Mona poured some more brandy into our glasses and then led me by the hand into the living room. There we drank and whispered and kissed—a lot. Toward the bottom of the snifters my trepidations evaporated. Mona showed me how and where to kiss and when to linger. In hushed tones she told me about her white boyfriend and how he would never let her guide him to her desire.
I was overexcited and so suffered two premature ejaculations, but Mona was more experienced and explained, between kisses, what was going on with me and how we could get back to where we wanted to be.
Somewhere in the night I looked up from the sofa and saw Sherman and Tanya, mostly naked, tiptoeing toward another part of the house.
“Kiss me, Stew,” Mona said, to bring my attention back to her.
The couch Mona and I staked out was long and deep, like the sleep we tumbled down into. It was slumber in an upholstered hole at the side of a road in some fairy tale my mother might have read aloud before my siblings and I fell to sleep . . .
My mother. I came awake suddenly, so deeply afraid that even the loss of my virginity failed to buoy me. I sat up quickly and felt a wave of pain go through my head. I gasped, looked around, and saw Sherman sitting in a stuffed chair set perpendicular to the foot of our sofa.
Mona groaned and shifted under a blanket I didn’t remember.
“I been waitin’ for you to wake up, cousin.”
“Does your head hurt this bad?” I asked.
“It’ll go away in the air outside,” Sherman explained.
“My parents are gonna kill me,” I predicted, through pain and some nausea.
“Uh-uh, man. I got that covered,” my cousin promised.
It was late May, and the sun was rising at around five that morning as Sherman and I made our way to the subway.
“What you mean you got it covered?” I asked Sherman for the sixth time as he handed me a subway token.
“While you was playin’ makin’ Mona moan I called Titi an’ asked her to call your parents and say you was sleepin’ ovah.”
No magician ever impressed me as much as Sherman did.
“And she did it?” I asked.
“Sure she did. I told her that you and me were on a double date. She understands what men need to do.”
For a week or so after the visit with Tanya and Mona, I avoided my cousin. I wanted to forget about cognac and sex and Manhattan too. I felt so guilty that I was even trying to do some homework one Wednesday evening in the bedroom I shared with my brother Floyd.
“Stew?” my mother, Mint Cardwell-Brownley, called from the hall.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Phone. It’s your cousin Sherman. If he wants you to come over, tell him you have to come back here to bed.”
“Hey, cousin,” he said, when I answered.
“Hi.” I didn’t want to be rude.
“Where you been, man?” he asked.
“Nowhere. Studyin’ for finals is all.”
“Well, come on ovah an’ I’ll help.”
There was no way that I was going to see Sherman and Nefertiti. My soul was on the line; that’s how it felt. I tried to think of some kind of reason that I had to stay and do my homework alone. Maybe it was some kind of spelling that I had to commit to memory, and Floyd was already testing me. That was a good excuse.
“What you thinkin’, Stew?” my cousin asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“So you comin’ or what?”
“OK.” And that was it. My soul was sold, and Sherman owned it.
That early evening we went down an alley past the back of a bodega. We stopped for a minute while Sherman looked around.
“You see that little window ovah the door?” he asked me.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s what they call a transom, and Julio’s ain’t got no alarm.”
“So?”
“I’m ’a break into that bastard an’ steal one hundred dollars.”
“Why?” I was so scared that even the spiritual devastation of sex seemed tame.
“’Cause I can. ’Cause I wanna do everything. Don’t worry, Stew. I won’t bring you into it.”
The years passed, and Sherman and I were fast companions. Whenever he broke the law he did it alone, but later he’d tell me all about it—step-by-step. I spent lots of time with him and his mother, my aunt Titi, in their sixth-floor walk-up apartment. Titi was always nice, kissing me hello and goodbye.
My own mother rarely kissed me. I had never much thought about that until I became the beloved chattel of my aunt and cousin.
After high school Sherman was accepted to NYU on full scholarship, and then I, the next year, went to work on an early-morning paper-delivery crew for the New York Times.
Somewhere in that time our cousin Theodora decided to take the NYC civil service exam. She asked Sherman to help, and he did. I hung around because it felt better to be with him than my own parents and siblings.
Theodora and I studied together. I had no desire to take the test, but I liked her. We’d laugh and try to fool each other, and Sherman told me that she’d do better if I was there too. Theodora was slender and tall, and she told us on the third night of study that she liked women more than men.
“I just like the way girls kiss,” she admitted between practice tests. “It’s like I know something with them, when men keep their secrets.”
I didn’t care about who she loved. Theodora was my blood, and I had learned from Sherman and Titi that that was all that mattered.
A few years later, after Theodora had gotten a clerk job at the local police precinct, Sherman got into a fight with the husband of one of his girlfriends.
It isn’t what it sounds like. Isabella Vasquez was a first-grade schoolteacher, who taught many of the kids that our siblings and cousins had produced. Sherman got to know her when taking our nieces and nephews to school on Thursday mornings.
Isabella’s husband, Murphy, one night got drunk and knocked out one of her teeth. So Sherman kicked his ass.
Murphy got mad at that, and with two of his friends he beat my cousin to death. They jumped him in an alley and stomped his face and ribs. Nefertiti and I sat by his body in the mortuary all Saturday morning, while Murphy Halloran and his friends were being arraigned and charged.
Nefertiti held the vigil in her sixth-floor walk-up. All forty-seven of the Cardwells, Brownleys, and Cardwell-Brownleys came. Our grandparents were dead, but Titi had brought out an old photograph of them and tacked it to the wall.