Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  I break down and call them. I make up some story about a horrible nightmare that has frightened me out of my wits. I figure they’ll understand that. I also don’t care at this point what they think, or whether they’ll be mad at me.

  Within ten minutes, they’re home. The Void vanishes, instantly, but the pain lingers for quite some time. For days, in fact. I do my best to explain my “bad dream,” but fail miserably. I tell Lou and Norma that I dreamed that I’d been taken to the top of a very tall mountain and that from there I was hurled across the Florida Straits back to Cuba. I break down and cry, just as I did on that day when I first came to visit this house and this family.

  How the hell did I come up with that one?

  Norma tells me not to worry, that the highest point in the state of Florida is only around three hundred feet above sea level, and that it’s way up north, hundreds of miles away. There’s no mountain anywhere within sight that I can be taken to, and besides, she wouldn’t let anyone send me back to Cuba. And she hugs me, of course.

  Thank you, Norma.

  My adversary had won. No doubt about it. Knockout in the first three seconds of the first round. To top it off, without the Marquess of Queensberry rules, I was screwed from the get-go. My opponent just wouldn’t quit. The sónomambíche kept pummeling and kicking me while I was down and out, grinding me to a pulp.

  After that night, I knew I couldn’t face this opponent again. The only advantage I had over it was that I knew it could attack me only when I was alone. It was fairly easy to figure out how to avoid it, but telling Norma and Lou that they shouldn’t ever leave me alone wasn’t easy. I dawdled, and hoped they’d never go out again, in that way that kids hope against all hope, thinking that if they want something to be a certain way, all they have to do is wish for it hard enough. So I got waylaid a couple more times, when I came home and found the house empty. Then, another fine Saturday evening, they announced that they were going out again, and that I’d be babysitting.

  That was it. Meltdown time. I broke down again and told them I couldn’t stay alone again. Never again. I couldn’t find the right words, but tried to explain my fear anyway. All they could hear was that I was afraid. I suppose it was all they could understand. No one could understand this. I didn’t quite understand it myself.

  From that point forward, any time they went out they hired a baby-sitter. And Norma made it clear to me that she wasn’t too happy about that. An eleven-year-old boy shouldn’t need a babysitter of his own, she told me in no uncertain terms. Something was lacking in me, something important.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  Oddly enough, the goddamned babysitter from across the street, who was only a couple of years older than me, kept the Void at bay. I didn’t know why, exactly, but she did. All I could intuit was that she embodied their presence, somehow, simply because they’d hired her, and because I knew they’d have to come home to pay her and allow her to go back to her house.

  Through a haze, I figured out that, somehow, they’d come back for her, but not for me, or Philip, or Eric, or Victor. Parents and relatives had a way of disappearing, but neighbors and friends did not.

  It was crazy. But then again, I was crazy. What else could one expect?

  Knowing I was nuts didn’t keep me from moving on with my life or from having fun. No way, no how. I told myself I was only insane about one thing, and that in America, the land of excess, it was perfectly acceptable to have a quirk like mine. So, armed with much better English than I’d had back in June—and outfitted with new American eyeglasses—I went back to Everglades Elementary School in September, ready to begin sixth grade, finally, a year behind. No more outcast classroom hut on stilts for me: I went straight into a regular class for American kids, in which there were only two other Cubans.

  I didn’t feel like an outsider as I rode my bike to school that first day.

  Me? I’m just like you. Look at me. Do I look any different? Listen to me speak. Do you hear anything odd, anything close to Desi Arnaz? Do ya? Watch me perform in the classroom. Betcha I’ll not only keep up with you, but lead the way. Football? Yeah, I can do that. Hike! Ask me about any movie or television show. I know ’em all. Come on, I won’t wait for you to test me, I’ll test you: Tell me, what’s on the tube on Tuesdays at eight thirty? Music? Yeah, I know all the top songs, including that new one by The Four Seasons, with the freak who sings like a girl, “Sherry, Sherry baby . . .” Just don’t ask me to dance; I’m a bit self-conscious when it comes to that, even if it no longer involves dancing with a partner, thanks to Chubby Checker and the Twist. Come over to my house, you’ll see how normal everything is, how perfectly American.

