No Matter How Much You Promise Read online

  “See, I told you, Agent Ho,” Cookie said.

  “I’m gonna talk to him,” Vidamía said and closed her eyes at her sister dismissively. “If he doesn’t wanna do it, that’s fine. No harm done.”

  Cookie and Vidamía went back and forth, insulting each other and laughing and pushing each other, and Vidamía said Cookie was a good one to talk about Agent Ho since she was banging Mario Wong, her Chino-Rican boyfriend, and her name was Fortune Cookie Ho, and silliness like that. Their father had gone and auditioned and they said he could play. That had been okay because he continued to practice for hours at home and played once a week and brought home a little money, but he was still sullen most of the time and he had almost hit Cliff and Cliff said he was going to move out and he and his girlfriend were going to get an apartment. It wasn’t fair. But it hadn’t stopped there. Wyndell had gotten a gig at some club and Vee said why didn’t he give their father a chance and they’d gone and set up a band and left her out. She didn’t know much about it but she heard Vee talking and Wyn had said no way and Vee insisted that he hear him play or let him sit in on a jam session and Billy had blown them away with his virtuosity and Wyn had finally said yes.

  Now that they were going to play the gig, they spent the whole day cleaning out the sixth floor and the next day they painted the place white and put in new lights and they rolled the piano out and put it upstairs and they rehearsed almost every night. At first they had let her play drums but now they’d brought a friend of Cliff’s from school. “Fawn, this is David Weinstein. David, this is my sister Fawn. She plays the drums, too.” David said “hi,” but you could tell he felt embarrassed, like he’d taken over her job. Anyway, she liked playing the drums, but she couldn’t keep up with the things her father was doing, and although he didn’t say anything you could tell he was uncomfortable with her playing. She liked Wyndell. He was always nice and made her feel like she was older than thirteen. She thought David was cute, but Cookie had said he was gay. Maybe she was both. Maybe when you didn’t like boys or girls it was really like that because you liked both and couldn’t decide.

  She hated them all now because they had this gig and didn’t need her. It wasn’t fair. None of it. First the family band stopped playing and now Wyn had gone and gotten a real gig together at the Village Gate of all places, which her father said was a really great club. A real jazz-playing job with Wyn and Cliff and a bassist. Someone should have said something, anything, even just “Sorry, Fawn, your drum playing is real nice, but we need someone older,” but nobody did, and now she felt that her drumming sucked and that was the reason. Maybe it wasn’t true but that’s how it felt.

  Maybe she’d just run away and go looking for Bobby McGee. Maybe she’d just go out with her harmonica one day and just start hitchhiking and go to Tennessee and hide up in the hills, like her mama talked about, deep in the woods, so that no one could find her ever again and then they’d be sorry. Or maybe she’d get a boyfriend, even if she hated the idea. Maybe she’d be real bad and take her yinandyango and do it to herself; maybe she’d jerk off, like the boys said, and then put it in herself. She thought that perhaps she could give herself a baby, but the notion was so strange it frightened her. In any case she thought that would be impossible because her thing wasn’t hollow and her mother had said boys’ things were hollow and that urine and sperm came out of it and her urine came from inside her peepee.

  She didn’t like looking at herself now that she had hair and breasts. Whenever she had to dry herself, she closed her eyes and then got dressed quickly so she didn’t have to look at her body. She had seen herself a few times and had felt ashamed and her face had gotten real hot and she had hit herself with her fist for being bad. She went into her room, opened her desk and from the very bottom of the drawer she pulled out her book and wrote in it.

  Faceless shadows walk with me

  dark shadows

  emerging each night out of

  the depth of the asphalt,

  rising like

  waves of summer heat,

  waiting to torture me

  with their wicked tenderness,

  waiting for me to succumb

  to their siren song,

  waiting for me to surrender

  myself to the pleasure

  of their deceit,

  waiting for me …

  She read this, shook her head, and ran the pen over it several times diagonally in X fashion, so that later, when she was gone, or in jail, and people saw her notebook, they’d know she had been angry, because the ballpoint pen had ripped through several pages of the notebook. She returned the notebook to the desk and went upstairs to the roof. As she passed the sixth floor she heard them rehearsing, her father playing soulfully, way up on the piano, the notes like heavy drops falling to the floor and the bass painting beautiful dark swatches of music beneath the brushes of the drums, where she wished to be, so that it made her cry.

