The Lost Boys
By paborama
- 701 reads
Riding down the street, the kerbside like an ice-shelf dividing the dusty gutter from the hordes of guys looking for a diversion. Street-life ain’t in it, sidewalk doldrums more the order of the day. You try trying to get a day’s work in the midst of a Depression when you ran away from the situation back home and you ain’t got no visa, no permit, no pizza, no beer and not even any cigarettes ‘cept the ones you pick bits off of by the taxi rank. But, y’know, you keep yourself clean and you offer a few words up to Sainted Mary and you keep looking. You keep looking. And then one day, your best friend from back home’s sister walks by, and she’s made good. And she smells of home.
And the Puerto Rican guy shouts, from across the street, ‘hey, baby, you wanna dance with me?’ So, they begin to dance. She got beats in the box, he takes what he gets. Her beat box is locked.
Riding around, the guys, in their cars, see her like a Smokey Angel in the periphery of their vision; in the hauntings of their yearnings and their sweethearts back home. They love this Lady Boss, these lost boys.
They love this Lady Boss who buys them all cocoa down at the Mexican café on the corner. These usually forward guys who’ll hustle anything and anyone for the sport. Who would usually chase a girl half down the block to throw an arm around her shoulders and taste the gum bubble she bursts in their faces treat this dame a dozen times more sweetly than that. There must be, what, eight of them perched around the café’s three other chairs, breathing-in her tobacco smoke and listening like five year-olds at Sunday School to her telling all about her life at The Doctor’s house and their pool and their Pontiac and their fine chicken dinners.
‘Where’s Rico?’ The dancing boy asks of his friend, her brother. ‘Rico never made it’, is the answer. ‘Rico died back home and that’s why I left’. The news is distressing, but they rally round and offer her a party this Saturday Night, Homestyle. But she can’t come. She’d love to but she can’t come. There’s no way The Doctor would understand. He would get all jealous and he don’t like dancing and drinking and hollering and hooraying. Her beat box is locked so long as she wants to ride the gravy train.
They understand. There isn’t a one of them who doesn’t know what’s right for her and, right now, that’s not them. Not that it doesn’t hurt like hollow bones. They’d deny their friends too if their children could grow-up with a spoon in their mouths. Don’t need to be silver, just a spoon would do.
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