The irony of Amapola and me was that I never would have gotten close to her if her family hadn’t believed I was gay. It was easy for them to think a gringo kid with emo hair and eyeliner was
un joto
. By the time they found out the truth, it was too late to do much about it. All they could do was put me to the test to see if I was a stand-up boy. It was either that or kill me.
You think I’m kidding.
At first, I didn’t even know she existed. I was friends with Popo. We met in my senior year at Camelback High. Alice Cooper’s old school back in prehistory—our big claim to fame, though the freshmen had no idea who Alice Cooper was. VH1 was for grandmothers. Maybe Alice was a president’s wife or something.
You’d think the freak factor would remain high, right? But it was another hot space full of Arizona Republicans and future CEOs and the struggling underworld of auto mechanics and hopeless football jocks not yet aware they were going to be fat and bald and living in a duplex on the far side drinking too much and paying alimony to the cheerleaders they thought could never weigh 298 pounds and smoke like a coal plant.
Not Popo. The Pope. For one thing, he had more money than God. Well, his dad and his Aunt Cuca had all the money, but it drizzled upon him like the first rains of Christmas. He was always buying the beer, paying for gas and movie tickets and midnight runs to Taco Bell. “Good American food,” he called it.
He’d transferred in during my senior year. He called it his exile. I spied him for the first time in English. We were struggling to stay awake during the endless literary conversations about
A Separate Peace
. He didn’t say much about it. Just sat over there making sly eyes at the girls and laughing at the teacher’s jokes. I’d never seen a Beaner kid with such long hair. He looked like some kind of Apache warrior, to tell you the truth. He had double-loops in his left ear. He got drogy sometimes and wore eyeliner under one eye. Those little Born Again chicks went crazy for him when he was in his devil-boy mode.
And the day we connected, he was wearing a Cradle of Filth T-shirt. He was staring at me. We locked eyes for a second and he nodded once and we both started to laugh. I was wearing a Fields of the Nephilim shirt. We were the Pentagram Brothers that day, for sure. Everybody else must have been thinking we were goth school shooters. I guess it was a good thing Phoenix was too friggin’ hot for black trenchcoats.
Later, I was sitting outside the vice principal’s office. Ray Hulsebus, the nickelback on the football team, had called me “faggot” and we’d duked it out in the lunch court. Popo was sitting on the wooden bench in the hall.
“Good fight,” he said, nodding once.
I sat beside him.
“Wha’d you get busted for?” I asked.
He gestured at his shirt. It was originally black, but it had been laundered so often it was gray. In a circle were the purple letters,
VU
. Above them, in stark white, one word:
HEROIN
.
“Cool,” I said. “Velvet Underground.”
“My favorite song.”
We slapped hands.
“The admin’s not into classic rock,” he noted. “Think I’m … advocating substance abuse.”
We laughed.
“You like
Berlin
?” he asked.
“Berlin? Like, the old VH1 band?”
“Hell no! Lou Reed’s best album, dude!”
They summoned him.
“I’ll play it for ya,” he said, and walked into the office.
And so it began.
Tía Cuca’s house was the bomb. She was hooked up with some kind of Lebanese merchant. Out in Paradise Valley. The whole place was cool floor tiles and suede couches. Their pool looked out on the city lights, and you could watch roadrunners on the deck cruising for rattlers at dusk. Honestly, I didn’t know why Pope wasn’t in some rich private school like Brophy or Phoenix Country Day, but apparently his scholastic history was “spotty,” as they say. I still don’t know how he ended up at poor ol’ Camelback, but I do know it must have taken a lot of maneuvering by his family. By the time we’d graduated, we were inseparable. He went to ASU. I didn’t have that kind of money. I went to community college.
Pope’s room was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Tía Cuca had given him a detached single-car garage at the far end of the house. They’d put in a bathroom and made a bed loft on top of it. Pope had a king-size mattress up there, and a wall of CDs and a Bose iPod port, and everything was Wi-Fi’d to his laptop. There was a huge Bowie poster on the wall beside the door—in full Aladdin Sane glory, complete with the little shiny splash of come on his collarbone. It was so retro. My boy had satellite on a flat screen, and piles of DVDs around the slumpy little couch on the ground floor. I didn’t know why he was so crazy for the criminal stuff—
Scarface
and
The Godfather
. I was sick of Tony Montana and Michael Corleone! Elvis clock—you know the one, with the King’s legs dancing back and forth in place of a pendulum.
