The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley

waters. This did not keep certain neighborhood eccentrics and teenagers from cannonballing off the disintegrating India Street pier, and dog-paddling in the slurry. The Handyman seemed to thrive in this neighborhood. For the first time, I thought that maybe I could, too. I’d been rejecting my new home. If I was giving up on no, it was time to give up on that, too.
    In between yelling hellos at hipsters, bums, and babies, the Handyman conducted a running monologue of his history.
    “So, mamita, it used to be heroin for me, but I got clean of the devil, and now I’m here. Montana was where I came straight from Colombia, three wives ago. Her mamá, we never got married, ‘cause I got smart.”
    I was alone amongst my friends in thinking that dating recovering addicts was actually not the worst thing in the world. They always told you their story, right up front. It was a refreshing change from persons addicted to other things: emotional warfare, codependence, Harold Pinter plays. At this point in my life, it seemed worth dealing with the addict’s night sweats, sievelike memory, and “bad liver and broken heart,” as Tom Waits put it, in order to get to his stories. Where else could I hear tales of piano bars and mystery scars, ballads of long-dead cronies named Mac, stories of jonesing for a hit of something or other and somehow ending up married to a waitress, and buried alive in a diner Dumpster by fried egg sandwiches? Stories like the Handyman’s.
    Carmela dropped back to listen.
    “Daddy also had a big mess with cocaine,” she told me.
    “I was getting to that, baby,” the Handyman called after her, but she had resumed her place in front of us.
    “Montana?” I asked. I was feeling pleased with myself for remaining unfazed in the face of the Handyman’s story. He was twirling his hammer with the panache of a marching band vixen. The zippers on his motorcycle jacket flashed in the sun. His spurs, yes, spurs, jingled. His teeth were white, and his skin was tanned, and it seemed that, even though hewas a walking contradiction, a motorcycle-riding Colombian cowboy, nothing bad had ever happened to him.
    “Dude ranch. The Flying Bull. We called it the Flying Bullshit, mamita, but it was not a bad place to be. First I was the dishwasher, then I was the cook. And Montana! Baby, you gotta get your sweet ass to Montana!”
    Carmela led us to a restaurant called the Manhattan Triple Decker. It was neither in Manhattan, nor three stories high. One story and a lot of eggs. She greeted the aged Polish man behind the counter, and then graciously accepted his lift onto a bar stool. Without being asked, he brought her a strawberry milkshake. Clearly, she was a regular.
    “I was bringing the powder to the cowboys, baby, and they were out there, on their horses, high, high, high, and all because of me, their dishwasher. Man. Those days are dead and gone now, dead and gone.”
    The Handyman ordered a hamburger. I got a grilled cheese.
    “Couple of the guys, they were the real thing, and the rest were the guests from everywhere, everybody who wanted to ride horses and pretend they were in a Western movie. Everybody liked the coke, though; man, mi amigo in the kitchen got me hooked up and before you knew it, we were selling the shit to the whole town. I could ride, back then, mamita, as good as the guys who were out there year-round. I had a horse I liked, and I used to ride all over the ranch, high out of my mind! And shit, baby! Did I tell you I could lasso? I lassoed whatever I felt like. One time, I put a loop around this chica in jeans and cowboy boots, and damn, damn, damn, mami!”
    He paused for a moment, lost in the memory of a girl I pictured as a lot like the big-haired Rodeo Queens of myhigh school. There’d been one who’d been famous for the constantly visible outline of a Trojan in the back pocket of her skin-tight Wranglers.
    “So, what happened? How’d you end up here?”
    “He got busted,” said