for rosemary
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the assistance of:
Thomas Davis
Kevin Hallinan
Alfred Howard
Ronald Marsenison
John McCann
Michael McTigue
John Meda
Richard Paul
Charles Summers Team C, Bronx Homicide
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A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
TITO SOLIVAN TOOK A pint bottle of whiskey out of the hip pocket of his baggy brown pants, swigged it and then spoke while his lips still glistened with drink.
“In Texas, most men become rich,” he said.
He took another drink from the bottle, which was pitorro, a moonshine. Solivan was a man of local olive drab skin, but with the blue eyes, snub nose and perpetual thirst of his grandfather, Michael Sullivan, a United States army soldier stationed in Ponce in 1916. Sullivan married a local black Indian and his name was refined over the years to conform to community standards: at death, he was listed as Colon Solivan.
“In Mississippi, you get jobs and money,” Sullivan’s grandson, Tito Solivan, now said.
“Maybe I’ll go to America,” Teenager said to him.
“In Seattle, Washington, it should be a sin for people to live,” Solivan said. “The life is so easy it makes God mad.”
Solivan stood in front of his shack, which was built high off the ground in an attempt to make dampness keep its distance. Chickens kept appearing at the top of the high wooden stoop and then turning to go back inside the shack. A couple of hundred yards away, the orderly spacing of streetlights and phone lines came to an end, with sneakers and tin cans hanging from the wires. Solivan was the town lecturer on the riches of America, and people came to him for advice even though Solivan had been born in this shack and had spent his entire life standing under the ceaseless sun on these mudflats running to the Caribbean. That his grandfather had been American, New York Irish, was qualification enough for Solivan to inform everyone of the life awaiting them on the other side of the land and sea from this town of shacks, La Playa de Ponce in Puerto Rico.
“Where is the best place?” Teenager asked Solivan, who was his cousin on his father’s side. He had asked Solivan this many times, but Teenager had a need to hear it again, for then he could walk away knowing that his future was assured.
“In New York, the priests are ashamed when they find out how poor the Pope lives,” Solivan said.
Teenager, however, was not yet ready. He stood holding the hand of a beautiful, vacant fourteen-year-old named Lydia, but there were so many others in the town whose hands he held and did not want to relinquish. Teenager’s life was in the town square, a place of cement walks and low tropical oaks called robles trees. The tree trunks were painted white and the walkways were lined with globe lights on tall posts. A bandstand was in the center and each evening the girls walked counterclockwise about the square and the boys went clockwise. In their strollings, boys and girls always would be face to face and the boys would be able to make remarks to the girls. Not remarks about the beauty or great charms of the girls, but rather boasts of how strong they were, of how easily they would destroy anybody who came near the girls, of how much they would like to have sex with the girls.
Teenager at seventeen walked the square, shoulders swinging, voice declaring to the night sky that all this belonged to him, that all the girls there were to be his pleasure. Rising out of a blank life, he found his identity depended upon his level of violence. Therefore he told his women in the square not of flowers, but of whom he beat up. His search was for domination, his basic urge was to destroy; sexual conquest for the sake of humiliating a woman was the first duty of a man to himself.
“You see that bus over there?” Teenager one night said to three men who had come over from the larger town of Ponce to capture women in the square. The three looked at the old bus and nodded.
“You have five minutes to get out of this square and onto this bus,” Teenager told them.
“What are you saying to us?” one of the three from Ponce said.
“I am telling you that you have five minutes to get out of this square and go onto the bus. If you are here in five minutes I will kill you.”
Teenager walked over to the El Cacique Bar, at the corner of the square nearest the water. It was a shed, with a thin bartender dozing on a high stool. The people drank Corona beer and Zorro rum and shot pool. Outside the open rear of the bar was a muddy path that ran through the weeds to the start of the sea, ten yards away. Teenager stood in the bar, stared at a pool game and guessed time in his head. He looked at the clock over the bar and saw that four minutes and forty-five seconds had passed. He looked out of the door of the El Cacique and saw the three from Ponce standing under a light in the square. Nonchalantly, staring at the ground, he walked out of the bar. The grass plots of the square had wire strung around them knee-high, held up by metal pipes driven deep in the ground. The wire went through holes at the top of the pipes. Passing one plot of grass, Teenager suddenly reached for a pipe. The wire did not go through this particular pipe; it was simply looped around, and when Teenager tugged, his special pipe slid quickly out of the ground and up through the wire loop.
When the three from Ponce saw the pipe in Teenager’s hand they began to run. Teenager caught the tallest between the shoulder blades. The tall one stumbled and started to go down. Teenager brought the pipe onto the back of his head and the tall guy lay there, stunned, the blood matting his black hair. Teenager said to him, “Now you get up and get onto the bus or I am saying to you that I am going to kill you.” The tall guy pulled himself up and wobbled across to the bus stop. Teenager took the pipe back to its spot, stuck it back into the ground, looped the wire over it and, taking a deep breath, looked around the square to see which girl he wanted to own.
