Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Managing your feelings, if you have any, is definitely your problem, not anyone else’s. And you’d better never cry or complain about anything, anytime. Real men never cry or complain. Nor do they ever say that they miss anyone.

  Making friends is not only your problem, it is actually a problem. There are already way too many kids in the house, so you’d better not invite anyone over. If by some chance you make some friends at school or out on the street, you’d better hang out with them somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  English is not to be spoken at home. That’s for school and for the street. Only the television is allowed to speak English. Given the fact that there are no Spanish television programs, this has to be allowed, regrettably.

  On the plus side, some major things don’t fall under the rules at all.

  We can go anywhere we want on our free time. Anywhere. And we have no curfew. We can come home anytime we want to, as long as we’re there for breakfast and school.

  Ah, but there’s always a minus side too.

  The thugs in the house have rules of their own, which Ricky and Lucy tolerate. And their first commandment is “Thou shalt not have anything I don’t have.”

  So, by the end of our second day there, neither Tony nor I have bicycles any longer. The thugs in the back room take them, sell them, and pocket the money. Tony and I make the mistake of complaining to Lucy, and she admonishes us for thinking that this is a problem. After all, none of the other boys came to this house with bicycles, so why should we feel entitled to have anything that the other boys didn’t have?

  Selfish louts, she calls us. Spoiled brats. Malcriados.

  We’d also brought a few other possessions with us: baseball gloves, the football that had made me cry, some comic books, my transistor radio. These, too, vanish immediately. And we know better than to complain.

  “Now you’re just like us,” say the thugs after they’ve stripped us clean.

  “No,” says Tony. “You’ve got our stuff.”

  Their second commandment is “Thou shalt not fight back, ever.”

  And the third is “Thou shalt fear reprisals for not submitting to our will.”

  The worst one in the bunch is named Miguel. He’s already done jail time, and he has a quick temper. He has a father somewhere in Miami, who is also in trouble with the law, on and off, and never calls or visits him. His real family is the Burger King gang in Little Havana, on Calle Ocho. The other two guys in the back room are less unpredictable than Miguel, but possessed by angrier spirits. Their names are Roberto and Mariano, and they’d come to the United States together on a fishing boat owned by Roberto’s father. Sometime soon after their arrival, Roberto’s father decided he couldn’t take care of them all by himself, so he abandoned them. He never calls or visits, and their real family, like Miguel’s, is the Burger King gang on Calle Ocho.

  The Burger King gang is the sworn enemy of the McDonald’s gang. Madónal contra Bergekín. The turf under contention is the heart of Little Havana, on South West Eighth Street, known to us as Calle Ocho. Our wonderful home is about thirteen blocks from there, so all of their street fighting is hidden from our view, most of the time.

  Every now and then, they’ll come home bruised up, and the rest of us won’t ask any questions.

  Mariano is a gifted artist. He can draw the most amazing pictures, or copy any image from any comic book and make it look better than the original. He also loves to carve old broom handles into clubs, with nothing but his switchblade and sandpaper stolen from hardware stores.

  His clubs are amazingly intricate masterpieces; the angrier he is, the more intricate the carving will become.

  “This will be perfect for smashing someone’s brains out,” I’ll hear him say as he lavishes attention on one of his clubs, rubbing the grooves on its handle with fine-grained sandpaper, caressing it, almost.

  An appropriate thing to say in our house, given our affinity for mousetraps. During the first few weeks in that house, a lot of brains will get smashed. Night after night, the mice fall for the traps we laid out for them, again and again, and after a while we no longer keep a body count. Then, almost suddenly, the snapping stops and the mice disappear.

  We got them all, or maybe they wised up and moved to a worse neighborhood.

  I wish I could follow the surviving mice to wherever it is that they go, but I’m stuck there, and so is Tony, and all the other kids too, including the Three Thugs in the back room, who deserve to have their name capitalized, like the Three Stooges. We’re all in a trap of our own, one dubbed “family warmth” by the adults who dumped us there.

  Snap. Gotcha, modefoco.

