Chicago Noir

by Neal Pollack

  "Fuck Cuba," she said aloud, in shamelessly accented English. She paused to regard the coffee's approachability. Fuck fucking Cuba—and Mexico too.

  Then in one cranelike swoop, she snatched up the demitasse, opened her wide mouth even wider, and tossed the scorching black bracer down her throat.

  It had been twenty-five years since Destiny, a/k/a Dagoberto Fors Arias, a/k/a Dago Fors, had landed on American shores. He arrived in South Florida from Cuba on a blistering summer day in 1980 in a small yacht named San Dimas which carried a beneficent Catholic dissident to Key West and was piloted by the meanest-looking priest Dago had ever seen, a bulldog of a guy named Mariano Delgado. It had been a lifetime since that journey and Destiny was in no mood to look back. But the Mariel boat lift had been both historic and controversial and, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, she was one of its stranger success stories.

  Now a newspaper reporter, a young Cuban-American dyke with misplaced nostalgia and a predisposition to all things Cuban, had tracked her down and wanted an interview. Destiny had tried to demur but the girl was insistent. She'd seen her on TV, an intense but pretty tomboy, disarming in a way but with the ferocity of those small dogs who clamp on and never let go. Somehow, she'd gotten Destiny to agree to the interview; somehow, she'd gotten Destiny to agree to meet her at the one place in all of Chicago Destiny had vowed never to return, La Caverna Club on 26th and Kedvale, so deep in the heart of the Mexican barrio that it seemed, but for the cruel cover of snow, that it wasn't in a northern enclave at all but at the very center of some lawless border town.

  Destiny sighed and ground out the Romeo y Julieta on an ashtray in the shape of the island, a long pink caiman, hollow inside.

  ***

  Dago Fors had gotten out of Cuba because in 1980 Cuban authorities let open the island's borders, causing a gush of refugees to force their way north on anything that would float. Almost immediately, hundreds of exiles had begun racing boats south to pick up their seafaring relatives. When the avalanche of refugees was so great that it embarrassed the socialist government, the Cubans emptied their jails and mental hospitals and forced the exiles to take along former inmates and other undesirables. It was their "lacra social," their catch-all category. Indeed, the snarling priest who'd brought Dago to safety had been promised the release of the Catholic dissident, who was his brother-in-law, as it turned out, only if he agreed to take a bunch of fairies back with him on his roomy boat.

  Dago Fors, café au lait, pouty-lipped, a catlike twenty-four-year-old drag queen, was doing his best to be one of them. When word got out about the goings on, he put on the trashiest orange blouse he could find, the tightest, most worn jeans (with nothing underneath, naturally), and immediately set himself to slapping his flip-flops up and down the Malecón in the hopes of getting arrested. Within twenty-four hours, he found himself with an itchy crust of salt from the sea spray on his skin but at last standing in an official line of so-called "social scum."

  By his own calculations, Dago knew it might be days, if he got out at all, unless the official system was interrupted in some way. A bribe was impossible for him, with a life's fortune of less than forty pesos in his pocket. So Dago screeched, his back arching each time. And the more he began to loudly comment on this or that part of the guards' anatomies, the more irritated they became, and the more anxious they were to get rid of him. When Mariano the priest pulled up, the guards figured they could exact a double price: rid the revolution of the insufferable fag and make him pay for his unrelentingly bad behavior by sticking him with somebody big and mean and morally imposing.

  To their surprise, Mariano sternly shook his head and touched his clerical collar every time one of the Cubans signaled for him to let Dago on his boat, but the brother-in-law, already on the deck and perhaps delirious from his prison trials, beckoned otherwise with his hand. That's about when Mariano threw open the throttle, sans scum aboard.

  Immediately, the guards started swearing, shouting and waving frantically, the dissident brother-in-law began to scream at the taciturn priest, and in the confusion Dago Fors gritted his teeth and threw himself, or was pushed by one of the guards (it was hard to say), into the froth, his fingers urgently gripping one of the yacht's dangling ropes. At that, the brother-in-law whooped with joy and began to reel him in, Mariano now gunning the yacht's engines as it roared its way out of Cuban waters.

