papi?”

“Course, man, sure. All yours,” the kid said, humoring me.

Those words remained engraved in my brain like Bergman's movies: “All yours, papi, all yours.” But “all yours” was that he was friends with la Carlos and they went everywhere together.

I did what everyone would have done: I called my ex, the one who cheated on me in Santo Domingo, so that he'd tell me that, after me, he never met anyone as special. That's why it's good to stay on good terms with one's exes, especially if they treated you bad.

Time passed and Santurce went back to being its usual paradise lost. The same calm from Monday to Wednesday and the same hyped enthusiasm of its publicized weekends. I took advantage of all this and went to the museums—MAC, MAPR, Bellas Artes—and to all the movies they were showing at the Fine Arts and the Metro, except the one with Mel Gibson, who I can't stand because he's homophobic.

I felt defeated. If there's one thing I am and have always been it's a sore loser. It makes me angry and even makes me feel invisible, incapable of entertaining any delusions. Now Carlos no longer even bothered to greet me when he'd come to the studio, and from my balcony I'd watch my Adam come and go looking more and more handsome and more and more distant. One night I had one too many beers at the bar and as two hustlers came over to offer me their eight and nine inches, respectively, I quickly came down from my high spirits. I always get depressed when a trick propositions me: I feel old, or what's worse, I feel I must look old and pathetic for these creatures to consider themselves objects of my desire. I said to myself “fuck this” and went home. Once there I saw la Carlos's Tercel and I went over to the studio and looked in the window. The kid and Carlos naked in the bed I had bought, with the air conditioner I had bought, and between the sheets I had bought. And that was the stud of studs, the big macho, I said to myself totally pissed, and suddenly the kid gets up and I step back from the window. After a short while I look again and when I see what I see I start to add up all my expenses and I realize that this little Adam of Moca owes me and plenty: Carlos was fucking him.

I sat on the balcony to laugh at myself and Carlos and all of us gays, eternal denizens of Santurce, who have polished these sidewalks like crabs back and forth and sideways looking for machos, watching out for machos, or simply drunk out of our minds, out late, arm in arm, laughing jubilantly at the cars passing, shouting at us: fags! And us, raising our arms up high like beauty queens, shouting back at them: cocksuckers! And off we go to oblivion, holding hands, swishing all along Ponce de León. And I laugh at Carlos, who spent so much gas, the poor thing, coming and going from Moca, buying pizza and fried rice, and bumming reefers in La Colectora. La Carlos, like me, was thinking “now this is a real man,” and as far as I could tell he's the kind who'd bend over in bed. Not that it's bad that he gave him his ass; it's just that us chumps give anything to charm them and to put them on a pedestal: handsome, male, virile, and one 100 percent tops. And I say to myself: “When that big queen Carlos comes out I'll invite her to Junior's Bar 'cause tonight there are strippers and I changed twenty bucks into one dollar bills. 'Cause there's always more fish in the sea.

FOR GUAYAMA

Sammy:

First of all excuse my handwriting since I didn't bring my glasses. It's just that, nene, I'm going nuts with Guayama being sick and all, I mean I'm really losing it. That's why I've been looking for you, so you could pay me for the curtains because with this Guayama thing I'm low on cash. I know you depend on your customers to pay me, but Guayama is dying on me. The doctor told me I had to put her to sleep and, nene, I almost fainted. They even had to rouse me with ammonia on a cotton ball and everything because I got so dizzy. He knows about cases like this and was real nice.
He made me tell him how I found her and I explained that taking a drive around the island I picked her up in the middle of the highway right after the Guayama toll booth, hence the name. Last night I left her in the doctor's office so she could rest, but tomorrow they're going to give her the injection. When I got home, it felt so empty and I felt so afraid of being alone that I said: no, I'm not going to lose her. I immediately got on the Internet and found a place out there where they can stuff her. They say they leave the hair as if she were alive. You know that beautiful coat Guayama has. That's why I need the dough. Call me, nene, I need the money.

