Olga Dies Dreaming(26)

Olga was out somewhere, likely being scandalous; she was never home in those days. So, he told his abuela he could go by himself, so the house wouldn’t be empty if she came back. She gave him the keys to the hooptie she used, and he drove. The very first drive he’d ever taken alone. The car had a cassette player and before he left, he ran to his room to grab a tape—a Wu-Tang mix he’d gotten at the Fulton Mall after school. He blasted it and by the time he was crossing the bridge and could see the prison in the distance, he felt placid. Far from happy, but calm. Able to manage the process of going through security, showing his newly minted driver’s license as a form of ID, extracting the exact bail from the envelope of cash—in mostly $10s, $5s, and $1s—that his grandmother had given him for this purpose. He was able to breathe as he sat in the plastic bucket seat in the waiting area behind the thick glass, waiting for them to bring his father out, gaunt, legs and hands cuffed together like he had done more than try to steal a TV. When the officer said, “I don’t know much, but I know we’ll be seeing you back here, son,” Prieto wasn’t sure if he meant to bail out his pops or as a criminal himself, but he was able to say, with calm and certainty, “No, I don’t think that you will.”

His father kissed his cheek as he’d always done when he greeted his son. Papi was tired. Prieto didn’t know if that was him coming off a crack high or having doped up in jail. It was hard to tell with his father sometimes, but he had hunted him down enough to know that, up or down, when Papi wanted to get high, he would find a way. Prieto let him lie across the back seat. He changed the tape in the car to Joe Bataan, knowing it would please his father and it did; he sang along before he drifted into sleep. In this way, they drove home. Prieto pulled up to the little house on Thirty-seventh Street between Second and Third, where his Tío JoJo’s friend rented Papi a basement apartment on the condition that he didn’t smoke crack there. The rent was only $200 a month, but Prieto knew that JoJo, Lola, and Richie had been taking turns covering it the past few months. (They didn’t complain, but you hear things.) His father was out like a light, so Prieto climbed into the back to shake him awake, and that was when he saw it, on his father’s neck—the KS lesion. He didn’t even know that’s what it was called, but he knew what it was—the mark of the beast, really. The mark of death. His heart raced. He carried his father out of the back seat and into the tiny apartment, wondering to himself how the fuck this homie had ever even been able to carry a TV when he didn’t weigh more than a TV himself.

The room: a portrait of a tragedy. A Puerto Rican flag hung on the wall, and next to it Papi’s Lords beret. A record player lay on the ground flanked on either side by what must have been a hundred records. The mattress was on the floor, a crate as a nightstand next to it, on top of which was a bare-bulbed lamp, a copy of The General in His Labyrinth, and, to Prieto’s quiet horror, Papi’s works, the needle in a cup of water, pink with blood. He set his father out on the bed and thought to himself: He’ll be high again before the sun comes up. Prieto got back into the car, drove into Bay Ridge, east onto the Belt Parkway, before he ultimately did what he had long wanted and turned the beat-up sedan around to make his way over to the piers off Christopher Street by the West Side Highway.

If the needle was Papi’s release, this was his.



* * *



PRIETO HAD THOUGHT himself street smart, but he’d been a simpleton when he arrived on the political scene nearly seventeen years ago. A Pollyanna was what the City Council speaker had called Prieto when he first assumed office and was asked what his side business was going to be.

“Side business?” Prieto asked, genuinely confused. “I think my job representing Sunset Park isn’t going to leave me much room for a side business.”

The speaker had laughed, clapped his hand on his back, and said, “Turns out our political dynamo is a real Pollyanna.” The nickname stuck, at least his first term, as he was genuinely shocked each time he discovered a new act of corruption or self-dealing going on with his colleagues.

They almost all had side businesses based in their districts. From pizzerias to laundromats to small accounting shops. Always storefronts that looked, to their constituents, like investments in their communities, but in reality were vehicles to clean the money that passed into their hands to secure votes for policies and measures favorable to a class of people living far from the neighborhoods they were representing. So much of this was happening in the open, or the near open, that, when discussing upcoming votes or meetings people were taking with developers and financiers, they would sometimes look Prieto’s way and say, “Pollyanna doesn’t have a problem with this, right?” This was their way of reminding him that if he wanted to play by the rules, no problem, as long as he didn’t fuck stuff up for the rest of them. It was his sister who pointed out to him that he could work this to his advantage, parlaying his silence into leverage over his colleagues for votes on matters that would benefit his small idyll of South Brooklyn, an area that, in those days, commanded very little attention in the city.

Sometimes, when he contemplated the direction of his life, he felt his wounds were self-inflicted. He ran for office because everyone ignored his neighborhood—the board of education and their overcrowded schools, the cops (except when they shot kids in the street with impunity), the sanitation department, elected officials. These days, all eyes were on Sunset Park, and it was he, Prieto, who had put them there. For better and for worse.