“Welcome,” Pope said on that first visit, “to Disgrace-land.”
He was comical like that when you got to know him. He turned me on to all that good classic stuff: Iggy, T. Rex, Roxy Music. He wasn’t really fond of new music, except for the darkwave guys. Anyway, there we’d be, blasting that glam as loud as possible, and it would get late and I’d just fall asleep on his big bed with him. No wonder they thought I was gay! Ha. We were drinking Buds and reading
Hustler
mags we’d stolen from his Uncle Abdullah or whatever his name was. Aunt Cuca once said, “Don’t you ever go home?” not mean like. Friendly banter, I’d say. But I told her, “Nah—since the divorce, my mom’s too busy to worry about it.” And in among all those excellent boys’ days and nights, I was puttering around his desk, looking at the
Alien
figures and the Godzillas, scoping out the new copy of
El Topo
he’d gotten by mail, checking his big crystals and his antique dagger, when I saw the picture of Amapola behind his stack of textbooks. Yes, she was a kid. But what a kid.
“Who’s this?” I said.
He took the framed picture out of my hand and put it back.
“Don’t worry about who that is,” he said.
Thanksgiving. Pope had planned a great big fiesta for all his homies and henchmen. Oh, yes. He took the goth-gansta thing seriously, and he had actual “hit men” (he called them that) who did errands for him, carried out security at his concerts. He played guitar for the New Nouveau Nuevos—you might remember them. One of his “soldiers” was a big Irish kid who’d been booted off the football team, Andy the Tank. Andy appeared at our apartment with an invitation to the fiesta—we were to celebrate the Nuevos’ upcoming year, and chart the course of the future. I was writing lyrics for Pope, cribbed from Roxy Music and Bowie’s
The Man Who Sold the World
album. The invite was printed out on rolled parchment and tied with a red ribbon. Pope had style.
I went over to Tía Cuca’s early, and there she was—Amapola. She’d come up from Nogales for the fiesta, since Pope was by now refusing to go home for any reason. He wanted nothing to do with his dad, who had declared that only gay boys wore long hair or makeup or played in a band that wore feather boas and silver pants. Sang in English.
I was turning eighteen, and she was fifteen, almost sixteen. She was more pale than Popo. She had a frosting of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and her eyes were light brown, almost gold. Her hair was thick and straight and shone like some liquid. She was kind of quiet too, blushing when I talked to her, shying away from all us males.
The meal was righteous. They’d fixed a turkey in the Mexican style. It was stuffed not with bread or oysters, but with nuts, dried pineapple, dried papaya and mango slices, and raisins. Cuca and Amapola wore traditional Mexican dresses and, along with Cuca’s cook, served us the courses as we sat like members of the Corleone family around the long dining room table. Pope had seated Andy the Tank beside Fuckin’ Franc, the Nuevos’ drummer. Some guy I didn’t know but who apparently owned a Nine Inch Nails–type synth studio in his garage sat beside Franc. I was granted the seat at the end of the table, across its length from Pope. Down the left side were the rest of the Nuevos—losers all.
I was trying to keep my roving eye hidden from the Pope. I didn’t even have to guess what he’d do if he caught me checking her out. But she was so fine. It wasn’t even my perpetual state of horniness. Yes it was. But it was more. She was like a song. Her small smiles, her graciousness. The way she swung her hair over her shoulder. The way she lowered her eyes and spoke softly … then gave you a wry look that cut sideways and made savage fun of everyone there. You just wanted to be a part of everything she was doing.
“Thank you,” I said every time she refilled my water glass or dropped fresh tortillas by my plate. Not much, it’s true, but compared to the Tank or Fuckin’ Franc, I was as suave as Cary Grant.
“You are so welcome,” she’d say.
It started to feel like a dance. It’s in the way you say it, not what you say. We were saying more to each other than Cuca or Pope could hear.
And then, I was hit by a jolt that made me jump a little in my chair.
She stood behind me, resting her hands on the top of the chair. We were down to the cinnamon coffee and the red grape juice toasts. And Amapola put out one finger, where they couldn’t see it, and ran her fingernail up and down between my shoulder blades.
Suddenly, supper was over, and we were all saying goodnight, and she had disappeared somewhere in the big house and never came back out.