One night, Teenager decreed that Lydia would take her clothes off only for him, and that if she ever did it for another he would kill both her and the male. Early one Saturday, Teenager’s mother and stepfather left for the shopping boat to Saint Thomas, and an hour later Lydia was in Teenager’s bed in his house. In midmorning, tropical rain crashing on the tin roof gave to the couple the feeling of being protected by castle walls, causing them to burrow deeper into drowsy privacy. They heard only the sound of rain, not the dripping hair of Teenager’s mother, who had returned from a swamping at sea. On Monday morning, she took Teenager and Lydia to the judge in the city of Ponce and had them married. As they were not in a state of grace, they could not be married in the Catholic Church. Nor would the mother allow time for confession and other regulations necessary to the sacrament of matrimony, because she wanted the young people married immediately so that if one of the beauties of their Saturday was pregnancy, the child would be legal from first cell onward.
Teenager had a job in a car repair shop owned by El Negro Bobo—Black Bobo—in the Belgica section of Ponce, the part of town for those with skin color running from bitter chocolate to blue coal. In this setting, Teenager appeared as pale as paper. People with his color, faded khaki, lived primarily on the West Side of Ponce. On the hills rising sharply at the edge of the town there lived the Castilians, or people who pretended to be, and they would not allow their skin to be touched by the light from a heavy candle.
With no car, Teenager went to his job by bus. While he loved cars, and thirsted for the day he would own one, he despised working on them. His huge arms and great back muscles could lift up a car engine, but if he awoke with a stuffed nose, he said to himself that he had pneumonia and remained at home in bed. On days Teenager did show up, he was late, and he often went out to lunch and did not return. He was paid fifty-five dollars for a six-day week. Black Bobo thought it was cheap, as long as Teenager showed up for Saturdays, when at day’s end Black Bobo always went to a whorehouse in Belgica run by Mirta La Negron—Black Mirta. Black Bobo would get drunk at the bar and have Teenager, who sipped only a beer or two all evening, stand guard.
One night, a month or so after Teenager was married, he was at the whorehouse bar when his boss got into an argument with a man named Ralphie, who worked at the ironworks. Black Bobo slapped Ralphie in the face. As Ralphie picked up a beer bottle, Teenager reached out and got a hand on Ralphie.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said.
“You go away and I’ll fix this bastard,” Ralphie said.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said.
“I come back here with a gun and I shoot him,” Ralphie said.
Black Bobo laughed and returned to his drink. Thirty minutes later, Ralphie walked through the door with a pistol in his right hand. Ralphie walked down the bar toward Black Bobo. Teenager dived for Ralphie’s gun hand. Teenager’s left hand clamped onto Ralphie’s right wrist and Teenager’s arm muscles rippled as he pushed Ralphie’s gun hand out, as if opening a door. Teenager took a step to his own right, moving his body away from the wavering gun. Suddenly, Ralphie found himself with his right arm held far out to the side and with the entire front of his body open to Teenager, who was off to the left. Ten thousand years of male instinct caused Ralphie’s knees to clap shut in front of his groin.
Teenager’s right elbow rose and his right side moved in one piece. The elbow hit Ralphie like an iron bar on the bridge of his nose. Ralphie did not go down. He simply doubled up, hands over his face, the blood running out from beneath the palms.
Black Bobo threw his arms around Teenager. “The champion of this whole whorehouse!” he yelled. He banged his glass on the bar for another drink.
Black Mirta, watching Ralphie shuffle out, said, “I don’t like this. It is not the end.”
“Bullshit,” Black Bobo said.
“You’re the one who is bullshit,” Black Mirta said.
Teenager was bored. He had to stand at the bar with a beer that was warm and listen to Black Bobo boast and babble. When is this man going to have sex with some girl and let me go home to sleep, Teenager kept saying to himself. After 1:00 A.M., with Black Bobo still at the bar, Teenager was in the bathroom just starting to piss when he heard a shout that drowned out the juke box. He came out of the bathroom on the run. He saw Black Bobo scurrying out the whorehouse door. Behind him, a gun in his hand, was Steve Alvarez, Ralphie’s brother. Steve had on a yellow shirt. Teenager ran for the yellow shirt. He could not get through the people in time. The yellow shirt was out the door and running over the rutted dirt of the whorehouse parking lot. Up ahead, racing for his car in the corner of the lot, was Black Bobo.
“I get my gun in my car and I kill you,” Black Bobo yelled at the yellow shirt. The yellow shirt did not stop chasing him. Black Bobo ran up to his car and pulled the door open and put his head into the front and shrieked, “Now I have my gun, you mother-fucker.” Steve Alvarez stood in his yellow shirt directly over Black Bobo. He fired the pistol. It sounded like a tray falling on the floor. Teenager’s hands went out for Steve Alvarez’ yellow shirt. The tray kept falling. By the time Teenager pounded on the yellow shirt, Steve Alvarez had emptied his gun into Black Bobo. Steve Alvarez walked backward. Teenager did not touch him again. Teenager looked into the car and saw the blood in the darkness and Black Bobo down on his left ear on the floor of the car.
“What happened?” somebody shouted from the door of the whorehouse bar.
“I just lost my job,” Teenager said.
At four the next morning, Teenager and Lydia left in a pickup truck that Teenager had taken from Black Bobo’s auto repair shop. They drove across the mountains to San Pedro. Teenager was not yet eighteen and Lydia was not yet fifteen. Teenager had with him the address of a brother of his late father. The brother lived in Manhattan and would do anything to help, Teenager’s mother told him.
Two hours later, as Teenager was about to turn into the airport, he swerved out of the line of traffic and rode alongside the airport until the road turned to dirt and ran under coconut palms. He remained on the dirt road, which became even more rutted. Vegetation brushed against the sides of the truck. People and cows walked in the road in front of the car and it was futile to blow the horn because there was no room for anyone to stand on the side of the road.
