No Matter How Much You Promise Read online

  “I remember,” she said, but all she could think about was having the things on her chest. Two of them right in front just like her mama and Cookie and Vee and the rest of the girls and she with that other thing so that she didn’t know which way she should be. She wanted to ask her mother if they could make the things smaller, like she was just a young girl again.

  Ever since the business with the Doberman, they watched the blond girl day and night as she went from school to her home or to the store for her mother. When summer came, she sometimes walked with the two girls: “the blonde, the little stuck-up bitch who said hello to everybody”—except them—“and the other one with brown hair cut like some butch cachapera lesbian, but with a fine culo, which she was probably handing out left and right cause they’d seen her with some big moreno musician and those morenos could fuck you up just like that, man, so you had to watch yourself at all times when they were around. Morenos all carried pieces and they’d blow you up for nothing so you had to be fucking careful, man.”

  One afternoon toward the end of summer when things began to get real boring, the four of them were loping like a pack of wild dogs, their tongues hanging out, smacking each other five as they went, stopping over by Houston Street in the playground to “light up some erf and get stoned and maybe go to the hangout in the basement and light up the pipe and get really good wif some rock,” when they saw her, “all blond and her tittles sticking up big from the T-shirt and whatnot.” She was all alone, without her sisters that they heard were called Cookie and Vidamía, “like she was P.R. and whatnot,” which they didn’t believe, “not because she was white, because there were plenty of white Puerto Ricans, blondes and redheads like the family over by Norfolk Street that all the kids had red hair and whatnot.”

  “And shit, you can’t get no whiter than Papo wif his green eyes, even though he’s all bizco, cross-eyed and whatnot.”

  “Oh, goof, man, gimme five, bro, daniggah be buggin’ out. One eye be goin’ one way and da otha goin’ da otha way.”

  “Niggah, fuck you, it’s your mother that’s bizca from takin’ all that daga in her crica, bro.”

  “Hey, niggah, don’t be dissin’ my moms, okay, faggot? Whatcha think your motha is, a burgen, like Madonna?”

  “Oh, shit, daniggah call your motha Madonna. I be buggin’ if some dude call my moms Madonna. That bitch take a lotta dick. Julio and Davey from Avenue C said they fuck her in her limo and whatnot.”

  “Oh, shut up, you retard mothafucka. Madonna ain’t no burgen. You gotta a GQ of about twenty-two and can’t read or write you so stupid.”

  “Oh, fuck you, niggah. Your GQ about twelve. You buggin’ cause you got your eagle all indaway whendaniggah said your motha was Madonna, who be fucking niggahs all up and down Avenue C in her limo.”

  “Niggah, suck my dick. Youdaone that’s plexed up, cause you got serious eagle problems and should be goin’ over to Bellevue regular to see a shink.”

  “Your motha should be going to see a shink since she’s so crazy that she had you, cause you gotta be totally bugged out to have a niggah like you in her family.”

  So it was obvious that the girl that was always with them couldn’t be Rican even if her name was Vidamía, which wasn’t even a Rican name anyhow, even though her name sounded like it cause they heard her talking and she talked “like she was on television, right, bro?”

  “Yeah, like a ankle woman,” Pipo said.

  “A what?” Pupi inquired.

  “A ankle woman,” Pipo replied. “Them bitches that givedanews on TV, man.”

  “Oh, yeah, like that Michelle Fifa on Channel 2, or that chink bitch Connie Yingyang on CBS,” Pupi said. “They all fine bitches.”

  “So like what’sdabitch’s name?” Pipo said.

  “I tole you, niggah,” Papo said. “Fun. She was in school wif me.”

  “Phone? Wha kine o’ name is that?” Pepe inquired.

  “Not Phone, you dumb mothafucka,” Papo said. “Fun, like we gonna have us some fun.”

  “That’s a fucked-up name,” Pupi said. “How you gonna name a baby Fun?”

  “Man, American people name their kids all kinds of weird shit,” Papo said. “Her name’s Fun Farrot. Somethin’ like that.”

