I craned my neck up at my new apartment building: four stories of faded green aluminum siding that seemed to lean a little. Not like an old man who needs a cane. More like a tree that’s begun to go away from its center. It reminded me of a teacher’s explanation of the difference between potential energy versus kinetic. How a boulder on the edge of a cliff equals potential energy, while a falling boulder equals kinetic. The façade of my new apartment building was faded and quiet and grim. And it leaned just enough to give a hint of its potential.
Tony pointed to an empty window with the lights out. “Top floor’s you, kid. The penthouse,” which was his attempt at making things light.
Tony grabbed the suitcase out of my hand and went in. The hallway was a mix of roach spray, patches of worn, musty linoleum, and plaster from shit-colored walls that came off in chunks. Tony lugged my suitcase up the steps like a bellhop in one of those old black-and-white movies where white people travel by train and fall in love.
“Sweet location,” he said. “Close to the park.” Tony looked over his shoulder as he inserted the key. “You probably remember the ’L’s pretty close, when you need to zip around.”
Tony unlocked the door, stepped in, pulled a string in the center of the room. A circular fluorescent bulb fluttered on with a buzz. I remained in the doorway. Tony occupied the center of the room.
“I know it’s tight,” he said, “but it’s just a spot to hang it for a while. Come in.”
I traveled the length of the room in three steps. It had a small low bed, a scratched dresser, a mirror with the silver backing peeling off. The card table had a tiny refrigerator tucked under it. In the corner was a rickety chair.
“Smells like moldy clothes.”
Tony forced open the window. “So you buy some incense.”
The vomit-pink carpet was sticky, like it wanted to gum up the soles of my boots.
“Is there a toilet somewhere?”
Tony pointed toward the hallway. “You share with the other rooms on this floor.”
“A kitchen?”
Tony cocked his head. “Get real.”
I sat on the piss-stained mattress. Empty hangers dangled in the doorless closet like a previous tenant’s bones.
I sniffed the air. “Did something commit suicide in here?”
“What the fuck did you expect for five hundred clams? You think this is 1986?” He pointed an unlit cigarette out the window in the direction of downtown. “At least you got a view. And you ain’t locked in. This is by the week. You’re good for a solid month.”
Tony dragged the chair to the window and sat. He propped his heels on the sill, and tipped the chair back on two legs.
I rubbed my temples. Handcuffs, right hooks, and evaporating money morphed into a cinder block inside my head. “What the fuck happened out there, Tony?”
“With the narcs?” He leaned to flick ashes out the window, but got them on the windowsill. “Nothin’. Just another night in the business. They must’ve staked us out.”
“Don’t you mean they staked you out, Tone?”
He inhaled tobacco smoke. “If that makes you feel better.”
I began to get heated. “Tony, how’d they know where to find you?”
“They’re cops, Eddie. They probably followed us from the Spot.”
I said, “When you picked up the money? We ran into Beto?” I replayed the tape in my mind of when we stopped at Tony’s dope spot. “Didn’t I tell you to take me home first?”
“You gonna blame me now?”
“You refused, didn’t you?”
“Eddie, how the fuck was I—”
“You blew me off, didn’t you, Tony? Every time I wanted to go, you made an excuse.”
He narrowed his thick eyebrows. “You driving at something?”
“I’m out forty G’s behind this.”
“You saying I had something to do with it?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Tony, you knew I’d be holding.”
“So?”
“You knew business was good, and that I’d save. That’s why you cooked up this stew. To rip me off. I wouldn’t be in this if it wasn’t for you.”
Tony fake-laughed.
“You were real secretive on the phone.”
“Eddie, you’re paranoid.”
“Who fired the gun?”
“What gun?”
“The one you tried dropping on me, not two minutes before the heat popped in.”
“Coltrane lied about that. Did you forget how it is when pigs try to shake you?”
“You got my fingerprints all over that chrome. Why did you do that?”
“I was trying to give you a gift.”
“Yet you handled it with gloves.”
“My driving gloves?” Tony pulled them from his pocket and held them up like a trial lawyer. “We were going back to the car, remember?”
“You got a reaction for everything, don’t you, Tony?”
“Eddie, if I was half as clever as you’re making me out, I might have tried it.”
Tony turned his attention back out the window. He smoked and shook his head, with the chair angled, and his feet back up on the sill.
