Las Biuty Queens Read online

  “This is my friend,” La Manuel told him in the way of an introduction. Typical. You know how well-known we Latinos are here for our good manners.

  “What’s up,” Willie greeted me. His whole bad-boy act didn’t seem to match his good-guy expression or his relaxed-guy vibe.

  As I said hi, I thought about how good the boy looked, but I knew he belonged to my friend. O sea, untouchable. He wasn’t Willie anymore; I decided right then and there to call him the Boricua or El Bori. El Bori passed the bottle of Pepsi and a pack of Marlboro Light 100s to La Manuel. She took out a cigarette and gave the pack back to him. It looked like they were passing a ball back and forth in a baseball game. La Manuel has definitely mastered this guy’s body language.

  El Bori put a cigarette between his lips and searched in his right pants pocket for some cash to give La Manuel. She gave me a look like, “Mira, chulita, he brought back change.” I looked at her with a desperate expression that said, “Ya, pues, let’s get going with the weed.” La Manuel heard me loud and clear. She took out a bag of weed and tossed it to El Bori, followed by a blunt. They kept up their routine of two baseball players tossing a ball back and forth.

  “Vamos, roll one up,” she ordered El Bori, who started to empty the blunt and fill it with marijuana. He used up the whole bag. If it’s up to me, because I’m old school, I prefer to roll blunts with bamboo paper.

  We got high. La Manuel and I talked about everything and nothing. We each asked the other about our friend Sylvia. That morning, we’d both spoken to her on the phone.

  El Bori stayed there, at our side, sitting on a corner of the bed. He looked absent, like he was somewhere else.

  “What’s up with him?” I asked La Manuel as quietly as I could. She shrugged as if to say she had no idea.

  All of a sudden, she jumped out of the only chair in the studio, where she’d been sitting oh so comfortably.

  “Time for our munchies! Here we have some doughnuts the loqui brought, and with this Pepsi, we’re all set,” she announced.

  La Manuel opened the Dunkin’ Donuts box with great ceremony and offered them to us.

  “You might as well take two or three now. I know you,” she teased me.

  I took three. Two of my favorite, Boston cream, and another filled with strawberry jelly. Before I started to devour them, I stood up to pour the Pepsi into cups full of ice. The three of us sat in silence again. El Bori looked even more absent than before.

  “Let’s go out!” I said, suddenly springing to my feet. La Manuel followed suit. We went down the stairs of the old building. El Bori trailed behind.

  These were my first memories of the Boricua. Sometime after that, I lost touch with La Manuel. Too much drama about drugs and money, if I’m being honest. Years passed and we didn’t see each other. Until one day, while walking through Times Square, I ran into El Bori. I recognized him immediately. He looked like a grown man. He must have been close to thirty years old. We said hi to each other. I asked him if he still saw La Manuel. He said yes, she was pretty sick, she’d been diagnosed with colon cancer.

  This should have produced anguish or despair in me, but the truth is that, in our circle, fatal illnesses are pretty run of the mill. The only thing that occurred to me was to ask if she was okay. He said she was following the treatment and that he was taking care of her himself.

  We exchanged numbers. We promised to call each other that night. I really wanted to speak with La Manuel, but my wish wouldn’t come true. I lost the piece of paper where I’d written down the number.

  A few years later, which in New York is the blink of an eye, I was on an R train going to Astoria, Queens, when, around four stops before my destination, I saw someone with a familiar face get in and sit down across from me. It was her, La Manuel. We looked at each other and, without even saying a word, stood up to give each other a big hug.

  We agreed that neither of us had changed a bit. Neither of us did drugs anymore. Correction: we didn’t do as many as we used to. We swapped phone numbers. I had a cell phone by then, so I saved it right away so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing it again. La Manuel lived in Harlem and I was living in Washington Heights. We were close by. After that chance encounter, we started to see each other frequently.

  One of those nights when I went to see La Manuel, she told me El Bori was coming to stay with her for a few days. They weren’t together anymore, but they’d become close friends. She said El Bori had been good to her while she was sick. That he’d even had to clean her more than once.

