The Flowers Read online

  Praise for The Flowers:

  “Dagoberto Gilb has written a brilliant novel that vibrates with the psychic underpinnings of the contemporary Latino experience in Los Angeles. He captures the fluid literacy of fifteen-year-old Sonny Bravo, whose untutored intelligence sparkles with the raw poetic power of the streets. As a Chicano novelist, Dagoberto ventures into the netherworld of an apartment house—where the social intercourse between the working class, immigrant, criminal, black, white, and brown tenants of Los Flores is unrelentingly secretive and full of longing—and creates a new kind of literature out of the barrio English of his protagonist. His achievement is a stunning portrait of a crackling bilingual universe where life and ‘death hums through the wires’ above the streets. It is a totally original work of American literature.”

  —Luis Valdez

  “Gilb’s new novel is hilarious and thought provoking as it traces the bigotry and alienation among the wildly varied cast of characters living in and around the Los Flores apartment building in an unnamed city that may remind some readers of Los Angeles. … Gilb offers sharp commentary via his quick-witted narrator [Sonny], and the reader feels.

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “The prospect of reading a novel narrated in run-on sentences, fragments, Spanish phrases, and street slang might seem daunting, but not when you meet the precocious, Holden Caufieldesque narrator of Dagoberto Gilb’s coming-of-age novel … Sonny’s voice is mesmeric. It keeps us reading.”

  —The New York Times

  “A psychologically complex novel that captures both a young son’s resentment and a mature man’s understanding.”

  —Marcela Valdes, The Washington Post

  “The Flowers speaks to us of heartbreak in a fractured urban world and of the courage it takes to survive there. We’re lucky to have this fellow shining his light for us.”

  —William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field

  “Gilb’s novel is populated with an amazing variety of unpredictable characters, people who come dangerously close to being stereotypes but, because of certain quirks, stand as individuals. … Gilb is a master of dialect. … He exploits three languages, making them work both directly and symbolically. … In the end, Gilb suggests that racial harmony is a dream, even as he embraces everyone’s favorite platitude: love conquers all.”

  —Orange County Weekly

  “The Flowers is laced with humor and tenderness and, in the end, a sense of hope. … The author handles the voice of a teenage narrator with skill … [and] does an admirable job with the rhythm and flow of the novel. … The simple language of the novel often turns lyrical. The result is a portrait of a working-class world with all its flowers and thorns.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “The Flowers evolves into classic Gilb, where one square block is the whole world for his characters, and there is so much tension shimmering under the surface that the thing is almost uncomfortable to read. … This could be any young-adult novel, expect that Gilb gives his main character too much knowledge, too much sophistication that even Sonny himself doesn’t seem to know he possesses. … The sidebar racial tension and battles between civilians and police and civilians and each other serve to make the novel richer than just a coming-of-age story.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Gilb expresses sympathy for women under the thumb of angry, threatened men while vividly portraying a romantic, vulnerable, yet calculating and resilient young man coming of age in a storm of prejudice. With a scorching sense of humor, a keen ear for dialogue, and a gift for creating microcosms, Gilb tells a suspenseful tale of loneliness, rage, yearning, and hope.”

  —Booklist

  “Along with Sonny’s daydreams come lessons about life … [and] through it all, there is a taste of something sweet: the faint hope of love in the offing, even as sirens scream out above an angry city.”

  —Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio

  “What makes The Flowers bloom, what lifts it beyond polemic and cliché, is its ability to transport the reader into another life. A story “that didn’t have nothing to do with people or places you’ve ever seen,” the book also lifts its seasoned author to another place in the literary order.”

  —Steven G. Kellman, Texas Observer

  “Reading this captivating, deceptively compact novel is like having a nimble, well-informed guide on a journey into Sonny Bravo’s contradictory, multidimensional, multicultural self.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “With his new novel The Flowers, Austin-based Dagoberto Gilb has written his most powerful book to date, digging his hands into the fraught subject of race relations, but doing so in his signature humorous, meandering, natural way that makes him such a winning chronicler of Western urban life. Although Gilb’s story alights on all kinds of touchy subjects—racism, illegal immigration, women’s roles, sex, and drugs—he never lectures. Instead, he creates a tableau of humanity that allows readers a fascinating glimpse into the sort of lives they may have wondered about.”

  —New West Book Review

  “The raw narrative about the life of the teenaged Sonny is especially intriguing because of its gritty authenticity. Gilb conveys a realness lacking in more conventional novels by using a mix of Spanish and English to show how Sonny speaks and thinks and by allowing the plot to skip along in relation to Sonny’s tangled thoughts.”

  —Library Journal

  “Like all coming-of-age novels narrated in the first person, the success of The Flowers depends on its protagonist’s voice and sensibility. Sonny Bravo’s voice captured me from the beginning and, despite some shaky stretches, didn’t let go until the end.”

