Prieto ran nearly every morning, lifted weights, even took the occasional yoga class, but nothing calmed him quite the way a drive did, his whip his fortress of solitude. Always with the music blasting, always with the windows open, even in the winter when the air bit, unless it was raining or snowing. It had been this way since he was first able to drive, and Abuelita got a call that his father needed to be bailed out of Rikers for some fucking crackhead shit that he was always getting into then. It was spring of Prieto’s senior year, a Friday, and he was watching TV with one of his homeboys when the phone rang and then, a minute or so later, Abuelita called him into the kitchen. “Bendito, your Papi got into a little trouble and we need to get him some help.” Prieto remembered the lump that formed in his throat when she told him what kind of help he needed, the feeling of heat that came with shame. Yo, son, I gotta bounce and go get my sister was the lie he told his friend. Lying, a survival tactic he mastered quickly. He remembered thinking the ground would swallow him up before he let anyone know where he was going and why.
Olga was out somewhere, likely being scandalous; she was never home in those days. So, he told his abuela he could go by himself, so the house wouldn’t be empty if she came back. She gave him the keys to the hooptie she used, and he drove. The very first drive he’d ever taken alone. The car had a cassette player and before he left, he ran to his room to grab a tape—a Wu-Tang mix he’d gotten at the Fulton Mall after school. He blasted it and by the time he was crossing the bridge and could see the prison in the distance, he felt placid. Far from happy, but calm. Able to manage the process of going through security, showing his newly minted driver’s license as a form of ID, extracting the exact bail from the envelope of cash—in mostly $10s, $5s, and $1s—that his grandmother had given him for this purpose. He was able to breathe as he sat in the plastic bucket seat in the waiting area behind the thick glass, waiting for them to bring his father out, gaunt, legs and hands cuffed together like he had done more than try to steal a TV. When the officer said, “I don’t know much, but I know we’ll be seeing you back here, son,” Prieto wasn’t sure if he meant to bail out his pops or as a criminal himself, but he was able to say, with calm and certainty, “No, I don’t think that you will.”
His father kissed his cheek as he’d always done when he greeted his son. Papi was tired. Prieto didn’t know if that was him coming off a crack high or having doped up in jail. It was hard to tell with his father sometimes, but he had hunted him down enough to know that, up or down, when Papi wanted to get high, he would find a way. Prieto let him lie across the back seat. He changed the tape in the car to Joe Bataan, knowing it would please his father and it did; he sang along before he drifted into sleep. In this way, they drove home. Prieto pulled up to the little house on Thirty-seventh Street between Second and Third, where his Tío JoJo’s friend rented Papi a basement apartment on the condition that he didn’t smoke crack there. The rent was only $200 a month, but Prieto knew that JoJo, Lola, and Richie had been taking turns covering it the past few months. （They didn’t complain, but you hear things.） His father was out like a light, so Prieto climbed into the back to shake him awake, and that was when he saw it, on his father’s neck—the KS lesion. He didn’t even know that’s what it was called, but he knew what it was—the mark of the beast, really. The mark of death. His heart raced. He carried his father out of the back seat and into the tiny apartment, wondering to himself how the fuck this homie had ever even been able to carry a TV when he didn’t weigh more than a TV himself.
The room: a portrait of a tragedy. A Puerto Rican flag hung on the wall, and next to it Papi’s Lords beret. A record player lay on the ground flanked on either side by what must have been a hundred records. The mattress was on the floor, a crate as a nightstand next to it, on top of which was a bare-bulbed lamp, a copy of The General in His Labyrinth, and, to Prieto’s quiet horror, Papi’s works, the needle in a cup of water, pink with blood. He set his father out on the bed and thought to himself: He’ll be high again before the sun comes up. Prieto got back into the car, drove into Bay Ridge, east onto the Belt Parkway, before he ultimately did what he had long wanted and turned the beat-up sedan around to make his way over to the piers off Christopher Street by the West Side Highway.
If the needle was Papi’s release, this was his.
* * *
PRIETO HAD THOUGHT himself street smart, but he’d been a simpleton when he arrived on the political scene nearly seventeen years ago. A Pollyanna was what the City Council speaker had called Prieto when he first assumed office and was asked what his side business was going to be.