Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  By the way, the name on my dog plaque was Charles, not Carlos. I didn’t speak much English, but I knew what the English version of my name should be. And when my new foster parents asked me what I’d like to be called, I said Charles.

  I wanted to fit in, not stand out in any way. I was hell-bent on becoming an American.

  Too bad I was branded on my face as well as on my tongue. A four-eyes since second grade, I was permanently saddled with eyeglasses, and mine couldn’t have looked more foreign or bizarre. I had the same frames that Fidel Castro wore, which were exclusively Cuban: an oversize, bulked-up version of Ray-Ban Wayfarers made of genuine tortoise-shell. No American kid had anything like it.

  My eyeglasses were utterly ridiculous on this side of the Florida Straits: the ugliest possible proof of my alien status that I could have asked for. Hanging a dead rotting dog from my neck would have been preferable, and less humiliating. All I had to do was show my face and everyone knew I was not from here. I wouldn’t even have to open my mouth, which would also give me away instantly.

  My blond hair fooled most Americans, though, confusing the hell out of them. “Huh? What’s wrong with this picture?” Cubans weren’t supposed to be fair-skinned and blond. We weren’t supposed to be smart either.

  Ignorance and prejudice are joined at the spleen.

  And my ignorance of English was a serious problem. I knew how to form basic sentences, but I couldn’t really communicate with anyone who didn’t speak Spanish. I could say simple things, such as “He is my brother.” I’d actually used that line at the Miami airport, right after we landed and were going through immigration. Tony had always failed at English because he couldn’t have cared less about it, so, at the airport, I had to serve as his bumbling interpreter. Tony wasn’t fazed in the least. He’d never cared about such things. He’d make up words when our aunt Lucía would help him review his English vocabulary for tests at school.

  “Cómo se dice ventana en Inglés?” How do you say window in English?

  “Ventan.”

  “Cómo se dice caballo?” Horse.

  “Quey-bal.”

  His English version of numbers one through ten sounded something like this: un, du, tri, qwat, sink, sez, siet, og, nuvi, diz.

  And so on. Much of it came out sounding like a deranged version of French, but it was pure coincidence. He stunk at French too.

  Being able to speak and understand simple sentences from Dick and Jane books is one thing. Actually living with people who speak only English is quite another. My first attempts to communicate with Norma and Lou were pained, but agreeable enough. We all knew what the basic problem was and worked around it, with a combination of pantomine and constant pausing at unfamiliar words, coupled with a lot of pointing at objects and the routine invocation of the proper names for everything that was pointed to. Their sons, Philip and Eric, were no problem, because neither one of them was old enough to speak yet. I had no trouble communicating with Victor either, my kindred spirit and doghouse cell mate, who quickly became a good friend.

  My first evening at that house seemed otherworldly, more of an entrance to the afterlife than anything I’d experienced in the past three weeks. I don’t remember arriving at the house, or having dinner. But I do remember being shown to my room, which must have been only about ten by twelve feet, yet seemed palatial to me. It was my own room, something I’d never had. I also remember watching television in the bright, open living room that night. The Chaits had a mechanical remote control for changing the channels on the TV, another marvel that had been deflected by Castrolandia’s Soviet energy field and Fidel’s determination to return Cuba to the Stone Age. I clicked and clicked. It made a very loud and reassuring sound, that remote, which was linked to the television by a cable. Back then there were only three or four channels to choose from, but I tried them all, again and again.

  Clack, clack, clack. If it hadn’t been my first day, I’d probably have ended up in the doghouse.

  Norma and Lou were also nice enough to buy me a transistor radio, a compact battery-operated Japanese model that fit in the palm of my hand and had a dial for station-searching. It was brown and ivory, with gold trim, and you could listen to it through an earphone. I’d never seen those either. You know why by now. Blame all of this astonishment of mine on Castrolandia and its fascination with Soviet backwardness.

  I loved that radio. It made my heart sing, and it made me love Norma and Lou. Every night, at bedtime, I’d turn it on for about twenty minutes before going to sleep and dial away, searching for good music. Much to my dismay in the beginning, there were no Spanish-language radio shows of the kind Tony and I had listened to at bedtime back in Havana, before Fidel squelched all genuine entertainment.

