The Cuban Club

by Barry Gifford

  The crowd surged to the curb as a long, black limousine pulled over and stopped. The driver got out, came around the car and opened the curbside rear passenger door. George Burns got out, holding a big cigar in his right hand. He was a very small man; he smiled and waved. He wore glasses and a bad toupée. People shouted his name over and over and shouted, “Where’s Gracie?” Everyone was genuinely excited to see that it really was the famous comedian.

  George Burns and his brother had grown up in New York City. They were from a poor family that lived on the Lower East Side. Nathan had become an entertainer when he was very young, beginning his career in vaudeville, eventually changing his name and moving to Hollywood. Some people in the crowd tried to get his autograph but his chauffeur pushed through the throng clearing a path ahead of the comedian and the two of them went up the steps of the synagogue and disappeared inside. Two police cars drove up and parked behind the limousine. Two uniformed cops got out of each car and waded into the crowd, telling people to move away from the synagogue entrance.

  Nobody left; they were determined to wait until George Burns came out so they could see him smile and wave his cigar at them again. A black hearse pulled up and stopped in the middle of the street. Roy and Elmo crossed the street to get away from the people pushing and shoving one another in order to be in better positions to watch the mourners leave for the cemetery. More cars came and parked in a line behind the hearse.

  Two mechanics from the gas station came out from the garage and stood on the sidewalk with Roy and Elmo. The name patches on their coveralls were Rip and Don.

  “I didn’t know George Burns was a Jew,” said Rip.

  “I like his wife on the show,” said Don. “She’s always getting’ things mixed up and he stands around holdin’ a big cigar and explains what she said.”

  “I know a guy named Bill Burns,” Rip said. “He’s a Lutheran.”

  Roy and Elmo did not wait to see George Burns come back out. They were walking to Elmo’s house when he said, “What if George Burns changed his name back to Birnbaum now? He’s sixty years old or older and famous, not just starting out, so he shouldn’t be worried about anti-Semites preventing him from getting work. Everyone knows who George Burns is, right? Everyone in the entertainment business knows he’s a Jew. So do his fans.”

  “Rip, the grease monkey at the Standard station, didn’t know.”

  “It would be an important statement against anti-Semitism, I think,” said Elmo.

  “You should write him a letter,” Roy said, “and tell him that.”

  When the boys got to the house Elmo’s father was in the gangway digging up dirt around his tomato plants. Elmo told him his idea and that Roy had suggested he write to George Burns. Big Sol Rubinsky owned a salvage business on the south side of Chicago and had fought in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II.

  “Them guys don’t think like that,” he said. “You’d just be wastin’ a stamp.”

  The next day Roy read in the Sun-Times that George Burns had been in town for his brother’s funeral. The article said that due to personal differences the brothers had not talked to or seen each other in many years. When asked the reasons for their estrangement, George Burns was quoted as saying the only difference between them was that his brother did not smoke cigars.

  LAMENT FOR A DAUGHTER OF EGYPT

  When he was a small boy, Roy’s mother liked to throw parties. She was a good dancer, especially of the Latin variety such as the samba, mambo and cha-cha-cha. After her divorce from Roy’s father, when Roy was five years old, his mother invited several couples to their apartment on Saturday nights every other week or so. Her own companions during the three years between the divorce and her second marriage were a succession of over-smiling, iron-handshaking, smooth-dancing guys who were always surprised that she had a child. It was obvious to Roy that she had not mentioned his existence to any of them prior to the evenings of her parties.

  On one of these occasions, while her guests were shuffling tipsily to Art Blakey’s “Jodie’s Cha-cha,” Roy’s mother and her date, a broad-shouldered, slick-haired man with a dark brown paint-smear mustache named Bob Arno, got into a tiff over his having danced once too often with someone’s wife. Roy usually hung out on the periphery observing the action. His mother’s wrangling with Arno began in the kitchen, where he was in the process of mixing himself a drink, then continued into the diningroom before ending abruptly in the front hall, where he hammered the remainder of his cocktail, handed the empty glass to her and left the apartment.

