The Misbegotten

We had - by the time the doorbell rang twenty minutes later - composed and straightened ourselves. To a degree, we almost looked normal, though our excitement and wonder was difficult to contain. When I saw Jacob standing on the porch, sandwich bag two-thirds full of weed outstretched before him, I was almost myself.

He never caught a whiff the girls and I had decided to become a trio-in-everything. He was too preoccupied with the score. I doubt he would’ve noticed if I’d’ve answered the door in my boxers, a girl draped on either side of me, each wearing nothing but bra and panties. He would’ve walked right passed us as if everything was normal. He would’ve begun rolling joints by the hundreds on the dining room table, if I’d have let him.

Instead I said, “Dude, do you have to flaunt the fact you have a shit load of weed to the entire fucking neighborhood?!? Fuck, Jake, sometimes I think you’re retarded or something.”

He stuffed the bag under his shirt as fast as he could. He glanced around to see of anyone had noticed. After all, he was carrying enough marijuana to put us both in jail for five-to-ten, especially now.

The NIA had been ruthless with drug trafficking and usage. They had gone so far to rescind the legalization of marijuana in the fifteen states that had already passed laws ratifying its’ legality. In some cases, those resolutions had been on the books for more than six years as with Washington state and Colorado. No, it was best not to take chances.

Of course, Jacob was either too stupid to be aware of this or had a mind too muddled to remember. It was a matter of common sense, right? What a douche!

I backed up and let him in.

He looked ridiculous with his hand up his shirt, obvious he was hiding something underneath.

I followed him into the TV room were the girls were sitting on the couch, one at each end.

He glanced from one to the next, waiting to illicit some kind of response. When neither of them looked his way, he turned back to me with a bewildered cast to his countenance. It was the classic “don’t they know I have the weed?” sort of expression.

“Well, ladies, Jacob has returned with the goods. And, the food should be arriving any second now,” I announced.

Both girls turned to me and smiled wide, ignoring Jacob. Man, if that wasn’t a freeze out, then I’ve never seen one in my life! It was like the dude wasn’t even there.

I covered up his unease by continuing. “So, I say we get what we need from the kitchen and set up camp upstairs in the Loft. That way, should anyone come home earlier than expected, we’d have enough time to put away whatever contraband we’d have out.”

“Good idea, my love,” agreed Ramona. She bounced off the couch and twisted toward Katie. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go get organized.”

Katie shut off the TV and followed my girlfriend out of the room through the other door. Both of them talked loud over the food about to arrive.

I myself was sort of looking forward to it as well. Katie had ordered pizza, a few real good Chinese dishes and four pastramis, one for each of us. There was no way we were ever going to finish it all. But, practical as always, my cousin mentioned by the smoking marijuana, we were bound to get the munchies. So, we might as well get prepared in advance.

Ramona had laughed, mentioning without much thought that smoking pot only made her horny. The remark made us all laugh. The nerves were palatable. The room turned anxious. We eyed each other, wary glances all about. This was going to be weird until we figured out what were the ground rules.

Now, we had a shit load of food coming our way, so the girls went to get what we would need.

Jacob and I found ourselves alone.

“You guys gonna need any help?” I yelled after them just make sure.

I heard Katie reply in the negative.

I motioned for Jacob to follow me.

He stood there for a second longer, trying to figure out what had just happened. He trailed after me, scratching at his head.

I made my way up the stairs. “So, Jake, how’d we do on the weed?”

That seemed to shake him out of his discomfiture in an instant. “Dude, my boy hooked us up, ‘Cuz. He gave me like… fuck, I don’t know… like two ounces free when I told him I wanted to spend the two-fifty.”

“Really?” I was somewhat surprised. Usually drug dealers were stingy motherfuckers, way fucking way worse than any penny-squeezing Vieja. That was fucking-a, god’s honest truth! I know, because I am one of them.

“Yeah, bro, he hooked us up! Look how much fucking shit we have!” He displayed the baggie for me. “He gave me like a five percent markup on his price, which is unheard of on the streets. But, homeboy’s got my back, ‘cuz, you know, right? Ever since I got his little chivato out of a jam and shit,” he explained. He was admiring the score as though he had a bag full of diamonds.

What the fuck, Jake, why do you always talk like a fucking Cholo every time you got weed in your hand? You sound so stupid! You’re not a Cholo!

