“Don’t stop. Please.”
Leila held on. It was mostly smooth, like the trunks of certain saplings with knots where the faint blue veins stood out. Then with her thumb and forefinger, she encircled the knob at the end, a kind of snout, really, and squeezed it.
“Do you love me, Leila?”
She turned to her brother, but his face was unfamiliar. His eyes looked abnormally large and they held her captive, as if he were somehow anchoring himself inside her. A sticky heat spilled on her hand, like goat’s milk, but thicker and more pungent. Did she do something wrong?
Maman called to her harshly from in the garden. Leila hurried to the bathroom and washed her hands with the hospital soap. This calmed her a little. She could hear the cook outside praising the Holy Prophet and his people with a clang of pots and pans. When Leila returned to her brother’s bed, he was asleep. She picked up the syringe filled with morphine and slid the needle into his arm. This time, there was hardly any blood.
The rain came down unexpectedly, at a slant. In the garden the leaves crackled in the downpour. A taxi driver honked his horn and shouted Son-of-a-whore, no different than any other day. She could hear the call to evening prayers from the neighborhood mosque. There would be a party tonight at Aunt Parvin and Uncle Masood’s house for their son’s eighteenth birthday. (Their first child, a daughter, had died of diphtheria very young.) Aunt Parvin prided herself on throwing real Parisian-style parties with authentic French dishes and cream puffs for dessert.
Leila would wear her new dress, ivory colored with a pleated skirt and pearl buttons down the side. She would bring a bouquet of red tulips.
(1972)
Enrique Florit
Enrique sat next to his father in the grand ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel, staring up at the stage. A hulking fellow in a lilac dress was auditioning to be Papi’s assistant. The man’s legs were clean-shaven, but his upper lip was stubbly and his falsetto unconvincing. Perhaps it’d been a mistake to advertise the job in all the local newspapers. Everyone within five hundred miles of Las Vegas who’d ever harbored ambitions of going into show business was strolling, bumping, flailing, shuffling, and sashaying across this stage.
The biggest problem, Enrique thought, was that Papi didn’t know what he was looking for. After his fallout with Sammy Davis Jr. (Papi’s ten-minute opening act had often stretched to forty) and his testy partnerships with lesser lounge singers, Fernando Florit had finally decided to hire an assistant. Or, as he proclaimed: “We must put to flight the maledictions that have been plaguing us!”
Last month, his father had tried out a six-foot-tall cocktail waitress named Betty Rouze, who’d been perfect in his latest trick. Betty strode onstage in nothing but a mink coat until Papi shot a fake pistol at her. As the coat blew apart, leaving the comely waitress momentarily in the buff, the pieces of fur turned into skittering minks. Unfortunately for Papi, Betty had run off with a car dealer from Muncie, in town for the Cadillac convention. Now Papi had only three weeks to prepare for his engagement with Vic Damone at the Flamingo Hotel.
“Next!” Papi yelled.
A dwarf wearing a faded clown outfit waddled onto the stage. She lit a cigar and blew smoke rings that turned into shadow puppets—a howling wolf, a tusked elephant, a chimpanzee with a baby on its back. Enrique nudged Papi appreciatively but his father’s expression remained grim. He reminded Enrique, sotto voce, that he was looking for an assistant, not a competitor. The clown squared her hips in a combative manner, as if to say, See if you can top that, pal.
“My dear,” Papi said in a conciliatory tone. “That was very impressive, but what else can you do?”
Enrique liked that his father treated each performer respectfully. In fact, the more execrable the act, the more impeccable his manners. His English was much improved, too, thanks to intensive speech lessons from a former Miss Arkansas turned blackjack dealer. Now he had a vaguely southern drawl, like everyone else. Enrique felt guilty for turning down his father’s entreaties to perform with him again but he wouldn’t go near a stage after what had happened to Mamá. He sensed that wherever she was, she supported his decision.
Papi decided to break for lunch, and they headed to the Flamingo’s coffee shop. Enrique ordered his usual: a grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich with French fries. His father got steak and eggs and a vanilla milkshake. They liked it here, not only because Papi got a fifty percent discount as the magician-in-residence but because—and this was a difficult thing to secure in a place as transient as Las Vegas—they were treated like family.
