Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Or at least, that is what I think and feel at the level of everyday awareness, and dreams. Some other part of me, some much deeper part, is bound and gagged at the moment, but it’s just the opposite of bleached bones. It’s very much alive, wounded, and screaming into its soundproof gag. And waiting for a chance to break free. This imprisoned part of me will escape, soon enough. It’ll come roaring out, crazed and aching for revenge against Carlos, Charles, Charlie, and Chuck.

  The Void will spring it loose and possess it, like a legion of demons.

  But for now, I’ve got nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. I’m finally out of Plato’s cave and living in the realm of light. Fall is just a few weeks away, and winter can’t be too far behind. Just a couple of months, maybe three at most. Soon I’ll be jumping into piles of red and golden leaves, maybe making a colossal bonfire with them. You can burn the leaves, Uncle Amado has told me. I’ll be counting the leaves as they fall, the same way I count all of the perfect features on the girls at school. And I’ll be just as transfixed by each multicolored leaf as by every perfect face and every perfect pair of legs. The pain will be exquisite. I’ll be seeing snow soon too, counting the snowflakes as they fall, one by one. I’ll be rolling in it as it piles up on the ground; I’ll be sledding, making snowballs and snowmen; I’ll be catching snowflakes with my tongue as they fall from heaven, letting each and every unique one of them dissolve like a consecrated host, with exactly the same reverence. Maybe even more.

  I’m fine. Just fine. Perfect. I’m higher than a junkie on heroin.

  I’m waiting for snow in Bloomington.

  Twenty-one

  It happened so quickly. One day the leaves were green, the next day they staged a revolt against chlorophyll. The trees are all ablaze, and I’m on fire too. I pick up some of the leaves that fall to the ground. Many of them aren’t just a single color, but practically the entire spectrum. The patterns on them remind me of kaleidoscopes. The maple leaves are the best, by far. They transfix me, each and every one of them.

  I save the most spectacular ones, stick them into books, between the pages, hoping they’ll never fade or crumble away. Some of them will actually stay in good shape for a while, and I’ll be able to kick-start my euphoria many times over, simply by retrieving them from their hiding place.

  The cold air also knocks me out. Especially at night. Seeing your own breath is something otherworldly to me. I don’t care how ordinary it seems to those who live up here. To me, it’s a miracle. I’ve seen frost again, several times. Another miracle. It’s most easily detected on the garage roof first thing in the morning, from the breakfast nook where I toast up about half a loaf of American bread every morning. The toaster is right under the windowsill, on the table, and I just keep popping them in as fast as I eat them. Margarine, still. No butter. Refugees can’t afford butter.

  School is a constant high. Jerks and thugs are at a minimum, and the girls seem to get more beautiful with every passing day. No one has yet asked where I’m from. No one has made a single remark about my accent. Maybe I don’t have one anymore? Hard to tell, and Chuck’s not about to ask, “Hey, could you tell me, please, do I speak English with an accent?”

  I continue to model my speech after that of Andy Griffith and the Beverly Hillbillies. Fortunately, those two shows are on the CBS network, the only one we can pick up with our ancient television set. I practice by myself, when no one is looking.

  My new friend Gary is one of the nicest and funniest guys I’ve ever run into. Everything is a joke to him. But he lives far away on the edge of town, on the border with Normal, out near Route 66, near the Ewing Mansion, one of the town’s tourist attractions. It’s hard to get together with him. My other new friend, Eddie, is also a great guy. And he lives just a few blocks away on Olive Street, in my neighborhood, so we get together very often.

  As the fall colors reach their peak, our family is invited to a picnic out in the countryside, at a place named Funk’s Grove, where Abraham Lincoln once stopped to give his horse a drink from a sulphur spring. Poor horse. That spring stinks. And the stench is nothing compared to the taste. It’s bad enough to make you spew whatever you’ve eaten, right there, on the spot. This picnic was organized by the folks who run the Americanization program in Bloomington, and one of them has driven us all out here in his car. These are the good people who introduce the few foreigners in town to the English language and the American system of government. Most of them are immigrants themselves who’ve been here for a long time. Uncle Amado and Aunt Alejandra go to these classes. How willingly they go, I don’t know. These Americanization folk also help new immigrants in other ways, and it could be that Amado doesn’t want to upset them.

