I was hoping that Lula was out on a date or something. She’d been depressed lately, and I didn’t like leaving her alone in the apartment when I was at Manny’s for a few days.
When I’d called him to come get me the other day, I told him to park his car at the corner so he wouldn’t upset my neighbors. The people on my street was not used to seeing cars like Manny’s cruising around. I really don’t even know exactly what kind of car it was. Something long, low to the ground, white all over except for a design that’s suppose to be a flame of fire on the hood. He had a ornament perched on the front end of his hood. The same typical Latin foolishness I seen every day. It was one of them big-tittie women with a misshaped head and flaps that I couldn’t tell if they was wings or a cape. A huge pair of foam dice was dangling from a string off the hook on his rearview mirror. The same place where normal people hung baby shoes.
Speaking of babies, I had to deal with one of my own. Don’t ask me why, ’cause I couldn’t say why God let some things happen. Up to now, my life had been more than a little crazy. But what happened to me in that alley in Manny’s neighborhood put the icing on the cake. I didn’t know none of them guys who jumped me and ripped off my panties and fucked the hell out of me. I didn’t care then, I don’t care now. It’s too late to care about anything. Since I was in a fucking coma or something while I was getting fucked inside out on that ground, I couldn’t say if any of them bastards used condoms. I should laugh at myself for even thinking something so crazy. Since when did rapists care about safe sex? And anyway, guys desperate enough to rape somebody, they probably already got every disease in the book.
I didn’t tell nobody at first about me getting raped. Not even Lula. I had to tell Manny. And that was only because he was the one who found me sitting in my car that night with blood all over me and my clothes ripped to shreds. Calling the cops was a joke. They barely came to this neighborhood when somebody got murdered. I had left my car unlocked, but I’d lost my keys back at the scene of the crime. After Manny took me into his place, wiped me off, and put me in one of his big shirts, he went out with a baseball bat looking for them thugs. He didn’t find them, but he did find my purse. My car keys was still in it, but my money was gone. My credit card was gone, too. But that worthless piece of plastic had been canceled by the bank anyway because I kept going over my credit limit and forgetting to pay the bill.
I was glad to be back in Manny’s place. It felt more like my home than my own home.
Compared to my sharp apartment, the dark, musty (but clean), postage stamp–size place Manny lived in looked like part of a flophouse. The wallpaper was so cheap I couldn’t tell if the faded designs was roses, balloons, or what. Why he even bothered to cover his windows with the drapes he had, I don’t know. You could see straight through them things. But since Manny lived on the third floor he didn’t have to worry about nobody peeping in on his business.
The couch in Manny’s living room was so hard and lumpy, my butt and back was aching like I had been with ten tricks in the same day, back-to-back—as I had been just a week ago! But I wasn’t sure then that I was with this baby. When I went to see a doctor he gave me some good news: I was pregnant and I wasn’t HIV positive so I didn’t have to worry about AIDS. But even before my visit to the clinic, I had promised myself that if I was pregnant and HIV, I still wasn’t having no abortion. I was going to have my baby and do the best I could for as long as I could. I would give my child a better chance than my mother gave me. I wanted to do at least one thing in my crazy life that I could be proud of.
Anyway, Manny had this lopsided chair across from the couch that was even worse. The last time I sat on it, I fell clean through the seat. He covered the seat with cardboard and a flat, musty pillow and that’s where he was sitting, looking very handsome. Picture that movie star Andy Garcia, a little younger, looking a little rougher. That’s the kind of handsome I seen when I looked at Manny. Now like I said before, I been knowing Manny since I was a real young kid.
During my teenage years when I rode shotgun with them outlaw gangbangers, Manny was already in OG territory. He was a veteran, and I had just started doing things like fucking and bleeding every month.
I had heard about Manny before I even knew who he was. The street reporters told everybody how Manny handled his business. Nobody got in his way, and if they did, they only done it one time. One weak-minded asshole who had to be crazy or new in town and didn’t know Manny’s rep tried to jack Manny and take his new Nikes right off his feet. He was the only man Manny killed and got caught for. But he only had to spend like five years in San Quentin.
