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I felt quite proud that Joe, the miracle worker, he who could feather a pump’s water pressure just enough to give us the most beautiful fire-hydrant creations ever, lived in our building. For the most part, though, and this is a side of Joe that tends to be overlooked, he spent his waking hours drunk or high. He would have loud parties that ended up in fistfights at 3 a.m., people falling down our three-flat’s stairs, creative insults being slung in the stairwell, bottles being thrown on the front sidewalk. Delia and I were often awoken by Joe’s scuffles, and we would look out our front window to see Joe out there either pounding on or being pounded by some similar-looking heavyweight. My father would call the cops (if Betty downstairs hadn’t already) and things would be settled. Joe would crawl back upstairs, we would crawl back into bed, and all would be forgotten. It was routine. Joe gets loud, someone calls the cops, Joe apologizes with a sincere, smiling face to my mother and Betty the next day.
At times, when summer was in full swing and the pump contests were unofficially under way, the block just down from us, just across Nineteenth Street, would try and outdo us with its own fans of water. It occurs to me now that we really had no name for these fans of water. All one had to say was “Man, look at that one,” and it was obvious to all those listening that another oasis had been spotted, another reprieve in our neighborhood’s desert of concrete. To stand beneath one of these great formations, within its massive dome of water, was to be in a completely different world, secluded, excluded, soundless except for the roar of the rushing water. Even the kids standing right next to you could not be heard, though you could see that their mouths were moving, that they were screaming just like you. The test was to see who could stand to be beneath the dome the longest. And then, upon exiting, the most excruciating task of all was to become real again. You would run to someone, the first person you saw, and start bragging about how great it was to have been beneath the dome so long. Or, if you were younger, as I was, you would run full speed to your mother, and act as if you had just performed some great feat of courage, some act beyond human comprehension, like the scaling of a monstrously high chain-link fence, the rescue of a baseball from a dog-infested yard, anything to get a reaction, a confirmation that you were there, that people could hear you and that you could hear them. At any one time during those summers, there were hordes of lost individuals, newly escaped from the great domes of water, ru
From where our pump was, the kids down the block looked like miniature figurines, pet people ru
We always won. The block down from us had a history of shoddy pump construction. The minute theirs would give, they would all yell in disappointment. Sometimes a little voice could be heard echoing down the block—“Next time, assholes, we’ll get you next time.” And they would set to building their dome up once again — ru
There was a layer of grit settled at the bottom of May Street’s gutters, and possibly, this is what sparked the idea to start pa
At first we must’ve looked like fools, Delia and I, leaning over the curb, sifting through the heavy till of the gutters. But soon we became pioneers, and it was not long before the other kids of our block began prospecting as well: Little Joey from the apartment building next door and his sister, Genie; Mario León, the son of the corner grocer; and even Peety, the eight-year-old pool-shark, whose father owned the corner tavern. I seem to remember Delia saying to me once, “They’re taking all our gold,” but I am not sure if this is actual memory. Though this seems like something my sister would have said (she was the more enterprising of the two of us), it seems also that Delia and I almost never spoke while we did our pa
Gold was, of course, the most sought-after of the precious commodities we pa
We discussed our plans late at night in the bed we shared. Much to the disgust of Delia, my ideas on what we would do with our fortune focused more on family matters: how a move up to a mansion might benefit our other family members, for example, Pepe moving out of the pantry and taking over the apartment, and my cousin Chuey, who often slept on our kitchen floor when his wife kicked him out, moving in to the pantry. There were other ideas as well: how we might purchase a van for my uncle Max, so his chile-delivering business could prosper, how we could pay for my aunt Chachie to become a doctor and guarantee ourselves free medical care for the rest of our lives. These were all even trades, I figured, arrangements that would in some way benefit each one of us. But Delia had different ideas — ideas that seemed more along the lines of what millionaires might really do with their fortunes.