  Nobody loved her, nobody. She was a freak and nobody loved her, and nobody ever would. Her mother had to say she loved her because mothers were expected to say such things, but she couldn’t love her. How could she let them break up the band? It was awful. They didn’t even play bluegrass anymore. Everything was jazz and her father was so mean lately, yelling and screaming and wanting to know where everybody was going.

  Sometimes there was a little noise and he’d jump up and start looking around, muttering that somebody was trying to get in. Vidamía had also betrayed her. She hated them all, and maybe she’d stop eating like the TV program about the girl singer, something Carpenter. Maybe that’s what she’d do. Just stop eating. When she got to the roof, she sat watching the buildings of the city, wondering how many people felt as she did. Probably many, but thinking this didn’t take the ache away and she sat quietly on one of the benches and cried. She thought that maybe she’d sit on the edge of the roof like she’d seen her father do and maybe close her eyes and just drift off, but the idea of hitting the ground frightened her. She would have to be brave and not open her eyes. Once she hit the concrete below, things would be over.

  She watched a flock of pigeons circle above and then head home to their coop several blocks south. To the west the sun began to set, into New Jersey it seemed, and she tried to think positive thoughts, but couldn’t. She was a freak, like Angela with her harelip was a freak. The two of them were freaks, except no one knew about her problem. She was a secret freak, and even after the doctors did the operation, in her mind she would always have the thing hanging there between her legs swinging back and forth, so that she could feel it slapping against her thighs like some live thing trying to invade her.

  Once, when she was alone in the house, she had lain in bed and taken the spongy organ in her fingers and caressed it, feeling it grow and then bending it so that its fingertip point was touching her clitoris, which Cookie said felt good if you rubbed it. She had done exactly as Cookie said until she was almost in a dream world, and from far away she could hear herself gasping and the yinandyango fighting against her, wanting to go inside and she keeping it under control until she could no longer stand the pleasure and pushed down on the yinandyango and heard herself scream and her face began to twitch and then everything was black and she fell asleep so that when she woke up she was sweating, her whole body ached, and she felt damp between her legs.

  She had gotten up out of bed, gotten dressed, and come out into the loft, but nobody had returned, and for a moment she thought that perhaps her family had gone away forever and left her behind, abandoned her. She felt indescribable loneliness and then a wild rage which made her scratch her face. She knew the yinandyango had been trying to get into her during her sleep, trying to fuck her. Don’t fuck me, she thought. She repeated the phrase over and over and pounded herself in the groin until she was twice as sore and then through her jeans she grasped the appendage and squeezed it with all her might, her nails digging into it so that she imagined that she was making it bleed, reducing it to nothingnes
s until in a final gasp of agony she fell to the floor and was overcome by one of her attacks, her face contorting itself into a hundred hag grimaces, the witch of a thousand nightmares rising up to curse her life over and over, spitting venom from her sulfur-filled mouth, the teeth like a viper’s and the eyes like red-hot coals.

  As Fawn sat on the roof, she again saw the visions of horror that at times threatened to choke her and she again reached down and squeezed the cursed yinandyango, wanting to kill it, disintegrate the power which kept her at all times focused on its ugliness, on its spongy redness; its image ever present except when she was playing music, and now that was impossible because everyone was going one way and she wasn’t included; everybody had somebody who loved them, and even Caitlin, caught up in the game, talked about her boyfriend Ricky in school, while she was utterly alone, her only companion the yinandyango. As the visions of hell and burning grew in intensity, she again thought of going to the edge of the roof but thought better of it and sat gripping the bench with her hands at her sides. And when the visions began to ebb away she lay on the planking of the roof garden which she had helped construct, the failing light shrouding her despair, and again cried quietly and more profoundly, knowing she could never be happy.