  “Parrot?” Pepe said. “Like a bird? My grandmotha gots two parakeets. They fly all around da house and sit on her shoulders. She had three but one landed ondafrying pan when she was frying pork chops and got fried. My uncle Ricky ate it.”

  “Forget you, okay, Pepe?” Pipo said. “You got a fucked-up head and trying to get niggahs to watch another one of them science-friction movies. Whyncha chill?”

  “No, it’s true, man,” Pepe protested. “It ain’t no science friction.”

  “Shut up, homeboy,” Papo said. “And it ain’t science friction. It’s science fixin, cause they always be trying to fix shit like they be doin’ on Star Trek and whatnot. You always seeing ’em trying to fix something some monster broke. Anyway, da bitch’s name is Fun.”

  “Yo, how you spell that?” Pipo asked.

  “Man, whatcha wanna know for?” Pupi said, crossing his arms in front of him and pursing his lips, his head turned so that the peak of his baseball cap, already askew, was facing Pipo. “You ain’t gonna remember da mothafucka, so whatcha wanna know for?”

  “Word,” Papo said. “You another re-tard.”

  “Niggah, fuck you,” Pipo said.

  “Oh, man, suck my dick,” Papo said, grabbing his crotch.

  “Chill, fellas,” Pupi said. “I betcha we could get us some pussy offa that girl.”

  “Yeah?” Pipo said.

  “Hell yeah, man,” Papo replied. “I tole you I was in da fourf grade wif her. She’s fine, ain’t she? I know she likes me.”

  “Yeah, I bet she got them serious blond pendejos down there and her pussy’s all pink and whatnot,” Pipo said.

  “Damn, homeboy,” Pupi said. “Stop talkin’ about that shit. My dick’s getting so hard it’s gonna rip my pants. I’ma go lookin’ for that fine mami.”

  “We gonna fuck ’er, Pupi?” Pepe said, finally catching on to what they were talking about.

  “Yeah, but we gotta go slow,” Pupi said.

  So, their brains, which didn’t function too well when it came to ordinary problems but went into high gear when it came to the production of criminality, ascertained that the best course of action was to have Papo, who knew her, begin haciéndole el cuento and comiéndole el celebro. Not cerebro, as all other Spanish-speaking people said, but celebro, which anyone with enough Latin or even a rudimentary science education can figure out since it refers to your thinking sombrero—using phrases which their predecessors had used, but which still served them when talking about women, because things hadn’t changed that much since it had been tribally and traditionally established that women weren’t all there. When you talked to women about love, when you gave them a story, or the story to be precise, el cuento, their pantaletas immediately needed about three-quarters of an hour to dry after you had eaten up their brain, so that the only conclusion one could come to regarding the amorous discourse of Latin men to their women is that their words had a corrosive effect on the cerebral cortex and rendered the women unable to think and triggered some mechanism in their brain which was connected to their vaginas and which caused their underpants to fly off them and their legs to spring open in grateful anticipation.

  So Papo began his conquest of his lady fair, not with the childish intent of your average male who wishes to reenact some idiotic pageant of courtship in order to entice an unsuspecting maiden to her sexual doom, but with the intent of getting the Posse of the Pingo finally laid properly instead of manipulating their morcillas.

  They didn’t even talk about how to proceed, but instinctively knew it was required that they separate from each other until the proper time. Although they periodically got together in the evening to hang out and smoke erf and some rock and talk about things, they generally spent most of the day oc
cupied by their own responsibilities, nefarious as they were. Pipo, his mother having escaped to Puerto Rico, managed to remain in the apartment by selling small amounts of crack. Pepe spent most of his time at his grandmother’s house watching Spanish soap operas with her, being told to shut up, and getting smacked on the head so that his grandmother could concentrate. He liked getting hit on the head. It was almost like getting high. His grandmother hit hard.