“I’m gonna forget about this, Eddie. You just got sprung, you’re tripping. And it’s true that you have suffered a terrible shock. You ain’t thinking right. Besides, you always had an active imagination.”
I stared at my empty hands. Finally, I got up and walked across the room, took off my army field jacket, and hung it up in the closet. On the way back to the bed, I surprised Tony by kicking the chair’s hind legs out from under him so that he fell hard to the ground. I jumped on top of him with my knee in his gut as I dug my forearm under his chin. Tony’s face turned red and his eyes bulged with surprise.
I spoke through clenched teeth. “I want my money back.”
Tony’s windpipe sounded distressed. “I—I didn’t take it.”
“Liar! You set me up!”
In one swift move Tony threw me off and rolled out from under. In another move he was up on his knees, with his fists in a boxing position. His face was red. He breathed like a stoked engine. “I oughta pop you in the mouth.”
I was a little out of breath too. We stood up straight, pupils locked. Tony lowered his fists.
“Eddie, c’mon—”
I startled him with a hard slap from the right, before throwing a quick hook around his neck from the left and yanking him into a headlock. I squeezed.
“Where’s the money being dropped?”
“Sto—” He couldn’t get the word out.
I shouted, “When do you get your cut?”
Tony bucked and threw me into the empty bureau. We knocked my suitcase on its side, but I didn’t release. I squeezed Tony’s head with my biceps, and kept my weight above his. Suddenly, the image of Tony’s neck snapping spilled across my mind and I released to catch my breath.
Tony stood upright. His face glowed. His eyes watered and two lone tears spilled in long thin streaks to the bottom of his face. He sucked the mucus into his nose.
“Eddie, we been friends a long time. Don’t you trust me?”
“Go tell whoever’s got my money now to give it back.”
The muscles in Tony’s face turned slowly downward. He moved to the door. His shoulders slumped. “I’d hang myself before burning you.”
Tony waited with his hand on the doorknob.
“You got the message, Little Tony. Gangster. Go deliver it.”
Tony left. I listened to him hustle all the way down, keys and change jingling in his pockets. From the window I saw him jump in his red Caddy and rip a loud, squealing U-turn. Tire smoke rose into the yellow streetlight. It tainted the atmosphere with the smell of burnt rubber.
“Fucking asshole.”
I picked up the chair and righted it. Tony’s cigarette had flown and landed on the carpet, where it burned a small hole. I flicked it to the street, then pulled the window shut.
I jammed the chair under the doorknob to hold off intruders, and noticed a small illustration taped over the door. Saint Michael the Archangel. He flew down with scales and a sword upon a cowering Satan and knocked him into a lake of fire.
I counted the twenty-five hundreds Pelón loaned me, and divided them into three piles, which I hid under different sections of the carpet. Then I bent a wire hanger into a shank. If anybody came through the door, I would open negotiations by taking his eye out.
I grabbed my field jacket from the closet, folded it into a pillow on the bed, and hid the shank underneath. I pulled off my construction boots, placed them by the bed in a way that would make them easy to slip on in a pinch. I lay down to stare at the ceiling and to dwell.
My problem was the money. I toiled for it so long, staked so much on it. Losing it felt like an amputation.
I needed that cash to go into the salsa business with Chiva down in Miami. Chiva was to be my business partner, but he was also my mentor, my padrino in more ways than one. Neither one of us would be happy if I showed up without the seed.
I thought a lot that first lonely night about the past, especially my partnership with Chiva. The way it all started when he stopped for weed one day at my cell.
I’d seen Chiva before, hanging around with some old-timers in the Yard. He was a skinny black Cuban in his late fifties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee that he stroked a lot as he talked. He kept his kinky gray hair pulled into a short, stiff ponytail.
Chiva looked up and down the passageway when he came to score that first time. “Gimme two dimes.”
I heard the man’s order, but didn’t move. “You a Cubano?”
Chiva said, “What the fuck, chota, you work for Fidel?”
“What’s up with those hands?”
He made a face. “What kind of questions are these?”
“Your hands look calloused. They get that way from jerkin’ off?”
Chiva balled up his fists. “Maricón, who the fuck is you to talk about my love life?”
Chiva was all of a hundred thirty pounds. I was two decades younger, and outweighed him by a hundred in solid muscle.
I said, “Relax, Manos de Piedras, I’m just curious.”
Chiva tossed the money on the cot. “Just get the herb, cotorro. Stop putting on a show.”
“You used to play congas?”
