I’m staying with my cousins Enrique and Juan this weekend. Grams has to watch Mrs. Roland, an old lady she takes care of sometimes. Her daughter, who is old too, is visiting her son in Chicago. I don’t mind staying alone at the house, but I’d rather not if I don’t have to, and since Grams isn’t crazy about Enrique spending the night here (he’s a horrible boy, Grams always says), I go there. It’s cool with me. His pops, being a pastor, has a big-assed house out on the northeast side of town, where the white people live. It’s got two stories, about five bedrooms, and their neighborhood has a community center with a pool, tennis courts, and a small golf course. It’s clean as hell, and you don’t have to watch your back there.
I haven’t spent much time with either Juan or Enrique since I started at Sunnydale. Mostly because I’ve been hanging with Nacho, but also because Juan and Enrique have their own high schools and none of us has gone out of our way to kick it together. We used to have a lot of fun. When my pops and moms were together, we went to Enrique’s father’s church and we’d see each other all the time. Once we bought boxing gloves and had a tournament every weekend for the summer. We’d pound on our friends from church, and it always came down to me and Enrique in the final championship bout. We’d slug it out till we were both dizzy. Most of the time I won, at least until Enrique started getting his growth and he got big all of a sudden.
Enrique’s mother is a pain in the ass about order. She’s always putting him on discipline because he didn’t clean his bathroom right or because he talked back. Always some bullshit with those two. After my pops and moms split, Enrique started going off about how lucky I was, you know, because no one could tell me what to do. All this freedom, so different from the discipline his mom was crazy about. My moms was letting me drive and she couldn’t really control me too much. But I didn’t feel very lucky. I’d look at his crib and his old man sitting at the dinner table, always being nice, but giving me that pitying look, and I’d think about how lucky Enrique was to have his family together even if it meant having to take a little grief about piss sprinkles on the toilet seat.
* * *
Tonight we get some cheap wine, Thunderbird, and after we drink it, I go upstairs. I just want to sleep. Juan and Enrique stay downstairs. Somehow they’re hungry. My stomach’s feeling like shit and I know better than to have drunk that cheap-assed alcohol. I’m not supposed to drink. The doctor gave me a list of foods I’m not allowed to touch because of my ulcer. Some of the things on the list I don’t miss at all, like lettuce, radishes, or corn; some I miss a lot, like pizza, beer, and fried food. It’s a perforated one, my ulcer. That means it bleeds.
The more I want to sleep, the less I can. The more I pay attention to my stomach, the worse the pain gets. I know the routine by now. It starts out dull, like I’ve eaten too much, but the pressure grows till it feels like a little animal, a badger maybe, is trying to claw its way out. The pain gets worse and worse till it’s so bad I double over in bed, bringing my knees up to my chest as if that might kill the little fucker in there. On top of the fucking pain, I got no fan in this room! I can’t drop off without a goddamn fan. I know that. Yet I forgot to bring one. It makes me mad, my big metal fan sitting there at Grams’s house in my bedroom not being used, while I lay here in pain not being able to sleep.
So instead of dropping off, I start thinking about my moms finding out about my pops having another woman and a baby. I spent that night just like this, unable to sleep, knees up to my chest, miserable. First thing I heard was my moms’s voice, shrill, desperate, desesperada, as my grams would say. It was strange to hear her voice like that because my moms hardly ever got excited. It was late, three or four in the morning, and I was in the living room half asleep after rolling newspapers all night long. My old man, always on the lookout for some extra money, had got the bright idea of delivering some neighborhood rag once a week, five or six hundred deliveries unless he got tired, in which case he’d throw them in a random Dumpster.
I’d rolled the papers and Moms and Pops had taken off to deliver them, another three hours’ work. It being a school night, I stayed home. Antony wasn’t born yet, although my moms was already big with him. Then I heard my moms’s voice outside the back door. Listening to her voice so scared and angry at the same time, I got a cold lump in my stomach. I knew something was wrong. Really wrong. It’s like a storm warning, my stomach. I heard my pops’s voice, deep, trying-to-be-rational-like. His voice got lower and more persuasive as hers grew louder and more desperate. I was wide awake then, sitting up on the couch looking at their silhouettes bobbing on the back-door window shades.
Wham. The door jerks open. Moms rages in, heading straight for me. “Your father is cheating on me,” she yells. “He’s got himself another woman.” She’s crying now. “Real good, Teresa,” my old man says, kind of disgusted, but not looking at her or me, just shaking his head. “Just beautiful.” He grabs at her. “Leave me alone,” she yells. “C’mon,” he says, menacing, forceful. Real ugly, like the shock of seeing two dogs tear at each other. Violence hitting home for real. And wham! They’re out the back door just as suddenly as they came crashing in. I’m sick, my stomach stewing; I lie back down and bring my knees up to my chest and stare as the blackness outside starts to turn gray.
“Fuck!” I wake up, but nobody else stirs. Juan and Enrique are knocked out cold. The whole house is quiet and I don’t have anybody to talk with to shake the dream. It’s still with me hard. I lay there like I did that night all hell broke loose, waiting for someone in the house to come back to life. I need distraction.