  It had been a surprisingly quick trip north, Destiny reminisced so many years later. But it wasn't Mariano, as the Cuban guards had hoped, but the brother-in-law who gave him a lesson in catechism, going out of his way to explain Saint Dimas, for whom the yacht had been named.

  "He was the good thief," he said, "died on a cross just like Jesus, on the same day, with him. Patron saint of criminals. Bet you didn't know criminals had a patron saint, huh? Well, Saint Dimas repented at the last minute, surrendered, and so Jesus said he'd take him to Paradise. It's what we Catholics call baptism by desire."

  Sitting in her kitchen now, Destiny remembered the helter skelter arrival in Key West and the resettlement unexpectedly negotiated for him by the gruff Mariano. In a matter of weeks, Dago Fors found himself sponsored through a church in Chicago's trendy Lake View neighborhood, living in a spare room belonging to an elderly white gay man who practically licked his lips at the sight of him.

  Mariano was assigned to a small but thriving parish in a South Side Mexican barrio. As soon as he left, the elderly white man immediately took Dago by the hand around the apartment, explaining exactly how he expected each room to be cleaned and with what products. He lingered lovingly over an antique bureau and demonstrated the gentle rubbing action to be employed with the special cloth and lemon oil. He also seemed to think that Dago's penis should be grateful enough to stand on command and insert accordingly.

  "He thinks he hit the lottery!" Dago complained to Mariano that night, whispering into the kitchen phone now that the elderly man was asleep. "Somebody to clean his toilet and fuck him too. This isn't my idea of freedom!"

  Mariano showed up the next day, accepting a cup of coffee from the elderly man, who nodded enthusiastically as he explained that these were difficult days of transition. The old man was aghast as Mariano delivered his sermon, with Dago prim and still across from the two of them at the kitchen table. The elderly man, his hand shaking, assured them both that his largesse had been lost in translation. On his way out, Mariano gave Dago a stern, annoyed look.

  That night the elderly man made himself a scrumptious beef brisket, heaping mounds of creamy mashed potatoes doused in butter beside it. It was not by any stretch a gourmet meal, though it was a particularly hearty one. Dago watched him devour it, his mouth flooding, his own plate empty. When Dago reached for a roll, the elderly man slapped his hand, surprisingly hard, and suggested that if he wanted a roll, if he wanted anything at all, Dago could clean the mess in the kitchen, bloody cutting boards and green stems, peelings and greasy foil scattered all over the counters. Later, in the privacy of the spare room, a determined Dago took a shoelace from a boot he'd found in the hall closet and tied the tightest, most arduous knot he could in its very center. He did this over and over, until it was hard as a pebble.

  "Saint Dimas," he whispered in the dark, remembering the prayer that Mariano's dissident brother-in-law had taught him on the yacht, "I will not undo this knot from around your balls until you return to me my way, my path, my fate."

  The reporter—her name was Zoe Pino, an understandable reduction, Destiny would find out later, from Zozima Castro Pino— already knew most of his arrival story. She'd drawn its outline in an email that made the jaunt across the waters seem considerably more adventurous, yet abbreviated it into one solid paragraph. Destiny knew that what Zoe wanted now was the story of how Dago Fors had transformed himself from a little nobody Cuban wetback to something of an international drag legend. But she didn't just want a recitation of facts, of this-happened-then-this-happened. She already knew about all the pageants Destiny had won, she c
ould list all her titles and claims to fame. She had Destiny's lines memorized from her cameo appearances in The Garden at Midnight, a film based on a murder mystery that ended up getting much greater box office than anyone could have suspected. Destiny had turned that into a flurry of talk show appearances, in English and Spanish, and even set up a website that sold DVDs of her performances, a beauty booklet she'd penned, and assorted Destiny accessories, like T-shirts and lunch boxes.

