Free South by South Bronx by Jr., Abraham Rodriguez

into place. someone should tell benny about the peace-and-tranquility part. liquor gave him that feeling of invulnerability. popeye’s can of spinach. he could slow the pictures down, pick and choose, no rush. benny should learn that shit before he preaches about the evils, but then benny should know better. he was once a drinker too, even owned a bar. used to toss them back like a pro, but he mistook liquor for a new belief system, depended on it to make him into someone else. benny was always looking to change himself. he convinced himself that liquor changed him for the worse. alex was not so convinced. drinking made him normal. his blood, his nervous system demanded it. “you can’t talk a drunk off a ledge with promises of bible,” he said to benny, he said to belinda.
    â€”that did it, she said. you choose: the bottle, or me.
    was it such a problem, his drinking? did it have to come up every time something went wrong? he tried it her way, pouring another bottle down the drain. proof he was a new man: but poses become roses, whither and die, crunchy and dry. did he really choose the bottle? was it really a question of choice? she had talked to him, endlessly, about how she had been in relationships before and how this was her last time, do or die. she would force it to work, with her own hands force it with sheer will. she had talked to him. she had always talked to him. she knew he was sick of running around waking with strangers, but she felt the liquor was what caused infidelity. it was like that with her father, she said, it would be like that with him. alex tried to tell her there was no connection, women came through his open doors until he closed them, he swore he was closing them for good. but the fighting about drinking caused more drinking, so alex one night opened his doors. sometimes it’s the only way out.
you’ll never have a woman again. you’re never going to find love like you had it, like I gave it to you, like you spent it.
    it was a good speech, he wrote it on the bedroom wall. big letters in drippy black paint, just to prove he would never forget them, drunk or not drunk. alex had a hard time remembering how the rooms were then. it was far from him, almost another life. some people have to fill a room with clutter to remind themselves they’re alive. the curtains were all hers, the bureau. the big mirror where she used to stand in her panty hose, adjusting those bra straps. boxes of cosmetics, kitchen utensils, fashion magazines. bulby ceramic lamps. flowered tapetes .
    the last time he saw her alive she was throwing the vase of yellow peonies at him. hit the wall with the impact of an RPG, him flinching from shrapnel where he stood under those drippy black letters. her face usually so calm, now so furious broken, as she charged out the door, stooping only to pick up her shoulder bag. going going gone. she never called about her clothes, her furniture, her things. “our things,” she would have said, insisted. she never called.
    he tried her a few times at work, the investment firm of debussy and stark, but she wasn’t getting back. it was what he told the police barely a month after she left, when they came by to visit. it wasn’t that he was a suspect, they said, but whenever a daughter kills herself, the family always blames the boyfriend. the cops found it strange that he never met the family, which had nothing but derogatory things to say with what little they knew about him. belinda never spoke well of her parents. she always said they were too rich and too narrow-minded and that was why she was more than happy to move here and write them and say “I’m living with a man in the south bronx.” alex was the part of her rebellion that failed. a half-mad half-dominican blonde with castellano to her english, she had stopped taking her medication when she came to live with him. the details were sketchy now, intentionally so.
    there was no