All the people on the road were quite black, descendants, the mixture undisturbed, of the slaves brought by the Spanish to Puerto Rico to work in the sugar fields. Upon being freed, this group of slaves left the fields and moved to the coast, where they were shunned by the Taino Indians, who felt no need of any deeper shade of skin. Nor would the white Spanish do more than glare at them. Perhaps out in the mountains nobody cared. And in America’s South the white farmers, born of Irish and English sheep violators, had no inhibitions about rolling among cornstalks with a field nigger. But in this particular spot along the Atlantic Ocean, the Castilians were truly afraid that it would rub off. An Indian or so was all right; high cheekbones were not catching. But black was untouchable. So now, two centuries or so later, those living in this jungle area were as dark as the day their ancestors had the chains taken from their necks.
Teenager drove to the village of Loiza Aldea, consisting of a street, then an old gray fort of a Roman Catholic church, St. Patricio’s, a town square, a shed with a Corona beer advertisement and, two blocks from the church, a green wooden house with an old sign on the front porch: “Templo Espiritual de Sanidad Divina.” The person inside practiced positive witchcraft; if Teenager had wanted anyone hurt he would not have come here, to Loiza Aldea, but instead would have driven along the other coast, from Ponce directly to Guyamo, which is where the evil voodoo people live.
A plump woman on the porch motioned Teenager and Lydia into a dim living room, where Teenager sat on a straight chair which was under a large cloth banner of Jesus, whose garments were held apart to display the Sacred Heart. Another banner was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, a third showed Christ being attended to by St. Michael the Archangel.
An inordinately short woman, a measure away from being a pygmy, looked out of a bedroom that had a curtain as a door. The woman smiled, displaying top front teeth missing.
“I soon be out,” she said.
A few moments later she appeared, full set of white teeth gleaming. She carried a glass of water. The spirits drink the water, although you cannot see the level of water go down even if you leave the glass out for an entire day. After settling their thirst, the saints talk to her through the water. She placed the glass of water on a saucer on the small table and sat on the opposite side from Teenager, who pulled his chair up to the table. Lydia remained against the wall.
“You require a session?” the woman said. She yawned. “You are the earliest today.”
She rubbed her eyes and stared at the glass of water. There was no conflict in her mind between her glass of water and the banners of Jesus and the Virgin Mary hanging on the walls. The Spanish priests, trained and sharpened at Salamanca until the edges of their faith sparkled and could cut through the thickest jungle, still found the beliefs of slaves in Puerto Rico to be unsplittable. Therefore, over the centuries, mergers were allowed, and people prayed to Christ and listened to water, as the woman was now doing.
There were two ways for the spirits to speak to Teenager: they could whisper to the woman and she would relate it to Teenager, or the particular spirit could overtake the woman and begin speaking out of the woman’s mouth, and thus directly to Teenager. The spirit the woman was talking to was Changó, the saint of war, power, prisoners and sex. After several minutes, the small woman shivered. Teenager sat forward. He knew the woman’s body was tingling with the presence of the spirit who spoke to her.
The little woman, watching the water, said, “Soon you will make very much money. There is a person you admire most in the world who made very much money and soon you will make this money too. That is what you want. Do you remember the day you first admired this man? You were at a place where children play and you admired this man. You cannot make the money here. You must make it in the city in America. The man you admire most is there.”
Teenager knew that the woman was speaking to the proper spirit. His hero was Rockefeller. Once, in the yard behind the school, Teenager sat on a bench with a book from the library about Rockefeller. The other students were playing softball; Teenager read over and over one passage about John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It said that early in Rockefeller’s life he imported more opium than the law allowed. Rockefeller, the book said, was using the opium for a patent medicine. Teenager decided it was for pure drug selling. Rockefeller, Teenager believed, made his fortune with opium and then caused all the laws to be passed against it in order to prevent anybody from becoming rich that way. Teenager remembered sitting in the schoolyard for a long time and thinking about how smart Rockefeller was.
Now the small woman said, “You must use your strength to get these riches in America.”
Teenager nodded. “I am going there now.”
“Do you have someone to advise you in America?”
“This woman called Mama. She is going to be a saint. They give me her address.”
“Listen to her. She will tell you what to do.”
Teenager paid the woman five dollars. Lydia and he got into the pickup truck and started for the airport. Teenager’s arm hung out the window and the sun warmed it. It was October of 1966 and another life fashioned by the sun and the water was coming to the place made of cement and steel.
STATE OF NEW YORK, Department of Correctional Services.
4/6/76
Parole Hearing, Albion Correctional Facility.
Case of Ramon Solivan, 73C748
Commissioner: Lewis Constable
Q. How old are you, Teenager?
A. Twenty-seven.
Q. For a guy of twenty-seven you were in and out of trouble for a long time, right?
A. Yes sir.
Q. I can tell you straight out, Ramon, that this board looks at your record very seriously. And you were found guilty by a jury verdict.
A. Yes sir.
Q. Well, we take the jury system very seriously around here. If a jury says you’re guilty, then we give that quite a bit of weight.