More and more, my life takes place at night where I can hide. My cousins and friends always ask me, how do you do that? It’s easy. To me it’s the daytime that’s long and terrible. You see everything too clearly during the day.
When I was a kid, I was scared of the dark. I used to get up like some bizarre sort of creeper and inch my way into the hallway, just wanting to get out of my room where the dark was so dense, like I could eat it with a spoon. What was really spooky, though, was that I was afraid that my pops and moms had left me again, like they did when my moms used to go on the road with him. So I’d stand outside their room and make sure they were in there. I’d stay very still, listening for their breathing.
I remember standing, the moon shining from my room’s window and me staring at the silhouette on the wall in front of me. My shadow meant the worst—black stillness, emptiness, just me. I’d stare for a long-assed time, almost to where I couldn’t stand up. I was like some vampire guard making sure no one tried to sneak away and leave me. My uncle’s church played this movie every Halloween. “This is what you should really be scared of,” he’d say. It was called Distant Thunder. In it everyone gets raptured and a few unsaved suckers get left behind to face getting their fucking heads cut off because they were too stupid to believe. That movie freaked me out good. It still scares me sometimes, although I wouldn’t tell Nacho or my cousins that. It’s the first thing that jumps into my mind sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and find everything dead quiet. Nothing is spookier to me than the idea of everyone in the world that I know disappearing without a clue. Can you imagine the feeling of it dawning on you that they’re gone permanently? That you’ve been left behind?
After my pops left, the darkness took on a different feel, though. It meant home. Day was for school, for having to be with assholes who didn’t know shit about me, my moms, or Antony. By eighth grade, I knew school was fucked beyond fucked and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I took this shitty paper route to help my moms, waking up early to deliver papers to deadbeat neighbors who never wanted to pay up at the end of the month. People will do some crazy shit to keep from paying their little piddly-assed bills. They’ll send their kids to the door to tell you they aren’t home, or they’ll just stare at you from behind the blinds like you can’t see them peeping out. Lots of times they’ll flat out deny that they owe you. But money was tight, so those few bucks came in handy. Plus, with my moms starting to get sick, she didn’t mind when I skipped school. I was useless there anyway. By the time I got to Crockett, I had my routine down. I had an ulcer, my moms was sick, and I didn’t give a shit.
I had this old teacher, a little nut named Ms. Arania. She liked to give me hell whenever I came back to school. I used to fall asleep in her class because I couldn’t sleep at night. It was math and I was always behind. That old malevolent bag decided to use me as her goat. She took to giving me shit in front of the others. She’d stand there in her wig, barely five feet tall, trying to make me do problems on the board. She was always a sarcastic bitch: “Robert, nice of you to join us today. Let’s see if you can enlighten us on how to solve this equation for x.”
By that time, Moms was staying up all night crying, losing her hair, and I was taking care of Antony. One day, like a sucker, I try to tell her that I can’t come to school because I had to take care of my baby brother. She looks at me and says, “That kid has caused me so many problems already, he should be mine!” Then she says, “Get up there and solve for x.” I don’t know x from o, but I walk up to the board, all the other kids quiet and embarrassed for me. “Take the chalk,” she says, and I do, but I don’t write anything because I don’t have a clue. She bounces up behind and says, “That’s the chalkboard,” and as she does, she pushes the back of my head so that my face smashes against the board hard. That’s it for me. I swear I don’t even think about it. It’s like my hands decide to act on their own and sweep all the shit off her desk onto the floor. Then, without saying a word, I split. She’s so freaked out, she doesn’t say anything till I’m in the hallway. Then she comes out yelling, “You little bastard, you little bastard!” That part’s almost funny because she’s so short. This black kid I know, Sylvester, is in the hallway just coming out of the bathroom and, hearing her, yells, “Fuck you, bitch!” and jumps back in before she can spot him.
That’s how I got kicked out of Crockett—that, along with me missing so much school. Moms didn’t even make the meeting with the principal. They didn’t give a shit and I was way beyond giving one, either. I learned right there and then that people want you to learn things on their own goddamned terms. They had this counselor there who used to say to me, “You have to come face-to-face with your problem.” That was all bullshit, though. That old midget Arania taught me better than that. It wasn’t the problem on the board, the one everyone can see, that’s the bitch. The real bitch is all the suckers who don’t know anything about me and want to pretend that their solution fits anyway.
That’s how the dark got to be different for me. Even though it still fucks with me a lot, at least now it isn’t about being closed in and suffocated. It opens things up, makes the horizon look far away, like maybe it doesn’t even exist. Sometimes, when I’m screwing around, I see myself as a vampire. Like them, the hunted, I creep around at night, and when I’m lucky, it’s clear enough so that I can see the lights for miles from my hideout, so far sometimes that I could swear I’m seeing all the way to L.A. Makes me wish I could turn into a bat or mist and just drift away while everyone sleeps.