1958-1970: My South Bronx
Little Whitey loved my mother’s Star-Kist tuna sandwiches on toasted Wonder Bread. The day he heard I never had a mayo sandwich, he acted out a dainty swoon; his stick-figure body ended up splayed on the kitchen floor. When my mother set his plate on the table, he sprung up!—to hand press his favorite treat into a poor man’s Panini. As if I knew about Paninis back then. Nick and his Italian family probably knew; they lived down the block in an old wooden grey house like my own. Nick was in our fifth-grade class at P.S. 66; but forget spoiled Nick; he was boring compared to Whitey. Whitey was the first friend I ever invited home; or did he invite himself Where didn’t he invite himself? I was shy; he was not.
He was a terrible student and more interested in being a comedian; he was also fearless—squealed out dirty-dozen your-momma-so-nasties that decimated other kids. When he took down one of the biggest with one your momma too many, he had the most surreal fight. Whitey hissed, snarled, cut his eyes, flashed his teeth, and charged at the other boy; his arms were windmills; fingernails he had deliberately filed to pointy ends sliced through the air! He became a gouging, hair-grabbing, vortex! I laughed only to gasp the next moment. Kids would mess with little Whitey—rarely saw the same kid mess with him twice. God, I had to love him. God…
God and Whitey…he talked way too much about The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. He carried around a little New Testament with a grainy green plastic cover in his right back pocket. Except for schoolbooks, I only read comics. Whitey would read me bible verses and follow them up with his explanations—wound up giving me a little bible of my own. He sang in the choir at the storefront Baptist church on Southern Blvd and Freeman Street, facing the elevated train station. Can’t say he was completely serious about religion though, going by the way he goofed on church ladies, especially how they became possessed by The Holy Ghost! He once started stutter-stepping around the kitchen table, ankles together in invisible shackles, back arched, head thrown back, open hands reaching for heaven above!—he yelled out, Thank you Jesus! Thank You Jesus! By the time he began babbling in tongues, my mother and I had cracked up.
Whitey had moved up from Alabama and invited me over to his apartment several times; but always followed up by saying the place was still a mess; maybe later. He also mentioned three big brothers, noting the meanest one was not right in the head more than once. Said his momma thought church would be good for his brothers, if only she could get them to go. Whitey obviously loved and listened to his momma, considering how much he talked about her.
Nothing could stop me from going to Whitey’s church the Sunday morning he appeared on my porch. I took a chance laughing at his baggy black suit with matching bow tie and floppy wing-tipped brown shoes. My mother pulled me inside to point out, as she sometimes did, that Whitey was black, but this time spitting out slurs I learned soon enough were plain racist. Sad—being my little sister and brother, of a different father, were both brown and we obviously had Afro-Latinx relatives; sad I would have to wait until adulthood to access authentic accounts of the Spanish, Indigenous, and African cultural legacies in Puerto Rico.
As my mother came to the end of her warnings in the living room, while Whitey stood outside, she had to realize the obvious: toxicity was spreading in our neighborhood like an oil spill around the same time the U.S. government was still loving the Vietnam War; and gangs, guns, heroin, glue sniffing and weed were right outside our front door; however, Whitey was a sharp kid headed in the right direction. Why not let him bring me along. As we walked out of the house, my mother handed me a dollar bill and some quarters for the collection plate; and ordered me to come right home after the service.
For the first time, I had the experience of being the whitest face in the room. Everything happened so fast at that church—could not turn my head without having something get my attention. I saw the assorted church ladies in colorful hats; watched sweaty black men shed their Sunday best jackets in the growing heat; heard the hallelujahs; heard the swelling sound of gospel songs sprinkled with banging tambourines! When things quieted down, an old barrel-chested preacher in a green Sharkskin suit, was holding a mic—its chord trailing behind him like a tail. He dashed left and right shouting demons out of existence! Get out of here, Satan! Don’t you try it, Devil! Not in this house! This is our house. Get Out! Out! Out now! Bodies sprung from their seats—jumped into the aisles. Here and there people were speaking in rapid-fire semi-automatic tongues! Some passed out and fell back into waiting arms; some, once gently placed on the ground, seemed to fall asleep; others continued their convulsions. Speechless, I didn’t know what to think or do. Occasionally, I heard a subway train screech and rumble by in the background.
Not long after this day, Whitey’s family disappeared from the neighborhood and he stopped coming to school. I loved Whitey: thought we would grow up together going to church and getting in trouble. I know he would have loved going with me to the basement Santeria church that would open up next door before our sixth-grade graduation. Honestly, the Santero’s two beautiful black Dominican daughters had gotten my attention—he never let them step off their porch. My mother, no surprise, had a problem with the mixing of African and Catholic religions—she found Santeria’s fiery and powerful figure, Changó and ritual blood sacrifices of goats and chickens cause for worry. She hated that whenever big happy Titi Lydia from Rio Piedras, whose laughter echoed through the house, visited, Don Pablo’s church was her fuel and escape. My first floor bedroom overlooked one of the church’s windows along the driveway, but I could never figure out exactly what was going on down there. If only Whitey had not vanished: we would have gotten past my mother. On Wednesday and Saturday nights, until leaving to attend college, I slept to the ecstatic and haunting sounds of African drums.
