by Tom Wolfe
“That’s who it is!” said the TV voice. “That’s the teacher, José Estevez! A civics teacher at Lee de Forest High School. He’s now under arrest for punching a student in front of an entire class and then dragging him to the floor, we’re told, and all but paralyzing him with some sort of neck hold. The police have closed in around him in a sort of—uh-uhhh—phalanx to protect him until they can get him inside the police van.”
—a squall of yowls and howls and gullet-ripping epithets—
“They’ve figured out that’s him, Estevez, the teacher who assaulted one of their schoolmates about two hours ago!”
“What is that shirt?” says Lantier, in French.
The teacher and his army of cop bodyguards are pulling nearer and nearer to the camera.
Ghislaine answers in French, “Looks like a guayabera to me. A Cuban shirt.”
The TV voice: “They’ve almost reached the van… you can see right there. The riot police have done an amazing job, holding back this big and very angry crowd of students—”
Lantier looks Ghislaine squarely in the face again and says, “Philippe comes home from school, from the same classroom where all this happens, an army of cops occupies the schoolyard, and there’s a mob of his own schoolmates ready to hang his teacher from a tree if they can lay hands on him—and Philippe doesn’t want to talk about it, and his Neg pal Antoine doesn’t want to talk about it? If that had been me, I’d still be talking about it after all these years! What’s going on with Philippe? Do you have any idea at all?”
Ghislaine shook her head and said, “No, Papa… none at all.”
7
The Mattress
::::::Do I exist?… If so, where?… Oh, man, I don’t live… anywhere… I don’t belong anywhere… I’m not even one of “my people” anymore, am I.::::::
Nestor Camacho—remember him?—was evaporating, disintegrating, coming apart—meat from bone, turning into Jell-O with a beating heart, sinking back into the primordial ooze.
Never before could he have possibly imagined himself attached to… nothing. Who could? Not until this moment, just after midnight, as he emerged from the locker room of the Marine Patrol marina and started walking to the parking lot—
Officer Camacho!
… and now he was hearing things. Nobody but cops coming off the shift were out here at the midnight hour, and no cop was going to call him “Officer,” unless it was a joke. Himself alone, on a too warm, too sticky, too soupy, too sweaty, too dimly lit dusky September night in Miami… had he ever had the faintest notion of what desolation was? He hadn’t tried to kid himself about what was happening to him over the past twenty-four hours.
Exactly twenty-four hours ago he had left this place, the marina, soaring on the applause of his fellow cops, astounded by the realization that the entire city—the entire city!—had been watching him—him! Nestor Camacho!—on TV as he saved a poor panicked wretch on top of a seventy-foot mast teetering over the edge of the Halusian Gulp. Barely fifteen minutes later he walks into his own house—and finds his father standing right at the door, anger up, paunch out, to dismiss him from the family… and from the Cuban people, while he’s at it. Nestor is so upset, he barely sleeps at all and gets up in the morning and learns that the Spanish-language media—which essentially means the Cuban media—has been saying the same thing for the past twelve hours: Nestor Camacho has betrayed his own family and the Cuban people. His father not only considers him a non-person, he acts as if he no longer has a corporeal presence. He acts like he literally can’t see him. Who? Him? Nestor? He’s not here anymore. His neighbors, people he has known practically all his life, turn their backs on him, actually turn around 180 degrees and show him their backsides. His one last hope, his salvation, his one remaining attachment to the life he has lived for the past twenty-five years, namely, all his life, is his girlfriend. He has been seeing her, dating her, which is to say, these days, going to bed with her, and loving her with all his heart. So she shows up just a little over eight hours ago, just before he has to leave for the shift… to inform him that she is seeing, dating, and no doubt sharing the sheets with somebody else now, and hasta la vista, my dear Damaged Goods.
To top it all off, the shift starts, and his fellow cops, who were flocking about him like a bunch of cheerleaders twenty-four hours ago, have turned—well, not cold, but distant. None badmouths him. None acts like or insinuates that he has betrayed anybody. None acts as if he wants to take it back, the praise they gave him last night. They’re embarrassed, that’s all. After twenty-four hours they have this piece of meat beaten black-and-blue by Spanish-language radio, Spanish TV, the Spanish newspaper—El Nuevo Herald—and even kindly souls discreetly avert their eyes.
The only one who showed the faintest desire to talk to him about the whole mess was Lonnie Kite, his americano Safe Boat mate. He took him aside just before they boarded the Safe Boat to begin the shift and said, “You have to look at it this way, Nestor”—Nest-ter. “If that little fucker had been up on top of a mast almost anywhere else, all anybody would be saying is ‘This kid Camacho is Tarzan with a pair of stones you could take down a building with.’ Your bad luck is that it had to happen in front of a bunch a gawkers on the Rickenbacker Causeway on a Friday afternoon at rush hour. They all get out of their cars and line the bridge, and they got the best seats in the house for a game a Cuban Refugee—he the brave little guy—fighting Dumb Cop. They don’t know shit. Without all these clueless assholes, there wouldn’ a been nobody with their undies in an uproar.”