  Before Fidel or, in shorthand, B.F.: Something that needs explaining, I suppose (A.F. in Spanish: Antes de Fidel). Ask any Cuban. It’s a reckoning of time that is as essential to understanding us as A.D. and B.C. used to be for understanding Western civilization.

  We had all sorts of radio shows in the era B.F.: action, comedy, Westerns, soaps. Tony and I listened mostly to the action and comedy shows, especially to La Tremenda Corte (The Tremendous Court), a hilarious show that brought the same characters to a courtroom every single night. The accused was always the same man, José Candelario Tres Patines; the judge and prosecutor were always the same too, and so was the plaintiff, Luz María Nananina. The concept was absolutely insane, for Tres Patines would always end up saddled with crushing fines and jail sentences, only to return the very next day, accused of some new crime, but the insanity worked beautifully, somehow. We also listened to an adventure show about a white man who was king of the jungle in Africa, a total Tarzan rip-off. Once, the star of the show came to our house and all of our friends came to see him. He was an ordinary-looking guy, and kind of small and wiry, and that surprised us. We expected a muscle-bound Cuban equivalent of Johnny Weissmuller, the real Tarzan. We asked him to prove that he was indeed the king of the jungle. “Do your yell! Do your jungle yell,” we pleaded. “Prove that it’s really you.”

  So he went into my father’s study, closed the door, and—after a moment of the deepest silence that house had ever witnessed—yelled his lungs out, basso profundo.

  Haa-oooo-a-ooo-arrrooo-ah!

  My hair stood on end, and so did everyone else’s. It was him! He was the real thing! We stared at one another in disbelief. How could that little guy belt out such a roar? It was magic, pure and simple, we had to admit. The same wimpy guy that had walked into the study walked out, looking no worse for wear, with every hair still in place. He wasn’t any taller, or beefier. But for an instant, there, behind that closed door, he had transformed into someone else we could only imagine.

  How wise of him, not to rob us of our imagination. I still thank him, every now and then, for not breaking the spell.

  There was nothing like that on Miami radio in 1962. So I gravitated to the rock-and-roll stations. And in a matter of days, I got over my dismay concerning Spanish-language radio. All this great new music, and years of lost music to catch up on. Charles needs to catch up, if he’s going to be Charles instead of Carlos.

  That first night I also met one of the neighbors. Norma called him over from down the street. He was the only other Cuban boy on the block, and his name was Freddy. Like me, he’d already changed his name from Federico. He’d also come to the United States without his parents, and he was living with his uncle and aunt in a house that was nearly identical to that of the Chaits, a few doors down, across the street. He was also almost exactly the same age as me. From the very start, however, we didn’t hit it off very well. I don’t really know why. And I’ll never figure it out either. Most of the time, I think, we had the same feeling, as if we were positively charged magnets that repelled each other. We’d end up having some good times together, but we’d also end up fighting a lot. But on that first night with the Chaits, it felt so good to know that there was another Cuban boy on the street, someone
to whom I could speak in my own tongue, and from whom I might pick up a few survival tips. He’d already been in Miami for more than a year, so he knew a lot.

  I’d learn a lot from Freddy.

  It was Freddy who would reveal to me, about two months later, that Desi Arnaz spoke English with a very thick Cuban accent. Until he broke the news to me, I thought Desi spoke perfect, unaccented English. “I can’t wait till I can talk like Desi,” I used to say to myself. “That guy has really nailed the language deal, and picked up a redhead too, as a result.”

  I was stunned beyond belief. I had such a long steep climb ahead of me.

  It was Freddy who would show me where everything was in the neighborhood, including all the best shortcuts and how to ride bikes up and down the side walls of the concrete drainage ditches behind the Westchester shopping center. He’d also straighten my head out more than once, about my identity.

  Once, he had to slap me on the side of the head, really hard, and yell at me, full throttle, to remind me that I was still a Cuban, despite the fact that I lived with an American family.

