Free Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Page B

Little Albania but was on the Grand Concourse, near Fordham Road, in Latino territory. The cops held no sway here. The neighborhood was called Paradise Road, in honor of a nearby movie palace that had once been the crown jewel of the West Bronx, with an “atmospheric” indoor sky, filled with stars and wandering clouds. Angela was born a little too late, after the Loew’s Paradise had been chopped into pieces, its ornate statues and staircases removed, and its immortal sky went dark, while Paradise Road itself was embroiled in a drug war. But the Albanians had pushed the drug lords aside, and even if Paradise Road wasn’t part of Lekë’s kingdom, the Latino warlords left him alone.
    He occupied the penthouse of an Art Deco palace that local architects and builders had put up eighty years ago, when the Grand Concourse was the Bronx’s own Jewish boulevard. A Concourse millionaire had lived in the penthouse. Lekë moved in after the millionaire fled to Palm Beach and the Concourse grew into a wild land. Paradise Road had sharpshooters reigning from the roofs. The drug lords had put them there. But after a while the sharpshooters were bored to death and would pick off children and old men . . . until Lekë had them hurled off the roofs.
    The building had an Albanian doorman, who signaled with his cell that Angela had arrived and rode upstairs with her in an elevator that had a silver ceiling. She was startled by the penthouse. It didn’t have one image of Lekë’s ancestors on the walls, no Dukagjini in fierce tribal dress, with battle-axes and rivers of blood. Lekë himself didn’t seem so fierce away from his clan. He greeted Angela in a silken robe.
    â€œLord, you must not send me diamond rings.”
    â€œAnd why not?” he asked in a softer voice, without so much gravel. “You’re the one I intend to marry.”
    â€œI’ll never marry you, sire, even if you have my father thrown into the street.”
    â€œAh,” he said, “now I’ll have that kiss you promised me in our gambling hall.”
    Her whiskers were sprouting again, but she felt sorry for this warrior-king who kept sending her diamonds, and she was in no mood to maul him.
    â€œSire, my kisses could be fatal.”
    He pulled her close to him. She could smell the wild man’s perfume. Angela herself began to feel strange and confused, even a little dizzy. She could hear Lekë’s heart beat under his silk robe. She started to growl. The wild man rubbed against her. Her tongue darted into his mouth. His robe loosened. The lord of all the Albanians in the Bronx had a clit.

    T hey were married within a month, not at a chapel, but in the cave on Bathgate Avenue. Angela’s papi was there; so were members of the Neapolitan social club and the Latino lord of Paradise Road. Angela was dressed in white. She’d invited a few of her sisters from the farm, who had come to the wedding on a weekend pass. These sisters were startled to see their cat lady as a bride. How could they have known that this blond assassin and warlord was sometimes a lady and sometimes a man? He’d been wearing men’s clothes ever since he was five. Lekë had come to America at fifteen, took over Little Albania before he was twenty. None of his subjects suspected that he wasn’t always a man, though Albania had a long history of hunters and kings who went into battle smeared with their own menstrual blood.
    Lekë was often filled with gloom. That’s why he gravitated to the Grand Concourse. He could sport around as a woman or a man in his penthouse along Paradise Road. And he could also sport with his bride. He’d been in love with Angela from the moment he saw her in the Italian market, with that sad, beautiful face and the lithe body of a jailbird, and he would have destroyed a whole army of Robertsons to have her.
    She couldn’t always tell whether she was making love to a