The Best American Essays 2016 Page 7

  Nguyen we just called Gook. Ten Bears became Ten Bears Fucking. Black we called White and White we called Black and Green we called Baby-shit and Brown was just Shit. Bevilacqua was Aqua Velva, which was getting off pretty light as far as names went so sometimes we called him Bologna or Ballsack.

  Leaks had a leaky dick, and Lebowitz was a lesbian, to which he would proclaim loudly that he was indeed a lesbian, trapped in a man’s body, another lame joke that we all laughed at because there was nothing else to do, no other way to get through the long days than to laugh and name each other dicks and diseases and dysfunctions. At eighteen we were barely grown boys wielding weapons of war while bombs went off in our little part of the world and the ground shook beneath us. Our drill sergeants were constantly calling us cocks and cunts, threatening us with physical violence. We were scared all the time—of our drill sergeants, of the base where we had been sent to train, of the future—and to keep the fear from flying out we flung bravado at one another in our choice of words. We were all dysfunctional, we thought, for we were told so by the drill sergeants all the time, from the first long days when we arrived at Fort Sill and cried sometimes in this harsh new place, through the hot afternoons of drill and ceremony, marching in big round wheels under the summer sun, all the called commands a way to discipline us, make us move as one unit instead of fifty different men, like the naming was to break us down so we could pull closer together; through Basic Rifle Marksmanship and the hand grenade course and the bayonet course where we stabbed dummies of Russian soldiers; through med-training where we learned to treat sucking chest wounds and splint broken limbs and administer antidotes for anthrax and sarin and mustard gas; through morning eight-mile runs and evening mail call and even through the too-short nights. We could shoot and fire and knock out hundreds of push-ups but were constantly derided, a strategy meant to demean us but also demand that we rise above such degradation.

  I’ll say we did. That a man can get used to being called dickhead or dumbfuck or some other designation, to be named by his nationality or upbringing, some physical attribute like Aaronson’s Dicknose or Biobaku’s almost blue skin. Twenty-five years later I laugh at being called Crankshaft and Cumshot. Benavidez’s big belly did seem to hold a lot of burritos, and when we graduated and were waiting to be released for the last time, some of us to go to college and some of us to war, we shook hands hard. I’ll miss you, Motherfucker, we said, and other words that only made sense in light of living with fifty men for months at a time, hearing farts and of football and girls they’d fucked, all the things men say to make themselves sound stronger.

  Perhaps we were scared of letting one another know how we felt so we hid everything behind a screen. Perhaps all our words are only screens for what we might say if we were better people or perhaps we only use words that fit what world we find ourselves in. Our voices were hoarse from yelling all the time, making us sound much older than we were, and we had to shave every morning now, look at ourselves in the mirror and see the men we might become.

  In our final days of training, as we wound down toward release and finally began to relax a little, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we were all called together so the drill sergeants could tell us we were going to war. We stood there in stunned silence until someone—Talleywhacker, maybe, or Hot Ding-a-ling, said we’d fuck that fucking towel-headed sandnigger right in the fucking asshole is what we would do, and we all cheered with our hoarse voices standing there in our young boots.

  But later that night after lights out, as we lay on our bunks in the darkness, we had no words to contain how we felt. The silence stood around us like stones. We could hear bombs off in the distant part of the base, as if the war had already come. The windows rattled softly in their panes. There were no jokes, no called names. Only a hundred quiet conversations, Alarid or Benavidez or Talley whispering across the big bay dorm, “Hey Crenshaw, hey man, are you scared?”

  JAQUIRA DÍAZ

  Ordinary Girls

  FROM The Kenyon Review

  We started talking about dying long before the first woman jumped. What our parents would do once we were gone. What Mr. Nuñez, the assistant principal at Nautilus Middle School, would say about us on the morning announcements, how many of our friends would cry right there on the spot. The songs they would dedicate to us on Power 96 so that all of Miami Beach could mourn us—Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” DRS’s “Gangsta Lean.” Who would go to our funerals—boys who’d broken our hearts, boys whose hearts we’d broken.