  Totally Leave It to Beaver, my life. Better believe it.

  Oh, yeah. One more thing. Wanna go bowlin’?

  Nine

  Teach me how to swear in Spanish.”

  I can’t add up how many times I’ve had this request already. Everyone wants to learn all the bad words in Spanish, even the girls. This puts me in a tight spot, for uttering bad words is against the First Commandment and an entry ticket to hell. So, if I teach bad words to anyone, I’m endangering not only my eternal fate but also theirs, and that makes my sin doubly worse. And if I say nothing, they’ll just keep pestering me.

  I tried that, and I know that silence won’t work. Plus, if I refuse I’ll be totally uncool, worse than a nerd. What’s a boy to do? Toss them a bone, maybe.

  “Remolacha,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the Spanish word for sex, you know, the really dirty word with the f.”

  “Gimme more.”

  “Okay, how about ‘Méteme una patada en las nalgas.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means ‘Go have sex with yourself,’ you know, another version of the big bad f-word.”

  “Thanks, Charles. Thanks a lot. This is great.”

  I don’t tell him that what I’ve just taught him to say is beet and kick my buttocks.

  The Monty Python guys would steal this trick from me a few years later, in their “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” skit. How they did it, I’ll never know.

  John Cleese: “Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait ’til lunchtime.”

  Eric Idle: “Here, I don’t think you’re using that thing right.”

  Giving foreigners the wrong information about swear words is the ultimate revenge, the surefire way to undermine their civilization and to escape hell, all in one fell swoop.

  Monty Python, you thieves: “The Hungarian phrase meaning ‘Can you direct me to the station?’ is translated by the English phrase, ‘Please fondle my bum.’”

  John Cleese, Eric Idle, both of you owe me, big-time.

  Thousands of Cuban soldiers would end up in Ethiopia in the 1970s, doing the fighting that the Soviets couldn’t take on openly. Had I stayed in Cuba, I’d have been among them, for sure, if I hadn’t yet ended up in Angola, or in prison, or executed. And maybe I’d be dead, and you wouldn’t be reading this. But what matters the most is that they too stole my trick. Their sweet revenge on the locals was to teach them to say “Go screw your mother,” and make them think that they were saying “Have a nice day.”

  I know one Cuban who was there in Ethiopia, with the troops, and he was shocked to find Ethiopian after Ethiopian who greeted him on his first day by saying—with a huge smile—“Go screw your mother.” Of course, this phrase included the f equivalent of the more polite screw.

  They all owe me too, big-time.

  Everyone knows I’m Cuban, here in the sixth grade at Everglades Elementary School. Damn. How do they know? It’s my tongue, of course, but I refuse to accept the fact that I haven’t surpassed Desi Arnaz yet. I thought my English pronunciation was perfect. I’m in a total state of denial.

  Then, one day during that first week of school, I raise my hand to answer one of the teacher’s questions, and he calls on me.

  “That’s easy,” I say.

>   The entire classroom erupts into laughter. Belly laughs, not mere snickering. Prolonged outright laughter.

  Before I can ask myself what’s wrong, the whole class starts repeating what I’ve just said, again and again. And it sounds so wrong.

  “Easssssy, easssssy, easssssy!” Ha! How funny! Ha, ha, ha!

  Not “eazy,” which is what I thought I’d said.

  The laughing seems to last forever. From that day forward I’m called “easssssy boy.” One girl loves to say “eassssy” again and again every time she sees me.

  I resolve at that moment, as they’re all laughing so hard, to dedicate myself one hundred percent to losing whatever accent is left in me.

  “They’ll never laugh at me again, ever,” I vow.

  And what’s this crap? What’s wrong with these books?

