Nacho doesn’t know that Diana’s been calling me. She’s been coming by to see me, too. I haven’t been encouraging it, mind you, but when she called me the first time, I was like “Yeah, come on by and we can watch some TV or whatever.” Thing is, Nacho’s in love and he keeps talking about her and how fine she is and how he’s gonna put it to her before too long. He doesn’t realize I’ve been hitting it for a month now. I felt guilty for an hour or two and then Diana started telling me how Nacho bores her and how she told him there was no way he was gonna get any panochita. So, I love Nacho and all, but if he can’t get it, then I shouldn’t have to suffer, right? Anyway, I dig this girl a lot. She’s sweet. She does nice things for me, like calling me up after a long night and asking me how I feel. When she hears I’m hungover, she comes by and brings me something to eat. Even my grams likes her. “She’s nice, but why does she wear so much makeup?”
What I like best is that Diana doesn’t mind taking care of me sometimes. One night I was feeling so sick from my stomach that I couldn’t get out of bed for real. Even Grams didn’t give me a hard time about missing school. I’d been up all night puking. I didn’t want to wake Grams because she just gets very, very nervous, and wants to start praying for me and pulling yerba buena from her herb garden to make me hot tea that doesn’t work when the pain is this bad. Sometimes she even ties a long rag around my stomach, like the coils can keep the pain from spilling out, like it might be able to concentrate it into a small ball, like cud that I can then throw up once and for all.
So, I’d had a rough night and was feeling weak. Well, Diana calls me up and I tell her that I’m feeling bad and that I’ll talk to her later. That crazy girl came over without me even asking, and she came in while I was lying there moaning like a kid. She walked in and sat on my bed and said, “My poor Roberto,” and she didn’t say anything else. She just put my head in her lap and started running her fingers through my scalp even though I was sweaty from the pain and probably smelled like shit. You know what? After a few minutes, I forgot what I must’ve looked like, and my stomach started to feel better. She didn’t even expect me to talk, and before long I fell asleep and she left without waking me up. Things like that make me want to marry her. But then there’s Nacho. I admit it bothers me.
* * *
Grams has gone to church and I get a pass because I’m sick. I’ve been lying in bed trying to fall back asleep. Sunday morning is good for that, but I can’t do it. I get dressed and walk outside. I sit on the back porch, the bleached-out brown-gray, waterlogged wood planks creaking with age. It’s nice out here, the sun not yet hot. Tina and Ruthie are outside, too, and I wave at the little girls. “Hi,” Tina yells at me. “C’mere.” She’s standing next to the fence and Ruthie is right next to her, her small fingers poking through the chain links. I lift off the porch with a groan only I can hear and I walk over.
“My sister’s graduating tonight,” Tina says. “She’s got a white robe and a hat, too.”
“Graduating from what?” I ask.
“From kindergarten. You want to come? My mom is going.”
“Where is it?” I say thinking that I might want to go and practice my big-brother skills. I try and encourage them when I can.
When Nacho comes over later, we take a drive and smoke up. “That little girl, my neighbor, she’s graduating,” I say, making conversation.
“Wha?” Nacho says. He’s deep into some classic Ozzy.
“Those little girls that live next door, the little one is graduating and they want me to go. I feel bad about not.”
He turns toward me and says, “Where?”
“At Saint Paul’s.”
Nacho’s senses cheap entertainment. He turns in the direction of the church.
“I don’t want to go,” I say, trying to stop him. “I don’t dig going into church stoned.”
Nacho looks at me with that stupid grin of his. “What, you afraid of being struck down by lightning? You crazy bastard, if it wasn’t for weed, I wouldn’t be able to stand church.”
Biblical scenes centering around sacrilegious acts begin to come to mind: Eli and his sons; the characters who went into the temple drunk; or that king—Nebuchadnezzer, maybe—who drunkenly refused to read the writing on the wall. What about those fools, also drunk, who joked Noah and paid by drowning? And the punks who mocked Elisha and got mauled by bears! “Dude, it’s not a good idea,” I say, changing my mind. But he’s set for a show and we’re not far from the church.
