The Empanada Brotherhood (6 page)

Eduardo dropped by with a bottle of wine. He was already drunk because he'd seen Adriana and her fat “pimp” getting out of a taxi that afternoon. We ignored him. Eduardo never mentioned the ten dollars he owed me. Gino and Chuy also appeared and hugged everybody except Luigi, who almost snarled at Gino when Gino embraced La Petisa. The newcomers were all eager to share dinner with us tomorrow at Fugazzi. Chuy had a bag with two magnums of French champagne in it. We drank them, then bundled up and stumbled outside to sing carols. Snow was falling harder. As we walked up the middle of MacDougal Street old people leaned
from their windows listening to our voices belting out holiday ballads in Spanish. A snowball landed on Luigi's head; another one knocked off Gino's new Borsalino. In retaliation we bombarded a third-floor window with snowballs.

“Feliz Navidad!” Luigi yelled up at the windows.

We tramped north on MacDougal, kicking apart clouds of white stuff. Eduardo cried, “I hate her! She's a witch!” La Petisa said, “Oh grow up, you baby.” At West Fourth Street we turned into Washington Square and wandered around the park and through the arch onto Fifth Avenue and up to Eighth Street and back again. Chuy told Eduardo, “Forget her. I'll find you a better one.” We continued down Sullivan Street to St. Anthony's Church on the southeast corner across Houston. All the church lights were on and the crèche figures were covered by snow. The sheep had thick powdery fleeces. Joseph had a white cone on his head. A loudspeaker played “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” drowning out our voices, so we shut up and listened, huddling for warmth and stamping our feet alongside a dozen other Eskimos enjoying the show.

Eduardo said, “I don't
want
any of your girls, manco. I can seduce women by myself. Get away from me. You're giving me escalofríos.”

“Pipe down, all of you,” Alfonso ordered.

Chuy shouted, “Oh my God—I almost forgot!” And he ran away through the storm, late for an important date.

“We can't come to the dinner at Fugazzi,” La Petisa admitted. “Tomorrow we're dining with friends of the family in Queens. In fact, we should go now, Luigi. We'll need plenty of sleep to deal with them.”

Luigi balked. “I detest those self-righteous prigs. I'm staying right here with my pals so we can eat together mañana.”

La Petisa walked off in a huff. Gino said, “I'll go with her,” and he did.

“Tu puta madre!” Luigi called after him.

We traipsed east for another block and turned right, down to Milady's Bar on the corner of Prince and Thompson Streets, one block west of my tenement. Alfonso, Luigi, and I played pool while Roldán and Eduardo talked with two college girls from Greenwich, Connecticut. The pool table was small and each rack cost a quarter. In a corner booth some happy drunken yokels sang “Silent Night,” the Italian version. At ten Eduardo departed with both the minas and the cook appeared at the pool table. By eleven, feeling sick from all the smoke, we left Milady's and bought bagels and cream cheese at Miguel's All-Nite Puerto Rican Deli on Spring Street. Church bells were calling people to midnight Mass.

Back at Roldán's apartment there was no leftover wine to drink and Luigi grew pensive. “I don't mean to sound like a spoilsport, but that girl is all alone. I can't leave her like that.”

“She went with Gino,” Roldán reminded him.

“That's worse than being alone.” Luigi added, “She refuses to make love with me, but damned if I'll let her bring that good-looking asshole to my place.”

So he bid us adieu. That left Alfonso, me, and Roldán. The cook toasted our bagels and slathered on the cream cheese, and then added sardines and pickle slices. He and Alfonso were drunk. When Eduardo banged on the door we let him in. We brushed snow off his head and shoulders. “They laughed at me,” he whined. “They told me to ‘drop dead.'
Nobody tells me to ‘drop dead.' Look at me, I'm a man.
I am a man.
”

Alfonso looked at him. “No you aren't,” he said. “All I see is a jealous, paranoid hypochondriac.”

That befuddled Eduardo. “What are you talking about, you fucker? What are you
talking
about?”

Roldán said, “Easy, boys. Let's not get personal here.”

“What do
you
think, blondie?” Alfonso asked. “We need a neutral opinion.”

“What do I think about
what
?” I stammered.

