Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  “So, you boys had a good day at the factory today?” asks Mrs. Ricardo.

  I detect nothing peculiar in her voice.

  “It’s not a factory; it’s a warehouse,” I say. “And yes, we had a great day. We made three dollars apiece.”

  Ay. Whoa. Fireworks. I didn’t know that icy Lucy could be so full of fire, or venom. She rips into us the way a great white shark goes after big fat seals. I have trouble following everything she says because it’s all so tightly wound together and delivered at such a fast clip, and so loudly.

  She shouts at the top of her reedy voice.

  “Who the hell do you two maricones think you are? What gives you the right to think that you’re better than everyone else? Well, the time has come for you to realize that you’re just like everyone else, maybe even lower because of your selfishness, your unmanliness, and your attitude. Niños bitongos, hijos de puta. Malcriados. Spoiled brats, sons of a whore. You’re used to having everything handed to you on a silver platter, to having people pull strings for you, or give you all sorts of special gifts and special deals, like those bunk beds you sleep in. Cabrones. Bastards. Why should you have bunk beds, when none of the other boys do? Is it because you went to such a fine school back in Cuba? Because you lived in Miramar? Because you have Jew friends? Who the hell does Mr. Rubin think he is, sending bunk beds to this house for you, and hiring men to assemble them? Why should you both sleep on soft, new mattresses? And why should you both come here with bicycles, and radios, and all that other stuff that none of the other boys have, and clothes from Burdines and Sears? And why do you two high-and-mighty princes think that you can now have jobs, when none of the other boys do? Que coño. . . What the hell entitles you to make more money than anyone else? And when the hell do you think that you’re going to be able to go to work? On Saturdays? Well, forget that. No way. Saturday is cleaning day around here, and you have to do your chores. And forget Sunday too. You can’t have jobs. That’s that. No exceptions for anyone. Nobody can be special here. Nadie, nadie, comprenden? Nobody, do you understand? Maricones, puñeteros hijos de un juez. Fags, lousy sons of a judge. Bueno, aquí, como lo ven, no hay juez. Well, as you can see, there’s no judge here. No judge to pull strings for you. No goddamned lawyer-janitor to get you jobs and stuff your pockets full of money. No favor-maker gets through my gate here, and no one here can be anybody’s favorite. Aquí me tienen que besar las chancletas. Here, you have to kiss my flip-flop sandals. Cabrones. You bastards . . .”

  Something like that, more or less. She went on and on in that vein until her voice gave out. Smiling from ear to ear, the Three Thugs savor every word, every syllable. Everyone else disappears more quickly than the cockroaches do in the kitchen when you turn on the light. Whoosh.

  Ay. So much for our jobs. But at least I found out where the bunk beds came from. I thought it was weird that Tony and I were the only ones with new beds.

  Fade to black.

  Flagler Street becomes our best friend, quickly, our emergency exit, our link with sanity. Downtown Miami is full of movie theaters and a few of them charge only thirty-five cents admission for school kids on weekends. Every Friday night we run out the front door as soon as we can, after kitchen duty, and Tony and I walk all the way downtown, about three miles away. We’ll see just about any movie, save for anything with Doris Day in it. We’re not picky. Every now and then we luck out and the film turns out to be a great older one, like Spartacus, or great new ones like The Nutty Professor or Jason and the Argonauts. We can’t even dream about getting into the nicer theaters, to see something like Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. No. That would cost way too much, maybe even a whole dollar. But we don’t care. We even dare to see Flipper.

  We’d love to go on Saturdays too, but our allowance can’t stretch that far. On Saturdays we just go out and walk around at night, sometimes down on Calle Ocho, in the neighborhood that some of the English-speaking natives call Little Havana. We steer clear of the Burger King and the McDonald’s, where the gangs hang out. There’s nothing we can afford there, anyway. There’s nothing we can afford anywhere, save for a Cuban guava pastry every now and then: a pastelito de guayaba. Tropical fruit milk shakes are out of our reach. Way out.

