Lot

by Bryan Washington

you know how that goes.

He wore his hair like the whiteboys, and when I asked why that was he called it one less thing to worry about.

Roberto said that was cool but I was a fat black gorilla.

Since it was the year of my endless flu,

That’s just what America did to you.

Home’s wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.

this is the part where I should say my family opened their pantry but we didn’t do any of that shit at all.

Eventually, I asked Roberto if maybe this was a bad thing, if maybe his folks were being punished for our sins, and he asked if I was a brujo or a seer or some other shit.

My father said we’d all paid witness to a parable: if you didn’t stay where you belonged, you got yourself evicted.

He didn’t tell me he was disappearing.

we squeezed our palms together and I called it amazing anyways.

Just before they slept together for the final time and before Aja’s lover was tossed by her husband, our neighborhood diplomat, onto the concrete curb outside their apartment complex, and then choked, by that same man, with his bare hands, in front of an audience of streetlights, the corner store, Joaquin, LaNeesh, Isabella, Big A, and the Haitian neighbors, James asked Aja to tell him a story.

We watched them bloom like an opera, a telenovela, the sunrise.

Sometimes it was as simple as Do you have hot water this morning? No one ever does. or So our neighbor, Juana—does she ever put those boys to bed? No. And that’s why her man left her, years ago, for a Puerto Rican. and even You know what, it’s funny, but I haven’t seen the stars since I made it to Houston. And no matter how long you stay here, they’ll never touch your eyes.

Also, we knew this guy had questions.

She’d met Paul at the market back home, the way everyone meets anyone anywhere.

after his mother poisoned his father,

but he lingered over Aja, the way we all linger over Aja, and when she came around looking for ackee his was the freshest on the shelf.

Of course we got all of this after the fact. Charlie told Jacob, who heard it from Adriana. She took it from Rogelio, who’d been sort of fucking Juana, and the two of them copped it to Nikki down the way.

our resident queer.

she showered, swept, wept, started dinner for Paul.

With our not-legals shuffling in,

their opus

So we did it. We told him. We’re the ones who opened our mouths. But not all at once. We’re better than that.

And, the thing is, we liked Paul. We liked Paul. We liked Paul.

to call us anything other than what we were—just the neighborhood.

We’d seen his type before, had watched this country swallow them whole.

The Who put What in Wheres.

damned him back to Taiwan.

Documentation, he said. That’s how we do it in this country. A noxious joke. But we laughed regardless. Ha! Ha ha! Ha.

Whiteboy slumming, what could you expect.

He was, despite everything, still one of us.

And from the viejas to the juniors to the Filipinos to the black folks, we danced, danced, danced, to the tune of that story, their story, his story, our story, because we’d been gifted it, we’d birthed it, we’d pulled it from the ashes. Aja was Aja and Paul was Paul and James was James and James was Paul and Aja was James and they were us, and we told it, remixed it, we danced it from the stairwell, and we hung it from the laundry, and we shook it from the second floor, until our words had run out, until our music ran dry, and Five-0 shut it down on account of the noise.

Es solo para mujeres y maricones, he said, because the real men of the kitchen were out killing pigs or whatever. But you, he said, you’re like your old man. Hierba mala nunca muere.

Bald and young and old and hooded and thick and loose and hard, they’d whistle me to their tables.

She said everything left eventually.

Our father loved Ma for the rest of the month.

When it was finally just Ma and me, and I wasn’t cruising Midtown, or stuck in the back room washing dishes, or out in Montrose fucking boys, I’d sit on one end of the sofa, and Ma’d settle into the other, and her knees would graze the edge of my thigh as she slept through the drone of the television.

I looked at this woman, in her home, and her comfort, and I wanted to slap her. I wanted to hug her.

Está bien, he said, and then one more time, and then we opened the door, and we were home.

to treat her like pottery,

Our mother, who returned grape bunches over single sourings; who’d shipped my sister, Nikki, to Tech with a knife in her pillowcase; who’d slipped into this country, this home, her life, on the whim of a fortune-teller, from the eastern coast of Port Antonio, after she’d told her, peasant to peasant, that good things came to women who looked to the shore.

she smiled like mandolins ringing.

I Will Tolerate You Out of Necessity, and Not a Second Longer Than Required.

my cousin grew up on wood floors, with Ravel and Mahler conducting the apartment.

She was risking her life for poems.

She hit the resorts; she discovered Milton; she worked the coast; she discovered Rimbaud; she bought some heels; she discovered Babel; she took care of her skin; she discovered Rumi; she tried not to catch the clap; she discovered Borges; she caught the clap; she discovered Allende; she waited it out; she discovered Plath; she tried not to catch anything else.

This was the summer we were going to get laid, to touch and to suck and to fuck, if they let us.

marveling at all of the space in my head no one had taken the time to tell me about.

she insisted that she understood, even if I didn’t yet, and then she squeezed my knuckles.