Chiva looked at me with his lids half-lowered and paused. “The proper name is tamboras.”
“Your hands remind me of my father’s.”
Chiva said, “Wow, a sentimental marijuanero. You see everything in this place. Send me a postcard on Father’s Day. For now, get me my dimes, OK?”
I smiled.
Chiva waited. Then he finally looked at his own hands. “You right, I play. But they’re getting soft. I’m out of practice.”
“Why’d you stop?”
Chiva raised his skinny arms to indicate the cell. “The fuck I’m gonna play in here? And get these faggots on my culo?”
“Think you’re that good?”
“Mira, I didn’t come here to stretch my tongue. Give me my yerba.”
I got Chiva his weed and he split. For days, all I could think about was the sound of the drum. Finally, I greased a couple guards and imported two: a conga and a tumbadora.
The next time Chiva came to my cell, I stood next to the drums like a kid who brings home a ribbon. Chiva’s almond eyes went round.
“¡Congo mulence!”
“What you think, Cuba? Think you can still play?”
Chiva stroked his goatee and looked at the drums. “You should’ve got a quinto.”
“Part the Red Sea and carry you?”
Chiva grinned. “Rólate un tabaco.”
I rolled a fat joint. Chiva inspected the drums. He looked them up and down, walked around, but did not touch or take his eyes off them. He turned them over and looked inside their hollow bodies. Then he set them upright and got down to their level to peer across the surface of their skins with one eye closed, the way a golfer or a pool player lines up a shot. I had no clue what Chiva looked for, but he impressed me that there was something innate about the instruments, something in their natures to sniff for, the way a dog confirms one of his own.
Chiva arrived at a conclusion. He sat on the edge of the cot, pulled the drums close, one between his legs, cracked his knuckles, and warmed up.
He slapped the leather. Tuned it with a wrench. Slapped it some more. Tuned it. We burned a big bomber. Then Chiva was off and drumming.
Beats ricocheted around the cell with the rumble of mythic stallions. Without thought, I yelled, “¡Camina Cubano!” like I heard on a record once. Black and Latino inmates gathered in and around my cell, and jammed with us, playing tin cups like cowbells, and even tapping out rhythms and melodies on the bars. Chiva’s calloused hands made like jackhammers and butterfly wings all at once. He grimaced as he caressed and punished the drums. And when he smiled on certain high notes, his white teeth shone.
Over time I learned how Chiva studied percussion his whole life. He’d grown up with it, from his mother’s overturned pots and pans, to some cheap bongos he got for Christmas once. As a teenager he scored the full-sized drums from money he earned shining shoes in the Capital. As he grew, he traveled the world in pursuit of certain teachers, certain experiences to call out the drummer within. He even returned to Cuba once and holed up at a relative’s house in Oriente for months. They lit candles and channeled spirits with the help of rhythm, tobacco, and rum. Chiva studied percussion from an old man who actually invented a widely imitated variation of an ancient rhythm.
“In Cuba music’s more than just to party. Is spiritual. Like a way of feeling the voice of the earth, the universe, and everything that lives.”
I knew that Chiva believed it. He made me believe it. He told me stories about New York. How he strutted all over the Big Apple in the sixties and early seventies, hustling on the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx.
“Living the life,” he said. “Smoking weed. Bebiendo ron. Eating steak in Times Square. And poosy? Olvídate. Boricua, Cubana, Colombiana. Dominicans? Asses as big as the moon.” Chiva held his rough hands out wide enough to demonstrate. “¡Brutal!”
In those days Chiva played on the street, on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Central Park, in a thousand nightclubs. He heard the great ones play live too. Joe Cuba, Mongo, Candido, Patato. Even Barretto. Chiva witnessed a heyday through the skin of his drums. And he began to teach me the craft of it early on. The history. And the mythology too.
We started with the clave. “It’s everything,” he said. “For the music you wanna play. The heart of it.” Chiva clapped it out, and made the sound with his mouth: “Ta-ta. Ta, ta, ta. Ta-ta. Ta, ta, ta.”
I clapped along. At first I didn’t quite feel it. I was on time. I had the rhythm, the tempo. But I couldn’t quite feel what was so special about this 2/3 beat. Until one day, when I was practically meditating, going through the exercises Chiva made me do on the drums. The clave surprised me. It came from inside, like a secret from another dimension.