Your friend,

Naldi

Sammy:

It's the second time I've come to your house to leave you a note and I can't find you. And on top of that, here's the note I left you yesterday. Nene, come on, call me or come by the house because I need that money urgently. Not for me but for Guayama, the doctor is pressuring me because she's suffering too much. The people who do the embalming are ready to take her but I need the money to send her little body over. It's really expensive. I'm so desperate I called Héctor, who as you know I haven't spoken to for over a year ever since he called me a pimp right in front of my sister, to ask him to lend me the money to tide me over until you paid me. A lot of good it did me to humiliate myself: that queen told me I was crazy, that it's the sort of thing only sick people do, which is why he stopped talking to me in the first place, and twenty thousand other things I won't even mention. That's why I need the money urgently. Call me, please.

Your Friend,

Naldi

Sammy:

They put Guayama to sleep this morning. I felt, nene, like I can't even say. Total despair. You can't let too much time pass after death to send her, but the doctor insisted and we did it. I was there to make sure, like the people who dry them out recommend—they have a name for that but I don't remember—that they not add any chemicals with color so as not to damage the fur, since it looks nicer that way. I felt sad but since I know I'll have her with the money from you for the curtains, well I wasn't so affected by it. I wondered so much about where you were I didn't have to be sad. This work costs money. I've got her all wrapped up in the freezer at the bodega next door, since for the lady it's no problem as long as she gets her
cuartos
, as she says. No questions asked. But, imagine, today they sent me a DVD from the company and you should see people with their little dogs, playing with them like they're alive. I'm telling you I'm desperate but here are the other two notes I left you before. Nene, where are you? The neighbor said you're in Santo Domingo. Knowing you, I'm not surprised.

Naldi

Sammy:

I see now that you really are in Santo Domingo. Your landlord just confirmed it for me. In fact, he told me exactly where you are. You'll see. I need that cash and if you read this note I'm in Santo Domingo, since you know I get free trips because my sister works for American.

Naldi

Sammy:

As you can see from the stationary this note is on, I'm in your hotel but you're not in your chamber, as they say here. I need you to communicate with me ASAP. It's urgent. I'm also telling you I had to charge my room to your account. You can take it off the bill for the curtains. I'm desperate. Listen: when I mentioned your name here in the hotel, everyone understood what the situation was right away and they've showered me with propositions, but I can't put those on your bill. Besides, I'm in no mood for that with Guayama in that freezer in Santurce. I'm waiting for you.

Naldi

Sammy:

I'm going to a town called Azua. After I told the girl at the counter what happened to me, she told me she had an uncle who stuffs animals. I'm going to see how they look because he has a showroom. If you come back, don't leave. Tell the people at the counter to connect you to Yasrelis's cell phone because we're here together. I'll come right back to the hotel today. Don't leave.

Naldi

Sammy:

I'm back at the hotel and not even a note from you. They haven't heard from you. I'm leaving for Puerto Rico but I'm coming back in two days. I went to Azua and I liked the work the man does there. They can change the eyeballs to any color you want. They gave me a massage and I put it on your bill. I'll tell you about it later.
This place is paradise. When I get to Puerto Rico a cousin of the guy who stuffs the animals is going to pick me up and he's going to come with me to the bodega to pick up Guayama and get her ready for the trip back. I think they cover her in some salts or something like that. Since I can't count on you for the money I'm going to pawn some jewelry mami had been saving in case I ever gave her a granddaughter. But what better granddaughter than Guayama? I'll be back here with the dog in two days. I'm so excited I can't wait to get there!

Naldi

My dear “friend” Sammy:

I'm writing this letter from jail. Yeah, imprisoned like a criminal for having friends like you. If only you could see me. I'm all shaved and dressed up like a woman. I've got a husband they made me choose as soon as they figured out what the situation was. He couldn't be more common. It's humiliating. I need your help urgently. I gotta have the money for the curtains to pay my lawyer. The Azua thing was one big lie. As soon as I got to Puerto Rico the supposed cousin took Guayama to “get her ready.” What he did was fill her with social security cards, birth certificates, and even passports. They caught me at the airport. It's a federal offense and I'm locked away for identity theft, smuggling documents, illegal appropriation, and God knows what else. Please, send the money to the lawyer because my sister won't even answer my calls. Guayama is in the freezer in the federal building. Now she's evidence. When the lawyer clears everything up and I'm free to go, they have to return her to me. I found out from a friend of my prison husband about a guy in Santurce who stuffs animals. I'm telling you, nene, practically next door. If only I'd known. Give me the money for the curtains, please, if not for me, at least do it for Guayama, please.