  Being out, wandering around aimlessly—this becomes our obsession. We’re not looking for anything or anyone, we’re simply escaping, wearing out our shoes. Four months later, I’ll be wrapping mine up in black electrical tape stolen by Miguel, just to hold them together. I’ll be using about a yard per shoe, per day, because the uppers and the soles don’t want to stay together. The holes in the soles will prove much harder to deal with.

  Then we hit pay dirt, by accident. Tony discovers a public library. He’s so desperate to find any escape hatch that he actually listens to what one of his teachers has to say about this tiny branch of the Miami Public Library on Seventh Street Northwest, and the next thing you know we’re in there just about every single evening during the week, right after we’re done with our kitchen chores. It’s quiet. It’s air-conditioned. We can read books in there, or check them out. Our library cards become our new passports, and replace our useless Cuban ones. Mine actually works as a passport to the past and the future, and eventually it gains me admittance to my chosen profession. Tony chooses not to use his that way, but rather to dive deeper into the abyss within him.

  The world that opens up to me in that library has no boundaries whatsoever. It’s infinite and eternal. And that boundless expanse calls to me, louder and louder with every passing day. Every time I set foot in that library I say “Whoa,” like someone who gets to the top of Mount Everest or ingests a hallucinogenic drug for the first time. And my whoas keep getting louder and louder with every visit to that ragged, cramped little library that no one probably ever thought would make a difference to any of the slugs in that neighborhood.

  And no quadrant of that limitless universe calls to me louder than the past. Before I know it I’m obsessed with time, and above all with the way in which all that we can really own is the past, what once was, but no longer is. The very thought that the present constantly turns into the past drives me wild with excitement, and the thought that there is so much to discover in the past pushes me further into fits of ecstasy.

  I kid you not.

  When I stumble onto the insight that the past is all there is, and that it is every bit as real as the present, or even more real than it, since there is so much then and so little now, I freak out at first, for my mind lags behind my soul, and, in the gap created by that lagging, it realizes for the first time that what it’s been calling real all along is only a misperception of what is really real, and an infinitesimally small glimpse of it, on top of that. I don’t realize it, of course, but at that moment, in the throes of that most peculiar transport, I’ve turned into a historian. A historian with taped-up shoes and no clue as to where he’s headed, but a historian all the same.

  The shoes have a lot to do with this life-altering insight, for they make the present look so bleak. And my own recent brushes with what people call history have a lot to do with it too.

  I’m part of one of the largest exoduses of kids since the Children’s Crusade, and no one seems to know about it or to care. I’m a pawn in something people call the Cold War, and no one seems to give a damn about that either. I’ve just seen President John F. Kennedy in person, on December 29, 1962, and also his wife, Queen Jacqueline, and the two of them have promised to the tens of thousands of us Cubans assembled at the Orange Bowl—including the returning veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion—that Cuba will once again be free. I’ve had a certain future promised to me by the most powerful man and the most charming woman in the world, but all I can grasp up here, at my high perch near the top row of the Orange Bowl, is the past that has brought me and everyone else to that spot. We’re all there because the man who is promising us a bright future betrayed the Bay of Pigs veterans by sending them to certain defeat and also betrayed all of us Cubans by promisi
ng to Nikita Khrushchev that he wouldn’t allow us to fight against the totalitarian regime that hijacked our native land. President Mr. Future, JFK, King of Camelot, has screwed up the past badly, as far as my fortunes are concerned, and also the present. To add insult to injury, I’m also saddled with a father who not only lives in the past, but also claims to remember all of his incarnations in great detail—a father whose memory spans millennia, but who is not here with me, at this modern Colosseum, or at that Palace just a few blocks from it, and who is also doing nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, to correct that injustice, or to fix my shoes now.

  Never mind the hunger I feel, which could have something to do with my ecstasies. The Palace Ricardo Diet is beginning to take its toll on me. All of us at that house are getting only one real meal a day, and a poor one at that. Monks don’t fast for nothing. Stop eating for a while, and you’ll have ecstasies too. Hell, even if you’re a goddamned atheist, you might get to see God, if you’re hungry enough.

