Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  News to me. I don’t know what to say, save “Glad to see you.”

  Fade to black. Return back to late spring 1963, which is really already summer in Miami, and hotter than a blast furnace.

  Paquito, the eight-year-old, catches the chicken pox while visiting some of his relatives. Like Tony and me, he gets away every few weekends. He’s covered in sores from head to foot, and he is quarantined on the sun porch.

  Too late, too bad. It doesn’t take long. Within a few days, nearly all of us at the Palace Ricardo are stricken too. Only two or three guys are spared because they’ve already had the pox. The Palace turns into an infirmary of sorts, in which there are no doctors or nurses, no medications of any kind. We all broil in the Miami heat, as we wrestle with our fevers and sores. Jesus H. Leper-curing Christ, this is really bad. I’ve never felt so sick, or so uncomfortable. Tony and I are both riddled with pox, even in our ears and inside our noses and mouths, and down yonder in the nether regions. Our friend José wins the prize for the highest number of sores. We pass the time counting them on one another, when the fever subsides, save for those on our private parts. The count for those is left to each individual, and is accepted unquestioningly, on our strictest honor code.

  “Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta.” I swear, it’s true. May an evil lightning bolt cleave me in two. I have five on my cojones.

  During the worst of the worst, when our fevers are at their highest, Tony and I get one of those unexpected three-minute calls from Cuba. And we tell Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette that everything is hunkydory. We’ve never had it better, and can’t think of what more we could ask for. We’re in a lovely home, we’re loving school, and we’ve never felt better. Never, ever. Don’t worry about a thing. And, yes, we’ll see you soon, here, not there. Bye.

  We miss nearly two weeks of school and go back to our classrooms as summer vacation is about to start. On the last day of school Miss Esterman turns into a psychic and predicts what each of us is going to do with our life. She tells me I’m going to work for the United Nations, and master several languages. Little does she know what effect the second half of that prediction will have on me.

  Tony remains consistent: He fails every single subject and isn’t allowed to proceed to tenth grade. This makes me happy in a perverse way, for it means that next year, when I’m in seventh grade, he and I will be attending the same junior high school. He’s already earned a reputation as one of the scrappiest fighters in the school, and no one messes with him. At home, of course, it’s different. The more defiant he becomes, the more Ricky Ricardo and the Three Thugs make life difficult for him.

  But every now and then miracles happen and redemption sneaks up on you from the most unlikely quarter. As soon as school lets out, when we’re all staring at the prospect of three months of unrelenting boredom and incarceration, the worst thug of all, Miguel, discovers a way of turning all our free time into gold, literally. A Cuban humor magazine, Zig-Zag, is looking for door-to-door salespeople, and they don’t give a damn about your age. All they care about is selling as many copies as possible. The magazine sells for ten cents, and the salesperson gets to keep half of that for each copy sold, a whole five cents. You merely have to go down to the Zig-Zag office in Little Havana, ask for as many copies as you think you can carry, and walk away with an armload of potential profit. You don’t even have to put any money down; they trust you to come back because they know that if you do manage to sell some, you’ll want to come back again the next week and the week after that. Or maybe, if you’re a really good salesperson, you’ll come back several times a day, for another stack to sell.

  Refugee ethics. A bit different from those of the world of the fully settled.

  The best thing about selling Zig-Zag is the money, no doubt about it. But a great added bonus is the magazine itself, which is beloved by Cuban exiles. Zig-Zag had a long history back in Cuba: It was one of the most daring satirical publications, always dripping with political acid. I loved reading it. Zig-Zag respected no one in authority. And it was full of great cartoons, including those of Antonio Prohías, who, in exile, would sell his “Spy vs. Spy” strips to MAD magazine. Many of the Zig-Zag’s covers I handle, week in and week out, are drawn by Prohías. As one might expect, Zig-Zag was one of the first publications to be squashed by the censors of Castrolandia. And, as one might also expect, when it was resurrected in exile, its acid content increased exponentially.