A. Yes sir.
Q. Do you admit your guilt at this time?
A. Yes sir.
Q. How do you feel about this crime you committed?
A. I am sorry.
Q. For selling dope.
A. Yes sir. I am sorry for selling dope.
Q. You are now credited with six hundred and eighty-one days jail time. And you were found guilty of possession of drugs and conspiracy to sell drugs and assault second on a police officer. And you received a five-year maximum sentence on each count, but they are to run concurrent.
A. Yes sir.
Q. Are you a junkie?
A. No sir.
Q. Why on your misbehavior report does it show that you entered another inmate’s cell and beat him?
A. That was a bad guy started a fight with me.
Q. Let’s get back to your crime. How many fellows were involved with you in your crime?
A. Three.
Q. Benny Velez, Nector Lopez and Ramin Negron.
A. Yes sir.
Q. So far as you know did any of them go to trial?
A. Nector Lopez and me.
Q. And Ramin?
A. He copped out.
Q. Took a plea?
A. Yes sir.
Q. It doesn’t say here that he took a plea. It says here that he was found cut into parts and left in an empty lot.
A. Yes sir.
Q. Why do you say he took a plea?
A. Because that is what he did, he told them he was guilty.
Q. And then he got killed?
A. This I don’t know.
Q. It says here that he got killed before he got to court.
A. This I do not know.
Q. Let’s go to the start. Here you are nineteen and you assault and rob a cab driver. Was this in the Bronx?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Was narcotics involved here?
A. Yes sir.
Q. You were involved in quite a few assaults prior to this?
A. Yes sir.
Q. How many would you say?
A. Not many. I just come here then from Puerto Rico.
Q. So when you started your criminal career, you were about nineteen?
A. More or less, yes sir.
Q. And those other fellows with you belonged to a gang called the Teenager gang?
A. Yes sir.
Q. And you are known as Teenager?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Considering the fact that you were continually in trouble in Bronx County with crimes of narcotics and assault, how can you expect to get parole today?
A. I don’t have any plans of associating with these people I was with before.
Q. Well, you saw enough of Ronald Schiavone while you were here. He has an organized crime folder. Seemed you were his bodyguard around here. Do you plan to see him on the outside?
A. Never.
Q. Now your gang was named after you?
A. Yes sir.
Q. And you are going to stay away from them.
A. Yes sir.
Q. The New York Police won’t be happy to see you coming back to the Bronx. Certainly the reports from this institution or even the reports from the reception center weren’t too good.
A. Yes sir.
Q. And you were given one month credit for jail time before your trial. So you are locked up almost two years now.
A. Yes sir.
Q. And on a five-year bit you’ll have until October of 1977 to go on parole.
A. Yes sir.
Q. That’s over a year and a half from now.
A. Yes sir.
Q. I wonder, I really wonder, and so does the board wonder, whether you can make it on parole over that period of time. What do you think?
A. I want to try.
Q. Why?
A. Because when the parole is over I plan to go back to Puerto Rico and live again with my mother.
Q. You weren’t working.
A. I was working.
Q. I see no jobs listed here.
A. Well, I worked.
Q. How much were you making at this job of yours?
A. This guy gives me one hundred fifty.
Q. Apparently you weren’t making enough to satisfy yourself if you became involved in the crimes that are explained here.
A. It wasn’t the need for the money. It was just the guys I was hanging out with.
Q. How do you plan to support yourself and your wife and children while you’re on parole?
A. I have this job painting rooms in apartments.
Q. I see that. Now, do you think you have done fairly well in here despite your background and your ability?
A. Yes sir.
Q. In what way?
A. I was thinking about when I get out on the street to finish school out there. Go to a community college.
Q. Do you have a drinking problem?
A. I didn’t ever do that.
Q. Do you have a drug problem?
A. No sir.
Q. But when we look back at the crimes you committed, robbery first, grand larceny first, assault first, assault second, possession with intent to sell, and these were just a few of the things you did out there. Three homicide arrests. Now you know and I know that you don’t get arrested for homicide for nothing. Even if you’re let go immediately, the arrest still indicates you’re around serious trouble.
A. No sir.
Q. No?
A. The police break my chops.
Q. With homicide arrests.
A. Yes sir.
Q. They arrest you for murder just to be pests.
A. Yes sir.
Q. This is the longest period of time that you ever were in prison.
A. Yes sir.
Q. And you feel you learned something out of this.
A. Yes sir.
Q. All right, Ramon, we’ll take everything into consideration when we make our decision.
A. Yes sir.
Q. Think there’s any chance at all that you’ll stay out of trouble?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Or would you get yourself right back in?
A. This is the last time I will ever be in these places.
Q. You can’t afford it, whether you are here or in Puerto Rico, with this record.
A. My record will be good enough to let me out.
Q. You’re pretty sure of yourself.
A. Yes sir.
Q. I have to tell you that I’ve seen a lot better records.
A. Soon I will be out.
Q. You’re pretty sure of this, aren’t you?
A. Yes sir.
Q. Well, we’ll let you know.
A. That’s all right.
THE COLLECT CALL FROM Prison came at six o’clock at Ana’s Bar on East 138th Street, in the South Bronx. Benny Velez, who worked for Teenager as a drug peddler, shrieked when he heard the voice. He slapped his hand on the bar when Teenager told him that he had a chance for parole.
