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Miss Kutzler only dropped her handkerchief on my foot after the Avocado Man had whispered into her ear. And that made me think. Maybe the invitation wasn’t from her.
AHHHHHHH SOMETHING IS HAPPENING
“I built a tank bigger than my room in the tenement, and I don’t even get to live in it.” “Ha! The poetry of the peasant class,” he remarked,
Barco que no anda no llega a puerto.
You only swallow ashes if you know what it’s like to go hungry.
“Good English don’t build cities,” I said curtly. “Good smithies do.”
What I said next came out in Spanish. Because all my truest thoughts were in Spanish and because I knew he understood it. “It is no wonder you cried out,” I breathed. “I cannot imagine losing your liberty and your mother in the same breath. I am so very sorry.”
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
Río, on the other hand. The sight of him ripped up everything I thought I understood about creation. One look at him and you had to wonder if the Bible had been selling God short this whole time.
My cell is haunted by a man who would destroy me by my ears—and guarded by another who would relieve me by them.
For a full minute, my jaw hung open. I’d never known a love like that—the kind that paved a road through Hell and motored you to freedom.
“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“I learned all I needed to know about what the world thinks of ‘someone like me,’ by which I mean . . . Manos a Dios, I don’t know how to say this . . .” I drew a deep breath. “A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.”
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
The softest hearts wear the thickest armor. I have seen enough of your heart to know it exists.”
Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
AHHHHHHH
“But if there’s anything I’ve learned just being human in this lousy, jacked-up world, it’s that love and hate—they got something in common. They put blinders on you, so’s you can’t see nothing but whatever it tells you to see.
“How much do you love him?” he asked. My voice still sounded like steel wool. “I can’t breathe without him.”
I tried hopelessly to brand him into my mind. Hopelessly, because, when it came to losing people, the more you tried to make them permanent on the shorelines of your recollection, the more time eroded them away. I wondered if he was doing the same, carving my face into his memory, sealing my voice between his sensitive ears.
As for me, seems the only thing harder than lifting two thousand pounds is writing a goldang memoir nobody’s gonna read. But I’m writing it anyway because when you get to my age, you find out memories are about the only things worth holding onto. And, to that end, I’ll never forget my friend.
Sobbing
You’d never guess by looking at him—that brown, Caribbean smithy who barely came up to my armpits and fiddled with his chain whenever his nerves got louder than his asthma—that he was made of stronger metal than the iron he hammered.
