Malcriado

Malcriado

Mom pried off a press-on nail and dropped it into her purse. I watched: The bag rattle as our cab flew over another pothole on our way to the airport where we were dropping her off. Mom bragging to the cabdriver about how this was going to be my first time staying in Nicaragua without her. Of course I’d be fine, she insisted, though no one had said otherwise. He turned the radio up slightly. American music. Mom plucked another nail. The Sandinistas sent her brothers, my tios, off to Cuba when they were around my age and they were OK. She squeezed my knee, half her fingers naked now, and leaned over his seat—twelve years old, he’s practically a man already.

I reached inside her purse and smuggled a press-on back out, placing it over my own finger and admiring how the glossy acrylic looked over my chewed nails. I felt like a rich white woman in a novela—all Soraya Montenegro, draped in a paisley kaftan with a dash of Chanel No. 5—and imagined myself flinging a glass of wine into a fireplace. Would it be more moving to squeeze out a single, pearly tear, or did it make more sense to tilt my head back and laugh?

“Yeah, he’ll be fine,” the driver supposed. “What they did to kids back then…” He chuckled to himself, as if he was remembering better times. “Those crazy hijueputas.”

I snuck out more nails until I gathered a whole set, then tapped Mom on the shoulder and modelled my new French manicure for her, holding my hands up gameshow-style. The country outside was her prize. It looked just like Orlando, only with Spanish subtitles. A billboard advertised McDonald’s all-new menu de desayuno. A pack of scrawny dogs nosed through a pile of burning trash by a red Alto sign. Mom narrowed her eyes at me as if they were trying to work through a math problem. It was the same look she’d given me a year before, the week after she’d enrolled me in karate classes, when she still hoped she could toughen me up. She’d walked into my bedroom and caught me doing a split, one hand on my forehead in salute, my older brother, Diego, pointing a video camera my way.

“It’s for my demo reel,” I’d told her. “I’m sending it out to agents.”

“What do you need an agent for?” she’d asked, giving me The Look. Dividing me in half. Solving for X.

I shrugged matter-of-factly. “I want to be famous.”

After that, there were no more karate classes.

Most nights that year, I could hear her fighting with my stepdad. He found out I’d used all the lemons to give myself highlights and now he didn’t have any for his beer, and why was she letting me wear jeans so tight? “Can’t you see why he’s like this?” he’d yell. “He doesn’t have room to grow huevos!” “I know what I’m doing,” she’d scream back, and Diego and I would turn up the radio in our room and write new scenes to film for my reel. I was working on a character named Grace Hodge. She collected Fabergé eggs and chain-smoked toilet paper. She was forgetting how to do a split.

The cabdriver glared at me in the rearview mirror. Mom’s eyes met his and she blushed and pulled my hands down into her lap.

“These aren’t toys,” she said, snatching the nails off my fingers.

I crossed my arms and huffed. “Yeah, I know. I was just joking around.”

“Well, it’s not funny. And tus tios won’t think so either.”

“I know.”

No, I didn’t. The only thing I did know was that this trip was important, so much so that Mom had to leave me with my uncles for the next two weeks. No, Diego couldn’t come, and no, she couldn’t stay any longer. Because Starbucks wouldn’t give her more time off, and because Diego had summer school, and when did I start having so many questions about everything? Why wasn’t I more grateful? Can’t even go on vacation in peace!

So she was flying home to Florida. Listen to your uncles, she said. Don’t be a malcriado.

I could see them behind us, following in a truck, Tio Iván standing on the cargo bed guarding Mom’s suitcases so no one made off with them at a red light, and Tio Andrés honking madly so his brother would sit down. Tio Iván misread the signal and started waving his fist in the air in time with the horn, his just-graying hair flapping around him in the wind, like garden snakes, like Medusa. I slunk down into my seat.