Two others, Boogaloo and Albertito, got on the phone, and Benny Velez, deciding to make the world a total delight, put a small plastic box, large enough to hold a ring or some medicine, on the bar. Using a dollar bill, he took cocaine out of the box. Without bothering to go to the men’s room, or even to turn his back to the window on the street, Benny made lines of cocaine on the bar, put the bill to his nose, bent down and took a great sniff of barroom air that became enchanted as it went inside him.
“Teenager!” Benny Velez shouted.
Maximo Escobar, the tallest person in the place, sauntered to the phone, grinning. Everybody in Ana’s Bar watched as the neighborhood celebrity, Maximo, shouted in Spanish to the neighborhood legend, Teenager. Teenager wanted his wife taken to see Mama, so that Mama could pray to the saints and get Teenager released. Of course he could do that, Maximo said, for he had intentions of seeing Mama himself. To say hello, not for voodoo. But he would see to it himself that Teenager’s wife, Lydia, saw Mama for a ceremony.
“Mama told him on the phone he would be out of jail by July,” Benny Velez said. “His saint is always right.”
“The prisons are so crowded that they let everybody out when they do minimum time,” Maximo said.
“His saint, that’s the one who must do it,” Benny said.
Maximo didn’t want to argue. “What does he do when he comes home?” he asked.
Benny shrugged. “He comes here to be home.”
Maximo picked up his beer. He would not embarrass Benny by saying anything bad about Teenager. Maximo despised drug peddlers; at the same time, he loved Teenager. Maximo was twenty-three, four years younger than Teenager, and he came from a shack in Ponce that was two doors down from the one in which Teenager had been born. One of Maximo’s first memories in life was being five years old and watching Teenager climb to the roof of a car and sit there, cross-legged, as the car bumped down the street without the driver realizing anything. When the car paused at the corner, Teenager jumped off. Over the years, no matter what Teenager perpetrated, Maximo never could feel total disgust; that they had sprung from the same landscape was more important. And if asked to choose between Teenager, even if found selling heroin to babies, and some fat Irish detective or little Jew judge, Maximo found it no contest. And as he thought of Teenager now, Maximo smiled. He began to realize how much he had missed Teenager, with those fifty-two-inch shoulders and the eyes that turned into cat slits when you told him something funny.
Maximo could see Teenager, his chin rising, his great head sitting on those huge shoulders, on the morning the clerk in the subway change booth started trouble.
Maximo, his right arm wrapped around a pyramid of schoolbooks, had gone into the subway at 8:00 A.M. and held out his high school pass.
“That’s no good until tomorrow,” the man in the booth said.
“They just gave it to me yesterday,” Maximo said.
“I don’t care when you got it, it’s no good until tomorrow.”
“What should I do?” Maximo asked.
“Pay thirty-five cents.”
“I don’t have any money,” Maximo said. He didn’t. Nor was there any money in his house. His mother had been laid off for two weeks, and each day she went out into the hall and borrowed two dollars and used it for dinner.
“Thirty-five cents,” the change-booth man said.
“Have a nice day,” Maximo said. He walked to the turnstile, lifted himself onto it, swung his legs over and began walking down the platform. He looked into the darkness at the head of the tracks to see if the train light showed.
There was shouting behind him, from the change booth, and Maximo heard footsteps. He turned to see a stocky policeman coming after him.
“I have my train pass from school,” Maximo said, holding the pass out.
“What did you jump the turnstile for?” the cop said, walking toward him.
“I have my pass,” Maximo said.
The cop’s hand came out and grabbed Maximo’s hair. The cop yanked the hair and Maximo’s books spilled from his arm. The cop dragged Maximo off the platform and into an alcove by the change booth used for storing cleaning equipment.
The cop pulled Maximo’s head up. “You’re going to get the beating of your life,” the cop said. He slapped Maximo across the mouth. The slap made a noise so loud that a woman near the change booth, seeing what was going on, gasped. Hearing her, the cop let some of the anger drain from his eyes. He pulled Maximo to the stairs, kicked him in the shin and sent him up.
“I dropped my schoolbooks,” Maximo said.
“Why don’t you come down and get them?” the cop said.
Maximo, his eyes wet with frustration, went back to his building. He was about to go into the doorway when he heard Teenager calling him from the corner.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Teenager said.
Maximo told him. Teenager punched Maximo on the arm. “That’s all right. Come on with me.”
Teenager went down the stairs to the subway two at a time. Maximo followed him. Teenager went by the change booth, loped up to the turnstile, slapped his palms on it and vaulted the turnstile, his legs folding under him, more easily than Maximo had ever seen anyone do. The cop, standing by the change booth, watched closely.
“Come on,” Teenager said to Maximo.
Maximo went up to the turnstile and lifted himself over it.
“Go get your books,” Teenager said.
The cop called to them.
“That’s all right,” Teenager yelled.
As Maximo picked up his books, the cop came up to the turnstile.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said again.
“You didn’t pay and that kid didn’t pay,” the cop said.
“That’s all right,” Teenager said.
“I said you didn’t pay,” the cop said, his voice rising.
“That’s all right.”
The cop took a closer look at Teenager and remained on the other side of the turnstile. His voice went high enough to quaver. Teenager swung his shoulders and he and Maximo walked away from the cop, who did not come after them.
Maximo preferred to think of Teenager in this way, the protector on the subway and the kid sitting atop the car in La Playa de Ponce, rather than as a drug seller to be hated.
