Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Nineteen

  I’m laughing my ass off. There’s nothing in the world that can match this. No way. I’m laughing so hard I think I might pass out.

  And I’m not drunk or high, or anything like that. Just a couple of beers. They’re too expensive in here, and I’m a refugee. Once a refugee, always a refugee.

  “What? You want how much for this beer? Sure, give me one that will last all night.” Please imagine a thick Chicago accent, which is how I speak now: Waaat? Ya waaant how much fer dis beeerrr? And we say “sure” all the time here in Chicago. It’s an all-purpose word, pronounced shurrr.

  It’s summer, in the year 1973. I’m at Second City, in Chicago, and these people onstage, just a few feet from me, in this very cramped space, are redefining funniness minute by killer minute as they improvise, following our cues or totally ignoring them. They’re probably all high, but it seems to help them rip open some veil that no one has ripped before.

  The funniest guy, hands down, is some hefty Albanian named John Belushi, who transcends the tiny stage in this incredibly small space. This guy’s a wayward angel, not quite fallen all the way. He has to be. There must be some of those, in between. He probably made God laugh too much and got sent to earth rather than to hell. He’s on some celestial wavelength, poking fun at Creation itself, bringing us all in that room to an uncanny level of enlightenment, somewhere between blasphemy and beatitude.

  I’m addicted to laughter. It obliterates all polarities and helps me see that opposites can, in fact, coincide. For a refugee, all of life is nothing but a welter of contradictions, and holding two contradictory thoughts as true, simultaneously, is essential for survival. So I can’t ever get enough of this spasm caused by our highest brain functions, this uncontrolled winking of our third eye, this flare-up of the divine spark at the core of the soul.

  Belushi knows all about the true nature of laughter, though he may not be able to explain it to you, especially tonight. Or maybe any other night, for that matter. Every time I’ve come here, he’s been in an altered state. He is an altered state, come to think of it.

  The others onstage are also wayward angels, probably. But they came from some rank just one smidgen below Belushi’s. One of them, Bill Murray, is damn close; so is the fat guy, John Candy; and the tall guy, Joe Flaherty; and the ones from Toronto who show up sometimes: Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, and Gilda Radner.

  I come here as often as I can. Tonight I’m here with my bride of six months and a couple of good friends who will also get married and move away in less than a year. They’re the ones who will end up with the loft in Tribeca. But this night we are all in Chicago, where we all live and where we went to high school together.

  I have long hair and a moustache like Pancho Villa’s, and I am about to grow a full beard. I think I need one in order to succeed in graduate school. I’ve just finished college, and in less than two months, I’ll be heading east to Yale, to study religion and history. I don’t know yet that I’ve managed to get into a PhD program rather than a master’s program, because no one has spelled it out for me. I’m an ignoramus when it comes to these things. Once a refugee, always a refugee. I’ve simply assumed that if all I have is a BA, I have to prove myself at the master’s level before I can move on to doctoral studies. In a couple of months, I’ll be pleasantly surprised and terrified, simultaneously.

  As soon as I get to New Haven, I’ll discover that I’m a PhD student and that nearly everyone else in my seminars has some sort of master’s degree, save for just two or three of us schlemiels who’ve had only four years of college. I’ll also find out that although I have a fellowship that covers my tuition, this award prevents me from working and making any money with which to live. A tough catch-22. And a very serious problem for my bride, and therefore also for me. A marriage-killer, in fact.

  I’ll be right about one thing, though. When I get there, every other male in my program will have a full beard. And eyeglasses.

  I’m sporting antique gold frames designed in 1911. No more plastic crap. The age of plastic is behind us, forever. No one, ever, will wear plastic frames again, especially black rectangular ones, or any with right angles, or especially those that look like the mask on Robin the Boy Wonder from Batman comics. Round is in forever. And the wet head is dead too. Men will never, ever again, put any goop of any kind on their hair, and they’re never going to shave again either.

