Fellita is on a mission to kill the man who violated her granddaughter. He put his hand so far up Elena’s nalgas that he managed to grab her holy hole too. Fellita only knows about the ass grab, she’ll take out his whole family if she knew the rest.
Elena is chunky, like me. We hide inside big jogging pants with the waistband rolled up so we can look fatter. We wear long T-shirts, me to cover my boobs and Elena, her bubble butt.
I am used to ignoring the hungry dog looks from men older than Papi. Our uptown Manhattan neighborhood is infested with sinverguenzas who undress young girls with their eyes. Watching my best friend get assaulted in broad daylight, right in front of our building while I was too chicken shit to protect her, trips me up with guilt. It should have been me. The minute he saw us, Nestor started telling his friends what he would do to me if he ever catches me alone. Elena put her arm around me and that’s when he came at her, and called her a fat, ugly dyke. I should have punched him, pulled his hair, kicked him, instead, I froze.
From behind, Fellita looks like a teenager. She bleaches her hair blonde to look like her idol but she is more Celia Cruz than Gwen Stefani. Her copper skin and curvy shape always gets men’s attention but her face always freaks them out. They are expecting Lolita and instead get a fifty-year-old grandma with braces and coke bottle glasses.
She walks slowly, the cowry bells on her silver anklet jingle all the way up the block. She’s in disguise, cat eyes sunglasses and a big floppy sun hat. The men on the corner of 170th and Broadway selling stolen True Religion jeans out of the back of an SUV have already spotted her. Fellita moves slowly like a mermaid luring them to their untimely demise. Elena and I follow her from the other side of the street.
Nestor whistles at Fellita.
She takes a hammer out of the Hello Kitty tote bag and smashes the windshield of the SUV. The crack in the glass spreads like a spider spinning its web at 100 miles an hour.
The men, caught off guard, freeze when she aims the hammer at Nestor’s head.
“Abue nooooo! he didn’t do it!” Elena screams, running across the street to stop her grandma from killing Nestor. I run after her.
“Este es el perverso?” Fellita asks Elena, then me as she crumbles Nestor the molestor’s balls into tiny specs of dust. I nod. One of the men grabs Fellita from the back. She kicks him like a pissed off mare, and bites the arm he tried to grab her with. Nestor’s high pitched screams reverberate, bringing everyone to their windows, their stoops and the corner. She finally lets go when he pees on her hand.
If one of my nosey neighbors tells Mami I am with Fellita and Elena after she told me not to hang out with them because they are chusma, I’ll be grounded for life.
When a police car pulls up to ticket the SUV for blocking the fire hydrant, the men scatter along Broadway like cockroaches running from a can of Raid.
Nestor leaves me alone for the rest of the summer and relocates his business to the corner of 173rd and Amsterdam.
170th and Broadway stays free of sinverguenzas and pervs. Fellita, and the neighborhood’s abuelas, tias and mamis, including mine, patrol the block armed with hammers, rolling pins, and screwdrivers they are not afraid to use.
Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley was born in the Dominican Republic, raised in New York, and has been living in Los Angeles for the past 16 years. In her work as a writer and filmmaker, she strives to make the identity of the bilingual, bicultural, brown girl/woman visible and to dispel some of the stereotypes that marginalize people who grow up immigrant, urban, and poor.
Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash