Hells Kitchen

Ramirez protested. “These guys, they fuck up you mind.” And downed his portion of the worm.
    After they finished two plates of tamales each they strolled outside. Ramirez stopped at a package store and bought another fifth of mescal.
    Working their way downtown, Ramirez said, “Man, here it’s Saturday night and I no got a woman. That sucks.”
    “That waitress at the bar. She was flirting with you.”
    “Which one?”
    “The Hispanic one.”
    “Her?” He scoffed. Then he frowned. “Hey, Pellam, lemme give you some advice. No say ‘Hispanic.’”
    “No?”
    “That’s no good no more.”
    “Tell me what’s politically correct. I’d like to hear it from somebody who says ‘mick’ and ‘nigger’.”
    “That’s different, man.”
    “Is it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How?”
    “Just is Ramirez announced. Then he continued. “Whatever country somebody come from that’s what you say. Dominican. Puerto Rican. I’m Cubano. If you gotta use one word say ‘Latino.’” Ramirez took a hit from the bottle. He began reciting, “‘ Apostol de la independencia de Cuba guia de los pueblos . . . Americanos y paladin de la dignidad humana. ’ You speak Spanish?”
    “A little. Not enough to understand whatever the hell you just said.”
    “Those words, they on the statute of Jose Marti on Sixth Avenue. Central Park. You ever seen it?”
    “No.”
    “Ah,” he said, sneering. “How you can miss it? It thirty-feet high. His horse, it up on two legs and Marti is staring down Sixth Avenue. He look kind of funny, like he no trust nobody.”
    “Who was he? Marti?”
    “You don’t know?”
    Art fims aside, history in Hollywood is pretty much limited to very unhistorical Westerns and war movies.
    “He fought the Spanish to get them out of Cuba. He was this poet. He got exiled when he was fifteen or sixteen and he travel all over the world to fight for Cuban independence. He live here in New York for a long time. He was a great man.”
    “You ever been back to Cuba?”
    “Back? I never been there.”
    “Never? You’re kidding.”
    “No, man. Why I go there? Havana got traffic jams and slums and dust, it got las muchachas and las cerveza. It got hombres embalaos on ganja. Crack too now probably. It just like New York. I want a vacation, I go to Nassau with a beautiful girl and gamble. Club Med.”
    “It’s your home.”
    “Not my home, man,” he said sternly. “Was my grandfather ’s home. Not mine. . . . There this guy at a warehouse I use sometimes, Señor . . . ” Ramirez stretched the word out to work contempt into his voice. “Buñello. Loco, this viejo. Look at him—he want everybody call him ‘Señor.’ ‘I have to live in los Estados Unidos for now. But I am Cubano,’ he say. ‘I was exiled.’ Oh, man, I gonna punch him out he say that one more time. He say, ‘We all going back someday. We all going to sit on sugar plantations and be rich again and have los moyetos, you know, blacks, do all the work for us.’ Puto. Man, my father couldn’t wait to get out.”
    “Your father, was he a revolutionary?”
    “ Mi padre? No. He come here in fifty-four. You know what they call us then? Latinos who come to America?They call us ‘summer people in winter clothes.’ He was a kid when he left. His family, they live in the Bronx. He was in a gang too.”
    “You mean a club.”
    “Back then crews, they was different. You move into a new neighborhood, you go one-on-one with the leader. You know, you got it up from the shoulders—you fought with your fists. Until you do that, you was nobody. So while the fidelistos were burning plantations and shooting batistianos my father, he was in this circle of punks and fighting this big puto on a Hundred Eighty-sixth Street. Got the crap beat out of him. But, after, they all went to drink cervezas and rum and he was jumped in. They give him a name. They call him, ‘ Manomuerto. ’ That was the day he prove his heart. That’s what they say. ‘Proving your heart.’ Su corazón. ”
    “Where’s your father now?”
    “Left six, seven year ago. Went to work one morning, sent my brother Piri home with half his pay envelope and say he call sometime. But he never call.” Hector Ramirez laughed loud. “Who know? Maybe he in Havana.”
    A bunch of tiny worms were taking tie-dyed trips in Pellam’s brain. He hadn’t had that much really, five or six shots.
    Okay, maybe more.
    And, okay, maybe there was something psychedelic about the