It was their turn with me. Time to make me a man. Find out where my balls were, once and for all. Here was the plan: Tio Andrés said we were going to the gallera, his cockfighting ring, this weekend, and Tio Iván said he knew a bar he could sneak me into the next—the doorman was a friend from one of his construction gigs. I thought of Mom’s locked bedroom door. How she would emerge puffy-eyed after her fights with my stepdad and crawl into bed with me, ruffling my hair and telling me I was lucky I’d gotten her looks, that I should keep trying, because I was right, I was going to be famous. The next day, we’d act like nothing had happened. Maybe she would take me shopping at Saks, her nickname for the thrift store, where she sometimes paid in quarters. I wondered how many hours she spent making lattes to afford this trip. This trip that was just for me.

In the cab, I put my hand over hers. I’d already begun to suspect there was something wrong about me, something no one dared talk about, in our avoidance making the outline of the bad thing more apparent, like a bleeped word in rap song on the radio.

I was… I liked…

If we didn’t say it, it wasn’t true.

 

Tio Andrés and I made it to the gallera around midnight, fashionably late, not that it mattered, because the best cockfights didn’t begin until my uncle, El Ingeniero, arrived. By day, Tio Andrés was a white-collar engineer with a greasy comb-over and a briefcase crammed with blueprints for government projects: highways, the occasional bridge. I’d fake a pee run out of whatever room he’d invariably cornered me in before he ever finished telling me about his job. Sometimes I thought of him as a book in the basement of a library somewhere, slowly gathering dust. But he must not have been that boring, because one day, far away from the freshly paved roads he hired men like Tio Iván to lay down, at the end of a skinny dirt side street at the edge of Managua, he built a gallera. It was a place where he could loosen his tie. Somewhere fun and loud and alive. This night, Tio wore loafers. His loafers wore pennies.

“Al fin,” the security guard told my uncle and me as we approached the front gate, “It’s getting crowded in there.” That put a smile on Tio Andrés’ wide, toadish face. He rubbed his palms together in excitement, then shook the man’s hand, slipping him some cash so he’d watch over the car. When it was my turn to shake, my hand squirmed inside the guard’s like a goldfish out of water. I yanked it out of his grip and wiped his sweat on my jeans. I preferred to double-kiss on the cheeks, Mom’s way of greeting me, though later I would find out she only did it to make sure I wasn’t stealing her foundation. We wore the same shade: Maybelline, Rich Tan. Tio Andrés grabbed my arm to stop me from being so fussy and pulled me to the stands.

The guard was right. The gallera was packed shoulder to shoulder, though for El Ingeniero and his nephew, a couple of seats were cleared in the front row. We sat down as two roosters were flung into the bloodied dirt arena. Above them, a clock counted down from ten minutes. Men in the audience reached for the loose bills in their pockets, elbowing each other to get a better look. None of it—the crowd, the money, the timer—mattered to the roosters. In awe of their sudden spot in the limelight, they simply skirted the cramped ring, utterly baffled by each other.

Roosters trained as fighting cocks are isolated at birth, cut off from their flocks in tin-wire cages where they are bred to be combative. A trifecta of insufficient feeding, lack of socialization with other chickens, and oftentimes drugs and hormones produces a strain of toxically masculine, hyper-territorial cocks that are easily triggered by the sight of females.

The referee dragged two hens out of their cages. They were bound at the feet. This got the roosters’ attention. They moved in closer, heads cocked to the side, eyes bugging, wings fanning out. They opened their beaks and, there’s no other way to describe it, screamed.

How do you get the hens to take it? They’re paralyzed, their wings clipped and feet tied. In their powerlessness, the hens used to provoke the night’s fighters didn’t even bother to cry out. I was learning to keep quiet too. I was small for my age. My relatives were beginning to wonder. I stuttered answering my family’s questions about girlfriends. They were curious about my walk, my lisp, my breeding. I was curious about me too. Did I like boys or was this just an awkward phase I was going through? Maybe I’d grow out of it, like a perm. I kept my secret under a hat, where I thought no one would notice it.

The bait hens were swung in circles around each rooster. Disoriented, the roosters tried to claw their way out of the flesh hurricanes they were trapped in, thrusting the blades attached to their spurs into the hens’ necks. Their handlers slowly lifted the hens, higher and higher, while the referee prodded the roosters to attack each other. The crowd exploded—finally what they were here for.