Their waitress, Doreen, showed Papi the new Chihuahua tattoo she’d gotten in Tijuana. Doreen adored Papi. Since Mamá’s death, Enrique hadn’t known his father to have a girlfriend, yet women flirted with him constantly. They stroked his cheek or tenderly rubbed his gargantuan knees—smooth as marble saints kissed for centuries, Papi boasted—and held his gaze with unmistakable longing. Did he spend time with them during school hours? As far as Enrique knew, nobody but he and his father set foot in their penthouse suite except for their housekeeper, a stout boliviana from Cochabamba who left them extra bath towels.
Backstage at the Flamingo, the showgirls shamelessly dressed and undressed in front of Fernando without a trace of modesty. Enrique, too, saw his share of unfettered buttocks and breasts and the neat strips of fur between the showgirls’ legs. (His own body was unpredictable and mortified him without warning. The girls teased him, knowingly patting his crotch.) But he was perplexed about their bodies’ specific mysteries and pleasures. His eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Doerr, had shown the class a film that was supposed to fulfill their sex education requirement but was, instead, a documentary on the mating habits of prairie chickens.
Back at the ballroom, a dozen more aspiring performers were waiting to audition. The head bartender, Jorge de Reyes, stopped by to see the parade of hopefuls. One comedian performed his German shepherd jokes balancing on wobbly stilts. A Boulder City bail bondsman with a brick-red complexion billed himself a ventriloquist, although Enrique could read his lips from ten rows back. Discouraged, Papi postponed the remaining auditions until the following morning. A pale, freckled brunette holding a peacock intercepted them at the exit.
“Tomorrow,” Papi apologized before she could say a word. “Tomorrow, I promise. Now let’s go, hijo.”
Enrique knew what their next stop would be: the poker pit at the Diamond Pin. The casino was located downtown next to the pawnshops and the motels-by-the-week, worlds away from the pretensions of Las Vegas as anything other than a place to gamble. At the Diamond Pin, there was no prettifying or pretending for tourists, no chandeliers or rooftop pools or valet parking, just slot machines and table after table of every imaginable game meant to separate a man from his money.
The giant thermometer at the east end of town read ninety-two degrees. Enrique took solace in the fatal sameness of the weather, in the spilled blue liquid of the sky. Papi had a theory about the weather, which he’d developed by studying old maps of the Americas. He believed that the monotony of climate tempered emotions, unlike the tropics, with their continual threat of change. Yet this theory didn’t account for the drama they witnessed daily in Las Vegas. It wasn’t a pretty sight to watch a man lose his last dime and consider the future. In spite of the steady weather Papi started getting migraines. He took to his bed with plastic bags of ice for his head, growing increasingly morose until he finally fell asleep. Invariably, the ice melted everywhere and he woke up irritable and damp as a baby.
The weather inside the Diamond Pin also stayed constant: cool and aquarium dim. The owner, Jim Gumbel, was a good friend of Papi’s and made a fuss over him, ordering him frozen pineapple daiquiris (a ludicrous drink for the regulars) and setting him up at the best table. Fernando Florit wasn’t one of the Diamond Pin’s best customers—there were too many high rollers for that—but Gumbel respected him for his total disregard for money and the grace with which he lost it. If people were meant to hold on to money,
Papi liked to say, they would have put handles on it.
Gumbel looked after Enrique as well, apprenticing him to professional poker players, most of them Texans, like Johnny Langston and Cullen Shaw, who taught him a lot more than how to expertly shuffle a deck. These men believed in poker the way other people believed in salvation. In the end, Enrique wondered, who would die surprised? The Texans said that Enrique was the best twelve-year-old player they knew. They told Enrique that poker, like life, was a zero-sum game: if you won, someone else lost and vice versa. To win, they said, you needed three things: a first-rate memory, an ability to read people, and heart—the courage to bet it all when the odds were in your favor.
Enrique loved playing poker but he preferred ordinary times with his father: eating at the Flamingo’s coffee shop, sharing the newspaper and a pot of hot chocolate, listening to Papi recite his Martí poems (“I dream with my eyes open and always, by day and night, I dream…”). At night they unplugged their air conditioner, opened the windows, and let the aromas of the desert lull them to sleep.
