Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

they lived in a small concrete house like all the others on their street. Their next-door neighbor brought stray dogs home and kept them on his rooftop, feeding the dogs to fatten them up so that later he could mix their meat with lamb into the birria he sold from a sidewalk stand. He kept his sheep in a little pen in his backyard. At night Lulú could hear the dogs innocently barking, excited to be fed.

Those were the years when Lulú only wore rock band T-shirts, ripped jeans, and a steel bead in her tongue. Her best friend, Janeth, talked her into trying crack when they were fifteen. They rented a room in a cheap by-the-hour pension, Janeth showing Lulú how to cook the drug in a spoon. She and Janeth met to smoke crack four or five times, as if they were rehearsing to become crack addicts, but Lulú didn’t like it. Crack made her feel nauseous and paranoid, and since then, she says, she hasn’t even tried pot again.

So then what is this message that has just come from Lulú now resolute: “A gringo boy invite me to a party for ayahuasca. He move into house where my friend and her family live before. I am sad because now my friend they move to Yonker. Drugs scare me, so I think maybe no. But he seems like a good muchacho. Panchito, you ever take that drug?”

She’s asking me to give an opinion on whether she should accept this apparent housewarming party invitation from this good gringo muchacho or if she should go and take ayahuasca. She thinks no, maybe. When did she meet Ayahuasca Bro? I saw Lulú only the night before last.

I had better think about what I’m going to answer. I feel a little sick.

During one of our first conversations in Dunkin’ Donuts about her friend Brenda, the college student housekeeper with the boyfriend who pays her tuition, Lulú said that Brenda had decided to try to have a New York gringo-type relationship instead of a Mexican one. How are they different? I’d asked. Here in New York, she explained, the couples give each other freedom, but they have to be honest and talk about everything. In Mexico, she said—she slid her lips sideways, narrowed an eye—at least one part of the couple, the man, probably lies. It’s impossible, she said, to have an open relationship in Mexico because the man, almost always but probably the woman too, would become so jealous and angry. But the men, too many are violent too. You know how people say: He hit her, but it’s understandable because he was jealous. To be jealous is so stupid, said Lulú. I totally agree, I said. So, your friend is having an open relationship then. Yes, she said, Brenda’s boyfriend believes in open relationships. But that doesn’t mean he wants to sleep with other women, she said her friend had explained. He says he doesn’t want to because he loves Brenda. But if it happens that he has sex with another woman, or if Brenda does with another man, it is permitted, but only as long as they don’t hide it, they have to tell each other everything. My friend says that’s the way young people here have relationships.

Tell each other everything, sure, I repeated. Here in New York. Then I thought, Maybe that is how they have relationships now; what do I know about what the young couples are doing?

She said with a gentle firmness: Educated people, I think Brenda means.

During my freshman year of college, after I’d taken off into the city from that hotel out by LaGuardia instead of going home with my parents for the nearly monthlong Christmas vacation like I was supposed to, I stayed on in Manhattan, first at the family apartment of a friend from my dorm. When that college friend’s flight from Rochester, the nearest airport to Wagosh, was canceled because of a snowstorm, his parents sent a limousine to bring him all the way from Broener to the city, and knowing I planned to take a bus there in a couple of days to meet my parents, he invited me to come along and stay at his place. I’d never ridden in a limo before. It steadily ploughed through the blizzard and blowing snow like a coast guard cutter down the endless thruway all the way to New York City. This is real money, I realized for maybe the first time in my life. Here is what real money does. My friend’s family apartment was on Park Avenue, but he had his own little apartment attached to theirs with a private entrance. I never got to go upstairs where his parents and sisters lived, though once I saw his mother, looking like Cleopatra in a shiny black-and-gold dress, a long fur coat draped over her shoulders, coming down the stairs from that main apartment to the lobby.

I didn’t want to go back to Broener after the Christmas break. I couldn’t face being in my dorm, living on the same floor as the Adonis, where Abbie Schneider had practically moved into his room. The Adonis must have known that all I’d done with Abbie during our more than a month as a couple was make out until our lips were like chewed-on balloons, feel her up outside her bra, and JesusHChristdryfuckinghump. They must have shared some sweet laughs over that, mixing ridicule, bafflement, and hilarity as they cuddled in intimate bliss, she even faking pity and affectionately scolding him for having too much fun with his cruel mockery. Who else had they told? I was sure that if I had to go back to Broener again I could die from the humiliation of it. The city represented the chance for a new start, and though I really didn’t know how I was going to survive, I felt different to myself just walking out onto the city sidewalks. By the end of that