Juliet Takes a Breath Read online

  Juliet Takes a Breath© 2016 by Gabby Rivera

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  For more information contact:

  Riverdale Avenue Books

  5676 Riverdale Avenue

  Riverdale, NY 10471.

  www.riverdaleavebooks.com

  Design by www.formatting4U.com

  Cover art by Cristy C. Road

  Digital 978-1-62601-250-9

  Print 978-1-62601-251-6

  First Edition January 2016

  Praise for this ground-breaking first novel

  Inga Muscio, author of Cunt

  “Even if Holden Caulfield was born in the Bronx in the 1980s, he could never be this awesome.”

  Riese Bernard, CEO of Autostraddle

  “Rivera cuts your heart right open with the most original young lesbian character I’ve read in years, seamlessly weaving together racial politics, awkward teenage romance and a queer coming-of-age that manages to both center on and transcend the identities it represents.

  So tender, so real, so crazy-beautiful and earnest and honest and everything you’ve ever wanted in a queer coming-of-age story but could never find until now.”

  THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD I ATE IT IN TWO DAYS

  Glendaliz Camacho

  “Gabby Rivera’s gift is for wry humor and pages that pulsate with oh so much heart. Her prose is a friend that lovingly and confidently envelops you and shows you through the beautiful struggle of a young queer Latina from the Bronx.

  Rivera vividly conveys Juliet Palante’s journey—away from the familiarity of home to the newness of Portland and inward to her Self—as she seeks love, acceptance, and her place in the world.”

  Kristin Russo, Everyone is Gay

  “Juliet Takes A Breath is an absolute necessity in a landscape that often erases the strength, importance, and very existence of queer, feminist women of color. There are far too many young people who aren’t given the opportunity to witness the nuanced journeys of characters who look, think, or identify like themselves. For this reason, and many others, I am endlessly thankful for this beautifully crafted story and the critical conversations that it will inspire around intersections of sexuality, feminism, race, and gender.”

  For Christina Elena Santiago aka Nena

  We will always be homegirls coming up in the Bronx on the hunt for 32 flavors and then some.

  This book is also dedicated to all the round brown girls who are told they aren’t enough, who move in the world uncertain if there’s room for their bodies, selves, and hearts.

  Take all the room you need, camarada.

  Make no apologies. Fight hard. Love on each other.

  You are a miracle.

  Palante * Pa’lante

  adverb

  Puerto Rican slang, also used in Latin America and other parts of the Caribbean.

  Contraction of “para adelante” meaning to move forward.

  A call out into the world for our people to always keep it moving

  Preface

  03/04/2003

  Dear Harlowe,

  Hi, my name is Juliet Palante. I’ve been reading your book Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind. No lie, I started reading it so that I could make people uncomfortable on the subway. I especially enjoyed whipping it out during impromptu sermons given by old sour-faced men on the #2 train. It amused me to watch men confront the word pussy in a context outside of their control; you know, like in bright pink letters on the cover of some girl’s paperback book.

  My grandma calls me la sin vergüenza, the one without shame. She’s right. I’m always in it for the laughs. But now I’m writing to you because this book of yours, this magical labia manifesto, has become my Bible. It’s definitely a reading from the book of white lady feminism and yet, there are moments where I see my round, brown ass in your words. I wanted more of that, Harlowe, more representation, more acknowledgement, more room to breathe the same air as you. “We are all women. We are all of the womb. It is in that essence of the moon that we share sisterhood”—that’s you. You wrote that and I highlighted it, wondering if that was true. If you don’t know my life and my struggle, can we be sisters?

  Can a badass white lady like you make room for me? Should I stand next to you and take that space? Or do I need to just push you out of the way? Claim it myself now so that one day we’ll be able to share this earth, this block, these deep breaths?

  I hope it’s okay that I say this to you. I don’t mean any disrespect, but if you can question the patriarchy, then I can question you. I think. I don’t really know how this feminism stuff works anyway. I’ve only taken one Women’s Studies class and that was legit because a cute girl on my floor signed up for it. This girl made me lose my train of thought. I wanted to watch her eat strawberries and make her a mix tape. So I signed up for the class and then she became my girlfriend. But please don’t ask me about anything that happened in that class afterwards because love is an acid trip.

  Feminism. I’m new to it. The word still sounds weird and wrong. Too white, too structured, too foreign: something I can’t claim. I wish there was another word for it. Maybe I need to make one up. My mom’s totally a feminist but she never uses that word. She molds my little brother’s breakfast eggs into Ninja Turtles and pays all the bills in the house. She’s this lady that never sleeps because she’s working on a Master’s Degree while raising my little brother and me and pretty much balancing the rhythm of an entire family on her shoulders. That’s a feminist, right? But my mom still irons my Dad’s socks. So what do you call that woman? You know, besides Mom.