  Zoe had immersed herself so completely in the minutiae of something so incredibly niched that she'd said, as casually as if she were asking a waiter for a tall drink of water, "Destiny, I think you're even bigger than David de Alba," who was really the greatest of them all and who, like Destiny, was a Cuban who had gotten his professional start in Chicago. Of course, David had never been to La Caverna; David, who could pass as Judy Garland's reflection, would have never in his life set foot in La Caverna.

  Dago Fors had always been very, very good at one thing: being a drag queen. He wasn't a cross-dresser, he wasn't a female impersonator; he wasn't confused. He was a marvelously talented performer, an impressive six feet tall, with style and imagination and just enough restraint to give off an air of enduring elegance. No bookkeeping or waiting tables for him, this was all he knew how to do, all that he'd ever done.

  In Havana he'd gotten to practice his skills due to uncommon good luck. Sure, there were tons of underground drag shows, something pieced together at somebody's apartment until an intolerant neighbor turned them in. But his real showcase had been a lunchtime show, performed completely under the auspices of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It was conveniently chaired by a friend's aunt, whose husband was a high-ranking military officer blackmailed to okay the whole thing. It turned out that Dago's friend's aunt had found out her husband was having an affair with the wife of an even higher-ranking officer and was now using the info to get him to do pretty much whatever she wanted, including lending his official imprimatur to the lunchtime drag extravaganza. As a result, for two years Dago had been free to be himself—or whomever he wanted to be—for ninety minutes every Monday to Friday.

  The show took place at a worker's cafeteria across the street from the Presidential Palace, right in the middle of the city, accessible to anyone who had the time and inclination to come. There was no stage per se, just a space opened up by pushing the long lunchroom tables together. This discouraged complicated choreography but really put the premium on presence. Moreover, without stage lights, and with the light of day pouring in unfiltered, the queens really had to be extraordinary to make magic in so naked a place. For Dago, it was a grueling but exuberant apprenticeship. Nothing would ever be as hard again. Nothing would ever require so much of his psyche and heart.

  In Havana back then, all the girls loved to do Celia Cruz, the exiled queen of salsa. It was not that Celia was particularly beautiful, because she wasn't at all, but her music was saucy and her costumes, even then, interplanetary. Lots of queens also liked Garland, of course, and Barbra Streisand and Marilyn Monroe. But the girls of color tended to go for Celeste Mendoza, who wore towering African wraps on her head and rivaled Celia for sheer rhythmic audacity, or Juana Bacallao, who had a nice ghetto thing going and was a lot of fun.

  For Dago there really was only one choice: Moraima Secada, also known as La Mora. A gorgeous mulatta, a little richer in color than Dago, she'd begun as a member of a famous quartet but went off on her own to record a style known in Cuba as filin, a kind of overthe-top ballad in which both lyric and melody worked from simple melancholia to unfettered tragedy in about three and a half minutes.

  Her style was sui generis: She sang with a stern face, as if she were incandescent with rage. She would tilt her head up, press her lips together, and raise her arm, fist clenched. But as she brought up her trembling limb, her fingers would slowly open, almost against her will, as if all fortune could take flight. La Mora was so intense that after her husband was killed in the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airline on its way back from Panama, she still kept her nightclub engagement that night in Havana, the only crack in her otherwise militant façade a suppressed sob, like a hiccup.

  Of course, in Chicago no one knew anything about La Mora. When Dago finally found himself covered by the honeyed lights of a real stage, there wasn't a soul in the audience who had a clue about his inspiration. In the long run, it was just as good that way— Dago was able to inhabit her, to fold and tuck and invent without worry. After a while, he came to believe he'd conjured her whole, except for the aching sadness left by the turbulence of love suddenly and unexpectedly lost. That was real, real for both of them, real and terrifying too.

  The phone rang. Destiny didn't need to glance at the caller ID to know it was Zoe Pino. There was just enough of a yap to give her away.

  "Destiny, babes," the girl said into the answering machine, "I'm just calling to confirm our date tonight. You say the first show doesn't start until 1 a.m., right? I was thinking then we could meet a little earlier, for a late dinner or drinks or whatever, you know, and just talk. I really wanna get as much of the background on this as possible. Call or text me, okay? See you later, corazon."