  Each and every one of us boys at the Palace Ricardo, save for Paquito, turn into Zig-Zag salesmen. They would take Paquito too, even at eight years of age, but he just doesn’t want to do it. We go down to Little Havana, pick up our big fat stacks, and fan out in different directions, having reached some sort of agreement beforehand about how to carve up the territory. Sort of. We’re not precise, but we’re all on the same page about not competing with one another. We all know there’s maximum profit in spreading ourselves out as much as possible. God bless America. God bless free enterprise and freedom of expression. I want to change my name to Zig-Zag, I love it so much.

  This is why I came here. This is why I’m in exile. This is why I have no parents, so I can sell this magazine. If I’d stayed in Cuba, what I’m doing would be not only impossible, but also illegal. Not just the anti-Castro humor I’m peddling, but the very simple act of selling something door-to-door and pocketing a fair share of the profits for myself.

  I haven’t been this happy since I first set foot in the Palace Ricardo. That fat stack of magazines under my arm weighs nothing. It buoys me up, in fact. It’s an antigravity device, which helps me levitate from door-to-door, along with Tony. We walk miles and miles, knock on every single door with all the obsessive-compulsive thoroughness of Immanuel Kant, and sell most of our stash. Little Havana is the best territory, and it’s large enough for all of us. When you knock on a door there, you know you’re bound to have it opened by a Cuban. But after a couple of weeks, Tony and I decide to branch out to terra incognita because too many of those Cubans in Little Havana tell us that they’ve already bought one. We know there are Cubans scattered everywhere, so we decide to go north of Flagler Street, where no one has gone before.

  We strike it rich. Sort of, as we see it. But it takes a lot more walking and door-knocking, for only about one in ten doors you knock on has Cubans behind it, and only one in eight of them buys a Zig-Zag. Many of them tell us that they would love to, but can’t spare the ten cents. We have a lot of doors slammed in our faces by non-Cubans when we say we’re selling a Cuban humor magazine, but we don’t care. Every now and then, some English-speaking person will be nice enough to buy one anyway. I’m way beyond shame now, and I don’t care if the line between begging and selling gets blurred every now and then. Every Zig-Zag Tony and I sell means five more cents in our pocket. This means we can buy food for ourselves, even get sandwiches, and Cuban pastries, and chewing gum, and Twinkies, and candy bars, and Cokes and 7•Ups to slake our thirst as we wear out our shoes some more, along with the tape that holds them together.

  We learn a few things along the way. For starters, we become intimately acquainted with seediness and many of the down-and-out non-Cuban residents of Miami. We Cuban exiles had nothing, and we filled up these crummy neighborhoods because all we could afford was at the absolute bottom of the heap. But these neighborhoods hadn’t been built with us in mind, and they had become slums long before we showed up, penniless. Before we came, these neighborhoods were full of American bottom-dwellers, men and women who had flocked down here to the absolute South from somewhere up north. God only knows what dreams they’d harbored when they fled here, seeking sunlight, fun, and fortune, only to end up in some ramshackle hellhole of a home, every bit as derelict as the Palace Ricardo, or worse, where they had to spend a good part of the day squashing cockroaches or hiding from bill collectors and boys who sold Cuban magazines.

  Children were scarce in the area around the Orange Bowl. So were young adults. Almost every door we knocked on was opened by older
American men and women, all of whom looked as if they’d had the stuffing knocked out of them day after day for the past forty years or so. Apartment buildings were the worst. Sun-scorched, half-ruined, the nadir in shabbiness, those stuccoed caverns were full of wrinkled oldsters who smelled awful and had bulging bags under their eyes and nicotine stains on their teeth and fingers. Many of them had no teeth, at least when they came to the door. Sometimes they’d say, “Wait a minute,” and come back fully toothed.

