My aunt Terry was like a second mother to me and a defining personality in my life and very much helped me to become who I am today. She passed away this week. A lot of celebrities passed away recently, in bunches as they usually seem to do. Oddly enough, I like to think of Titi Terry as one of a celebrity too. To me, she was a star, an exotic presence, the archetypal crazy aunt who would visit in a whirlwind of energy, manic laughter, malt liquor, and smoke. Buenas noches, Terry.
My first battle with Javier was about television. We had a small black and white TV that sat in the middle of our home entertainment center. During the summer, I would watch the cartoons in the afternoon, then the 4:30 Movie, then Eyewitness News, then my brother would come in from outside, where he seemed to live, and we would watch reruns of the Dick Van Dyke Show, Gilligan’s Island Show, and Beverly Hillbillies, like that, and then That’s My Mama, Good Times, Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter, and Chico & The Man, like that, then the cop shows like Baretta, Rockford Files, and Starsky & Hutch, like that, until it was time to go to sleep at 11.
One night at Javier told us we should be in bed.
“All right, kids, get to sleep,” he said, a cigarette hanging out the front of his mouth.
Sleep! But there was so much TV left to watch!
If we went to bed now we would just lie in our beds for hours, tapping our feet, cracking jokes, and laughing until my sister peed on herself. But it was summer, and our rooms were hot, even with what my father called a Puerto Rican air conditioner — open windows. So we wanted to wait till the night was cool enough, and the only things keeping us awake were the mosquitoes.
Why sleep now?
“Get to sleep,” Javier said, towering over us. But we kept our eyes on the TV. And that’s when the belt came out.
We were no strangers to being hit. My mother favored her chancletas for a quick smacks across our legs or behinds. One time, though, she was cooking with a metal spatula. I had done something wrong, dropped an egg or spilled milk, and she was yelling at me. My brother was nearby and laughed. She immediately turned and hit him in the arm with the spatula. It split his skin and he bled. I think she felt bad, though, afterward.
What Javier had was a thick leather belt. He pulled me up first by my skinny left arm so that he could get at the back at my legs. Smack! It was sharp and hard and it hurt like hell.
“Ay!” I yelled.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
“That’s . . . what . . . you . . . get,” he said, a smack between each word.
My brother went running and caught only one in the back of his legs.
I wriggled free of Javier and ran crying, “Mami, mami,” and “It’s not fair,” all the way to my bed.
My brother cried and then stopped to listen to me cry, then he would cry again. I did the same, listening to him in the darkness. My sister, who had been listening to the radio, immediately got in her own bed and began crying with us.
Later, my mother came in to say good night and remind us to say our prayers. She kissed me on the forehead and said, “You see. Javier is a man. You have to listen and respect him.”
I had a great time reading with a couple of my Hit List: The Best of Latino Mysteryhomeboys Carlos Hernandez and Sergio Troncoso for the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, on July 12. We went a-riding up there together. The actual reading was at Que Chula es Puebla, a charming Mexican restaurant with great guac and tacos al carbon. As well as gin and tonic. (Yeah, I wanted to drink margaritas before a reading, but then thought better of it. Maybe next time.) Thanks again to the lovely people at HVW for having us — and to Sergio, for arranging the whole thing, and for driving!
Per the recent epidemic of star deaths, the latest issue of AsininePoetry.com contains the obligatory commentary you’ve come to know and mildly kind of like, just a little:
That was also the summer our cousin Javier, from my mother’s side, came to stay with us. He was from PR and had a wife and baby girl back there. He was in New York to find a job and a place to live, then he would send for them. He wore U-shirts and was thin like Jesus and had afro hair and a chiba on his chin. And he preferred to speak Spanish. When he spoke in English we could barely understand him.
I liked cousin Javier at first. He taught me how to play geography. We would sit in the living room with a world atlas that Mami had bought from a neighbor for ten dollars. Javier opened to a page and said in his accent, “Portugal.” Then he would slide the atlas to me. It was tough because I had to figure out what he was saying and also look for the place on the big map.
“Portugal!” he said.
“Awright,” said Javier, and he looked at me with his eyes that were green like boogers. Then he said, “Ecuador.”
I was glad to be learning new things, and Javier seemed happy to be able to teach me. He smoked a cigarette and drank beer while I was looking for Ecuador.
But when I heard him and Mami in the kitchen it didn’t sound like he liked us.
“Estos no tienen respeto,” he said. “They ain’t got no respect.”
Respect was my mother’s favorite virtue. You were no good if you didn’t have respect — for your elders, for the priests and the nuns, for teachers, for the landlord. You had to have respect! She agreed completely with Javier.
“Si,” she said, between puffs of her cigarette, and who could blame her? My father was around, but only in the afternoon. For the most part, there was no man in the house, no one to discipline us. So she agreed with him, even when he focused on me, the youngest.
“These kids don’t know how to behave,” he would say, in his thick accent, “and Jimmy he’s the freshest one.”
“Si,” I would hear my mother say, in her own thick accent. “He’s a fresh one. Mr. Ants in His Pants.”
My mother called me that because I had broken her plaster panther statue, her plaster unicorn statue, and her plaster clown set. My hair was always a mess, and I could never keep my shirt inside my pants. Every time I went down the stairs of our second story walk-up it was at a run.