Besides, on this day in the bar Maximo Escobar had more important uses for his anger. Earlier in the day, before he had taken his five-hour bus ride home from school to start the Easter recess, Maximo had been interviewed by a man from Mobil Oil. It took place in a room on the second floor of the Law School building. The man from Mobil Oil was in his midforties and his name was Bo Watson. When Maximo entered the room, Bo Watson stood up. Bo Watson’s handshake was firm and his gray-blue eyes locked on Maximo’s. Watson then looked Maximo up and down. Bo had no trouble with Maximo’s color, which was a shade off white. His eyes paused on Maximo’s shoes, which were black, pointed, high-heeled and spit-polished.
“Maximo,” Bo Watson said, “I am very glad to meet you.”
As Maximo sat down on the near side of a chrome and wood desk, he pulled an envelope out of his shoulder bag. He handed the envelope to Watson, who pulled out the résumé , and took a pair of bifocals out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket.
Maximo’s résumé gave his address: 1523 East 138th Street, the Bronx, New York. It said that he had attended La Escuela Maria Puente, Calle Colon, Ponce, Puerto Rico. Then P.S. 263, the Bronx; Intermediate School 224, the Bronx, DeWitt Clinton High School, the Bronx; Lehman College, the Bronx; and now Harvard Law School, Cambridge. He was presently in the top tenth of his class. Under the section headed “Work Experience,” Maximo had listed that he had worked for the last three summers at Cutti’s Superette on East 138th Street.
“This is very impressive,” Bo Watson said. “Is this the South Bronx?”
“Yes,” Maximo said.
“Is it as bad as they say?” Bo Watson asked.
“It is very bad,” Maximo said.
“Have you ever been arrested?” Bo Watson asked.
“No,” Maximo said.
Bo Watson jotted down a series of notes on a Mobil Oil employee interview form. Maximo saw that next to the word “Appearance,” Watson wrote, “student, Spanish, medium build.”
Watson put down his pen, looked up from the form, held out his hand and walked Maximo to the door.
“You’ll be hearing from us,” Bo Watson said.
Sure would, Maximo knew. A Harvard Spic was the hire of the year. In the last two months, he had received one hundred letters from corporations. Two days before, the man from ITT hadn’t even bothered to make notes; he simply asked Maximo to let them know when he would like to begin his career with them. Maximo was tempted to go back inside the room and tell Bo Watson that he had lied, that in fact he had been arrested in the South Bronx. He wanted to see Bo Watson nod and say, “Well, I’m sure that’s all done with and you’ll have a fine new life with us.”
It had been that way all through school. Nobody at Harvard openly patronized him; they were beyond that, and they even had seen one or two live Puerto Ricans in the years before Maximo. But they did want him to know at all times that he was different from his people, that he was better. This was done best at wine and cheese parties. For three years, every time he turned around, there was a wine and cheese party thrown by some woman named Pebble, whose husband taught Constitutional Law. Maximo decided that wine and cheese was the standard Protestant way to teach a Puerto Rican how to dispose of Spic-ishness.
Maximo met Teenager’s wife, Lydia, two nights later in front of the building where Mama lived on Southern Boulevard.
“Have you got the picture?” Maximo asked.
Lydia stamped her right foot several times on the sidewalk. On the phone, Mama had told her to get a picture of the judge who sentenced Teenager and to put it in her shoe and walk on it. Lydia didn’t know where to find such a picture, but she went through a newspaper and found a photo of Senator Russell Long at a natural gas hearing and, figuring that judges and senators were the same, tore out the picture, tucked it into her shoe and went around stamping her foot on the face of Russell Long, as extension of the judge. This act, Mama had assured her, would cause the judge to become seriously ill and the prison gates to open for Teenager.
Maximo took her into the building and down a lightless basement corridor, at the end of which a red votive candle played across the heavy-boned ebony face of Mama.
“Entra en la casa para que los santos te ayuden,” Mama said.
When she saw Maximo, her religious demeanor dropped and she gave a toothy smile and a howl. She placed the candle on a small table inside the door and held out her arms, demanding that Maximo allow himself to be hugged.
“I asked your saint to see that you pass all your subjects in school,” she said. “This I do for you.”
“I didn’t take the exams yet,” Maximo said.
“Then when you take the exams, your saint will see that you pass them.”
“We will pray to Changó and bring Teenager home to his house,” Mama said, waving Lydia into the darkened basement apartment. Lydia wore a skirt and blouse and carried jeans and another blouse; she thought it would be simpler for the skirt, rather than the jeans, to be cut off her during the ceremony. In the darkness, somebody took the jeans and blouse and Lydia stood uneasily, arms folded. As she grew accustomed to the darkness, she noticed two women in white dresses and three young men in white suits. Mama was in an old print blouse and dark pants. She padded about in gray socks. There was a noise at the door and a tall young man in a white suit pulled a goat on a rope. Mama waved him away and followed him out into the hallway, giving orders. Then she came back and stood in the kitchen and watched Maximo peer into the refrigerator.
“Orange juice, grapefruit juice, something like that,” Maximo said.
“When the boy comes back, I’ll send him to the store,” Mama said.
“Maybe I’ll go out myself,” Maximo said.
“You do not stay?” Mama said.
“No, I’ll just go for a walk,” Maximo said.
“Changó helps you in the school, too,” Mama said.