  He arrived one night in the middle of winter. La Manuel called me right away to invite me over to eat; she’d cooked arroz moro and chicken breasts to welcome him. You don’t have to tell me twice. I f lew there.

  As soon as I entered my friend’s apartment, I greeted El Boricua affectionately, but he didn’t answer. I said hi to him again, thinking he hadn’t heard me, and still he said nothing. La Manuel shot me a look that said I shouldn’t take it personally. I should let it go. We’d better just eat.

  “Mmm. Qué delicioso. I’ll do the dishes,” I said as soon as I’d scarfed down the last bite. I wanted to show my gratitude for the succulent feast.

  “Ay, no,” said La Manuel. “This isn’t the first time you’ve offered. And no offense, but you always leave them sort of dirty. Let’s just roll ourselves a blunt and I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “All right, but you can’t say I didn’t offer.”

  As always, La Manuel tossed a bag of weed and a blunt over to El Bori. He took apart the blunt to put the weed in while my friend, in the kitchen, hummed a song.

  Once El Bori finished rolling, he stood up as though he’d only just seen me and gave me an enthusiastic hug.

  “Hey, it’s so great to see you.”

  “Yeah, you too,” I answered with the same enthusiasm, not knowing if he was joking or being serious.

  La Manuel, refined as ever, came out of the kitchen carrying three cups of coffee on a silver platter. And while she deposited everything on the center table, she whispered to me not to say anything. We sat down to have a coffee and to smoke the blunt. Soon El Bori started talking. He wasn’t addressing La Manuel or me. He was speaking to someone else. We were high. I didn’t pay him any mind. I started chatting with La Manuel about one of our favorite conversation topics: trans beauty pageants. We got all wrapped up in an argument over who was the most beautiful winner of Miss Continental, the most prestigious pageant, which was held every year in Chicago over Labor Day. She said it was Mimi Marks. I argued that Erika Andrews hadn’t just been one of the most beautiful winners, but also one of the most talented. Then we sat in silence, tired after all that clucking like Swarovski crystal parrots. El Bori didn’t stop communicating with himself.

  He stayed at La Manuel’s place for another week or so before he went back to Chicago. A job was waiting for him there. And, it appeared, a girlfriend, too. I didn’t ask La Manuel about El Bori’s strange behavior. I understood without her even saying it that she preferred it that way.

  On another one of El Bori’s visits a few months later, La Manuel called to ask me if I’d bring over a flan from Washington Heights. A few days before that, I’d gone to see them, and El Bori hadn’t left the bedroom the whole afternoon. La Manuel said it was so that he wouldn’t hear voices. I wanted to impress them, so I bought one egg flan and one coconut. When I arrived and delivered them ceremoniously, she said to me, as she always did:

  “Gracias, loqui. You shouldn’t have. I’m going to save them for tonight, I lost my craving. All I want to do right now is sleep. Also, I took half a Percocet.”

  My friend was basically a pharmacy on legs.

  “Sit down in the living room and watch some TV. I’m going to lie down. There’s soda in the fridge.”

  “What about El Bori?”

  “He went to the store for a blunt. But I’m not going to smoke. That pill already did me in. You should smoke with him.”

  “Okay,” I said, arra
nging myself on the red leather sofa and putting on CNN en Español.

  “All right. Let me know before you leave,” she said, disappearing behind the bedroom door.

  I sat there, surprised, watching television. They’d eliminated DACA, the policy that protected thousands of children who were brought to this country by their parents, that helped them become documented. Trump is an imbecile, a pig. I was talking to myself when the apartment door opened and El Bori greeted me.

  “Hi,” I said, shocked. I was positive he wasn’t going to pay attention to me.

  “Let’s smoke,” he proposed, holding up a blunt and a bag of weed.

  He rolled the blunt in record time. I watched him with pleasure, thinking about how good he looked. We smoked and hummed a Frankie Ruiz song that goes, “la cura resulta más mala que la enfermedad.” I didn’t want to keep watching the news; that little shit Trump reminded me of Pinochet. I turned off the television to focus on El Bori, on the soft crooning of songs I’ve heard so many times from other Boricua friends. We were rather stoned. We looked at each other. Our eyes were red like rabbits’. We laughed.

