When people ask me if I believe in God, I sometimes say yes. I sometimes also say no, because that’s what I’ve come to realize. But it’s safer to say yes. You get less stares, don’t have to explain as much, as if you called somebody’s mom a ho.
I used to stack boxes with a dude named Alvin. I was nineteen when we met. He was about twenty, twenty-one, black, tall, skinny, white pimples hella across his neck. Fool was quiet unless you got him started on the Dallas Cowboys or Jackie—his supposed ex who had his baby.
Working with Alvin all day, I got to know him. He’d stash his pocketknife and joints in this little slot he’d cut in the side of his black Air Force Ones. I can still picture him looking up at me after I’d catch him, goofy ass tryna act like he was tying his damn shoelaces, playing down that ingenuity. One night after our shift, we took our shirts off to see who had a bigger chest—no homo. This was back when I did a thousand pushups a day. Homie’s nipples were huge, like the pepperonis you get at Subway, except black.
“Damn, son!” I said.
He punched my arm hella hard then put his shirt back on. That’s when I started calling him Pepperoni. He laughed, but said it was the most fucked-up moniker of all time. He said that malarkey had better stay in-house. He used corny words like that.
Pepperoni rode the bus to and from the warehouse. He couldn’t afford a car.
“Not even a Cavalier?” I asked him once. “Look online, homie. Kelley Blue Book.”
“Cabrón,” he said—he’d call me that because I’m Mexican in appearance and attitude—“I couldn’t even afford gas for a fucking Vespa if Santa brought me one for Christmas. Chingao.”
One night I offered to give Pepperoni a ride home, but he said naw. The next night I insisted, but still naw. The next night I was like, Homie, I gotchu. Hop in.
“All right, cabrón, all right, don’t get your chones in a twist,” he said.
He said to drop him off at the corner store on Rittiman, that he’d walk home from there.
“Walk home? What am I, the VIA bus? Just let me drive you home, fool,” I said. Because maybe he’d invite me to smoke up.
He said his neighborhood wasn’t “precisely safe.” Said it was “rather treacherous.” Air quotes.
“The Valero’s fine here, cabrón,” he said.
“Really, dawg?”
He stayed quiet, just stared out the window like he was searching for somebody. Message received. I was only human, so I left him with:
“Prideful pepperoni-looking-ass motherfucker.”
“Gracias for the lift,” he said, tipping an invisible hat.
The next two days he didn’t show up to work. Didn’t call in. Didn’t text me or anybody.
Turned out he was shot the night I dropped him off. The night I fucking left him at the store. An investigator—that’s what she called herself—stopped by the warehouse to break the news, ask some questions. She said it was probably a wrong-place-wrong-time kinda thing.
“C’est la vie,” I remember her saying. She didn’t seem bothered one way or the other.
God, I thought. I couldn’t believe it.
Seems like half my life has passed me by and I still can’t fathom this shit.
C’est la vie.
Sometimes I say to people, “Sure, I believe in God, yeah.”
I bet ten years from now nobody’ll remember Pepperoni except me. I bet hardly anyone remembers him now. His custom Air Force Ones, his huge pepperoni nipples I can’t unsee. I don’t know where they buried him, who his family is. Nada. Sometimes I dream about visiting his grave, catching him up on all the malarkey that’s gone down. Pouring one out on his headstone—cliché, I’m aware—watching the sauce soak into the dirt. I don’t think that’ll ever happen. I know it won’t. Believe that.
Do I believe in messiahs or saviors? It took me a long time to comprehend that I’m still here, and if there’s one thing fucked about this duplicitous story, it’s that.
That I’m still here. C’est la vie.