Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Whoosh. It’s 1981. Tony crashes and burns. Rock bottom. He checks into Resurrection Hospital, on Easter, his drinking totally out of control. As I chat with him, I glance out the window and see a rabbit jump out from the bushes. Peter Cottontail, at Resurrection Hospital, on Easter. Is this a good omen, a mere coincidence, or a cruel joke? It’s only the first of many such stints in clinics for Tony, and none of the others will be graced by Easter bunnies or omens of any kind, or any real healing. As I say good-bye to Tony that night, at Easter Bunny Hospital, I see the same look in his eyes as he had when we were separated at the Miami airport, back in April 1962.

  Whoosh. It’s the late 1980s and early ’90s. Marie Antoinette’s health takes a sharp turn for the worse. Bum liver, infected with the hepatitis C she picked up from a blood transfusion in Mexico, back in 1965, just after she left Cuba. Crippling pain in her back and legs makes her life miserable, and on top of that fatigue too, caused by post-polio, a resurgence of the disease that ravaged her in infancy. Toxins invade her brain, sometimes, and scramble her thinking. She falls and breaks a hip—her good hip, the one to which her only useful leg is connected. She learns how to live in a wheelchair.

  Whoosh. She’s visiting me in Connecticut in 1996. I’ve just moved here from Virginia, and I want to show her the ducks in the swamp that borders my new house. I park the car at the top of the hill, at the end of my road, take out her wheelchair, help her get in, and set both of her brakes as tightly as possible. I turn around to shut the car door, and when I turn back to grasp the wheelchair handles, she’s not there at all. Tick tock. I lift my head slightly from that shockingly empty spot to see my mom careening down the steep hill in her wheelchair, at about twenty miles per hour, straight toward a clump of tall oaks at the edge of the swamp. She’s headed straight for the biggest, fattest tree of all. I see her life flashing before my eyes, and my eternity in hell as well. “I’ve just killed my mom,” I say out loud as I dash down the hill. But before I can take more than three steps, her wheelchair veers sharply to the left and rolls into a large pile of freshly ground-up mulch. She’s thrown from the chair, flips in the air, and lands on top of the mulch pile. The empty chair tumbles to the very edge of the murky water, like a rogue die tossed by an angry gambling deity. When I reach her, a few seconds later, we both start laughing as I brush off the mulch from her sweater. “You know,” she says, “you shouldn’t really push the chair that fast.” All I can say is: “You need a new chair with brakes that work.”

  Whoosh. It’s the late nineties: the end of the millennium, and the end of the road for Tony. He crashes through rock bottom and vanishes from his body, his soul snatched by the drugs that the doctors prescribe. “Post-traumatic-stress-syndrome,” say some doctors. “Anxiety disorder,” say others. “Schizoaffective disorder,” say yet others. It makes no difference what the doctors say, the end result of their ministrations is the creation of a zombie who doesn’t even look at all like Tony. All of his teeth fall out. His hair turns white. His now-diabetic body turns into a gross caricature of a blimp, or of our father, the very fat Louis XVI. He shakes all the time and rubs his leg constantly. His tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard’s. His speech is slurred. His attention span is reduced to a minute, at most, and his responses to questions become grunts. He stops bathing or shaving, or cutting his hair, changing his clothes, or controlling his blood sugar. A stinking Bizarro Santa Claus, he scares people on the street and the nuns in our mom’s building. Even worse, his wife insists that he’s getting the best of care and that there’s nothing else to be done for him. And she views all advice as hostile meddling.

  Whoosh. New century, new millennium. The braided rope in my mind’s eye is so frayed now, so tightly wound around me. Marie Antoinette declines rapidly, alongside Tony. As her visits to the hospital become more frequent and the care she requires intensifies, I fly to Chicago, back and forth, almost as a commuter, and search for a solution. She insists on remaining in Chicago so she can be near Tony, even though she can’t really do anything for him, not even visit unless I fly all the way out there and rent a car. All along, as her health has worsened, she’s been thinking she’ll eventually move into the nursing home that’s attached to her apartment building. But it doesn’t turn out that way. She falls into a coma, her brain awash in toxins. The doctors offer no hope. This is it. Curtains. If she comes out of it, she’ll be a vegetable, they say. The Little Sisters of the Poor decide that she can no longer keep her apartment and refuse to take her into their ultra-plush nursing home, where Cardinal Bernardin’s mother is living out her final days on earth. Tony scares them too much, they say, and so does my mother’s bright red lipstick, and her Cuban loudness, and her inability to speak English. No amount of pleading by me or her friends can change their nun minds. They give me three days to clean out my mom’s apartment, and they offer no help in finding her another place to live.

