Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Yeah. And I’m sorry too. So sorry. I wish the others hadn’t turned me into a hoodlum.

  Some essay. If this were a trial, with a judge and jury, I’d surely be acquitted. But there’s still one dark shadow in there, in my conscience, which my essay fails to exorcise: the image of one of my crayons striking that one guy in the eye. The image won’t leave me alone; it bothers me more than anything else that happened yesterday. That’s how it is with me. It’s always images that reveal the truth to me, silently, without words. Words can be used to deceive oneself and others. Somehow, images never lie.

  The crayon struck his eye while it was wide open. He wasn’t looking at me. He was peeking from behind his open desktop, in another direction. He held his hand over his eye for a long time, and he stopped throwing stuff. I saw the pain in his face, and then in the look he gave me with his one good eye. Not a pretty sight. That look said it all, and I knew it.

  No way I could admit that in my essay. And that’s the worst problem of all.

  But, by the same token, why is it that I have no image at all of that teacher after the first couple hours of that day? Where the hell is she? Why isn’t she there? Why aren’t my mother and father there either, to read the principal’s letter and my own wretched essay? Where? Images never lie, but it takes a lifetime to interpret them. And even by the time you get to the end of your life, to that final death that takes you out of your body, you won’t have exhausted their meaning.

  We’re born liars, but the lies we tell ourselves are a lot like the promises we make and the vows we take. They’re what we wish could be true.

  Flash forward, twenty-eight years or so. My firstborn son is only about three years old, and he’s taking amoxicillin, a liquid antibiotic, for some infection. Talk about looking cherubic, this little guy is straight from the highest heaven. He radiates light, literally. There’s no guile in him, whatsoever, no hint of a shadow within, much less of any beast.

  He has to take some of this pink antibiotic several times a day. I know he understands that. I also know that he’s getting old enough now to figure some things out for himself, such as the need to take one’s medicine when one is sick. So, I decide to let him take his own medicine. He’s our first, so Jane and I are learning as we go along, trying to do our best as we fly by the seat of our pants. This seems like a logical step to me.

  I fill a little thimble-like plastic cup with the right dosage. I place the cup on the coffee table. He’s watching a videotape of his favorite television show, Thomas and Friends. Man, how I wish this show had existed when I was his age. Sometimes I think I enjoy it more than he does.

  “Time for your pink stuff. Here it is,” I say. “Drink it up.”

  I leave the room, patting myself on the back for being such an enlightened father and so unlike my own Louis XVI, who used to whip me with his belt. He wouldn’t have even bothered with something so beneath him as to dispense medicine to his sons. That was woman’s work. Plus, neither he nor my mom would have trusted me. My mom would have shoved that pink stuff up to my lips and tilted the cup with her hands until its contents were safely down my gullet. And she’d have watched for gulping, and maybe even asked me to open my mouth and stick out my tongue, to prove that I really had swallowed it.

  Not me. I’m enlightened. This kid will live most of his life in the twenty-first century. High time to leave the sordid past behind, and to do things differently. I can trust my son to take his own medicine. He’s such a good kid.

  I busy myself with feeding our daughter Grace, who is only about a year old. Now, there’s a kid who needs all sorts of help, simply because of her age. Her older brother is old enough now to do some things on his own.

  About a half hour later I go into the downstairs bathroom to rinse something out in the sink, and what I see makes me reel.

  There’s a large pink puddle inside the sink.

  Yeow. This one hurts. “Hey, John-Carlos, come here, please. I’m in the bathroom.”

  The cherub comes in from the living room. He stares at me with his big blue eyes.

  “What’s this?” I ask, pointing to the pink puddle in the sink.

  He peers over the edge and takes a look. He hesitates for a while. “I dunno,” he says, finally.

  “Did you take your medicine?”

  “Yes,” he says, nodding. But his eyes tell a different story. He’s shocked, bewildered, and frightened.

  “What do you think this is in here?”

