Dorothy Parker's Elbow Read online

  After Adelita finished she was silent for a moment, like she was waiting for the applause. I was lost in my own memories.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “You’re sad. But you have talent.”

  She smiled, and I noticed she had one black tooth near the back of her mouth. “The minute I saw you, I could tell you were the man for me.”

  Let me tell you, carnal, sometimes a man gets tempted to throw everything away for a woman. Like there’s one of those Oaxacan carnival devils on your shoulder, the ones with the red horns, giving you bad advice. Just pushing you to do something stupid. A man has to be on guard for these moments. And it looked like one of these moments was upon me. I took a closer look at her. She wasn’t much you could hold on to, thin as a fence post really, and that Colusa soil still dirtied her nails. But I had a powerful urge to bury my face in that wild hair of hers and smell it. I wanted to feel what it was like to squeeze her in my arms and wake up in the morning with her dark face next to me. And I could feel myself sinking into her temptation like I was waist deep in quicksand.

  I’d stayed away from temptation for years. Especially Chicanitas, my only heavy vice, those brown girls. I’d been through the bad hurt before. Real bad. Back in the days with Reina Sarmiento. My one true love. My always and forever babe. Her name in blue letters on the knuckles of my right hand. I ruined my life for her, lost three years in Soledad, taking the rap when we were busted holding two kilos of some potent Jamaican ganja. I threw a beer can at the cops when they busted the door down and got an assault tacked on the possessions charge. That meant a felony, some extra time. And when I came out, what did Reina have waiting for me? I had a stash of nearly ten grand before the takedown, and she couldn’t tell me where the money was. Down her arm and up her nose. I loved that woman so much, had kissed every nook and cranny of her body, had dipped my tongue between her legs and over her breasts, now I wouldn’t kick her in the ass if she bent over. So you see? That’s why I don’t believe in love.

  After the pinta I had gone north to get as far as I could. To get as far from the grief and drugs and booze of East Los as probation would allow. Now my colors were neither red nor blue, I was neither Norteño nor Sureño. This was my first trip back in ten years, and I was tense. I meant to make the deal with T-Mex, sign the forms for my brother’s funeral, and be out within twenty-four hours. And never go back.

  Adelita pulled down the sun visor, then, looking in the mirror, rolled her hair up and knotted it in a bun. A small curl slipped out of the knot and down her nape, and that just drove me crazy. Right there I would have sold my soul to hang like that curl and kiss the back of her neck. She reached into the backseat and hauled her suitcase up front, ripped the tape off, and I could see all she had in there was a beat-up accordion and a pint of peach brandy. The real sweet stuff. She shoved the bottle at me.

  “Have a drink with me, cowboy.”

  I licked the dust from my lips. “No, thanks.”

  I fished in the ashtray for the joint I’d been hitting on the night before with Sage. Up to this minute I had forgotten about her premonition. Now here I was with a woman who was a dream chaser.

  I fired up the roach with the car lighter, sucked in a little jet stream of smoke, and held my breath like a blowfish. Then I blew a rush of purple smoke that clouded the Camaro. I’d been sober for years, just smoked a little—once a vato loco, always a vato loco, and the last thing I wanted was to start drinking. Booze was poison to me. I had too much Indian blood, that’s what Sage told me. But Adelita tipped the bottle to her lips, and a thin line of brandy trickled down her mouth. I noticed her mouth, wide with full lips, the kind I like. She wiped her mouth with the palm of her hand.

  I was holding the roach with my fingernails. “Care for a hit?”

  “No. It’s bad for my voice.”

  Once the herb came on, the landscape stretched out, the seconds floated by, and the miles seemed farther apart though I kept a steady eighty. A bug went splat! on the windshield, leaving a dribble of yellow liquid. I could feel the bug’s pain, its surprise at suddenly flying into something solid when it thought the sky was clear. Splat! There went another one. I was too sensitive to be in the fast lane, so I moved over to the middle lane and slowed to seventy. And I thought of Shorty doing hard time in Soledad. A woman he loved had poured scalding water on him while he slept, leaving half his face melted like wax. But he survived the county hospital doctors. Months later, he ran into his ex-wife and her new vato, in the Reno Club in Sacra. Shorty didn’t care about her anymore, but a fight started anyway and he stabbed the vato with a five-inch blade, right in the neck. So now one man was paralyzed and another in prison, and the woman who’d caused it all flew off free as a golondrina. Pobre Shorty. He should have walked away from her when he had the chance. Poor, stupid Shorty. I learned in the joint there’s nothing more dangerous than loving a woman the way Shorty had loved, blind as a worm, the way I had loved Reina Sarmiento. The woman didn’t exist that was worth your life. And I intended never to love a woman, any woman, that bad again. But that was the only way I knew how. And faking it with Sage was the coward’s way out.

  Adelita turned quiet too. She hunched in her corner of the front seat, her knees crossed, and didn’t sing anymore, just sipped her brandy through tight lips. Every now and then she’d take a quick glance at me, then look away. The only sound came from my Camaro ripping off the miles. After a while she turned to me, with just a hint of pleading in that voice I would have followed anywhere.