Maximo smiled. Mama had such great sense in this big old body of hers, yet she persisted in identifying any thoughts of her own as being messages from her saints; in his first year at Harvard, with his insides crying for something familiar, Maximo had called Mama simply to talk to someone, and she listened to him for a few sentences and then told him to regard himself as a prisoner and move immediately into the Spic group. “When you go into the yard, you stand only with them,” she said. By yard, she meant any area similar to the one at Attica; she had no idea that Harvard had a Yard. When Maximo told her there were no Puerto Ricans at the school, Mama then insisted that he move out of his dormitory and into a Hispanic neighborhood. Maximo took a room in Roxbury and regained his ability to breathe.
“Maybe you helped me by yourself,” Maximo now suggested to her.
“But you did what I told you to do.”
“I guess I did.”
“And you are still doing the workout?”
“I am.” Mama had told him that to defeat the effect of Harvard whites, he must use pushups, just as Puerto Ricans in Attica, their loins screaming, try to exercise the sex out of their systems. Maximo would come to Constitutional Law with aching biceps.
“If you did what I told to you on the phone, then you did what Changó said,” Mama said.
“Whatever it was, it helped.”
“The saints now will help Teenager.”
“I don’t know who’ll help him,” Maximo said.
“You still let them fool you,” Mama said. “It is not an American religion, so you think something is bad. If some Puerto Rican people believe in this religion, why cannot it be good? You are as bad as the people who go to the market and they say, ‘Don’t give me that little tomato. That’s a Spic tomato. Give me the big one over there, the American one.’ That is what they have done to the minds of the Puerto Rican people. If it is Puerto Rican it is no good. Only American is good. You do not believe Santeria even it helps you. Prove to me that Mama cannot do more for you than the priest in the church.”
“I guess I can’t.”
“You see? Tonight, I will have the saints help Teenager.”
At this, Maximo decided to go for his walk. He wanted to do it casually, for he couldn’t insult her. She had been part of his life since childhood. When he was ten, three blacks with baseball bats walked up to him in front of the projects on 137th Street and began swinging. One of Maximo’s ankles broke and he pitched onto a patch of dirt and crab grass in front of the projects and began screaming, his hands ripping at the crab grass. He heard Mama’s voice call out that she would help. His hands kept ripping at the crab grass, and Mama went into the street and stopped an ambulance. In later years, Maximo understood that the ambulance had happened onto the street at that time, but on that day Mama had claimed that the saints had sent it, and no one, particularly Maximo, disputed her. Since then, whenever he felt like displaying cynicism toward her belief, he remembered the time he was ripping at the crab grass. For that day alone, he never could hurt her.
“I have to go out for something anyway,” Maximo told Mama. “You take care of your ceremony.”
As he walked out of the kitchen, he heard a fluttering; in the doorway, the young guy now stood with a bird of some kind. “Gallina?” Mama asked. The young guy assured her that it was a hen. Maximo went by them and into the hallway.
“When do I see you?” Mama said.
“Soon,” Maximo said.
“I will pray to the saint for you,” Mama said.
Case of: Ramon Solivan 73C748
Date: 6/15/76
The subject is to be conditionally released on the marginal date (9/1/76) from the Albion Correctional Facility. On the day following the marginal date, the subject is to make his Arrival Report to the New York area office. He is assigned to report to the Bronx Parole unit, Bronx County Courthouse, 161st Street and Grand Concourse.
MAXIMO HAD JUST WALKED out of his house and was looking at the headlines on the newsstand when the arm came under his chin and pulled him back. The moment Maximo felt the size of the arm, he knew who it was.
“I feel the presence of an evil personage,” he called out.
“I am saving you again,” Teenager said. “I am pulling you up from a deep hole.”
Teenager released his arm and spun Maximo around. “Let me see you. You look smart. The school has made you look very smart.”
“You look terrific,” Maximo said.
“Of course. I have been away to school too.”
“I think you were with nicer people,” Maximo said.
“I was with lice. Never have I had to be with such people. All bums and lice who get caught. Never will I be there again. Mama said this time she will watch for me every day and save me.”
“This time you ought to try watching yourself,” Maximo said.
“Mama will do it for me. You helped me get out, Maximo. For taking my wife to Mama, I will buy you something. Here, we’ll go down the block to Eddie Hernandez and I will buy you all new shirts. Yes, I will do that for you right now, I will buy you something.”
“I don’t want to go there,” Maximo said. “Not today. I’ve got things to do.”
“What have you got to do? You’re finished with school?”
“I still have to take the test, the bar exam.”
“After this, you will become an abogado.”
“If I pass.”
“You will pass everything. Then when you pass, I will hook you up and you will make millions. You will keep Teenager out of jail.”
Teenager held out his hand. Maximo, laughing, slapped it.
“You are so brilliant that the judges will see you come into the courtroom and they will say, ‘Oh, we cannot go any more with this case against Teenager. Here he is bringing Maximo with him and Maximo is too smart for all of us.’ ”
“I don’t think your business will be my business,” Maximo said.
“Anything you do I will make sure that you earn millions,” Teenager said. He saw something out of the corner of his eye and he turned around and gazed at the other side of the street. “Is that Pat?”
“Where?”
“That one.” Teenager pointed to a young woman, growing heavy in the waist, pushing a baby carriage.
“That’s Pat,” Maximo said.
Teenager roared. “Pat!” he called out.
Across the street, the young woman with the baby carriage stopped, focused, and then gave a whoop as she saw Teenager.
