For Love of the Dollar. J.M. Servin

was almost empty. I finished it off. I stayed for a long while, and nobody said another word to me. Belches. Suddenly, Papi looked at me from the corner of his eye. Neighbors walked by with an attitude as if they were the only ones on the street. Almost all of them were black. Some entered the store, others paused at the corners, looked around, while some others would run by or communicate shouting. Men and women glistened with sweat and aromatic creams. The women would wear short pants stretched tight across their asses and suggestive blouses without sleeves, braless; the men ambled about bare chested, some of them rubbing their bellies. The heat on that asphalt beach was a good enough motive to take out one’s bad mood on the kids and curse from one sidewalk to another. The Mexicans let fly insults in a well-rehearsed English learned from the reproaches of others. One of them asked me a question in a falsetto vernacular. He spoke with a hint of a ranchero’s nasality. He sported boots and a hat, which helped transform him into an imported urban cowboy who would never return to wearing huaraches and a straw hat.

      “What part of Mexico you from?”

      “From the capital.”

      Two of my countrymen standing nearby groaned in unison while remaining focused on the game.

      The game continued in silence. When it finished, I said good-bye, and everyone murmured a “see you later” without removing their gazes from the dominoes.

      In the kitchen, I opened a beer and put the other one in the refrigerator. While going up to my room, I savored the coolness trapped in the staircase. The white walls and the high ceiling helped with the ventilation. I sat at my desk in order to go over my drafts. I wanted to have some fun by writing something that would contradict my sister’s accusations—that’s to say, something grandiloquent, something that could be passed off as committed and poetic. But I gave up, once again confronting my own notebooks filled with false starts. Yet another battle between duty and desire.

      $

      The streets at the start of the evening changed into a furious soundboard. Sirens. Noises and music wove links, at times imperceptible due to the enraged tirades of rappers. It all seemed like an invocation to tribal identities that responded with delight to the street’s schizophrenia adorned with graffiti. Tone and rhythm with resonations inspired by Lucky Cienfuegos and Miguel Piñero: those capos of the underworld’s poetry. Odors of fried food, sea, incense, and the immense farts from smokestacks browned the summer breeze. International flags fluttered from windows, entryways, and cable TV dishes that adorned immigrant hierarchies. The Bronx and its shouting. People posturing from fear. Jokesters. People warning you. Where the devil prowls at all hours is where the crime sheets publish the most-read epitaphs.

      I would perceive a neighborhood that didn’t progress: it lurched. From one form of barbarism to another, it purified in its own special way an implacable, productive fundamentalism. The immigrant hordes surrendered themselves to it wholly, with customs from the old country and other stubborn habits. Living under the same law—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—the interpretations of God’s word separated and singled out folks. If advanced societies organized themselves through exclusion, the Bronx was a tumor to dig out. Here, where one could see the distant skyscrapers, one had a free pass to the violence of machismo.

      Back then, I had no idea how many months would pass by before I served my time as an immigrant.

      $

      I awoke at dawn, hungry and hungover. I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. In two hours they would open the store. The hurried clacking of heels resounded from the street, and in the distance, dogs barking, electronic drum beats, and car alarms. I paused for a moment, wondering if Norma had returned to say good-bye to me but, upon seeing me sound asleep, had opted to not do so. She had saved enough during the year in order to go to Italy and visit her daughter. Norma worked as a nanny in a town next to the Bronx, up north, in the county of Westchester. It was a place that was immaculate, peaceful, and desolate—the area where wealthy white people lived. She believed that a brother who “wrote” would make her stay in the United States less lonely. She had read only a few music reviews that I wrote early on for a newspaper in the capital. It’s certain that she assumed I hung out with important people. Almost all of her information came from letters my other brothers had sent her, and they knew about as much as she did. She presumed that I was working on a highway that would get me far away from the slums and mediocrity. She never imagined that the majority of my writing was a result of all that. She also didn’t know that the majority of the material had been rejected for that reason, among others. Plus, she hadn’t seen my file with clippings and photos from the lurid crime pages. She believed what she tried best to believe and feared digging any deeper. Nothing but pure intuition. We never talked about me.

       CHAPTER THREE

       In which...the landlord’s son is revealed to be the Video Game Hero...Reluctant Roommate...and Protector of the Realm.

      Mark spent several days without appearing in the Bronx. Rose shared this information with me while we had lunch in the backyard. Sandra hadn’t mentioned this during our recent light-night sessions, and I didn’t notice the usual noise that once emanated from the basement studio was now gone. No more complaints about someone plundering the groceries. Until then I hadn’t understood Norma’s taciturn way when it came to waiting for news. Despite everything, the atmosphere in the house was now agreeable; the dog days no longer penetrated walls and windows, and Joe and Norma weren’t at each other. An ideal circumstance for weekends, without a doubt. Sandra would stay in her room, and we probably wouldn’t see her until dinner. Rose exaggerated her concerns, but she was shaken up enough about the matter to not even take her dosage of Valium.

      Mark was all grown up, twenty-eight years old, married to a Californian woman who gave off airs as an intellectual. She was working at Condomania until she could land a better gig. With a BFA in interior design, money wasn’t something that worried Carol a whole lot, especially not while her parents continued to send her a monthly check to cover her expenses. Mark preferred expensive restaurants. His friendly look, clean-shaven features, and gift of the gab as a salesman were his calling cards for that moment when he would eventually ask if there were any openings for waiters.

      “He’s probably with his friends, you know him. Have you called around?” I said in order to reinforce Rose’s suspicions and assumptions, before going upstairs to take a shower, feeling woozy from the tedious chatter from someone who needed someone else to take care of her own problem.

      All of Mark’s friends lived in Brooklyn and he spent the majority of his time with them, except for those moments when they would get together in his studio in order to play video games or watch the Oscars, all of them dressed up like movie stars. Mark always chose Robert De Niro in his role from The Godfather. Joe would dress up as a John Wayne type of cowboy, while Carol dressed up as Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. The cast from The Rocky Horror Picture Show delivered to your door.

      Mark liked smoking pot with Joe. Without speaking too many words, they understood each other. When Mark would bring his friends over, Joe would go downstairs to the basement studio. They loved pizza, fruity soft drinks, and chocolate, and apart from video games and computers, they had exchanged basketballs and bicycles for bongs.

      Mark always had a lot of excuses to not be at home. They almost always had to do with job hunts or culinary night classes. The last time, he had signed up for a course at an institute for French pastries. He dropped out after three months, and with a loan from his mother, he opened a pastry shop on the outskirts of New York, close to where his maternal grandparents lived. He found Carol and they spent almost a year as his grandparents’ tenants. When they returned to the Bronx, Mark was depressed and irritable, and Carol stopped talking to all of us. Rose’s anger dissipated not too long after, though her savings had been depleted from the parties, rental items, burned cakes, cake decorations, and equipment with which they’d started the business.

      Mark was confident that he would soon be a prosperous restaurateur, or at least that’s what he would claim each time he started a new job as a waiter.

      Carol wanted to believe him, and,