  She was a French woman, the first jumper, that’s what people said. She didn’t live in Southgate Towers—Papi’s high-rise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard—but her boyfriend did. According to the boyfriend’s neighbors, they’d been having problems—she drank a lot, he drank a lot, they fought. That night, the neighbors told Papi, she’d been banging on the door for a while, calling the boyfriend’s name when he wouldn’t open. My father was in the security booth outside the lobby when he started getting calls from some of the Southgate residents. They thought they’d heard a crash, something falling from the sky, the air-conditioning unit on the roof maybe. Or maybe someone had flung something heavy off their balcony. Nobody had expected it to be a person, least of all my father.

  Our planning started way before the French woman jumped, during a four-month stint living with my mother in Normandy Isle, across the street from Normandy Park. One day after school, Boogie and I were on the swings, rocking back and forth, digging our sneakers into the dirt and kicking off. We talked about how we’d do it, imagined we could make it look like a tragic accident. We’d get hit by a Metro bus while crossing the street, which would be easy since nobody expected a girl to just step in front of a bus in the middle of the afternoon. The park would be alive with people—ballers on the courts, kids on the merry-go-round, boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk, hood rats on the corner waiting for who knows what. We’d smoke one last stolen cigarette, flick the butt before we jumped the fence out of the park. Then we’d take care of it, the business of dying.

  Some girls took sleeping pills and then called 911, or slit their wrists the wrong way and waited to be found in the bathtub. But we didn’t want to be like those ordinary girls. We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.

  Ordinary girls didn’t drive their parents’ cars off the Fifth Street Bridge into Biscayne Bay, or jump off the back of a pickup in the middle of I-95, or set themselves on fire. Ordinary girls didn’t fall from the sky.

  We spent most afternoons that way, in the park, smoking my mother’s cigarettes, drinking her beer. Sometimes we paid the neighborhood tecatos to get us bottles of strawberry Cisco, or Mad Dog 20/20, or St. Ides Special Brew. Occasionally Kilo, my boyfriend, and his cousin Papo would show up with a bag of Krypto and smoke us out. We’d lie on the bunk beds, listen to DJ Laz’s power mix, and laugh our asses off. Until the effect wore off and we were ourselves again—reckless, and unafraid, and pissed off at our parents for not caring that we spent most of our time on the streets or drunk or high, for being deadbeats and scutterheads. But it wasn’t just our parents. We were pissed off at the whole fucking world—our teachers, the principal, the school security, the DARE cop. All those people, they just didn’t get that there was no way in hell we could care about homework, or getting to school on time—or at all—when our parents were on drugs or getting stabbed, and we were getting arrested or jumped or worse. Only three months before, Mikey, Kilo’s best friend, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

  One Saturday morning, after a long night of drinking and smoking out on the beach, the four of us walked back to Normandy Isle in a haze. It was so early the sky was still gray and the Metro buses had just started running. The sidewalk along Normandy Drive was secluded except for the four of us. For a while we just walked, sand in our sneakers, our mouths dry, my hair frizzy from the beach air, Kilo
holding my hand, Papo and Boogie holding hands in front of us, the four of us marching down Normandy Drive, laughing and fucking up all the lyrics to Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di.” It was our thing—pretending we were beach bums, that nothing could touch us, that life would always be like this. Carefree and limitless and full of music. We didn’t yet know that Miami Beach wouldn’t always be ours, that even in a few years when we were all gone, we would still, always, lay claim to it, that we would never truly belong anywhere else.

  We had just gotten to Normandy Park when we spotted this kid riding his bike across the street. He was dark-skinned, with hair shaved close to the scalp, wearing a wifebeater and baggy jean shorts. I knew him from the neighborhood. Everybody called him Bambi. He was older than us, out of high school already, but he looked young.

