The guy they had hired to direct the low-budget music video in Miami declared he “had it” now, finally, and we all applauded.
Adelaida and Roxy, the backup singers, made an exaggerated bow as if thanking an applauding audience of millions when, including the cameraman and the director, we were barely ten people in that sweltering rental warehouse turned recording set.
Minutes later, we were picking up batteries, lights, instruments. We were tired. We wanted to go home.
Everyone except Johnny, the band’s vocalist, he of the faux-sexy syrupy voice, springy curls, and two-day beard. The one responsible for the drunk students and hipsters who filled the places in which we were lucky to play.
And he knew that. It’s why, while the others helped me roll up cables, dismantle stands, pack microphones into padded cases, Johnny laid more than sat on the only good seat in the room: the Danish Dux armchair that Luquis, his partner in the band, called his “firstborn,” his most precious possession, bought on eBay and lugged from city to city and from location to location across three states.
Johnny knew that too. That’s why he rubbed himself against the armchair, placing the lower part of his sweaty back almost on the edge of the seat, his legs spread as if he were about to take a photo of the warehouse with his damn dick, but needed to frame everything with his thighs first.
That’s how it was with everything. Take the music video for example: even though it was low budget, it had cost more than the band could afford, which is the same as saying more than Luquis could afford. Because even though he and Johnny were partners and co-owned the group, I was sure Luquis was the one who took care of things and kept them flowing, while Johnny just placed his pretty face in front of the microphone and bleated.
Luquis would have told you “they” had made the extra effort of producing the video because they believed in “Secret Strokes,” a reggaetonish rock piece inspired by Soda Stereo’s “De música ligera.” But I wasn’t fooled: Luquis financed it to please Johnny. I was sure because that was Luquis: a truly good person, a forty-something man married to music, whose only other obsession, as far as I knew, was a second-hand midcentury modern armchair upholstered in the red velvet of old-time theater seats.
“Dude, I’m telling you, this went on for over forty- two hours! The asshole would go up two dollars, and I’d go up three dollars and five cents—the five cents being the key—until I won it, heh, heh, heh. But look at it and tell me it’s not a beauty. Comfy, too.”
We’d all heard the story. If Luquis had been a superhero, the damn chair would’ve been the throne of his origin story.
But Johnny was, well, let’s just say Johnny took his bad boy role seriously. He was a talented loser, but a loser, nonetheless. His favorite game? Hoarding chairs he had no interest in, just so the person who really wanted them wouldn’t be able to sit on them. With them. Rubbing himself against what others loved, that was what it was about for him.
Me? Oh, I was nobody. The roadie. Another loser, but more so because I was a loser without talent. My only admirable quality, being aware of how much of a loser I was. The super loser-assistant-pipe-slave who’d never be a musician.
The job paid the rent and bought me beers, okay? That’s all. Unless you want to add that it kept me close to Adelaida, the backup singer, yes, the same, and the other reason I was such a super loser. A loser crazy in love with the woman Johnny treated worse than he treated
Luquis’armchair.
That afternoon, I was making sure we didn’t leave anything behind because anything that went missing came out of my salary. When the microphone, or battery, or cable count reached the number I had brought down to Miami, I’d load the counted items into the old van whose sides read “I.O.U, Laura,” the band’s name. (Apparently, it was Luquis’ mother’s favorite phrase, and also, Laura was the name of his father’s current wife. You can connect your own dots.)
The temperature was a thousand degrees, but Miami was too expensive for a local band like ours, and the plan was to finish loading the damn van and return to Orlando that same night, to rest in our own beds after weeks of playing in cheap venues all along Interstate 95 heading south.
Everyone in the band was Caribbean—born and raised in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba, except for Luquis and me. Luquis was a gringo Boricua, born on the island and raised in the States. And I was a Dominican gringo, born in New York to Dominican parents who’d been undocumented until “just the other day,” a lifetime of living under the radar, ya tú sabes.
Adelaida reappeared a few steps from me. She was no longer a songstress, black and seductive, of heavy lashes and platinum blonde braids (a wig). She had changed into her own clothes and now looked like a schoolgirl: without makeup, in a white t-shirt and jeans.
