When I left the infirmary, I said to him, Father Walter, I want to be in your Church, to be one of your people, and he said, you already are, José, it was the eye of God that looked at us and showed you the way, let us give thanks that we met and are both already in His militia, and then he shook my hand and looked at me intensely and I felt life stream into me through all the cavities in my face, as if shot through a powerful hose, as if I had done ten lines of coke in one go, and I think my body started healing at that moment, because I felt this enormous desire to jump up and down and climb the walls and even the ceiling, it was the greatest high I’d ever had and the beginning of my new life, my friends, because with Walter’s power and influence and lawyers, after six months I was out again, free and back at work, first in the mansion in Charleston and then in the Ministry of Mercy’s house in South Beach, because he said I had to help him in the alma mater, Miami, where heaven and hell lay in wait on the same corner, where Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Big Master, could meet Satan the Traitor in any bar or any grocery store, that was how things were in this city at the end of days, and when I got there and felt the heat of the sun and saw the shiny asphalt and smelled gasoline and frying oil I started crying, my eyes filled with big tears, remembering hard times, the abandonment and the fear, the wish that something happy would happen just once, hazy memories of that life filled with knives and syringes, and I cried because for the first time I felt that I’d be more useful alive than dead, and because I’d found a path I was ready to follow, by the side of Walter and Miss Jessica, by the side of the Everlasting Father, the Big Enchilada, and his son, who were both tattooed on my heart.
At night I would cry again for all the years I had wasted that wonderful thing called life, take note, my friends, especially the younger ones, and sometimes my tears were tears of anger and I would scratch my arms until they bled and bang my head on the floor, because I thought, José Maturana, what a piece of shit you are and what undeserved luck has fallen from the sky, damn it, and I swear to you that in those days I was so angry with myself that I came close to slashing my wrists, which was what I deserved for being scum and an opportunist, but I didn’t do it, I took a deep breath and let time pass, and stayed in my corner, in silence, praying and devoted to God.
After a few weeks’ training, Walter and I started in earnest, preaching the word in prisons, which was my natural modus vivendi, and there I started to realize that the world and each one of us, in reality, were the great stage where a struggle with knives and bullets was taking place between good and evil, because in more than ten years of visiting prisons I saw a bit of everything, the hosts of the Big Enchilada triumphant, of course, but also those of Satan, who seemed to be advancing the fastest, and that’s why it was so necessary to go and fight him in the yards and cellblocks, it was there that evil found its raw material, that wickedness was made flesh, Latino flesh, Irish flesh, black and mixed race and oriental flesh, every kind of flesh imbued with wickedness, everywhere distorting faces, turning them into threatening masks, expressions so common they became almost invisible, because disguised as surprise or boredom, but carrying inside them dark, thick water, ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wondered what the souls of the wicked look like? I’ll tell you, the souls of the wicked are black, it’s a shadow on the faces of those who are afraid.
Apart from the prisons, we opened another front in our campaign to recycle human garbage: the nightclubs, especially those of Little Havana, where everyone was hooked on drugs, liquid or solid, fucking up their brains, and offending God, and there, too, we saw a bit of everything, well, let me tell you a few anecdotes.
One night I went out on one of these field trips with Miss Jessica, who was good to take with me, seeing as how this had been her world, and we went to a club that was very hot at the time, called the Flacuchenta Bar, with good music, the kind that heats the blood of us Latinos and gets us leaping onto the dance floor, do you copy me? rap, tropipop, champeta, and techno-salsa, anyway, we sat down at a table and she asked for a Tom Collins and I ordered a non-alcoholic beer, because after that heavy detox I’d been through I couldn’t even look at a drink, and around eleven in the evening, which is the hour when wickedness starts to get in the body and Satan wakes up, Miss Jessica said, José, go take a look in the men’s bathrooms, so there I went, fearlessly, dear brothers and sisters, because with my natural authority, a result of my time in prison and these muscles you can see, I started looking in the stalls, and what can I tell you, it was enough to make a man weep, in the first there were two young guys doing lines of coke on the toilet bowl; in the second there were two more young guys and some leftover coke, but one of the two was giving the other a blowjob that could have given Monica Lewinsky a run for her money! it looked like mouth to mouth resuscitation, only through the cock; in the third a black man the size of a refrigerator was vigorously screwing one of the waitresses from the bar, who was kneeling over the toilet, with her back to the action; in the fourth a young guy was smoking freebase with his pants down, and as he inhaled the smoke he was jerking off and his cock was so huge it looked like an escalator, and in the fifth and last, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll never guess what I found, the rarest thing of all in a Miami disco, can you guess, my friends? I found a man taking a shit! just that, and as he was taking his shit he was reading an old edition of the Miami Herald, the political page, to be more precise. Of course he was the only one who protested, saying, hold on a second, you fucking junkie, I’m already leaving the place warm for you. The last words I didn’t hear because the people in the other stalls were already coming out, looking very upset, of course, so I cried, this is your lucky night, this is a police raid, but we’re looking for someone in particular, consider yourselves lucky and leave quietly, I said, but the man from the fifth stall said, oh yes? and since when is taking a crap a crime? and he added, don’t fuck us around, go back to your town and sell secondhand condoms, if you’re a cop then I’m Butch Cassidy’s gay grandfather! The guys in the third stall said, listen, you fucking Castro Nazi, what the fuck you got against homosexuality? eh? come out of the closet, homophobe, a good fricassee of cock is what you need, you fucking psycho! The only one who was really scared was the waitress, who came out and said, I’m sorry, officer, he’s my boyfriend and we almost never see each other, we’re going to get married, I swear we’re going to get married; right then and there I left the bathrooms before the black man, who was shaking his dick and wiping it with a Kleenex, could come out and add his opinion to the others.
When I got back to the table I said to Jessica, my friend, we’re going to have to do a lot more work in these places, there’s a bit of everything here, and she said, I know, José, I went to the women’s john and saw what you always see, cocaine, syringes, pills, vibrators with dinosaur tails, and then she said, I’ve never told you anything about my life, but I used to be on the edge myself and I know what happens in these toilets and what you find in these girls’ G-strings, and it isn’t only bodily fluids, no sir, but anyway, that’s woman’s talk, and she raised her glass and said, José, I’m going to tell you my story, so listen, this is how it was.