  Destiny knew what Zoe wanted from her: a story about the good queen, the queen that against all odds found the liberty and success that was the inspiration for so many Marielitos. But in her few informal talks with Zoe, Destiny had already experienced a certain discomfort: Was Zoe trying to get her to say her dreams had all come true? They hadn't, but would admitting that be some sort of betrayal? Or would going along with the story of awe be what was treasonous? If she had been able to accomplish what she had, was she inadvertently passing judgment on those who'd had a hard time?

  In fact, what Destiny feared was that Zoe might have a secret angle: that Dago Fors had come to town, learned the ropes at La Caverna, then forsaken his Latino brethren forever to become a huge hit uptown and around the world. After he'd crossed north of Fullerton Avenue, not once had Destiny ever set foot in a Mexican club, or anywhere near anything even vaguely Mexican, for that matter.

  Initially, Dago had actually gone in search of La Caverna, although he didn't know that then. The day after Mariano's visit to the elderly gay man's, Dago got up, borrowed a coat from the hall closet, and walked out. But as soon as he opened the door, he was stung by the bite of Chicago's autumn and he hugged the coat closer to him as he headed east on Barry Street to Broadway. He had no idea then he had aimed for the very heart of Chicago's gay male world.

  He'd vaguely imagined he could sleep in a park if he had to but that had been before he'd tested the temperatures, which were to him the equivalent of a Havana winter. The sky was gray; the streets were shiny from a predawn shower.

  He turned south on Broadway, unaware of direction, and peeked in the large window of a diner right on the corner. It was well lit and clean and no sooner had he slid into a booth, a slender Mexican man with cobalt hair and a caterpillar mustache was deftly and deferentially wiping clean his table. Dago surveyed the room. It took him all of a second to realize the busboys were Latinos, squareshouldered youth who walked with a slight side-to-side sway, their heads tilted forward whether they were carrying trays or wet towels or simply disappearing between the two rubber-mat doors that slapped into the kitchen.

  Dago waited patiently, then focused on the boy who'd cleaned his table. He was a little shorter than the others, a little boxier and compact, with more of a macho strut perhaps, although—Dago knew instantly—gay as a goose. Dago also knew that it was only a matter of throwing him a slightly bewildered smile, a vaguely helpless sigh, and the boy would find a reason to come back.

  Quique Lopez proved a better connection than Dago could have ever guessed. He was, as Dago had hoped, Guatemalan, but with fake papers that said he was Mexican, fluent in Spanish but also perfectly capable of communicating in English. And he'd been in Chicago long enough so that, once Dago explained his plight, Quique knew immediately what to do.

 
"La Caverna, that's where you need to go," he said, "but all I can do is take you. The people I know there, I don't even know their real names, you understand? There are American places, a couple around here, some downtown. One on the South Side, I think, but that's a black thing. Maybe you could pass but … without English, I just don't know."

  After his shift, Quique took Dago to the red line on Belmont, paid for his fare, and, various line changes and nearly an hour later, led him off a bus from 26th and Ashland to a nondescript building a few blocks away. There, in a studio apartment with six mattresses, they napped platonically, ate a modest meal of carnitas and rice, and watched TV until about 10 o'clock, when Quique again led him to the bus stop, this ride straight west, until they were deposited just steps from La Caverna, a club so notorious it didn't boast any kind of sign. Instead, it had a huge metal door with black lettering stenciled across it, unintelligible to Dago at the time, but warning customers not just about IDs but also about its ban on handguns.

  There wasn't much of a crowd inside at that hour. A gaggle of queens who doubled as waitresses stared as Dago and Quique strolled in, waved through by the cross-eyed bouncer. Dago was amazed: There was a man dressed in black, replete with black boots, black bolo, and black cowboy hat at the bar. A stern looking middle-aged Mexican man served drinks. Quique led Dago to a corner table where a tiny elderly woman with reading glasses was going through a ledger. A glass of lemonade accompanied her.