Now that the roosters were ready, the hens were taken away and wiped clean. I watched a handler examine the more damaged of the two. After a brief once-over, he pressed her beak to his mouth and sucked out the blood lodged in her throat. He spat the red stuff into the clay dirt, then threw her back into a cage.

 

Tio Iván gave me until the end of his drink to go talk to her. The fabric of his novelty T-shirt was stretched taut over his beer belly, an arrow on his chest pointing up to his red-splotched face—The Hero—another down at his bulge—The Legend. We were in a small dance club next to a dentist’s office. I couldn’t figure out which came first. Tio held his glass to his eyes, squinted at the few sips of brown drink left, then set it down on the table. His wallet wasn’t bottomless like Tio Andrés’, so tonight better not be a waste. His construction worker friend hadn’t shown up and he’d had to give the doorman twenty bucks to let the twelve-year-old kid in.

“Get over there,” Tio Iván said, pointing his chin at a figure at the end of the bar. “Ask her to dance. I mean, c’mon, look at those legs!”

I looked at those legs. They belonged to Tio Andrés’ former housekeeper. She was maybe seventeen, a girl-woman. Me, a girly-boy.

“You can’t tell me you don’t want a piece of that!” he went on. His gray hair was plastered with sweat against his forehead. The strands looked like scars from old scratches.

“Why did she get fired?” I wanted to know.

Tio Iván downed the last of his rum and coke, then, not wasting a minute, ordered three more. Three. He waved a glass in the air. The girl-woman stood up and floated over, as if she’d been waiting all night for his signal. She introduced herself by taking the drink from Tio Iván’s hands and nodding at me, like, This him?

My uncle patted the seat next to mine. She sat down and swayed to the music, shook her curly hair around. In the disco lighting, her face was streaked neon red. She had the same sultry, sleepy eyes of a Bratz doll.

“So, you worked for Tio Andrés, huh?” I asked.

She shrugged and took a sip from her drink. She didn’t want to talk about that. It was her night off. “Come on, let’s dance!”

“I don’t really know how,” I started telling her.

She dragged her chair over, then rested her hand on top of my knee and looked at me sideways, Really?

“Sorry.” I moved her hand away.

If her eyes were flirty before, now they were pulled into fierce slits, willing the bar to cave in on me. Who was I? I was the kind of boy who held his cocktail with a napkin, who referred to a rum and coke as a cocktail, who didn’t know how to dance. Who was I to turn her down? My uncle whispered something about money in her ear; she giggled and pushed his shoulder. The next thing I knew, our table was full of empty bottles. Then Tio Iván was gone. It was just me and her, ordering another round of shots. It was just me and her, two tangled bodies on the cramped dance floor. How we got there and where Tio had gone didn’t matter; we didn’t care. It happened in a blink, in the change of a song, and suddenly it was very important that I know how to move. I placed my hands on her waist and maneuvered us around in sloppy circles. Her claws dug into my back when I dipped her. Our faces flashed red and purple and green. She tried not to laugh at my attempt to lead. I loved her for that. When she finally couldn’t hold it back and fell over in hysterics, I loved her more. Maybe it was the alcohol, or that I still had hope that whatever was wrong with me would go away, but for a moment the thought crossed my mind: I really could love her. This was it. I was growing out of it.

“You’re awful!” she screamed from the floor. “Didn’t anyone teach you anything?”

I picked her up and we tried again. To Luis Enrique’s “Yo No Se Mañana” and Frankie Ruiz’s “Bailando.” Till the sound of horns and maracas melted into the bartender yelling last call. Till Tio Iván finally appeared, shaking his car keys at us.

 

The hens watched from their cages as the roosters aimed their steel blades at each other’s throats.

Cockfighting roosters are regal, not at all like the scraggly chickens you might see on a farm. Once in the ring, they’re given names based on the color of their coats. Rojito, Red, my uncle’s pick for the match, was more of a merlot color, his chest mahogany, his tail feathers, spreading out behind him like a paper fan, a dizzying pewter. And Marrón wasn’t really brown. He was chestnut. He was red. Red on his beak where Rojito licked him with his blade. Red on his wings. A pool of red sinking into the clay dirt by his feet.