  Your book is a refuge from my neighborhood, from my contradictions, from my lack of desire to ever love a man, let alone wash his fucking socks. I don’t even wash my own socks. I want to learn more about the wonder of me, the lunar power of my pussy, my vadge, my taquito, that place where all the magic happens. You know, once people are quiet enough to show it reverence. I want to be free. Free like this line:

  “A fully realized woman is at all times her true self. No soul crushing secrets or self-imposed burdens of shame, these create toxic imbalance, a spiritual yeast infection if you will. So step out into the fresh air and let that pussy breathe. “

  I’ve got a secret. I think it’s going to kill me. Sometimes I hope it does. How do I tell my parents that I’m gay? Gay sounds just as weird as feminist. How do you tell the people that breathed you into existence that you’re the opposite of what they want you to be? And I’m supposed to be ashamed of being gay, but now that I’ve had sex with other girls, I don’t feel any shame at all. In fact, it’s pretty fucking amazing. So how am I supposed to come out and deal with everyone else’s sadness? “Sin Vergüenza Comes Out, Is Banished From Family.” That’s the headline. You did this to me. I wasn’t gonna come out. I was just gonna be that family member who’s gay and no one ever talks about it even though EVERYONE knows they share a bed with their “roommate.” Now everything is different.

  How am I supposed to be this honest? I know you’re not a Magic 8 Ball. You’re just some lady that wrote a book. I fall asleep with that book in my arms because words protect hearts and I’ve got this ache in my chest that won’t go away. I read Raging Flower and now I dream of raised fists and solidarity marches led by matriarchs fueled by café con leche where I can march alongside cigar-smoking doñas and Black
Power dykes and all the world’s weirdos and no one is left out. And no one is living a lie.

  Is that the world you live in? I read that you live in Portland, Oregon. No one I know has ever been there; most people I know have never left the Bronx. I refuse to be that person. The Bronx cannot own me. There isn’t enough air to breathe here. I carry an inhaler for those days when I need more than my allotted share. I need a break. I know that the problems in the hood are systemic. I know that my neighborhood is stuck in a sanctioned and fully-funded cycle of poverty, but damn if this place and the people here don’t wear me down. Some days it feels like we argue to be louder than the trains that rumble us home. Otherwise our voices will be drowned out and then who will hear us? I’m tired of graffiti being the only way to see someone’s mark on the world—the world that consists of this block and maybe the next, nothing further. There aren’t even enough trees to absorb the chaos and breathe out some peace.

  I’ll trade you pancakes for peace. I heard that you’re writing another book. I can help with that. Let me be your assistant or protégé or official geek sidekick. I can do all the research. Seriously, some of my best friends are libraries. If there’s room in your world for a closeted Puerto Rican baby dyke from the Bronx, you should write me back. Everybody needs a hand, especially when it comes to fighting the good fight.

  Punani Power Forever,

  Juliet Milagros Palante

  P.S. How do you take your coffee? This will help me decide if we’re compatible social justice superheroes or not.

  Part One

  Welcome to the Bronx

  1. Wolves, Falcons, and the Bronx

  We are born with the power of the moon and the flow of the waves within us. It’s only after being commodified for our femaleness that we lose that power. The first step in gaining it back is walking face first into the crashing seas and daring the patriarchy to follow.

  Raging Flower: Empowering Your Pussy by Empowering Your Mind

  Harlowe Brisbane

  * * *

  There was always train traffic ahead of us. The delay between the cell-block-grey train car and my red brick house on Matilda Avenue, mi casa, was long enough to merit the “Assaulting an MTA officer is a felony” sticker on the wall. Without a heads up, I was sure we’d all be busting heads and windows open on the #2 train to the ends of the earth, A.K.A. the North Bronx. Any wait period that lasted longer than two songs provoked collective teeth-sucking, eye-rolling, and a shared disgust for the state of public transportation. I always wondered what would happen if the white people didn’t all get off at 96th street. Would it make my commute home to the hood easier? Would the MTA give any more of damn? Good thing I had a pen, my purple composition notebook, and headphones blasting The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill like it was my j-o-b.

  The train was elevated after 149th and 3rd avenue, so for almost one hundred blocks the view of the sky existed only above the train station—but no one ever seemed to look up that far. Past the train, there were clusters of electrical wires and telephone poles that looked ready to burst into flames or fall over from a gust of wind. Past that, if you were still looking—which most people weren’t—you’d see the sides of never-ending apartment buildings and project complexes. You’d see windows and fire escapes that flowed into black iron bars blocking entry into people’s square box apartments. I’d looked through metal bars my whole entire life just to get a view of the sidewalk and the sunshine. This was my Bronx: the North Bronx, the split between the Bronx and Westchester County, the difference between the South South Bronx and the part of the Bronx that no one ever traveled to.

  “We apologize for the inconvenience,” said the automated, white, male robot voice used by the MTA to assure us that they feel our pain. Cop-outs, bullshit, I just wanted to get home. I was leaving that night for Portland, Oregon, and I still had to finish the mix tape I was making for my girlfriend, Lainie, who was already away at her internship with the College Democrats of America. I still had to pack, shower, get ready for my goodbye dinner, come out to my family, and then hopefully still be able to hug my mom so hard that I could feel her on my skin for the whole summer. I didn’t have time for traffic to be stalled.