At breakfast his father combed the newspapers for unusual crimes (he based his most macabre tricks on them), but he was disappointed by the tedium of vandalism and vagrancy in Las Vegas. The offenses were as monotonous as everything else, including the executions by the mob, who buried their victims in the Mojave Desert. In contrast, Papi said, Havana and Panama City were stupendous cities for crime. The combination of Catholicism, passion, and jealousy proved a potent recipe for the violent imagination. Every morning, Papi threw down his copy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and complained that even a minor Cuban poet could commit more interesting transgressions.
On the opening night of his father’s show at the Flamingo, Enrique settled into a plush booth near the stage, which was draped with massive gold curtains. Waitresses circulated among the tables in miniskirts and beige stockings that made their legs look like artificial limbs. Enrique got aroused just looking at them, though he wasn’t exactly attracted. The orchestra was playing up-tempo music, nothing he could distinguish. Searchlights scanned the crowd as the emcee announced the opening act: “Direct from Cuba, that infamous island of sin and Communism, descended from Indian nobility, renowned for his mind-boggling feats of magic from Havana to Buenos Aires, the Flamingo Hotel is proud to present the incomparable, the astounding, the unforgettable Fernando Florit!”
Papi appeared in a puff of psychedelic smoke and with great fanfare hurled a mirrored ball high into the air. Fastened to the ball was a rope ladder. He called over his assistant, the pale brunette with the peacock, whom he’d ultimately hired, and encouraged her to climb skyward. She did so, to the appreciative hoots of the audience, and disappeared above the curtains.
“Lucille!” Papi called to her.
No reply.
“Lucille, mi amor!”
Silence.
He shook the ladder.
Still nothing.
Then he climbed up after her.
Soon body parts began thumping down to the stage: one leg, then another, a set of shoulders, a sequined torso, followed by an arched throat—all pieces of the missing assistant. The audience murmured nervously. Even Enrique, who’d seen the trick countless times, grew agitated. Had something gone wrong? A moment later, Fernando Florit gracefully leaped from the ladder and started fitting the body parts together like a giant puzzle. With a twirl of his wand he called to Lucille one last time and, miracle of miracles, she stood up, erect and whole, looking somewhat dazed.
“What can we expect of the night but mystery?” Papi crooned to explosive applause.
He received three encores before Vic Damone took over the stage, singing a medley of hits, a frozen smile on his face. Five minutes later, Papi slid into Enrique’s booth still wearing his tuxedo and cape. “So, how was I?”
“Pretty amazing.” It didn’t matter that he knew how his father’s tricks were executed. In the moment Enrique, too, believed in the illusion.
Papi grinned and ordered two dinner specials: Caesar salads and lobster bisque followed by rib roasts with scalloped potatoes. He was in a festive mood. Fans crowded around their table, congratulating him on the show. Even Don Rickles stopped by to say hello. “You’re a bigger sicko than I am,” he joked and punched Fernando in the arm. Papi confided to Rickles that he was perfecting another trick, in which he would turn the hateful maître d’ into a llama.
Suddenly, Enrique felt the spotlight on him. Vic Damone was addressing him as the Birthday Boy. “He’s thirteen, today, ladies and gentlemen! Let’s give the magician’s son a warm round of applause!” Everyone turned to look at him. An army of waitresses marched over with a flaming baked Alaska. Damone sang “Happy Birthday” as the audience joined in. Papi laughed and laughed, proud of his coup. Enrique didn’t know where he found the breath to blow out the candles.
After the hoopla, his father slipped him a crystal paperweight with an unfamiliar photograph of Mamá inside. She was very young, resplendent in a saffron-colored sari and wearing an orchid in her hair. Enrique was startled at his own resemblance to her. They could have been twins—except for the sari, of course. It turned out that the picture had been taken at the Hindu bazaar in Panama City on her thirteenth birthday. How long had Papi saved this for him? Why hadn’t he shown it to him before?