  Thank you, Freddy. Mil gracias.

  Living as he did with his aunt and uncle, Freddy could never fully forget that he was Cuban. They still called him Federico at home, and they all spoke Spanish constantly. But living with an American family made it easy for Charles to forget about Carlos. Freddy and I spoke Spanish all the time, and that was the sole reality check I had, other than talking to Tony on the phone twice a week. Lou and Norma made me call my brother twice a week. They’d sit there and watch me, and wait until I connected with the Rubin household, for they soon realized that I needed prodding when it came to some tasks.

  I find it very odd now, but back then, I thought it was perfectly normal and more than all right for me not to call Tony regularly. He was in his world, and I was in mine. And he never called me. It was always up to me to stay in contact with him, never the other way around. “Well, let him call me,” I’d think. “Have you called Tony yet?” Norma would ask. If it weren’t for her, I’d have probably never called.

  I knew I was going to see Tony at church on Sundays, anyway. We always got together on Sundays, as part of a most unusual ritual arrangement. So unusual that it ended up shaping my character, and my take on religious differences.

  Since both the Chaits and the Rubins were Jewish, I thought I had it made. I knew that Jews didn’t go to church. I’d had Jewish friends back in Cuba, and so had my parents, and I knew that Jews went to synagogue instead, on Saturdays. So, I thought for sure my new parents would do me the great favor of acting neutral, like the Swiss, and not send me to either church or synagogue.

  I hated church so much. Nothing was more distasteful, more awful, more creepy, or more boring than church. Jesus scared me most of all. That cross, those nails, that crown of thorns. All that blood. Jesus was the ultimate creepy monster, worse than anything Hollywood had ever come up with. Frankenstein and Dracula had never haunted my dreams, but Jesus certainly had.

  The church’s ritual didn’t scare me. It was the symbols: the churches themselves, and their thousands of spooky images, many of which were life-size and decked out with real human hair and glass eyes. Madame Tussauds wax museum couldn’t compete with any church in Havana when it came to macabre realism. Jesus being whipped. Jesus on the cross. Jesus dead in the tomb. Mary with seven swords piercing her body. Mary holding the dead Jesus, who has already started to turn green. Saints with their eyes on a platter, or their heads under one of their arms, or their tongues chopped off. Mutilation, torture, mayhem. Saints being flayed alive, or torn apart, or boiled, or disemboweled, or beheaded, or filled with arrows like a pincushion. Some saints’ images were so grotesque that—if they hadn’t been so scary—they would have made me laugh, like the one of the saint with an ax sticking out of the back of his head.

  Eventually, I’d end up writing my doctoral dissertation on how and why Protestants attacked and destroyed Catholic images in the sixteenth century. Then, after that, I’d dedicate my professional life to studying this subject.

  I don’t need to ask doctors Freud and Jung about that choice of mine.

  Catholic ritual was not scary at all, but it sure was annoying. The mass was just mind-numbing drudgery. The same damned thing every time, again and again, and always in Latin. Dominus vobiscum. Yeah, sure. Go vobis yourself. Whatever. Go ahead and mumble some more in your ridiculous outfit, you girly man, up there with your back turned to us, wearing your stupid frilly albs, copes, and chasubles, or whatever you call them. I call them dresses. Vestidos, that’s what you wear. Dresses, not vestments. Yeah, and why don’t you get some real shoes? What’s with those sandals? Those are for maricones, not for real men. Wash that gold cup, girly man, glide your handkerchief over it compulsively, again and again, and make sure you do the same to those gold plates. But don’t take too long, please. We’ve already been here far too long, and it’s hot. It’s always ten times hotter in church than anywhere else.

  It’s like hell in here.

  Confession and communion were a major nuisance. Confession kept you from doing all sorts of great things that you wanted to do, but would be too embarrassed to tell a priest later. It also made you take yourself too seriously, forcing you to blame yourself for all kinds of sins that were really out of your control, or not really your fault at all, but God’s, for making the world the way it is and you the way you are. And communion not only made it necessary for you to go to confession, but also to fast for three whole hours. No water, even. Not one drop of water, no matter what. Too bad if you were dying of thirst. Plus, you had to be careful when you brushed your teeth before going to church, because if you allowed a single droplet of water or toothpaste to go down your gullet, you were toast.