“Oye hombre, I hope you’re hungry for chicken soup!” my uncle yelled at Marrón’s handler. Hearing that, the man’s cheeks blushed pink. The crowd nicknamed him Rojito.

I turned my eyes from the fight. Focused on the men around me—pupils black, arms waving money in the air, mouths tearing into plates of carne asada, stretching the steak out with their teeth, the meat thinning, snapping. The air thick with the smell of beer, and, because the bathroom was simply wherever you could find privacy, piss. On the side of the arena, leaning against the ring’s enclosure, an off-duty handler wiped his bare chest with a dirty rag. His pants sat just below his waist. I could see the band of his underwear, a line of hair trailing down his soft, tan belly like a finger giving directions. I wanted to know what his sweat tasted like, take my tongue and follow the…

Shit, I was staring. I turned away. I couldn’t look at the fight, where Marrón was tipped over and draining out as Rojito hacked on with his talons, couldn’t trust myself not to look at him. I didn’t know where to stare, so I shut my eyes. In the dark, I could feel Tio Andrés watching me, appraising me like one of his prized animals.

Lizards can regenerate a lost appendage within sixty days, a man on TV told me the summer before. That afternoon, I climbed a tree, trapped one, pinned it down with my knee, and sliced its tail off. It curled into itself, and out, like it was doing sit-ups. I lifted my knee and waited. I wanted to see if something could really live without half of itself. For a second, the lizard was still, as if it didn’t know yet what I’d done, or worse: It did know, and it was afraid there was more to come. Then, in a flash, it was gone, leaving its bloody limb writhing behind it.

It wasn’t much, but it was everything, because it was when the idea first sprouted in my mind: I could lose a part of me if it would save the rest.

I heard the referee count down from fifteen, to ten, to nine. I didn’t want Tio Andrés to think I was too much of a wussy to watch, so I opened my eyes. Marrón thrashed wildly on the ground. Just give up, I tried to compel him with my thoughts. Save yourself, you idiot! If he stopped trying to fight back, the referee would call the match. He could quit. He could choose to live.

 

 

I lay on a twin-size bed with Tio Andrés’ former housekeeper. The lights flicked off, the bedroom door closed shut, the gears in the knob clicked, Tio Iván’s footsteps stumbled up the stairs. We were locked in.

I could smell her fruity perfume next to me. Pixie sticks. Vodka. My BO. We stared at the ceiling. Neither of us was sure what to do next. I’d seen porn before, watched silhouettes twisting together in the grainy channels our cable box didn’t quite get. I knew we were supposed to kiss first. I had never kissed anyone. What if I didn’t do it right? Would she know me from my lips? Know what I really was? Would she be able to taste me on me?

“Are you OK?” I asked her.

She hesitated a moment, then answered, quietly, “Yes.”

“OK.”

One of my shoulders was pressed against a wall, the other a half an inch from her. I didn’t ever get her name, and at this point, it seemed rude to ask. I only knew her for what she wasn’t. She was the former housekeeper and she’d been fired for some reason no one wanted to tell. To get out, I would have to climb over her. I was trapped. I brought my arms into myself.

Outside, through an open window, a whistle. The neighborhood watchman, paid fifteen bucks a month to wander the streets, making noise so burglars would know not to come here. I wondered if he did a good job scaring away thieves, why my uncle was so insistent on taking me out tonight, why he needed me to have sex with this stranger, how much he knew.

That’s just it, I was realizing. He knew. They knew.

Mom leaving. The gallera. Her.

This wasn’t just about a boy losing his virginity, which is what I figured Tio Iván may have told her when he handed her the money. I was meant to lose something else entirely.

I couldn’t imagine how embarrassing this was for her, what story she would tell herself when we were out of the room to assure herself that this was OK, it didn’t mean anything, she was just doing what she had to do.