  Nearly all of these good people are German.

  “Vould you like anozzer viener,” the kindly old man asks me, as I sit near the small bonfire on which hot dogs are being roasted.

  “A what?”

  “A viener,” he says. “A viener,” he says again.

  I catch on. “Yeah, thanks, I’d love another hot dog.”

  It’s as fabulous a fall day as you might wish for, anywhere. Out here in Funk’s Grove, which is a patch of trees surrounded by an ocean of seemingly infinite cornfields, the afternoon autumn sunlight makes everything seem on fire.

  By now I know for sure that we’re the only Spanish-speaking family in town. One day at Woolworth’s, downtown, a little girl came up to us as we were talking to one another in Spanish, and she just stood there with her mouth totally agape, her eyes so wide open that I thought they were about to pop out of her head. Her mom tiptoed over to us, took her by the hand, and led her away without saying a word. Up in Normal there’s another Spanish-speaking family, and they happen to be Cuban, but they’ve been here so long that they’re barely Cuban. The head of that family is a Spanish professor at Illinois State University, and he and his wife have been in the United States since the 1940s. Their children don’t even speak Spanish. We can’t visit them because they live so far away, but the one time they came over to our house made me thankful for that. I was so bored, I had trouble staying awake.

  Most of the other foreigners in town seem to be German. At Bloomington Junior High School, the only other foreign kid in seventh grade is a German too. And he’s subjected to frequent abuse. Way too often, our classmates give him the Nazi salute and a “Sieg heil!”

  No one notices me, for no one seems to know where Cuba is, or that it exists. So Chuck Neat-o sails right over potentially troubled waters, unnoticed. I’m just another guy, with one of those weird surnames that end in O. Good thing that no one seems to know anything about Cuba, or I’d be getting the clenched left fist salute and a constant round of “Venceremos.” But I’ve checked out the history and geography textbooks in my social studies class to see what they have to say about my birthplace, and they’re no different from the ones I’d used in Florida. According to these books, I hail from one of the most primitive, corrupt, and politically unstable countries on earth. All of Latin America, including Cuba, is like some starving child running amok, half-naked and three-quarters savage.

  I dread the day when we’ll get to this section in class. That’s when I’ll have to deal with the dumb questions for sure. And it’ll be so hard to stay cool.

  But I have other things to deal with here, in Funk’s Grove, in the fall of 1963.

  It’s a perfectly named place, Funk’s Grove. It may look to everyone—and to the camera—as if I’m having a grand old time, but the God’s honest truth is that I’m in the bluest of blue funks. This morning, before we came out here to the countryside, the Void pounced on me without warning.

  I woke up, made my toast and coffee, sat in the breakfast nook, looked at the backyard, and wham!

  “Long time no see. Dukes up!”

  Wham!

  Jesus H. Crucified Christ, help me.

  In the wink of an eye, the world around me loses its boundaries, and all of its details turn sour. All I can see and f
eel is this vortex of nothingness, emptiness, and utter loneliness. Pure Absence. I recognize it immediately for what it is, but I’m unable to deal with the enormity of it all. For starters, this house is totally full of people. I’m not alone at all. To top it all off, I’ve been so deliriously happy these past few weeks, and these autumn leaves have taken me even higher than I thought it possible to go with euphoria.

  Where the hell did this come from?

  I tell Tony how I feel. For the first time, I actually reveal this awful secret to someone. I go into great detail, the best I can. He doesn’t know what to make of it. He tells me to ignore the feeling, that it’s just some weird fluke, and that it’ll go away soon enough.

  All I can say is that I hope he’s right, but that I don’t think he really understands what I mean. He shrugs his shoulders and says, again, “Forget about it; it’ll go away.”