Soon, Christmas came, and Pope again refused to go home. I don’t know how Cuca took it, having the sullen King Nouveau lurking in her converted garage. He had a kitsch aluminum tree in there. Blue ornaments. “
Très
Warhol,” he sighed.
My mom had given me some cool stuff—a vintage Who T-shirt, things like that. Pope’s dad had sent presents—running shoes, French sunglasses, a .22 target pistol. We snickered. I was way cooler than Poppa Popo. I had been over to Zia Records and bought him some obscure ’70s CDs: Captain Beyond, Curved Air, Amon Duul II, the Groundhogs. Things that looked cool, not that I’d ever heard them. Pope got me a vintage turntable and the first four Frank Zappa LPs; I couldn’t listen to that shit. But still. How cool is that?
Pope wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t blind either. He’d arranged a better gift for me than all that. He’d arranged for Amapola to come visit for a week. I found out later she had begged him.
“Keep it in your pants,” he warned me. “I’m watching you.”
Oh my God. I was flying. We went everywhere for those six days. The three of us, unfortunately. Pope took us to that fancy art deco hotel downtown—the Clarendon. That one with the crazy neon lights on the walls outside and the dark gourmet eatery on the ground-floor front corner. We went to movie matinees, never night movies. It took two movies to wrangle a spot sitting next to her, getting Pope to relinquish the middle seat to keep us apart. But he knew it was a powerful movement between us, like continental drift. She kept leaning over to watch me instead of the movies. She’d laugh at everything I said. She lagged when we walked so I would walk near her. I was trying to keep my cool, not set off the Hermano Grande alarms. And suddenly he let me sit beside her, and I could smell her. She was all clean hair and sweet skin. Our arms brushed on the armrest, and we let them linger, sweat against each other. Our skin forming a thin layer of wet between us, a little of her and a little of me mixing into something made of both of us. I was aching. I could have pole-vaulted right out of the theater.
She turned sixteen that week. At a 3 o’clock showing of
The Dark Knight
, she slipped her hand over the edge of the armrest and tangled her fingers in mine.
This time, when she left, Pope allowed us one minute alone in his garage room. I kissed her. It was awkward. Delicious. Her hand went to my face and held it. She got in Cuca’s car and cried as they drove away.
“You fucker,” Popo said.
I couldn’t believe she didn’t Facebook. Amapola didn’t even e-mail. She lived across the border, in Nogales, Mexico. So the phone was out of the question, even though her dad could have afforded it. When I asked Pope about his father’s business, he told me they ran a duty-free import/export company based on each side of the border, in the two No-galeses. Whatever. I just wanted to talk to Amapola. So I got stamps and envelopes. I was thinking, what is this, like, 1980 or something? But I wrote to her, and she wrote to me. I never even thought about the fact that instant messages or e-mail couldn’t hold perfume, or have lip prints on the paper. You could Skype naked images to each other all night long, but Amapola had me hooked through the lips with each new scent in the envelope. She put her hair in the envelopes. It was more powerful than anything I’d experienced before. Maybe it was voodoo.
At Easter, Cuca and her Lebanese hubby flew to St. Thomas for a holiday. Somehow, Pope managed to get Ama-pola there at the house for a few days. He was gigging a lot, and he was seeing three or four strippers. I’ll admit, he was hitting the sauce too much—he’d come home wasted and ricochet around the bathroom, banging into the fixtures like a pinball. I thought he’d break his neck on the toilet or the bathtub. The old man had been putting pressure on him—I had no idea how or what he wanted of Pope. He wanted the rock ’n’ roll foolishness to end, that’s for sure.
“You have no idea!” Pope would say, tequila stink on his breath. “If you only knew what they were really like. You can’t begin to guess.” But, you know, all boys who wear eyeliner and pay for full-sleeve tats say the same thing. Don’t nobody understand the troubles they’ve seen. I just thought Pope was caught up in being our Nikki Sixx. We were heading for fame, world tours. I thought.
And there she was, all smiles. Dressed in black. Looking witchy and magical. Pope had a date with a girl named Demitasse. Can you believe that? Because she had small breasts or something. She danced at a high-end club that catered to men who knew words like “demitasse.” She had little silver vials full of “stardust,” that’s all I really knew. It all left Pope staggering and blind, and that was what I needed to find time alone with my beloved.