It'll Put Hair On Your Chest

Ray Leubano was a friendly gust of wind on our family’s last matchstick of dignity. What with my mother’s strong attraction to construction workers and Ray’s ability to drink a can of beer while smoking a joint, they were bound to find each other. We met this strange Mexican man in lot number 76 of the trailer park, which was two parking spaces down from us. My mother and I were enjoying a sopping wet humid day in Miami as we walked past the shopping carts and scattered debris that carpeted Fowler’s trailer park, when we heard a faint whistle to our left. As I turned my head I noticed a short man with no shirt that seemed to be waving and whistling at us. His hair was tangled into a thick dark mat that had a halo of stray hairs dancing in a circular blur. The stench of his scalp caused this blurring effect much the same way that heat would off the afternoon pavement. I would later find out that “shampoo was for pussies”. As Ray once put it, “This bar of Dial is your soap, your conditioner and your shampoo”. His jeans were cut just above the knee. I use the term “cut” loosely, as the pants themselves appeared to have actually had their legs torn and ripped off in a frenzy, as if he had become some sort of werewolf the night before. The way Ray drank, this was not so far from the truth. He stood before us with no shirt and his upper body showed evidence of years of manual labor as his muscles sank down on him like a suit of armor. His stomach on the other hand, showed evidence of years of heavy drinking, as it poked out like a basketball, his belly button popping out with force every time he breathed.

“Hey mommy, you want a beer,” he slurred as he knelt down and picked up a large glass bottle of beer, the label wet and scratched half off. “Uh, no thank you. This is my son Gregory,” she calmly replied as she made a gesture towards me, implying to Ray that I was too young and innocent to know about alcohol. I hated it when she called me Gregory. I always pictured that name on an overly cheerful male flight attendant, “Hi my name is Gregory, can I get you a pillow?". Ray was now staring at me. “Hey Gregorio, you want some cerveza? It’ll put hair on your chest,” he said, stumbling in my direction. This was Ray’s argument for everything, whether it was for me to get him a beer from the fridge or to try some Tabasco sauce on my cereal. “Come on Gregorio, it’ll put hair on your chest”. I still don’t know what it means. My mother just smiled and reached into her blue vinyl oversized purse for her compact. “So what’s your name,” she questioned from behind the small plastic mirror as she formed her lips into a pouting position. “My name’s Ray,” he said in a gravely voice as he took a swig from his drink. Just as he was setting his beer down on the pavement an orange tattered beast leapt down from the sky and onto Ray’s bare shoulder. “Ahhh pinche gato!” he screamed as he looked for a rock to throw at the monster, which had bolted out of sight. “That’s princess. She been livin here for a while,” he gurgled under his breath as he massaged his upper shoulder, now raw with three long pink scratches. What Ray was referring to was the orange cat that lived with him. The trailer park was the cat’s true home, but Ray fed him enough to keep him coming back. This thing was a reddish orange that seemed almost rusted with age, its face covered in scars and the left corner of his ear missing. On most nights, myself and the rest of the trailer park were invited to listen to a concert of hisses, screeches and wails made by the friendly neighborhood felines as they fought to their heroic deaths. Princess was no doubt one of the main performers. The fact that Ray had named him Princess only added to the animal’s rage, for he was clearly a male cat, this being obvious due to the sight of his abnormally large furry testacles that strutted from behind his legs as he walked. Ray and Princess had more in common than they knew, for they were both stuck in this trailer park with no escape or attempt of escape in sight, they both terribly needed showers and as Ray stumbled into the plastic lawn chair in front of my mother and I, his jean shorts opened just enough to let his furry testacles plop into sight.

My mother acted as if she didn’t notice the horrible sight before us as she said politely, with her hips slanted and one hand planted on her side seductively, “Well maybe you could come by and help us fix our air conditioner. There is a nice dinner for you if you say yes.” Ray looked up with a drunken glaze and half cocked smirk, “Hey anything you want me to eat I’ll eat.” He then nodded and winked. Dear God. “Okay then Ray, it was nice to meet you, we live just two doors down. Come by anytime,” she smiled again as she turned to walk away. I was too young to understand how crude the comment was but I was not too young to see how repulsive the man behind the comment was. My mother on the other hand, saw an “honest side” to him and told me that I should be polite to him. “Don’t you want your mother to be happy,” she said when we got back home inside the trailer. I calmly reached for the gray circular handle and twisted open the heavy glass shutters. As I looked out the window and breathed in the warm, dusk filled sky I saw our shirtless friend running away down the asphalt street cursing at the orange cat. He then leaned his body onto the side of a large green dumpster and proceeded to urinate into an oval arch that splashed before his bare feet. “No mom, I don’t want you to be happy,” I said under my breath as I sank down into the polyester cushions of our sofa.