Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

  I nodded. “I’ll get one tomorrow.”

  “What’s wrong with this afternoon?”

  “Okay,” I said. I was onto her. The days of fooling me were over. Sometimes, you find things out about people. And after that, you can’t hate them anymore.

  Chapter Five

  I quit my job at Speed Sweep Janitor Service. I was tired of getting up at four in the morning. I got a full-time job for the summer with the landscape crews at the university. Pifas Espinosa got a job there, too. He’d just graduated from Las Cruces High. He looked like he’d be permanently hung over for the rest of his life from all that celebrating. The first day on the job, Pifas said working there was the same thing as going to college. Pifas. He just didn’t get it.

  When I got my first paycheck, I ran into Juliana at the Pic Quick. She was buying a pack of cigarettes. I was buying a Pepsi. We walked back home together. We didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, I said, “You want to go out tomorrow night?” I didn’t look at her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “that would be nice.”

  I thought maybe she’d say no because the last few times I’d asked her out, she’d told me she was busy. She seemed sad to me. I thought maybe it was me who made her sad. Maybe I hurt her.

  I stopped walking. I thought a while. Maybe I’d just beg her to stay with me, tell her I was sorry if I’d hurt her. Beg. And then she stopped walking, too. And she looked at me. I thought she was going to kiss me. But she didn’t. I didn’t see any anger in her eyes, no remnants of her father. I didn’t see any pieces of Hollywood or Las Cruces High or any of the other parts of the world that had hurt her. Her eyes were like a book and there were words written there: I might be a knife. I might cut you. Sammy, tell me that you’ll bleed. For me. And then her eyes became a desert, calm and large and I didn’t care if they swallowed me up. And I understood. Standing right there. That she loved me. That she loved me the only way she knew how. And then I kissed her. And she put her hand on my heart, and I knew she could feel those wings that were throwing themselves against my rib cage.

  We walked back to Hollywood as slow as our legs could take us.

  Every time we went out, she always came to my house. Because of the way her dad was. The next evening, I walked out of the house and sat on the front porch. Waited. Saturday night I need you, ba-a-by. . . I looked at my shirt. Maybe it wasn’t right. I never knew what to wear. Not that I had a lot of shirts. I just wanted to look fine. Hated to wait—gave me too much time to think about stupid things, things that didn’t matter. Like shirts. Seven thirty came and went. She didn’t show. Fifteen minutes later, I was still there. Waiting. Eight o’clock. No Juliana. That’s when I heard the ambulance. It passed right in front of our house and kept on moving down the street. I don’t know why, but I ran after it. I felt my heart beating in my chest like a bird flapping its wings, trying to find his way out of a cage. I ran and ran after the ambulance. When it stopped in front of Juliana’s house, I stood still and stared at the crowd. I heard myself screaming, but I wasn’t me anymore. “What’s wrong? ¿Qué pasó? ¿Dónde esta Juliana?” I started to follow the guys in the ambulance into the house, but a policeman stopped me. “Sorry, son, can’t let you go in there.”

  “But Juliana—”

  “Sorry, son, you’ll have to move back toward the street.”

  “No. No!” I was yelling. “Juliana! She’s in there! She’s my girl—”

  I felt the policeman’s firm hand on my arm. He led me to the street. He looked at me like he was real sad. Like he was real sorry. “It’ll be okay, son,” he said. He left me there, staring at the house. Surrounded by most of the citizens of Hollywood.

  Everyone around me was talking, and some lady, Mrs. Moreno, was saying how Mrs. Ríos had left the house screaming and yelling, swearing to God that she was never coming back. “¡Parecía loca! Y el Señor Ríos, he told her to go ahead and leave, que se fuera mucho a la chingada—but when she came back don’t expect to find your children. ¡Me la vas a pagar, cabrona! I’m gonna get your ass! And he went back inside the house. That’s when I heard the gunshots.”

  I stopped listening.

  Another ambulance came.

  I saw Pifas and I asked him for a cigarette. “She’s okay,” he said, “don’t worry, ese. You know how it is, big family, ese. They fight, ¿sabes, Sammy?” He kept talking. I saw him moving his lips. But he was far away.