But he’s too young, she must have been thinking. She didn’t see my uncle taking it this far. Thought it was a joke when he asked her to come home with us, with me. Or maybe she didn’t. She had come, after all. Maybe she knew exactly what the money he gave her was for, knew it at the bar and knew it now, even as my heart drummed beside her. This was different. I didn’t want to. Neither of us wanted to. This wasn’t what she’d signed up for. How to get out of here? She would have to knock on the door, ask him to let us out. And would she still get paid if she didn’t sleep with me? She didn’t have a job. Did she even have enough cash for the cab ride home? No, she couldn’t change her mind. She was trapped.

We stared at the ceiling, baffled by each other’s smells in the dark. Lying there, without moving, without speaking, we agreed, I won’t tell if you won’t. There was a timer on us. There was a man waiting. There was nowhere to go.

How long does it take for a boy to become a man? That’s how long we waited.

 

As the night dragged along, the gallera grew manic, the air filling with a wild, frenzied energy. The winners, electrified by their new money. The losers, furious to make it back. One of the handlers pounded on his bare chest, his shirt tucked into his back pocket to use to wipe the blood off his birds between rounds. Marrón lay in a corner of the ring with a towel draped over him. His feet poked out, the blades still attached. Chicken soup.

Tio Andrés, who, as the owner, could never lose even if he lost, wrapped his arm around me conspiratorially, handed me a twenty-dollar bill, and told me I could place his next bet. His phone buzzed lightly over the din of the crowd. It was my aunt. When was he coming home? When he was done, Jesus, he intoned into the receiver, cool as ever, and snapped his phone shut. Two more roosters were dragged out of their cages and flung into the ring. Black. Brown. Tio looked at me expectantly. Well, are you going to do it or not?

Years later, I don’t know how intricately this trip was orchestrated, whether Mom told my uncles to fix me, or if they stepped in on their own to help their little sister who maybe didn’t have it in her to do it herself. What would always nag me, though, beyond anyone else’s complicity, is my own. As much as my family wanted me to be straight, I wanted it too. More, even. I would have pried off my fingernails to make myself like everyone else. That night at the gallera, I still thought my straightness would turn on someday, like a stubborn light, and I just had to keep flipping the switch and pray that each flicker would lead to something permanent. I wanted to prove that I could be like everyone else, not for anyone else, but for me.

“Twenty on Negrito!” I hollered, waving the money in the air. No one took the bet. It was too much money, the fight hadn’t even started, my Spanish accent was bad. I sounded like a try-hard. “Twenty!” I tried again. It was desperate. “Ten!” Nothing.

Tio Andrés pulled me closer and held me tight. “Next time,” he whispered into my ear. Next time, I told myself. Next week, Tio Iván would take me to the dance club. Maybe then. In the ring, a handler approached the clock to reset it by hand. Side by side, Tio Andrés and I watched the last of the night’s fights. It began as they all did. Two chickens danced around the arena, wondering how they got there and who we were.

 

We put the former housekeeper into a cab. One second it was there, loud and bright, then its lights vanished into the night. I followed Tio Iván back inside. Watched him plop down on the couch and go back to flipping channels on the TV, his obligations to Mom taken care of.

In the bathroom, I washed my face. Woozy from the drinks I had at the bar and stuck somewhere between fight and flight, I stared into the mirror so long that my reflection became a blur. Two dark smudges where my eyebrows were, my lips a red blob. I blinked and came into focus. I blinked again, but the trick stopped working. Everything was as clear as it was going to get. I didn’t lose my virginity to her. This was next time, and I hadn’t lost anything.

It would be morning in a few hours. There was no way I could go to that bed, not right now. In the living room, Tio Iván’s chin was tucked into his chest, his mouth chewing on something in his sleep. I tiptoed up the stairs, careful not to wake him, and made my way to the second-floor minibar, where I poured myself a tall, warm glass of rum, filling it to the brim, not really sure what I was doing. Next to the bottles of alcohol, someone, probably one of my cousins, had forgotten a joint. I snatched it and walked out onto the balcony, softly closing the door behind me.

I fumbled lighting the joint, at first setting the filter end on fire and burning half of it with a lighter. When I finally got it right, I leaned over the railing and regarded the neighborhood knowingly. It was important that I look knowing, because something big had happened, and the occasion called for me to know something big, and I did.

