Bodega Dreams

So, since we were almost convinced that our race had no culture, no smart people, we behaved even worse. It made us fight and throw books at one another, sell loose joints on the stairways, talk back to teachers, and leave classrooms whenever we wanted to.

Nor were they violent, with switchblade tempers.

My father understood where we were living. He knew, and when I would come home with bruises or a black eye he never lost his cool. I liked my father, and my father liked Sapo. He knew the importance of having someone there to watch your back. It was important to have a pana, a broqui.

“The next day we went to City Hall and filed our demands. And you know what happened the next month, Chino? […] The next month, they hiked the subway fare from twenty-five cents to thirty-five cents. […] So we waited, and we waited, and we filed and we filed. Finally, when we knew our demands weren't going to be met, when we knew […] the sanitation department wouldn't even lend us brooms to clean our streets, we had no choice but to take over the streets of East Harlem.”

“[…] Mr. Blessington told me I was going to end up in jail, so why waste my time doing homework?”

Julia-day-Burgos is so obscure it would be hard to find a single poem of hers. In any language.

If Sapo killed that reporter then he deserved to go to jail. I thought that, but I knew I didn’t mean it. I felt bad for Sapo. I also knew I would never rat out Sapo or Bodega. I wasn’t going to say a word.

No wonder Bodega’s name had spread like a good smell from a Latin woman’s kitchen.

With her light skin, semiblond hair, pale seagull blue eyes, she could easily pass herself off as something other than a woman born and raised in East Harlem. She spoke as if she had spent her formative years in some boarding school, walking around with a big lettered sweater tied around her shoulders.

“I’ll buy her one bigger than that! One with a diamond as big as the Palladium.”

“When you complain that you’re gonna feel awkward graduating with a big belly, I know what you really mean. You mean people are gonna think, ‘She may be smart, but she was stupid enough to get herself knocked up.’ But when you go to church it all changes. They like you pregnant and you like them to like you pregnant.”

“Blanca, why does me becoming Pentecostal have any bearing on you getting your privileges back? On you playing the tambourine in front of the congregation? Why do they look at me and my faults and not you and your merits?”

“And he loved her. And she, and she—don’t tell me you don’t know what she did. Don't tell me you don’t know that she later left to fornicate with other kings. Don’t tell me you don’t know that she left her king and went with others, and don't tell me you don’t know this princess was called Israel. And she went with other gods and slept with many idols. You still don't know what she did? […] I’ll tell you what she became. You all know what she became, don't tell me you all don't know what she became. She became a harlot! […] A whore! […] A prostitute!”

They had seen the coming of the Lord. He was coming soon, maybe even that very night. Roberto Vega had told them so. The kingdom of God would arrive, and they would all go to heaven, to the penthouse in the sky. Until then, they would go back home to the rats and roaches.

He was the Lord’s stud, wanted by sisters in Christ who all hoped to be his chosen.

“For a Latina that’s not married, twenty-seven is ancient. Nobody is going to want to marry her.”

I always knock the people in Blanca's church, but a lot of them were right there that night helping us move our things, everyone splashing around ankle-deep in water. If we hadn’t had Blanca’s spiritual brothers and sisters we would have been moving things out all night.

All I understood was that Bodega was in trouble. Not with the fire department, which would know right away it was arson and dismiss it as another case of pyromania in a neighborhood crawling with fire-bugs. Nor with the media, who needed sensation and since no deaths had occurred would give it only passing mention, like a footnote in a thousand-page book.

“Look around, Julio. Every time someone makes a million dollars, he kills some part of the world. That part has been us for so long, and it will continue to be us unless we fight back. The day will come when, lust like the white guy, we will also steal by signing the right papers […] What do you think, it comes from nothing? America is a great nation, I have no doubts about that, but in its early days it had to take some shady steps to get there. Manifest Destiny, that was just another word for genocide.”

That night Sapo dropped me off at one of the new-old buildings Bodega had renovated on 116th and Lexington. Those buildings had been condemned for years. The City of New York takes so much time to either renovate or bulldoze a condemned building it’s like those guys on Death Row who die of old age rather than execution. Bodega had bought the entire row from the city and had slowly renovated three of them. He had improved the block. Improved the neighborhood. Given people a place to live.

The captain talked as if he were bored; it was all a formality, something he had done too many times and could do in his sleep.

“Let’s not say anything right now, okay? I’m going to be staying at Mami’s for a while. At least until the baby is born. I think that's best. Best for both of us.”

I would never have guessed he was Latin. He was more American than Mickey Mouse and just as old.

Everyone was there like in some pageant for a dying monarch. And to pass the hours on fire, Bodega tales began winding around the avenue. Almost everyone had one, and those that didn’t added to the tales by retelling them.

“Willie Bodega doesn't exist […] l’m sorry. […] Pera! […] You can stay with me.”