Painted Cities

DAYDREAMS

My memories come in negative. My mother had a box of photographs, but I don’t recall ever seeing any of them. Instead, what I recall are her negatives: the orange-tinted strips of color film that she kept tucked in the developers’ envelopes. Some of these envelopes she’d labeled — CHRISTMAS 1974; FLORIDA 1972. Others she hadn’t, and she would lift these out of the photo box and say, “All right, let’s see what these are from.” She always went for the negatives, never the actual prints.

My memories compete with reality. I know my uncle Juan had a cream-colored Lincoln. We waxed it every fall, every spring. I used to sit in the backseat while my uncle cruised with his girlfriend, Letty. They hardly spoke a word, only listened to music: the O’Jays, Earth, Wind and Fire. Sometimes my uncle would look back at me. Then Letty would look back too, and then they would look at each other, and smile.

When it was dark and we had dropped Letty off, I used to sit in the front seat and stare at the glowing dashboard. The warm smell of summer always poured in through the open windows, even when we stopped at a red light or stop sign. In the flood of streetlights, my legs would turn a bright orange and I would wonder if I was going to get a sunburn. We’d drive a little longer. I’d try to guess where we were by the tops of the apartment buildings. I never knew when we had actually returned home. My uncle would say, “Okay, man, let’s go.” And only then would I know that we had parked and that the ride was over.

I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt like. I try to piece together image from that. When I try to think of image, what I see is the light blue of my uncle’s skin, the silver black of his Dago T-shirt. What comes to mind is a glaring white night sky, a glaring white dashboard, luminescent, bright opaque, an opaque so bright you want sunglasses, but then you realize anything dark is just as bright, and you’re helpless. What comes to mind are my uncle’s dark teeth as he smiles, frightening, outlined in white, like ghost images. And I can see through my uncle, his ice-blue skin. I can see the tuck-and-roll of the driver’s side door. I can see the darkness of the chrome door handle and window lever, all this in complete reverse, like an x-ray image.

When I was seven or eight, there was cotillion in my family. My cousin Irene had just turned fifteen. My sister, Delia, who was only a year older than me, was selected to participate as a dama, and my cousin on my father’s side, Little David, was selected as her escort, her chambelán.

The girls wore pink outfits. I don’t remember this, but in the basement of our old house, my sister’s pink gown hung in a plastic sheath throughout my childhood. My sister wore a corsage, and a pink headband to keep her hair back. These things I also don’t remember, but there was a negative, a photograph of my sister and Little David, together in front of the house we used to live in.

In the negative, her gown is purple. In the negative, everything pink is a deep, luscious purple, a purple I’ve never seen before or since, bright, yet at the same time thick and heavy. David, in his tuxedo, is only his reverse: wide lapels, black coat with tails. Stuck in his left lapel is a fat carnation, dark, like a bundle of black roses. And his teeth are glowing. In the negative, David’s teeth are glowing, the way my uncle’s used to late at night, when we cruised our neighborhood.

There was a shootout at the cotillion. My cousin Irene was dating a Morgan-Boy and a rival street gang had shown up, friends of one of the guests. I didn’t know where my father was. I didn’t know where my sister was, or David. But my mother took me underneath the table and held my head in her lap and covered my ears. I remember the gunshots. I remember the screaming.

Eventually my mother let me lift my head. The white tablecloth draped around us like long curtains. My mother opened her purse, and beneath the table, with gunshots ringing off the walls of the church basement, my mother pulled out an envelope of photographs. “All right,” she said. “Let’s see what these are from.” And against the glowing white of the tablecloth’s edge, we held up our orange strips of celluloid and saw things that weren’t there, colors that didn’t exist.