Author: Antonio Pedro Ruiz

The following short story was written as part of an assignment for English 405 at CSULB. It is the first draft. A final version is due in December.

Read Part One Here: Chacho and The Five-Dollar Bag

Part Two

He can hear Kiki’s mother screaming behind the door. His sister Gina opens it, and she’s crying. Chacho pushes his way in, rapping some shit about, “I saw some guys try to rob Kiki, and they chased him into the building, but I told them that he ran down 141st street.” He prayed that Kiki had not given them another story.

Momma is still screaming. Sister is still crying. Kiki has his snatch and run uniform off, holding a towel against his left arm full of blood dripping down onto the black case that he had taken from the old woman on the floor. It was slightly open, and Chacho, huffing and puffing out of breath, could see the corner of a bible inside. Kiki looked at him and then at the black case with the bible book peeking through the unzippered opening and back to Chacho. What the fuck? He mouthed.

There’s so much chaos that Kiki’s mother and sister don’t see the black case on the floor. His mother is on the phone calling someone to come over and take Kiki to the hospital. Chacho slowly bends down and picks up the case, catching Kiki’s eye, who’s mouthing to Chacho to take that shit outa here. Chacho backs out of apartment 12B, talking about how he’s going to find those ladrones de mierda, fucking thieves, who tried to rip off Kiki. No one hears him or cares.

Chacho steps out into the hallway, finds the stairs, and slowly makes his way down twelve floors hoping not to run into those guys who were chasing Kiki or anyone from his family or anyone who knows them. When he gets to the first-floor landing, he stops and opens the black case. Inside a pocket, Chacho can see money sticking out. His eyes bulge in surprise, then he freaks, thinking about taking money from an old woman. But Chacho’s nose is now running full drip of snots, his body shivering from more than the winter cold. All that really matters now is stopping the shaking.

He falls back onto the wall of the first-floor hallway, and his mind races with calculations. Chacho counts it…twenty-five dollars. That’s five five-dollar bags. That’s at least two, maybe three days of getting high.  

As he stands in the hallway to his building’s back door, Chacho thinks that, in the future, he will respect all old ladies walking down the streets with their bibles and purses from now until his death. Chacho will ask that they forgive him even as they look at him and wonder, “¿Qué te pasa, chico?” What’s wrong, boy?. “Nada, I just need your forgiveness forever.”

Chacho turns and hustles out the back of the building into the playground, where he walks across Willis Avenue looking over his shoulder for la jara or the guys still looking for Kiki. He passes Sammy’s and scopes the clock inside. It’s eight o’clock, and he really needs to get high soon. Determined but still shaking, he heads to Westchester Avenue, the number 26 bus to 156th and the man with the best dope in the Bronx.

Chacho has heard of El Gato. Big-time drug dealer. What the fuck was he doing up in here? The trashed-up and boarded-up tenement building on 156th Street is littered with dead syringes, yellowed newspapers, beer bottles, discarded glassine bags, and the lingering smell of too much dope, too much alcohol, and too much death. Chacho struggles up the darkness-covered stairs to the third floor, hoping he doesn’t step on no shit and no dead junkie who gave his life for a high that he will never repeat.

When Chacho left the Seminary, his friends, including Kiki, told him that his student deferment was dead. Nothing was going to save him from the draft. It was only a matter of time before Chacho got the call: next stop, Vietnam. Crazy advice followed.

Carlos told him, “If you shootin’ junk, they won’t take you.”

Herman’s idea was even crazier, “Bro, when they call you down, go high. Punch some holes in ya veins, and they won’t draft ya.”

Kiki had the plan all worked out.

 “Chacho, it’s real simple. All you gotta do is get strung out. Ride the white horse into the main vein direct to your brain all the way to the draft board.”

Chacho is in a deep hole. This is not what my mother and father had prayed for me.

El Gato lies on a cot in front of an open oven door, trying to stay warm. His hands are smeared with too much pain, blood, and dirt. It’s hard to believe this broken-down-looking man has got the best dope in the Bronx. At least, that’s what Kiki told him.

“He’s a little messed up now,” Kiki told Chacho, “But, he still got good connections.”

A trail of dead food, half-empty beer cans, old smelly rags spill out behind Chacho as he moves a battered stuffed chair closer to the man. El Gato fumbles with a grease-stained brown shopping bag next to him. Out comes a smaller brown bag also marked with blood and dirt.

“I just wanna skin-pop. I don’t mainline,” Chacho says nervously.

