The Book of Unknown Americans(49)

I didn’t know a soul when I got to New York. I slept on the floor of Grand Central Terminal for the first three nights, watching everyone’s feet walk past, men in loafers, women in patent leather heels. Click click click. Everyone with somewhere to go except for me. I had gotten to my destination and now what? A dream isn’t the same thing as a plan. I started feeling like I wanted to return home, but the way I left—all that youthful righteousness and conviction that I threw at my mami como un tornado—I would have been embarrassed to go back so soon. My mami would have said, “You see, nena! You’re just a little girl after all.” No. I had planted a stake and now I had something to prove, to my mami and to myself, to everyone from my neighborhood. I had to prove that I could make it.

I got lucky, though. In the train station, I met a girl, this chica de compa?ia named Josie, who had gotten kicked out of her parents’ house for smoking dope. She had a friend, a guy in Queens, who was going over for the war and she was going to stay in his apartment until he got back. I’ll never forget, she said, “I have to water his plants for him so they don’t die.” Later, when he didn’t come home, when they couldn’t even find enough pieces of his body to put together to send back, she cried so much and for so long that I knew: She was in love with him. She had been waiting for him, every day pouring cupfuls of water into the pots that held his plants, turning them in the sunlight, taking care of them because she thought it was a way of taking care of him.

I lived in that apartment for one year. I had gotten a job as a waitress, but Josie never charged me rent. Her friend’s parents were paying for the apartment, she said. It was covered. Instead I put all my money toward dance classes and acting classes that I took in the mornings at a little studio in Elmhurst. For food, I ate leftovers off diners’ plates at the restaurant. I scraped whatever people didn’t eat into cardboard take-out containers and saved it for later. Hash browns, toast crusts, noodles, creamed corn, todo eso. The boss didn’t really care.

I went to auditions when I heard about them. I remember there was an open call for Man of La Mancha at a small theater in Greenwich Village. I tried out for the role of the housekeeper. When I got there, a man was lining up all the girls. I remember I asked him whether it was okay that I wasn’t Spanish. Because of course it was a Spanish play. He said, “What are you?” I told him, “Puertorriquena,” and he said, “What’s the difference?”

I didn’t get that role or any role after that. Not a single one. For years I tried. After the news of Josie’s friend, I had left the apartment in Queens because it didn’t feel right for me to stay there. Josie refused to leave. She took over the lease. She kept watering the plants. Maybe it was denial, but maybe it was her only way of holding on to someone she had loved. Maybe we should all be so passionate.

Once I was on my own again, I found a place in the cellar under a corner grocery store. Really a cellar. It had damp stone walls and one window no bigger than a squinted eye. I danced all day and took trains and buses all over the city to auditions, and at night I carried around trays of food and flirted with the men for bigger tips. On my walk home sometimes, and as I stepped back down into that cellar apartment, my eyes heavy from exhaustion, I would think, Is this what it is? This country? My life? Is this all?

But even when I thought that, I was always aware of some other part of me saying, there is more. And you will find it.

Oh, I didn’t find it, though. I worked like crazy. I practiced dancing until my feet bled and my knees felt like water balloons. I rubbed Vicks into my cracked heels and took so many hot baths I lost count. I went to a voice coach and sang until my throat was raw. I killed myself, but it never happened for me. The world already had its Rita Moreno, I guess, and there was only room for one Boricua at a time. That’s how it works. Americans can handle one person from anywhere. They had Desi Arnaz from Cuba. And Tin Tan from México. And Rita Moreno from Puerto Rico. But as soon as there are too many of us, they throw up their hands. No, no, no! We were only just curious. We are not actually interested in you people.

But I’m a fighter. You get me against the ropes and I will swing so hard—bam! So I thought, well, if I’m not going to find it, then there’s only one other option: I will create it.

I researched and found out that taxes for new businesses were lowest in Delaware, so I saved money for a while—I stopped taking classes and signed up for extra shifts at the restaurant—and said good-bye to New York. I came to Wilmington to try to start a theater company of my own. I got a job as a waitress again, only at nights, at a bar this time, and during the day I worked on getting the theater going. It was a different time then. The society was different. Free love, fellowship, turn on, tune in, drop out. There were communities of artists, people who didn’t want to work for the big corporations, people who were willing to help a girl like me, and many times they worked for free. I met a guy who helped me build sets and put up some lights. I did all the painting myself. I got a whole truck full of wooden pews from a church that was being renovated. I lined them up for the people I dreamed would one day come to watch my shows. The Parish Theater, I called it, because of those pews.

In 1971, we had our first production, a play called The Brown Bag Affair. It was very racy, provocative, a lot of nudity, but the story was powerful, and even though for the first few weeks only a few people showed up to see it, word started to spread. First, we had an audience of ten people, but eventually it grew to twenty, everyone sitting shoulder to shoulder in those long pews. Every few months, we did a new show, and two years after we opened our doors, we were getting regular crowds for every one. The theater wasn’t making much money, but we were bringing in enough to keep the plays on. That by itself was some kind of miracle.