  When I glanced at Kilo, his face had changed, turned the color of paper. His lips were pressed together, and I could see the vein in his temple throbbing like it did when he was fighting with his mom, or when he was about to throw down. We all stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Kilo let go of my hand, pulled out his pack of Newports, and lit one. He took a long drag, then rubbed at his eye with the back of his hand.

  “Y’all know that guy?” Kilo asked.

  “That’s Bambi,” I said.

  “Doesn’t he look just like Mikey?” Kilo asked, but nobody said a word.

  Back in my room, the four of us piled up on the bunk beds. Kilo and I sat side by side on the bottom bunk, our backs against the wall, and Boogie and Papo fell asleep on the top. After a while, Kilo leaned over and laid his head on my lap, the vein in his temple still throbbing. I put my hand on his head, listened to him breathing, and after a while I noticed he had tears in his eyes. I wiped them away with my thumb, but they kept coming. He wrapped his arms around my waist awkwardly like he needed to hold on to something but didn’t know how. This was not the Kilo I knew.

  The Kilo I knew threw up gang signs and wore baggy jeans and wifebeaters and high-top Air Jordans. He was tattooed and foulmouthed and crazy. He looked at people hard, laughed loudly, talked back to everybody, played streetball, and dunked on half the guys in Normandy Park. The Kilo I knew smoked blunts, drank Olde English 800 by the quart, talked dirty, cracked his knuckles, sucker-punched a guy twice his size, tagged all over the back of the Metro bus, got kicked out of school.

  We were like that for a long time, Kilo crying into my lap, holding me, and me not able to say a single word. While I hated seeing him that way, the truth is it also made dying seem like more of an option. And I realized that that was exactly what I wanted—a love like that. I wanted somebody who loved me so much my death would break her.

  The first time, I was eleven.

  I was living with Mami in South Beach. She’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia three years before and was on a cocktail of antipsychotics and anxiety medications. She was also using cocaine. Our nights together were unpredictable. Sometimes my mother slept for sixteen hours straight. Sometimes she paced around the apartment talking to herself, laughing, screaming at me for doing God knows what. Sometimes she threw plates across the room, or threatened to burn me with a hot iron, or gave me a full-blown ass-whipping. I was five-feet-six by the time I was eleven, four inches taller than my mother, something she loved to remind me of as she was kicking my ass—the bigger I got, the bigger my beat-down had to be. Eventually I started hitting her back. We came to blows regularly.

  That weekend I was alone with my mother. She was manic, talking to herself, screaming at me, insisting that I’d stolen a pair of her heels. She searched the entire apartment, turning over cushions, upending tables, emptying all the drawers onto the floor, pulling hangers out of the closets. When she didn’t find her shoes, she made me search, standing behind me as I opened and closed and opened and closed drawers, as I turned over mattresses and emptied out the bathroom cabinets. I did this over and over, and every time I didn’t find the pair of heels, she’d slap the back of my head, harder each time. Until I refused to search anymore.

  I knew what it would mean, to defy my mother, but I did it anyway. I turned to her, balled my hands into fists, took a step back, and said, “I didn’t take your goddamned shoes.” I turned to leave, and that’s when I felt the whack on the back of my head—hard, much harder than before—and then a shower of blows.

  She beat me until I fell, and after I fell, and stopped only when she was good and ready.

  Afterward she put on multiple layers of makeup, slipped into a slinky silver dress, found a substitute pair of heels, and announced that she was going dancing.

  I was still on the floor when she walked out the door, couldn’t have gotten up even if I’d wanted to.

  I got up a few hours later and took my mother’s pills, all of them—antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills. I washed them down with half a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I’d heard the stories about toddlers who’d gotten poisoned with Drano, or detergent, or bleach, but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that too. I was determined to die.

  Later I sat in the living room, waited for my mother to come home.

  When she found me, I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, throwing up blue.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, or making my way from the living room to the kitchen, or being on my knees.

