Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the UC Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Epoch, the Southern Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Crazyhorse Emerging Writer Prize & Residency as well as scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Raised in Miami and a former sketch comedienne, she now lives in Los Angeles near an excellent taco truck. Men Who Punched Me in the Face Jennine Capó Crucet        The other guys on the football team called him Vick the Dick, and he said it was because he had a huge one, but I wouldn’t have known then since his was the first one I ever saw. Victor was half Cuban—half decent, my dad used to say—and half some sort of Venezuelan-Ecuadorian mix. My mother declared him The Best Looking Guy To Ever Talk To Me three minutes after meeting him. He had this hard-line chin and perfect eyebrows that looked like a professional Hialeah beautician had sculpted them. He never got carded when he ordered beer at El Rey Pizza. He could grow a beard in two hours. After a game, he smelled so much like man sweat and dirt that I worried just smelling him would make me pregnant. He was light brown but close enough to white that my Abuela didn’t hate him. He bit his nails down so much that skin grew over the tops of them, so he’d chew on that until he ripped off spit-able hunks. Sometimes I worried that he’d get germs in me because his hands were so raw from how he ate them, but that was the kind of thing I never said to him because I didn’t want him to realize we didn’t belong together.        A few hours before our first date, I couldn’t stop noticing in the mirror that I was growing a mustache, or at least, the shadow of one. The dark hair on my arms had magically migrated to my face, and in the light of the bathroom, it seemed more pronounced than ever. And because I thought that maybe Victor might kiss me—I held unreasonably optimistic ideas about love before meeting him—I went through my mom’s medicine drawer and found her Nair. After wiping the caked cream from the ridge of the bottle, I applied a thick, even layer over my entire face, covering everything except my forehead and nose just to make sure I didn’t miss a hair. I was either too sensitive or no good at telling time; either way, the cream burned everything, red blotches blending in with the light purple scars of my old zits. Later I tried to hide what I’d done by dragging a sponge soaked with foundation across my stinging skin.        Victor did not say “What happened to your face?” until we left the movie, like that was the first time that night he actually saw me.        I said, “I must be allergic to something.”        He said, “I hope it’s not me,” and he finally kissed me, in front of everyone leaving the theater, messed up skin and everything. That moment, coming right at the beginning of Us, made me think for a long time he was sweeter than he really was.        To be honest, it was closer to a slap than a punch, and I only stayed with him afterward because that’s what I kept telling myself: it was a slap, not a punch, and every time I pictured it, his fingers opened up more, my memory making it over into something I could allow. I told myself Victor was a very emotional kind of person—the rush that made him hit me was the same one that made him throw me over his shoulder in the school hallway and carry me to my next class. And he started off being okay with me not wanting to have sex until marriage. He took it upon himself to teach me how to give blowjobs. I was sixteen and way behind most of the girls in my grade at Hialeah High. Part of me was relieved to get it over with, and with a guy who other girls wanted and who didn’t mind being my tutor.        Victor was not smart or creative, but he lifted women off the ground when he hugged them and talked about how much he loved his mother in front of my mother. Mami liked him so much she’d lie to my dad about the level of parental supervision wherever we were going and let us go out without a chaperone, which excited and terrified me at the same time. Only a handful of us girls in the neighborhood still had these throwback parents—members of the Chaperone Guild that collapsed once we all turned twenty and moved out amidst threats we could never come back—and that meant guys rarely talked to us for very long. But for some reason, Mami covered for Victor—she wanted us to be alone together. By our five-month anniversary, I was making myself vomit before every date for fear of throwing up on him when he’d come, which is what happened the first time, in the backseat of his car, and what made him hit me. The second after he did it, he looked at his own hand, and his dark eyes got huge. He said, “Oh baby, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,” and I thought he might cry. He pulled me to his chest, even kissed me on the mouth, with his tongue, and I could taste his musty spit through the vomit and semen. His sweat-slicked chest hair scratched my face as he breathed, and I started negotiating with myself: I’d never had a real boyfriend before him, at least not one my mom willingly lied to my dad about when it came to a chaperone. By then it was clear that my mom loved Victor, and at that age I still thought she knew better than me when it came to love.        After Victor dropped me off, I sat outside my house until the red welt melted so my mom wouldn’t ask any questions.        The weekend after the slap, to prove that he loved me, Victor took me to meet his dad. He hadn’t seen him in three years, not since his dad was moved from his old apartment on North Miami Beach to a hospital complex where he couldn’t wander off and get put in jail for breaking into people’s homes he mistook for his own.        