  More silence.

  “Is this your medicine?”

  “No.” Perfect shaking of the head. Perfect befuddlement in his eyes.

  “But it looks just like your medicine, right?”

  “Yeah.” More nodding.

  “Well, huh, this leaves us with a mystery. The medicine bottle is on a high shelf in the kitchen, and it has a childproof cap, which means that you can’t reach it or open it. I didn’t do this. Mom didn’t do it. Grace can’t do it. The only medicine that could be spilled was in that cup I gave you, out there in the living room. But you drank that. So where did this come from? How did this get here, if you drank your cup?”

  “I dunno.” Shrugging this time. And his sky blue eyes are now bottomless pools. I can see the vortex of a black hole forming inside of him. It’s an amazing sight.

  “Are you sure you don’t know?”

  Silence. Lots of it.

  “No.”

  “Don’t do this again. All right?”

  End of conversation. His first lie. His first failure at lying. He knows it. I know it. There’ll be other lies. Many more, each and every one of them a wish, and an echo of a beastly howling within.

  Like father, like son.

  Seventeen

  Kirk Douglas is hanging on a cross, just like Jesus Christ. This doesn’t seem right. I knew he couldn’t beat the Roman army, but this is too much. Kirk and Christ are total opposites. Kirk is Einar, the Viking, not the Prince of Peace. Kirk doesn’t look good up there, and neither do the hundreds of other extras who are hanging on other crosses along the Appian Way. You might as well put Santa Claus suits on all of them, it’s that much of a mockery of Christ. Jean Simmons shouldn’t be there either, showing Kirk their baby. Guys who hang on crosses don’t have girlfriends, much less babies. What kind of sacrilege is this? And there’s been damn little action in this movie too. Yeah, the gladiator fights were all right, and some of the battle scenes too, but this is nothing like The Vikings, even though Tony Curtis, another actor from that movie, is also in this one.

  I’ve been waiting to see Spartacus for three years, about one quarter of my whole life. I’d followed the making of this movie back in Cuba, in 1959, in the same magazine that had previously covered Fidel’s guerrilla theater in the mountains, a weekly rag called Bohemia. Every week we’d get an update on the making of Spartacus and on the progress of Fidel’s so-called Revolution, now that he had switched roles from glamorous jungle revolutionary to maximum leader of the whole island. Bohemia was still partial to Fidel in late 1959, even though he was clamping down on the press, in a heavy-handed way that made Batista look about as repressive as a kindergarten teacher at a Quaker school. Censorship was the order of the day, and the censors were ultrasensitive. By the time Spartacus was released in 1960, Cuba had entered its Dark Ages, and the thought police wouldn’t allow the film to be shown, even though it was about a revolution.

  So, ironically, none of us got to see Spartacus in Cuba, thanks to the so-called Revolution. I guess that seeing a revolution fail on the big screen might be perceived by the authorities as some kind of threat to correct thinking. Kirk/Spartacus does end up getting crucified after all.

  Imagine Fidel on a cross, with Che and Raúl on either side. If you were in charge of thought control for the so-called Revolution, you wouldn’t want anyone to imagine that. No way.

  But I’m no longer in the land of censorship and thought control. I’m free as a bird, right after Noah’s flood has subsided. Not only am I in the Un
ited States, I’m living in a house where no one cares what I do as long as I tackle my chores. If I were somehow to get roaring drunk or high on heroin, no one would notice or give a damn. And now that I’ve developed a passion for ancient history, seeing this film or any other set in yesteryear has become an obsession. I need to see the distant past re-created on-screen. So, I’m delighted to learn that Spartacus is showing at one of the theaters on Flagler Street. I blurt out the news, thinking no one will care.

  Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s been waiting to see this movie. Everyone at the Palace Ricardo is just as interested in seeing it, and we end up having a rare mass excursion down Flagler Street. The Palace empties out and we amble down Flagler as a wolf pack. Even the Thugs come along.