  My geography and history books have chapters on Cuba, and also on other Latin American countries. What I find in them is shocking. According to these books, every country in Latin America is just about the same as all the others: All of them are very, very poor, and terribly backward. All of them are ruled by a tiny number of rich, nearly white but not really white people who exploit the darker-skinned poor folk and suck their blood. The photographs in the books speak volumes: starving barefoot peasants behind ox-drawn plows, half-naked children in straw skirts. All that’s missing are bones in their noses. But wait! Here’s one with a bone through his nose! And he’s holding a bow and arrow too! Damn, I didn’t know I was a savage. My geography book has only one photograph of Cuba, and it’s of a grass hut and half-naked, barefoot black kids standing at its door, looking hapless and helpless (two new fiendishly similar English words I just learned). My history book says that Cuba, like all Latin American countries, is too backward to handle democracy or genuine civilization, and that whatever little progress it has made is due to the help that the United States has offered since it freed the island from Spain’s grip in 1898. I also learn that the real hero of the Cuban war of independence was Teddy Roosevelt.

  Jesus H. Textbook-shredding Christ!

  No wonder I get these questions all the time:

  “What was it like to wear shoes for the first time when you got to America?”

  “You had toilets in Cuba? Televisions? Hospitals? Cars? Pants?”

  “What’s it like to ride on donkeys all the time?”

  “How’d you learn to read so quickly, if you just got here?”

  And so on. I might as well stick a bone through my nose and show up barefoot, to confirm their worst suspicions about me. Maybe I should grunt a lot too.

  The most annoying question of all is “Why aren’t you dark?”

  My blond hair throws everyone for a loop.

  “My ancestors were barbarians, just like yours,” I say.

  “Oh.”

  “Hey,” I say, “wanna learn another dirty Spanish phrase? Here you go: ‘Soy un comemierda.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kiss my butt, you know, with the a-word.”

  Someday they’ll find out I just taught them to say “I’m a shit-eater,” which is the same as saying “I’m a total idiot.” Somehow, the word comemierda is not against the First Commandment. I use it all the time. It’s only a venial sin.

  Welcome to America, Charles. By the way, could you tell me, please, why all Cubans have big lips?

  That’s a question some boy asked me in the bathroom at school. I’d never thought of my lips as big before. I still don’t think of them that way, especially nowadays, when so many women who can afford cosmetic surgery have their lips blown up to look like blimps.

  “I guess those Mambo lips make all of you really good kissers,” says the boy in the bathroom.

  Prejudice dogs me, everywhere I go. It’s inescapable. There aren’t any Negro kids to pick on at this school. It’s 1962, and Florida schools are still segregated. Why we Cubans weren’t sent to the Negro schools still puzzles me to this day. After all, we weren’t considered white then, same as now. But given what the textbooks have to say about me and those of my ilk, you can’t really blame anyone for thinking of me as inferior.

  I want to be a crossing guard. They’re so cool, these kids. They get a really nifty belt from Triple-A, the American Automobile Association, one that goes around their waist and also up and around their right shoulder, with a shiny AAA badge on it. They can stop traffic and control the flow of pedestrians and bicycles. Some of them wield these flags on long poles. They’re almost like cops, for heaven’s sake, or like soldiers. They have real power, and prestige. They keep their AAA belts on top of their desks all during class, so you can admire them all day long.

  I’m not allowed to join the crossing guard patrol. Something about my English. It’s not quite right, you know. I have trouble with the letter S.

  One day, mysteriously, my bike gets torn apart. I come out to unlock it from the bicycle rack, and it looks as if a truck had crushed it while one of the AAA crossing guards was asleep. What’s this? How did this happen? My wheels look like pretzels, those wonderful twisted crunchy snacks. The only thing missing is the salt. Pretzels are up there with sauerkraut on my list of new wondrous things found only in America. But damn, the seat is sliced up too. Nice job: Jack the Ripper would be proud of you, whoever you are. The chain is gone, and so is the gearbox. Vanished. And the brake and gear cables have been diced and sliced, like salad fixings. But all is not lost. The handlebars, the pedals, and the frame are still in one piece. Oh, but damn, my handlebar grips are gone too.

