Chango's Fire (15 page)

So when Maritza heard about my clubhouse, she threatened that unless I was willing to let girls join, she was going to bulldoze it. She never got the chance. That same night, her building lit up, taking the rest of the block with it. Maybe Eddie had been hired to set that fire, who knows? But back then I only knew him as Trompo Loco's good-for-nothing father. The man that Trompo Loco would drag me to 118th Street to take sneak peeks at. Like he idolized him from a distance. But I don't recall much about Eddie, all I remember was that the fire that dispossessed Maritza's family was a grandiose fire. Six houses aflame at once. Unemployed faces staring at a bitter winter, the only heat arising from the flames that warmed up the entire square block. Truth was, I was happy Maritza was gone. She now lived in the South Bronx and I didn't have to deal with her anymore. But it didn't matter, because my clubhouse didn't last. A week later, these white men drove into East Harlem. It was not common to see white people in the neighborhood back then. Me and Trompo Loco were inside our clubhouse eating chips when they burst in: “Get out!” And we scattered like roaches in the kitchen when the lights are suddenly switched on. From across the street we watched the white men burn my clubhouse down and hammer in the ground a
FOR SALE
sign on the very spot where my clubhouse had stood. The sign would stay there for years and years, and some residents didn't even know what it was that was for sale. I sure didn't, not at nine years old.

When I turned eleven, Maritza was back. Her house in the South Bronx had lit up. Now Maritza and her family had landed in the projects. The projects were dirty, neglected and dangerous, but at least they were fireproof. Maritza again attended the same public school I did, and sure enough, in the sixth grade, we were in the same classroom and Maritza was still picking on me. Walking to school I'd pray to God, “Lord Jehovah, please let Maritza be absent today.” But God never listened to me. And Maritza picked on me all year long, especially that year, because that was the year when my father became a little legend in our church.

Unlike my mother, my father joined the church because of the music. He wasn't getting anywhere with his own band, destined to be a studio musician all his life. Plus, in those days, the salsa pioneers were always getting ripped off by promoters. Even the greats were cheated out of tons of money and pressured into playing too many gigs. Many fell into drug addiction. My father was one of them. Depressed and hooked on anything he could cook, after years of playing for peanuts, he was searching for God or anything close to it. What my father really found in the church was not God but a new stage. An opportunity to impose his own style, rhythms, and lyrics. To run his own show. My father began to use the church to create a new gospel and invent the Latino spiritual.

Not only was my father proud of writing that song, he said that “I Went Down to La Bodega” was just as ingenious as “Come Into the Lord's House It's Gonna Rain.”

The lyrics were all Pop's and he thought them brilliant. Truth was, they were some of the worst lyrics ever set to gospel music. Still, my father would create Latino gospels that no one had ever heard before, with words that weren't in any songbook issued by any church.

Sometimes, parishioners would laugh at the lyrics when first presented. But no one laughed at the music. It was what my father was blessed with, and because of his music our temple had the highest attendance of any Pentecostal temple in Spanish Harlem. The three head pastors saw this gift that my father had, and they let him run with it. Soon, our congregation would become a living songbook. What our temple lacked in preaching, anointing or healing, it made up for with music. The services would start off with singing, then a prayer, then a brother would give a short speech, then more singing, then a sister would recount some spiritual experience, then more singing, a little testifying, then more singing. The new Latino gospels that escaped from the walls of that building were as unique as the whispers that a cold winter wind makes as it swirls inside an empty, burned-out building. A sound you can only hear in a ghetto. People walking by would hear music, this music with strange lyrics about an urban Jesus who spoke in Spanglish and understood our wants and needs, for he lived in the projects and suffered the same injustices. About Jesus who prayed for more heat, hot water, and no lead paint. A junkie Christ who pleaded with his Father to help him keep his veins clean.

In a few years our temple's attendance was so high, and the funds just deep enough, that the three pastors rented a bigger space. The temple moved from this little hole in the wall on 110th Street and Madison Avenue to a two-story storefront building on 100th Street between Lexington and Third. My parents and I lived upstairs from the church and so we helped a great deal in fixing the space up. The three pastors bought cans of paint, mom put in the curtains, Pops bought the best used piano he could find, the band came along and the rest of the congregation followed. A sign was placed outside,
LA CASA BETEL DE DIOS
, and Pops was back in business.

I'm embarrassed to say it, but those were wonderful days growing up, every moment was a Sunday afternoon. Me and Trompo Loco would sing to the Lord and feel as if the angels in heaven were playing the tambourine right next to me. I always sang with terror and joy, hoping and not hoping that the Holy Spirit would strike me. What would I do with all that power? God's power. I had seen many times how brothers who were struck would cry and scream, their faces afire, speaking in tongues, spewing prophecies. How not-so-young bodies danced and jumped, struck by some divine electric juice that reinvigorated their body and soul. How others would give way to those that were struck most often. These holy ones, these saints, were the ones everyone wanted to sit next to, so as to maybe, just maybe, feel what it was like for God to enter you. To live in God's presence. I waited with fear and joy for this to happen. I wondered when Jehovah would gather up some bolts from Heaven and hurl them my way. I got baptized, and years passed by, and it never happened. I mean, I did believe in God. But when I turned sixteen, instead of heavenly blessings, it was our turn to flee.