  —John Repp, The Plain Dealer

  “The Flowers illuminates the true art of Dagoberto Gilb’s fiction as he explores life’s passions and ambiguities while grappling with the interplay between hope and despair. This is a ferocious, provocative novel, one that confirms Gilb’s reputation as one of our finest contemporary writers.”

  —El Paso Times

  “Dagoberto Gilb’s new novel, The Flowers, is a tightly woven narrative about a boy coming of age in a community bubbling with racial tension. It’s beautifully rendered in part because Mr. Gilb nails the voice of fifteen-year-old narrator Sonny Bravo with pinpoint accuracy.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “The Flowers is a bildungsroman about how Sonny, a flawed, deeply appealing hero, becomes a man … Gilb writes in a dry yet luminous style; the patience and calmness of his writing quiets and ensnares the reader. And although he peppers his tale with Spanish, his writing is accessible even to people who, like me, don’t speak Spanish.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “The Flowers reveals a writer at the height of his powers, at ease with characters both unique and archetypal, a plot that caroms like a heat-seeking missile, and thematic concerns from the many faces of love, racial prejudice, and violence, and hope in spite of shattered dreams.”

  —Albuquerque Alibi

  “From the first measured words of Dagoberto Gilb’s new novel to its final, heart-wrenching exclamation, Gilb takes readers through a journey that is both startling and inevitable. Its painstaking start may create impatience in some readers, but once The Flowers gets going, it sails to its wondrous conclusion. … [Gilb] writes with enormous acuity, heart, and, most importantly, a deep respect for even the most unsavory of his characters and their deeds.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  Also by Dagoberto Gilb

  Hecho en Tejas (editor)

  Gritos

  Woodcuts of Women

  The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña

  The Magic of Blood

  The Flowers

  Also by Dagoberto Gi
lb

  Hecho en Tejas (editor)

  Gritos

  Woodcuts of Women

  The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña

  The Magic of Blood

  The Flowers

  Dagoberto Gilb

  Copyright © 2008 by Dagoberto Gilb

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4822-4

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  The Flowers

  Not that many years ago I would go to a house in the neighborhood, not always someone’s I knew, one I’d never been inside of, where I’d only have to maybe hop a fence, nothing complicated, and from the backyard I’d crawl through an open window. People always latch the ones in the front but never in the back, and especially not the bathroom one, you know, and it wasn’t so small I couldn’t get in quick. I could’ve stole lots of shit in those houses, except that’s not what I was going in there for. I wasn’t like that. Maybe I don’t know exactly what I was doing except I was doing it. I never took nothing, nothing much if I did, because I didn’t want to. I was more watching how the people lived, imagining how it would be in their house. I stared at the framed pictures they had of their family. Husbands in suits and wives with necklaces and old grandparents from the other times way before. Unsmiling dudes, glaring at you, in tilted military hats and coats with medals and ribbons. Full-body shots of happy daughters in white veils and lacy crunchy wedding dresses that poured all over into the bottom of the picture. Shocked little babies on blue backgrounds squinting like What’s going on here, what’s all this light shit? Dopey-dumb I’m-so-proud high schoolers graduating and making a face like they were department store managers. If I felt like it, if I had the mood, I sprawled out on their couches or lay down on their beds. Go, How would I be if I lived here? I’d let that come into me, I’d let my mind go to the show it liked. Maybe you could say I would go off to my own world. To me it wasn’t mine, nothing like mine, because it would go to black. I loved that color. It was like when the eyes aren’t open but try to see. What would finally come were colors and lines busting through, flying out and off and cutting in, crazy fires and sparks, and it’d come out speeding, and I’d be like a doggie out the window, those lane dividers whiffing by on the freeway straight below an open car window. I’d start to see shapes floating and straightening and wiggling and see it like it was a music that didn’t make sound but was making a story. Not a regular story and I don’t mean one you would hear some loco nut tell you, one that didn’t have nothing to do with people or places you’ve ever seen. It’s that I can’t describe it better. Just, I have to watch, I have to listen. It was always good too. Say like when you hear music and it gets inside your brain and goes and goes, sticking there. And so I guess it got in mine like that. I listened and watched until I stopped getting too stupid because, you know, I had to leave and get out of there fast. And once I got up, shook it off and remembered where I really was, even if I opened their refrigerator, when I looked inside, wasn’t like I didn’t think of eating or drinking, I didn’t take even a soda, thirsty as I might have been. I didn’t want them to know I’d been there. Though I kind of opened the fridge door because maybe I do think of—well, like orange juice. It’s that I like orange juice. So maybe when there was some orange juice I might have taken a gulp or two. But see, even then, nobody’d really know. One time I was in this one house, and I was looking inside a drawer in this girl’s bedroom. I knew about her because she was this dude’s older sister, and she was in junior college. It was that there were a bunch of bras, and I picked them up and looked at them, touched them because I was holding them. Wasn’t like I never seen my mom’s and my sister’s, it wasn’t like I didn’t know the difference. And it was the only time there was something like that, swear, and I did stop and yeah I still got jumpy about it and felt like it was fucked up, real bad of me and afterward I only snuck into one more house. Like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing it for, and it wasn’t like I liked doing it.

