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

who when I was leaving said, If you were a girl, I’d go out with you, and she kissed me, leaving a pink cloudlet of lipstick on my cheek. My hair was now longer than ever, tangled and viny like I’d dreamed it could be, something like how Jim Morrison’s hair must have looked at the end of his life or even like Chantal Goya’s hair after wild sex. Everywhere I went in the city girls smiled at me, though nothing had happened with any of them. I’d developed a crush on Gail, who seemed to want to break up with her boyfriend who was never home anyway. Every evening I faithfully walked her horrible dogs in Riverside Park. Gail was an inch or two over five feet, with a fey prettiness and slanted sleepy eyes and wavy black hair that snaked to her bony hips, and like most New York waitresses, she wanted to be an actress. The other night I’d gone to meet her in the Dublin House after her waitressing shift. We were both a little drunk when she gestured toward another young woman in a red leather jacket and a so-called little black dress leaning against the back wall and said, I want to fuck her. I said, I want to be a lesbian. Gail laughed, put her small hands in my hair, and said, Too bad you’re not one, then. I’m ridiculous and pathetic, I thought, sitting opposite my uncle. My face felt hot and prickly. I lifted a cloth napkin over my face and pretended to sneeze. Frankie, estás bien? my uncle asked. I excused myself and went to the men’s room, where in the mirror I saw that my skin had slightly broken out in hives. I leaned over the sink splashing cold water over my face.

Over dessert, a sticky dark chocolate-and-cherry roll called Vampire Cake, I asked my uncle if I could come to Guatemala and stay in his house. What I was telling myself was that New York City is fucking me up, I should go to Guatemala to help the earthquake victims. He said, You know you are always welcome, Frankie, but I think it would be better if you went back to college first.

My uncle did know how to tell a story in a way that made you sense, in the nonsense cake he was baking, darker layers of frosting, which as soon as you tried to taste them with your finger turned to air. All I wanted my uncle to say was that I’ve always known Bert was an hijo de la gran puta, and my sister ruined her life by marrying him.

Ay Yoli, Tío Memo suddenly blurted. Pobrecita, la Yoli.

Sí, Tío, pobrecita, I practically cried out. Allowing myself that exclamation was like squeezing a sponge, and my eyes filled with tears that probably weren’t only for my mother.

A few weeks later I’d go to a barber, cut my hair short, and head back to Broener for the spring trimester. But by the next January I’d be back in New York, transferring into a special program at the New School.

As we were finishing our coffees, Tío Memo said something that took me by surprise. He said, That joven, not so joven anymore, turned up in Boston and found Yoli there.

Maybe because I’d been silently dwelling on my own problems, it didn’t occur to me to ask if this muchacho’s coming to Boston had happened before or after I was born.

When my uncle said a moment later that my mother had sent el joven away and told him not to bother her anymore, I sensed he was improvising. Who knows where he is now, said Tío Memo. Cuba, probably, and he guffawed at the idea of el joven ending up in Communist Cuba instead of Guatemala, the Little Land of the Free.

On some of those previous visits to Green Meadows, I’d asked my mother if she remembered her old friend who came to look for her in Boston. Every time I asked, she really did seem to think it over before shaking her head no or saying, Frankie, I don’t remember. Well, I’d said across the Scrabble board during our last visit, I don’t know if his name was René, Ramón, or Raul. Maybe his name was Rodrigo or Roberto. Maybe it was Juan, Tomás, Diego, Gonzalo, Miguel—

Miguel? she pronounced softly. What do you mean, Miguel? There was a quiet note of defiance in my mother’s voice.

Before I leave today, I’m going to ask my mother who Miguel was.

Mami, that tooth Daddy made for you? I ask. You still have it, right?

She doesn’t respond. She looks back at me as if she didn’t hear me and is waiting for me to resume our conversation.

One evening, when I was about eleven, when Bert had taken the family out to dinner, he presented Mamita with a velvet ring box. When she opened it, instead of a ring with a radiant gem, she found a radiant artificial tooth. But my mother seemed happy with her gift and laughed gaily with her napkin held over her mouth. She’d been going around with an Alfred E. Neuman smile for months, a gummy gap where a central incisor had been pulled. My father must have put all of his expertise into that tooth, trying to achieve perfection as his craft defined it.

You do remember that Daddy made a tooth for you, I ask, don’t you?

Yes, I do, Frankie, she says.

Smile, I say, and she smiles. Her front teeth all look pretty much the same, healthy considering her age. I can’t tell which one is the implant, though.

My father hated the words “false teeth.” What’s false about them? he’d growl at anyone who called them that. When you don’t get it right, that’s when it looks fake, I remember him shouting. A false tooth is a badly made tooth. I can spot one of those in somebody’s mouth from ten feet away!

Artificial tooth, prosthetic tooth,