I was staying at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel & Casino, and in the afternoon I went looking for him. Scaling up hills covered with multicolored colonial houses, cobblestone streets, and tons of tourists, most from cruise ships docked by the Malecón. The only pictures I had of my father were from when he was a teenager, when he acquired his famous name.
I spotted three old men sitting outside, drinking coffee by a café.
“Have any of you seen an old man named Salvador Argon, also known as the Capeman?” I asked in Spanish.
“You came to San Juan looking for an old man?” one of them answered in Spanish. “The whole town is old.” And they laughed together.
I continued walking. The humidity never bothered me. I expected to find him in some corner drunk and lost. I walked all around Old San Juan. Lit a candle for Mama at the cathedral. The cult of Mary is not in my bones.
Exhausted, I gave up as night was approaching. I took a taxi back to the Sheraton.
I replayed this search the next day with no luck.
On the third day he rose from the dead; I received the call. It was a female voice, speaking in English.
“You are looking for the Capeman?”
“Yes,” I said anxiously.
“Why?”
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Meet me tomorrow at the San Juan Gates, where the fishermen are.” And she hung up.
Whoever she was, she knew him by his famous name. So she knew what he had done.
My father was born in Mayagüez and had been shuffled from the island to New York City by his parents as many times as he would later be shuffled from juvenile detention to juvenile detention, from prisons to asylums and back to prisons.
He came from a time when the New York City streets belonged to teenage gangs. My father was president of the Vampires. Like many members, he had dropped out of school, left his mother, and then rented a five-dollar-a-week single-room occupancy on the Upper West Side.
The night of the playground incident was a Saturday. All over the West Side of New York City, from the 100s down to the 60s, the large population of Puerto Ricans who lived there before gentrification, before the cleaning up of Needle Park, were taking in the street life. Radios blasting salsa. Everyone looking for someone to love and be loved in return. Everyone cooling off from a summer heat wave.
It was around nine o’clock when word arrived that some kids from a white gang named the Norsemen had beaten up a Puerto Rican member of the Vampires. As president of the gang, my father called up all the Puerto Rican members and told them to meet at the playground on 46th Street and Ninth Avenue. Some came walking. Others took the bus. My father jumped the turnstiles, hopped on the 1 train, got off at 42nd Street, and walked west. He was a Vampire and so he wore a cape. In his hands a dagger, along with years of anger, betrayal, abuse — a wealth of tragedies from his young life just waiting for a reason to be set free. When my father and his Vampires assembled at the playground it was midnight. The lampposts were broken. Hanging out by the swings were these two white boys. It was a moonless New York neighborhood known back then as Hell’s Kitchen.
“Hey, no gringos in this playground!” my father yelled. The two white boys ran but my father and his Vampires chased and fell on them. My father tackled one of the boys, threw him down on the pavement, and started screaming at his face: “This is our playground. No Norsemen! No white Norsemen!” My father wielded his dagger. Began stabbing the white boy and then the other boy... but these were not the Norsemen. They were just white kids hanging out.
Bleeding a river of red, the first white boy made it to the entrance of a tenement building. He knocked on the door of some old lady. She quickly recognized him as a boy from the neighborhood. The old lady kneeled down and held the bloodied boy in her arms as if she wanted to give him what was left of her own life. He in turn looked up at her eyes and tried to say something but died in her arms.
The other white boy made it to his nearby tenement. He managed to drag himself up a flight of stairs and to his apartment. His mother opened the door and saw her bloodied son coughing like a broken radiator. She held her son as he died in the hallway.
This happened a long, long time ago, when my father was just a fourteen-year-old kid. New York City had never seen anything like this. My father made the cover of Newsweek. Was in Time and all over the papers. The media wanted his blood. Called him the Capeman. He was sentenced to the chair but was pardoned at the last minute and did sixteen years.
Many years afterward, a legendary and wealthy musician wanted access to my father’s life story. This guy wanted to produce a multimillion-dollar Broadway musical based on my father’s life. The musician went looking for my father too, like I am looking for him today, but all he found was Mama and a twelve-year-old me. The musician gave Mama a piece of paper; it was a legal contract. It stated that they were setting aside a lot of money in an escrow account. Should my father ever show up, the money would be waiting for him. The Broadway show went on, though Mama never saw it. She held onto that piece of paper like it was a lottery ticket. She kept the contract safe and dry for years. “Remember, Julio,” she said to me on her death bed, “only ask of him what is due to us. What he never gave us.”
The gates of San Juan are lovely, but they frightened me. They are there to lock you out. To deny you access to the city. To tell you that you are a pirate. An outsider from Spanish Harlem, the mainland. A tourist and not a true Puerto Rican from the island. When I arrived at the huge red doors, I did not enter. I stayed standing there looking out toward the sea. I was afraid that for some reason I would not be let back into San Juan, that I’d be left out among the iguanas and stray cats that roam El Morro all night and day. What scared me the most was that the Capeman might be on the other side.
“Are you going to just stand there or come help me fish?” she asked, not ten feet away from the gates.
“Hi,” I said, “my name is Julio.”
“I don’t want to know your name. You came looking for my father?”
“Your father?”
“I have my net and pole over there,” she pointed with her chin. “Come help me.”
She was young, much younger than I was. She was lovely beyond anything, as if she had been assembled by a committee of men. She was sweaty. Wearing shorts and her long, long hair hid her behind when she walked in front of me. I quickened my pace for us to be side by side. I studied her face to see if I saw my father or myself in her. It was a stupid thing to do since I had never seen him. Just pictures of when he was the Capeman.
“Caldo de pez tastes so good,” she said. “Touristy restaurants buy them from me. All I need is to catch one today and I’ll have enough money for a month.”
We walked toward a small inlet marina. There were many fishermen. From the boardwalk’s platform stemming from El Morro, one could see the large fish swimming below.
“With you here next to me, the men won’t be able to take the best spots for themselves. They’ll see you and make way for me.” She elbowed her way between two men who, annoyed, saw me standing behind her and left her alone. She then baited her pole and casted it out to sea. I could see that there were fish just a few feet away from us. “Those are no good,” she said, knowing full well what I was thinking, “too skinny.” She didn’t have a hat or anything to cover her head and the sun was beating down on me. Even the men had covered their heads. “Why are you looking for my father?”