  Three women immediately surrounded Roy’s mother, each of them chattering like monkeys about the incident, indicting the wife as the instigator. A tall, blonde woman appeared in the hallway, a mink stole draped around her otherwise bare shoulders, said good night to the other women and made a swift exit. A few seconds later, a husky man in a baggy gray suit approached them.

  “Have you seen Helen?” he asked.

  His face was green and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “I believe she just went out to get a pack of cigarettes,” said Kay O’Connor, a skinny redhead about whom Roy had once heard his mother say never left her house without make-up on and a gun in her purse.

  “Helen doesn’t smoke,” said the man.

  “Come on, Marty,” Roy’s mother said to him, “let’s dance.”

  She handed Bob Arno’s empty glass to Roy, took one of the man’s hands and led him into the livingroom.

  “Didn’t you used to date Bob Arno?” one of the women asked Kay O’Connor.

  “He’s afraid of me,” Kay said.

  “You mean he’s afraid of Harvey,” said the third woman.

  “What’s the diff?” said Kay.

  The three women walked into the livingroom.

  Roy watched his mother doing the cha-cha with the husky man. His face had turned from green to bright red and Roy’s mother was laughing, showing all of her teeth.

  After the cha-cha number ended, someone put on another record. A woman’s voice, high-pitched with a tremble in it, delivered the song’s lyrics slowly and directly, but somehow a half-step behind the band without dragging the beat. Everyone stopped talking and laughing and listened.

  “I still remember/the first time you said/If I can’t be free/I’d rather be dead/Now that you’re gone/and nothing has changed/the answer to my question/can be arranged.”

  Somebody took off the record and put on a mambo and people started talking and laughing again. Roy went to the kitchen, put the glass in the sink, then went to his room and closed the door.

  The next morning, he asked his mother if she thought it had been a good party.

  “Not all bad,” she said, “but not all good, either.”

  “Are you going to see Mr. Arno again?”

  His mother reached far back into a cabinet, found a clean cup, and poured coffee for herself. The kitchen was a mess.

  “He’s not in our plans any more, I don’t think,” she said. “You don’t like him, anyway, do you, Roy?”

  THE OLD WEST

  Like most young boys in the 1950s, Roy often wondered what it would have been like to have lived in the Old West. Movies and television shows mostly glorified those days, despite frontier lawlessness and having to fight hostile Indians. The reality that not many people lived into let alone past their thirties did not enter into Roy’s thinking; to a seven or eight year old, thirty or more years might as well be two hundred. Neither did the idea of men killing one another without remorse deter Roy and his playmates in the least. Growing up in Chicago, they were used to hearing and reading about gangsters strangling and shooting their adversaries; also, most of the boys were sons of men who had fought in World War II, some of whom had been wounded or had brothers who died in battle. Violent death was a not unfamiliar circumstance, nor was it devoid of meaning; but this did not preclude their pantomiming violence in their fantasy scenarios.

  Rube Danko, a ten year old cousin of Roy’s friend Billy Katz,
had, thanks to Billy, the reputation of being an exceptionally fast draw. Danko lived in a rough neighborhood, and Billy bragged about how tough his cousin was. When Billy brought him around one day, Roy was surprised that even though Rube was a couple of years older, he was short and pudgy. Danko didn’t look tough and had a seemingly permanent grin on his puffy-cheeked face. He did not say much, and agreed to participate in whatever games his cousin and the other boys were playing. Danko wore a shiny silver and black gunbelt and badly scuffed brown and white cowboy boots, a black cowboy hat, blue jeans and a green T-shirt with the words Logan Square Boys Club written on it in white lettering.

  Jimmy Boyle, Tommy Cunningham and Roy were the good guys; Katz, Danko and Murphy were the bad guys. Following a big shootout, only two boys were left standing: Roy and Rube Danko. The final showdown was between them, a quick-draw gunfight. Whoever pulled their gun and fired first won; the losers would then have to buy cokes for everyone.

  Roy and Danko faced off ten feet apart. Katz’s cousin was grinning, fingering the butt of his gun. Roy drew, pointed his revolver at Rube and shouted, “Bang!” Danko did not draw, just stood there smiling. Finally, he pulled his pistol and fired it twice into the air.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “they’re blanks, and I’ll buy the Cokes.”