When we awoke many hours later, all four of us joined up again and tromped through brilliant sunshine and snowy streets to Fugazzi for a lavish meal of spaghetti with clam sauce and Chianti wine. Three small tables were shoved together to accommodate us plus La Petisa, Luigi, Popeye, Gino, Carlos the Artist and his wife, El Coco, and Chuy and his accountant, Greta Garbo, all of whom had promised to join us. But none of them showed up. Caruso played during the meal. The waiter was an old Italian who could speak Spanish because he'd fought with an International Brigade during the civil war. He sat down beside us at the end to smoke cigars provided by Eduardo.

We raised our wineglasses.

And Roldán paid for everything.

The day after Christmas I went to the dance studio where Cathy Escudero and Jorge were hard at work, same as before. I pushed open the door slowly. Cathy stopped right in the middle of her dance and snapped, “Dale, gringo, either come in or go out, but don't just stand there.”

I hustled to the far wall and sat down with my shoulders hunched, as inconspicuous as possible.

Cathy called over, “What did Santa Claus bring you for Christmas?”

I shook my head, embarrassed—nothing at all.

“He brought me a fur coat, silk stockings, and a satin garter belt,” she said, grabbing a pack of cigarettes off the windowsill. “You want to see them?”

I cocked my head, staring at her quizzically.

The dancer lit her cigarette, then turned around, bent over, and swished up her skirt, mooning me. There were no stockings and no garter belt, only her white cotton panties and pretty legs.

It lasted only a second before she laughed, dropping the skirt and facing me.

“You know what Santa Claus brought Jorge?” she asked.

By now I was confused and at her mercy.

“He brought Jorge a big lump of coal and the rent bill,” she said, blowing smoke out her nose. “Christmas in America is crazy. Okay, muchacho, hit it.”

Jorge started again at exactly the spot where I had interrupted. Cathy grabbed her skirt and began to pound the floor with the incongruous cigarette still in her mouth. She danced
that way for five minutes with the weed between her lips like a tough little Humphrey Bogart. It never disturbed her concentration. A few times she inhaled and then exhaled smoke in huffing bursts, but she never touched the cigarette with her fingers. When it had burned down almost to a nub she spit it out and gasped loudly and finished the dance. The nub burned out on the floor.

Cathy panted, dripping with sweat. She pulled up the hem of her skirt, tucking it into the waistband, exposing her legs from the knees down.

She said, “In Argentina the Three Wise Men place candy in our shoes on January sixth, the day of Los Reyes. Little kids put their wish lists outside the door by their zapatos. They also leave some hay and a bowl of water for the camels. But my family never had money for presents. In fact, if any of us had ever seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer we would have slit his throat and turned him into sausage on a parrilla. Here's a nice memory, though. When the Peronistas still held power they brought trucks to the barrio full of toys and gave them to us poor kids. One year I got a ball and a yo-yo and a notebook. That's the last time I ever received something for nothing. In real life if you want anything good you have to kill yourself to grasp it. Isn't that right, Jorge?”

Jorge shrugged and smoked his cigarette like a professional actor in a gangster movie. To me, the two of them together seemed like ancient souls trapped in adolescent bodies. And for the rest of that practice session they ignored me completely.

On New Year's Eve I quit typing on my college romance at nine
P.M.
Then I walked up to the empanada stand where the cocinero was cutting cards for nickels with Gino and Carlos the Artist while he cooked. The boys squeezed over to let me in the alley. Their tattered deck of cards featured sleazy naked ladies. I put four nickels on the counter and joined the game. The great Gardel was singing his laments on the Victrola. Three inches of wet snow covered the sidewalk and it was still falling like blobs of frozen custard. Despite the cold, revelers were all over the place. Taxicabs honked loudly in the traffic jams on Bleecker and MacDougal.

“What's your New Year's resolution, blondie?” Roldán scooped up three nickels for producing the queen of spades, a bosomy gal with her lips puckered in a kiss. The cook poured each of us a shot of wine from a bottle he kept under the grease bin.

“I'm going to sell a book and get rich,” I said.

“I'm going to get laid three hundred and sixty-five times,” Gino said, winning our nickels with the ten of diamonds, a buxom tart bent over looking backward at the camera through her legs.