Mysteriously, like God Himself, at night, the church had somehow caught fire. It burned to the ground. Weeks later, the building next to it was also lit up, and then the one after it. One by one, the buildings on that block were torched, until only a shoe repair shop stood alone. The city placed all the families in welfare hotels, and later we all landed in the projects. The days of singing and glory were over. It was from that day on that, for me, the word of God was never “love” or “light” but “fire.”

A
ll these memories invade my thoughts as I take a shower. The silkiness of chlorine-treated tap water that travels through hundreds of thousands of yards of pipes always brings me back to the past. It also reminds me of good memories, of opened fire hydrants on muggy summer afternoons. Of splashing girls and cars with street-made aluminum-can spigots. Squatting in front of a fire hydrant, as if hugging it, and using your hollow can to channel all that water pressure at whom you wish. Everyone's dryness across the street was at your mercy. Cars would roll up their windows in the dead heat of summer so as not to be drenched by you. These boyhood thoughts and the warmth of the shower water make me feel secure, like I'm not just washing away dead skin but my problems as well.

I come out of the shower to a clouded mirror. I take my finger and scribble, “Helen.” I step back and look at her name. How much more white can a name be, I say to myself. Then I add to it, “Helen and Maritza, I have to burn the building.” And then I quickly erase it, as if I don't have to go through with it. I dry off, remembering the day when Papelito had agreed to place his name on the deed for me. How I told myself that I was starting to live another beginning, a final one. How much promise my floor was filled with, sunny promise. Like a box I'd open to find gifts. One was Helen.

“Mira, que
Kaiser wants to come inside,” Mom urgently knocks at my door and I look at the kitty-litter box underneath the sink. “You've been in there a long time and the cat needs to
caca.”
I can hear the cat scratching the bottom of the door. I hate the cat. I remember once hearing that professional thieves only steal when they are 99 percent sure they will not be caught. That one percent, well that's the unknown, the unseen, the off-duty cop who is in the John, the kid who captures your image on the mini-video camera he got for Christmas, or the corporate shredder that is out of order. But sooner or later that one percent will show its ugly face. That one percent, for me, was a fucking cat.

“So what,” I shout.

“You cleaning it then,” Mom says.

I grab a towel and open the door. The cat runs inside the bathroom, like he needed to go bad. Mom accompanies him, as if a cat needs to be paper-trained.

I go to my room, I find my altar dark and fruitless. I feel guilty. I've let the goddess Ochun down. But I hope she'd understand, though I know she can punish me, too. So I light my candles, and I brush the peacock feather. I get dressed and feel clean, a bit more relaxed, at peace.

Mom knocks at my door. I tell her to come in.

“Mira
Julio,” she says as I'm putting on my shoes, “I went to the bank the other day and asked to see if we could get a loan.”

“A loan? To fix this place up?”

“Y pa' que ma?
Of course to fix this place up.”

“What you do that for, Ma'?” I say as if it was a bad idea. It was a great idea. With a bank loan we could fix up the rest of the floor. Maybe put in a bathroom, splice the wall up and make it into a little studio and rent it.

“The bank,” Mom says with eyebrows up, “didn't have you as an owner.”

That is exactly why I can't get a loan and fix the place up.

“What do you mean the bank didn't have me as an owner? Well, what bank did you go to, Ma'?” I play it off.

“Banco Popular,” she says as if that was obvious, it's the only bank she ever banks with. It is where Papelito has his account, too. Where the deeds of this apartment are filed away in some computer under his name.

“Well, see Ma', I deal with Chase Bank,” I say. “I got a better mortgage rate payment with Chase,” I say and finish putting on my shoes.

“But I gave Banco Popular this address and they said that someone does pay
un morge
that lives here but it was confidential—”

“So maybe it's the
blanquita,”
I say, cutting Mom off. “Maybe it's Helen. Maritza rents that space downstairs for her church, so it has to be Helen.” Kaiser enters my room. He starts to sniff at my candles, though the fire repels him.

“Why would a
blanquita
place her money in a Spanish bank?” Kaiser then goes over to Mom and jumps on her back. Mom doesn't flinch. She lets him sit on her shoulder like a parrot.

“A bank is a bank, Ma'.” I say as she makes kissy faces at the cat.

”
‘Ta bien,
” she says, sighing, “then come with me to Chase, to get a loan to fix up this place—”

“Ma', it's not that easy,” I say. “Plus I've been thinking that this place isn't that great. Maybe we should sell it and go.”

“Crazy,
mira,
unless you get me
Troomp
Towers.”

“Trump Towers? Why would you even want to live there, Ma'?”

“No se,
just to live there. Just to see what it looks like.”

“Well, I don't know about this loan, Ma',” I repeat, and now that Mom knows her idea of a loan isn't happening, she stares at my altar with disdain.

“Eso
Kaiser,” she talks to the cat, not me, “is going to bring the devil in this house.”

She sees me putting on a tie.

“Where you going?”

“Ask the cat, Ma'.”

“Julio, you getting all nice? The
blanquita,
right?”

“No, Ma', I'm going to church,” I lie to her, and she knows I'm lying, because it's too good to be true.

“To that church downstairs?”

Why didn't I think of that? I say to myself. That would get her off my back.

“Yeah, and don't touch my candles, okay?” I point at the cat. “And keep him out, too, he might burn his paws or something.”

“Esas velas, pa' demonios?
” she rapidly waves a finger in the air. “I won't go near those candles. My cat knows better than to touch them,” she says, walking out of my room.

“Ma',” I call her back, “kiss me good-bye.”

“Only if you leave that room.”