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

initial week in New York, I’d found a job at a florist shop on Broadway on the Upper West Side, where during those first several days, I must have tied thousands of pine cones onto Christmas wreaths with bits of wire. Soon I was renting a tiny bedroom in a nearby apartment too. After Christmas, six days a week, I was up at dawn to drive the florist’s van down to the wholesale flower market on Twenty-Eighth Street in Chelsea to pick up the flower orders. Most of these came packed inside long cartons, wrapped in wet newspapers from all over the world: Colombia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Ecuador, South Korea, Costa Rica, Haiti. Occasionally the tropical flowers, birds-of-paradise, heart-shaped red anthuriums with long yellow stamens, heliconia, voluptuously fragrant tuberoses, came wrapped in Guatemalan newspapers, and some of the orchids, packed inside crates with moist mossy jungle earth, were from Guatemala too. Down in the basement workroom, I’d spend the rest of the morning sorting flowers and snapping thorns off rose stems, while constantly enduring raunchy homosexual teasing from the owner, Steve, a diminutive, hirsute Jewish Buddhist horticulturalist with pointy elf ears, and Howie, the Cheerful Fat Slob Master Flower Arranger, as I’d privately nicknamed him. They weren’t a couple, but they gave the impression that in the past they’d had a thing. Sweetie Pie, Howie used to call me. Upstairs, the ferny, earthy, nutrient-enriched smells of deep forest rot, sweet blossoms, and photosynthetic saturation of the flower shop’s misty air made it like being inside a cloud forest. Everyone kept their jackets or sweaters on except for Howie, who always worked in an old flannel shirt, usually wildly unbuttoned, sliding off and baring his blotchy ham-hock shoulder or exposing hairless belly blubber, the maw of his navel hanging out over his belt like a screaming Edvard Munch face. Downstairs in the workroom he’d lewdly tease me: Is Sweetie Pie a cherry pie or a blue-ball pie? and Steve would cackle. Shut the fuck up, I was always shouting at them. Leave me alone! Shut the fuck up! I’m not a fag! I’d pretend to menace them with flower-cutting shears. They’d run into corners as if to hide, laughing. They made me laugh, but I made them laugh more. I regarded their harassing antics as part of the “New York experience.”

Around noon, I’d go back out in the van again until nearly evening, delivering flowers and plants. Often, after apartment building doormen put down their intercom phones and waved me in, I brought flowers up in elevators that opened directly into vestibules that provided peeks into some of the most opulent homes in Manhattan. One elevator man gruffly advised me to show some respect and remove the Red Sox baseball cap I was wearing because the apartment I was bringing flowers to had once belonged to Babe Ruth. Usually I handed the deliveries over to servants but sometimes to women, mostly older, who came out to receive them and who looked so mesmerizingly stylish, artificial, glamorous, women who went outside in winter wearing Russian novel fur hats, long mink coats, hands plunged into muffs, uncanny faces glowing like glasses of neon milk, intense red lips. One afternoon, Yoko Ono, arm in arm with John Lennon, came walking toward me up Broadway, she looking so magnificently leonine with her streaming black hair and darkly lustrous midthigh fur coat, her powerful tread pulling John nearly weightlessly along, pale and waifish in his skimpy black leather jacket and little black cap, my face went red hot, as if I’d been caught spying on their intimacy. I delivered bouquets to young women barely older than myself who lived in apartment buildings without doormen and buzzed me in or came down to the grimy, small lobby in sweatpants to open the door, usually delighted to be getting flowers, lifting the paper cones to their noses and happily exclaiming, some even blushing. Those were the girls who’d earnestly apologize for not being able to give a bigger tip or sometimes any tip at all. But some received their flowers with a smirk or a fed-up roll of the eyes, carrying their bouquet back to the elevator like a dead rabbit by the hind feet.

I was out making deliveries, stuck in clogged traffic near Lincoln Center that February afternoon, when I heard on the van’s radio that a massive earthquake had struck Guatemala. Tears blurred my eyes; I had to find somewhere to pull over. Abuelita, the rest of my family, my cousins, had they survived? I hadn’t seen Abuelita since the summer after seventh grade, when we’d gone down for the last time with my mother. That was the summer of Abuelita’s eightieth birthday party, held in her house and to which all the shopgirls were invited, and there was a marimba band and some traditional Guatemalan dancing. Watching Mamita dance like the village Maya girls, hands clasped behind her back, doing those hopping steps, one heel lifted back at a time, was always a little embarrassing. Whenever I go back to Guatemala and stop into Juguetelandia, I say hello to Amalia, who has worked in the store for at least half a century, so withered and stooped in her blue store smock, her smile like a twist of lipsticked yarn; she always first asks about my mother and then enthuses over that party of thirty years ago like it was the single most festive night of her long life: Ay, Frankie, it was so alegre. Do you remember how even Abuelita danced? It was at that party, in front of everybody, that Abuelita reached up to pinch my cheek and pronounced me the most Montejo of the Montejos, and that made me so happy.

The quake had hit the capital hard, but in the provinces the situation was catastrophic: avalanches, roads and villages buried. In Guatemala City, homes and buildings had collapsed, including a hotel blocks from our family stores … thousands feared dead … still