1971-1976: Indelible
Have you ever seen a heroin junkie freeze on the sidewalk in front of your house on your way to school—all his momentum gone, eyes closed, head drooping forward and jerking to the side? Seen one sway back and forth on his heels in slow motion—then that scratch: those curled fingers moving over a stubbly cheek…for that long slow scratch? I can almost hear it. I saw my share on the block after veterans started coming back from Vietnam and swelled the ranks of our local addicts. How many of them would live to watch Saigon fall on NBC?—see a swarming mass of brown bodies claw its way up to an army helicopter perched on top of the U.S. embassy? What would stream into a Vet’s head watching that?—how would it mix with all of Moloch’s other shit jammed in there. I was too young to be part of the Sixties revolution: missed all that sexy and sad action. What I remember most is how, toothless, the Sixties crawled into the Seventies and died.
Hope had been shredded by Corporations, COINTELPRO, and Congress; hope had been assassinated. I liked Malcolm, King, and the Kennedys. I liked Bob Dylan—where did he go hide? It was time The Owners taught us all a lesson—so they sucked the money out of cities making the most noise first—let my South Bronx burn—wrapped us up in all things war. Who’s going to argue against a war on poverty or drugs; today we’ve lost our future to a war on terror; the master narrative remains shameless. What chance has peace ever been given? I was too young to know which way the wind blew back then: too young to know the most clandestine wars—the wars on our schools, democracy—memory—had started long before; but I was old enough to look around; and every time I looked back home, I was afraid of becoming one more casualty.
Then Uncle Lou suddenly appeared. If you’re twelve and never knew your father, it’s not uncommon to look for mentors: Lou was a great role model! Had a Paul Newman cool, and okay, he kept his hair in place with a hairnet overnight. One night, just days before Christmas, as I looked out through the living room window, he drove up to the house in a glistening heavily muscled white Mustang Mach 1 and brought the rumbling beast to a stop under the streetlamp out front. He wanted to see his mother, my abuela, since he was back in the country. She cried. He was her wild young son—nothing like bible-carrying wife-whipped Uncle Herman. Uncle Lou was the son with the secret life, who drank and showed up with drink-filled talkative cleavage-showing blonds, then disappeared again for a year or two. When I showed Lou my brown mixed breed puppy and said I needed ASPCA tags in case he got lost, he took out a silver money clip pinching a wad of bills. “Sure, cute dog,” he said, “This should cover it, and here’s a little extra just in case.”
No nonsense—and affectionately all there.
I think of abuelo learning to hate the U.S. and finally leaving to live out his last years in a corrugated tin-roofed shack by a lagoon in Puerto Rico; how my class clown older brother made jack-in-the-box appearances; how my mother and abuela used their hysterical attaques to shame and guilt me into obedience. My sister was too little for any deep nurturing conversations; who was there for me? Lou’s sure calm voice, like abuelo’s, signaled there was nothing he could not handle.
However, he needed to change, and he was not changing into a model citizen right away. First, he had to get caught for robbing several banks in New Jersey—the reason he had spent the last few years hiding in Mexico. Once caught, there was the long wait for the trial, which seemed lucky for me: by the time of the trial, Darcy, his girlfriend, had become my best friend. How many kids on the block get driven around in a glossy white Mustang Mach 1—built to race—by a wild thirty-something who smoked, drank, and wore black leather pants? The day of sentencing, when moving him from a holding pen to the courtroom, she stole a minute with Lou and I saw how a kiss is supposed to be when it means something. Two cobras entwined, two eagles entwined, two animals wrapped in each other—trembling—amazing.
She would help turn Lou around when he got out, she promised. On one long drive up to Sing Sing prison with her, listening to Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” on the radio, I believed her when she said everything would be all right when Lou got out—that we would make for great family.
Lou found a good lawyer, was not the leader of his crew, cooperated, behaved in prison, and was out in a couple of years. He began to buy and fix up old houses in the South Bronx to resell. He gave me work painting interiors and cleaning dirty mucked up stoves and Frigidaires. On weekends, Darcy or Lou would drive me to their beautiful dark red brick Fort Lee Jersey home. I became friends with Darcy’s sweet irresistible daughter, Nayla—my age. Darcy being Irish, a black daughter with a huge perfectly round Afro was a surprise. One snowy December day, we spent hours on a two-seater toboggan shooting down the long hill their home faced, Darcy and Lou watching us from their parlor bay window. I never saw bigger smiles on them. It was easy to forget I was just visiting on that long beautiful day—easy to forget I would have to go back to the South Bronx and an old wooden house that was my world—until dinner was over.
One day after school, my mother met me at the front door to tell me police found Darcy on the kitchen floor with two bullet holes in the back of her head. Seems Lou heard the shots in the kitchen from the second floor; grabbed his .38 caliber snub nose; and was on his way when he was shot on the staircase spiraling into the parlor. Nayla didn’t go into the house when she found the front door ajar and heard Lou’s labored breathing. She ran to a neighbor for help. By the time the police arrived, they were both dead. It wasn’t a robbery. They never caught who did it. A few years later, I heard something about Lou crossing the wrong people—something about cocaine.
At the Ortiz Funeral Home near St. Mary’s Park—where I saw abuelo for the last time a year before—two gleaming white caskets, nestled in a rainbow of flowers, were opened and angled towards each other, so their heads almost touched. Walking up to Darcy and Lou was too much for me. I spent my time walking around the block smoking weed and Newports—no different from what I did at abuelo’s funeral—I was not going to be seen crying. It is surprising how I came to believe men don’t cry. I must have wanted to be a man very much; I wanted to be like Lou.
Contributor Notes
Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in the Directory of Poets and Writers. His work appears in the recently released anthology We are Antifa: Expressions Against Fascism, Racism and Police Violence in The United States and Beyond and he keeps a personal blog, The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation
