Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman [best story books to read .txt] 📗

In the evenings, doing my round of closing chores, I’d crawl out onto the jib to tie up and fasten the furled sail, and then I liked to sit there straddling it, legs dangling, looking out over the gleaming water rippling in from under the Northern Avenue Bridge, flashing blue chrome hues at that evening hour, gulls swooping. I was so fortunate to have had that job on the Beaver II. It was like “my first ship” in a Polish Joe tale, one that had taken me away from home to a distant port where I could now catch another ship headed anywhere. As the end of that summer loomed, whenever I had to squeeze my Jack Tar seaman’s hat atop my ever-more-abundant ’fro, I’d be reminded of why I’d grown my hair like that, my rash secret plan, and feel a nervous tightening in my stomach.

A few days before I left for college, I went with my mother to a hair salon in the next town. The hairdresser applied a smelly heated paste that burned against my scalp, smeared and tamped it into my hair with a plastic palate knife, and massaged it in with rubber-gloved fingers, up to her wrists in gooey tangles. This is a big job! she exclaimed. I sat under the hairdryer for a long time, then the hairdresser went to work with her scissors. The whole operation took a couple of hours, and my mother patiently sat there, sometimes idly leafing through a women’s magazine or staring primly at some apparently invisible point in space. When we left the salon, I had straight hair falling nearly to my shoulders, silky and thick. I remember how it tickled my collarbones and how thrilling that was. The hairdresser said I looked like a baby-faced George Harrison. I thought my hair was more like Todd Rundgren’s, but when the Godard movie Masculin Féminin was screened at Broener College on a weekend night early that fall, I realized it was more like Chantal Goya’s. After we came home from the hairdresser that afternoon my father’s disgust didn’t bother me because what did I expect? It didn’t stop him, the day I left for college, from giving me a present, a meerschaum briar pipe, with a tin of tobacco and pipe cleaners, from Leavitt and Peirce in Harvard Square, where he bought his own pipes, tobacco, and cigars. A college man has to have a pipe, said Bert.

It’s almost noon, South Station, and I’m looking up at the schedule board for the track number of the train to Mamita’s nursing home when my phone vibrates, a text message from Lulú. It’s in English: “Tani want to know. More windows in the world or more children? So cute. I tell her that my friend know the answer! More windows or more children? Besitos.” I walk out onto the long platform with a bounce in my step. Pelícanos and now this. Is Lulú a poet? In little more than an hour I’ll be in Green Meadows, walking into the overheated dayroom on my mother’s floor, where I usually find her sitting in her wheelchair, often dozing like a dormouse, and I imagine myself shouting with such overflowing ebullience “Mamita, I’m in love!” that all other dementia- and Alzheimer’s-afflicted old folks in there, faces pale as frozen pie crusts, lift their heads to smile at me. Frankie, what good news, Mamita will say. Does that mean that soon you’ll give me a grandchild?

More windows than children in the world or more children? As we pull out of the station, through a sunny concrete ravine, this commuter train, its grimy steel floor and scarred, brown leather seats, reminds me of a troop carrier, maybe an East German IFA truck like the Sandinistas used. I’d hitched rides in the back of a few, sitting squeezed on a bench between young soldiers and their AKs, smell of metal and grease, overheated bodies inside fatigues of heavy green cloth, overripe sweat and always a slight but pervasive odor of shit, a result of what constant fear does to churning adolescent stomachs already infected with jungle parasites. My hands, fingers intertwined, dangle between my knees. Really, you spend much more time looking at your own hands than you do at your own face. My hands probably resemble me more than my face does. I unclasp them and look at the mole in the middle of the left one. At Wamblán, a Sandinista special forces outpost by the Honduran border, the young commanding officer, Jacinto, was convinced it was a stigmata scar and wasn’t sure if that presaged good or bad. But for this mole to be credible as a stigmata, you have to imagine people worshipping a Christ who dangles from the Cross by only one arm. These are also the knuckles that crashed into the side of my father’s head, the second punch landing harder than the first as he fell forward, the appalling sensation of bone and skin through hair, a criminal punch in a way the first wasn’t. I can never recall it without a queasy lurch in my stomach. Could that first punch alone have been enough to make him never hit me again or was it the follow-up that put the fear in him.

In a town like ours there were easily more windows than children. The house on Wooded Hollow Road, for example, had, let’s see, five downstairs windows, seven upstairs, plus the sliding glass doors onto the porch. The overwhelming numerical advantage of windows over children in Boston, New York, probably in any Western city, any city in China or Japan too. But what about Lagos, Mexico City, Rio, childless skyscrapers versus ever-spreading child-teeming misery belts, more children than windows—or close to a tie? Traditional Maya village houses of one room with mud walls or built from mud packed with grass and sticks might not even have one window, just a door, often a half-dozen children or more living