I heard while he was in that place, he had some more trouble. Some White dudes into that White supremacy shit called a challenge to Manny, and that was a big mistake. Now from what I heard, Manny didn’t even have to kill that sucker hisself. There was tons of the Mexican mafia in lockdown with Manny, and they had a lot of love and respect for him. He had them take care of that White punk. Before the deed was done, Manny got cut up in a few places and came so close to taking his last walk of shame, they had even called in a prison priest. But guys like Manny never die easy.
Anyway, once Manny got out of the joint, battle scars running up and down his back and belly, he had put all that shit behind him. Hell, he was even talking to young kids, trying to get in their heads what a precious thing life could be! And if that wasn’t saintly enough of him, he sent money back to Mexico to help support some of his relatives. Now here he was: ex-con, ex-killer, ex-thug. Yeah, Manny was a changed man. He was somebody I could tell anything to.
“Manny, I’m goin’ to have a baby,” I said during a commercial break for Friends. He was sitting next to me on that lumpy couch of his.
He didn’t say nothing at first. He just looked at me and blinked, and then he started laughing. “So that’s why you keep refusin’ my margaritas.” He took my hand in his and forced me to look in his eyes. “Ester, you are a very lucky woman. You been blessed with a gift from God.”
I trembled. “What do you mean by that? Ain’t you goin’ to ask me who is the daddy?” I knew it was too soon for my baby to be moving, so it had to be my own heart slamming against the inside of my chest.
Manny shrugged. “It don’t matter who helped you make that baby. You still need to give thanks.” Manny smiled, showing me teeth that was no longer sparkling with them cheap gold caps I sometimes seen grinning between the lips of too many people thinking they looking fly. He was still smiling when he scratched his neck and looked off to the side. “I hope it’s mine.”
A pain shot through the side of my belly, straight up to my head, forcing tears into my eyes. Manny’s words made my head spin and my eyes burn.
I was two months pregnant. I had just been with Manny, for sex I mean, for the first time just three weeks ago. No way was he the father of my baby. He got me to his bed after I’d finished with a really handsome and sexy trick that night—a very famous star from television! Every now and then I got a little pleasure from screwing a trick, but never the kind I wanted. Not even when it was a sexy famous person. The trick that night had almost done me some good. He would have if he’d done the job a little bit longer. One thing I never did was to try to get a trick to keep fucking once he had cum—unless he wanted to. A trick was all about business for me, not pleasure. So after I left the trick’s hotel room, I drove to Manny’s apartment, anxious for some sexual healing for myself for a change. I had been making my own orgasms for years. That was a sad confession for a woman my age, but it was true.
Manny did a good job in the bed, at least for me, he did. Nothing like that lazy, clumsy Clyde. Manny had a real nice body—most of it at least; six-pack across his chest, toned arms, nice butt, something nice between his legs. I overlooked his battle scars and skinny legs.
“Manny, look, I been in all kinds of shit these last few years.” The commercial was over, but we didn’t look at Friends no more. Manny was still looking in my eyes.
“I know that,” he told me, sipping his second shot of tequila. I wanted some myself so bad, my mouth was itching. But I had my baby’s health to think about.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I know you,” he said, pointing from his head to me. “Maybe you been mulin’ shit inside every hole in your body from Mexico for the cartels like my three sisters. Or, maybe you been robbin’ everybody in San Francisco but the mayor. Maybe you got some games I ain’t never even heard of up your sleeve.” He shrugged, blinked. “I used to do all that shit and then some, but not no more. And you know what,” Manny paused and took a real deep breath, beatin’ his chest with both fists, “it feels good. I didn’t know what it was like to walk down the street and not have to watch my back until last year. I’m thirty-six fuckin’ years old now, and I feel like I just was born. I feel…real good.” Manny had a beautiful smile, and it was aimed in my direction. I giggled like a little girl when he pulled me onto his lap. “Let me tell you somethin’, mamicita. Even when you was a little kid tryin’ to hang with the gangs, I had my eyes on you. You been comin’ to me now,” he nodded and winked and motioned toward his cracker box of a bedroom, “sharin’ with me my bed. I like havin’ you here.”