  I have a hard time explaining the bike to Norma and Lou. I expected them to be furious and to call me irresponsible. But they’re nice enough to buy me another one, that same afternoon.

  “Nice new bike,” say a couple of guys as I lock it to the rack the next day. “I hope you have better luck with this one than the last one.” I stop riding my bike to school. It’s not a very long walk, after all.

  I make a friend in class, a really nice Jewish guy named Toby. He reminds me a lot of some of my friends back in the old country, Plato’s cave. He and I get along well, and he even invites me to his house one afternoon after school.

  “Stay away from Toby,” says another guy in my class the next day, a guy whose skin is about ten shades darker than mine and whose hair is jet black. His face is burned into my memory as clearly as Christ’s is on the Shroud of Turin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. Don’t play stupid. I know what you’re up to, and if you don’t stay away from Toby, there’ll be lots of trouble for you.”

  I’m so dumbstruck I have no more replies, or questions. And I have to refrain from punching him in the face. Every cell in my body screams out, but my brain steps in. The beast in me wants to hit him as hard as possible, and to keep pounding on his face until nothing is left of it. Contemplating an image of his mug, all bloodied, gives me great pleasure, but some part of my brain says, “Let it go, you’re way outnumbered.”

  The same threats continue to issue for a few more days from the same guy. I stop all after-school and playground fraternizing with Toby. We remain good friends in class, but all of the extracurricular socializing comes to an abrupt end.

  I don’t know what the swarthy dark-haired guy thinks I’m doing to Toby, or what he means to do to me, but I don’t want to find out. By now, I’m seeing a pattern, and it’s not a very pretty one.

  In the lunchroom, a boy named Curtis tells me not to come anywhere near him and to keep my “stinkin’ mitts” off his tray. Well, the word isn’t really stinkin’, it’s that f-word that I translate as remolacha, or beet, for those who beg me for cussing lessons in Spanish.

  Curtis is big and burly, with red hair and freckles, and loves to call me a spic. He looks like an overgrown Howdy Doody, and he hasn’t discovered the charm of underarm deodorants yet, like I did three years ago, back in my grass hut. Yeah, my grass hut.


  I’m doing fine in class, though. My grades aren’t anywhere near what I’m used to getting, especially in math, but I chalk it up to the fact that I missed a whole year of school back in Cuba. I do a class report on the country of Turkey, and it’s a winner. I spend hours on the map, and it ends up being so detailed that the teacher expresses no small measure of amazement.

  “Not bad for a Cuban.”

  Freddy and I become better friends than ever. Somehow, I don’t mind it much anymore when Federico takes over his body. We spend time together after school and on weekends.

  And we had a blast on Halloween. It was my first, ever, and his second. He was a veteran. We didn’t have Halloween in Cuba. I’d once seen some American kids in costumes walking down Quinta Avenida in Miramar, doing their trick-or-treating, headed for certain frustration, and I’d been enraptured by their appearance and their quest. Louis XVI explained it all to me, back then, before the earth got sucked into another dimension.

  “In the United States children celebrate the day before the Day of All Saints by dressing up in costumes and going door to door, begging for candy.”

  “You’re pulling my leg again.”

  “No, seriously, this is what they do. Take a look at those kids: That’s what they’re doing right now.”

  “But we don’t do that here.”

  “No, we don’t. And those poor kids are in for a big letdown.”

  But I wasn’t in for a disappointment, here, living with the Chaits in Miami. No way. This was the United States of America, and Halloween was guaranteed by the Constitution. It was in the Bill of Rights, or something like that.

  I got all fired up about Halloween as early as September, when the decorations began to show up in stores. Pumpkins. Scarecrows. Cornstalks. Red, orange, and yellow leaves. Witches. Spiderwebs. Skulls. Skeletons. All sorts of spooky stuff that belonged up north, where it snowed, rather than down here in Florida. I couldn’t wait, and I counted the days. This was going to be better than Christmas, I told myself. Bigger than any birthday. Imagine going from door to door and getting candy. Imagine being able to vandalize people’s homes with impunity if they have no candy for you.