  There is the faint memory of riding in the ambulance, sitting up on the stretcher, someone’s hand pressing hard against my chest, shaking me, bringing me back from wherever I was.

  There is a woman’s voice: What is your name? Open your eyes. What did you take? Don’t fall asleep.

  There I am sinking, sinking. Then I’m gagging, a tube up my nostril, down my throat. Don’t fight it. Don’t cough. Swallow.

  There is chaos, the shuffle of people all around me, moving me, prodding me, holding me up until I’m throwing up charcoal into a plastic container.

  There I am: stomach thrusting against the back of my throat until my eyeballs are almost bursting until there’s charcoal vomit splattered down the front of my T-shirt until there’s nothing left inside me and I realize I’m in a hospital and I’m in a hospital bed and there is my mother and there is my father and there I am. I am eleven and I am alive.

  I used to imagine that the French woman knew something about pain, about planning. That she had tried before, as a child, as a teenager. That she sat in her bedroom and listened to whatever was on the radio, wrote poems about darkness, dreamed of jumping off bridges and arsenic cocktails and death by electrocution. Because she was no ordinary girl.

  I’d like to think that someone loved her—before she jumped, and after—even if she didn’t know it.

  Or maybe she did.

  That Halloween we decided to throw a party. We spent the night at Kilo’s and woke up around 2:00 p.m., crusty-eyed and cotton-mouthed and ready for trouble. I called up my aunt Titi, who lived a short walk from Kilo’s neighborhood—and smoked weed all day every day—and told her we needed a place for a party. An hour later we were at her apartment on Harding Avenue, smoking her Krypto and listening to her ’80s freestyle. We called everyone we knew with the details. Bring your own weed, we told them, and wear a costume.

  Whenever somebody’s mom would ask about a chaperone, we put Titi on the phone. She gave them her address and phone number, said please and thank you, laughed easily. She was every teenage hoodlum’s dream, my aunt. Like an older best friend who would cover for you, go to court with you when you didn’t want your parents to find out you got caught stealing at Woolworth’s or the bodega around the corner, who acted like a teenager even though she was in her twenties. She partied with us, smoked us out, then took us to the movies or skinny-dipping on South Beach. She taught us not just how to fight but how to fight dirty, to bite the soft spots on the neck and inner thigh, to pull off earrings and hair weaves, to use anything as a weapon: pens and pencils, keys, a sock full of nickels, Master combination locks.

  T
hat night Boogie and I dressed up as toddlers, parting our hair into pigtails, dotting our faces with eyeliner freckles, baby-blue pacifiers hanging from the gold chains around our necks. We wore Mickey Mouse and Pooh Bear pajamas, sucked on Charms Blow Pops, drank malt liquor out of baby bottles. The apartment filled up with our friends from Nautilus, Kilo’s friends from the barrio, Titi’s weedhead friends. We sat in a circle on the living room floor and passed around a Dutch, blasting House of Pain on Titi’s stereo, until Kilo and I got bored of watching everybody jump around and stole a dozen eggs from her kitchen.

  Outside, we climbed onto the hood of somebody’s old Chevy Caprice and flung eggs at trick-or-treaters, some old scutterhead stumbling down the street, a guy in a pickup. Afterward, when all the eggs were splattered down Seventy-Seventh and Harding, we jumped off the car, Kilo all sweaty, the malt liquor in my baby bottle already warm. Kilo lit two cigarettes, handed me one. I slurred a faded version of Lil’ Suzy’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” and we started slow-dancing right there on the sidewalk, Kilo breathing smoke into my neck—danced in the yard next to Titi’s apartment building and collapsed onto the grass. Then we lay there, side by side, laughing and laughing at nothing, at everything. Everybody else seemed so far away, even though we lay there listening to their coming and going, the building’s front door opening, closing, footsteps scurrying across the lawn, our friends coming over to say, “You got grass all up in your pigtails,” and, “I think they passed out,” and, “The hell you doing down there?”