Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(39)
With every conversation, the pep in his voice got a little bit lower, and the clarity of his words got hazier. He started using fewer phrases and more letters: E, LSD, AC/DC, MJ, and Notorious B.I.G., whom, Paolo kept repeating, had died last March in a shooting tied to the then-prominent East Coast–West Coast rap feud. He repeated that story over and over, inflating and deflating details each time. He obsessed over Biggie’s and Tupac’s mysterious deaths, and claimed that he could solve them.
“It’s just common sense, man. This guy hired that guy to kill the other guy because he was overstepping. He was in goddamn LA when it was clear that Brooklyn was his fuckin’ territory. Common sense, man. They killed each other. They fuckin’ killed each other.”
He stopped talking to me in sentences and instead replaced them with Biggie’s chorus about making more money and having more problems, and Tupac’s song about the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and the war between cops and bodies.
The swings between his crazed, raving mood and a mopey-dopey state came quickly and frequently.
“Kuya, are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Paolo replied, head down, eyes half-shut, mouth barely opening. “Just trippin’, sis. Just livin’, just trippin’, just . . . just tryin’, sis. You be good, sis. Don’t do what I do. You be good because you are good, sis.”
He reached behind the TV and pulled out a ziplock bag of pills.
“You don’t touch this, okay? This is only for hopeless, broken-ass boys like me. Boys who got nothing. You—you have plenty. It’s good for me, but it’s bad for you.”
“Okay,” I said and bit my lip to not cry.
I wanted to be good because that’s what he said I was and should be. And with that, he put our friendship at stake. To be good, I had to stay away and stay awake. I had to find other company.
Manong Bidoy, Elma’s dad, brought home a puppy from the dump. He was disposing of our trash when he found a three-legged brown pooch at the foot of the garbage hill. It was young enough to vaccinate, he thought, so he brought it home, assured that the three-pound mongrel could be made rabies-free. In the Philippines, whatever could be purchased legally was available half off from a bystander or wet-and-dry-goods market, vaccinations included. In exchange for old chafing dishes and utensils from the now-defunct Mansion Royale: A Grand Palace, the stray got an injection and handwritten records. He was officially safe and officially mine.
At first, Manong Bidoy and I were afraid that Mama would disapprove of having such a deformed, disabled creature at the mansion. But after surveying the crooks that had been entering and exiting what had become a turnstile—the main doors—we decided that the little pup was no more appalling nor less sensible than the half-sober, half-naked, half-lying crooks Norman had befriended through cockfighting: beer-bellied forty-something-year-old men and their “for hire” women parading through the house. Mama was out with Norman all day, anyway, scrambling for money by any means. She barely noticed the changes my body was going through, so she wouldn’t have noticed that a dog was living at home.
The limping pooch was brown like cocoa, so I named him Milo, after my favorite chocolate drink. He was a true puppy—always following me around, whimpering for my attention, licking my face and hands and ears. He liked to sleep next to the bed, instead of on it, because, I assumed, it was much like sleeping at the foot of the garbage hill. He jumped in the shower with me every morning and sneezed in excitement each time the water hit him. Milo and I were both small-framed and dark and skinny from the shortage of food at home. He had big teeth, an overbite, and a little round pug-like nose. Like brother, like sister. He replaced the brother I lost to infant mortality and the brother I lost to drugs.
With him I played the two games I knew best: house and war. I pushed him around in Tiffany’s buggy, wrapped in the swaddle I used to pretend was Tachio. He wouldn’t lie still, and instead propped his paws on the front side of the basket, his tongue sticking out to the side, and whimpering.
“Shhh, go to sleep now, baby Milo,” I whispered, fixing the end of the swaddle that had come undone.
He shimmied out of the cloth and licked my face.
“Thank you,” I said, picking him up from the pram and holding him over one shoulder like a baby. “I don’t think you want to play house. Let’s try war.”
I staggered Paolo’s superhero plastic cups in a zigzag on the herringbone-patterned floor. At one end of the obstacle course, I scattered crumbs of that morning’s pan de sal.
“Okay, Milo, you’re my army dog now. I’m Alpha, you’re Beta, and this is how we get back to our camp.” I slalomed down the winding track and he followed. “That’s it, boy!”
We did several rounds of zipping back and forth, and at the sixth or seventh turn, I added a challenge. I noticed the day Manong Bidoy brought the mongrel home that it had a limp but could jump high, up to about hip height. So I tried a command on him. I yelped “Bravo!” for jump and another army alphabet letter for down. “Bravo!” Jump. “Charlie!” Down.
He sprang nonstop until we reached X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu.
With a few bread crumbs left on the breakfast tray, I taught my new best friend how to fetch. I’d heard Papa talk about recovering his men from the Gulf War, and so I assumed that retrieval was a skill all soldiers had to have. I threw a plush toy down the corridor, and Milo instinctively knew what to do. He whooshed to where the toy landed and returned it to me, his tongue still sticking out to the side, pushing past his big teeth. Upon retrieval of the toy, he knew to expect a reward: a pat or a rub and a bit of bread.