But Johnny was too busy with the half-empty beer bottle in his hand to pay attention to her. He’d been sweeping his cloudy gaze from one end of the warehouse to the other every couple minute, while the rest of us, including Luquis, worked, even swept the polished cement floors, him lying there, purposely languid in his phony lax displeasure with life until Adelaida got tired of being ignored and went and sat on his lap, and I’m telling you, I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to take it.
The problem wasn’t her not seeing me, or not knowing I was alive. (I’d been invisible my whole life. I was used to it.) The problem was that she was wasting herself on him. That she was so blind to her own beauty, to her talent. You won’t believe me, but if Adelaida had fallen in love with Luquis, I wouldn’t have minded. Seriously, there were nights I prayed he’d fall for her, save her from Johnny. Luquis would have loved her well, treated her like the queen she was. Like he treated his mother. His sisters too, even though they were beyond fugly. Even me, he always treated with affection, but also with respect, you know what I mean? But no. Of the large number of preeminent assholes roaming the streets of Florida, Adelaida had had to go and fall for Johnny.
Someone had opened the warehouse loft’s tall steel casement windows, but it was Miami, and they didn’t seem to have a breeze worth living for down there.
“We be ready to go in fifteen, Johnny,” said a sweaty, stressed-out Luquis, not waiting for a response. Not getting one either. But that was Luquis. ¿Didn’t I tell you he was someone who respected everyone? It didn’t matter if he wasn’t respected in return.
I was just a couple of meters away, kneeling in front of a series of metal trunks that I had lined up in an effort to be efficient, but Johnny had thrown me off with his bullshit and I pretended to count batteries and camera chargers, unable to concentrate because Adelaida was still on his damn lap, while he took his time making her feel unimportant, like she was nothing.
He didn’t care that her beautiful cinnamon-colored arms were around his neck, her slightly crooked-toothed smile searching his face for a kiss. “Papi, please,” she was saying. “Don’t drink anymore tonight. Let’s go home already.”
But of course, the supreme asshole had to make her beg. Took his damn time, too, bestowing his pardon, sliding his empty paw down Adelaida’s ass before saying to her: “You’re such a pain, woman. Jeez, all right already. Find your jacket and we’ll go. Hurry up.”
She smiled then, leapt off his lap, gave him a kiss that meant to be quick and playful but, of course, he had to take her wrist and turn it into a spectacle while I briefly imagined what it would be like to shoot someone. Myself, mostly. To destroy my still pockmarked face at speeds I wouldn’t be able to stop, but see the bullet in slow motion, like that guy in the only short story I ever liked from all they force-fed me in school.
It was obvious, wasn’t it? I had to quit. The notion had been circling me in, quarantining, jailing me, and now I thought about it again because there was Adelaida, still kissing Johnny as if they were trying to break the Guinness World Record for sloppy kissing, me, now fully convinced that things just flew right over her. That she didn’t realize, or didn’t want to realize, anything: the triumph in Johnny’s voice when he ordered her to find her jacket, while searching for me with his eyes to make sure I had seen it all.
She’d missed it, or was unable to see it, just like she was unable to see him now, looking at her walk away, measuring her like he measured groupie meat from the stage wherever we played. Like she always just missed seeing me, unable to stop looking when she dropped from the waist at the slightest bead of sweat, gathered her long tangled brown hair between both long-nailed hands, twisting it all into a wobbly bun that she’d let hang loosely from the side of her head like a big solitary earring.
It was time to go was all. I’d find another job even though I liked this one because it allowed for sleeping in, more than paid the bills, and left enough for sending money to mami, who’d divorced my father and gone back to Dominicana. (All that swimming just to die on the beach, as they say. But. That’s life, as mami herself would say.)
The worst was nobody would miss me. Not when you could kick any corner you liked and out would pop a roadie, and, since I hadn’t been much good with all my wound-licking the last couple of months, anyone Luquis hired would be an improvement over me. Band wouldn’t miss me either, least of all Adelaida, for all her tousling of my hair whenever she walked past me.
“You know I’d kill for that thick curly mane of yours, don’t you, Petey?” she’d say.