“You are very beautiful,” Teenager called.
Pat waved her hand.
“Is that Maximo’s baby?” he called out to Pat.
Pat put a hand to her mouth and shook her head no.
“That is too bad. Maximo is going to make millions. You and your child would be very rich.”
Pat seemed uninterested in Maximo.
“Your next baby will be with Maximo,” Teenager shouted. Pat turned the corner quickly.
Teenager said to Maximo, “I am going for a drive.”
“I’m going to sit down someplace and read,” Maximo said. He carried a thick law book.
“Come on, you can read in my car,” Teenager said.
“Where are you going?” Maximo asked.
“To New Jersey,” Teenager said.
“What for?”
“What difference does it make? Wherever I go, you just stay in the car and I promise you it’ll be all right. It’s nothing. Just a ride.”
The Mercedes was parked around the corner. Maximo slid into the car, put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes as Teenager drove up toward the George Washington Bridge.
“Who are you going to see?” he said.
“Mariani,” Teenager said.
“Some wop,” Maximo said.
“You could call him that,” Teenager said.
Maximo was uneasy now. Maybe you better make this the last, he told himself.
Teenager drove onto the George Washington Bridge, a structure meant for splendor, but now, loaded with Sunday afternoon traffic, just another crowded federal highway. Beneath the bridge, people furiously enjoyed themselves on small boats. The traffic moved into New Jersey, where somewhere children ran through grass. To find this place, one had to know the proper muffler shop or fried chicken stand to use as a turning point.
Louis Mariani lived in Swiftbrook, and Teenager had been given his phone number by a son-in-law of Mariani’s named Ronald Schiavone, the inmate at Albion who lived in continual trouble with the blacks and Hispanics. Usually, Teenager was the only object between Schiavone and the hereafter. When Teenager called, Mariani first said he would meet him the next day at the bar next to the funeral parlor on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. When Teenager said he wanted to see Mariani right away, Mariani said he was home cooking Sunday dinner for his family, but he could spare a few moments from the gravy to welcome a returning veteran, particularly one who had done so much for him. If Teenager had not assisted Schiavone, Mariani would have placed land mines on his front walk before allowing a Hispanic into his house.
Mariani was the boss-in-fact of the Mafia family running the Bronx. News and law-enforcement people call it the Lucchese family: Lucchese had been dead for years, but cops and reporters have decreed that the Mafia, like prestigious Protestant law firms, goes under the names of founders even though those heroes have been dead for decades. The man with the actual title of boss in this particular family was a man named Albert who was in prison. The family, run by Mariani, had no name other than its newspaper and police file name, and its members operated in “crews” whose lives revolved around finding the right black to sell dope to; the wrong black being an undercover agent. Little else mattered, for importing and selling dope always has been the only serious occupation of the Mafia.
Teenager stopped at Burger King on Route 4 in New Jersey and asked directions to Mariani’s house, which was difficult to locate because a golf course cut off many of the streets. Teenager and Maximo had a hamburger and onion rings, each tasting like cardboard, and then turned off the highway at a transmission repair shop and several minutes later wound up at Mariani’s, a large yellow brick home on a corner lot in a neighborhood of houses set far back from the street. Teenager put his Mercedes 300 directly in front of Mariani’s house, got out of the car and stretched. If you came to a neighborhood like this, there is no reason not to let everybody inspect you, Teenager said to himself. The windows of the houses of the street were covered, but Teenager could feel people: suburban eyes can look through velvet and still make out a Puerto Rican or black.
Teenager had on a red silk shirt from Eddie Hernandez’ store. His great upper torso, which seemed to carry half his hundred and ninety pounds, was outlined sharply against the shirt. Light tan gabardine pants without a wrinkle sat on his thirty-one-inch hips smoothly.
His hair was a thick black mane, shaggy and striking, that, through mustache, sideburns and full beard, allowed the hairless part of his tan-yellow face to be covered by the palm of a hand. Hooded eyes seemed sleepy. He grinned as he looked at Mariani’s house, the high cheekbones rising even more.
Teenager knew that his hair was part of the reason why Mariani changed his mind and invited him to the house. Teenager had pelo lacio, which is straight hair. If he had pelo malo, Mariani undoubtedly would have made it plain that he did not want Teenager in his house. Pelo malo means bad hair: wiry hair, kinky hair, African hair. There is a crazed regard for pelo lacio, while pelo malo causes people to withdraw.
Teenager did not have to ring the doorbell. Louis Mariani appeared with his arms spread. He threw them about Teenager’s shoulders. His capped teeth gleamed.
“I love you like a son,” Mariani said, “for what you done for that kid.”
“It is good to see you,” Teenager said.
“Where’d you leave the car, in front of this house?”
“Yes. It’s all right. Parole officers don’t work on the weekend,” Teenager said.
“I didn’t mean that. I meant that you can’t put the car in front of anybody else’s house. Some of these neighbors, they’re citizens. They beef when they got cars from this house in front of their house. You one of my babies.” He pinched Teenager’s left cheek and blew kisses with his mean mouth.
The pinching annoyed Teenager. Who is this little man to touch me when I could snap his arm off?
Mariani suddenly withdrew and waved his hand. “Look at her, will you?”
Walking across the lawn from the driveway was a young woman with a long cheerful body.
“My daughter Nicki,” Mariani said. “She’s my baby doll.”