"Dang, bro, what's wrong wid you? Do you or do you not like Puerto Rican girls?"
Sonny was miffed at his friend Pablo's question. "Ain't nothin's wrong wid me, man. They're hot, alright? Too damn hot. Sizzling, burning flesh! I can barely lay my hands on them." Sonny was not ready to talk about Puerto Rican girls. Not yet, he wasn't. He was more interested in baseball. With bats, balls and strikes on his mind, he tried to change the subject. "What's wid dem Yankees, anyway?"
There was this boy, Angel ("Cool name, huh?" Sonny whispered to himself), who must have been all of eleven or twelve. When you stop to think about it, he wasn't that much older than Sonny. Still, the guy looked about eighteen, maybe more. Angel sported a tiny little mustache - a barely noticeable whisp of stubble above his upper lip - and some stringy chin hairs, too. Angel was slender and broad-shouldered. With black curly locks, and dimples on his tanned cheeks. A broad smile, brown eyes, slim waist. Shoot, the guy was a walking, talking Greek god or statue, or something. The girls thought he was "dreamy," and he had good manners. Girls loved that last part. Manners, that's what counts, that's what made all the difference. They like to be treated like ladies - even if they weren't.
"Like the freaking queen of England, bro," Angel would add, as if girls were the most important thing in a young person's life. Which they were, of course. Only, Sonny didn't know it.
The guys who got the girls knew all about treating them well. And they did, you know. Like Latin royalty. That is, until the rubber met the road. That's an old cliché, of course, but in this case it served the intended purpose.
Angel went out with Miriam, a cute chick from Sonny's class. Sonny couldn't remember her last name, not that it mattered much. Angel, for his part, was just another classmate. Sonny hadn't seen him since school ended in mid-June. When classes started up again in September, after Labor Day, Sonny met up with Angel. Damn! He must have matured overnight. One week, he was just another scrawny kid in their class. The next week, he was Mr. Love God. And Miriam, "What a freaking hot dish!" She couldn't have been more than twelve, or maybe less. Short, flat-chested, no curves at all, legs straight as arrows, two pencils in saddle shoes. She, too, had little hairs resting on her upper lip. Even when Miriam smiled, she looked serious.
Sonny was baffled. "I didn't know girls could grow mustaches?" They grew more than that.
Just as with Angel, overnight Miriam sprouted like a late-blooming weed - but in her case, the sprout manifested into a pair of humongous breasts that would knock anybody's head off their shoulders. From hell to heaven. Wow! She looked and acted as if she were twenty-one. Angel told Sonny, in secret, that she was really eleven. That her parents had lied about her age so she could be in a higher grade. Oh, man! Eleven years old! Imagine! Shit...
"Eleven, going on thirty!" Angel whispered to Sonny.
"Lucky bastard," sighed Sonny.
Here he was, Santiago "Sonny" Delacruz, all of twelve going on thirteen. Still playing stickball with the little runty kids from the neighborhood. Still keeping watch over his little brother Juanito. While this guy, this "Angel" fellow, more sinner than saint and not much older than Sonny was; Angel, a fellow classmate in the fifth grade, a Puerto Rican, South Bronx-raised teen from the " 'hood," got the opportunity of a lifetime: to go steady with a hottie tamale that was younger than either of them.
"Man, oh, man, must've been something in the air," Sonny surmised. "Or maybe in the tap water." Whatever it was, Sonny wanted some of what Angel was having. And soon, too.
They say Soundview is a part of the South Bronx. Sonny heard it referred to as the South-Central Bronx. People described it the way they described it. But no matter how they felt about the subject, the Bronx was still the Bronx. East, West, North, or South. From any direction, from any angle, and from any vantage point, it was all the same shit hole to him. A dump on a bump of a lump off a rump.
Soundview, the section of the Bronx that Sonny and his family resided in, was always Soundview. Papi told them it was named after the area's closeness to the Long Island Sound inlet. "You can see Long Island Sound from the top of the Soundview subway station."
Sonny took this odd notion as gospel. Straining his little neck in the direction that Papi told him and his brother to look, all Sonny could see were faint misty clouds. A strip of land, fuzzy and formless, in the distance, gleamed dully in the morning sun. Sonny had no idea what the hell he was gazing at. Nobody bothered to tell him what an inlet was. And he never bothered to ask, either.
As a youth, Sonny remembered playing in filthy, empty lots around Stratford and Morrison Avenues. After the family moved to nearby Bronx River Avenue and the Bronx River Housing Projects, greedy real estate developers began to see plenty of dollar signs in their future. They decided, in a moment of inspiration, if that's what you want to call it, to build a mass of high-rise apartment complexes where once there were empty spaces, the majority of them along a wide-open, marshy plain between Orchard Beach and City Island, in the northeast corner of the Bronx.
In the early 1960s, this same wide-open, marshy plain became the site of a short-lived amusement park area dubbed Freedomland U.S.A. - the East Bronx equivalent of a poor person's Disneyland. It operated for a spell in the Baychester region. But the park went broke after only a few years of unprofitable operation. Not wanting to let good land go to waste, the real estate developers hit upon another bright idea: to build big, mammoth apartment structures. Housing hundreds upon hundreds of families, the gigantic Co-Op City housing development soon replaced the cheap rides and historical attractions of the now-defunct Freedomland. A city within a city within a city. You call that freedom?
As a young working stiff in his late twenties, Sonny found his way back to the old neighborhood. Certainly not out of nostalgia or reminiscence. Not a chance. The truth was, he'd been dating a Puerto Rican girl whose family lived in one of those fancy new high-rise dwellings. The family's apartment was nice, really nice. Richly furnished, too, with wall-to-wall carpeting and state-of-the-art bathroom facilities. It was nothing like what Sonny had been used to when they first arrived in the U.S., or from what he recalled of his own family's residence: the tight, boxed-in look and feel of cubicle-sized rooms. The kind that reminded you of those claustrophobic jail cells in Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart crime pictures. Still, they were a hell of a lot more livable than those horrible "prison units" his family occupied at the old Bronx River Houses.
Sonny's anger rose up within him. He stopped thinking about apartment houses. "Too 'complex,' " he joked to himself. "I got bigger shit to worry about."
Copyright © 2023 by Josmar F. Lopes