The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

times in my whole life, so I went with him. We made sure Momma was okay and we went across the hall and we knocked on the door and he answered in his boxer shorts and t-shirt with tomato sauce all over it and my brother started talking.

What’s up, Ben.

Ben wiped some grease off his face and talked back at him.

What’s up, Alberto.

This is my sister Mariaangeles and her daughter Mercedes.

Yeah, I met them once.

Ben looked at me.

How you doing?

I gave him a dirty look.

You gonna invite us in?

I guess.

He opened the door. Stepped aside. And we went in and I started looking around. Big TV in the living room. A grubby old couch with cigarette burns that looked like it was made out of old carpet.

Video game disks and controllers. Kitchen was nasty. Pizza boxes. Empty cans of soup and pasta with spoons and forks still in ’em. Garbage bags filled on the floor. I opened the fridge ’cause I was thinking of having a soda or something and all it had in it was some ketchup and that was it. Whole place smelled like old food and stale beer. Went to the bedroom and there was a mattress and a pillow. Some clothes on the floor. Closet had his uniform hanging up in it, and it was the only thing that looked cared for. Bathroom, the bathroom where that man was hanging, was worse than the kitchen. Stains in the toilet and sink. Tissues overflowing out of a little garbage can. No toilet paper to be seen and I doubt he had ever cleaned it once. Even by the standards we was used to seeing, his place was bad. And more than bad, or nasty, or disgusting, it was just sad. Real sad. Like he didn’t know any better. Like he thought it was normal for a grown man to be living like that. Made me think he didn’t have nobody in his life that cared about him. Like he was all alone. Alone in a place where he didn’t belong because he didn’t have nowhere else to go, and no one else to go to. They’d have done something if they was around. But they weren’t. He was all alone. I went back into the living room. Bang bang bang. Him and Alberto shooting Nazis, throwing grenades at ’em. Mercedes sitting on the floor chewing her blankie, watching people explode on the TV. Too much. There’s enough ugliness in the world already without pretending to do more. Too much I said, and I smacked Alberto on the back of the head. He got all mad, said you knew what we was doing here, you didn’t have to come. I said play another game, play some game where you don’t gotta see blood squirting everywhere, and Ben said we’ll play the NBA game and changed the disk. While he doing it I ask him where he from, and he says Brooklyn, and I ask if he got family there, and he says yes. I ask him do he see them, he says no. I ask him why and he says I just don’t. I ask for how long and he says a long time. I ask him how old he is and he says thirty, I ask where he been living before this and he says he don’t want to talk about it. Answers made me sad. I always thought white people had good lives. Even the worst of ’em had it better off than me and everybody I knew. Just what I believed. But this boy didn’t have it better. Worse. Just him and his video games and his shitty apartment that no one else would live in. I had my girl and my family at least. He had it way worse.

Their game started back up and I didn’t like being there ’cause it was sad and depressing so I got Mercedes and we left and went back to our place. And that was it. For a long time. Six or nine months or something. Alberto played video games with Ben. I’d see him around. In his uniform if it was day, drunk if it was night, sometimes in the hall in his underwear while he was waiting for a pizza. I turned eighteen. Went out with some of my girlfriends from around the project and some girlfriends from when I was in school. They was all around my age, almost all of ’em in a situation similar to mine: no diploma, a kid or two and a couple had three, boyfriend still around but not really there, no way to get out or move up. Just ways to make it through the day or the week or the month. One of the girls was wearing nice clothes and a nice watch and smelled good like expensive perfume and she started saying she was working as a dancer and making plenty of money. Said you had to be eighteen, but could make three, four hundred, maybe five hundred bucks a night dancing in clubs. We started saying she was hooking but she said no, she danced naked on a stage and gave men lap dances in a private room and they gave her cash. That it was easy. Men from Manhattan would come up, tell their wives they had meetings or was working late, or they’d come over after baseball games at Yankee Stadium. They was stupid and it was easy to make ’em think they was getting some ass and the more you could make ’em think it the more they would pay you. She said it wasn’t a churchgoing job, rubbing her ass and tits all over white men, but none of us was churchgoing girls, and a good shower at the end of the night and she was fine with it, especially ’cause she was making so much money. She said maybe she was gonna leave the neighborhood. Find her a place where her kids would be able to go to a good school. Because even though almost all of us was dropouts, we knew the only way out for real was an education. Just none of us could do it.

Next day I called the girl. She took me to the club. I met the manager. Fat white man from Westchester. He made me strip down to my panties and bra and show him how I danced. Made me rub my ass on his crotch and rub my titties down his chest and whisper shit his wife wouldn’t say to him in his ear. His hands started wandering and I asked him what he was doing and he said he test drove all the girls before he let ’em out on the track. Made me sick. But we needed the money. Momma wasn’t working and who the fuck knew what Alberto did. Made me sick. But I let him. I let him do anything and everything. Took me for a test drive. Made me fucking sick.

Started working a few days later. It wasn’t hard but I had to close up part of my heart, part of my soul. I had been with three men before. One when I was twelve. Mercedes’ father, who I was with from when I was fourteen until he left when I was seventeen. The manager. Except for that manager, I’d waited. Tried to make sure they loved me. I know I loved them. Would have done anything for them. Killed for them or died for them. Hit the cross for them. I thought they felt the same, loved the same. But love is different for every person. For some it’s hate, for some it’s joy, for some it’s fear, for some it’s jealousy, for some it’s torture, for some it’s peace. For some it’s everything. For me. Everything. And to let a man touch me like that, or to touch a man like that, I had always had to love. So I shut it down. Closed it. Buried it somewhere. And I danced and touched and whispered and got them hard and took them as far as I could and took them for as much as I could. They didn’t know but they took more from me. A shower at the end of the night wasn’t enough. Not even close. Didn’t clean nothing.

Three nights a week I worked, sometimes four. Started saving up. Got Mercedes some clothes that hadn’t been worn before, some of her own shoes, brand new. Got my momma a sweater, and new magazines every week. Didn’t put none of the money in a bank ’cause I know what happens with white people and their banks. I put it away. Where Alberto wouldn’t never look. Where nobody would look. A couple months, a couple more. Making money but hurting. And changing. Keeping myself closed and hard all the time started taking it out of me. One of the girls gave me some shit to smoke and it helped. So I did more of it. And it helped. More than a shower or anything else. But when it wore away it started hurting more so I was taking more. Sleeping and working and getting high. Starting to do things I would have never done before because I didn’t care, because I was hurting so much that more of the hurt wasn’t nothing. And it brought more money. One night I was working and Ben came in and one of the girls smiled and said look who’s here. And I asked her what about him and she said he was an easy mark. Would come in with his paycheck and get drunk and give the whole damn thing away. I told her he was living in my building and that he was mine. She got in my face about it for a minute till I told her how far I’d go. I was dipping into my money too much and I needed more. Momma was getting sick and Mercedes was getting sick and I needed them to get to a doctor and I didn’t have no insurance. And I needed more.

I went over to him. He was already drunk. He smiled and said hi and I said hey baby, nice seeing you here. And I didn’t even ask him. Took his hand. Led him to the room where we did the dances. And I went at him, giving him what all them men wanted and whispering in his ear about what we could do back at home now that I knew what kind of boy he was. I told him I wanted to suck his cock and I wanted him to fuck me, that I would ride his ass all day and all night, that I was getting all wet thinking about it. And I kept ordering drinks and feeding him. Just kept it going. And he took it. And was wanting more. And after an hour he was gone. His