I finished my Pepsi, then got myself another. Man, I loved drinking Pepsi. Everyone in Hollywood drank Coke, but not me, I drank Pepsi. I lit a cigarette. Then I opened Pifas’ letter. His handwriting wasn’t nearly as neat as Jaime’s but there was something about it—I liked it. There was a raised fist at the top of the letter—hand drawn. And under it, he’d written, “Fuckin’ A, Sammy.” Crazy. The guy was nuts. What in the hell was he doing fighting a war?
Ese Sammy—
Today I was todo agüitado. I mean, I was down. Down, down, baby. I mean, bummed out. Bummed outa my fuckin skull and shit. Maybe it’s because my patrol leader es bien gacho. Sammy, I mean gacho. A gacho gabacho. He’s from Maine. Fuckin Maine—you should hear him talk. Baby, that’s some shit he talks, but it ain’t fuckin English. What an asshole! ¡Híjole! If I get my ass shot, he’s not fuckin gonna cry. Nope. Just one less pfc to take care of. Not that he takes care of me, just fuckin yells at me that Charlie’s gonna shoot all our asses cuz someone like me’s not paying attention. He fuckin laughs. Thinks it’s funny that a Mexican like me comes from a barrio called Hollywood. Fuck him. See what I mean. Today, I’m one pissed off mother. I am, Sammy. It’s just that I’m tired. Damn, I’m tired.
It stopped raining today. Rains all the damned time, Sammy. People in New Mexico don’t know shit about hot. Not till they’ve been to Nam. So it’s not raining today and I have two days R&R unless something happens. Something always happens. And it’ll rain again. God, Sammy, I just wanna sleep. So that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna sleep. I’m gonna get loaded, and then I’m gonna sleep. Look, I’m not fuckin gonna talk about what’s happening here. I figure you know as much as I do. No T.V.s here, Sammy. All I know is what I’m told to do. And damnit, I do it. Just one thing, Sammy. You go to college, and you fuckin stay there. I don’t want you dreamin blood the way I fuckin dream blood. Maybe someday, you’ll tell yourself, God, I could fuckin kill that sonofabitch. Killin him ain’t gonna do shit but give you dreams. Some guys here, they dream bad. You ever seen a dog dream? They whine, and they whine, and they tremble like they’re gonna fuckin fall apart. That’s how it is with some of the guys here. They dream like that.
Gigi writes. Man, Sammy, I love that girl. I do. I asked her, I asked her if I made it home, would she marry me. She said she’d think about it. That she’d really think about it. I think that’s a good sign. I mean, if Gigi wanted to, she’d tell me just to go fuck myself. So, I figure that if she’s thinking about it, that’s a good sign.
Don’t you think so, Sammy?
Listen, sometimes I tell myself I’m gonna make it, and go back home, and kiss the fuckin ground. And kiss Gigi and marry her. I love Hollywood, Sammy. I love that place. I never knew I could love a place like that.
Look, if you go out with René and Reyes or Jaime, have a beer for me. And if you run into any of those chucos from Chiva Town, kick their asses for me.
Da le gas. Da le mucho gas, baby.
Pifas
I put out my cigarette. Pifas hadn’t heard about Reyes. That he was dead. He didn’t know about Jaime either. Hell, I wasn’t gonna tell him. Not me. The hell with it. Let him think that everything was just the way he left it. That’s what he needed to think. Why the hell not? A place always stays just the way you left it. Yeah.
I finished my Pepsi.
I tried to picture Pifas in Viet Nam. I tried to picture what he looked like. All I could see was a boy on a bus who looked fifteen. With big hands. Pifas at the bus station. But I couldn’t picture him in a uniform. Okay, I’d seen that picture he’d sent Gigi but it was like he was just playing. It was just a game. But it wasn’t. I watched the evening news with my father. That’s what we did, my dad and me, watched the evening news. And Walter Cronkite, with that kind voice of his, he would tell us how many soldiers had died. But he never told us why. And anyway, they weren’t soldiers, not to me. They were just guys like Pifas. They weren’t all that different from me. Or maybe I was just kidding myself. What the hell did a guy who’d never left Las Cruces, New Mexico, know? I didn’t know jack shit. I kept staring at Pifas’ letter. It’s like I just couldn’t stop staring at his words. It was like I was in love with his words. I was in love with them. And then, I see my little sister standing next to me.