“What about you, kid?” Carlos asked me. He had little gold stars pasted all over his cheeks. “How many times do you plan to get laid next year?”

“I don't know, I don't have a girlfriend,” I said, losing my third nickel to the artist's nine of clubs, a lewd nude wearing a top hat and high heels.

Gino acted incredulous. “How can you not have a girl in this city? There are more women here than stars across the sky. It's like an apple orchard with ten thousand trees and a thousand ripe apples on every tree begging to be picked. You're young like me, you're not bad looking, and you can speak English,” he added. “There's no excuse not to have a novia.”

“But I'm always broke,” I explained self-consciously. “I can't even pay for dinner and a movie.”

“‘Broke'?” he exclaimed, even more disbelieving as he cupped his crotch with one hand and yanked upward. “Che, blondie, all you need is
this
.”

Popeye chose that moment to stop at the stand with a woman named Martha on his arm. She had jumped right out of the deck of cards we were playing with. At least twice the sailor man's size, she had blue hair and a butterfly tattoo on one cheek. She was missing two front teeth and wore lipstick the color of Nehi orange soda pop.

“I love this guy,” Martha shouted in English, pounding Popeye on the back. “He's the peppiest pup I ever met. Dumber than a bucket of hair, I'll admit. But still, I haven't had this much fun since the pigs ate my baby brother.”

In Spanish, to Roldán, Popeye gasped, “Her tetas alone weigh more than you do, patrón.”

“What'd he say?” Martha asked me. “You talk their lingo, don't you?”

I nodded. “A bit. But I don't understand when they speak slang.”

“‘Slang'?” Martha blustered. “Slang my ass. This little critter is an Einstein with his prick. Come on, sailor boy, let's go home, I'm hungry.”

With a grunt, Martha picked Popeye up in a bear hug, backed out of the alley onto the sidewalk, put him down, lovingly cuffed the back of his head, and barked at us: “This bubba don't know the meaning of quit.”

“Hey, Popeye,” Carlos called hilariously in Spanish, “
don't fall in and drown.
”

Martha must have caught the drift because she bent over and fashioned a snowball the size of a grapefruit. She fired it through the half-open window at the artist but missed, nailing Roldán on the temple instead. He stumbled backward against the coffee percolator while large chunks of ice splashed and hissed as steam puffed up from the grease bin.

“
Auxilio!
” the boss cried. “Martians are attacking us!”

Everything was quiet on January first. I felt antsy. From nine until noon I wrote a maudlin short story about a blind teenage guitarist visiting from Spain who got hit by a New York taxi and wound up in a hospital suffering from amnesia. The nurse who took care of him was practicing to be a flamenco dancer. She was beautiful but of course he couldn't see her. I didn't know how to end the story so it went into a pile on top of half a dozen other incomplete stories.

Time for a little break. Dressed extra-warm, I traipsed downstairs and said “
Buon giorno
” to Rocco, the super, who was hauling garbage cans out from the boiler room to the sidewalk. I offered to help but he grunted me off. “
Vada via.
”

So I walked north on West Broadway to Washington Square. All around the dreary park, tree branches were spindly naked, very black, icy cold. The dirty snow was pockmarked by a million footprints. Somebody had built seven snowpeople inside the fountain, which gurgled water only in summertime.

A bus carried me up to Forty-seventh Street. My heart started beating faster six blocks before I got off. Nevertheless, I mustered the courage to walk west past the diamond exchange and a camera store to El Parrillón and found it closed. I was relieved and disappointed. Peering through the window, all I could see was a bar and many round tables covered by clean white linen. Where did Cathy and her parents live and what were they doing right now?

On my way back to Fifth Avenue I stopped at a pay phone, making a collect call to my folks to wish them a happy New
Year. We didn't talk long because it was too chilly not to be in motion.

I took a bus south from Forty-seventh Street to Madison Square where I got off and hiked the rest of the way downtown feeling excited, desperate, and hungry for more in life. I wanted Fame, Fortune, Sex, Love, and plenty of delicious food and high-class alcohol. I wanted to be married and fly around the world, visiting Paris, Rome, and Istanbul, maybe even Manila. Too bad the holiday season had ended.