  I expect something to go wrong, at some point. This is much too weird.

  But nothing goes awry, much to my surprise. No arguments, no fights, no unpleasantness of any kind. It’s a long and slow-moving film, but we’re all drawn into it. No one but Tony and I have a gold standard to measure it by—The Vikings—but even the two of us have to admit that for all of its languor, it’s a mighty fine film. Everyone’s deeply moved. All of us grieve for Spartacus at the end. The slaves should have won, no doubt about it; at the very least, Kirk should have slipped away in disguise, or let someone else die in his place. He should have thought of himself, rather than his noble cause.

  But, then again, Kirk Douglas does have a habit of playing characters who do stupid things at the end, like being unselfish. As was the case in The Vikings, Kirk embraces total detachment at the end, and he ends up losing his life in the bargain.

  Although I grieve with everyone else, I’ve known all along that Spartacus is going to fail because I’ve read up on his story at the library. I expect a sad ending, but no one else does. They all expect a happy Hollywood finale. And this leads to trouble, once we all get home.

  Roberto, one of the Thugs, can’t shut up about how unfair it was for Spartacus to be defeated. He goes on and on, repeating himself a thousand times, ignoring the fact that this was a historical epic, based on real events. Everyone nods in unison, except for me. The more that Roberto expresses his disgust with the movie script, the harder it becomes for me to bite my tongue and refrain from speaking.

  Ay. But there comes a point when I can’t take it anymore. Right after Roberto says for the thousandth time that the film had the wrong ending, I put in my two cents. Unfortunately.

  “Spartacus couldn’t win because Spartacus really lost, in real life.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Roberto.

  “The real Spartacus lost. This movie is just telling that story.”

  “You mean to say that you weren’t rooting for Spartacus to win?”

  “I would have loved for him to win, but I knew he’d lose. He was fighting Julius Caesar, after all.”

  Yeow! That’s it. Watch out! Roberto starts screaming at me, using every foul word in the book. I’ll spare you those details. The gist of his outburst is this: I’m just as bad as the Romans who owned slaves and crushed Spartacus’s slave uprising.

  “There you go again, maricón, you bastard, defending class privilege!”

  Punch. Kick. Punch, kick, punch. Kick. Punch some more . . . kick some more.

  If you’ve ever thought that all Cuban exiles were rich or middle class, forget about it. The Cuban exodus was not driven by class tension, but by political repression, and all of the unresolved class issues went into exile too, along with all of us who left. We had as much class tension in the Palace Ricardo as in Cuba, Manhattan, Liverpool, or Hong Kong. Roberto’s father had been a poor fisherman, and Roberto resented me as much as Fidel did, with only one huge difference: Roberto wasn’t a revolutionary megalomaniac.

  Poor Cubans could hate Fidel as much as rich Cubans, and often did. No one likes to be told what to think, or to be permanently gagged, or to be promised nothing but poverty and struggle forever. No one does, save for those who are out for revenge against perceived oppressors, or those who think they can switch roles with the so-called oppressors and take all of their stuff from them.

  The same class tensions that drive Ricky and Lucy Ricardo to loathe me and Tony drive Roberto to explode when I observe in a matter-of-fact way that the real Spartacus had really failed and the movie could have had no other ending.

  I say nothing in response to Roberto’s outburst, or his kicks and punches. I know that anything I say won’t make a bit of difference. Even though he and I are in the same tight spot, he’s not ready to let go of his prejudices or his resentment of me. And I’m not ready to get clobbered again.

  Tony and I get beaten up a lot. Tony fights back. But I’m much smaller than the Thugs, and I learn the hard way that any defiance on my part will only lead to more bruises at the end of the day. I’ve also learned that the Thugs love to make the rest of us miserable, no matter what. Anything can set them off.

  A few weeks prior to the Spartacus outburst, Roberto and Mariano had both beaten me up for making a simple observation about a science-fiction movie we were watching on television about an expedition to outer space.