  The very act of going door to door and not skipping a single one is at once a thrill and a tremendous chore. But, since you never know where you’ll find a buyer, the challenge of finding them keeps you going. Knock, knock. Ring, ring. You could tell right away whether you were staring at a Cuban or an American. Facial features and skin tone had nothing to do with it. The Cubans looked stunned and stressed, but healthy. Most of them were youngish, too, and some had children. The Americans all looked as if they’d already given up the ghost, or sorely wished they could.

  To Cubans, we simply say, “Zig-Zag?” To Americans we say, “Oh, sorry, we’re selling a Cuban magazine; sorry to disturb you.”

  Every now and then we run into something unsavory, maybe even dangerous. One day we run into José, our housemate, who’s walking across the street from us, going in the opposite direction. A tall, portly man is walking beside him, talking up a storm. What we see looks peculiar, but Tony and I don’t give it a second thought because José waves at us as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.

  Later, at home, he tells us that the guy was a total pervert who was trying to get him to go to his house and had spent more than an hour following him around, describing in detail how much fun they could have with each other’s private parts.

  Tony and I are invited into a few squalid apartments by old geezers and old bags, but we know better than to accept these invitations. It’s the geezers who worry us the most.

  We don’t make tons of money, but we’re deliriously happy with every nickel we pocket. Sometimes we make as much as one dollar apiece, after an entire day of selling. Returning unsold copies to the Zig-Zag office always hurts, but the people down there are so nice, and so much more like family than Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, that they always find something to say that makes us feel better.

  “Hey, count how many you sold, not how many you’ve returned.”

  And they never stiff us, or scramble the numbers in their favor. They actually seem happy to give back to us half of what we turn in to them.

  Had we stayed in Cuba, where everyone works for the government and everyone gets paid exactly the same salary regardless of what kind of work they do or how well or how poorly they do their job, Tony and I would be nothing more than glorified slaves. Both he and I know this, even though we’re just kids. We also know that one dollar per day is more than any adult makes in Castrolandia, thanks to Marxism-Leninism.

  I can’t speak for Tony, but selling these magazines is the ultimate payoff for me: the surest vindication of my life as an exile. I couldn’t spark a slave revolt back home, like Spartacus, but I’ve rebelled nonetheless. I’ve slapped my masters in the face, and spit at them, merely by slipping out of their grasp and selling magazines that poke fun at them. Like Spartacus’s son—the one held up at the foot of his cross by Jean Simmons—I can be free even though my parents are still in bondage. Like Spartacus, they’re happy to know that their son has eluded a life of coerced servitude and silence, even though, as he walks from door to ramshackle door in Miami, they both hang on their crosses, back in Cuba, along with millions of others who line the Carretera Central, the highway that runs from one end of the island to the other. Our version of the Appian Way.

  Now, if I could only find a Jean Simmons of my own, to constantly slay me with her beauty, this slave revolt of mine would be a total victory.

  Eighteen

  Cottonmouth!”

  “Que carajo es eso?” says José. What?

  I’ve never heard the word before. But I don’t have to ask what it means, for I see that snake right away. I’ve never seen such a big one, or any so aggressive.

  It darts out from under a rock at the river’s edge and lunges at the guy with the smallest fishing pole. He backs away and whacks it with his pole, but it just keeps coming at him, its white mouth agape, its fangs on full display.

  The more he whacks it with his teensy-weensy fishing pole, the more aggressive the snake gets. It’s full of hell, and it fears nothing or no one. All of us who are there at the river’s edge back away several feet.

  I pick up a rock and throw it at the snake. Others join in. With six or seven of us pelting the snake, it starts to back off. No one hits a bull’s-eye, but the stoning gives the fisherman a chance to jump away safely, out of the low riverbank, up into the grassy field above it. As the stoning continues, the cottonmouth turns around, slithers into the water, and swims away.

  The sight of that undulating V-shape in the water—something I’ve never seen before, not even in movies—evokes the same feeling in me as a shark fin breaking the water’s surface.

  We pelt it with rocks until it disappears down the river.

  “Thanks for the rocks, boys. Thanks a lot.”

