Let me tell you something....

My name is Laritza Fulani and I don’t like to take shit from anyone or anything.

Okay, now that’s out of the way and we can be cool. I can say what I got to say, and you can listen politely or not. I don’t really care if you believe one word I have to say, because in the long run, it won’t matter.

‘Cause I got the scoop on the end-times, babies, and if you’re smart, you’ll get what you can out of what I got to say.

Or not. Who cares? Like the old joke goes, I don’t care if you smoke, and I care even less if you burn.

I resist starting at the beginning for fear of being corny and generic. I would prefer to start at the middle where it’s at least sort of juicy and scary… but Chaba warned me about putting too much out there too soon. Let form follow function and all that shit. So the beginning is what you get, at the end of my mother’s short life.

My mother died in childbirth. But she made deals with certain people to make sure I didn’t follow her into the hole. Out one and into the other would be a big waste.

I didn’t know my mother, except for the few times she showed herself with some cryptic blah-blahs from beyond the grave… but Chaba told me never to trust the words of the dead, because nine times out of ten somebody is pulling their strings. My alcoholic grandmother’s memories of her are all peachy clean and saintly and totally function to make grandma look like a good mother, which of course she wasn’t. But from what I pieced together from her old friends and her relatives, my mom wasn’t too awful a person, and was actually sort of a bad-ass in her own way.

Ana, my mother, got pregnant the year she finished high school and was up in the army. She was bored with the city and her ghetto and her alcoholic mama and daddy, and wanted to see the world, even if she had to take shit from other people for a while. Her secret plan was to get stationed in another cool, semi-warm, semi-democratic country and jump ship. She’s find a new life, new loves, and maybe some new money. But she got too happy about leaving one night and got drunk at her cousin Leticia’s birthday party only two weeks before boot-camp. She ended up in bed with Lucho, my pop, who was very pretty and very fucked up. Plus, he had the coolest tattoo of Betty Boop as La Virgen de Guadalupe on his back. Who wouldn’t love that? So, 6 weeks into boot camp, my mom failed the pee-weed-out-the-sluts-test and got sent back on the ‘bus of dishonorable discharge’.

First thing Ana did was hunt Lucho down and beat the shit out of him for fucking up her life, and then ended up staying with him for keeping quiet about who sent him into the hospital with a broken shoulder blade and a busted t-bag. They deserved each other.

I know, sometimes I think I shouldn’t talk about my parents like they were trash, but they kind of were, and I don’t want to lie. But, although I get a lot of my problems from them, I also got a lot of good things. Like for instance, I’m really good in school, just like my mom was, especially in math and science and am pretty good in art like my dad used to be. And I can beat someone three times my size if it’s really necessary, which was all from Mom. Lucho was a little more gentle and a little confused about everything in general, but he had a really handsome face, was strong in the right ways, and I think he would have really tried hard to be a good Pop if he lived.

Anyway, after Pop’s beating, Ana calmed down and found a job cleaning houses in White Plains, and was preparing to take the Post Office exam when she miscarried the first time. When this happened, my father begged her not to leave him, since he actually fell in love and promised to always be faithful and true. Since she was actually starting to give a crap about this guy, she decided to stick it out for a few more months, which ended up being a few more years. It took 5 more accidents and oaths never to have sex with my father again before she got me in the oven. I wasn’t even supposed to be born, but she made a deal with Chaba, and here I am.

Chaba. What a pain in the ass, but I suppose I have to thank him/her for my life.

Yeah, thanks a frigging lot, Chaba.

Mom got a good gig at the Post Office and started being a letter carrier. She was strong, and loved to walk in those corny shorts, and none of the dogs even bothered to mess with her. She gave off that energy back then. The Universe understood that she was not to be touched. My father, on the other hand, was born under a black star, because he could never hold down a dollar or a gig, and in the end he stopped trying to fight it. Even though my mom had a good enough check every week, he started doing stupid things for money. You see, the never-ending bullshit of male pride never fails to mess things up.

First he started being the lookout for a hot spot up on 138^th Street. Then he moved up to buying shares in the local weed business. After that he sold a little coke, and bought his first and only car with the proceeds of a lucky heroin sale. Then he got involved in dancing go-go at clubs and selling his dick for money. Yeah, my pop was a puto, but that didn’t make him so bad. All the time, he lied about where he was, and told my mom (who probably knew better) that he was working in clubs owned by rich Koreans, and of course there were never any drugs involved. Those Koreans were Christians! I don’t know if she was stupid or just didn’t want to deal with it, but I think my mom loved my father very much, and maybe she gave him the benefit. So she accepted the big furniture and big television and the trips to Atlantic City and kept quiet about it.

But, pendejo that Lucho was, he couldn’t sustain his employment for very long. He just didn’t have the heart to do the things necessary to keep up with the business. He stopped selling one night after a very bad bust that went wrong, and he came home covered in blood and garbage from hiding in a dumpster while his partners got killed by the Dominicans. He got ‘shaky’ after that, always looking behind him, not getting sleep, seeing things that weren’t there. His black star was getting dimmer and darker.

My mother tried everything to save him. She brought him to the temples and had the spirits kicked out of him. He brought him to church and had the Guyanese nuns prepare their special secret whammy juice. She even had him bled with leeches in some cheesy Wiccan’s (my grandma called them weak-uns) house, but stopped right away after my father started screaming her cats were coming to eat him. All the time, my father stayed beautiful and too sad. I don’t think she could leave him, because he had those eyes and that body and that trembling lower lip. Ain’t that some shit? She was fucked from the beginning.