El Gato digs into the paper bag for the improvised tools whose only job is to plunge heroin into one’s central vein, where it will crawl up the arm through the body into the brain. He pulls out an eyedropper. A small needle with a red cap is supposed to protect someone from being pricked. That’s funny, Chacho laughs inside. He’s getting ready to shove heroin…or what El Gato claims is heroin…into his body, and they’re worried about their fingers being pricked.

Up until that moment in that jive-ass shooting gallery, Chacho had been snorting or popping, injecting under his skin. It takes a little longer to catch the rush, but he had been assured by the best street dope experts that he wouldn’t get hooked. They were lying. El Gato wonders what the point is.

“Man, if you main, ya don’t have to use as much. Ya get high faster.”

There is always a ritual when preparing for death. First, don’t worry about sterile. Ignore the dirt on the floor. Ignore the old blood dripping down walls that haven’t been washed since the building began or the smell of old piss and dying garbage all around you. “Man, did someone die up in here?” This is not Good Housekeeping certified.

The old junkie has an old bottle full of water.

“I cleaned the bottle, man, before I put water in it,” he assures Chacho, who knows he’s lying, but he doesn’t care.

El Gato takes the rusting bottle cap off and sets it down on a broken-down coffee table next to him. If that table could only talk, Chacho knows it would warn him, “Don’t take this ride on the mainline home.”

The stench from El Gato, the crying voices from elsewhere in the shooting gallery where the same ritual is happening. All of it is starting to choke Chacho’s mind. He just wants to get high and get out of there, down those dark steps, and rush into the street, praying that he has some coins for the bus ride home.

There’s a small ball of cotton stuck to the inside of the cap like it’s permanently engraved there.

“Gimme the bag,” the old junkie snorts.

There’s one five-dollar bag of heroin. Chacho is holding on to the other bags. A five-dollar bag is best for only one person, but El Gato has the works, the tools for the injection.

“Yeah, since we be sharing one bag, you gotta main, or you ain’t gonna get high.”

Chacho is convinced. See how easy it is. Why be in that cesspool shooting gallery if he ain’t going to get high.

Practice makes perfect as El Gato wraps the belt around Chacho’s upper arm, looking for the central vein crying for the high. The muddy water sucks up through the thin needle from the bottle cap through that week’s old cotton ball up into the eyedropper back down through the needle into his bulging vein. His blood percolates back up and down with a rush of warmth.

Chacho knows the heroin is authentic, imported from some foreign country, smuggled across thousands of miles hidden in suitcase bottoms to apartments where naked women mix it with baby milk powder (or worse) into glassine bags into the hands of Paco down the block onto pissed on steps leftover from the last fool who overdosed crying for his mommy into an overused rusting bottle cap with water that ain’t clean through a dirty needle into the main vein. For Chacho, this will not end with a trip home.

Chacho slides down the overstuffed chair until he’s now half sitting in the chair and the floor and his legs are splayed in two different directions. El Gato jumps up from his cot. He’s wearing an army jacket over a full-length wool coat. A scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that it must feel like it’s choking him. Chacho’s eyes are rolling back in his head. El Gato is screaming, slapping Chacho across the face. One cheek, then another.

“Get up, dude. Get up. Ya’ can’t die here.”

El Gato grabs Chacho’s feet while yelling out to other people elsewhere in the apartment. Two dope fiends rush in.

“Help me get this motherfucka’ outa here. He dies here, and we’re all fucked.”

But first, business is business.

“Check his pockets. See if got any more dope or money.”

They ransack Chacho’s motionless body, pulling at his pockets, finding the other bags and a black case they open, seeing a bible inside.

El Gato is pissed.

“Motherfucka’ was holding out on me.”

Junkie number one grabs one arm, and Junkie number two grabs the other arm. All three carry an already or soon to be deadweight Chacho out the apartment door and turn left onto the stairs up to the roof.

“Let’s dump him on the roof,” El Gato says thoughtfully, “Man ain’t gonna be dead in my pad.”

And that’s it. Pedro, aka Chacho, is dying alone on the roof of a five-story shabby-ass tenement building full of shooting gallery apartments where heavenly music crashes with the sounds of sirens and people screaming outside. This is not how the day was supposed to end, as Chacho swears to the night sky that he can’t die. He’s got things to do. There’s that job he has to get. The one that Carmen demanded he gets during their last argument so they can get married. She wants a big wedding and a white wedding dress and a honeymoon in old San Juan. But he can’t get a job because he’s a junkie, and mom and pop tell him that he’s got to move out. “I no want a junkie livin’ here,” tears washing over her brown face.

Carmen will not be getting her wedding, and his parents won’t have to worry anymore about kicking him out.

Chacho wonders if people can see their soul falling, life’s breath oozing out as he goes from looking up at the sky to looking down on his body. How is that even possible is his last fading thought.