  By the way, I’m not Cuban anymore. I stopped being Cuban when I got married and moved out of my mom’s basement apartment. I’m a Chicagoan. Everyone in Chicago came from somewhere else, even our Native Americans. We have a neighborhood full of them, Uptown, which is only five blocks from my mom’s apartment. But all of those Indians have come here from other states, mostly from out West. The native Pottawatomies are all gone. Long gone. All that remains of them are the names they gave places. And my bride and I live right across from Indian Boundary Park, which was once the line between the white settlers and the natives they itched to exterminate. The street we live on, North Rogers Avenue, was the boundary line itself. And we live on the settlers’ side.

  My bride’s family is Jewish and they came from Eastern Europe.

  Everybody here is from somewhere else, including John Belushi’s parents. And everyone is a Chicagoan, and an American. Hell, you don’t even have to be a citizen to be an American, or speak English to be an American citizen. My mom took her citizenship exam last year in Spanish, and she still doesn’t speak English, and never will. But she’s a citizen. And my high school principal had a map of the world in his office with colored pins all over it. Each pin marked a country represented by at least one student at our school. Every continent but Australia and Antarctica was full of pins. If he’d placed one pin on the map for every student, the entire island of Cuba would have been blotted out.

  Hell, the overflow alone could have filled Australia and New Zealand. Many of us were airlift kids too. Way too many of us. So many that I started to think that no family had ever left Cuba intact. We never talked about it, those of us who had lived through the airlift and the foster homes, and the resettlement and all that. Unfortunately, too many of us were too busy putting up with bad teachers and rough classmates. Only a handful of us were allowed into the honors courses because the counselors had trouble conceiving of us as bright or sufficiently motivated. And, despite the pins we could have claimed on the principal’s map, we were sort of invisible. The school was so huge that we simply disappeared, like some spice sprinkled on a stew. We were unnoticeable until the time came, once a year, to photograph the Spanish Club for the yearbook. This club was practically one hundred percent Cuban. We’d fill up the entire stage in our auditorium. I wasn’t in the club, but I’d sneak into the picture, just to be with my fellow Cubiches. Many of them took Spanish in order to get an easy A, or to give our Spanish teachers a hard time. Payback for the grief experienced in other classes.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Throckmorton, that’s not how arrastrar is pronounced. You need to roll your r’s like this, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

  I’m working two jobs, as I do every summer: one full-time and one part-time. About sixty hours a week. My full-time job is a farce. I’m working for the Social Security Administration, transferring information on disabled workers from the files of local agencies onto paper forms that are to be sent to Washington, D.C. A well-trained monkey could do my job—probably better than me—but it requires a college degree. There are more than a hundred of us involved in this farce, in one huge room in a building in downtown Chicago. It’s supposed to take us two months to complete this process, but some genius in Washington didn’t do the math right, or something. We hardly ever have any work to do, for as soon as the files come in, we dispatch them in less than two hours. Since these deliveries take place only about three times a week, we don’t have much to do at all. But we get paid for a full week’s work, anyway.

  So we read a lot, all of us, and collect our paychecks. After a month or so
we become more brazen and bring cards and board games to work, and while away the hours playing poker, or Risk, or Monopoly, or whatever. I read a lot of novels I never had time for in college, that I know I won’t have time for in graduate school. I round out my education.

  I finally get to read Moby-Dick. And the book is so much better than the movie.

  It’s the best job I’ve ever had. How I wish they’d all be like this.

  My part-time job is the same one I’ve had since 1966. I’m a grocery clerk at a Jewel supermarket. This summer I’m a produce man. I get to unpack and stack fruits and vegetables, and weigh whatever the customers want to buy. It’s a wonderful job, and I love it. This is my second Jewel. I had to leave the first one because a bigoted, racist manager chased me out. He went to great lengths to make me uncomfortable by constantly bringing up the subject of my ethnicity and complaining about how many spics worked at his store. He also tried to get rid of me by assigning tasks that I would fail and he could count against me, like assembling grocery carts with a stopwatch running.

  “Even a dumb amigo should be able to put this together in five minutes, tops. An amigo in college should do it in three.”

  The unassembled carts came with no instructions, so it took me a lot longer than that.

  “One more screwup and yer outta here, amigo.”

  So I found another store to work at before he could fire me.

  The new Jewel store is just about three blocks from my apartment, and I can get there quickly by climbing over the Chicago and Northwestern railroad tracks, which run right behind the store. It’s against the law to do that, of course, but this is Chicago, and I’m not the only one breaking laws.

  We have our way of dealing with infractions here.

  Waaat? But, officer, de light was yellow. Hey, officer, ya know, cut me a break . . . Oh . . . Jeezus . . . waat’s dis? Hey, look, officer, sir, it looks like ya dropped a twenty . . . Look, dere at yer feet, sir.

  I should be more careful, though, with my long hair and Pancho Villa moustache. It’s much harder to deal with Chicago cops if you look a certain way. My customers call me the “hippie guy.”

  My bride and I think we’re happy. And perhaps we’re as happy now as we’ll ever be. I’m great at overlooking anything unpleasant, avoiding arguments, denying the obvious, and burying anything that hurts. She’s the opposite, and I refuse to acknowledge it. We were made for each other, I’m convinced.

  Sure.

  My mom and brother are out of the picture now. My bride wants me to cut ties with them, as much as possible. They’re such a drag.

  My mom is living with my father’s sister, Lucía, who came over in 1971, at the age of seventy-six. Lucía went to live with her brother first, our uncle Amado, in Bloomington, but that didn’t work out. So my mother took her in, and they now live in the basement apartment from which I’ve fled, the one with the pipes and radiators on the ceiling.

  Tony is living with his new girlfriend, way out in the northwest corner of the city, not far from O’Hare airport. He’s already been married once and divorced. His first wife was Cuban, and I’d rather say nothing about her, save that watching Tony exchange vows with her at St. Ita’s Church was a lot like watching a train wreck in the making and not being able to stop it from happening. The marriage actually lasted longer than I expected, about eighteen months. His new girlfriend, whom he’ll marry within a year or so, is part Polish, part German. She’s divorced too, and has a daughter from her first marriage.

  Tony and I hardly ever talk or get together. His force field is totally impenetrable now, and I’m living in a totally different world from his, the world of books. He gave up the printing trade, lied his way into Northwestern University’s business school, dropped out of that, studied computers, and got himself a decent job as a computer technician. The place where he works is one giant computer. It takes up the whole building, practically, and there are wires running everywhere—under the floor, above the ceiling—all hidden behind removable panels. Reels and reels of tape too. And rooms full of reels. It’s 1973, and microchips are about to change all of this radically. So, rather than keep up with the changes, he’ll bail out of that too, and go to work as a dog catcher and debt collector before he ends up at O’Hare airport, loading food on planes.

  The airport will be a wild nonstop party for him. And he’ll fit right in, because, when he’s on a roll and high as a kite, he can be very funny. Funnier than John Belushi, at times.

  Pretty soon, he’ll start to disappear for long stretches of time, and no one will know where he’s gone, or even whether he’s dead or alive. Our mom will go nearly insane with worry every time this happens, but no one will be able to do anything about it. And he’ll reappear just as unexpectedly as he disappeared, and somehow, he’ll keep his job at the airport and party on while he’s there, nonstop.

  Quite often, at the end of the workday, he and his coworkers will hop a flight to Las Vegas—for free, of course—party it up, and fly back for work in the morning. Again and again and again. And eventually the party will come crashing down.

  Flash back, ten measly years. The first of September, 1963.

  Tony and I have made it to Chicago, and it’s late afternoon. Only one more flight left to go.

  We’ve just flown over six states, in perfectly clear weather. Not one cloud to block our view from Miami to Chicago. Tony and I have shared the window seat, in half-hour intervals, and what we’ve seen defies description. This is no jet plane we’ve been on, so it flies low, and we can see a lot.

  I’ll never think of the earth the same way again. It’s too small. Way too small. If we can fly this great distance in less than a day, and feel as if we’re flying over a map, then we’re all in trouble. A “world” should be bigger than a map. It should be nearly infinite.

  But what we’ve seen from our perch in the sky, no matter how seemingly small, has left us speechless. The red earth in Georgia. The mountains in Tennessee. The lush green farms in Kentucky. The patchwork quilt landscape of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, all laid out in perfect grids. All those roads, going in all directions. So much land.

  Lake Michigan. Good God in heaven. I’ve been waiting years to see this marvel. A freshwater lake so big that it could pass for a sea, joined to four others, all splayed out like a weird flower or an inkblot. An inland sea that freezes over. Who could ask for more? I’d spent hours and hours back in Plato’s cave, poring over maps of the world, meditating on the places where I’d love to live—rather than in my own benighted land—and the Great Lakes were always high on my list. Any of the three big lakes would do. Erie and Ontario would be all right, but not as good. I’d prefer all those lakes in Manitoba. And also Hudson’s Bay, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Scandinavia, Scotland, Greenland, Iceland.

  Chicago. Ha. What a joke. I’ve been laughing about this place for years. Cago means “I defecate” in Spanish. But this city we just flew over is nothing to laugh at. It’s large. It has a whole forest of skyscrapers, not just some small thicket of them downtown. It’s beautiful too, and it reminds me a lot of Havana. As we approach the lakeshore, I spy a road that looks a lot like the Malecón. And the lake is almost turquoise.

  O’Hare airport is nothing but straight lines. Horizontal and vertical. No diagonals, no curves of any kind, save for one spot where a couple of terminals converge and they put in one circular atrium just for the hell of it. This is the very definition of modern. And, despite the fact that it’s sheathed in glass, it feels more solid than any building I’ve ever been in.

  It’s also huge.

  Tony and I have to walk a long way to get from one terminal to another, but we have no trouble finding our way.

  We wait at O’Hare for about an hour, and then board our Ozark Air Lines flight to Bloomington. This is one hell of a beat-up plane. It looks like a relic left over from the Second World War. The two wooden boards fastened to the tail rudder worry us a little. And the interior of the plane doesn’t inspire any
more confidence than the fuselage. It’s as worn out inside as outside. Could this help explain why there are so few passengers?

  It’s a smooth flight, though, and we get to see many more details below because we fly lower than we did in the Eastern Air Lines plane.

  Illinois is made up of straight lines, just like O’Hare airport: squares and rectangles, in various shades of green. The slanting sunlight from the fast-setting sun lends an amber tint to the corn and soybean fields. We see a few trees, here and there. It’s mostly wide-open farmland. So much of it, and so utterly flat. A house here and there, clumps of trees, some squirming streams that seem to annoy the straight lines, a town or two, a few lakes.

  I’m on the lookout for pines, even though I’m no longer an idolater. This is where Christmas trees come from. I’m just curious: I want to see huge ones, a hundred feet tall. And every now and then I see some, near farmhouses. Or so I think.

  In about forty-five minutes we begin our descent. In the waning sunlight, everything is bathed in gold. But where’s Bloomington? Or Normal? It’s all cornfields, and suddenly, yeow, an airstrip. Down we go, steeply. The descent is quick and the landing rough. Very rough. And the plane shimmies and spins all out of whack, because the third wheel is in the rear rather than the front.

  Tony and I look at each other and laugh, nervously.

  We look out the window and are surprised to see a lot of people milling about. It’s a mob out there in the open, with tall corn as their backdrop. They and the corn are all awash in gold.

  “Are they here for us?” asks Tony.

  We climb down onto the tarmac and see our uncle, aunt, and cousins, leading the mob toward us. They look about the same as the last time we saw them. The girls are a little taller, but basically the same. It feels so good to see them. We approach, in what seems like slow motion. Our aunt covers her mouth and gives us an odd look. Our uncle smiles. Hugs for everyone. Our aunt observes we’re way too thin, and asks me what’s wrong with my back. We’re introduced to everyone in the mob. They’re the good people who’ve been helping our uncle and his family for the past year or so, without whom their life would be unbearable.