“Well, yeah, you know, um, I’d kill for yours,” I’d shot back the last time she’d said it, that’s how lame I was around her. That’s how pathetic of a fucking super-looser I became whenever she was near me. I’d kill for yours. Seriously?
Nah, I had to go. Period. It was the best thing I could do because Adelaida was just going to keep missing it all, forever, blind to realities until the ends of time like my mother, maybe like Luquis’ mother, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. Couldn’t keep promising to give her everything every time I looked at her: in the rehearsal room at Luquis,’ on stage, in the band’s bus when she’d sing a cappella to distract us during the long tedious trips through turnpikes of nothing but pine trees, tar, and rest stops. Yep, I know, you don’t have to bother telling me: wanting the wife of the guy who controlled the guy who paid my salary was not the dumbest thing in the long list of dumb things I had done with my life, but it was in the top five, maybe in the top three.
Adelaida’s back now, coat in hand, but now Johnny’s faking being asleep, or drunk, one of the two. He’s being a dick. A pendejo huelestaca (a favorite compound term of Luquis’ meaning something akin to imbecile loser, but dirtier).
She pulls on his arm, impatient, wanting to go, and I kick the trunk shut without
any idea of how many batteries are in there, snap the locks, bend a little in order to lift it onto my left shoulder. I’m thinking it’s settled, right? I’m going. First thing tomorrow, I tell Luquis, and I’m gone.
But when I raise my head, the trunk now easily breaking my clavicle, I see her: hands turned into fists, one on each side of her waist. She’s doing that tap tap tap thing women do with the tip of her left boot. Except it’s not her I’m seeing, not really. The woman I’m looking at is a goddess. A La Lupe, a Frida, a Julia de Burgos. A woman too magnificent for Johnny. For me, too. A saint of golden wings stitched in loneliness. A strong angel, destined to have to pick itself up from the floor after love that was just too bad, too devastating.
And damn me to hell, can you believe I start to cry? And I’m not even drunk, I swear. But I cry because I don’t want what I’m seeing for her. I don’t want it. And I don’t know what to do or what to say.
Suddenly, I hear a voice like an ancestral echo saying, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver” and I see the most obstinate of those who, blinded, refused to see: my mother. Another devastated angel, one who left without needing to emigrate, now back in her homeland, but when you visit, she greets you sadly, somehow diminished, as if she were a package returned unopened to the store because she wasn’t enough to satisfy the customer’s needs. Like a gambler who risked her life to get to the casino with a single coin and is back with a tired thumb and nothing in her pockets. And no, no way can that be Adelaida’s destiny, coño. Not with that voice and that smile and, well, other things of hers.
But what am I talking about? Who do I think I am? Spiderman? No, it’s a done deal. I’m leaving, finding another gig, starting over. What the hell? I’m young. Haven’t even turned thirty yet, and that’s still young, right?
“You all right, there?” Luquis asks. I have no idea how long he’s been watching me, but he looks worried.
“Yep. All good,” I say, watching Johnny get up, finally, and give Adelaida a slap on the butt with a little too much force before turning to say something to the ass-kissers and boot lickers who adulate him nonstop (Payco, the drummer, and Junito, who plays the synthesizer.)
And there, right there, in that moment, I see it. I mean, I think I see it: Adelaida’s expression changing as soon as Johnny turns to his in-house groupies. Putting away that smile of hers and raising her pupils way high before letting it all come down into a scowl framed by her furrowed brow, she, hartita de odio (like saying chock full of hatred) against Johnny, just like me. Lucid, finally, a self-saved angel.
She’s waking up. That’s what I see. She won’t be wasting herself on Johnny for long. Nor with me, though, who knows, insists my stupid heart daring to want, to wish for something for itself.
But, nah. Damn angels must have been working overtime that day because the instant I even contemplate the possibility of Adelaida, a light turns on a mere few feet from me, probably one of the warehouse lights on a timer.
But listen, that it turned on isn’t the thing. The thing is what it tells me in neon blue letters on a sign I hadn’t noticed before. One that now reads, “The exit is this way, asshole.”
