Drown by Junot Díaz

Author:Junot Díaz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1995-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

Boyfriend

I should have been careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn’t you know, I woke up in the hallway of our building, feeling like I’d been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would have been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn’t been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake Girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, Motherfucker, I’ll give you all the space you need. I knew Boyfriend a little. I saw him at the bars and saw some of the girls he used to bring home while she was away. He just needed more space to cheat. Fine, he said, but every time he went for the door she got to crying and would be like, Why are you doing this? They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me. By the time Boyfriend got himself into the hallway I was already in my apartment. Girlfriend would not stop crying. Twice she stopped, she must have heard me moving around right above her and both times I held my breath until she started up again. I followed her into the bathroom, the two of us separated by a floor, wires and some pipes. She kept saying, Ese fucking pepetón, and washed her face over and over again. It would have broken my heart if it hadn’t been so damn familiar. I guess I’d gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.

The next day I told my boy Harold what happened and he said too bad for her.

I guess so.

If I didn’t have my own women problems I’d say let’s go comfort the widow.

She ain’t our type.

The hell she ain’t.

Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry. And her boyfriend, olvídate. That nigger could have been a model; hell, they both could have been models, which was what they probably were, considering that I never heard word one pass between them about a job or a fucking boss. People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and then transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living. What was worse was how much Spanish they shared. None of my girlfriends ever spoke Spanish, even Loretta of the Puerto Rican attitudes. The closest thing for me was this black chick who spent three years in Italy. She liked to talk that shit in bed, and said she’d gone with me because I reminded her of some of the Sicilian men she’d known, which was why I never called her again.

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