  I heard this shit because she was on the phone and I listened to her. It was her sound, a white ripply line right into the black. Not above. Black was everywhere and the white came from the front, above, maybe below. I don’t know. I think it was Nely she was talking to, probably. That was who she talked to. That’s who I thought. My mom was going like What can he do? and So what he screamed. Listen to me, she said. No, listen to me. No, listen, listen. And I listened to what I could. I saw the white ribbon curling and swirling. Men. She kind of laughed. He will never know, she said. Ay, ay, no! She laughed. She said, He is a man, and I didn’t ask for that. She was laughing but not laughing happy and I’m listening and I’m like going to that somewhere else inside my head, all by myself.

  I got worried I was getting sent to juvie when I did have to go to the court because of nothing, for so much less. That was this time when the police scraped the tires of their black-and-white against the curb ahead of me. I was walking by myself. At first I didn’t believe it was about me, but that policeman kept wanting to know what I was doing. I was not wanting to say. Okay, maybe, even really I was scared like anybody and I didn’t want to show it but probably I did. How was I supposed to answer because what’d I do? I was just walking, you know? Maybe a couple days earlier I pocketed a chocolate bar and I folded a baby comic book down my pants. It wasn’t like the first time I did that, and when I did get caught this one and only time, when a drugstore man yelled something, I ran, and I never made it back to that store again and that was the worst of it and that already was back then, and no way anyone could still care or remember. So the passenger policeman who came up to me first, he goes, So what’re you doing? and I’m like, Walking on the street, mister, which is when the driver policeman comes around to stand next to his partner, and he frowns at me too, like I’m stinky. Until a second or so later, he gets this expression on his face. His eyes go a little up to the sky, and his body gets kind of stiff, and he blows this fat old pedo. And so, like anybody would, I laughed. I did because it was funny, right? And so yeah I’m all guilty of laughing. But that’s when they both get all blowed up mad, like I’m disrespectful, and I got attitude, and who did I think I am? They got so close into my face I thought they were gonna kick the crap outta me. And so that’s why I had to go to the juvie court, to hear a commercial about disrespecting the police and authority and to hear about all the potential trouble I was going to be in if I didn’t go right and goodboy, straighten out and care about school and my education and get good grades. My mom had to be there with me too. She had to take off from work and listen and act like she was all worked up about me too, which she wasn’t, I knew it, because I heard her talking all the time on the phone about what she was up with, but the lady judge wasn’t going to notice nothing. Once I told my mom how the police dude threw a fart, she cracked up just like me, because it was funny, right? But I knew not to say nothing to a judge about what really happened. I’m not stupid. That judge, she wouldn’t have laughed, and then I don’t think my mom would’ve laughed no more, and she never laughed as much as me. She was tired, and she didn’t like to waste time because she was already way too busy.

  It was that my mom, if she wasn’t at her job, was out o
n dates and whatever. And sometimes she’d get in so late I wouldn’t be awake. That was better for me than when she was home, because when she was home, though I lived there and slept there, it was better to be inside a neighbor’s house than pissing her off. She could get all mad and complaining about me and go how I messed up this and that and she could yell at me how she couldn’t afford a maid to clean up after me, though once in a while a lady named Marta, a sister of a friend, would come to pick up the house and scrub the floors and wash windows and dishes and vacuum even under the torn couch cushions. That Marta thought I was all right because I made my own dinner and lunch and did my shit without nobody. She told me whenever she came too. That didn’t mean much to me except when I was getting yelled at and I knew it really wasn’t about none of what the yelling was about. Probably my mom’s screaming at me was that it used to be my sister, Ceci, she would yell at. Then it got to be me. I didn’t ever believe it was because I was a man or made bigger messes, like she said. My mom used to fight loud with my sister. She would get so she’d go after Ceci with belts or wooden hangers or whatever was near. One time it was a soda bottle. I remember that time good. I was eating banana after banana during the fight and my mom turned on me for one second too—maybe why was I eating all the bananas the minute she bought them—and my sister screamed right back so much it jumped back over to them and they called each other out, like they would go at it for real. Sometimes both of them would cry for a while during and after, though mostly it was my sister, once she got old enough, and meaner, until she finally stopped being at home much. Ceci wasn’t talking to me very much then either. Then they were both gone mostly. It was just, without my sister there, I was starting to have the whole house, like it was mine. I never got hit or yelled at like Ceci. My mom would be around for maybe an hour or two, and she’d either change clothes and leave or be so tired she went into her bedroom and went to sleep.