  “Nastiest water moccasin I ever saw,” says another fisherman.

  “Close call, bud,” says the guy who first yelled “Cottonmouth.”

  None of us from the Palace Ricardo say much, other than “Wow” or other such one-syllable summary expressions of sheer amazement. In English, of course. All of these guys with fishing poles speak English. Two of them are black, and they’ve obviously come here from some other part of town, for this is 1963 and Miami is still segregated. As the local elites would say, there’s nothing but spics and poor white trash in our neighborhood.

  We don’t care much about all of this civil rights stuff we keep hearing about in the news. It doesn’t include us, even though hardly anyone considers us white, and often enough we’re told to ride in the back of the bus.

  Of course, unlike black Americans, we haven’t had to put up with segregation for more than a few years. And that makes one hell of a difference.

  We don’t care much about anything that’s happening in the wider world either. We’ve got troubles of our own. And we’ve discovered the Miami River, about ten blocks from the Palace Ricardo, near the intersection of Eleventh Street and Twenty-second Avenue Northwest. It’s a wild place, still untouched by the city. To get to it we have to walk through a big open field with lots of tall grass, which we know could be full of snakes. It’s not the main branch of the river, but a smaller one. There are small fish in there, and we take off our shoes, go into the water, and scoop them up with jars. Then we take them home and try to keep them alive, but nothing seems to work. We even use some of our Zig-Zag money to buy fish food, but they still die.

  So, we’ve settled for watching guys with poles catch bigger fish. Every now and then they catch something edible. We hang out there for hours and hours, exploring the riverbank or just sitting there. Every now and then we see someone cruising down- or upriver on a boat. They always wave at us, and we never wave back.

  “Why don’t you ask us to join you, bastards?”

  Years later, the Dolphin Expressway will go right through here. Much of that toll road will be laid right along this waterway, erasing what is here now, and no one will foresee its constant, monstrous traffic jams. But right now, in the summer of 1963, this is one of the last wild places left in this part of town. We hear stories from the fishermen about alligators and manatees. “I know of boats being overturned by gators and manatees, not far from here,” says an old guy with a heavily creased face. “If you follow this river up, it gets wilder and wilder.”

  That’s all he had to say to spark our interest in going upriver.

  Exploring on foot, we go upstream as far as possible, and also downstream, to where this branch empties into the big one, where there are all sorts of docks and boats.

  Tony gets an i
dea. Why not borrow a boat? A little one. No one will notice, especially if we do it at night. It sounds a bit crazy to me at first, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. A rowboat would be nice. No engine to start, no noise. Who would know?

  Our first excursion is a great success. In the dark of night we “borrow” a rowboat and set out for the jungle upstream, the one the old guy told us about. It’s a moonless night, and without any streetlights nearby, the river is a dark black ribbon surrounded by shadows and silence. Rowing against the current isn’t as hard as we expected. The oars dip and dip. Slish, slosh, slish, slosh. It’s all we hear. We don’t say a word, so no one will hear us.

  Upriver we go, quite a ways, looking for the jungle. But like those of our ancestors who wasted their lives looking for El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth, we find no jungle. We do find trees hanging over us in places, and nothing but pure stillness all around us, but we can sense the city just beyond either bank.

  “What if a manatee or a gator is right under us?” whispers José.

  “We’ve got oars we can hit them with,” says Tony.

  I immediately sense huge shapes under us, of course. I see nothing. It’s too dark to see anything. But the mere mention of gators and manatees sets me to imagining their presence. I picture us being overturned, like the whaling skiffs in the movie Moby Dick, tossed into the water. Alligators, manatees, and cottonmouths gang up on us, and we’re history.

  “Shut up,” I whisper. “We’ll get caught.”

  The large shapes below don’t go away. They just multiply in my mind. But this is too great an adventure, well worth the risk. Tony is right: At least we have oars with which to beat the crap out of the gators and man-eating manatees. But what can we do about the cottonmouths? Better not to think about it, to enjoy our adventure.