  More cop cars came. And a black car. A white guy in a tie got out of the car and went into the house. All those gringos. In Juliana’s house.

  They took Mr. Ríos away in handcuffs. I tried to see his eyes, but I couldn’t get close enough. What have you done to Juliana? What have you done?

  It got dark. And then the moon came up. It wasn’t full, but it gave enough light. I could see everything. They started wheeling out the dead. Juliana and her four brothers and her two sisters. All of them. Hollywood had never been so quiet. When there isn’t any hope, it doesn’t do any good to say anything.

  I sat on the sidewalk. Pifas sat there with me. He kept giving me cigarettes. I kept smoking them. We didn’t try to talk.

  Mrs. Apodaca made a wooden cross and planted it in front of the house. She hung a rosary on the cross and said a prayer. Half of Hollywood brought candles and lit them. And whispered things. Prayers. The yard looked like a cemetery. On the Day of the Dead.

  After a few hours, it was only me and Pifas. By then we’d finished his cigarettes and he wandered away.

  And then it was only me.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I looked at the stars and the moon and I thought maybe nothing had happened. Juliana was sitting right next to me on the hood of my father’s car. We were at the Aggie Drive-In. I was kissing her. I was lighting a cigarette for her. I must have fallen asleep at the foot of Mrs. Apocaca’s cross. Sometime in the night, I felt someone shaking me awake. “You can’t stay here, mi’jo.” When I saw it was my dad, I started to cry. He kept kissing me and whispering things to make me feel better. I couldn’t hear, nothing, not the words, not the sound of his voice. But I could feel his arms around me. And I wanted him to carry me home in those arms. I wanted him to tell me that when I woke, Juliana would be alive. In the morning, she would be waking up from a long sleep. She would be lying next to me in bed. In my house. But when I woke up, I knew it was all true. That she was gone. And I didn’t have anything inside me anymore. The wings were gone. And, maybe, I thought, that it was a good thing, that those wings were gone, because now they were free. I don’t know. I didn’t care. Not about anything. Not anymore.

  I was driving around in my father’s car. It was raining and thundering and the sky was acting exactly like Juliana’s eyes. I had tried not to think of her, but somehow, she always came back. And that morning, in the newspaper, I’d seen a picture of Juliana’s father. They were sending him to prison, and there he was on the front page. The Hollywood Murderer. That’s what people called him. All afternoon, I felt sick. And driving home, it all came back to me. And that damned song came on the radio, Frankie Valle singing You’re just too good. . . and all of a sudden I saw myself handing Juliana a pack of cigarettes. I pictured her in the backless dress she never wore—the one I was going to buy her. I pictured her giving Birdwail all the right answers. I pictured us on the hood of my father’s car. She was looking at me. I was cold and shivering, and I knew I had to pull over to the side of the road. I didn’t know what was happening. I just knew I had to get out of the car. I stepped out into the rain, and as I stood there, I swore I heard Juliana’s voice Someone’s gonna hurt you some day, Sammy. Maybe it was the thunder. Maybe it was the rain. I knew I was yelling and shouting only it wasn’t me. It was someone I used to be. I didn’t know if I was crying. Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe it was the rain.

  Somehow, I managed to get back in the truck and drive myself home. I remember walking in the door and feeling like I was on fire. My dad made me take a hot shower. He put me to bed. “What were you
doing out in the rain, Sammy? You’re burning up.” I was in bed for three days. I had dreams. I was wandering around the streets of Hollywood—alone—knocking on doors. No one was home. Everyone had moved away. And I prayed to God. I prayed, God, God, take away my heart.

  “Every day, just take a breath and keep trying, Gigi.”

  “What for, Sammy?”

  “Cause if we don’t, we’ll all be dead. We’re too young for that.”

  “Ha, ha, Sammy. Ha. Ha.”

  Chapter Six

  I don’t know what summer meant for most people, but for me, summer meant work. At least I didn’t have to go to school. Summer. Work. Pifas had just graduated—“At the bottom ten percent of my class,” to use his own words against him. “Screw it. Who cares? No one cares. Maybe our moms, maybe they care, but only for about five minutes, and then they move on to worry about lots of other stuff, you know, like money and food and clothes and where to find someone to fix your car for free and shit like that.”