“What are you doing, Sammy?”
I was in love with her voice. That was another thing I was in love with. “I was reading a letter from Pifas.”
She nodded. “I like him,” she said. She liked everybody. She was like my father.
“Yeah,” I said, “he’s something, that Pifas.”
“When is he coming home?”
I didn’t say anything. “Read me a story,” I said. That was our new thing. I’d stopped reading to her. Now, she’d started reading to me.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll read to you.” She knew I was sad.
After the riot. After the school board changed the dress code. After all that, things seemed calmer at Las Cruces High. Calmer didn’t actually mean calm—it just meant that things didn’t feel like they were going to explode anymore. And we didn’t have to wear belts, and every day I wore a t-shirt because the weather had already turned, and now I could wear t-shirts to school. I could actually do that. But I still tucked them in and I still wore a belt. But mostly everybody else just went crazy with the things they wore. Dresses got short. Jesus. God. They got real short. If they were too short, girls were still sent home. But, God, they were shorter now. Gigi had given me a tie-dyed t-shirt—to celebrate the new dress code. I didn’t get her anything. She wasn’t my girlfriend. But I should’ve gotten her something. But I didn’t. I wore my tie-dyed t-shirt once a week. One day I even wore tennis shoes without socks. But when I came home, my dad kind of went mental. He said people were going to think I was too poor to buy socks. He said only gringos did that sort of thing, anyway. “A Mexican man,” he said, “wears socks.” Yeah, yeah, Dad. Okay, so I never did that again. But you shoulda seen the things people wore. Sandals—never could wear those before—and beads—on ankles, on wrists, around necks, beads everywhere. So now, at Las Cruces High we looked exactly like everybody else in America. This was why we’d fought to change the dress code—for the freedom to look like everybody else.
Colonel Wright, man, he’s freaking, he’s fucking freaking, especially because all the guys are growing their hair long. Except for me. Well, mine was getting a little long, not too long. I was experimenting. “It’s getting in your eyes,” my dad said. I’d push it back. It would fall back down into my eyes. “Maybe you should get a haircut,” he said. “Maybe you should get a haircut,” Mrs. Apodaca said. “Maybe you should get a haircut,” my boss at the Dairy Queen said. Jesus, I only worked there once a week. God. So, maybe I was growing it long. Maybe I was. Even though I didn’t really like it that much, but it didn’t look bad. Gigi said it looked good. If it would’ve looked bad, Gigi would’ve told me. She shot straight, Gigi did. Colonel Wright just shook his head. He really hated me now. He blamed me for the whole thing. “The Ringleader”—that’s what he called me. Blamed me for everything. “You and Miss Freedom of Speech” (that would be Gigi). Yeah, he decided he hated us. The demise of western culture. That’s what he was saying in his classes. Boys with long hair, girls wearing pants. To school! God! Yeah, yeah. He and Mrs. Jackson said crap like that. As if Colonel Wright and Mrs. Jackson weren’t prime examples of the demise of western culture. They hated our clothes. They hated our music. They hated the way we talked. They didn’t like the way gringos talked any better than they liked the way Mexicans talked. They hated everything about us. And we knew it—then they wondered why we hated them back. Them and their clothes. And their music. Yeah, I think I was gonna let my hair grow. But not too long. No. Just a little.
Chapter Twenty-Two
So one day, right after I get those letters from Pifas and Jaime, maybe a few days later, Charlie Gladstein comes up to me, and he says, “Hey, Sammy, you gotta get yourself one of these.”
And he’s grinning and showing off the beard he’s starting to grow. He could do that. Grow a beard. No mestizo in him. Nope. Hairy that guy. Fuzzy. That guy was real fuzzy. And he was taking full advantage of the new rules. God, he looked happy. He always looked like he was half stoned, but he wasn’t. He just always looked like that. “You gotta start wearing one of these.” One of these happened to be a black armband to protest the war. I wondered what Colonel Wright would do when he set his eyes on Charlie Gladstein’s arm. We were standing in the smoking section behind the cafeteria. He lights up and I light up and he starts telling me that we gotta organize against the war. “We gotta, Sammy. It’s our moral duty.”