  “Seven times three is 21, seven times four is 28.” Across from me, a young girl and her mom, both wearing bandana dresses and headwraps, reviewed times table flash cards. Three dudes stood in the doorway. They bragged about their conquests over “some bitches from last night.” When boys talked, it sounded like feral dogs barking. They fiended for attention, were always aggressive, and made me wish I could put them down.

  I pulled out my worn copy of Raging Flower, a nonfiction book about the almighty power of the punani, written by Harlowe Brisbane. Raging Flower pushed my senses into overdrive. Every part of my body felt inflamed, alert, full of the burning awareness of Eve. All of a sudden I was given access to information that I’d been shielded from my whole life. Within the pages of Raging Flower, I learned that tampons are dipped in bleach and evil, that no man should ever be allowed to tell me what to do with my body, and that I should take a mirror and look at my vulva. Like, look all in between the folds and, oh my god, what an afternoon that was. Weird at first, but afterwards it felt like a barrier between me and my body had been breached by an investigation, a peaceful protest.

  So I emailed Harlowe Brisbane. I told Harlowe things that my mom didn’t know about me. And she wrote me back. She offered me a summer internship as her research assistant and a place to stay in her home in Portland, Oregon. I cried, happy holy-shit tears, knowing that for a few weeks, I’d get the hell out of the Bronx and dive into whatever hippie world Harlowe Brisbane came from.

  Still stuck in between stations, I re-read the passage that gave me life on a day when I felt so stuck in myself, in my closeted, privileged, no-risk-taking self:

  You must walk in this world with the spirit of a ferocious cunt. Express your emotions. Believe that the universe came from your flesh. Own your power, own your connection to Mother Earth. Howl at the moon, bare your teeth, and be a goddamn wolf.

  Ferocious cunt. I circled that phrase in neon purple ink. Was I a ferocious cunt? The next night, I’d be in Harlowe’s home, not on the train in the Bronx. I planned my escape—chose to come out and run off into the night. What kind of wolf did that make me?

  I needed air. I wasn’t ashamed of myself. I wasn’t ashamed of being in love with the cutest girl on the planet, but my family was my world and my mom was the gravitational pull that kept me stuck to this Earth. What would happen if she let me go? Would my family remain planted to terra firma while I spiraled out and away into the abyss?

  We all lurched a little. “Nine times five is 45. Nine times six is 56.” The mother and daughter duo beside me packed up their flash cards and led the way off the train. The train doors closed with a high pitched, two-note signal.

  At the corner of 238th Street and White Plains Road in the Bronx, the #5 and #2 trains split ways. I got off the train and stood on the corner of 238th and White Plains Road, staring at the fork between the elevated train tracks. A bent, metal, corroded rainbow, it curved above and beckoned the #5 train in another direction, away from Mount Vernon and into the unknown. But nothing likes to be split in half and that feeling echoed from the train tracks. When the #5 train hit that bend, sparks flew out and landed like mini-meteors onto the sidewalk. The wheels ground hard, metal on metal, and sent out a screech: a torturous yell that could be heard for miles. The sound shredded the fibers of my bones. I felt it in my cavities, heard it in my daydreams. When something splits apart, the whole world needs to know about it, and the only sound that suffices is a wail in the night.

  I made a left after Paisano’s Pizza Shop and watched the sun set over the neighborhood. Black and brown bodies were in full motion. A solid line of people shuffled in and out of the liquor store. It was owned by Mrs. Li. She sent flowers to my Uncle Ramon’s wake when he died two years ago from cirrhosis. Jamaican men stood in zigzag patterns o
n the block, shouting “Taxi, miss?” No insurance, some without a license, but damn if they didn’t get a person where they needed to go. Sirens sounded as ambulances rushed to the nearest emergency to transport the bloody and wounded off to Our Lady of Sacrifice hospital. The block was never silent. We lived loud and hard against a neighborhood built to contain us. We moved like the earth pushing its way through cement sidewalks.

  I pulled a dollar out of my pocket. “Robert,” I said to the man crouched in between the liquor store and Paisano’s. He didn’t move. Jacket over his head, he stood still as death. Robert existed in a plume of crystal white smoke. “Robert,” I said again, louder. The jacket shifted, his wide brown eyes peered out from the sleeve.

  “Hey ma,” Robert said, not-blinking. I put the dollar in his coat pocket. He nodded thanks and pulled the jacket back over his head. I didn’t know how else to reach out to this man who’s been smoking crack in between the same two buildings for almost 20 years. Even on Christmas morning, he stood like a sentry dedicated to crack rock. I’ve asked him if he needs anything. All he ever asked for was a dollar. That was our relationship. Past his smoke spot, past the row of cab drivers, past the 17-year-old prostitutes and their 18-year-old pimps and I was almost home. My cell phone buzzed in my back pocket. Mom.