ocean park, pr
8:02:00 PMThose mild waves lapping up that you'd been trying "body surf" with lackluster success then grabs you and takes you in its undertow, tumbling you over and over; and, it seems like forever ... undrowned and rising out of it, the salt-water mixes with the mucus, noatrils still stinging respiration still settling back into a rhythm. Building sandcastles didn't really matter anymore. Top of the nose and back already charred. Hurt. Would hurt, a lot.
Then, getting hosed down before being let back in through the side, one's swimsuit weighed down by gobs of sand between the legs.
Dad's practicing his firearm.
My namesake whose place had been on the right, on the other side of the grate was kicked out by granpa long ago. He had left his congas and his waterbed, deflated.
Some other time, I overheard my uncles reasoning him being childless due one of them noticing at a urinal his urethra on the side and not at the tip of his penis. It happens.
Some other time he was telling everyone present about he'd been unsuccessful that year smuggling in a parrot from somewhere. Thing, apparently, freaked out and pecked the shit outta him and the stewardesses in the back of the plane. You could still smoke on planes back then.
I never really got a chance to know the person I was named after very well. He always told the best jokes at the holiday house parties.
There are still a few chickens pecking around where the swimsuit had been left piled up with all the sand, next to the washer-dryer and the door I never opened thinking it haunted and deadly to go in there.
Within the hot bath, lathering Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, I hear dad's still practicing beyond the window of the shower his target practice -- some pistol. He might have been twenty-nine at the time.
Later some other afternoon, the Dominican butch-girl with a sweaty and stained a-shirt and red jogger-pants propositions me (indescently). The sofa was a florida pattern and wicker. In retrospect, I would guess she had been hired to de-flower me by somebody next door, my dad already having pointed out (by the way) where his dad, my grandfather, had thrown him into a brothel in Old San Juan, saying, "now go be a man."
My dad described the experience, and I can only imagine (the ecstacy), involving him loosing all the strength in his legs, convulsively.
Uncle -- gramps' namesake (the fifth or sixth), shuffles from one room to the other with a hangover ... his Dominican wife, my aunt, still enjoying my squirming in the wicker sofa, the hard-on I'd had starting to hurt (and, she knew it). It was nice.
And, after throwing pepitas at a STOP sign in front of the house along Cacique, I have a BB gun in-hand and am pumping it. Frambueza (cherry flavor) is still on my lips from the shaved ice piragua, and I manage a shot -- like 20° up and to the right of the pigion, compensating for the breeze; it, about fifty yards and several rooftops over there, nearer McLeaey Ave.
I didn't expect to hit it; but I did, and it died. It's gasping for breath left an impression on me.
I think in those days, I still looked up in the evenings, thinking I'd see Skylab or Rudolph The Red Nose Raindeer. In those days, I didn't think a parent could be able to lavish themselves with illusions of being great for having acquired the fineries now considered the mark of "awesome." Him with the most toys wins, after all.
It never dawned on me as a fledgeling in Ocean Park that a parent wouldn't ever take the time to notice that their kid was and had become as great and as awesome as him (though fineries were something for those still in the enthrall of rubber-necking "society-folk;" and, it would seem, that as the mark of success hasn't gone over well at all, The Duke of Sussex still screwing up and his mother (and boy-Epstein) still dead).
I didn't think the task of parenthood would be, if one might have found the chance for it or to gain purchase with it as an enterprise of inspiring envy and FOMO in other parents; for it to become an effort, with all one's might, to make sure one's progeny *not* behold this majesty of creation or to ponder the mystery of being, that being a distraction to the acquisition of things more luxurious that anyone else had managed to get.
Some people -- you just can't reach ... not even sometime next year ... after The Republic has fallen or any number increasingly catastrophic events, both natural and man-made, make it clear through the growing body counts that this is an outright culling going on here.
And, in the midst of all the forthcoming frenzied scramble for the remaining crusts of bread and toilet paper from the Magnificellaneousness of kinfolk and countrymen, it will still come down on a person like me to be blamed and to hold, like a tampon, all the blood and guts and blame they all, especially those whose grandparents just barely escaped extermination from in the last culling, were too cowardly to be better than, though they had been warned repeatedly? throughout all their history, what folly befalls those who make idols of and worship inanimate things such as silver and gold.
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