  “I need a ride to Vegas,” she said. “You want to take me, be with me when I make it?”

  I couldn’t believe it. Why did I always find the crazy ones? The ones even the devil didn’t want. “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. “You can’t just take two people from the middle of nowhere and mix them.”

  She glared at me, eyes all fired up with anger. “Why not? Or do you want that whole game playing first? Tú sabes, the sweet-talking and the playing around like you don’t know what you’re after. I’m through with that. Either you come with me or you don’t. I’m not asking you again.” She pinned me down with those arrowhead eyes of hers.

  I stuffed the last handful of sunflower seeds in my mouth and crushed them viciously. Hell, I knew I could get along with her, I could tell, but Virgen María, what was she like day after day? Passion is fleeting—I knew that much. One morning you wake up and they want to sit on your face, and you just can’t handle it that early, even with the most beautiful woman, so that kills the romance right there. And she was tough, the type that would get back at you while you slept. I could see that. Maybe she poisoned her ex–old man, and that’s what she was running from. Or maybe her ex was getting ready to come after her. Maybe there was no ex, maybe it was a husband. So there was that to worry about. She didn’t seem too concerned about her kids, either. And I didn’t need troubles. I especially didn’t need her troubles.

  Just to test her, I said, “You maybe have money to get there? You know the old saying, Gas, grass, or ass.”

  “I’ll pay you somehow.”

  I turned my eyes back to the road: “Chale,” I said, “I have business in El Ley.”

  That hurt her. She stared out the window for a while, like there was something to see, but I knew there was nothing out there. Finally she spoke, pleading but not pleading.

  “You don’t seem like a bad man. That’s all I’ve ever known. Since I was fifteen.”

  I didn’t want to listen to the oldest story in the world.

  “A woman needs some kind of protection. Or else bad men will take advantage of her.” She tilted the bottle up and took a long swallow. Wiped her mouth with her hand again. “It’s not easy raising two kids alone. And no man wants a woman with kids, I don’t blame them. But all I’ve ever wanted to do was sing. I’d sing in the fields, just to ease that pain in my corazón, right here where it hurts all the way through your back. I’d sing under the trees during lunchtime, or after work,
whenever I could. And people were always saying I should get paid for it and they’d pass the hat. You know what you get paid for picking walnuts?”

  “I don’t really care,” I said.

  “Not very sucking much”

  She took a deep breath, shook her head, took another drink. Now she really unleashed it on me.

  “My last boyfriend, you know, he did some things to me…”

  Damn, I wanted to stop the car, get out right there in the middle of nowhere, and show her not all men were animals.

  “So I left my two boys with their abuelita. And split.”

  “I’m glad you did.” And I looked at her, sitting sad as a bird on a wire in winter.

  “I’am sure you had to,” I said.

  “But you’re different, I can see that. You have corazón, like me.” And she took another swig and smiled, looking like a little girl. A little girl on the run, telling stories and nipping her brandy.

  The honesty of her confession wrapped around me like tule fog, and there was nothing else to say. I thought about a woman like her, alone on the road, making her way with strangers who offered rides. The sort of trouble she could get into—being kinda good-looking, and a little crazy and all. Leaving her kids behind must have hurt some, I guess. And who knows what that boyfriend did to her. She’d probably been chained to the stove, or worse, and this was her only chance, her last chance at life. It was tragic. I mean there was a tragedy waiting to happen, and I didn’t want it to happen. I had to admire her taking the risk, getting set one day, packing her things into that patched-up suitcase and slipping out to chase her dream. I just didn’t know where I fit in. I’d wasted the first half of my life already, and I sure didn’t want to blow the rest over a piece of nearly flat Chicana ass.

  Before my life had gone to hell, I’d been a guitarist, sat in on some of the first gigs Los Lobos played when they were still a garage band. Five years passed, and then time in the joint, and after I came out I didn’t remember what I had started out to be. Didn’t give a damn either. Now I only wanted to live my life, die in peace, be buried and forgotten. My dreams had withered in the day-to-day survival. But something about Adelita was rubbing off on me. Just watching her sit there, a hurricane being born, I felt the itch to do things again, to take chances. Live life at full throttle. It was that funny feeling I’d gotten when I first saw her.

  The green freeway sign read LOS ANGELES 90 MILES. I’d been driving six hours. I was tired and thirsty; the thin film of dust over the Camaro seemed to cover me too. I turned to her and said in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Let me have a sip of that brandy.” That was my choice. Had nothing to do with her. I washed some of that cheap stuff down my throat and handed her back the pint. My eyes burned like I was giving up the ghost.

  She was measuring me. “I bet I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What’s that?” I squinted at the road so she couldn’t read my mind.

  “You’d like to kiss me.”

  “It’s pretty hard when I’m doing seventy on I-5”

  But a kiss is not what I was thinking. I was thinking I had just taken my first drink in ten years and was ready for more. The road to damnation—someone once said—is paved with wine, women, and weed, and I had a full house. I checked the rearview mirror. The magic red-and-black beads that my shaman friend Maestro Andres had given me hung like a broken piñata, and they seemed to have lost the power to protect me. Adelita slid over next to me and placed her hot little hand on my thigh. The speedometer went straight up.