  Pupi was the envy of the other three because he had the most prestigious job. Pupi, through his uncle Mike, who raised pit bulls and fought them, was helping him to train them. Every day he had to bring one of the dogs down to the park on the other side of the FDR Drive, near the Baruch Projects, throw the training rope over a tree branch and bait the dog until he grasped the other end of the rope. The dog’s end of the rope had a knot which the dog grabbed in its massive and powerful jaws and refused to let go. In order to strengthen the dog’s jaw, it was Pupi’s job to pull on the rope until the dog was off the ground. Such was the fighting spirit and determination of the dogs that it was virtually impossible for them to let go once they had locked in on their prey. Sometimes, he tied his end of the rope to a bench and watched the animal hang by his jaws for an hour or so, incapable of letting go. When he’d let the dog down, the animal would stand on unsteady legs, the knot still clutched in its jaws. That is how Pipo would bring the dog back home, the animal still clutching the knot until he got him to the kennels in the basement of the building on Avenue D and gave the dog water.

  Pupi also had responsibility for cleaning up after his uncle’s dogs, walking them, and making sure they had food and water. For his efforts his uncle paid him fifty dollars a day and had let him pick a puppy from a litter one of his bitches had whelped the year before. Pupi named the puppy Macho Man—“in case some crazy-ass homeboy wanna fuck wif me.” The puppy was a brindle color with red gums and strong, bowed legs. Eventually, it grew to be a magnificently large and powerful dog, trained to attack on command.

  Once, in the park, he had cornered a fairly large stray and ten minutes later the other dog lay dying in spasms of horrible pain as Macho Man bit deeper and deeper into its throat, crushing the larynx so that even in its death throes the victimized dog, attempting to bark, did little more than emit small, wheezing sounds that resembled escaping gas. So magnificent was Macho Man that his uncle Mike offered Pupi five hundred dollars for him. Pupi shook his head, but, knowing that his uncle could take the dog if he really wanted to, he told Mike that he could breed Macho Man whenever he wanted and could keep all the puppies. His uncle laughed and said, “Word,” and told him that wasn’t a bad deal and pulled out a big roll of hundred-dollar bills and gave him a couple and threw a nickel bag of grass his way. Pupi’s affection for his dog was the closest thing to love that he would ever feel for another living thing.

  Papo now became a lone wolf and got himself pretty straight, so that he was only smoking grass a couple times a day, and even got himself a little job, helping the vegetable man at the supermarket. He avoided hanging out with his homeboys except late at night when they’d get together up on some roof and he’d report on the progress of his hunt. His romantic pursuit of Fawn Farrell was minimal until one day when it was pouring rain and he caught sight of Fawn running through the wind-driven downpour and ducking into the pizza shop over on Houston Street, around the corner from Katz’s on Ludlow Street. Papo went in carrying his umbrella.

  “Yo, how you doin?” he said, and stood by the door shaking the rain out of his sombrilla.

  Fawn immediately blushed and looked down at her shoes. The chill of the rain was making goose bumps on her arms. The big boy, his cap turned all the way back, his green eyes boring into her, made her feel more awkward than usual. Unable to speak, she was on the verge of dashing from the store and running home in the rain to get away from the discomfort.

  “We useta be in school together, right?” Papo said.

  “I don’t know,” Fawn replied.

  “Yeah, in da fourf grade wif Miss Gold.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Fawn said, suddenly recalling him. “Your name is Carlos, right?”

  “Yeah, right, Carlos Marcano,” he said. “Papo.”

  And then she saw him in the picture: back row, standing to the left of her; his hair falling a little to the side and his eyes clear like hers, but a little crossed, so that she always felt sorry for him. His skin was white and not like the other boys and girls, who were dark.

  “I remember now,” she said. “Did you move away?”

  “Yeah, we moved up to Harlem and whatnot,” he said, posturing, his hands turned inward toward the middle of his body and then going forward to either side as if he were giving a safe sign as he explained, his gesticulations perfectly timed to the rhythm of his words, mesmerizing her. “My moms got a project up there, but I don’t like it wif so many niggahs so I come down here and stay wif my aunt over on Avenue B. You’re Fun, right?”

  “What?” she said, confused. She guessed she could be if she tried, but this was too scary.

  “I mean, your name’s Fun,” Papo said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said shyly, looking up and sweeping her hair behind her ears, finally catching on. “Fawn Farrell.” She made sure he heard her name correctly.