  “Hey, look, here we go again: There’s only one woman in this movie,” I’m dumb enough to say. The responses are too predictable. I should have known better than to open my mouth.

  “Yeah, so what? She’s hot.”

  “Yeah, look at those boobs. Coñooo. I’d love to get my hands on them.”

  “Forget the boobs. Look at the rest of the equipment.”

  My stupidity knows no bounds. I speak up again. “These movies are all alike. Her role is to be dumber and weaker than the men and to fall into the monster’s hands, and to give the men an opportunity to come to her rescue. And she has to have big boobs. It’s part of the deal. That’s why the monster or space alien abducts her in the first place. Hollywood monsters love big boobs as much as any earth man.”

  “Maricón, hijo de puta. . .” blah, blah, blah . . . I don’t need to spell out the rest of the venom spewed at me. Even at their most inventive, these guys are hamstrung by a finite number of foul words at their disposal. And they’re also handicapped by a machismo that borders on hysteria. Everyone who disagrees with them or questions their judgment is a fag.

  They accuse me of not liking women as they pound me with their fists.

  Idiots. If they only knew the full extent of my obsession with women, and how many mystical experiences I’d already had simply by contemplating the way some girl’s hair flowed over her cheeks, or the shape of her calves, or the line of the bridge of her nose, or just the sound of her voice. Comemierdas. Their blows don’t hurt me nearly as much as the sight of perfect lips or ankles, or breasts. You want to hurt me, you morons? Do you really want to injure me severely? Show me a pretty girl. Nothing hurts more than that.

  Truth, beauty, and goodness. All of them hurt, way deep inside, any time they cross your path. But a beautiful woman hurts the most. Ay. Sometimes, it’s almost enough to kill you, or to make you wish for death, right there and then.

  Up on the screen, in the movie theaters, I see some beautiful women who slay me. Honor Blackman as the goddess Hera in Jason and the Argonauts; Stella Stevens in The Nutty Professor; Jean Simmons in Spartacus. Stella, especially, causes me exquisite pain and suggests to me subliminally that I should become a professor. On television I catch glimpses of Marilyn Monroe, who is now dead and rotting in her grave, much to my dismay. I’m especially thrilled when a news program shows footage of her singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John Kennedy. I’d missed this epiphany when it took place originally in May 1962, shortly after I’d moved in with the Chaits, and I’m transfixed by what I see. Whoa doesn’t even begin to cover it. Too bad she was singing for such a knucklehead. Too bad they didn’t allow her to stay onstage when Mr. President John F. Bay of Pigs Kennedy took the podium. She was so much more important than he, and so much nicer to look at. I hope they buried her in that dress. No other woman ever will ever be w
orthy of wearing it.

  I haven’t seen a beautiful girl in real life for a very, very long time, however. Citrus Grove Elementary School seems to sift them out, somehow. None of my female schoolmates causes me the right kind of pain. In a way this is good, for given my circumstances and my taped-up shoes, I’m in no position to cause any girl a commensurate measure of grief.

  We have no full-length mirrors at the Palace Ricardo, so I have no clue as to how the house diet has changed my appearance. I’m not only alarmingly skinny, but also sort of deformed. My back, especially, is twisting and curving, and, as a result, my rib cage is bulging out. Since all I ever see of myself is my face, in our tiny bathroom mirror, I can’t notice this. In my mind, there’s nothing wrong with my looks, save for my clothes and footwear.

  Flash forward briefly, just a few months. Tony and I climb out of an Ozark Air Lines plane in Bloomington, Illinois, and we’re greeted by our uncle and aunt, and their daughters, along with some other nice people we’ve never met before.

  Our aunt Alejandra holds her hand over her mouth when she first sees us. Then she hugs us and says: “Ay, Dios mio, que flacos están!” Oh my God, you’re so thin! “Y qué te pasa en la espalda, Carlos?” And what’s wrong with your back?