  “Let’s go out,” said El Bori, standing.

  “Super.”

  I stood right up and we left without saying anything to La Manuel. We let her sleep.

  “Let’s go to Washington Heights. I’m gonna buy some weed, papi ran out.”

  It’s so sweet he calls La Manuel papi I thought, looking at him with tenderness.

  We stopped by the liquor store. We bought ourselves some little bottles of booze, one for each of us. It was cold, and we had a long walk ahead of us. We each took a sip as soon as we left the store. It was 3:30 P.M. on a Thursday in February. In another hour it would start to get dark. We walked along 132nd Street toward 5th Avenue. We walked to 135th and continued west from there. Then along St. Nicholas all the way to 175th.

  El Bori sang as he smoked a Marlboro Light 100. We stopped right before we got to 145th and Amsterdam. We stood in the space formed by the facades of those houses from the twenties, the ones where you have to walk up four steps to get to the front door. They fill up with rats at night. We took a drink. We each had half a bottle left. El Bori looked at me.

  “Oye, I’ve wanted to ask you something for a while now.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What was your childhood like in Chile?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. Hundreds of images came to mind. And I felt pleasure at having lived through everything I’ve lived. I gave him my answer in the form of a smile.

  El Bori looked at me, smiled along with me, and said it seemed like a happy time.

  We started walking again and turned onto St. Nicholas going uptown. Thirty more blocks and we’d be in the middle of Washington Heights. A cold, icy wind blasted us. We turned our backs to it. We hopped up and down so we wouldn’t freeze. El Bori said the wind in Chicago was even worse. We drank what remained in our makeshift canteens and continued on toward the heights of Manhattan. As we walked, Dominican bakeries started to appear, multicolored bizcochos adorning their window displays. I went into one of them, making the excuse that it was new and I wanted to see what it was like inside. I treated him to a morir soñando and I had a coffee accompanied by a slice of coconut and pineapple cake. El Bori slurped up every last drop of the morir soñando.

  It couldn’t have been later than five when we got to Washington Heights, but it was already dark out. We went straight to get the weed. When choosing between all the spots I know, I picked the one with the best-looking tígueres. El Bori took out a twenty-dollar bill and passed it to me. He said it would be better if I bought it because they didn’t know him. I told him no worries, he was with me and he wouldn’t look much different from any other tipo from the hood. He gave me a sideways glance like he didn’t appreciate my comment. The boys were somewhere between eighteen and twenty years old. There were a few guys riding back and forth on bikes. They had to be the ones who kept a lookout for the cops. The tígueres looked El Bori up and down, trying to figure out his background. They could tell he was Boricua. There’s a rivalry between Dominicans and Boricuas I’ve never understood. We stopped in front of one of them. El Bori passed him the twenty-dollar bill with attitude. With the very same attitude, the dealer gave him the bag of weed.

  We went to the park to roll a blunt and smoke looking at the Washington Bridge. On the way, we saw a bunch of teenagers leaving the high school across from the park. They were the children of Latino immigrants, born here. The children of Dominicans, Mexicans, and here and there, a child of Asian immigrants, too. Most likely Chinese.

  El Bori rolled one quickly, in case a cop was around. We saw the Washington Bridge in all of its glory. It looked impressive all lit up like that. We saw the traffic piling up between New York and New Jersey.

  We smoked and sat on the benches, turning our backs to the river and the view. It was dark. The sound of cars and people coming and going served as a reminder that the city still wasn’t sleeping.

  “Let’s go,” I told him, coming out of my daze. “I’ll show you how to get back.”

  We left the park. We walked to 168th along Fort Tryon Avenue. When we got to Broadway, we started walking downtown.

  When we reached the slab of concrete that is New York Presbyterian, just a few blocks from my house, I decided to part ways with El Bori. The fatigue had gotten to me and I told him so. The street was well lit. I could see his sky-blue eyes. They were crystalline. He held out his hand to say goodbye. As I gave him my hand, I saw a tattoo on his.

  “Is that new?”

  “No. I’ve had it for years.”

  “What is it? It looks like a name or something.”

  “Yeah, it’s my mom’s. See you around.”

