Bodega Dreams: Book III

dreamt i was this poeta
words glitterin’ brite & bold
in las bodegas
where our poets’ words & songs
are sung

And Bodega would, too, confident that Nazario would get him acquitted or at least a light sentence.

Sapo was right, Bodega was gone and his dreams had dissolved like a wafer in water; his buildings would be reclaimed by the city, which would raise our rents.

At the funeral the entire barrio was there.

It seemed as if everyone had set aside everything and had gone to pay Bodega their humble respects and show their appreciation.

The service was held at the redbrick Methodist church on 111th Street and Lexington Avenue—the same church the Young Lords had stormed and taken over, and from which they had launched their great offensives: clothing drives, free breakfast, door-to-door clinics, free lunches; they even picked up the trash the Sanitation Department always neglected.

He thought Veronica was as madly in love with him as he was with her, and as ardent as he to advance the status of Puerto Ricans.

The young Izzy had stood guard under the funeral home’s clock, which freely gave the time to Madison Avenue, alongside his fellow Lords with their berets and empty rifles.

It was a time when hope for El Barrio seemed fertile, and love at last seemed attainable.

Everyone was there like in some pageant for a dying monarch.

Everyone was there like in some pageant for a dying monarch.

After the three-day wake, a hearse, long, black, shiny, and sleek like Ray-Ban Wayfarers, took Bodega’s body to a Queens cemetery.

And all along the endless convoy as it made its way out of the neighborhood and onto the highway, you’d hear a passerby ask, “Who they burying?”

Nene stood there, dignified, but cried and cried, inconsolable.

Nearly the entire East Harlem aristocracy.

Afterward everyone lowered their heads for an interminable moment of silence.

He smirked as if embarrassed that he’d been caught, and then smiled lightly at the detectives and brought up his hands for them to cuff.

On my way back to Spanish Harlem, I figured that it wasn’t Fischman that had set that fire in retaliation for Salazar’s death.

“No. I’m not Bodega and I’m not rich,” I said, and tousled the kid’s hair.

Our people are evolving into something completely new.

Its music and people had taken off their mourning clothes.

Young girls strutted their stuff, shaking it like Jell-O, proud to be voluptuous and not some bony Ford models.

Old women gossiped and laughed as they sat on project benches or by tenement stoops, where they once played as children with no backyards—yes, they were happy too.

He had represented the limitless possibilities in us all by living his life, striving for those dreams that seemed to elude the neighborhood year after year.

But in that transitory moment when at last the pearl was about to be handed to him, like Orpheus or Lot’s wife, he had to look back to find Vera.