  “A lavar mi carro, muchachos.” Time to wash my car, boys.

  Twelve

  Christmas. Christ, no.

  Please, no. Por favor.

  It’s Christmas Eve. Nochebuena. The most sacred time of the year. Whether you want it to arrive or not, whether you like it or not, it rolls around and crushes you under its weight.

  Sacred time is supposed to be a foretaste of eternity, an irruption of heavenly life in the here and now. Redemption from the here and now, in fact.

  In Cuba, even under the worst of circumstances, Christmas had never failed to tear asunder the veil between heaven and the here and now. Ripped it to shreds, every single time, even when it had nothing to rip it with: no food, no presents, no decorations, no trees, no lights, no Nativity scenes, no time off.

  Here, in the house of family warmth, Christmas seems to be a heavy smothering thing, a choking column of smoke, a freakishly cruel joke.

  We have no Christmas tree. Not even a tiny artificial one tucked into a corner of the living room. No sign whatsoever that Christmas is here.

  Back home in Havana, my parents have to pretend Christmas doesn’t exist. The ornaments and lights that once hung on our imported pine trees are all boxed up, tucked away somewhere in that cluttered house, along with the miniature Bethlehem that my father Louis XVI had gradually re-created piece by blessed piece, year by year.

  God only knows what Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are doing or thinking on this Christmas Eve. And God can keep that knowledge all to His Highest Self, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to know what they’re up to, or what any other loved one is up to either.

  Images from Christmases past assault me all day long, pummeling my senses, piercing me mercilessly. Inverse transverberations, the very opposite of ecstatic raptures, but every bit as intense. I hear the sounds from Christmases past; I smell the Christmas trees; I see the lights strung out all over Havana; I taste the turrones, and the filberts and walnuts; I feel the warm night air blowing softly on my grandmother’s porch, so thick with the sea’s imprint as to be tasted, not just felt.

  I’m far from alone, here in the house of family warmth, but the Void circles and circles all the same, like a hungry shark. I eye it, warily, suspecting a sneak attack unlike any other, in a house full of people.

  “’Tis the season to be jolly . . .” “Don we now our gay apparel . . .”

  I’ve been forced to learn some fiendish lyrics at school. Miss Esterman loves music, and the past few days have been a constant songfest. I’m thrilled to finally learn the English words that go with the Christmas songs I’ve been hearing all of my life. But it’s just my curiosity that’s pleased with this turn of events. I’m like a novice being introduced to the deepest gnostic secrets of an ancient cult. And I’m just as flummoxed as any of them. The mysteries ain’t at all what they seemed to be, from far away. What once sounded like sacred hocus-pocus is now unmasked as the most banal nonsense.

  “Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh . . .”

  “And I’ve brought some corn for popping . . .”

  “Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow . . .”

  No me jodas. You’ve got to be joking.

  Or the words prove to be the cruelest messages, carefully designed to enlarge whatever hole you might be sensing in your heart, or whate
ver happens to be missing from your life.

  “May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white . . .”

  “I’ll be home for Christmas . . . Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams . . .”

  “Let nothing you dismay . . . O tidings of comfort and joy . . .”

  Yeah, sure, go Yuletide yourself, and cram some tidings and popcorn up your nose while you’re at it. What have I got to be jolly about? Or gay, or merry, or bright? Chew on your crappy mistletoe and choke on it. Not even that frost I saw and touched and tasted makes one bit of difference. None at all.

  I won’t be home for Christmas, ever again. In fact, I won’t ever have a place to call home ever again. And Christmas has died. It’s as dead and putrid as any Christ on a crucifix.

  We have a lousy Christmas Eve dinner at the ever-inflexible time of five in the afternoon. It’s just all of us orphans, and Lucy and Ricky. It’s the first time that Tony and I lay eyes on Señor Ricardo, who, while apparently not invisible after all, does seem to be a man of few words, and even less capable of exuding family warmth than his frozen cod of a spouse. The food is awful: some greasy pork and the usual overcooked rice and black beans. No turrones, filberts, or walnuts. No special treats of any kind. We can’t all fit at the table, so we scatter all over the house and eat wherever we find some comfortable spot in which to consume our feast. Then three unlucky guys get to clean up the mess.