Feature Image by RenoBeranger from Pixabay 

© 2021

The following short story was written as part of an assignment for English 405 at CSULB. It is a first draft. A final version is due in December.

Part One

Pedro was pissed when he found out what his nickname meant. The nickname that Kiki, his best friend from childhood, gave him. He started calling Pedro Chacho when Kiki got back from ‘Nam. At first, Pedro ignored it. He figured it was no big deal. Then, his brother, Tony, told him that Chacho was slang for Muchacho, as in small boy. Now, all his friends called him Chacho. Pedro protested to Kiki.

“I ain’t no boy. I’m eighteen years old.”

“Bro, it’s just a nickname. Everyone in ‘Nam had a nickname,” Kiki calmly explained.

“Yeah, what did they call you?”

“Kiki.”

“But, Kiki is your name.”

Chacho stands at 142nd Street and Willis Avenue, watching the sunset between the project buildings. Dark, ominous clouds take its place. Snow is coming to the South Bronx.

He’s freezing his ass off, his cold brown hands shoved deep into his peacoat, a thin alpaca shirt under his coat, no hat. Even his busted ass Keds are no protection for the crosswinds winding their way through the canyons of the Jefferson projects. All he can fume about is the damn nickname.

Kiki said the plan was simple. All Chacho had to do was to be the lookout at the corner. And Chacho believed him. He and the rest of the boys always believed and trusted Kiki who was two years older than the rest of the group. That made him the leader in his mind. And that was okay with everyone, including Chacho, Carlos, Herman, Junior, Guy. They all looked up to Kiki because he wasn’t scared of anyone, anytime, anywhere. But Chacho was scared now.

“My mom’s bedroom window is like right there…on the eighteenth floor,” he protested, “She could look out and see me.”

“What she going to see from that far? Man, you just look like a bug,” Kiki tried to convince him. “Just look cool and watch for the man. If you see him, ya holla.”

Hector’s Barber Shop is two doors down, where Hector himself would give Chacho a razor cut every time he came home from school. Sitting in the barber’s chair as if he was on a throne listening to Doble-OOO radio. Traditional Puerto Rican music oozing out like milk from a momma’s breast. Spanish and Spanglish chatter reminding him where he comes from and where he is at.

He missed it the last four years while he was away at the Seminary. Yet, he felt more distant every visit when he came home for Christmas, Easter, and summer. Now that Chacho was back in the neighborhood, he was trying hard to blend back in. The old crowd was no longer the fourteen-year-olds he left behind. They were now young men, like him, with their own dreams and nightmares. Carlos got drafted and was in ‘Nam. Herman got a job down on Delancey Street with a baby on the way. Last he saw Junior, he was running from la Jara (the police) across Willis Avenue screaming some crazy shit about Yo momma ain’t got no draws. And Guy, the word was he had graduated to a big-time dope dealer in Manhattan. They don’t got time for Chacho. Only Kiki does.

Directly behind him is Sammy’s Pizza, where, on a good day, Sammy would give Kiki and Chacho small paper cups of clean water for free. Sammy knew why they wanted the water. It was used in a ritual where water would drop into a bottle cap full of smack along with a small blob of cotton and heated over an open flame. The water would help purify the death that they tried so hard to bring upon themselves in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost. Bless you is all Sammy would say as if it was the last goodbye to Chacho and Kiki. The final act in a dangerous and tragic play called The End.

Chacho is still skin popping. Kiki is mainlining. Bragging how the dope in ‘Nam is the shit.

“Higher than those B-52s dropping their loads. My homeboy told me, some of the brothers be doped up while they dropped their bomb loads on the Cong’s ass.”

Sammy’s clock says it’s five o’clock. Chacho had hocked his watch last week, a gift from his girlfriend Carmen. She noticed it was gone when they went to church to talk to Father Kelly about their planned wedding.

“I lost it in the subway. The strap was loose, and I think it just…,” he tried to tell her, his voice trailing off.

He knew she knew he was lying. It wasn’t the first time that he was nodding in her face. Carmen started crying and ran home. Chacho stood in front of Saint Anselm’s Church wishing he could run after her. But, as high as he was, the only place he was running to was face down on the sidewalk.

The streetlights are on, and headlights are streaking up and down Willis Avenue. It’s rush hour. That’s a good thing. A lot of distractions. Around him, people are shuffling home from bus stops and train stations and dead-end jobs that pay the high rent in rundown apartment buildings where they have to step over the deadbeat bodies of junkies during the dope epidemic of 1968. No one is going to pay any attention to a purse snatch. People gots to get home.