  Sinner. Unworthy. You’ve got to miss communion. You’d better pray that you don’t get hit by a bus or die from an embolia at the beach before your next confession.

  Even worse, if you did make it up to that communion rail, you had to act all pious and solemn, and after all was said and done, the host was no prize to be coveted, like the neat stuff you found in cereal boxes. It was like thin cardboard that melted on your tongue. All that waiting for it, all that fasting, and poof, the ever-disappointing wafer was gone in a few seconds.

  Body of Christ? Corpus Christi? Yeah? All right, if you say so, but it sure tastes like cardboard, and if I were crazy enough to chew on a cereal box, I’m sure I’d feel exactly the same way after swallowing that.

  That’s how I saw it all, back then, blasphemer that I was. One could say that the devil had me by the short nether hairs, but I was too young to have any of those at that time. And this was the main problem. Before one starts sprouting hairs in the nether regions, down yonder, or other such things that come along at puberty, it’s immensely difficult to understand or appreciate religion or astrophysics or other complex matters. So, by the time you get your nether hairs, it’s very hard to recognize the darkness inside yourself and the devil who’s had you by the throat all along.

  I’d already envisioned not going to church as one more of those freedoms that were guaranteed in the United States. Another bonus. Especially while living in a Jewish household.

  So, what’s one of the very first things that the Chaits and Rubins do to us? They make us go to church, because that is just what our parents would like us to do. Ay! Both Tony and I thought we were in the clear. Jews aren’t supposed to send you to church. And they certainly aren’t supposed to give you money to put into the collection basket either. But this is what they do.

  Damn.

  And they do this to us on the one day out of the whole year that has the longest, most mind-numbing, and creepiest of all liturgies: Good Friday.

  We’d moved into their homes on Holy Thursday, the Catholic equivalent of Passover. Rescued from Egypt on our Passover, set free from our bondage at the camps, only to be subjected to a very familiar sort of bondage, that of the pew, on Good Friday. Both families actuall
y arranged for some Catholic friend of theirs to pick us both up and drive us to St. Brendan’s Church in a large station wagon, along with his wife and kids.

  We’re doomed, I think. Not only do we have to sit through three hours of Oremus this and Miserere that, kneeling and standing, and genuflecting, and crossing ourselves and kneeling some more, and being suffocated with incense, we also actually have to do so with perfect strangers who don’t speak our language and will try to be very nice to us. Perfect recipe for a massive display of awkwardness on the part of all involved.

  Just what we need today, of all days.

  As soon as I get into that station wagon, however, I notice something very, very strange. The car radio is on, and it’s playing some kind of jazz. Wait a minute. What is going on? Are these people really Catholic? Maybe they’re Protestants, I think. Why else would they be playing jazz in their car on the way to church on Good Friday, of all days. You’re not supposed to play any music on Good Friday, save for doleful sacred hymns. You’re not supposed to do anything pleasurable at all on Good Friday. No. You’re supposed to mope all day long, and fast, and pray, and meditate on the suffering and death of Jesus. No television, save for shows on the passion of Christ, or long sermons on his final words on the cross. No movies, unless they’re about Christ. No radio, unless, somehow, Christ’s death is the main feature. No games or amusement of any kind. No way, no how. And God help you if you try to use any sharp tool or instrument on Good Friday, such as a knife or a saw, or if you try to pound a nail into anything. God will exact retribution. Anything that would have made Jesus Christ bleed is cursed on Good Friday.

  I’d seen this divine curse at work once, back in Havana. My nemesis and adopted brother, Ernesto, had set his mind on building something on Good Friday. My father tried to warn him about the curse, but Ernesto wouldn’t listen. He went out to the back patio and began to saw and hammer away. I can’t remember what he was making, and it doesn’t matter. What I do remember very clearly is the inevitable gash in his hand, and the blood spurting, and my father trying to stanch the flow.