  With Adelita I knew it was going to be all the way, all the time, without regrets, double or nothing. I checked her out sideways and I said, “What about that tattoo?”

  Without so much as a blink she reached up and pulled down a corner of her blouse, revealing a sunburned shoulder. The red half-moon of my nail mark was still visible on her skin. Her voice a sultry whisper wicked as a night on the delta: “I’ve never been tattooed.”

  I thought of Reina and Sage and all the other huizas I carry stitched on my body. But here was a woman willing to do it for me. Willing to go all the way—a toda máquina.

  “A heart on fire is what I’m going to put there. Then we’ll be a pair. Por vida.”

  She leaned over and blew her hot breath in my ear. My foot went to the metal and the Camaro took off, as if wanting to fly. Then she pressed a hot kiss on my mouth, her plastic bracelets clacking in my ear. This is it, I thought, no going back. I closed one eye and swerved down the middle of that four-lane highway, knowing there was not another car on the road, only her and me, our tough tattoos, and the radials running over those little plastic squares that separate the lanes, going fuckit fuckit fuckit.

  Grapefruit Flesh

  KAROL GRIFFIN

  A grapefruit slathered in petroleum jelly is quite possibly the most slippery object in the world, especially if you’re trying to hold on to it while wearing latex gloves. It’s virtually impossible to clutch a slick grapefruit in one hand while tattooing it with the other.

  You can’t start right in tattooing on human skin—I mean, you can, and some people do, but when you think about it, it isn’t a very good idea. So many elements to consider, like depth and angle and grain and control. There’s more to tattooing than needles and skin; you have to consider the responsibility inherent in the business of transforming other people’s bodies, other people’s lives. So you start with a grapefruit. You study and practice under the tutelage of someone who knows what they’re doing. For me, this person was Slade Fiero.

  On the surface, Slade was a cocky person with an omnipotent attitude about his profession and few qualms about what might or might not constitute a good business deal. He often traded tattoos for drugs or guns or stereo equipment. One time, he traded a tattoo for a human head. In essence, he embodied every negative connotation of the tattooist, all rolled into a stocky little package with a bushy mustache and neatly manicured hair. Underneath this facade, though, Slade was soulful, an artist at heart who happened to tattoo.

  I trusted him.

  At first, my tattoo apprenticeship seemed more like indentured servitude, but I didn’t mind. I was filled with self-importance as I unlocked the door of the shop. Even the most odious task was a treat. I trotted around behind Slade like a gleeful puppy, tidying up the shop between appointments and watching him work. I picked up paper towels soaked with green soap, ink, and blood that Slade had tossed in the general direction of the trash can. I secured stainless-steel needle tubes with a toothbrush and pipe cleaners before sterilizing them in the autoclave. I made stencils and ran Slade’s errands. I mixed pigment from powder so fine that it coated my skin with a rainbow of dust, which smeared and stained when I tried to wipe it off.

  I worked in the tattoo shop five days a week, devoting myself wholeheartedly to every aspect of my apprenticeship, determined to do my best, convinced that this was my destiny. Even though I wasn’t making money at it yet, I was committed. I knew that I should have looked for another job, at least something part-time, but I couldn’t justify spending much time in the straight world of retail when I could be in the tattoo shop instead. Eventually, financial pressure forced me to reevaluate. I found a job, one day a week, which was perfect. On Mondays, when the shop was closed, I worked in a bookstore down the block. I managed to scrape by on food stamps, and for extra cash, I held the hands of frightened (or more often, lecherous) tattoo clients for five dollars each.

  During the first three weeks of my apprenticeship, I never touched a tattoo machine. I was beginning to think I’d never get a chance to actually tattoo, that apprenticing was nothing more than an exercise in janitorial work. This made me grumpy, but I didn’t know what to say. I just kept picking up dirty paper towels and vacuuming, with increasing resentment.

  One day I slammed open the door of the tattoo shop, determined to speak my mind. Slade was one step ahead of me.

  “Don’t say it,” he said, smiling. “I know. You’re sick of the bullshit, rig
ht? You want to tattoo, right? You wonder why I’ve made you do all the grunt work around here”

  His words paralyzed my preargument icy frown.

  “Humility, doll.” He laughed. “It’s not all about ink and skin. You’ve got to learn to have the right attitude—otherwise, you’ll go down in flames. But I’ve got a surprise for you. Today, you tattoo.” Slade handed me a pair of latex gloves and set a cup of black ink and a cup of petroleum jelly in the ink rack. He took out his outliner machine, showed me how to assemble the needlebar and the tube and attach it to the machine. He pressed the foot pedal, and the machine hummed merrily in his hand. Slade reached under the counter and pulled out a grapefruit. He demonstrated proper depth, speed, and angle, deftly freehanding a gruesome skull on the grapefruit. He treated the grapefruit like a customer, like it was a real tattoo on a real person. He rubbed the grapefruit skin with petroleum jelly as he worked, and wiped away the excess ink with a paper towel wound between the fingers of his working hand.