Viejo

I met my first murderer when I was sixteen years old. He was sitting on a big-ass Impala parked under the El, reclined against the sloped windshield, his eyes half-mast, at once relaxed and alert. It was a sweatbox of a Saturday night in the summer of ‘77, a few weeks before the blackout completed the devastation of our neighborhood.

I recognized Viejo from down my block, across the street from the abandoned synagogue turned Lucha Libre school. I would see him standing under the slim underhang of a tenement doorway, smoking or waiting or just watching, in no hurry whatsoever. He seemed a street generation older than me, three or four years, and looked nothing special, but his grounded demeanor in our chaotic neighborhood distinguished him as someone not to fuck with. Guys like Viejo inhabited an alternate universe from mine. I was an SPE kid: the Board of Ed created a special class for the highest achievers but neglected to add a protective custody wing to my Junior High School, which could have been called Riker’s Prep. Walking the gauntlet to JHS 123, carrying books that actually got read, made me feel like I had a bull’s-eye on my back. As if it weren’t bad enough, I looked like nobody else in my tribe.

Everyone in my neighborhood looked like Viejo, or like Eddie, who was darker- skinned with straighter hair, but they were all unmistakably Puerto Rican. Either that or they were Black in its many gradations, high yellow to blue-black, even the freckled, orange-tinged mother fuckers in the middle, they were all black and they all knew it, lived it, inhabited it, nodding “what’s up” to one another in passing. Puerto Ricans had more range and subtlety in skin shade and hair texture, but you were rarely fooled. Even the morenos had a feline set to the eyes or mouth, and we walked with a less pronounced bop, a half-beat pause on the left stride, not the near limp that some Blacks used.

You could spot a Puerto Rican a mile away, from revolutionary black and afroed to green-eyed Papi Chulos with blow-dried DAs. But though my gait was true and my Spanish passable, I was never mistaken for Puerto Rican. My father was Irish or Italian, some kind of white – no one knew him long enough to say for sure. My family never threw photos away, fearing vague Santería hexes, and would instead cut an entire person out of a Polaroid, leaving half-carved remnants as if from a long-discarded jigsaw puzzle. I remember, as a kid, staring at a disembodied hand on my mother’s shoulder under her beehive hairdo and raccoon eye shadow, trying to divine who the hand was attached to.

My uncles had Superfly moustaches and Santana afros, and they walked the streets armed and nobody fucked with them. From childhood, I felt wholly inadequate compared to them. I regarded violence with the squeamishness of the elderly, feeling vulnerable in the streets and schoolyards. I learned to ignore quizzical looks and deflect boisterous questions, and I was later forced to scramble, a tense blend of deflecting and avoiding, dodging taunts and escaping outright threats. I avoided eye contact and tried to mask my fear. To hide my shame.

I turned to sports to burrow acceptance from hostile peers, and more recently had discovered the release and acceptance of getting nice with my former tormentors. Eddie was our smooth shortstop who dealt weed and we had become sandlot teammates and get-high buddies. On this night, awash in a hazy bonhomie of beers and joints, we left his mother’s apartment and walked into the Saturday night exuberance.

Eddie strutted down his block, swiveling from the hips, slapping five or hailing greetings in English to the energetic youngbloods who popped up from stoops or from behind parked cars, pausing their street games to greet him and eyeball me. He gripped shoulders and shook hands, in Spanish, with old-timers in guayaberas, who gestured efficiently while nursing beers and half-pints wrapped in brown paper bags, huddled under the awnings of liquor stores and bodegas, talking rapidly and passionately about baseball, or boxing, or women.

The bright storefront windows were our footlights and, turning at the Chino-Cubano and crossing the Avenue, we happened upon Viejo, settled into his perch like a sated lion. The car was parked in front of the steep, darkened staircase leading up to El Exclusivo, an after-hours for the more resilient and the most desperate, where English wasn’t spoken at all. The intermittent squeals and rumbles of subway cars overhead were white noise amid the nocturnal din. Eddie introduced us and Viejo pivoted, bending his legs over the hood, unrushed. He nodded his chin slightly in recognition. He must have noticed me on the block, too.

“My man Tommy here, he’s our centerfielder.” Eddie grinned, red-eyed and squinty, enjoying his own head, “He goes to Bronx Science,” referencing my specialized high school an hour away by subway. Viejo was dressed conservatively, a South Bronx elder statesman, blue pumas and faded glories creased with military precision. A thin gold chain flashed under his short-sleeved sweatshirt. He glanced at me without expression, then back to Eddie.

“And check this out. He’s gonna write a book. About us. About all this shit. ¨ Eddie said, equal parts pride and irony. He spread his arms in an expansive arc, beer in his left hand, an unlit joint in his right. A passing car beeped encouragement. ¨Life in the Bronx,” he said, offering me a working title, grinning, pinching the joint over his ear. I guessed Viejo didn’t get high.

Viejo sized me up, displaying the outward emotional depth of a Yakuza warlord. “You gonna write a book?” he said, curling a smirk, perhaps an understated threat, onto the end of his question.

Eddie beamed at me, mustached and toothy like a cartoon wolf, and I felt like a potentially lucrative hostage. I unconsciously reached up and matted down my kinky-flower hair, sneaking a peek at my reflection in the car window. I wore it parted to the side, brushed down flat, but a week after a haircut the edges began to flare up like Frederick Douglas.

“You should write about my man here,” Eddie said to me, squaring up to Viejo, slapping five. “Write his goddamn story. He killed somebody and got off. On insanity!” As if it were the pinnacle of societal achievement. Viejo eyed him, flexing a slow, confident, what passed for a smile.

I was too nervous to speak but too agitated to keep still. My eyes darted from one to the other, trying to deconstruct Eddie’s grin, trying to read Viejo’s face, wondering what he was thinking, flash-quizzing myself, questions flapping like a slot machine. Whom did he kill - some nosy mother fucker, no doubt. How did he do it – knife, gun, aluminum bat? Did he choke him with his bare hands? From what depths of fury could such an act emerge? I strove to stay put, straining to keep my face neutral, wondering if some manner of acknowledgement or even congratulation was in order. I said nothing.

Viejo tilted back his chin and lowered a languid, measured gaze on me, then offered, simply, “I got crazy papers.” He slid off the hood and stood, grounded, the matter settled. A proof for some wild and feral geometry.

Eddie barked, “Ha-ha! See? He got crazy papers. Ha-ha. Life in the Bronx.” He flayed about, slapping five with Viejo, then me, then an extra, exuberant round of pounds and fraternal shoulder grips. Viejo allowed me a smile, too, his eyes relaxed, their corners crinkling in a grin. He reached into his pocket for a Newport, lit up, looking me dead in the eye, freezing me. He blew smoke into the air then offered me his hand in a gesture of welcome, and acceptance, the boisterous street life growing silent to me in a new intimacy

.