  Ay. And José, poor José. The only real friend we have in that house. He’s a year older than me and two years younger than Tony. He’s our mirror image, although he’s an only son and therefore in a darker realm of loneliness. He’d gone to a good school in Havana and had a nice childhood, full of love, the kind of love you can never, ever find in America, no matter what. All of his grandparents were from Galicia, like ours. His father owned a hardware store in Havana, but like every other shopkeeper, he had it stolen from him by the Revolution. It stayed open for a while and he was forced to work there as an employee of the state, but when there was no longer any hardware to stock the shelves with, the store ceased to exist. José has no clue what his father does now, or his mother. Like us, he was damn close to being reunited with his parents in Miami, but the reunion has been postponed indefinitely, thanks to the fallout from the missile crisis.

  Cold War, my ass. All of us at the Palace have third-degree burns.

  José is very thin. Too thin. He’s been living on the Palace Ricardo Diet for several months already, and it shows. Tony and I briefly consider calling him el esqueleto, the skeleton, but we drop the idea once we find out what a nice guy he is. We have no inkling that soon enough, we’ll look just like him.

  José Cao will help to keep us sane. And when we finally get to leave that house, he’ll be left behind. Tony and I will never check up on him, or return the two neckties lent to us by him, ties that have little labels with his name sewn into them, labels sewn with all the love that he lost. I’ll have no good excuse for losing track of José and neither will Tony, save for one: All of us at the Palace Ricardo were desperate to forget our time there, to erase it and bury it in the deepest darkest Vault of Oblivion. He never wrote to us either, even though he had our new address.

  Wherever you are, José, whoever you are now, you and Tony and I are still linked by a common timeless bond. That past is as real as today, perhaps more real, for it tested us and shaped us in ways we still can’t discern. I hate to say it, I do. But that hellhole is in us, and we carry it around all the time, just like that upside-down blonde on Flagler Street carried the reflection of the fluorescent lights in her dead-looking eyes while she lay there, sprawled on the stairs, her hair and skirt a total mess, her shoe orphaned.

  And, by the way, that brief moment when we saw her and did nothing but walk away, that moment will be with us eternally, along with every other one. And in the world to come we’ll know once and for all, and forever, whether or not she was really dead when we saw her, or whether or not it was right for us not to linger and gawk, or for the lovely Mr. and Mrs. Ricardo to punish us for our past and theirs, and that of our parents.

  Whoa.

  Que hambre tengo.

  My stomach is roaring. I need a snack.

  Fourteen

  There they go again, those roaches.

  The instant you turn on the kitchen light, they all vanish. Whoosh. Motion is all that you can detect around you in that fleeting instant between darkness and light. Whoosh. Spots moving, running for cover, in unison. If only some artist could capture this and put it on display. Kinetic art of the highest order by Mother Nature herself. In its own twisted way, it’s beautiful. Sublime.

  We’d taken care of the mice, but the roaches were unbeatable. They’re the real owners of this crappy old house. El Palacio de las Cucarachas.

  We spray the kitchen from top to bottom with Black Flag insecticide, and a few others, to no avail. We even spray all of our dinnerware and the pots and pans, and ingest the stuff ourselves, every time we eat. You’d think that something that smells so foul could kill cockroaches, but they seem to thrive on it. They get fatter and fatter, and they multiply according to some exponential progression for which there is no equation. How I wish we could get our hands on some DDT. Now, there’s some nice stuff. It not only smells like heaven, but it actually kills everything smaller than you that has an exoskeleton, three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae.

  Whoosh.

  Damn roaches. We must have at least a thousand of them, mostly in the kitchen. They’re everywhere and they get into everything. Sometimes they crawl over us at night and wake us up. If you’ve never had a dream interrupted by the feeling of a roach’s six legs creeping over your lips or its twin antennae feeling up your nostrils, then you haven’t lived, my friend.