  “Tell La Manuel I’ll call her.”

  About three days later, I got a text from La Manuel. Call me. She told me El Bori had gone back to Chicago two days ago. That morning, they’d called to ask if she was a relative. Her phone number was all they’d found in El Bori’s records. Yes, I’m his uncle, La Manuel had told them. It was a doctor. They were calling to say that El Bori had been admitted to a psychiatric ward. La Manuel hadn’t been able to talk with him, but they gave her the number for the people who were caring for him. He wouldn’t be leaving for a while, they told her. He was under observation.

  I told my friend I’d be right over. She’d run out of weed and asked me to bring some. I knew it was more necessary than ever. When I arrived, she was pensive. In the living room, we rolled a joint in my old-school way. With bamboo paper. We smoked slowly.

  “El Bori was just a kid. He must’ve been eight or ten. I think he was ten, yeah, that’s what he told me. He lived in Puerto Rico with his mom, who had left his dad. She met another guy. Apparently he hit them. One day she couldn’t take it anymore and she kicked him out.”

  La Manuel took a sip of water and continued.

  “One day, El Bori was coming home from school and he heard his mom screaming. The door was open, he ran in. His mom was being stabbed to death, right in front of him. He doesn’t remember anything after that. Not the burial, not what happened to the murderer. He went from foster family to foster family. Then from juvie to juvie. Until he got to New York and he started going from shelter to shelter. That’s when we met that night near Port Authority. He told me all this once and we never talked about it again.”

  We sat in silence.

  “I’m going to sleep. I’m tired,” said La Manuel.

  “Okay. I’ll stay here. I’m going to lie down on the sofa for a while.”

  “Go to sleep if you want. I’ll make some coffee when I wake up. I don’t feel like it right now.”

  “Me neither. I don’t feel like coffee.”

  La Manuel went to her room. I turned off the living room light and lay down on the sofa. Outside, the wind pounded the windows. El Bori said the wind in Chicago was brutal. It could practically sweep people into the air. At least between those four walls, El Boricua
wouldn’t have to turn his back to the wind again.

  Lorena the Chilena

  THE LAST AFTERNOON I spent with Lorena, we went to eat at Juanita’s, the Boricua restaurant at 48th Street and 9th Avenue. It was Sunday. We had money in our pockets, as we always did after a weekend of hard work.

  “My treat.

  “No, my treat.”

  “Ay, loca, please.”

  “Okay, fine. You treat me to dinner and I’ll treat you to dessert later.”

  “We won’t be having anything later.”

  “I was just talking about some flan.”

  “Oh. I thought you were talking about another kind of dessert.”

  “You mean the white stuff we’re having after dessert?”

  “Qué lesa que eres.”

  I loved when people called me lesa. It was like going back to Chile after so many years. Lorena and I were paisanas. She left her town, Villa Alemana, at the end of the sixties. I heard her talk more than once about going to see performances of the Blue Ballet in the hills of Valparaíso. They were a kind of dance troupe who played female characters. They wore false lashes made of tinfoil. Lorena said you could see them glimmering on stage. She often repeated this story with a nostalgic lilt in her voice. She left Chile in the years when I was just an infant. Many years later, when I arrived here at the end of the nineties, we ended up meeting.

  Lorena was the one who taught me where to find empanadas, sopaipillas, and even chicken cazuela when I felt homesick. Every once in a while, when she wanted to get clean, she’d admit herself to Saint Clare’s Hospital. I always went to see her there. Lying back with an IV in her arm that delivered a solution to clear out her system, she’d ask me to go pick up two beef empanadas from a fuente de soda across the street run by a Chilean woman whose name I think was Rosa. If I told them I was there on behalf of Lorena, they always threw in two cheese empanadas on the house and said they’d treat her to some picarones next time she came around in person. So many smells washed over me just hearing those words. Aromas that opened into memories. Just like Lorena, Doña Rosa wanted to go back. She told me once that as soon as she turned sixty-five, she’d go back to Valparaíso, to a house she’d bought in Cerro Alegre. Since she was an American citizen, she could claim her retirement check from anywhere in the world. That way, to use her words, she could dedicate herself to la dolce vita.