Olga Dies Dreaming(53)
He was waiting for her on the stoop, also with a six-pack, a small speaker by his side pumping out an old Spinners tune. She felt happy when she saw him in a way that was new to her. He was soothing. Like sweet fried plantains. They smiled at each other in silence as she walked up the brownstone steps to the top of the stoop, sat down, rested her back against the banister, and swung her feet up onto Matteo’s lap. He unbuckled her sandals while she opened a bottle of beer, giving each foot a squeeze as he did so.
“This is a good song,” she said.
“Ah, the best. But you know what?”
“What?”
“It sounds better on vinyl.”
“Well, shit,” she said, “tell me what doesn’t?”
“Fair point.”
A skinny old man in a muscle tank and basketball shorts pushed a reappropriated IKEA shopping cart piled high with his possessions—framed art, bags of clothes, a folding chair, an old-school boom box—up the street past them. He called out to Matteo.
“Yo! My man! You got something you can contribute to my battery fund? I’ve got no juice.” He gestured to the boom box.
Matteo slid out from under her feet and bounded down the steps, slipping the guy a bill. He quickly resumed his position as her footrest.
“You think he’ll really use the cash for batteries?” Olga asked. The man had reminded her of her father towards his end, and the melancholy of the car ride blanketed her again, thick as the summer air.
“Freddie? Yeah. He loves that friggin’ boom box. He’ll stand in front of the bodega all day with that shit blasting. He’s harmless, but you know, the new blanquitos … he creeps them out a little bit.”
“Yeah. My dad, at one point, was kind of like that.” Olga could feel Matteo’s attention on her. She continued: “But he definitely wouldn’t have used the money for batteries, as much as he loved music.” She laughed, though the memory was not funny to her.
“Did I tell you my dad was a junkie when he died?” she asked, knowing fully well she had avoided the subject deftly to this point. “Basehead, too. A long fall from his Young Lords days.”
“Overdose?” Matteo asked quietly.
“Nah. People didn’t OD back then like now. AIDS, though, that was a different story. Death sentence. My Papi was a functioning addict for a long time. Kept a job, would still come and see us, like normal. But then, you know, the same old story. Starts missing shifts, loses his job, starts coming around high, then he’s pawning shit, then he’s stealing shit to pawn. But! In all that time, the only thing he’d never sell were his records! Anyway, one morning, Abuelita found all the albums in crates in the front yard of our house. His landlord heard he was sick and kicked him out. Papi carried out his records and the landlord burned everything else in the backyard. Magic Johnson had already played in the fucking Olympics with HIV, but this guy was afraid of a mattress. Co?o. After that day, for a couple of months we couldn’t find him. Then, we got a call from the hospital.
“This was ninety-four? The people still dying were mainly like Papi—junkies. Brown and Black addicts. Some gay men, trans girls. But by this time, they, too, were all Black and Brown. I don’t know what it was like in the eighties, but the doctors and nurses treated them fine—shit, for lots of people, sadly, the hospitals were more stable than their home situations. But these people were lonely as fuck. No one was visiting these homies. The hospitals were like ghost towns. But we would go, religiously, and see Papi. My aunt Lola would bring him food, though he couldn’t eat by then. My abuela would give him sponge baths. Even my uncles would come—which, honestly, I have to remind myself often these days, since my Tío Richie’s become one of these nutty Make America Great Again people, which I can’t even get started on. Anyway, my brother never went. Not once. At first, I thought it was because of my mother. But then I began to think it was something else.”
Olga could feel the weight of her words in the air, but felt a heaviness move off her chest a bit. She smiled at Matteo very faintly, felt her cheeks get flushed.
“What’d make you think your mom wouldn’t want him to visit your dad?”
“I assumed she sent him a letter like the one she sent me. She sort of took a ‘don’t let his shit weigh you down’ tack. But my brother and I? We think she was angry. Like legit pissed. The way she saw it, she’d fallen in love with a powerhouse activist who wanted to change the world with her, and then he goes and lets himself become another tragic Puerto Rican statistic.”
“And how did you see it?” he asked as he rubbed her legs. She pretended not to hear.
“Prieto never came to the hospital and he’d tell my grandma and anybody who was listening that he was just trying to preserve his good memories of Papi. Which was Mami’s advice, I knew. But, in the back of my mind I’d always wondered if he didn’t go because he was afraid.”
“Of AIDS?” Matteo asked.
“Of fucking everything,” Olga said, her head shaking in disbelief. She sat up straighter. “We had a big fight today—”
“About his fundraiser?”
“No, about a favor I wanted to do for a friend. It’s a long story…”
“You see me trying to go anywhere?” Matteo asked.
Olga sighed. “Okay. Have you ever been talking to somebody about, ostensibly, one small, specific thing, but the implications of what you’re saying shifts the way you perceive everything that came before and after it?”