Maybe it was. And then I thought to myself, I’m gonna get a lecture from Charlie Gladstein, from a gringo. Still, it wasn’t clear to me whether you really qualified as a gringo if you were Jewish. Maybe Jews weren’t gringos. I didn’t know about that. I didn’t. That’s when Gigi shows up and stands right next to Charlie. And then they start holding hands.
“So you guys goin’ out?” I said.
“Yeah,” Gigi says.
You’re not supposed to hold hands. That’s what I wanted to say. That rule hadn’t changed. Nope. Not that one. He’s not from Hollywood. That’s what I wanted to say. Look what happened to Jaime, I wanted to say. But I knew what happened to Jaime was completely different. Still, Eric hadn’t been from Hollywood. He hadn’t been. I wasn’t being logical. Gigi and Charlie? He’d always liked her. Hell, I knew that. She’d hurt him. She would. Then she’d drop him. That’s the way it worked.
But today, they were standing in front of me holding hands. Charlie and Gigi.
“So,” I said, “how long’s this been going on?” Shit. I sounded like Mrs. Apodaca.
“A couple of weeks,” Charlie said.
Gigi smiled. That killer smile of hers.
I smiled back. “That’s cool.” That’s what I said. Then I see René walking toward us, and he’s giving me the Aztec greeting with his chin. And I give it back to him. Those chins of ours, they saw a lot of action. And René, he’s wearing a black armband and a grin. Lately, he was smiling a lot, was getting into fewer fights. And I didn’t know about that. Why he was changing. Not that the changes were bad. I mean, not that I cared. I liked René. I’d always liked him. And he was about the only friend I had left. Not that I’d had hundreds of friends. I wasn’t like that. Gigi, well, she was my friend, too. But it was hard to have a girl as your friend. You know. It was hard.
I didn’t say anything about René’s armband.
“Gimme a smoke,” he says. And I do, and he stands there next to me and Gigi and Charlie Gladstein. And when he lights up, he looks at Charlie and says, “Are Jews gringos?”
And Charlie laughs and says, “Hell no. You have to be a Protestant to be a gringo.”
And then I said, “That’s not right. Lots of Catholics are gringos.”
And then he nods. “Well, yeah.” And then he laughs. “Well, some Jews are gringos. And some aren’t.” And we all nodded like he’d really said something. But he didn’t tell us which Jews were gringos and which Jews weren’t. But we just nodded. And I’m thinking this is the dumbest conversation I’ve ever had. And what in the hell got into René that he asked that question? I mean, I’d had the question, too, but I wasn’t stupid enough to ask it. Not out loud. God.
Then, after school, Gigi asked René for a ride home, right there in the parking lot.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked.
“His mom’s in the hospital. He went to go see her.” That made me feel bad. My mom, she’d been in the hospital. In the end, before she’d died.
“She gonna be okay?” I asked.
“Gallstones. Whatever those are.”
“Oh,” I said. Like I knew about gallstones.
And when we get in the car, Gigi says, “Pifas wants me to marry him.”
“Yeah,” René said, “you told us that before.” And he started up the car. And he’s driving out of the parking lot.
“Yeah, well, he wrote again,” Gigi said, “and he says he wants to know. I’d already told him that we had enough time to decide when he got back. But now, now he wants to know. He says he just can’t live without knowing. He says he can’t take it.”
“Pifas is nuts,” I said. “He doesn’t know what he wants. He’s just a kid.”
“He’s fighting a war.” René said. “That makes him a man.”
Yeah, yeah. René thought he was a man, too. René had thought he was a man since he was in the seventh grade. Because he had sex with some tenth-grade girl. Funny, how we all saw ourselves. I didn’t think of myself as a man—not a boy, not that, but not a man. “He just turned nineteen,” I said.
“A nineteen-year-old man,” René said. “He’s fighting a fucking war.”
“Okay,” I said.
Then René stops the car, parks it right there on the side of the road and turns around and looks at Gigi who’s looking like she desperately wants a cigarette. Sitting in that back seat. Desperate. And René turns around and asks, “You love him?” That René, he could ask such innocent questions. For a guy who had a fuse as short as a Black Cat firecracker, for a guy who thought he’d been a man since the seventh grade, he sure asked innocent questions. Like a kid. Not like a man. Like a little kid.
“No,” she said. Then she looked in her purse for a cigarette. I don’t know why she bothered looking. She never had any. “Sammy?”
I tossed her a cigarette. Well, she had a lighter. At least she had a lighter.
