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

a deep hole in a shit yard, bury myself, and never come out again. Our campus suffered from the usual horrendous American segregation, the small number of black students as defiantly isolated as a survivalist group except for a few athletes in frats. There was also a pair of scholarship Puerto Ricans brought to Broener, both probably from somewhere in the Northeast megalopolis. They became inseparable, he with a big afro and she with straight, glossy black hair, ash-brown skin, large eyes like shadowed ponds. They’d sit together on a hill behind a dorm while he played his bongos for hours. I used to spy on them from afar, longing to go up, say hello, and speak in Spanish, of course I didn’t dare. In my dorm there was a boy who lived down the hall, a lacrosse and basketball star, the classic Adonis. He took ten showers a day, briskly parading his muscular alabaster physique back and forth from the shower room with a towel wrapped around his narrow swivel waist. Within weeks he was Abbie’s new boyfriend. In our dorm we could hear her cries of ecstasy up and down the hall. They sure seemed happy; for all I know they’re married now.

But it wasn’t as if my classes weren’t interesting or as if getting good grades wasn’t a novelty, auguring that I’d be able to transfer to another college, one where nobody knew me, and start over. I took a lecture course taught by a fortyish gentle genius who spoke like a hypereducated five-year-old, in which we studied Egyptian hieroglyphics, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the pre-Socratics, Bach’s fugues, and Alice in Wonderland, and wrote essays in Egyptian hieroglyphs with colored pencils, all to help us recover the amplitude of our lost mythopoetic brains. In Modern Day Prophets, taught by an old Scottish Marxist, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Marcuse. Instead of an academic final paper, students could do a participatory project, and the one most students chose, arranged by the professor through his friendship with a comrade infiltrator of the police state, was to spend a weekend in a prison cell in Buffalo, though you had to pay room and board. I decided for my project to become a modern-day prophet, jumping freight trains and riding them to Finger Lake towns to turn up in supermarket parking lots handing out leaflets on behalf of the United Farm Workers. My reputation would spread, the skinny, long-haired boy with a Dolores Huerta button on the front of his black watch cap who hands out UFW leaflets, then vanishes! Knapsack stuffed with mimeographed leaflets, I descended the steep bluff at the edge of our campus to the railroad tracks by the lakeside and, running alongside one of the boxcars of a slow-moving freight train, hauled myself up through its open side doors. I got off in Penn Yan, handed out my leaflets in an A&P parking lot, and after—whoosh!—vanishing, took a bus back to Broener, heart drumming with honest pride.

Mamita shares her room with a long-widowed and retired schoolteacher from Worcester named Susan Cornwall, who lies perpetually like a log cake under her beige blanket, mannish wax-pink nose and myopic-seeming eyes aimed up at the ceiling, her silver hair like a wrung mop on the pillow behind her. She only seems catatonic, because she hears everything and does in fact speak. One morning soon after my mother came to live there Susan Cornwall interrupted my mother’s friendly chatter to shout at her: Will you shut up, please just shut up. I cannot stand the sound of your voice one more second, shut up!

My mother has never forgiven her roommate for that outburst, hasn’t spoken one word to her since, not a single “good morning” or “good night” or “bless you,” responding to her rare utterances with silence.

So far as I’ve noticed, anyway, Mamita is Green Meadows’ only resident who isn’t a white person. But the staff seems to be mostly Caribbean, Brazilian, and Asian, and many of those people seem genuinely fond of my mother. They recognize the tropical gentility of her manners; a few speak to her in Spanish. Lexi insists Green Meadows isn’t merely the best place she could find for our mother on “our” budget. She’s sure people pay much more elsewhere without getting the kind of personal care that Mamita gets here. We really lucked out. Plus, it’s a relatively easy drive from New Bedford. Mamita does stay busy enough. She likes the Bingo games and sing-alongs, she has her physical rehab sessions, and a Catholic priest comes once a month to celebrate Mass in the chapel; otherwise a church layperson leads the Sunday prayer service and also a midweek Bible-reading group my mother has joined. In the downstairs dining room, Mamita used to have to sit at the same table for every meal with three other women, one a Boston policeman’s widow with a florid, knobby face and eyes like violet marbles. During one of my first visits, I was sitting next to Mamita at dinner when the policeman’s widow, aiming her vitreous stare across the table, snapped: It’s rude that you don’t speak in English. It distracts us. She was always bullying my mother, Lexi told me, but finally my sister took care of the matter, and Mamita was moved to a table with nicer ladies.

The door to the stairwell off the entrance lobby is kept locked, so I ride the elevator up one floor to the dementia and Alzheimer’s patient wing, called Golden Meadows, and head down the hall to my mother’s room. The first thing I notice is that Susan Cornwall’s bed, the one closest to the door, is empty. I step back to check the name tag over the door frame. Susan Cornwall still there over Yolanda Goldberg. Danielle, the Haitian nurse, is in the room; she must have come in just before me to take my mother to the bathroom. Mamita is