  We both called ourselves Mexicans even though we didn’t have a peso’s worth of knowledge about Mexico. We were both raised in Hollywood—the only country either of us knew. We both smoked Marlboro’s. And we were both guys. That just about exhausted the list of things we had in common.

  I worked with Pifas all that summer. Working the grounds of the university. “Fucking minimum wage job for minimum wage Mexicans.” That’s how Pifas put it. Not that Pifas was prepared to do anything else. And not that he worked, either. Work was not something he was interested in. Took up space, that’s what he was good at—that, and complaining and eating his lunch. Oh yeah, and he was damn good at making like he was busy when the foreman showed up. “How you guys doin’?” the foreman asked every time he came by. He’d smile that idiot grin of his. Not smiling at me. Not at me. He was smiling at Pifas. People who weren’t interested in work had a way of finding each other.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Pifas would say. “Fuckin’ A,” the foreman would say. What was that? I never understood that fuckin’ A business. Not then, not now. Then the two of them would smoke a cigarette and talk about what needed to be done. They were good at that. Talking. I’d keep working. I felt better about collecting a paycheck when I worked for it. A curse I inherited from my father. And anyway, I liked to smoke my cigarettes by myself. I’d tell Pifas I had to find a bathroom, and I’d go and smoke a cigarette and get some peace.

  Aside from spouting his theories and asking me personal questions, Pifas spent a lot of time watching girls. “They’re all into sex now, ¿sabes, Sammy? All of ‘em. Think of it, man, it’s all too beautiful, Sammy. 1968 and they all drink and smoke pot and don’t wear bras and listen to rock. Man, man, man. Women are equal now, ¿sabes, Sammy? That’s the word. Equality, baby. And you know what that means? That means they’re all into sex, just like me and you. I never knew equality could be so beautiful. Man, man, man.” Man, man, man. That and fuckin’ A and far out and far fucking out—that’s what he said all summer. Pifas was dangerous with the English language. He was dangerous with any language. At least he didn’t say groovy. Groovy was too much of a gringo thing for Pifas. Good thing, too, or I’d have popped him one. I swear I would’ve.

  I got sick of him asking me if I was still thinking of Juliana. I’d be turning up the ground with my shovel, digging a bed for some new plants, and he’d say, “Hey, Sammy, you thinkin’ of Juliana?”

  “No,” I’d say. But if I was thinking of her, it would really get to me that he was asking. Because really it was none of his damned business. And if I wasn’t thinking of her, it would get to me even more because he would remind me of her. And it still hurt, that whole sad thing about Juliana and her family, and her good-for-nothing father who’d confessed to the whole damned thing. “I feel bad about this. Me muero de tristeza,” that’s what that bastard said—as if feeling bad and telling the world that you were dying of sadness because you’d killed your children was somehow going to make everything all better. Screw him. He felt bad. What was that? Juliana was dead. His daughter, the one he’d hated, his beautiful Juliana. She was dead. And all because he got mad at his wife. Such bullshit. It still hurt. The whole damn thing still hurt. And I missed the wings that had been beating inside of when I was with Juliana. I missed them—even though those wings had scared me. And I got into my head that those wings had belonged to a bird, and that the bird was beginning to grow inside of me, and that all of that meant something. Something important—like the leaves Mrs. Apodaca talked about—as important as that. But now it was all gone. And part of me hoped the wings would come back. And part of me just didn’t give a damn about anything.

  But the thing of it was that every time I thought of Juliana I could picture my insides and I could picture two broken wings lying inside my gut. They were just lying there.

  Once, when I was thinking of Juliana, I took a match and burned the tip of one of my fingers. Burned it like it was piece of paper. Or an exam that got handed back to me by a teacher who hated me. Burned it. Like that. And I got this huge blister all over my finger. I just looked at it. Just stared at what I’d done to myself. But I didn’t worry too much about it. I mean, it was easíer to think of my burned finger than it was to think about Juliana. She was so beautiful. That kind of beauty left scars. Anywhere it touched you. And I got touched all over.

  So one day, right before the fourth of July, I’d just mowed one of the campus lawns. And Pifas was supposed to be raking. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t raking. He was just standing there watching me. Like I was worth watching. I picked up a rake and got to work. No use in thinking Pifas was going to help me out. Then he looks at me. “So,” he says, “you thinkin’ of Juliana?”