“Well, then I’ll make you a deal, a quarter of that shit is yours to keep,” I told him. I was thankful he hadn’t screwed the entire thing up. Plus, I felt magnanimous to give him a little something in return, in light of what Katie and Ramona had agreed to give me. You know, Karma – the Ying and the Yang. That crap’s important!

“No shit?” he asked even more excited.

“No shit, Jake, call it a finder’s fee or whatever. You earned it.”

“Thanks, Eff!” he bellowed and put his hand up so we could high five.

I came up to the first landing on the second floor and smacked his hand.

He clasped quick, holding mine within his own. “There’s a reason why I like you more than all the other mamones in our fucking family.”

That made me laugh, knowing he was speaking about the Marquez’ branch of my family. They were the miscreants and washouts begat of my biological father’s lineage. They were people born under many strange and incredible social circumstances. Any attempt to explain a fraction of the truth… Well, it would be hard to believe. That’s a whole story onto itself. One I don’t have time to go into right now.

“Not every one of them is as fucked as you make them out to be,” I inputted. I walked passed my parents’ Master Suite on my way up to the third floor.

“Oh yeah, did you hear about Tita, right? Aunt Irene’s oldest?” he asked.

I nodded, recalling what my mother had told me a few months ago when my Grandma Trina had called. She had told her of the goings-on with that part of the family.

Something bad had happened to Tita that no one could comprehend. One day, she was the same old twenty-seven-year-old woman she’d always been. She was your traditional, statuesque Cholita. She had the lacquered hair, stiff with hairspray and helmet-like. She had the tattoos on the small of her back and arms. She was even said to sport one to the left side of her vagina that read something like, “You Get This Far and Its Por Vida”. She was ready-made for the Barrio.

Then, within half a year, she had deformed and mangled like she’d been in a horrible car wreck. She had changed, become unrecognizable. Her own children had run from her in fear, screaming aloud, “mommy is a monster that wants to eat us alive”. A few months after, she disappeared. She’d taken no clothes, no food, not even toiletries. She just left. Since then, none of us had seen her.

Yeah, I had heard about Tita.

“Yeah, my mom told me,” was all I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. It was hard, because I couldn’t get it out of my mind how pretty Tita had been to me when I was young boy. She used to go out of her way to play with me at family gatherings. Her hair had always been so perfect and matched her eyes to a tee. To me, it was like she’d painted it that way. She was my fun cousin, Tita, who always came out of her room when we visited, even when she was a more of a woman than a girl. She always said hi to me and showed me all the cool things she was into at the time.

I had watched my fist Blu-Ray movie with her. Her boyfriend at the time had bought it for her. To this day, I have no idea what was the movie we had watched, because she kept asking me question after question about my life. She even filled my short responses with tales and experiences of her own.

I just couldn’t comprehend what had happened to her. I found it real, real hard to envision her as one of those ‘things’ people mentioned. She couldn’t be one of those the news anchors were calling the “violently mutated”. Could she?

The rest of us referred to them as “trolls’.

Now, Tita was one of them.

I didn’t want to remember her that way. Trolls were horrid.

“Truth told, ‘Cuz, what happened to Tita just goes to show you that entire side of the family has a curse on it,” he concluded.

We gained the third floor, entered the Loft.

“I don’t know, Jake, that’s a hard judgment to make. I tend to think they were just uneducated and rash, and shit happened. That’s what came to bite them in the ass.” I grimaced with new thoughts of old memories. “I mean, no one told Grandpa Juan to go and knock up a fourteen-year-old girl. He was already married and had kids. What kind of shit is that?

“Still, that was a decision he made on his own. And, for the rest of his life, he paid the price for it.” I stopped, realizing a new truth. It struck me right then. I might be more like my grandfather than I ever had imagined in the past. Fuck!

“I guess you’re right, Eff,” he said. Jacob glanced around. Like a hyena on someone else’s kill, he spotted Katie’s belongings on the bed far to the right of the doorway. “Holy fuck, Eff, your parents got Katie up here with you all alone?”

“Yeah, so?” I replied, trying to act it like it was no big deal. I knew exactly what he was thinking though. It was what I had been thinking the day before. There’s a gorgeous, sexy, tight-assed teenage girl sleeping in the same room as me. When do I get to fuck her?!? “My mom said it would be good for her to be around… how did she put it…? Oh, I remember now! She said, I’d be good influence on her.”

“Good influence my ass, man! If your mom knew just half of what you’ve done, she’d have kicked your ass out of here so hard, you’d bounce on your ear,” Jacob responded. For some reason, he seemed incensed.