“Well, I do love him. But, you know, I love you guys, too. And am I gonna marry you? Hell no, I’m not. I’d kill you.”
“Maybe I’d kill you first,” René says. Then he laughs.
Gigi bopped him on the head. “Drive.”
“Let’s get a Pepsi,” I said.
And then René and Gigi both laugh and say, “At the Pic Quick.” Guess they were on to me. Not that I was so hard to figure out. I wasn’t hard—nope, an easy read. They’re both laughing and laughing. Like it was so funny—that I liked going to the Pic Quick to buy a bottle of Pepsi.
And just when René’s gonna start up the car, he yells, “There goes Angel.” She was walking with this guy just ahead of us. And just when I’m about to yell, “Hey Angel!” just when I’m about to yell that, I see the guy she’s with, and he’s trying to put his arm around her. And she pushes him away. I look at René and he looks at me. And Gigi isn’t saying anything. And we’re just sitting there—on the side of the road—watching Angel and this guy. Watching. And then she’s telling him to get lost and he’s pushing himself closer to her, and I recognize the guy as one of Huicho’s brothers. I hated those guys. I had my reasons. I hated them. And then he tries to kiss her, and Angel’s trying to push him away, and all her books go flying, and then I yell, “That’s enough, cabrón.” And we’re out of the car, and we’re there, we’re right there, standing in front of Angel and that bastard, Celso, Huicho’s little brother. And René starts to say something, but then decides he doesn’t want to say anything at all. I mean René could take or leave words—he could. So he just punches the guy. And Celso falls to the ground. And Angel runs to the car to where Gigi is and René just stands there looking down at Celso.
“Levantate, cabrón. Haber, cabròn, levantate. Te voy a dar en la madre.” That’s the thing about René, sometimes, when he got pissed off, his English went out the window. But Celso wasn’t gonna screw with René. He shook his head. He wasn’t gonna get up, nope, he wasn’t. “If you ever come close to Angel again, your pinche head’s gonna be part of the pinche pavement. ¿Entiendes, Méndez?” Then René just walks away. And I’m standing there, just looking down at Celso. He and his brother, they’d jumped me before. I just looked at him. I didn’t feel bad. I hated him. I wanted to kick him. I wanted to kick and kick and kick him.
I walked back to the car—and I wondered why sometimes, there was so much hate, and not just in the world, but in my heart. And
I felt sad. So many things made me feel sad. Gigi holding hands with Charlie, that had made me sad, and I didn’t even know why. It wasn’t that I loved Gigi. I didn’t, not like that. It wasn’t like that. Jaime’s letter, shit that made me sad. Pifas’ letter. Shit, that really made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad, I didn’t. I was a senior. Less than six weeks away from graduation. It was spring. It was a nice day. Perfect. What did I want? What the hell did I want? But really, I knew what I wanted. I wanted Juliana. I wanted to hold her hand like Charlie held Gigi’s. That’s the only thing that I really wanted. That was the only thing I was never going to have.
I walked back to the car. My fists in my pocket.
We drove to Shirley’s—the drive-in part. Gigi ordered a Cherry Coke. Angel ordered a swamp water—part Seven-up, part Dr. Pepper. I got a Pepsi. And René was drinking a root beer. Everybody had their own drink. That’s the way it was. Gigi and I were in the back seat. Angel and René were in the front. I couldn’t figure those two out. Maybe they liked each other. Maybe they didn’t. I wasn’t sure. René was always talking about the girls he laid. Big talker that way. Maybe it was all true. And maybe it wasn’t. Who knew? Guys were such liars. When it came to girls, guys lied. They lied when they were sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And they would lie when they got to be thirty. That’s the way it was.
But René, he didn’t talk that way about Angel, he didn’t, not that she was the kind of girl that was about to give him any. Nope. Angel just wasn’t like that. Not her style. And she knew about René. So maybe she liked him anyway.
So Gigi’s drinking her Coke and kind of watching how Angel and René are eyeing each other. Gigi always knew the score about things. Because she watched. She looked over at me and says, “So what should I do?”
“About what?” I said.
“About Pifas.”
“Tell him the truth,” I said.
“Don’t fucking tell him the truth,” René says. “No, no, no. ¿Qué tienes, Sammy? What the hell’s wrong with you? He’s in Nam. He doesn’t need more fucking reality.”