  Third Movement

  The Journey

  43. The Four Horsemen of Avenue B

  If you ever saw them together, which people in Alphabet City couldn’t help doing, since the four spent every waking hour and some sleeping ones in each other’s company, you would come to the incontrovertible conclusion that in their case civilization had gone astray in its socialization process and, having deviated so drastically, perhaps ought to have stopped by the side of the road to make amends and give them, as would a benevolent welfare system, rudimentary instructions on behavior among members of the human race. Ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two, they were called Papo, Pepe, Pipo, and Pupi. You could as easily call them Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death or Faminapo, Pestilenpe, Destructipo, and Deafpi, since the LC (linguistically correct) pronunciation of the Ricans in this part of the planet isn’t death but def, just as health becomes helf, and breath becomes bref, as in: “Man, I jumped into the pool and held my bref almost two minutes before I came up.” Rejoinder: “Man, you’re one crazy mothafucka. That ain’t helfy, bro.”

  It is generally accepted that the quantification of cerebral capacity isn’t always the most productive measure of intelligence. Most tests of this nature do not take into consideration cunning, criminality, Machiavellian design, and other demonstrations of evil. In the case of the four horsemen of Avenue B, it is safe to say that their individual intelligence quotients averaged about 80, a score reflective of low-level rote learning and perhaps some expertise on the comings and goings of Bullwinkle Moose. When together for the purposes of evil, however, said young men became dangerous, capable of mayhem and cold-blooded murder, an activity in which they had indulged on at least one occasion.

  The leader of the four was unquestionably Pipo, an eighteen-year-old the size of an underfed poodle-terrier mix with a heart so cold that rather than ventricles his corazón had ice-cube trays. His eyes, veiled by an ever-present anger, had lost all semblance of trust or any glimmer of hope. This condition came about at the age of four, when his mother’s boyfriend, Big Yuyo, a bicoastal type, pried Pipo’s mouth open for the express purpose of introducing him to the pleasures of fellatio, thus making him his special puto. When Pipo reacted negatively to Yuyo’s advances, Yuyo convinced his recruit otherwise with an assortment of well-placed blows to the face and head.

  Big Yuyo was eventually shot in a bad drug deal, but the experience of being violated left Pipo with a sense of outrage concerning the human race. The outrage took the form of a seething anger which kept his own meager and underdeveloped organ erect and in miniature priapic splendor, yearning for release.

  Eventually, his alcoholic mother became the recipient of this rage, for he had intuited subconsciously that she had, albeit unwittingly, condoned his violation. One Christmas Eve, after a pugilistic encounter in which she had gone fifteen brilliant rounds with Kid Bacardi, only to be KO’d in the last round when she could have at least salvaged a draw by staying on her feet, the fun began. A couple of friends had brought Awilda upstairs and deposited her on the bed. Morning came and thirteen-year-old Pipo had risen to a urinary erection and had seen his mother, Awilda, pantyless, skirt hiked up over her hips and legs spread in pink and black splendor, left in that condition by her girlfriend Petra’s husband who had come back up to “make sure she was all right.”

  Pipo tried waking his mother but she had been seduced by inebriation and caught in a dream in which she was traveling back and forth from a soap opera to the welfare building in a pink subway shuttle staffed by blond American stewardesses and so couldn’t hear her son and didn’t respond. Availing himself of the sexual training he had acquired from porno movies and magazines provided to him as his birthright, which all citizens of a democratic society must defend lest we lose all our other liberties, he essayed his first encounter with pubic reality.