Chacho is standing guard looking up and down Willis Avenue and then 142nd Street and across the street up to the 18th floor to make sure his moms ain’t looking out the window wondering, ‘Why is that fool standing out on that corner in this cold weather without a hat and gloves?”

Yeah, that’s not what she’s thinking! “He lookin’ for la droga again. Soy done con el.”

And she be right. Mom should be done with Chacho because he can’t believe he’s standing with the hawk kicking his ass on the lookout for la jara.

Meanwhile, Kiki walks behind an elderly woman up 142nd Street toward Willis Avenue, eyeing her black purse with the determination of a beast stalking its prey. Kiki is wearing what he liked to call his snatch and run uniform. Black leather jacket with some African print Dashiki thrown over it, black pants, black sweater, black socks, black and white Chuck Taylor Cons (the best for running, he bragged to Chacho). Kiki told Chacho that the clothes sent a message to old people, don’t fuck with me. I’m dangerous.  

All they need is ten bucks for two five-dollar bags of dope. Kiki has done this before, he says. “Plenty of times. I grab the purse and run. They ain’t going to stop me. If I have to, I push them down. Not hard. I ain’t no animal.”

Chacho’s never done this before. And he doesn’t want to do this now or ever. A year ago, he was upstate in a seminary studying to be a priest until he met Carmen during a holiday visit home. He was shaking. From fear. From the cold. From the creeping jones that was making its way up from his feet to his nose. The priesthood wasn’t for him. He told his father that. But his father didn’t want to understand.

“Hijo, why’d you leave? We all prayed for you to serve the church.”

“Pop, the Irish and Italian boys always wanted to fight me because I was Puerto Rican. I was alone in the Seminary,” Chacho tried to explain.

“There is pain everywhere. Maybe God was testing your faith.”

For Chacho, there was too much pain and too much testing of his faith. What he didn’t tell his father was the number of times the kids had called him Spic. His father hated that word. His children were forbidden to ever use it.  

Chacho had made up his mind that he was leaving after the last fight. He got his ass kicked by some Italian from Arthur Avenue who was twice his size. Father Burke accused Chacho of starting it. The other white boys just nodded. No one came to his defense. Fuck ’em.

In the end, there were just too many rules and too many daily prayers. Worse, Chacho told Kiki, there would be no sex as a priest. Kiki thought that was the best reason to leave Saint Thomas’s Junior Seminary.

Now he was a junkie “aiding and abetting” a strong-arm robbery of an old woman. Damn, I hope my mom doesn’t find out. But the road to a good high is just too strong. More potent than any guilt he would feel if Kiki in his snatch and run uniform had to push some old lady down on the ground because she refused to let go of the goddamn purse.

Suddenly, Chacho hears a scream shooting up 142nd Street, shutting out the Willis Avenue noise of buses, cabs, folks just trying to get home before the threatened snow piles up on the streets. They don’t have any boots on because they just got here from Puerto Rico or Santo Domingo, and they have no snow down there.

Chacho looks down the block, and an old woman is hanging on to something, struggling with Kiki. She’s screaming madness in Spanish, and Chacho can’t quite make out what she’s saying as Kiki pushes her down and starts running up 142nd street towards Willis Avenue.

Chacho prays that he’s got that woman’s purse when out of the corner of his right eye, he sees some bro’ in a doorway of a rundown apartment building on 142nd street. He’s just standing there, hands in his coat pocket, looking down the street. The man gotta see Kiki running and hear that old lady screaming mad as hell, “Por favor, stop him, please!”

Damn it, shut up. Chacho is freaking out looking for a way outta there. His heart is racing. Run mofo across Willis Avenue and home.

“¡Me robó!”

Then, the man in the doorway steps down and lunges at Kiki. Chacho figures he’s trying to grab him, but Kiki lets out a scream stronger than the woman’s, “Motherfucker, why you stab me?”

Kiki is running, tripping, holding his left arm. The guy in the doorway is joined by other men from down the block running after Kiki. He ain’t waiting for the light to change as he scrambles across Willis Avenue dodging cars and people towards his and Chacho’s building.

There’s a procession of chasers after Kiki as they cross the Avenue screaming “¡Ese hijo de gran puta! That motherfucker!”

Chacho is faster so he pulls up alongside the lead guy, the one who stabbed Kiki, and yells that he knows who that guy is and the building he lives in.

“He’s at 242. I’ll run around 240 and cut him off in case he tries running up 141st Street.”

They turn the corner and haul ass while Chacho pretends to look exhausted and when they’re out of sight, he runs into 240 and takes the elevator up the 12th floor, and knocks on 12B. There’s blood on the door.

Feature Image by RenoBeranger from Pixabay 

Next Week: Part Two

© 2021