  Later that day, after Rube had left, Jimmy Boyle said to Billy Katz, “Your cousin is weird. What if those bullets weren’t really blanks?”

  “His father works for the government,” said Billy. “The FBI, maybe. I’m not sure. The gun must belong to him.”

  “Did you know it was real?” Roy asked.

  Katz shook his head.

  “The kid’s crazy,” said Tommy. “Why’s he always smiling?”

  Johnny Murphy pushed Billy in his chest and said, “Don’t bring him around to play with us any more.”

  A couple of years later, Billy told Roy that his cousin Rube had gotten killed playing Russian Roulette.

  “He was probably smiling when he pulled the trigger,” Roy said.

  INCURABLE

  “Your father was a very generous man. He’d give you the shirt off his back, if he liked you. But in business he was tough, even ruthless; nobody got the better of him. Your mother shouldn’t have divorced him; but then she shouldn’t have married him, either.”

  Roy and his Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother, were riding in Buck’s Cadillac convertible on Dale Mabry Boulevard in Tampa, Florida, having just inspected a prospective site for a housing project Buck’s company, Gulf Construction, was considering for development. Roy was thirteen years old; his father had been dead for almost two years. Since his parents had divorced when Roy was five, he had not known his father as well as he would have liked. During most of his childhood, Buck had been the primary paternal figure and influence in Roy’s life.

  “Were you and my dad friends?”

  “We were friendly. He was only one year older but he had been in business since he was very young, so he was more experienced. I was just getting started as a civil engineer when your mother married him; and then for the first two years they were together I was up in the Yukon building the railroad. He knew most of the important people in Chicago, he made a good living. Your father made sure your mother had whatever she wanted and she enjoyed the nightlife. He was a twenty-four hour kind of guy.”

  “He was much older than my mother.”

  “Fifteen years older. He was good to her, and he really loved you.”

  “Why didn’t Nanny like him?”

  “Your grandmother didn’t dislike him, Roy. She was just protective of your mother. She was afraid of some of the people your dad did business with.”

  “I met a lot of those guys. They were nice to me.”

  “Why shouldn’t they have been? You were a little boy and nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of your father.”

  “Nanny said they were dangerous.”

  “Even after your parents were divorced, if my mother had a problem she called your dad.”

  “Did he always fix it?”

  “He loved your mother, so I’m sure he did what he could.”

  “I remember once when a guy my mother didn’t want to see any more kept calling her and coming around, and Nanny said to her, ‘If you don’t call Rudy to take care of him, I will.’ ”

  “There’s a good Cuban place up here, La Teresita. Feel like eating?”

  “Sure.”

  Buck pulled the Caddy into the parking lot of the restaurant. The sun was going down and when they got out of the car a strong breeze was blowing in off the Gulf.

  “Just a minute, Roy. I’m going to put up the top in case it rains.”

  “I’ll do it, Unk.”

  Roy slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and pushed the button that controlled the top. Once it was up, he fastened both the driver’s and passenger’s sides, turned the key off, removed it, got out and handed the key to his uncle. The wind felt good and Roy stood still for a moment watching the sky turn different shades of red. This was one of the best things about Florida, he thought, the sunsets.

  His mother had had three husbands since she divorced his father. Roy felt better when he was with his uncle. They went fishing together and Roy worked on construction jobs for him. Buck taught him about navigation, mineralogy, the correct way to build a staircase and the architecture of bridges. He treated Roy differently than other men, not exactly as an equal, but Roy felt that he could trust him, that he could talk to his uncle about almost anything.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” Roy said.

  Buck’s first wife had divorced him and Roy knew that his uncle’s second marriage was on the rocks.

  “ ‘Weak you will find it in one only part, now pierced by love’s incurable dart.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lines from a sonnet by John Milton. I had to memorize it when I was in high school. Do you remember Rameses Thompson, who used to work for me?”

  “The black guy who had a holster for his handgun on the inside of the driver’s side door of his pickup truck. Is he still around?”