Walking through the doors, I half expect fire to descend, or a holy finger, the size of a missile, to point me out as a grave sinner. No one pays me any attention when I sit. The little kids are all sitting up on the stage, dressed in white graduation gowns, with four-corner caps covered in white satin, little white tassels dangling. It’s a Texas summer night, and everyone’s waving white paper fans, trying to keep from sweating through their clothes. High above, from the ceiling, hang fifteen or twenty white fans spinning crazily, circulating the hot air. I sit there, my eyes drawn to the motion of the white fans and the featherlike tassles waving in the distance.
And then the children stand and begin to sing, their tiny high-pitched voices warbling “This Is the Day the Lord Has Made.” As I listen, I forget being afraid. The kids are angels, a floating chorus, singing so beautifully. I begin to laugh because of the purity of those child-angels flying around, singing for God.
Of course, I sound like some demented maniac, sitting in the middle of a hot congregation, laughing at a children’s choir. A few people turn around and look at me, insulted, getting upset, thinking that I’m cracking on their kids or worse, that I’m a freak who gets off on coming to church stoned. “You’re being rude,” some kid’s mother says from the other side of Nacho. He shoots me an amused but suggestive look, “Keep cool,” he says through his smile.
I try hard, but the angels are now singing “Father Abraham,” a religious hokeypokey. They flail their arms and kick their legs, eventually spinning in circles, the tassels whipping around in a frenzy along with the white ceiling fans and white paper fans. I can’t help it anymore. I laugh again, even though it’s the last thing I want to do. I am busted, conspicuous, guilty, and the finger of God is pointing me out. The congregation will any minute rise up and haul me out to stone me.
Nacho finally grabs me by the arm and leads me outside to the car. I laugh the whole way out of the church. We haul ass out of the parking lot.
“That was classic,” he says, “a real Robert Lomos moment there. Damn, I thought you were going to have a nervous breakdown. One minute you’re laughing, the next you look like you’ve seen a pack of demons eating your mother’s heart.” He’s a little pissed because he was enjoying himself.
“Man, I just had two really different visions in there.”
“What?”
“Like those kids were like angels, uncorrupted. I was seeing something really clearly.” I try to find the words to make evil Nacho listen. “Sad that shit will happen to fuck them up.”
“Like us, you mean?” He laughs.
“Maybe.”
“Man, don’t buy into the McNutt theory of the holy bubble and the big bad world, the godly and the worldly. I’ll tell you what, you’re fucked up because you want to believe in all this stuff but you know you can’t.”
“Maybe I just want to believe that God has some plan or purpose with all this shit. My grams seems to believe it.”
“Yeah, well don’t fucking count on it,” he says. “Spark another one up,” he says, pointing at the glove compartment where he keeps his stash. I roll up a pinner. I don’t want to be too stoned right now. We smoke, watching the traffic in the rearview mirror to make sure there’s no chota following behind.
“You punish yourself too much, man. Take it easy. Don’t get too fucked up.”
“What do you mean, ‘too fucked up’?” I ask.
“C’mon,” he says.
“Just because I think it’d be good for all this shit to mean something?”
He shrugs. “Look, let’s drop it. Everyone’s fucked up. Me, too. I’m no one to talk.”
“No,” I insist. “Tell me what you mean by ‘too fucked up.’ I’m interested.”
He thinks about it for a minute. He’s giving the matter serious consideration, so much that he puts both hands on the steering wheel. “Well, you should be taking it easy, man. I mean, I like to party and drink and get laid and generally to have as good a time as possible. But you, you party and drink like you want to kill yourself. You do what most people do to have fun, to have a bad time, to tweak up the pain. Sometimes you look like you’re ready to jump out a fucking window.”
“No I don’t,” I say. “I want to have as good a time as you or anybody else.”
“Yeah, maybe. But why do you always wind up making yourself miserable or sick?” He’s got a point, but I don’t want to give it to him.
“Sometimes you can’t get shit out of your head,” I say in my defense.
“Look, man,” he says, “let’s just drop it. Smoking too much yesca makes everyone think they’re Sigmund Freud and shit.”
“Well, those kids,” I say, “those kids were beautiful up there. That’s all. They made me think. That’s not a big deal. No one’s getting ready to jump out a window about it.”