The Return of The Fellas

October 1994

Like the cavalry they came, bearing Heinekens and weed, racing to the aid of their fallen comrade even though I had abandoned them years before. Today it was dark-kneed Johnny Vega’s turn.

Unmistakably Puerto Rican with almond eyes and a thin, regal nose, Johnny’s skin was the tone and smoothness of Brazilian coffee beans. But one day when he showed up for softball practice in cut-off dungarees, I noticed his rich-hued kneecaps and I told Manny Man, Yo, check out homeboy´s knees and the distinction stuck. The brother had dark knees.

Johnny was my original link to the Fellas, the only Catholic School kid I knew growing up. We didn´t mix, but I would see a few dressed in jackets and ties with shirttails flapping, huddled together like Mormons on the 4 train. I knew Johnny from the paddleball courts at Monroe, where he caught our attention and merited our respect due to the exhausting exhilaration of curve and cleft that was his girlfriend, a smoking-hot teen-aged goddess from the block, a dark-skinned brick with short hair, deep brown eyes, and absolute rockets for tits. Johnny wore a neat, short afro he got shaped up at the cocolo barbershop and prescription aviator glasses, an adolescent Bronx Romeo squiring his tropical explosion around the neighborhood, walking curbside, always, his arm around her shoulders and hers around his waist, a pair of paddles in his free hand as they ducked under the sheared slit of the schoolyard fence to the courts. I marveled at her geometry, resented him his bounty, pining for such a shot of life. Johnny and I played the occasional game of paddles but didn’t hang out too much given our tribal division, but freshman year at Syracuse University, up in Klan country, we became full and fast homeboys.

We were seventeen, eighteen-year-old miracles, firsts of our families to even dream of attending college, classic melting-pot fables. But on top of the adaptation we were forced into, the work and the struggle of just trying to go to class and occasionally study while freezing our balls off, we were forced to deal with our first blunt encounters with racism. Some of it was comical: a passing carload of ´zoids, too ignorant to know the difference, once called us niggers, and we laughed between cursing them out and throwing rocks or bottles or whatever we could find at their car as they sped off. Much of it was dangerous, fistfights or pitched battles. The Rojas Brothers, battle-scarred veterans of Prospect Avenue, where Jewish Lightning raged, once stood up to a bunch of football players, selecting jagged rocks and rusted rebar rods from a construction site to defend themselves. The curtain was lifted in central New York. We had never endured this the Bronx, where we were insulated in our neighborhoods and when we ventured forth, we were always close enough to retreat. Aside from a few select no-go zones, New York people at least knew we were there, that we weren’t going anywhere, that we had a right to exist, and we’d throw down for it, no matter what they said. But we weren’t prepared for the ugliness of it in Syracuse.

They were everywhere, these sons and daughters of the American Revolution, hoisting lacrosse sticks before their white supremacist frat houses, sitting on sticky floors at keg parties, spilling beer on one another as they got drunk and did undignified drunken shit: lighting their own farts, knocking their heads on thick wooden doors, tossing empty kegs out of fourteenth floor dorm windows to see how they would bounce, once even starting a fire on our dorm floor, ending up with some wasted knucklehead buffeted at the end of the fire hose trying to put it out. These people had no concept of cool, no understanding of how to dress sharp, to walk with any semblance of rhythm, they had no need to squeeze slivers of dignity out of a rigged life. It was theirs and they knew it, so they got drunk and yelled at niggers and ignored spics and graduated to run their father’s businesses and used their connections to fit right into the grooves formed for them. These were the guys who colonized the Trading Desks and beyond, guys whom I had to deal with every day on Wall Street. My natural enemies.

Many of these milk-fed white boys were huge. They looked like the offspring of prison guards, spoke in nasal twangs and once, during intramural season, as I formed a Nuyorican softball team with a few Dominicans and a Cuban and a Jewish guy from the Upper West Side, one of them called us spics and Johnny Vega, all of five-six, crafted his legend when he stopped, turned, squared up, and with a half-hop to garner torque, clocked that cracker right in his grill. I’ll always remember the look of surprise on the guy’s face that someone half his size wasn’t afraid to punch him, or maybe considering he hadn’t thought his insult through.

University changed us all. It got us out of New York City for the first time and introduced us to the possibilities and horrors of greater America. We were trampled by the American Dream, scrambling in the frozen Lake Eerie winds like imagrants, too many guys, not enough winter padding, beneath the notice of most of the overgrown student body. We were perplexed by the machinations of the institution we were thrust under and many of us lost our footing, producing miniscule GPAs before getting bounced. Like me. Like Johnny. Like too many of us.

Johnny’s toughness led to his undoing a year later at an off-campus Cocolo party, when he stepped to a Bama who may or may not have snatched the purse of a thick thighed señorita who was marginally part of our crew. He was alone, or at least without all of us, many of whom who had by then gotten bounced, or else a real tragedy would have transpired. Johnny grabbed the Cooley High looking local, who turned out to be the wrong motherfucker to grab because he had a gun. He smacked Johnny with it, knocking him to the floor, then he mounted Johnny’s chest like a kid’s fight only the top dog had a gun. The crowd of mostly bougie cocolos gasped and hewed, even the Que Dogs, that fake tough-guy Black frat (just as I always suspected), pushing girls out of the way to escape the room, lunging out of open windows. The Rojas brothers would have disarmed and shot the motherfucker, but they had been bounced the semester before. No one stepped up and things were looking dire until Mark Tyson of all people, tall, lanky, womanizing art major Mark Tyson, Doctor Love, jumped the guy from behind and held on, beginning a scrum so others could pile on until Johnny was snatched up and dragged to another room by a team of women, mainly. The Bama was pulled out by his backward-ass friends, shouting insults and threats at the ashen Johnny Vega in specific and at uppity college niggers in general, before the cops arrived.

This experience changed Johnny, and he quietly dropped out of school and joined the army reserves, where he honed a new personal discipline and learned how to disable someone with his manicured bare hands, hacking or chopping at the throat or with a well-placed eye gouge. I know this because he gave me a quick lesson one day over a few too many Heinekens. He got quieter, more reserved, often going off by himself without leaving the room. He left Syracuse as most of us did, sans degree and laden with government debt, but continued at night school in The Bronx and earned his degree in computer science. He became a teacher at a Fordham Road technical institute where he worked his way through the student body of ripe and luscious Latina babes, first generation, tops, seeking a better life through business training, after which they sashayed out to office jobs, bedeviling straphangers on the D train with hypnotic hips and devastating gaits. Johnny Vega, big heart, dark knees, and sound instincts, selected a choice student each semester for his own private stock.

I hadn’t seen much of Johnny after Syracuse, but we always kept tabs on one another through the fellas and when he heard about the shape I was in, he called, and I eagerly welcomed his visit. We had chicken wings and Heinekens at Blue Moon but didn’t get too ripped on a workday evening. We went back to my place to smoke a joint and chat.

He was another of the guys who I had almost zero contact with AC (after Claudia) so my task of preparing the appropriate context was difficult. I felt compelled to tell him how in love I was, how happy I was with her and our life together to justify my present-day situation. But the lofty romantic language sounded contrived even to me by this point in my early brush with reality and I struggled to bring him up to date.

Johnny Vega, my long-term friend, the regional king of pussy, the surprising warrior, sat, listening, looking around my new crib, fingering a matchbook, and when I was done, he gave a few seconds before responding. “You didn’t love her,” he stated, with conviction. “You loved the life.”