The nurse showed us to Victor’s dad’s room. He sat by the window, watching the rain smear the glass. He was bald on top, which I wasn’t expecting, and he was much darker than Victor. He wore a plaid shirt tucked into black pants held up by a brown leather belt. He turned around and stood by the window. He was bulky, but not fat, and one of his feet looked permanently bent outward, like it would go left with or without him. He was handsome, looking very much like Victor until he smiled, a movement that made the sagging skin beneath his eyes puff out like the red flash of a lizard’s throat. One of his front teeth was black, and the lower ones crowded together in a stampede to escape his mouth.        The nurse said, in Spanish, “Rolando, you have some visitors.”        Once she explained who we were, Victor’s dad seemed thrilled to have a son—a son with a girlfriend!—and he talked to me about being a boxer in Venezuela, which Victor later told me was true. Victor’s dad didn’t speak English anymore, so he spoke to us only in Spanish, which Victor, like a lot of people our age, never really learned. I did most of the talking between them. Victor’s dad asked every few minutes about Luz, Victor’s mom. Victor tried, in his broken Spanish, to talk instead about his older brothers, Rolando Junior and Paul, but his dad couldn’t place the names and would always go back to asking us when Luz was coming. Victor said, “I—I don’t know.”        Victor’s dad looked at me, the scary smile creeping out, and said, “She very pretty,” the English words surprising all three of us.        Victor said, “Who? Her? Or Mom?” but Rolando just sat there, his gaze drifting down to my chest, his smile gone.        As I drove us back to our neighborhood, windshield wipers working frantically in a typical Miami afternoon thunderstorm, I looked at Victor at a red light, and even though he was hiding his face from me and saying, “Come on, don’t look at me, huh?” I saw what Victor looked like when he really cried.        We stayed together almost six more months after he hit me. We broke up before he moved away for school. He ended up sort of going to college (never full time, never finished) and while he was there, he met this American girl who would have sex with him without being married, which, contrary to all Cuban logic, got him to eventually marry her once she graduated. He called me two weeks before the wedding to thank me, thank me, for teaching him so much, that he learned a lot from me about what makes a man, that he was sorry he was cruel about the blowjobs and the sex, that he’d been a dick. He said into my answering machine, “You know, Vick the Dick,” and laughed a little, like his name was an excuse. I stood over the machine as he left the message and deleted it the minute he was done.        One of the few people from Hialeah High whom I still talk to went to the wedding. She told me, when I saw her at La Habana Bakery days later, that his Americana wife, Vicky (Victor and Vicky—it made me want to throw up all over again) looked like a tulle factory explosion walking down the aisle, that she had the balls to wear white when everyone there knew she didn’t deserve it, and that she didn’t eat any of the wedding cake because of her diabetes. Something about this last fact thrilled me, this knowledge that for the rest of his life Victor would be with a woman who couldn’t eat whatever she wanted. I bought a whole box of señoritas, picking only the ones with piles of frosting and heavy cream and fruit fillings. I ate every single one of them that night in my apartment, gorging myself and licking powdered sugar from my fingers, laughing when cream filling shot out from the pastries onto my chin. I ate and ate until my stomach felt like it would burst.                                                   *  *  *        Some random guy named—I think—Carl took a swing at me once in a club called Karma. But he mostly missed and instead splashed my sequined halter-top—on which I had spent half my paycheck—with a drink called Liquid Cocaine that tasted like cinnamon and stained like blood. This was one of those low points, way after Victor, after other guys, after I’d moved out of my parents’ house and gotten the secretary job at UPI construction, which let me make some non-high-school friends who did more than sit around and smoke weed. One Liquid Cocaine cost twelve dollars, but it got you messed up fast enough to be worth the price, and getting messed up had become my new definition of weekend.        Carl was the only white guy on the dance floor that night. He had a shaved head and was so pale he looked almost see-through in the club’s strobe lights. After downing my second Liquid Cocaine, Carl glided over, pulled me off my bar stool, and handed me his drink. An hour later, we were still locked together. My friend Manny, a nice guy from UPI who’d invited me to Karma in the first place, glared at us from the bar.        Carl’s sweat soaked through his mesh shirt, making the net of fabric cling to his nipples, which were at eye level for me, even with my strappy heels. He slid two of his fingers between my skirt’s waistband and my stomach, pulling it down a little. I closed my eyes and threw my head back and kept dancing. Someone seized my elbow from behind me. I turned and there was Manny, dragging me from the dance floor to the bathrooms.        In that too-bright hallway, he screamed over some raging techno song, “What the fuck are you doing, Sandra?”        