“Let’s go get a liter,” he says.
“Who’s got some?”
“Richard El Cao.”
“C’mon,” I say, and I forget about the sun and the bitter vapors... Fuck, it’s actually the bitter taste of desperation. Same shit.
El Cao always has liquor. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes he also has pills. He gets them easily: He steals a script from his mother, who works as an administrator at a hospital, and he signs her name, and then they give him the best pills at the pharmacy. Easy, right? But there are no pills today. We took the last ones yesterday, with four liters of liquor. Yesterday was fucked up.
Now we’re drinking, not talking. It’s always like this: At first, you hardly talk. It’s as if your brain goes dead for a while. Later, we talk a bit, especially if we pop some pills. Alexis and El Cao talk the most.
After we’ve been drinking awhile, Alexis says, “There’s a fight today.”
“At El Hueco?” El Cao asks.
Alexis nods.
“I don’t have any money,” El Cao says.
“Me neither,” I say.
“I do,” Alexis says, and since he’s been drinking, he tells the whole story of how he got the cash: There were about twenty liters of oil, the good cooking kind, in the trunk of his father’s car, and he stole three. He sold them, so he has money. Three hundred pesos.
“Let’s go,” says El Cao.
“Let me finish,” says Alexis.
We drink a little more. This liquor’s pretty good. When we finish drinking, that’s when we leave.
When we arrive, the fight hasn’t started yet. We’re told today it’s Yoyo’s stanford against Carlitín’s boxer. I like the stanford. His name is Verdugo and he’s won like twenty fights. He almost always kills the other dog. The boxer is also somewhat famous: His name is Sombra and they say once he clamps down, he doesn’t let go. There are already twelve people here, waiting. There are two black guys, with their gold teeth and Santería necklaces around their necks. They must be Carlitín’s friends. He’s always hanging out with black guys like that. He has business dealings with them, and sometimes he pulls jobs with them too.
The betting begins. Alexis puts his three hundred pesos on Verdugo. I tell him to set aside fifty, for another liter in case he loses. But he says no, that there’s still plenty of cooking oil in his father’s car and Verdugo’s gonna win.
They set the dogs. And everybody’s screaming. Myself included. They let them loose. Verdugo sinks his teeth into Sombra’s shoulder, drawing blood on the very first bite. It’s practically black, this blood. Drops of this practically black blood swirl around Verdugo’s mouth and drop on the ground. Then the screaming intensifies. Sombra starts to turn and gets ahold of Verdugo’s paw. He’s gonna tear it off. Verdugo’s gonna leap right over him and Sombra’s unaware. Then Verdugo hits his neck. Carlitín and Yoyo jump in to separate them but Verdugo won’t let go, and neither will Sombra. They jam sticks in their mouths to control them. Sombra lets go first but comes around the side; Verdugo still won’t let go. Yoyo finally pries his mouth open and Sombra drops: Two streams of blood pour from his neck, even blacker and thicker. The boxer’s dead. Everybody’s still shouting and the losers start to pay up. Carlitín kicks his dead dog. Alexis gets his winnings, two hundred pesos, and tells one of the black guys to pay the hundred they bet. The black guy says the fight was bullshit. Alexis says he doesn’t give a shit about that, what matters is his hundred. The black guy says he’s not paying shit. Alexis says he can stick it up his ass. The black guy pulls a piece and sticks it in Alexis’s face.
“What you say, you little white shit?” the black guy asks, then hits his jaw with the gun’s butt.
Alexis doesn’t say anything. The other black guy has a knife in his hands and is looking around at everybody else. The two black guys laugh. Nobody moves. Should I do something, given that Alexis is my friend? I make my move.
“Let it be, bro,” I yell at the black guy. “Alexis, forget the cash.”
“Fine, big guy, you win,” Alexis says, and the black guy pushes him and laughs. The other black guy joins him. They leave without turning their backs. I like black guys less and less all the time. I swear to God that’s true.
Alexis talks even less than usual. And he drinks more. Between him, me, El Cao, and Yovanoti — that’s what we call Ihosvani now — we’ve downed two liters and a third’s almost gone. There’s one more. Here, on El Cao’s roof, there’s no fear: We’re encircled by a Peerless fence and, even if we get drunk, no one can fall off. Then somebody calls El Cao from the street corner.