  “Oh, I like that. It’s a pretty name,” Papo said. “I always liketed it. You wanna pizza?”

  Fawn shook her head but then Papo smiled at her and he was really cute, his hair cut nice and his eyes smiling at her even though he was still cross-eyed, which made her feel bad for him because she was sure people made fun of him, like they had with Angela and her lip. He asked her again. She finally nodded and said okay, so he pointed to a booth and she sat down and he asked her what kind of soda she wanted and she said Pepsi and he went up and got them pizza and sodas and they sat down and she kept thinking, even though her clothes and hair were all wet, that she was on a date like Vee and Cookie and Cliff. Her heart sort of gave a little jump and then she was frightened and began thinking that maybe he’d want to touch her or kiss her and her left eye began twitching a little bit like it always did when she got nervous. She immediately was afraid she’d start making the ugly faces that came on her sometimes, but everything passed. And then he was asking her about what she was doing during the summer and she said that she sometimes helped out at the video store over on Avenue C and she was reading a book about horses.

  Papo said he liked horses, but all he was thinking about “was being in Central Park that day and watching the big horse dick,” and then he felt his own dick getting harder as he watched “the little bitch all wet and her skin rosy and her big tetas all sticking out through the wet T-shirt so you could see her nippers all outlined on the clof,” as he said in reporting to his homeboys, so that all he felt like doing was “whipping out my dick right there and haciendo me la puñeta under da table so that it shot right at her jeans, bro. One big blast that smash up against her and burned her mothafuckin pussy,” he said to them. Instead, his “eagle” mediated the dispute between his “lid” and his “super eagle,” as they would have called it had they had full awareness of this Freudian concept.

  “I got a serious pit,” Papo said.

  “A pit bull?”

  “Yeah, a big one. Macho Man. That’s what I call him. You like pits?”

  “Yeah, they’re cute,” she said, lying, as even sophisticated adults will do on dates.

  “Yeah, they be chomping on your leg and they just shake till it come off and whatnot.”

  When they were done eating the pizza and drinking their sodas, it was still raining, but she said she had to go and he told her he’d walk her home and she shook her head. He insisted, telling her she’d get all wet and maybe catch a cold and he sounded like he was worried about her and all at once she was thinking about the song and about Bobby McGee. The end of the song said, “Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.” Fawn didn’t want to be there with this boy. She wanted to be with Bobby McGee. She and Bobby McGee wer
e running in the rain outside of Baton Rouge and they were happy. The thought relaxed her for the moment, so she said okay and when they got outside he opened up the big umbrella and she got under it and they began walking south on Allen, crossing Rivington and then Delancey and then when they were near the loft she said she had to go and he asked where she lived and she pointed at the big factory building and he said, “Yeah?” like he didn’t know.

  Fawn nodded and started to go but he held her back, his large hand grasping her arm and his veiled, sleepy eyes boring into her, so that she felt trapped and shook her head but no words came out of her mouth. She could feel the power of his strong right arm—the same arm that had snapped Huang’s neck—coursing through her blood and she began to hyperventilate and her face contorted horribly and he let her go.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Nothing, I gotta go.”

  “Maybe we can go to da moobies.”

  She shook her head, turned, and ran the half block to the door of the loft, all the while searching for her keys in the little bag that she carried. When the keys were finally out, she stuck the key in the lock, turned it rapidly, opened the door and nearly tumbled inside, pulling the door behind her and standing in the semi-darkness. Her breathing was labored and her face moved uncontrollably until all she could do to stop herself from shaking was to pull her own hair until it hurt so much that she cried. She then sat down on an old milk crate, put her head down between her legs, and vomited, feeling the acidy taste of the tomato sauce and the sugar from the soda mixing and making her gag worse so that she continued to dry-heave for several minutes. Oh, she hated him, just hated him, and couldn’t stand how he’d held her so that she couldn’t move.

  She took a deep breath and pushed the elevator button. When she heard it commence its creaky descent, she hunted for a broom and swept the vomit from the concrete floor, spreading it here and there so that in a few minutes the floor would be dry again. She’d have to tell her mother and then come back with a bucket of water and some Lysol and clean it up.