  “No. He killed his common-law wife, Rosita, and her girlfriend.”

  “His wife had a girlfriend?”

  “They were stepsisters, from Panama City. Thompson got caught in Mobile, Alabama, and a cop shot him in his spine. I hear he’s alive but can’t use his arms or legs.”

  “He was very strong. He could lift two chairs at the same time holding each one by only one leg.”

  “Rosita was ugly and lazy, but Thompson was crazy about her.”

  Another thing Roy liked about the west coast of Florida was that rain was never far away. It started a few minutes after he and his uncle were inside La Teresita.

  SHRIMPERS

  Roy and his friend Willy Duda were looking for a summer job. They were both fourteen years old and temporary work that paid decently in Tampa, Florida, in 1961, was hard to find. Tampa was a small southern city then, a fishing and cigar town with a large ethnic Cuban population. Roy’s uncle Buck, with whom Roy lived during the summer months, was in the construction business; he would have employed both his nephew and Willy Duda, as he had in better times, but the building trade was slow at the moment so the boys had to look elsewhere to make money. Buck, who had been a lieutenant commander in the navy during the second world war, suggested they sign up to work on a shrimp boat.

  “These little boats have small crews,” Buck told them, “usually only the captain and two or three helpers. The boats go out for ten days, two weeks, maybe three at most, then bring in their catch, sell it, take a few days off, and go back out again. Come on, I’ll take you down to the docks and we’ll see if someone needs hands.”

  Roy and Willy didn’t know anything about shrimping but Roy’s uncle said the work was pretty simple. It was a cloudless, sunny day, as usual, and Buck talked while he drove.

  “You toss out the nets into the shrimp beds, haul ’em in
and load ’em in a cooler. It’s repetitious, hard work, and there’s nothing to do but work on a shrimp boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. You sleep on deck.”

  “It’s hot as Hades out there,” said Willy. “We’ll fry like catfish being on the water twenty-four hours a day.”

  “You boys can hold up for a fortnight,” Buck said. “It’ll be a good experience.”

  The shrimp boats docked under the Simon Bolívar Bridge. Roy’s uncle drove his 1957 Cadillac Eldorado convertible right onto the wharf, parked, and he and the two boys got out. Most of the boats were empty or their captains were asleep under a canopy. Buck, Willy and Roy walked along the wooden planks until they came upon a man in a boat mending nets. The boat’s name, painted on the stern in faded black letters, was Lazarus.

  “Ahoy there, captain,” Roy’s uncle called out to him. “I’ve got a couple of strong young men here looking for work. Are you hiring?”

  The man had a lobster-red face with a six day beard and a dead cigar sticking out of the right side of his mouth. Roy thought he looked to be about forty years old, maybe older. The man’s left eye was closed and did not open during the time he spoke to them. He was wearing a sleeveless green sweatshirt inside out that had brown and black stains on it.

  “These boys are young but they’re able bodied,” Buck shouted.

  The man took a quick look up at Roy and Willy then returned his attention to the nets.

  “Too young,” he said. “A shrimp boat ain’t no place for clean cut kids. Only lowlifes work shrimpers. Alkys, criminals, cutthroats, perverts. Nothin’ to do but haul, mend, swill bad hooch like the devil’s slaves and bugger each other.”

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Unk,” said Roy.

  Two weeks later he and Willy were watching the TV news when a picture of the shrimp boat captain Buck had talked to came on the screen followed by a female reporter standing on the dock under the Bolívar Bridge.

  “Albert Matanzas,” said the reporter, “captain and owner of a shrimp boat out of Tampa, was discovered by the Coast Guard drifting in Tampa Bay close to death tied with a rope to the wheel of his boat with stab wounds in his left arm and shoulder and a bullet wound in his right leg. Two men were lying dead from gunshots on the deck. According to a statement Captain Matanzas gave to the Coast Guard, a third man was lost overboard in the Gulf after being shot by one of the dead men. It has not yet been determined what caused the dispute among the men. Matanzas remains in critical condition in Tampa General Hospital.”