“Richard, Richard!” a woman shouts. Or two women.
It’s two: Niurka and Betty. El Cao tells them to come up. They come up. They already know the black guys hit Alexis, cuz the whole neighborhood knows. They’re thirsty so we start the fourth liter.
“Either of you got anything?” I ask, but they play dumb. These two love to play dumb. “Don’t play dumb,” I tell them.
“I’ve got two parkisonil left,” Betty says, so I ask her for them. They’re two little white pills. I think I wanna have one. But I give them to Alexis, who swallows them with a gulp of liquor.
“Stop thinking about those black guys,” I say.
“I’m gonna get them back,” Alexis says, then lays down on the ground, closes his eyes, shakes a little, and starts to fly. That little parkisonil is a rocket when it’s fueled by liquor.
It’s nighttime and, since there’s no sun, I stare at the moon. I don’t like it as much, but it’s better than nothing. Betty is still sucking me off, and though I’m hard and the head is red hot, I don’t feel like coming. Sometimes it’s like that: It just feels swollen. Alexis is still sleeping on the floor while El Cao is sticking it up Niurka’s ass and Yovanoti rests. I think he’s singing, softly. I have the seventh bottle from our ordeal in my hand and I take another swallow. Suddenly, I don’t wanna be sucked off and I take it out of Betty’s mouth.
“Get on all fours,” I say, and I start to fuck her up the ass, and I think about movies in which men are sticking it up the ass of some woman. But nothing happens anyway; I’m not gonna come tonight.
“Here, my man,” I say to Yovanoti, and he comes over and Betty sucks him.
I start to look at the moon again, take another swallow, and fall asleep.
When I open my eyes, I see the sun. I’m alone on the roof.
I don’t know why there are days I like to come to church. Not to pray or to think about God, cuz I never learned to pray and I was spared the whole speech about God and the saints and the angels. I just like to come. My parents don’t care anymore if I come, cuz it’s not seen as a bad thing anymore. A few years ago it was really bad, and they didn’t like it when I came here. You don’t believe in squat, they said to me. Don’t you know that could get us in trouble? What the hell do you think you’ll find in church anyway? they asked. I just shrugged: I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Well, I do know one thing: I like it cuz I feel calm. But I don’t pray or think about God. I just look at him, nailed up there.
This car runs really well. El Kakín spends the whole day cleaning it, tuning it up, putting little things on it. Whenever El Kakín’s father’s abroad, he gets the car all day. Sometimes he lets us know. Everybody, go to the beach, and then we all go to the beach. Like today. Alexis is still pissed off about what happened with the black guys. He doesn’t even wanna get in the water. He just drinks rum and every now and then mutters, Fuck those black guys. Me, El Kakín, Yovanoti, and El Cao all get in the water. The water’s wonderful today. We get out and drink a little rum, and then I go back in the water and shit and the turd follows me around. But we go back in. Then we go back out, drink more rum, and Vivi and Annia show up. Since we’ve been drinking so much, we talk for a while. Annia says she’s leaving for La Yuma[1], her and her entire family. Some people from a church — Jehovah’s Witnesses — got them the visas. They go to that church once a week. They sing, they pray a lot, and everybody thinks they really believe in all that, now that they don’t smoke, or drink, or curse, or harbor ill will in their hearts, as Annia says. But my brother’s always losing his temper, she says later. Well, it doesn’t really matter that they don’t believe in Jehovah, since what they want is to get to La Yuma, just like a bunch of other people I know. Not me, though. They say there’s everything over there, but you have to work like a dog. El Cao says he doesn’t wanna go either; he does fine with moonshine and pills no matter where he’s at. El Kakín wants to go: He wants his own car, with five-speed transmission, four-wheel drive, eight cylinders, diesel motor, hydraulic suspension, cruise control. He knows that car like he already owns it. Alexis says he wants to go too: He says you kill a black guy over there and they give you a thousand dollars. He’s obsessed with black guys.