  As was and forever would be his fate, being that he suffered from promptness in this endeavor, he’d thrust harmlessly one or two times into his mother so that you couldn’t even truly accuse him of attempting a return to the womb before he was spent. Somewhat physically satisfied, he was once again angry and erect and once again genuflected at the shrine of the Blessed Mother of Bacardi. Luckily, Pipo was incapable of producing any life-giving fluids; knowing nothing had ever emerged from him in his manual explorations but accepting this fact in accordance with his belief that such ejaculations occurred only in the company and within the confines of the female anatomy since now whenever he was finished he was wet; learning eventually that this information was erroneous when he came home one day and wishing to emulate some large-membered screen stud with whom he identified, being that his every waking moment he was pursued by the image of Big Yuyo’s enormity in his face, he entered, thrust, withdrew, grabbed his minute, erect member and tried to spray his mother’s belly and face while she traveled comfortably through the suburbs of oblivion. Observing a string of zeros appear rapidly from his M&M-size glans, he became angry, released his Pee Wee Herman, and, making a fist of his right hand, pummeled his mother about the cheeks and eyes, causing contusions and welts to appear on her already ravaged face.

  Now, at all hours of the day and night as she lay in torporific repose he’d separate her thighs and quickly drive his infantile but erect member into his besotted mater, often combining this pseudo-conjugal activity with the dual enjoyment of a classic “Sylvester the Cat” or “Roadrunner” adventure on television. When his mother, Awilda, became aware that her own son was playing feed the bear on her person, her maternal instincts protested, and while he was out she had a lock put on her bedroom. This action truly enraged Pipo, who now resorted to even more masculine strategies, walking in one day to confront his mother and demand to know who in the fuck she thought she was, scabby bitch that she be, and no more his mother than any other whore in the street, shit.

  And with that opening salvo he delivered a perfect right cross to her temple, which stunned her. Grabbing her by the hair, he drove her into her unlocked room and proceeded to rip her clothing until she was naked before him, cowering, and reduced to a whimpering mess of tears, snot, urine, and feces, such was her fear. One would think that such a sight would produce, if not compassion, at least disgust in young Pipo, but nothing could stand before his rage, and, staring at her with lifeless eyes, he ordered his mother to hit the bed and spread. She pleaded for the dignity to be allowed to first cleanse herself, but he insisted on his rights immediately and she complied; shutting her eyes and wishing for death; conflicted as he lay atop her and within her, her maternal circuits awry since she wished to comfort her son but knew that her arms about him were tantamount to approval of this violation and she would have no part of it.

  Down at the Sixth Precinct th
ey knew Awilda as a drunk and a whore so that when she complained that her son was beating her up and raping her, the officers laughed and said, “Yeah, yeah, Awilda” and “That’s a good one, Awilda.” So that oftentimes she wandered the streets, hungry and cold, fearful of going home because of the humiliation and pain that awaited her; after a time growing used to the sexual abuse, but weary of the blows which rained upon her for the most minor of infractions; wondering, of all her sins, what particular offense she had committed to cause God to punish her in this way.

  This use and misuse of his mother was kept a secret from Pipo’s partners. If they knew they would’ve found a way to rationalize it, much as they rationalized their own brutality and heartlessness, but Pipo didn’t reveal his secret to the others, because they would have wanted to have a go at her, too, and what person in his right mind was going to allow somebody to fuck his mother? That would’ve been too much. In any case, he was sure they would rather spend their time by recalling films they’d seen up on Forty-second Street, or programs they’d seen on television, particularly cartoons. Sometimes they remembered an especially horrifying experience, laughing and slapping hands at the details of the adventure.

  They still recalled the time last summer when they picked out, at random, a fifty-seven-year-old expert in the preparation of egg foo young, sweet and sour pork, and moo goo gai pan who worked at the Golden Dragon Restaurant on Mott Street, and trailed him as he made his way up from his place of employment, across the Bowery and up Chrystie, carrying the ubiquitous translucent pink plastic bag, which held food for his cancerous wife, Mai Ling, whom nightly he would feed and console, telling her he wasn’t ashamed of their childless marriage, recalling their miserable life in Hong Kong, but here at least they had been happy, even if they lived in such a small place. Poor Huang, hurrying through the night, knowing fate followed him, but little could be done, headed home to his second-floor apartment and sad, delicate Mai Ling, who had been a true beauty in her youth. It didn’t matter that she had no fortune with children, though he knew she would have been wonderful with them. He moved with little steps, his legs hurting from standing all day.