Lucho promised her he’d try and get his act together. My mother worked with him to get his GED and then walked him through the Post Office test about a dozen times before he took it and actually passed. And even though he also started doing his little tricks on the side, things seemed calm enough to start planning for the future. Ha-ha on them.

In 1993, my mother got pregnant with me. That was also the time she found out she was not only HIV positive, but was too low on her t-cell count which means she had woud have full blown AIDS the first time she had to fight an infection. This also meant that the little troopers in her blood that were supposed to fight off enemy invaders like infections and bugs were all but gone, which was not a good thing. She took the news quietly and simply beat my father when she got home, and then made him take the test. And, yep, she got it from him.

Now she didn’t blame him. It was a virus, right? No morality in one of those. It just tries to live like everything else. And she knew about his life before, and during their relationship. If anything, she felt she should have been with somebody else than take the risk of her man being sensible enough to wrap it up and stay faithful. She had seen some of the girls around the block go through this exact thing, and saw them crumble away bit by bit like some sad cookie, but this wasn’t going to be her. She would do what she had to do to keep alive and moving forward. She had a bun in the oven, and not all of them got the bug after birth.

But Lucho didn’t want to listen about such things. Sex was wonderful with the people you love, and still pretty good when you get paid for it, and even though he dragged in my mother into this state, he was more worried about what this might do to his ‘side’ businesses. No, that’s not true. My aunts all talked about my pop like he was dirt, but I think they were jealous too. I believe my father had a lot invested in his looks. It was all he had to fall back on when things were not going good, which was all the frigging time. A diagnosis like that seriously messed with his pretty head. He had to be careful now. No more spontaneous anything. He had to watch his food, watch his pills, watch his activities, watch his sex… and worry about whether people ever knew, and what they would treat him like. And of course, there was the death thing, and the fact that he could have killed his entire family. I could understand the drama going inside my pop’s head. He just wasn’t as strong as my mom.

He was in denial for the longest time. He retested and retested, but never no negative. Then one day, after a whole day of being quietly drunk, Lucho, my father, went to the train station, and jumped in front of the 4 train. And that was that.

The funeral was a mess. My mother spit on his grave for being a punk and leaving her ass sick and alone, then threw herself onto the coffin and made one of those black-movie scenes where the old lady’s bloomers hike all the way up to her ears. After that, she never mentioned his name again.

Ana vowed to just live and move forward, and try to save the baby in her stomach, and move to Puerto Rico or Queens until there was a cure or she dropped dead. She never told my alcoholic grandma about the HIV, but decided she had to let her let her know about the cancer.

Sigh. I know. Cancer. Poor baby. My father’s star started shining on her. She had breast cancer. Three big ole bumps showed up at the 2^nd trimester, just when my mom was about to start using this anti-virus thing called AZT. It was metastasizing, which I think means it was growing kinda fast. The doctors advised her to lose the baby. but my mom said no. She would take the AZT, which would make her sicker and wasn’t too good for the cancer, but would help protect me from getting the virus in the womb. She’d ride things out until I was born, and, then, if she was still around, she’d have the surgery and the chemo and the meds and try harder to survive. In the meantime, she was preparing my grandmother for the worst. She even got her signed up at AA, which resulted in my alcoholic grandma meeting a whole bunch of new drinking buddies.

I better get to bed. Big test tomorrow. Come back, and I’ll tell you all about Chaba and how my mom met her and him about a week before she died.

I let my English teacher see this, and he said it read like Charles Dickens, and the he hopes the story gets brighter. Then I told him that the story is what it is, and I’m not going to lie about my life just so a couple of dickhead readers could fell better in between You-tube and Asian Porn sites. He had to laugh, and I had to laugh as well because it was so deep and profound. Mr. Garcia’s fat and pretty cool in a gay Santa kind of way.

I’m sorry I have written in so long. My teacher says that a good measure of a successful writer is how long they can sit in front of the paper and actually write. I have to get my shit together. I have too much to say and sometimes I don’t know where to start, and that leads to me not writing anything. Plus, my grandmother has been sick.

Yeah, I know it sounds like my dog ate my homework or something like that, but her being sick all the time becomes a really big issue and I end up having to watch her like a hawk. My grandmother gets into these bad moods that last for days. Last time it happened, she was in bed for a month. I had to clean her, get groceries, cook, do laundry, make sure the bills get paid, and make sure she doesn’t jump out the window, plus study for the finals and do three book reports. In the meantime, she’ll sneak out when I’m finally asleep and get a bottle to quietly sip-sip-sip on until she has to sneak out again. Everything just gets too much for her and she shuts down for a reboot or something until she’s back to her normal regular-nasty old self.

You know, sometimes I have dreams that she has died, and that things aren’t that bad for me afterwards, but then I wake up and feel really guilty.

Anyway, that’s my excuse. Sorry. I promise to be better.

Back to Chaba. On the day I was born, my mother died. Not from the sicknesses, not from the medicine, but from a doctor’s mistake. He cut something he wasn’t supposed to cut, and the blood wouldn’t stop. The last words out of her mouth were, “There, you have it.” And then she died.