  Fade to black.

  It’s dark out, and we’re in a car, with some social worker. Several of us are packed tightly into the backseat, so tightly that we have no room to move. Another car is following right behind, ferrying the rest of the residents of the Ricardo foster home somewhere, for a Christmas surprise.

  We’re on Coral Way again, apparently the only street ever traversed by social workers.

  Those huge trees in the median strip cheer me up, much more than any of the Christmas decorations we can see around us everywhere. Much more than the gayest and merriest of Christmas trees. In the dark of night these huge trees look even more imposing, and reassuring. They puzzle me and gladden me all at once. I have no clue why they seem like the only good thing out there, in godforsaken Miami, on this Christmas Eve. But they do.

  They’re a promise, each and every one of them. And there are so many. Legions of them, lined up, perfectly arranged, messengers from forever, watchers, sentinels, guardians, ever eager to follow good orders, and only good ones.

  We pull up to a building and park, right there on Coral Way, somewhere. The building is plain and modern, with large windows. We pour out of the car and fill up the sidewalk, quickly. Above our heads the limbs from one of my giant friends hover graciously, shielding us from the stars above and the void in which they float. The specimen directly across from us in the median strip, the one under whose branches we’re standing, is not much different from all of the others. It’s simply doing its job, magnificently. The social worker opens a door and we follow him up a flight of stairs into a large room full of children and teenagers, both male and female, and a handful of adults.

  A large and well lit Christmas tree fills up one corner of the room, and right next to it, a huge stack of presents calls attention to itself. The presents are all nicely wrapped.

  Large rectangular windows directly behind the Christmas tree reveal a tangle of limbs outdoors, thickly covered with leaves, each of which is playing with light and shadow in its own way, waving in the slight breeze ever so subtly, whispering something to the street lamps.

  Christmas music is playing from a phonograph, somewhere in the room. But since we’re all Cubans in that room, our voices drown out the carols. Never underestimate the noise that a mere four Cubans can make while talking to one another. It’s noisy and hot in there, and for a while it seems that there’s no plan other than to have us stand around waiting for something to happen. The Three Thugs make a beeline for some teenage girls and start talking to them. The girls smile and laugh. Go figure. Tony and I stay close to each other and to the one guy in our new home who seems most normal, and most out of place, like us, a skinny thirteen-year-old boy named José.

  The Christmas tree calls to me. My idol, my god from Christmases past. “Bow down and worship,” it thunders. “Love me, honor me, return me to the inner sanctum of your soul.” But, like Frederick the Great of Prussia—who once beat one of his subjects half to death with a cane while shouting, “You must love me!”—the tree fails to win my affection. It remains just a tree, despite its desperate efforts. For the first time in my life, I see the idol for what it really is: something I’ve been fooled by, something as deficient as I am, every bit as flawed and fickle.

  I revel in my newfound wisdom and recoil from it, all at once. I don’t know yet that I’m experiencing one of the worst feelings in the world, and one of the most valuable, full force. Disenchantment. My Spanish ancestors cornered the market on it, four centuries ago, as their global empire began to slip from their greedy hands. Desengaño. It’s a rude awakening, a necessary step on the way to enlightenment. A blessing, really, and close to a sacrament.

  There are plenty of refreshments and Christmas treats laid out for us, but I’ll forget what they were soon after that night. What I’m focused on is the hollowness of this forced attempt at Christmas cheer, and on those presents piled up near the Christmas tree.

  I’m just curious, not really eager to receive any presents. What could they possibly give us? What could I possibly enjoy finding inside whichever box is handed to me by a total stranger?