I was…gay.

I wanted to not know. If this is what they did when they merely suspected me, I didn’t want to know what the confirmation might bring. I wished there was a fireplace nearby. Tio’s house was planted at the intersection of two busy streets. I thought about throwing the glass of rum down there. I wanted drama. Something to corroborate that this wasn’t normal. That other boys weren’t raised like this. And if she’d decided not to risk it and climbed on top of me? And if this is what they’d done on the suspicion, what about when I confirmed it?

A pearly tear? Or maniacal laugh?

Every few minutes, a car honked. I heard giggles. Downstairs. On the wide porch anyone in the neighborhood was free to use. There were four of them. I couldn’t tell what, exactly, they were. Tall, dark, and handsome. One wore a leopard print top and mini-skirt. Another a strapless black dress with a butterfly brooch. They were women, I thought, or maybe not. Maybe, now, I’d think of them as transgender. Back then, when I was still getting used to myself, they were just girly-boys. I held my breath, but they must have sensed me watching them.

“Oye nene!” one shouted up, and soon the others joined in after her.

“You live in that nice house?”

“All by yourself?”

They adjusted their wigs and reapplied lip gloss, not bothering to remove the cigarettes from their lips. Their smoke trailed up and mingled with the scent of my cousin’s weed. I was starting to feel vague, like a doodle someone had erased. I’d never been high before, didn’t know not to mix it with alcohol. I swallowed a mouthful of rum and winced in pain as the liquor went down, then contorted my face into a satisfied smile.

“Hello!” I slurred back. “Hey! Hi…”

“You got a girlfriend?” the redhead of the group asked. “You want one?”

“No,” I said, a little quickly. I sounded defensive, so I tried it casual: “I mean, no, I already have one.”

“Yeah yeah.” She pinched her thigh. “Well, if you change your mind.”

It was a quiet night. When a rare car passed by, they quickly spread out and hoisted their dresses and waved. If the driver slowed down to get a good look, then changed his mind, they threw their cigarettes at the car as it sped off, the lit ends flying through the air like emergency flares. Then they marched back to the porch, sparked fresh ones, their faces briefly glowing in their lighters as they waited to do it all over again.

“You got anything for us, baby?” one of the girls eventually asked, growing more daring as the watchman’s whistle faded farther away. If he saw me talking to them, he’d tell my uncle, and he’d tell Mom. I couldn’t have her know yet. I wanted her to think the trip worked, only for a little while longer. I could already picture her greeting me at the airport searching my face to see if something had changed.

“What are you smoking?” her friend chimed in. I could see her butterfly brooch was pulling where it clung to her chest. The weight made one breast look slightly longer than the other. “You don’t share?”

By now, the joint was barely long enough to hold between my fingers, most of it gone in my embarrassing attempt to get it started. “There’s not a lot,” I admitted. I couldn’t believe I had anything to offer them at all. They were exactly what Mom was afraid of, that I’d end up like that. Plopped down on the corner of some street, making myself known. Her son, practically a man, a malcriado. It was sex work. It was begging. And because of hiring discrimination in Nicaragua, it likely wasn’t a choice. But they made it look fun. These girls had found each other. In this country where until 2008 it was illegal to be gay, where same-sex marriage and the right to perform gender affirming surgeries still is—they found a place among themselves. So what if I didn’t tell Mom right away? I wanted to know there was a place for me first.

“We don’t mind,” she cooed back.

I tossed what was left of the joint and watched it land noiselessly on the porch. The girly-boys gathered around it and passed it among themselves. I was so generous, they said, such a good boy, so handsome. They sounded like Mom at her best, those nights that put her on the defensive against my stepdad. Of course, I wasn’t bad, I was just like her: Her face. Her shade. Her kid. I was just like her. That was the problem.

If I wasn’t worried that lingering too long might wake my uncle up, I would have stayed longer. Maybe I would have gotten drunk enough to tell them everything, though I doubt it. Maybe just one thing, what I wanted to hold on to for as long as I could:

Thank you. I got it from my mom.