After that, I practiced everything Chiva taught. Especially tumbao. And guaguancó, which seemed more spiritual to me.
One day Chiva looked kind of depressed as he went through the lesson. I asked what was wrong.
“These drums. I don’t know. They get us through the night, but—”
I braced myself. I really did not want to hear that Chiva was finished with our studies.
He stroked his beard. “You know what? It’s that if you want a drum that’s really gonna speak to you, you gotta make it youself.”
“You mean build it?”
“Sí.”
“What difference does that make?”
“That’s how you know it got a soul.”
A couple years passed and Chiva’s sentence was almost done. He’d be out about a year before me. I knew I would miss him, so I never raised the subject of his release. One day he brought it up.
“Bueno, niño, what you gonna do when you get outta this hole?”
I kept drumming. “Back to Chicago, I guess.”
“I thought you got no family up there.”
I didn’t respond.
“No woman, no kids, right?”
“Nope.”
“Your friends there are worthless.”
I shrugged. “It’s the only place I know.”
Chiva stroked his goatee for a long time. He corrected something I did on the drum, then spoke as he studied my hand placement. “What about Miami?”
I stopped. Miami was where Chiva was headed. Like every Cuban, he had family there.
“Don’t fuck with me, Chiva.” I practically heard the surf in my eardrum.
“¿Cómo te parece?”
“What the hell would I do?”
“I bring you into what I got cookin’. I gonna start a business with some cats from my New York days. Musicians, music industry people. We gonna start a record label. Something like Fania. Make real salsa dura. Heavy shit. Not like these comemierdas.”
Chiva and I often shared our disgust with the state of salsa from the eighties coming forward. The way lightweight salsa romántica had all but killed the market for what we considered salsa, the sound that I grew up with in the seventies.
“A record label, Chiva? I don’t know shit about that.”
“Listen, you making a little money here. You just invest. Be one of the owners. We gonna start small, so you can buy in with thirty, forty thousand.”
I raised my antennae. Chiva had been a con artist his whole life. In his early teens he escaped the communists by bullshitting his way onto an American cruise ship, pretending to be the son of a Cuban diplomat. By Chiva’s own admission, he had defrauded people, governments, and institutions all over the Western Hemisphere. In fact, the crime that landed him in prison involved a complicated insurance scam that resulted in Chiva’s ripping off his own ex-wife and former mother-in-law, and then his ex–brother-in-law getting hot about it and “accidentally” getting “bumped” out of a seventh-story window. Still, in my heart I believed that, with me at least, Chiva had always been straight-up.
I took a breath. “You wanna be business partners with me, Chiva? You don’t know that side of me. I can be fuckin’ ruthless.”
“I’m counting on it. And let me tell you, Eddie. Miami got so much delicious poosy, you pinga gonna write me a thank-you note.”
That first night after I was released from prison, after my seed money got swiped by Coltrane and Johnson, after my scuffle with Tony, I lay in bed and let the gears crunch in my head. The scenes leading up to me getting ripped off replayed in a continuous loop:
Tony leading me by the nostrils. Coltrane slinging my money belt over his shoulder. Johnson punching me. Pelón’s extended claw.
Around two in the morning I accepted that I couldn’t sleep. I got up, laced my boots, and began to pace the small room. The yellow streetlight poured in and hung itself in abstract patterns on the ceiling and walls.
I felt a little guilty about the dustup with Tony. The way his face sagged as he stood by the door. But forty thousand dollars had sprouted wings, and it was very possible, likely even, that Tony played a part in that. No way I could just let that pass.
Either way, the narcs had my money now. And I had no clue how to get it back. Being cops made them untouchable. Sort of. Fucking with them would be very high risk. They obviously didn’t give a shit about boundaries. How do you get an edge on hoodlums that carry the law around inside their wallets?
I leaned against the window. At least Tony was right about one thing: the view from my room was a clear shot of the Chicago skyline. I took my boots off and lay on the bed again. There was no point in staying up all night.
I certainly had enough cash with the two and a half G’s that Pelón lent me that I could jump a bus to Florida. I could catch up with Chiva, let him know what went down. Chiva would understand. I could work, start over, deal from zero again, stack paper until I had my share of the investment. Chiva and I could still do our thing. There was no real need for me to stick around Chicago looking for trouble.
But then, that wouldn’t be me.
I stared at the ceiling as I made my decision. Fuck running. Fuck taking it up the ass. I was determined to get my money back. No matter what.