  Soon enough I find out. Some clown dressed up as Santa Claus shows up and starts handing out presents. “Jo, jo, jo, feliz Navidad,” he says, in Spanish. “Merri Kri’ma,” he adds, in his own Cuban version of English. Some of the younger kids in the room—and there are many of them—seem to fall for his act, and get all excited. They get their presents first, and all of us older boys and girls hang back. Eventually, everyone gets their turn, and everyone discovers what they’ve been allotted.

  Most of us boys get plastic model kits to assemble: one airplane and one battleship. They’re nice Revell kits, the very same kind I used to put together in Cuba, before it joined Atlantis at the bottom of the ocean. Once upon a time, I used to love these plastic models. My room back in Havana was full of them: my medieval knights in armor, my gladiators, my Viking ship, my airplanes and battleships. Louis XVI promised he’d take very good care of them, as if they were part of his precious art collection.

  “They’re more valuable than anything else in this house,” he said just before I left.

  I’d spent a lot of time with those models. I loved every part of the assembly process: breaking off the parts from the thin plastic frames on which they hung, like fruit on tree branches; following the diagrams step by step; gluing the parts together, little by little; applying the decals; painting the finished product; finding a great place in which to display it. But what I loved most was the glue. Nothing in the world could compare to the smell of that adhesive, save for the DDT from the pesticide jeep that used to spray our neighborhood. I inhaled deeply, as deeply as possible, every time I squeezed out a dollop and applied it to those pieces of plastic. And I was amply rewarded. It wasn’t just the model I was working on that seemed to assume a whole new depth of meaning, but everything else, even the dust motes that constantly hovered in my room, swirling like galaxies.

  Everything made so much more sense, everything seemed so much more beautiful and enthralling. So utterly real, and worthy of affection.

  Once, while working on a huge aircraft carrier, the room began to spin. At first the spinning was slow and hypnotic, but as I pressed on with my assembling and inhaling, the room began to spin faster and faster. And before I knew it I was flat on my back on the dining room floor, transverberated in the best way possible.

  I get the two kits, and so does Tony: a battleship and some fighter jet. And we thank the perfect stranger who hands them to us.

  Fade to
black, again.

  We’re back in the Ricardo house of family warmth, on the enclosed sun porch, assembling our plastic models on Christmas Day. Tony and I don’t have to spend much time on our identical kits. They’re small and simple. But we put our all into it, from start to finish. José, the other normal guy, also assembles his two kits. Three identical battleships and fighter jets are now part of our household, and there’s no place to display them.

  No problem. The Three Thugs make their way to the sun porch, take the models, and smash them all to pieces as they laugh their heads off.

  “Comemierdas,” they say to us. Shit-eaters. Idiots. Chumps.

  I have to restrain Tony, who wants to lunge at them.

  “You can’t win,” I say.

  “No me importa,” he barks. I don’t care.

  I don’t know how, but I manage to hold him back. I won’t be able to do that again after this day. Never. And he’ll never win either. But he’ll never lose his dignity, even when bruised from head to foot.

  “I kept you safe from those guys,” he’ll say to me many years later, on the phone, as he labors to breathe. And I’ll thank him, from a thousand miles away.

  Flash forward, sixteen years later, a thousand miles north of that sun porch in Miami. It’s Christmas Eve again, and I’m in a loft in New York, on the top floor of an old warehouse in Tribeca, in lower Manhattan, on Duane Street. Some friends have lent the place to me because they’ve gone back home to Chicago for the holidays. They’re great friends, and this is a great loft. I’d helped them move in four years earlier, and at that time no one else lived here in these buildings. My friends were among the first to claim some living space in these old abandoned buildings. Urban pioneers. Carrying all of their furniture up five flights of stairs had been a lot of fun, especially at the fourth floor, where the stairway suddenly narrowed into a ridiculously tight funnel. But the fun stopped when their couch got stuck on the narrow stairwell. It just sat there, suspended above the stairs, like some work of found art, only one landing away from the door to their loft. We’d tried to push it up, but all we’d managed to do was to wedge it even tighter. Getting it unstuck and hauling it back down to street level was quite a challenge, but we did it. Admitting that we couldn’t bring it up again was an even greater challenge.