The americano meant to be bucking up his spirits, but he depressed Nestor even more. Even the americanos knew! Even the americanos knew that Nestor Camacho just got whipped.
He was hoping something would happen on this shift, something so big, like a big boat collision—collisions, mostly involving small boats, happened all the time—that it would absorb his attention entirely. But no, it was the usual… boats adrift and they can’t get the engine to turn over… somebody thought they saw swimmers out in a boat lane… some idiot in a cigarette boat is barreling across the water, making extreme turns to rock other boats with his wake… a bunch a drunks are out on the bay, throwing bottles and unidentified trash into the water… that was the night’s catch, and none of it was serious enough to distract Nestor from his deep worries… and by the time they returned to the marina, he had begun totaling up totaling up totaling up his miseries…
… and the scene before him captured his tally—desolation—perfectly. He was approaching the marina parking lot. Here in the midnight hour at least a third of it was empty. The parking lot’s lighting didn’t truly illuminate much of anything. It created the feeblest mechanical dusk imaginable. The palm trees around this perimeter were barely discernible. At best you could see some flat black shapes. As for the cars in the lot, they were not so much shapes as feeble dusky glints of light… off a windshield here, a strip of chrome there… a wing mirror over there… a dub over there… feeble feeble reflections of feeble feeble light… In Nestor’s current state of mind it was worse than no light at all… this was light in its junk form…
He was heading for his Camaro… why?… where was he going to spend the night?
He could make out the Camaro only because he knew exactly where he had parked it. He headed toward it out of sheer habit. And then what? He had to drive somewhere and stretch out and log a good solid ten hours of sleep. He couldn’t recall ever feeling this tired and empty in his life… burnt out, dried out, drained… and where was that healing sleep going to take place? All evening, every time there was a lull he’d call up friends, asking for a place to crash, anything, even guys he hadn’t seen since Hialeah High, and the answers were all like Jesús Gonzalo’s, Jesús, his best buddy on the wrestling team, and he says, “Uhhhh well, I ahhhh guess so, but I mean, how long you wanna stay just tonight, right?—because I told my cousin Ramón—he’s from New Jersey—and he said he might be coming to town tomorrow, and I told him—”
I now live… nowhere… I don’t belong anywhere. Once more the question popped into his head: Do I exist? The first couple of times it popped into his head, it was with a tinge of self-pity. The next couple of times, it was with a tinge of morbid humor. And now… with a tinge of panic. I’m doing the usual, heading for my car at the end of a shift… and I’ve got no place to drive it to! He stopped in his tracks. Tell me truthfully now… Do I exist?
“Officer Camacho! Hey! Over here! Officer Camacho!”
Over here was somewhere in the parking lot. Nestor peered into the feeble electro-dusk of the place. A tall white man was running toward him along a row of parked cars.
“John! hunh hunh hunh hunh Smith! hunh hunh from the Herald!” he shouted. Not in very good shape, whoever the hell you are hunh hunh hunh hunh… panting like that after jogging maybe 150 feet. Nestor didn’t recognize the name but “from the Herald” sounded okay. Alone in all the media the Herald had been at least halfway on his side.
“I’m sorry!” said the man as he drew closer. I hunhunhunhunh couldn’t figure out any other way to reach you!”
Once they were face-to-face, Nestor recognized him. He was the reporter who had been waiting with a photographer when he and the Sergeant and Lonnie Kite returned to the marina in the Safe Boat. He couldn’t have looked more americano if he made a conscious effort… tall… floppy blond hair, absolutely straight… a pointed nose… “I’m sorry for intruding hunh hunh hunh hunh. Did you read my story this morning?” said John Smith. “Was I fair?” He smiled. He gulped. He opened his eyes like a pair of morning glories.
As far as Nestor was concerned, this John Smith’s turning up in this parking lot at midnight might as well have been the sort of apparition that people who don’t sleep and don’t exist are prey to… He still had enough sanity left, however, to take this americano at face value. He wanted to ask the americano what he was doing here, but he couldn’t come up with any diplomatic way to put it. So he merely nodded… as if to say, tentatively, “Yes, I read your story and yes, you were fair.”
“I know you’re probably hunhunhunhunh about to go home,” said John Smith, “but could you spare just a couple of minutes? There’s some things hunhunhunhunh I need to ask you.”
An eerie form of elation brought Nestor’s numb central nervous system back to life. He was reconnecting with… something, in any case. Someone, even if only some americano newspaper reporter he didn’t even know, was offering him, if nothing else, an alternative to driving around all night talking to himself. The vagabond in the Camaro! Homeless in the headlines! But all he said was “About what?”
“Well, I’m writing a follow-up story, and I’d hate to have to write it without getting your response.”
Nestor just stared at him. ::::::Response? Response to what?:::::: The word set off a nameless sense of dread.
“Why don’t we go have a cup of coffee or something and sit down?”
