Nuyorican Obituary

Continuing a fictional memoir.

We were poor, but we did have a bar. Where we got it from I don’t know. It was one of those pieces of furniture that was just always there. It stood about four feet high and came with two black stools. It was white, with gold-colored buttons in the padding around its body, and it had a formica top with speckled gold and a matching formica shelf for resting your feet at the bottom. There was also a gold formica shelf system, filled with highball glasses and bottles of rum and whiskey and sour mix, that went on the wall behind it. My father and I would work on glue-together models there. He kept the glue behind the bar, next to a shaker set and more bottles of margarita mix and brandy. He would sip his grapefruit juice and gin and I my milk. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t want me to smell the glue too much or because he didn’t want me to make a mess, but my father ended up doing most of the work. I would open the box and lay out the pieces and the instructions. Then I would take them off the plastic grid and hand them to him as he asked for them. I remember the summer we were doing the glow-in-the-dark Phantom of the Opera set. I was nine. The set featured the Lon Chaney-version of the Phantom proudly ripping his mask while behind him a prisoner wailed from behind bars.

That was the summer our dog Barbie was sick. My sister Evie named the dog—I didn’t! After the doll. Barbie was a white poodle mutt, but she always looked gray maybe because we didn’t give her a bath that much. She was a good dog, a smart dog, with dark brown eyes and sharp, pointy teeth she flashed when she was angry. We knew Barbie was sick when she began racing back and forth between rooms all day long. I could hear her uncut nails making scratching noises on the linoleum. Sometimes you could hear her in the middle of the night, back and forth, back and forth. I was scared because it didn’t make sense for the dog to be doing that, and a dog always made sense.

“We’re going to have to do something about that dog,” my father said.

“Are you gonna take it to the doctor?” I asked.

He laughed, a quick quick laugh. I didn’t know what that meant then.

Listen to Episode 56: “Asinine Trek.”

I had a lot of cousins, and sometimes it was fun to have them over, although they ate all of our food and drank all of our Yoo-Hoo. But sometimes it was not fun.

Like my cousin Carlos. Carlos was all grown up already but he acted like a kid. Mami told me someone had given Carlos a drug called Around the World and had left him all alone in a room and after that that’s why he acted funny.

Carlos used to come to our house without telling us. He would come in cab, and the can drive would say he had driven all the way from Philadelphia, and that somebody had to pay the fare.

One time Mami told me to go play with Carlos until his sister Anita arrived to take him back to the special place he lived in Philadelphia. So I took Carlos outside to play catch on the sidewalk in front of the house. I tossed him a handball. He caught it, but instead of tossing it back, he threw it over the roof of the building next door.

It was a really good throw, but I didn’t know why Carlos threw it up there.

“You supposed to throw the ball back to me,” I told him.

Carlos said, “Yeah, yeah,” and so I ran upstairs and got another ball.

I tossed him the new ball, but Carlos caught that one and tossed that it over the roof, too.

“Why’d you do that?” I said. “Throw the ball to me!”

Carlos said, “Yeah, yeah,” and so I run upstairs and found the last ball we had in the house.

Mami saw me and asked me if I was having fun.

“No!” I said.

She went to hug me, but I ran outside before she could get to me.

Outside, Johnny told his cousin this was the last ball they had in the house. “This is the last ball we got,” I said and tossed it. Carlos caught it. Then he smiled.

And then he threw it. Way up and over the roof.

“Carlos!” I said. “That’s it. Now we have to go upstairs.”

I went to the bedroom and drew people falling into a lava cave until it was time to eat.