“I didn’t have nowhere else to go,” I admitted. “Nowhere. I ain’t got nobody I can call my own. I still got a posse still alive over here, but, well…” The homegirls I used to hang with in the old days, the ones who started having babies at twelve and thirteen years old, now their daughters was strolling around them same streets with babies of their own. There was a lot of grandmothers in the Mission still in their twenties. I could have been somebody’s grandmother by now. “I’d much rather be here with you than with them,” I said. I felt myself drifting farther and farther away from Clyde.
Manny squeezed my hand real hard. “Listen, you wanna be with me, I wanna be with you. If you down with me, ain’t nobody gonna jack you up and get away with it.” He looked down at my stomach and patted it real gentle and quick. “Whatever you want to do about the baby, I’ll be with you.” He sucked in his breath. “Now, you plan to have it or what?”
“Don’t you want to know who gave it to me?”
“Do you want me to know?”
“It happened…that night.” I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. “I don’t know which one is responsible.”
“Oh,” Manny said, sighing. He tried not to look mad, but I could see anger in his eyes. He bit his lip and rubbed the back of his neck. He slid me off his lap, and he stood up in front of me. “You want me to help you get rid of it?”
It took a lot to shake me up. My face got so hot, I felt like I was on fire. I stood up from that couch so fast, I almost pissed my pants. Manny moved back a few steps.
“I would never get rid of my baby. I don’t care if a demon came straight out from hell and got me pregnant, I would never in my life turn my back on a child of mine,” I said. My voice seemed like it was coming from my heart instead of my mouth. Manny always knew about me, how I was left with the trash in that alley when I was born. It was something I didn’t like to talk about, so most of the people who knew me didn’t bring it up that much. “I got raped down your street by so many guys I couldn’t count them. They didn’t hurt me that much, and I got over it real quick. But they left me a baby. My baby.” It dawned on me that my mother could have been raped, too. That was all the more reason for me to keep my baby. I couldn’t repeat my mother’s crime.
Manny’s handsome face dropped so fast and far I thought it would hit the floor. “Hey, I’m sorry. I just thought, well, you know, it bein’ so hard to raise kids and all, chicks get abortions left and right. My landlady’s daughter, cheesy bitch that she is, just had her seventh abortion.”
I sighed and sat back down. “Now that you know I’m keepin’ some rapist’s baby, do you still wanna see me? And even after my baby comes, will you? Because, maybe I’m gonna get me a real job.” Like Manny just said about hisself, I was feeling real good, too!
Manny’s eyes slid to the side, and he looked kind of nervous. But then he looked at me and shrugged. “I went from workin’ the streets, makin’ bank, gettin’ paid.” A sad look that I seen on Manny more times than I wanted to, slid across his face now. “At the same time I had so much, but still, I had nothin’. Cops and other hustlers always breathin’ down my neck, so many guns bein’ aimed at me I felt like I was facin’ a firin’ squad—even in my own house.” Manny then lifted his head high up and showed me a proud face, smile and all. “Now I’m a cook in a restaurant that’s so bootsy it ain’t even listed in the phone book. I don’t make much money, but, I wouldn’t go back to the old crazy life if you paid me.” And then Manny said something that just made me want to ball up and cry my eyes out. He said, “I want to live.”
Then I got serious, because I wanted to live, too. “I…If I want to get my shit together, I’m gonna have to move from my place, cut loose, uh, cut loose some people I been kickin’ it with for a long time…” I couldn’t believe the words sliding out of my mouth! Clyde didn’t know about the baby yet, and I didn’t plan to tell him until I had to. Soon, though. Things had changed so much with him. His daughter and his own expenses was still at the top of his list. He was still pissed off with Rosalee for running out on him, putting a dent in his income. Now he was losing even more money, left and right, because of me and Lula ignoring his messages and hiding out from him. Since Clyde ran his business in such a loosey-goosey way, instead of the way other men like him did, enforcing strict rules and using serious violence, he couldn’t expect nothing better from us.
But things had changed with our little family. We were outgrowing Clyde and the business. It wasn’t just because of Rosalee running off and them guys jumping me in that alley.
Things was changing because it was time.