  One fine afternoon I reach in the cabinet above the sink for my cup—the red one—fill it with tap water and begin to drink. Wait, what’s this? My upper lip is being tickled, ferociously. I pull the cup away from my mouth, look in it, and see a big fat roach swimming in there, treading water, waving its antennae around, struggling to climb out.

  I spit the water out of my mouth, dump the contents of the cup into the sink, and watch the roach run in circles around the drain. I take off my taped-up shoe and crush it, gleefully. Yeah, I love it. Die, bitch. If you haven’t ever heard the sound a fat roach makes when it’s flattened, or seen its yellow insides spurting out, then you have something to look forward to, my friend.

  We also have scorpions. The crawl space under the house is full of them. Inside the house, they’re outnumbered by the roaches, but they’re there all right, and they know how to hide even better than the roaches. We have to check our shoes carefully before we put them on, and we have to shake out all of our clothing when we take it out of our drawers. We also need to check our beds thoroughly before we get into them.

  I’ve been on the lookout for scorpions all my life, already. My father, Louis XVI, was stung by a scorpion when he was a little kid, back in Havana, and he never tired of telling us that story. He was being dressed by his aunt Uma, sometime around 1912 or so, when ankle-high shoes were in style for little boys—a style that made it hard to check inside for vermin. Uma slipped on one of his shoes and he started wailing, and the more he cried, the harder she tried to get that shoe on him. She thought he was only being a spoiled brat. Poor Dad. That scorpion in the shoe stung him hard, and then he got very sick afterward.

  Spiders, yes, we have them too. But they really know how to hide, better than any other critter. Every now and then we see a really big one and kill it. Yeah. Smashing one of them is way cooler than smashing any roach.

  It’s us or them.

  Snakes, no, thank God. Every now and then we see a small one outside, slithering through the blades of grass on our patchy lawn. We leave them alone. Why, I don’t know. If Tony doesn’t kill them, then there must be something special about them. We have a few land crabs too, and they aren’t as lucky as the snakes. They make such a wonderful crunching sound when you smash them with a rock.

  Yes, it’s us or them.

  Lizards are in short supply. This surprises me, for the Chaits’ backyard was full of them. Maybe it’s because we have so little greenery around us, so few places for them to hang out and do lizard things. I’m happy about it, but Tony is sorely disappointed. If he only had lizards to torment here, this house might seem more bearable.

 
No frogs either, probably because the whole neighborhood is so arid. Back at my other foster home, every house had sprinklers, and you can bet they were turned on at least once a day. The lawns were lush, and the shrubbery dense. I once saw a frog near the front steps of the Chait house that was about the size of a football, and no amount of pelting with stones would make him budge from his spot. Here, no one ever waters their lawn or their yard, and the frogs stay away. Tony is disappointed by that too.

  And, speaking of the grass outside: We have no lawn mower. We do have a nifty pair of hand clippers, though, and they do a fine job of cutting that thick Florida grass, which grows just fine without watering. So what if it takes about five hours to do the entire so-called lawn on your knees, clip, clip, clip? It’s good, character-building exercise. One of the Three Thugs claims that it’s increased the size of his forearm muscles considerably. He loves to show everyone how his right forearm muscles ripple. He also does sit-ups and push-ups all the time. Mariano is obsessed with his muscles, and sex.

  All of the older guys are obsessed with sex. It’s all that the Three Thugs ever talk about, and also Armando, the oldest guy, who can’t wait to turn eighteen, and a few other older guys who pass through our house for only a month or two and then disappear as soon as they turn eighteen are all obsessed with sex. It’s all they can ever talk about.

  Mostly, they talk about their own frustration and how they’d love to get their hands on some dirty magazines.

  One fine afternoon, one of them comes home all excited, ready to burst at the seams. He’s stolen a nudist magazine, which back then was somewhere between dirty and kind-of-dirty, and somewhat easier to find than a really dirty magazine, like Playboy. He runs around the house, showing everyone his treasure, flipping through the pages, saying, “Take a look, take a look! Oh man, take a look at this. Have you ever seen anything nicer than this?”