I slurred, “Shit, Manny. I can handle myself.”        I leaned against the wall to keep Manny from swaying in front of me.        Carl busted out from the throng of people on the dance floor and stormed toward us, his mesh shirt climbing up his perfect abs like it was taking itself off. His belly button was a tight knot with a patch of curly blond hair dripping down from it, disappearing into his red pants. In the lights near the bathroom, I saw how much we were sweating; Manny’s hair had wilted and was plastered to his forehead, my own hair clung to my neck and shoulders like I’d dunked my head in water, and pearls of sweat dressed Carl’s upper lip, streams running from the top of his head down the sides of his face, down his neck, like he was melting. I shoved out my chest and smiled at both of them. Carl’s head turned from me to Manny then back to me.       Carl said, “Bro, why don’t you get up off my woman?”       I felt like I was about to puke up Liquid Cocaines, so I gulped hard and breathed through my nose, smelling the earthy stink of all three of us. Manny looked down at the ground, which was inexplicably muddy and dotted with multi-colored strips of paper. He leaned against the wall. Flecks of light from the dance floor decorated his face like moving makeup. Little pimples had sprouted between his eyebrows, the milky tops of them glowing—ingrown hairs, I thought, from where he let me pluck the strays threatening to unite his brows. I’d done it at work the day before, pulling the tweezers from my purse as he squatted by my desk during his break. He’d rested his chin in my palm and said, “Don’t hurt me okay?”        Manny squeezed his eyes shut like he was trying to erase me from his night and I felt bad just then for not dancing with him—I felt bad for wanting to dance with this stranger Carl over Manny, who I knew liked me, who had tried to do things the right way by being my friend first. But that obvious courting—his practiced conversations about concerts he thought I might want to go to, the way he asked about my mom even though he’d never met her—is what did him in, what made that version of me decide he was too nice, not aggressive enough, not my type.        I stepped toward him but tripped a little on the mud-soaked paper and started falling in Carl’s direction. Both reached out to help me, but I grabbed onto Manny’s arm with my free hand, stared up at his face, and said, “Can you take me home?”        Carl grabbed me by the shoulder, standing me up straight again, but then pulled his other arm far back and blasted his fist at me. I put my hand up in time to get him to knock the drink out of it on the way to my face. The plastic cup flew at me. Manny tried to bat it away but was a little slow, which made him hit the guy’s hand instead, so that Carl’s fist landed not in the middle of my face but at my jaw, his knuckles grazing my neck. Manny grabbed the top of my head and pushed it down, out of the way of the second swing, and then dragged my drunk ass down the hallway and back across the dance floor, my boobs coated in sticky reddish punch. When we got outside, the bouncer said, “Is there a problem?”        Manny, always good on his feet at work, said, “No, no, she just needed some air.”        He put his arm around me and made me walk fast, away from the club’s long-lined entrance, my ankles trying to escape my shoes and bending like chewed-on straws. I turned to look at the bouncer, and he was shaking his head no and laughing, mumbling something into the face-hugging microphone that seemed to grow out of his ear. He held the end of a velvet rope in his hand and clicked it to the post behind him, sealing all the beautiful people inside as we ran from Carl, or from security, neither of which had bothered to follow us.        After that night, Manny’s attempts to get with me trailed off. He stopped dropping by my desk during his breaks, stopped asking me what I planned to get into over the weekend. A few weeks later, he quit working at UPI to go back to school, didn’t even tell me about it until the day before he left for good. I asked him out then, told him we had to celebrate him getting out of that shitty office, but he said no thanks, told me he was tired of the same scene. Wasn’t I, he asked, getting tired of drinking my brains out? We stopped talking after that.        I blamed myself for his quitting, but was secretly impressed with myself for having such an effect on a guy—I had the capacity to ruin someone. But then I learned he’d met a girl at some new church he got into and married her four months later. From God, his mom told my mom. This new girl was sent to him from God. My mom suggested we go to this church and find someone for me. I stopped talking to her for a while, too.                                                 *  *  *        Rudy Torrez. He didn’t always hit me—it started with the walls, when we moved in together, his fist making circles in the plaster of our apartment like he’d gone crazy trying to hang a frame. But what hurt more than any punch was his lying, which he did all the time and about everything. He lied about when his parents came from Cuba because he didn’t want me to know it was on the Mariel boatlift. He lied that his mom was a nurse at Baptist Hospital when I told him I was thinking of going to nursing school, and weeks later he told me she owned a bakery in Hialeah when I said I had a weakness for guava pastelitos. Of course I called him out on this, and he said she did both, but then changed his mind and said I must have misremembered what he said. ... read the rest of "Men Who Punched Me in the Face" in Gulf Coast issue 22.1