  But the Void refuses to go away. It goes with me to Funk’s Grove and ruins the picnic and all that’s marvelous and divine in this otherworldly autumn day. Never before had the Void followed me anywhere, or tried to claim my soul while I was outdoors, or sitting in a car, so close to other bodies that I could barely move.

  On the way home from Funk’s Grove, as we’re passing cornfield after harvested cornfield, and the golden light is glowing ever more fiercely, smothering everything with its hypercelestial glow, I knock out the Void with a single thought: Tonight I’ll be watching television with my family. I’m not alone. Ha. Take that.

  One television show in particular helps me win the match, for I picture it in great detail and use those images to disorient the Void. It’s probably one of the stupidest shows ever to air on American television: My Favorite Martian. But it’s not the show itself that makes the difference, it’s the mere fact that I’ll be watching it with family.

  This time, I throw the sucker punch. And the Void’s out like a light, and down for the count. Ha, there you go. Annihilate yourself, cabrón.

  But this leaves me shaken. If the Void can spring on me so unexpectedly and intensely, when I’m surrounded by people, what can I do in the future if it happens again?

  I respond by doing what I’ve learned to do best: I resolve to forget this incident and bury it as deeply in my Vault of Oblivion as possible. Unfortunately, the best I can do is to put it in a waiting room, way up the hallway from the antechamber to the Vault of Oblivion. It just won’t go anywhere near the Vault, no matter how much I push and shove.

  Life resumes its usual wonderful pace. And everything seems to speed up, as the days get shorter and the nights grow longer.

  We try to burn some leaves on the street the next day, after the picnic at Funk’s Grove, but all they do is smolder. Apparently, we don’t know how to turn our leaves into incense. We give up after an hour or so, and just pile them up at the curb, where some truck from the town will pick them up and cart them off. I hope it’s to someplace where they’ll be burned in a huge bonfire.

  Once the trees are bare and the air is crisp all the time, Tony and I step up our watch for snow. We follow the weather forecasts every night, hoping for good news. But the news isn’t encouraging. Last year, the first snow came in late October. But this year, some stupid weather pattern known as Indian Summer is stretching way too far into snow season. Plenty of frost in the morning, but no snow.

  I love my sweaters and the winter coat the Presbyterians gave me. It’s from the 1940s, pure wool, and it keeps out the cold just fine. It looks like something that could have been worn to a polar expedition, and I don’t give a damn about its style. It’s the real thing: It’s seen many a winter, and that alone makes it better than any new coat. I love my wool cap, and my scarf, and the gloves, and the earmuffs from Kmart, that huge store out there by Route 66, where Mrs. Junk takes us every now and then. It’s the only store where we can afford to buy new stuff.

  I constantly check the thermometer Uncle Amado has screwed onto the outside of the dining room windowsill. It keeps getting lower and lower, with every passing day.

  Thank you, God.

  November 17. Unforgettable. Snow flurries. The flakes come down sparsely and blow about. They look like small hosts, hundreds of them, wafting, twisting, turning in the wind, smacking into everything and melting right away. Not one of them survives its fall from heaven. I can’t really gawk as much as I want to at school, when they first begin to fill the air, but once I get home, I park myself at the dining room windows and keep an eye on what’s coming down. The Victorian house next door is a perfect backdrop, especially the blue spruce. It’s snow, all right, but it’s not piling up. I’m enthralled and horribly frustrated at the same time. There it goes again, this refugee thing: the constant irritating coincidence of opposites, the wonderful and the awful inseparably linked.

  November 22, the day before my thirteenth birthday. If I were still living with the Chaits, maybe I’d be having a Bar Mitzvah. But I’m as far from such a ritual as I am from my parents, and all of my past. I’m about to turn into a man according to Jewish law, which, as I understand it, is the original deal between God and his Chosen People. I’m pissed that this part of The deal has been undone, and I’m disappointed, deep down, that my passage to manhood is not going to be appropriately recognized.

  But, what the hell, I’m here, in the Promised Land, in this Corn Belt Jerusalem, and that makes me some sort of Jew and just as Chosen and no less of a man. Come to think of it, I’ve been a man since I first set foot in the fishbowl at the Havana airport.

