Anatomy of Fear Read Free Page B

Rose’s tatelleh or my Abuela Dolores’s chacho.
    Hector Lavoe’s La Voz, the voice, was playing in the background, but only because I’d brought the newly reissued CD of the Puerto Rican salsa singer’s groundbreaking 1975 album with me. Otherwise it would have been Mozart or Beethoven, which I still couldn’t get used to hearing in Julio’s house.
    I looked around at the leather couch, Persian rugs and antiques, two floors of a brownstone on Ninety-fourth between Fifth and Madison. Ironic, I thought, Julio living the good life only minutes away from the mean streets of El Barrio where he’d grown up.
    “This place is too good for you, man.”
    Julio made a fist, tapped his heart, and slid into the street talkof his youth. “Don’ worry, brothuh, even though I’m at the top, you still my main-mellow man, mi pana. ”
    Jess rolled her eyes. “Must you guys always act like teenagers when you get together?”
    “Yo, mira, I think so.” Julio winked at me.
    We’d been buddies forever. Julio’s aunt lived in the same tenement as my grandmother and he’d hang out there because it was better than the peeling paint and roaches of the project where he lived with his single mom, who worked day and night to keep a roof over their heads. We met one day in the stairwell, Julio hiding out so his aunt wouldn’t see and tell his mother that her son was smoking dope at age eleven, and he gave me a toke, my first. When I recovered from the coughing fit we started talking, bonding over the music of Prince and Carlos Santana. From that day on we were brothers.
     
    A fter that I started going uptown all the time. El Barrio was an ugly ghetto, but compared to where I lived—the Penn South apartments on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fourth, which was filled with old people and had about as much life as a funeral parlor—it was exciting. My parents didn’t like it, but I told them I was in search of my Spanish heritage. Of course that was bullshit. What Julio and I were searching for was alcohol and drugs—and we found them.
    Julio would buy weed off the local salesman, some guy who hung around his junior high, then we’d get stoned and go lie around my grandmother’s apartment watching TV, playing Nintendo, and laughing. She was always asking “¿Qué es tan chistoso?’’ which would make us laugh even harder.
    Julio asked if I was okay and I nodded, but a piece of my pasthad started to play and I couldn’t stop it. I was back in my parents’ apartment on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, reliving that night, seeing it all—my room with its posters of Che and Santana, but mostly the look on my father’s face.
    It was inevitable that he would find out. Maybe I even wanted him to. I thought I was cool and dangerous, bringing shit home with me, grass and crack pipes, not bothering to hide them well. Ironic, you might say, me discovering drugs and my father being a narc with the NYPD. When he found the stash he went ballistic.
    Don’t you know what I do for a living? Don’t you know every week I find kids like you dead, OD’d? What’s wrong with you?
    He went on like that for a long time, face bright red, veins in his forehead standing out in high relief. He wouldn’t stop until I told him where I’d bought my stuff, then he stormed out in search of the guy who was turning his son into a junkie. I was scared shitless. I called Julio, told him to warn the dealer, and asked him to meet me uptown.
     
    I came back to the moment, rubbing my temple.
    “Headache, pana ?”
    “It’s nothing.”
    I’d started getting headaches after things went bad. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me, so my mother sent me to a shrink. He told me it was displaced anger or guilt and I told him to shove it and never went back. But it wasn’t anger or guilt that was giving me a headache right now. It was a combination of my past and the nonspecific dread I’d felt earlier in the day that was still with me. I couldn’t