Fish Out of Agua:. Michele Carlo
to her. And I can understand Dulce thinking that was treason. Horror beyond belief. It was, after all, her father. How do you get your mind around the fact that your own father could do something horrible? It goes against everything you know to be right. It goes against love.
I always wondered if my mother stuck up for me because she knew I was running away from Papa Julio. But she never asked me and I never told her. I wouldn’t see Titi Dulce again for a long while. She didn’t go back to live at abuelita’s, instead she and Ray-Ray moved in with her mother-in-law, Uncle Raymond’s mother. They would stay there until Cousin Evie was born and Uncle Raymond came home. But by that time, I found something else to admire.
13
JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE PARK
“Hey, look, it’s the Speck!” Another slight; another summer.
For two years now, we had lived on St. Peter’s Avenue in that Italian/Irish/German/Polish neighborhood where we had been the first Latin family ever to live there and where they had once complained to my father every chance they got that our food stank, our music was too loud, and my brother Kevin and I ran wild through the halls. It didn’t matter that my mother fed us Wonder Bread, instant mashed potatoes, and Stove Top stuffing, that the only music we ever listened to was Hugh Maskela, the Fifth Dimension, and 77 WABC Music Radio’s Cousin Brucie’s Top Ten Countdown, and that Kevin and I were not allowed to play in the hallways at all. I suppose someone had to be blamed for the relentless rock music (when everyone knew Puerto Ricans listened to Santana, thank you very much), the stench of burnt garlic (not all Italians can cook), and the junkyard of broken Tonka trucks and half-melted Crawly Creepers abandoned on the stairs (a pig wearing lipstick is still…).
Maybe some kids did play inside their buildings, but once summer came, all the neighborhood kids were encouraged, persuaded, or forced out of their houses or apartments to the playground up the block every day, starting immediately after breakfast until dinnertime at 6:00 P.M.
Welcome to the summer of 1969, when telephones were in the kitchen and water came from faucets; video games and cable TV had yet to be invented; hippies were getting ready for their legendary three-day music and mud-fest; and children actually played outside for eight or ten hours a day—tender, innocent, wholesome games…
Marijuana, marijuana, LSD, LSD!
Rockefeller makes it, Mayor Lindsay takes it,
Why can’t we, why can’t we…”
It was ten-thirty, maybe eleven o’clock in the morning. I was nine years old and standing in the middle of St. Peter’s playground. I was watching a group of kids on what we called a sliding pond (a slide) play a game I really, really, really hope no child anywhere plays at all, anymore, ever, called “Nigger on the Bus.”
“Hey, Speck, you wanna play? You can be our nigger. Bwaaaaah!”
To play this game three kids would first go down the slide, each alternately swinging their legs over the opposite sides when they reached the bottom and staying put. But the game didn’t “officially” start until a fourth kid slid down. Everyone would start the chant again as the fourth kid slid down as hard as he or she could with the sole intention of trying to knock as many of the bottom kids off the slide as possible. As more kids joined in the game, the stakes increased exponentially. Soon there were a dozen kids running and climbing, screaming, sliding, and falling.
“Oh no, here comes Fat Pat! Fat Pat, Fat Pat, the Sewer Rat!”
Fat Pat, a.k.a. Pasquale Baleena, was black of hair, swarthy of skin. Ten years old and the unofficial despot ruler of St. Peter’s Park, he seemed not to notice his name’s prefix as he lumbered up the steps. He was the boy who had branded me as “The Speck” back when I was in second grade because, as he told everyone, “She’s too small to be a regular spic.”
As Fat Pat reached the top, he took a moment to catch his breath, savoring the mounting unease from the squirming bodies below, and then he yelled, “Nigger on the bus! Nigger on the bus!” and flung himself down the shiny silver path of ruin. The irrefutable laws of physics and gravity took over, and as his mammoth haunches collided with the spindly frames of the next-closest children, a sort of domino effect took over. Five, six, seven kids were catapulted off and over the slide, landing on the concrete below.
“Ow! Ow! Owwwwwwwww!” the kids yelled as they assessed their damages: a scraped knee, a twisted finger, a shard of glass sticking out of a calf. Make no mistake, in our minds these were war wounds, just as much as were the tallies of the Viet Cong and U.S. dead and wounded we heard about each night as our parents watched the Huntley / Brinkley Report. Yes, St. Peter’s Park was a playground battlefield. And as always, I was on the wrong side.
“Speck!” Fat Pat flung at me as he went around to start the game again.
The first irony was that Fat Pat, like many of the other kids of Southern Italian heritage in my neighborhood, were two, three, even four shades darker than I was, but that didn’t matter. Since I was a spic, I was The Speck.
The second irony was, from my days behind abuelita’s couch, I knew there were five different words to differentiate the color of one’s skin. There were moreno and negrito: brown and black, which depending on one’s tonality and prior relationship, were also terms of endearment. Then, there were prieto and tregieño, which have no direct English translation and at the time seemed to me to be nothing more than mildly insulting descriptions much like ugly or stupid. And finally, there was cocolo, which loosely translates to “coconut head.” By no means could cocolo ever be considered nonoffensive. You did not ever call someone a cocolo unless you wanted to start a fistfight.
And the third and most shameful irony? Once I had actually wished that someone, somewhere, would call me a spic—just once—so I would know what it was like to feel that righteous indignation, that justified anger created by that nasty ethnic slur. I had even begged Kittenworld for it. I had imagined I was walking down a street when someone stopped and said, “Look at that spic.” And I said, “What did you say? Spice? Stick? Oh, spic? You think I look Spanish, you think I look Puerto Rican? Yay! Goody! Yippie!” And then Titi Ofelia clapped. It was not one of my finer imaginary moments.
But when it did happen and Fat Pat named me The Speck, I had cried and cried. Because that was the first time I realized I was a double outcast: I didn’t fit in with my family and I didn’t fit in anywhere. And even though not every kid in the neighborhood called me that and even though some of the kids did play with me—when Fat Pat wasn’t around—it still hurt…a lot.
Mister Softee arrived at two o’clock, just in time for lunch. I dug into my culotte’s pocket for the quarter my mother gave me and sat on a side bench with my Blue Gelati Italian ice and wooden spoon, digging at the vaguely lemony stickiness that would turn my tongue a psychedelic turquoise blue.
“Hey, you wanna play jump rope?”
It was a small group of also-misfit girls, Dawn, Nicole and Janey, who the cool kids called faggots, which didn’t mean a homosexual—not at all. Instead, it meant that by your physicality (too thin: Nicole), appendages (glasses, braces or both: Dawn,), or general doofiness (your mother made you wear “skips,” the cheap sneakers that weren’t Keds or PF Flyers: Janey), you, too, were just not cool enough to play Nigger on the Bus.
As for me, I was a bit chubby but wore no appendages and was dressed better than most. My mother took us a few times a year on marathon shopping excursions downtown, to Ohrbach’s and Bloomingdale’s where she’d spend hours scouring the sale and clearance racks for her pastel minidresses, white knee boots, swirly scarves, and clothes for Kevin and me. So no, I did not wear skips.
“We need an end. Donna had to go home.”
“Okay.”
I took one end of the rope, a long piece of dirty clothesline, and the smallest girl, Janey, took the other. We started turning as the metal-mouthed Dawn and splinter-thin Nicole took turns jumping.
Miss Lucy had a baby, she named it Tiny Tim,
She