What he had said though was close to the truth. I just covered my bases better than most. I went out of way to make sure I never got caught red handed doing something I wasn’t supposed be doing. Call it due diligence. I call it being smart.

“How can you stand it, ‘Cuz?”

“Stand what?”

“Sleeping so close to her and not wanting to creep over and at least touch her, man?” His eyes he had hooded already.

I was sure if he had been alone he would’ve starting beating off right there. “That’s because I’m not all perv’ed out over her, you jerk. Besides, you dick, she’s my cousin.”

There was always a time and place for some well-put indignation to stave off the ignorant. This is especially true if you want to do the exact thing the ignorant wanted to do, right?

“Who cares, bro, I would, at least, try and get some…,” he drifted into a thoughtful silence.

From the look on his face, the thought he had might’ve already tried it with some of our other cousins popped into my head. But who though? Only Melanie was old enough. She was the oldest child of my Uncle Andrew Marquez, which was Jacob’s mother’s brother on my father’s side of the family. But shit, she was only fifteen. Of course, he could be talking about one of the older girls from my Grandpa Juan’s first marriage. They were cousins as well, but to Jake only by half. Maybe he had gone after one of them? Damn! I thought, all those girls were out in the streets a lot, just like their parents had been before them. There’s no telling how many times those bitches got passed around the neighborhood. Yuck! Jacob’s dick was probably halfway detached by now. It might have already fallen off, if he had stuck it into one of those Strawberries¹.

“Get some what?” came a female voice from behind us and made us both jump out of our skin.

“Jee-Zuz, Ramona, did you have sneak up on us like that! I almost shit my pants!” complained Jacob. He walked deeper into the room, then edged his way toward my dresser, placing the marijuana on top of it.

I smirked Ramona’s way. “I’ll give you one guess.”

“Shit, I don’t even need one. It is truly all he ever thinks about. You should’ve seen him when I turned fourteen and he and some of his friends came to my birthday party.”

I slid my head to the side. I hadn’t heard this story before.

She handed me a bag full of warm boxes with the logo of a laughing Buddha stenciled on the outside. Looks like the Chinese food was here!

She continued, talking in low tones. “That dickweed comes up to me, asking me if I’d had my period yet. He was being stupid, because I got my period when I was like eleven. He kept asking me if a dude had me broken-in yet, or some shit like that. He was creepy as fuck, and kept following me around the entire time.”

“What made him stop?” I asked, interested now. As far as I knew, my cousin never took “no” as a rejection. For him, “no” meant the game was afoot.

“I finally agreed to make out with him behind the tool shed.”

I raise my eyebrows. This was fucking new to me.

She went on: “When we got back there, leaned in toward him… and then kicked him in the cojones as hard as I could. He fell to the ground and was cussing at me. I told him if I ever decided to be with him, he’d hear a gunshot a second after. I would know then that I was insane and needed to be put out of my misery.”

I laughed, unabashed.

Jacob walked back up to us. “She telling you about the day we became friends?” he asked with a smile on his face. Jacob might be many things, but he never had a problem smiling or laughing, even if he was the target. He had always been so easy going. When he wasn’t being obnoxious or miring us in undo mortification with one antic or another.

Truthfully, bro, I’m proud of what you’ve made of yourself.

“If that was the same day she kicked you in the ‘nads. Then, yes, that was exactly what she was telling me about,” I replied, matching his grin.

“She was just playing hard to get, the little hussy,” he countered. Then, he saw Katie struggling up the stairs with an extra-large pizza and a paper bag full of what had to be the pastramis. He moved passed us to give her some help. “Let me help you with that, sweet cheeks,” I heard him say to her.

Ramona and I just exchanged a look of resignation.

Over the next few minutes, we set up two card tables and placed them side-by-side. We used an old blanket to cover them. Then we pulled four of the many folding chairs my parent’s kept in the attic. It was accessible through a small door next to the bathroom. Finally, after arranging the food, we sat down to eat.

To keep Jacob from bothering Katie, we sat boys on one side and girls on the other. Ramona was across from me - a socially appropriate placement. The three of us had agreed. Pre-existing pretenses must remain intact; nothing was to appear changed between us. For as long as it was possible, discovery of our “trio” was not an option.

{ ¹”Strawberries”: An urban colloquialism coined in the late twentieth century, meaning a woman who sells herself for drugs (typically crack cocaine); termed thus, because of the supposed color of her overused vagina, “rubbed red like a strawberry”. }