Nuyorican Obituary

“You’re not ashamed of us, are you?”

As a boy I believed the devil killed my uncle. I believed this because my older cousins told me, “The devil shot our father in the basement.”

My aunt had six daughters then. (She later had two or three more — I lost track.) They lived in a four-family house on Cornelia Street in Bushwick. My cousins told me this story: That one day their father, who was a very very good man, was in the basement in the building on Cornelia Street.

And he was there at night, just being a good man, a good father, and then the Devil himself came in and shot him in the back.

They told me that the Devil lived in basements. Which made sense because that was the part of the house closest to Hell. He probably popped up right out of the dirt floor or came out from that pitch-black area behind the boiler. Basements are dark and dank and low-ceilinged, the natural dwelling place of evil. For years after I remained afraid of basements.

I imagined the scene: The good father, toiling away at something for his family, smoking a cigaret, enjoying one harmless half-can of Rheingold, when suddenly, this dripping-blood, red Devil pops out, tiny black beard, bald red head glistening, needle-sharp horns, clove feet, a yellow-toothed smile with blood in it, too, this Devil pulls a revolver on this poor man and shoots him! Blam! Till this good father lies face down in the dirt, blood leaking away into the drain.

A couple years later, my stepfather bought that building on Cornelia (that’s how he met my mother), and my father and my brother and I drove over there because we were supposed to move in. I saw the basement, but, it had a door that led outside to the front yard and light poured in. On the way back to my father’s van, I told him the story my cousins told me and he laughed. He confirmed that the man had been killed in that room. Then he said, “That bum was shot for drugs. He cheated somebody out of money.”

I was not a religious child, though my mother tried her best. We went to church every Sunday, and she combed our hair and dressed us up. But my hair apparently had free will and would mutate into a curly mess just minutes afterward. And my shirttail’s coming out of my pants, well, that was probably my fault completely.

My mother also enrolled me in religious instruction. Every Wednesday afternoon, at two o’clock, I and a flock of other neophytes would walk the two blocks over to the Catholic school at St. Peter and Paul’s, the same church we attended.

I found the nuns and priests who taught us very strange. First of all, they white adults, and I knew very few of those outside of the ones on TV. Also, they dressed in dark clothes and smelled odd, as if they did not bathe a lot.

We got some instruction inside the actual church. The lessons were lost on me—I was not in school and so not in the mood. What I liked to do was look at the stain glass windows and the giant crucifix that hung above the altar. These showed blood and gore, more than the horror movies I used to watch.

In fact, what church and religious instruction did most for me was not to put the fear of a god in me, but the fear of a devil. Satan! Evil! This red-skinned, horned, goat-footed, trident-bearing bad dude could appear anywhere and really do something bad to you. My impression was not that Satan made you do bad things, but that he actually did them to you.

I did my communion when I was 10. I wore a suit, a clip-on tie, and carnation (all sold by the church) and I accepted Christ as your savior, drank the sweet wine, and chewed the dry wafer. In the end, I understood none of it. But it did make me feel special to get dressed up, get photographed, and get a lot of attention.

Our apartment was on the second floor on a building on a small block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We had moved there from the other side of the neighborhood, on Rutledge Street, which was becoming Hasidic, so they didn’t really want us there anymore. My mother’s friend Monsita had just bought a building and so she rented an apartment to my mother. I think the rent was $100 a month.

The building had a front yard of concrete and a gate. You walked up the stoop the front door, and inside you walked up the stair that curved just at the top, and right at the curve was a small alcove where people probably used to put statues but there were never any statues in it when we lived there.

You walked into the living room. To the left of the front door was the kitchen. And right to your right was the bathroom, which had a pebbled glass window in it that was painted over. The bathroom had an old tub, and above the toilet was a wooden tank that I was always afraid would fall down on my head.

And down from the bathroom was a little hallway where the paint used to peel but we knew we weren’t supposed to eat that and anyway it was not as salty as potato chips so who would want to eat it anyway?

Past the hallway was the big bedroom, which was sometimes Ma’s room, or Ma and my room, or all our rooms, or the guest room. And then there was a little bedroom beyond that, with a window that was right over the front door of the building.

Outside the kitchen and living room windows was the roof for the rest of the apartment downstairs. They had bigger rooms down there, but up here we had blacktop. But it was like a private playground for us, except it sloped a little bit and there was no fence on two sides, so we didn’t play there that much. And anyway back there was where Ma used to hang our clothes after she hand-washed them.

This begins a fictional memoir, a sort of Ham on Mango Street on Rye, if you will.

FINALLY, THERE CAME THE DAY when my sister and my brother and I went to our father and asked him. He would know how to spell it. Our mother’s English was still slightly broken, but Pop talked like the people on TV did. He must know, we concluded.

However, although our father was a very intelligent man who read the paper every day and listened to WINS radio, I think in this case we asked him to spell something he had never seen in writing.

“How do you spell ‘fart’?’” we all asked him.

This was in the afternoon, when he came over to do the numbers, during one of his breaks, when the phone wasn’t ringing. I don’t remember precisely but he would either have had a cold beer or a gin and grapefruit juice in his hand.

He had to think about our question. “F-O-T,” he said confidently. This would have been my guess as well, considering how the word sounded in the New York City accent we were all sporting.

“F-O-T,” we three repeated. “F-O-T.” Repeating it like a mantra, to make sure we wouldn’t forget.

Some nights later, after we had been sent to bed, my siblings and I remained awake. The lights were off, but we continued to joke and laugh until we would fall to sleep. The spelling for “fart” came up again.

My sister Evelyn remarked that it was a strange word. My brother Rafael agreed. And then I, in a moment of brilliance that would of course mark the rest of my life, said, “Know what? I bet it stands for ‘Fumes Of Terror!’” This made us explode in giggles and laughter.

I did not know it then, but I had found my calling.

We made so much noise that Ma came in to see what we were up to. We explained my new word, and she chuckled, then told us to say our prayers and go to sleep.

“And a happy new year to you, too!”

I just launched the January 2009 issue of AsininePoetry.com. Read it. Read it now!

“Year-View Mirror: The Year 2008 in Rhyme” by Scott Emmons
“The Obamauguration!” by Richard Cairo
“Lastest Poem Ever” by W.
“On Getting Laid Off” by Jiffy Vega-Vega
“Investment Banker Blues” by Jon Wesick
“The Devil’s Wheel” by Alex Galper
“Let There Be Light Verse” by R.J. Clarken
“A Dog in Need of Attention” by Albert Van Hoogmoed
“The Fetching Cat” by Mas Mas
“Of All the Places” by Joe Sweatpants

The gang also decided to tally up the Top 10 asinine poems of 2008:
“Things You Think about While Making Love” by David Ochs
“Door Number Two” by Greg Schwartz
“The Persistence of Memory” by Creeley Piker
“Thinking of You” by Eileen Budd
“Al Gore on the Rocks” by Daniel Thomas Moran
“Success Is Counted Sweetest: On Meeting Kiss” by Condoleezza Rice
“Happy Father’s Day, Indiana Jones; Five Haikus” by Gordon Stanley
“Product Placement” by John Grey
“Obama, Imma Chargin’ Mah Lazrs” by Pajamaz, LOLcat Poet
“Poor Rudolph” by Natalie M. Dorfeld, PhD