Ricky Ricardo Joaquin

We were a strange pair. Me, the skinny longhaired doper and Ricky, the rock solid football stud.

Ricky's problem was twofold: girls and reds. He couldn't get enough of either. And, necessarily in reverse order. You know the thing about reds: they turn men into lovers or fighters.

His sister Grace called me:

"He's dropping them again... and he's looking for his car keys... .I can't hold them out forever... he'll beat me if I don't turn them over."

"Call his girlfriend. Make her come over."

"La puta odalisca? Ayeeeee!...she's on the rag and she acted all scared that Ricky was gonna mess her up, too."

"Ok. Ok. I'm coming over."

There was one and only one consolation for being friends with Ricky......his little sister, Gracie.

My family lived in a small two bedroom tract house at the edge of the little desert. Saturday night. The next door neighbor partied in his backyard, serenading the neighborhood with the sound of his Tejano band. They had a keg of Budweiser working. It would be drained by sunrise. The music too, would eventually falter into a hypnotic stupor.

My bedroom in the garage at the west end of the house was directly adjacent to pachanga central.

In the near distance you could hear the PA announcer from the drag strip followed by thirty seconds of excruciatingly loud jet engine noise as the funny cars battled for supremacy of a car crazed state of psychosis known primarily to outsiders as "Southern California."

After a few hours of intermittent racing, you would begin to smell and taste the dragsters' exhaust fumes hanging in the sour night air.

Gracie sat in her mother's living room chair, already exhausted, as if from fucking me in my unremittant teenaged fantasies. She raised her arm and pointed out toward the front screen door from where I had just entered. She said nothing.

I searched my options. Where would that motherfucker go?

"Ricky que va a la casa odalisca?"

Gracie looked at me like I was the world's greatest all time idiot. Which I suppose I am. Still, she said nothing, simply stared at me with eyes dripping dark caramel venom.

I left quickly, blue ballz already formed...yet again!

The problem with Ricky Ricardo Joaquin was that he was insane even when sober, so the effect of drugs and alcohol, especially when combined in liberal quantities, was about like mixing jet fuel with a funny car. Shit happened, and it tended to happen at the speed of sound.

I headed back home to my neighbor's house. The band was on break, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer on the patio.

"Oye! Luis, any of you guys see Ricky tonight?"

"Hey Ghost, whats happenin, my man? Ricky no lo he visto... and you keep that fucking vato loco away from my keg too, Pete. Or I'll make your papa grande reimburse me."

The vatos all laughed heartily. Normally, I would have stayed for a beer myself, maybe shared a bit of my dirtweed with them, but there wasn't time for that now. I had to find Ricky.

Too late, I turned the corner to the liquor store behind my house and saw a dazed bleeding man down on the sidewalk. I helped him to his feet.

"It was that big Mexican kid, Ricardo something or other. The linebacker. He wanted me to buy him a quart of malt. When I told him no, he just started punching me."

His mouth was bleeding from the inside of his lower lip. No missing teeth. He would have a black eye in the morning. Otherwise he looked okay. No broken nose, no noticeable eye damage. He was lucky. He shouted after me as I walked away.

"You tell that punk I am going to prosecute his Mexican ass... "

I went to the next closest liquor store, which was in the shopping center downtown. The parking lot was crowded. I drove past the liquor store. Business as usual, no signs of Ricky pacing the sidewalk, hitting up adult strangers and forcing money on them to buy him some beer. I drove down the parking lanes until I spotted his van.

No one in the front. I approached the door cautiously.

"Door's open, Casper."

He sat crosslegged in the back cradling two quarts of malt liquor. He held up a bottle for my inspection.

"Polish quarts," he announced proudly, handing me the remaining unopened forty oz bottle.

I drank the malt, which at first had the taste of rubbing alcohol. About a fifth of the way down the bottle, though, I had to admit it tasted OK.

"Hey Casper, where's the party, man?"

"Its in your mouth motherfucker and we're all coming."

We laughed. Both the question and the answer were in keeping with a certain tradition between us, a perfectly catholic call and response, so to speak. Mass was said every Friday night and every Saturday night of our teenaged existences in hell.

"How fucked up are you, man?" I asked, more to judge the tone and slurriness of his vocal response than his perception of self awareness.

"Pretty fucked up man, pretty fucked up. My girlfriend just told me she is knocked up."

"Bullshit. She just told your sister she was on the rag."

"If only, homeboy, if only."

"Gracie said you were going wild at your mom's house."

"I just heard the news, alright? I just heard the news. My life is over, Holmes."

I thought about it for a second.

"Bullshit. You have no life anyway. Look at you, sitting in the back of your van in the parking lot on a Saturday night downing forties."

Ricky Ricardo Joaquin, high school football hero with nothing but daylight in front of him for a hundred yards, yanked the bottle to his backwardly tipped head and guzzled gustily. When he finished he wiped his mouth with the back of his shirt cuff, smiled the smile of a man standing before the gallows and slowly shook his head back and forth.

"My fucking life is fucking over, esé."

With a sense of finality, Ricky Ricardo Joaquin and I finished off our forties, then slid over the engine compartment and into the front seats of the van. Ricky cranked the potent little Chevy V-8 which connected us. The engine radiated deep, reassuring warmth.

We drove off into the night, searching for a party somewhere.