Enrique stared at Mamá’s photograph and remembered their last day together. It was a Sunday and he was sitting in the front row watching his parents’ magic show in Colón Park. The wind was brisk and the flag next to the statue of Christopher Columbus noisily flapped. With Mamá’s assistance, Papi swallowed samurai swords, conjured up goldfish and Dalmatian puppies, juggled hot coals bare-handed, and turned a bouquet of tulips into a parrot that sang the national anthem. Except for the wayward storks—everyone thought they were part of the act—the show went smoothly.
Enrique studied his mother during the performance. She was petite and shapely and wore fishnet stockings and high heels. Her thighs flared becomingly and her eyelids were painted a seawater blue. A silver bracelet gleamed on her wrist. Enrique caught her eye during the goldfish trick and she playfully winked at him, both pleasing and embarrassing him.
It wasn’t until the finale that disaster struck. As usual, Papi bound Mamá’s ankles and arms with rope and invited the flat-footed mayor of Cárdenas, who happened to be in the audience, to test their strength. Then Papi lovingly tied a white handkerchief around her mouth, which she emblazoned with an unrepentant red kiss. A snare drum rolled as he escorted her up the three wooden steps to the rim of the aquarium. In a show of muscularity, Papi raised her over his head and lowered her into the turquoise water. As Mamá sank to the bottom of the tank, her hair rose like a crown of branches. Her eyes remained impassive as she struggled against the ropes.
Enrique heard the crackling before he saw the sparks, and the entangled stork, and the thick electrical cable, like a curse from the sky, swinging off its pole and into the tank where his mother was nearly free of her bindings. Once more she caught his eye, this time with such a wilderness of feeling that it cut off his breath. Then she opened her mouth and slowly drifted to the back of the tank. In that instant Enrique knew without words or explanations, his hair bristling, his saliva turning to a bitter paste on his tongue, that no amount of bravery or longing could save his mother or return them to the path they’d lost. Mamá was trapped, like she was trapped forever in this birthday paperweight.
Enrique accompanied his father down to the Diamond Pin later that night. Papi was in his element, backslapping, buying this one and that one drinks. A couple of the regulars surprised Enrique with birthday presents: girlie cards, a set of erotic dominoes (pussy tiles, someone called them), and a five-pound sack of pistachios. One of the Texans, Cullen Shaw, who was funny and long-jawed and had a surprisingly strong singing voice, gave him an album of Enrico Caruso’s greatest hits.
Before long, Johnny Langston staked Enrique a thousand dollars on a poker game for his birthday. How could he r
efuse? He took a seat and looked around at his middle-aged rivals: paunchy, pasty-faced men wearing Stetsons (except for Danny Seltz, a frozen foods impresario from New Jersey, who had on his lucky pom-pom hat). Enrique fingered his mother’s silver bracelet, safely tucked in his pocket for good luck. The men were a circus of oddities and tics. Langston had chest hair so thick it seemed to swipe at his Adam’s apple like a furry paw. Shaw licked his lips until it seemed they would vanish altogether. One by one, his opponents smiled at him in a way that made Enrique think of animals that ate their young.
Fifteen rounds later, though, he could do no wrong. Straights, full houses, a four of a kind. The mathematical probabilities of this kind of luck were staggeringly low, and Enrique knew it. But it was more than that—his brain had kicked into overdrive. He could remember every card on the table, effortlessly calculate the odds, read his opponents’ minds as if they were whispering in his ear. The men cracked their knuckles, shifting uneasily in their seats. The cigar smoke stung Enrique’s eyes but his mind stayed sharp. By five in the morning, he had more than half the chips on the table. Then he got a straight flush, his first ever, and won the pot: twenty thousand bucks.
It was daybreak when Enrique left the casino. The sun was weak and barely undercut the neon blaze. The ring of mountains stood guard over the city. Everything looked burned out. He hailed a taxi and got in, driving past pawnshops and sex shops, trinket and tourist shops. Crows were perched equidistantly on the telephone poles. The giant thermometer read fifty-eight. When the driver pulled up to the pink concrete fortress that was the Flamingo Hotel, Enrique tipped him a hundred dollars.
Outside his father’s penthouse suite, a tall woman was waiting. Her hair was so blond it looked white. She wore vinyl go-go boots and a fishnet dress that displayed her enormous breasts.
“Where’s your daddy?” she asked politely.
A Handbook to Luck Page 4