  “Look,” I said, “if you ask me that one more damned time, I’m gonna stick a fire cracker up your ass and you’ll never take another shit in peace the rest of your natural life, you got that, Pifas?”

  “Órale, don’t be such a cabrón. I was just askin’, ese.”

  “Just don’t be asking about her anymore,” I said.

  He really got on my nerves, Pifas. Such an asshole. And the thing is, he always had to be talking. What was wrong with listening to the wind blow? What was wrong with that? What was wrong with smoking a cigarette and listening to the sound of your own lungs as you took in all that poison into your body? It was such a good thing, really, to listen to yourself smoke. Yeah, I know it was bad for me. Everyone said so. Bad for me. Yeah, yeah.

  And every Friday, Pifas asks me if I want to go hang with him and his friends. “Hang,” he says, “let’s just hang. Drink a few cold ones, shoot the breeze.” He was good at that, shooting the breeze.

  I always tried to say no, but my excuses sounded lame, even to me. So one Friday Pifas says to me, “They think you’re a real culo, ese. Know what I mean, Sammy? You know what they say? They say, ‘He thinks he’s too fuckin’ good.’ They call you the Librarian, you know that? Cuz you read too many fuckin’ books. Books, Sammy, what the hell’s that?”

  “I know why they call me the Librarian, Pifas.”

  “Es una pinche vergüenza. Aren’t you embarrassed, ese?”

  “I don’t give a damn ¿sabes? You think I care what a bunch of pendejos think?”

  For some reason, he got this hurt look on his face. I hated that. “Okay,” I said, “okay. I’ll go.” Anyway, I didn’t have anything better to do. Okay. That word seemed to make Pifas happy. For some reason, he liked me.

  I shouldn’t have said okay. Sometimes okay can bring you a lot of trouble.

  So that Friday, Pifas picked me up. I was sitting on the porch waiting for him. Shit, I said to myself when I saw his car pull up. There was Joaquín Mesa, Jaime Rede, and Reyes Espinoza—all of them sitting in the back seat of his car, a whole convention of assholes. And right away, Reyes Espinoza starts in on me. “Órale, how come you get to ride shotgun?”

  “Look,” I said, “you were all sitting in the back seat of the car—shit. Shit! You want shotgun?” I said. “Pifas,
stop the car.”

  “Órale. Relax, ese.”

  “Stop this good-for-nothing-pinche car, Pifas.”

  Pifas stopped the car. I got out. I opened the back door. I looked at Reyes. “You want shotgun. You want to act like my little sister, Elena. Here! Take shotgun, you pinche.”

  Reyes didn’t say a word. He just got out of the car and got in the front seat. I got in the back and slammed the door. “Do we need any more changes here?” I looked at Jaime Rede who was sitting in the middle. “Are you happy? Is everyone happy? I’m happy. Are you happy, Jaime? Are you, Reyes?”

  Pifas started up the car. “You’re in one pissed off mood,” Joaquín Mesa said. He tossed me a cigarette. “Here.”

  I reached in my pocket, took out a book of matches and lit it.

  “Órale, Sammy, I gave you a cigarette. Say thank you, cabrón.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Eternal fucking gratitude.”

  That made Jaime Rede laugh. It was weird to hear him laugh. He didn’t laugh at anything. Then, pretty soon, everyone in the car was laughing. Even me.

  Pifas drove over to his brother’s house who lived in some trailer park near Mesilla. His trailer park was all trashed out, even by Hollywood standards. Pifas goes in and then comes right back out with a cold case of beer. Joaquín smiled like someone had just told him he’d won the pinche lottery. So we go riding around and everyone’s drinking and Jaime Rede’s complaining about Gigi Carmona who dumped him. “She wouldn’t even put out,” he said. “I should have dumped her first.” That’s what really got him—that she dumped him before he got the chance. It was hard to feel bad for him. All the girls thought he was good-looking. And he was. But the word was out on him. He was permanently in a bad mood.

  “Chicks are a pain in the ass,” Reyes said.

  “How would you know?” Joaquín laughed. “Who the shit would go out with you?”