Nestor stared at him some more. Talking to this baby-faced reporter could only get him in trouble unless some lieutenant or captain or deputy chief okayed it. On the other hand, he had talked to this guy twenty-four hours ago, and that was okay… and as long as he talked to the press, he existed. Was it not so? As long as he talked to the press, he was… somewhere. Wouldn’t you say? As long as he appeared in the press he belonged in this world… You had to use your imagination… He knew there was not a lieutenant, a captain, or a deputy chief in this world who would understand that, much less swallow it. But maybe they would understand this: “Greatgodalmighty, Lieutenant, put yourself in my shoes. I’m all alone. You can’t even imagine how alone.” It all boiled down to one thing. He needed someone to talk to, not in the sense of talking to a priest or anything like that. Just someone to talk to… just so he could feel like he existed again, after twenty-four hours’ terrible toll.
He gave reporter John Smith a very long, blank stare. He once more nodded yes without a trace of satisfaction, never mind enthusiasm…
“How about that place over there?” said the reporter. He was pointing toward Inga La Gringa’s bar.
“It’s too loud in there,” said Nestor. That much was true. What he didn’t say was that the noise would be coming from other Marine Patrol cops coming off the shift. “There’s a place called the Isle of Capri, over on Brickell, near the causeway. They’re open late and you can hear yourself talk, at least. It’s a little on the expensive side, though.” What he didn’t say was that no cop coming off the shift anywhere in Miami would be going to a place that expensive.
“Not a problem,” said John Smith. “It’s on the paper.”
Off they drove to the Isle of Capri, each in his own car. As soon as Nestor turned on the ignition in the Camaro, the air-conditioning blasted him in the face. As soon as he slipped the floor shift into drive and started off, the muffler blew. In concert the air-conditioning and the muffler rupture made him feel trapped inside one of those leaf blowers that are so loud, the seven-dollar-an-hour operators have to wear baffles over their ears… Trapped inside a leaf blower he was… questions were blowing around in his head. ::::::Why am I doing this? What’s in it for me, besides trouble? What’s he want me to respond to? Why would this be “on the paper,” as he put it? Why should I trust this americano? Just why? I shouldn’t, obviously… but I’m bereft of all that matters in this life! I don’t even have an ancestry… My goddamned grandfather, the great sluice gate operator for the Malecón waterworks, cut the family tree out from under me… and I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep. Christ, I’d rather have a conversation with a snake than have nobody to talk to.::::::
Nestor and the reporter sat at the bar and ordered coffee. Very deluxe looking, the bar at the Isle of Capri… Lights from below beamed up through an array of liquor bottles against a vast mirrored wall. The beams lit up the liquor bottles… absolutely glamorous, and the mirrored wall doubled the show. The show dazzled Nestor, even though he knew all these bottles existed for the benefit of middle-aged americanos who liked to talk about how “hammered” they got last night, how “wasted,” “smashed,” “destroyed,” “retarded,” and even how they “blacked out” and didn’t know where the hell they were when they woke up. The americano idea of being a Man sure wasn’t a Latino’s. Nevertheless, the way the bottles here in the Isle of Capri put on their light show made him feel delirious with the luxury of it all. He was also as tired as he had ever been in his life.
The coffee arrived, and John Smith of the Herald got down to business. “As I said, I’m doing a follow-up story to the man on the mast—how you saved the guy—but my sources tell me that far from looking at you as a hero, a lot of Cubans think of you as something close to a traitor”… whereupon he cocked his head and stared at Nestor with an expression that clearly asked what do you say to t
hat.
Nestor didn’t know what to say… the coffee with the sugar he heaped in it the Cuban way was ambrosial; it made him hungry. He hadn’t had enough to eat during the shift. The fact that his existence, if that was what it was, embarrassed other Marine Patrolmen took his appetite away. John Smith was waiting for an answer. Nestor was confused as to whether he should go into all this or not.
“I guess you should ask them,” he said.
“Ask who?”
“Ask… I mean… Cubans, I guess.”
“I’ve been doing that,” said John Smith, “but they’re not comfortable with me. To most of them I’m an outsider. They don’t want to say much… when I start asking them about ethnic attitudes and nationalities and anything in that area. They’re not comfortable with the Herald, period, as far as that goes.”
Nestor smiled, but not with pleasure. “That’s for sure.”
“Why does that make you smile?”
“Because where I come from, Hialeah, people say, ‘The Miami Herald’ and in the next breath, ‘Yo no creo.’ You’d think the full name of the paper was Yo No Creo el Miami Herald. You know ‘yo no creo’?”
“Sure. ‘I don’t believe.’ Yo comprendo. And they’re doing the same thing with you, Nestor.”
The reporter hadn’t called him by his first name before. It bothered Nestor. He didn’t know how to take it. He didn’t know whether the man was being congenial or using the first name the way you would somebody beneath you… like a fumigador. Many customers called his father Camilo right off the bat. “They’re twisting everything around with you, too,” the reporter was saying. “They’re taking what you did, which I—I think I made it pretty clear in what I wrote—which I consider an act of great courage and strength, and they’re twisting it into a cowardly act!”