  At lunchtime, in the cafeteria, some of the women who dish out our food suddenly start to cry. One of them shrieks, another one howls. I’m at the same table as always, mooching leftovers from my new friends. They call me the “moocher” because anytime anyone at the table leaves something uneaten that I’d love to consume I say “Are you going to eat that?”

  The word spreads like wildfire: President John F. Bay of Pigs Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. And he could be dead. Several of my table mates cheer. The rest don’t look as terribly upset as the cafeteria ladies.

  The loudspeakers in the cafeteria instruct us to go directly to our homerooms, immediately. So we all dispose of our trays and the trash on them, and we go where we’ve been told to go.

  My flat-topped homeroom teacher tells us that he doesn’t know any more than we do, but it is a fact that President Kennedy has been shot. Mr. Happy Birthday Mister President skintight–Marilyn Monroe–dress John Fitzgerald Kennedy. No doubt about it.

  The principal breaks the news on the loudspeaker. President Screw You Cubans Kennedy is dead. Go home, all of you. Run home. Run for cover. Our history has just taken a sharp unexpected turn.

  No one has to say it: This is bigger than us all. Here, in the land of Lincoln, presidential assassinations are taken much more seriously than elsewhere.

  I pick up Alejandrita from her school, and we walk home together. On Evans Street, I look down at the red bricks with which the street is paved. I tell myself that I’ll remember this moment till the day I die, and I’ll see the bricks every time I recall this day. I turn out to be right. Mention President Let’s Make a Deal with Russia Kennedy to me, and I immediately see those bricks. Each and every one of them, down to the nicks and dents and the grit in the spaces between them.

  Walter Cronkite confirms that President Missile Crisis Kennedy is dead, again and again. I’m glued to the television, and so is everyone else at home, just like everyone throughout the land.

  November 23. My thirteenth birthday is overshadowed by history. I don’t really give a damn about the birthday. I’m past all such trivial things, especially since no one is ushering me into manhood with a proper ritual. I get a Tinkertoy set for a present, which comes in a tubular container, not unlike those used to enshrine single-malt Scotch whiskies. Not quite appropriate for my age, this child’s toy, but I know how much it must have cost Uncle Amado, and I appreciate the gesture.

  As soon as I see Lee Harvey Fair Play for Cuba Oswald shot dead right in fr
ont of me, on live television, I know for sure that Cubans had something to do with all of this. No doubt about it. And this conviction will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  Accompanied by the icon of Corn Belt Jesus, we watch the funeral to end all funerals on channel three, the only signal that can reach our television. Aunt Alejandra is spellbound by the riderless horse, above all. I’m wondering if they’ve injected him with some kind of drug to make him so jittery. An impressive number of world leaders march in the funeral cortège. There’s the emperor of Ethiopia. There’s Charles de Gaulle. A bunch of Brits, too, including the queen’s useless husband. The German chancellor. And even a Russian who had paid many a visit to Cuba, Anastas Mikoyan. Fidel is nowhere in sight.

  Thanksgiving. November 28. Where’s the snow, damn it? What kind of cruel hoax is this? The corny song about grandmother’s house says you’re supposed to have snow on Thanksgiving:

  The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,

  Thru the white and drifted snow, oh!

  And the Currier & Ives calendar on our kitchen wall gives me the same irritating message. Home for Thanksgiving, it says, or something like that, and the print shows a house and landscape knee-deep in snow.

  Crap. It’s just because I’m up here. The tropical sunlight trapped inside of my veins is warming up Bloomington a bit too much.

  November 30. Saturday. My mother’s birthday. She’s forty-three today.

  Snow.

  Holy God. It fell overnight, while I slept. It snuck up on me, just like the Cuban Revolution. Except this is the best of all surprises, not the worst. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus. How is this kind of white possible? How is this whole thing possible at all? Baruch atah Adonai. It’s a million, zillion times more beautiful than I ever imagined. Surely, this is what going to heaven will be like, this kind of extrasensory bombshell.