To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him by Gwendolyn Zepeda Page B

red.
    “Wha-wha-what, man? I didn’t—I . . .”
    “That’s all right, man. You tell her later, when y’all two are alone!”
    Rudy laughs like a jackal.
    Great, Tina thinks, just what I need: another pervert after me. She turns her face to the street and follows it home.

    There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who get called crazy. Crazy Victor, Crazy Lupe, Crazy Susie on Kane Street. Some of them really are mentally ill, but some aren’t. Crazy Victor’s just mentally retarded and he holds his hands weird when he walks. Crazy Lupe’s speech is slurred, so you can’t tell if he’s saying crazy things or just regular stuff. People say he got hit by a train one night while running from the cops, and it scrambled his brains.
    Tina used to lie about Crazy Susie being her mom. She would tell people her mother was dead. Everyone pretended to believe it, for her sake. As if Crazy Susie had just happened to pick Tina’s front yard to yell from for no reason at all. As if Tina’s grandmother was just too charitable to call the cops unless Susie got really violent, waving a tree branch and screaming.
    “Get away from me! I’m not gonna let you rape me again, you dirty motherfuckers!”
    Normally, though, Susie just walks the neighborhood streets and around downtown, hauling a little bag of clothes and staring at people. Sometime she gets hungry enough to go back to Tina’s tan brick house and accept a bean taco or boloney sandwich from Tina’s grandmother, who used to be her mother-in-law.
    Tina sleeps over with friends a lot. One night, during a game of Truth or Dare, she found out that her friends and everybody else had known about Crazy Susie being her mom all along. At first she’d been embarrassed, but now it’s just one less thing to worry about.
    Mrs. Hernández, in the big orange house down the street, had given birth to five boys. With that many, it wasn’t surprising that two of them would turn out to be crazy. People say that Crazy Danny, her youngest, would take puppies up the Dow School fire slide and do nasty things to them. He went to jail when he was eighteen. Tina doesn’t know why.
    His brother, Crazy Tony, seems normal, except for his face. His eyes blink a lot and the corner of his mouth jerks up sometimes, as if he’s trying to stop thinking about something funny but gross. If it weren’t for that, he’d almost be good-looking, like his older brothers. He doesn’t have a job. But, then, Tina’s cousin Rudy doesn’t either, and they dropped out of school the same year.
    Tony doesn’t talk a lot. He walks the streets all day in his camouflage jacket, or else he drinks beer with the guys in front of Happy Land. People say he freaks out sometimes. Tina’s never seen it.
    Tina feels bad for Mrs. Hernández. She knows what a pain in the butt it can be to have crazy people in your family. But at the same time, she sometimes thinks that having drunks and drug addicts is just as bad.

    Sometimes hanging out with the drunks and the drug addicts in front of the red store gets kind of old, even for Tony. He crushes his Bud can. “Later, man,” and “Tell Manuel I said what’s up,” they say as he walks away, through the vacant lot, towards Washington Avenue.
    Really, it’s almost time to go home, but he wants to walk for a while, first. He crosses over to the Salvation Army and heads west.
    Rudy’s back. Not like you could miss it, with the way he talks so loud and puts his hand on everybody’s shoulder all the time. Asking people if they’re fags. Bragging about some chick he claims to have screwed the week before.
    Tony wonders if his brother knows that Rudy’s out and what he’ll do when he finds out. Rudy was working for Manuel when he got busted. Manuel had been ready to get rid of him, anyway, because Rudy was a big mouth and a thief. Then, he didn’t have to worry about it anymore because Rudy got himself caught way out in Magnolia trying to cut deals with some guys