  Her friends and I dispose of her few belongings, as if she were already dead.

  Marie Antoinette regains her senses and is fully back to her old self, but she has no place to live. Given that there’s no such thing as a truly nice nursing home—save for the one the nuns have barred my mother from—I find one that’s as close an approximation of “nice” as one could hope for. For the brief remainder of her life on earth, Marie Antoinette will constantly say, “You know, I lost everything twice; first when I left Cuba, then when the nuns kicked me out.”

  Her roommate at the nursing home is paralyzed and unable to speak. The best she can do is mumble and moan. Marie Antoinette becomes her best friend. The fact that my mom can’t speak English is of no consequence: Eventually, Mom will be the only one in the nursing home who understands each and every one of her roommate’s primal grunts.

  Whoosh. It’s 2003. Despite his dire state, Tony manages to drive himself to liquor stores and get into all sorts of jams at home and on the road. His wife is there, on the front lines, much like an infantryman in a trench, constantly shelled, unable to stop the shelling, convinced that there’s nothing anyone can do to improve the situation, suspicious of any attempts to intervene. All of the policemen and emergency room doctors and nurses in his town, forty miles north of Chicago, come to know him and his wife very well. One night, a diabetic blackout knocks him unconscious while he’s driving on the Northwest Tollway, and he rams his car head-on into a concrete barrier. Like Marie Antoinette on the mulch pile, he escapes unscathed. But his driver’s license is revoked by the state of Illinois. Never a stickler for the rules, Tony keeps driving anyway. Then, sure enough, he blacks out again one night while driving home from the liquor store and crashes into a parked car. As soon as he comes to and sees what’s happened, he limps away as fast as he can and leaves the two smashed-up cars behind. Nabbed at home by the cops and found guilty of driving without a license and fleeing the scene of a crime, Tony is declared a danger to himself and others. The options offered by the court at this crossroads are as limited as they are hard to accept: jail, a state-run mental hospital, or a nursing home. So, Tony ends up in a nursing home—and not a very good one at that because he limits his choices to those that allow smoking.

  Whoosh. It’s 2004. Tony and Marie Antoinette fade away at a fast clip, in their nursing homes. Marie Antoinette fades only physically, but Tony fades in every way. I fly to Chicago so often that I begin to think of cars and jet airplanes as no different from each other. Both have seats with seat belts and get you where you’re going. Unfortunately, air travel costs a lot and it eats up my income. Fortunately, at the Chicago end of my commute, John, the wounded Marine my mom took in years before, helps me out and lets me stay in his lakefront high-rise apartment. He’s done very well for himself. And he’s a constant companion to Marie Antoinette and Tony. Truth be told, he’s the only real brother I have. Tony’s gone. He’s died a thousand deaths with every pill he’s taken and is now one of the living dead.

  I bring our mom to see him and the three of us go to the International
House of Pancakes, each and every time. What a strange sight the three of us exiles are, here, at this table. What an abhorrent, unforeseen tableau, here, at the International House of Pancakes in gritty Waukegan, Illinois—2662 Belvidere Road—in the smoking area. Had anyone told us back in 1962 at the airport in Havana that this is how our family would end up, we couldn’t have believed it. Had anyone shown me this scene back in 1962—at the International House of Pancakes in the Westchester Shopping Center in Miami, on the corner of Eighty-seventh Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street Southwest, where all the different syrups brought me to the edge of rapture, or at Union Station in Chicago on the third of November, 1965—I could never have recognized it as my future, our future.

  Not even Louis XVI and his Ouija board could have fathomed this grotesque ending, this frayed and tattered braid. All the same, however, we’re always seated at a table for four and I can’t help but feel the ever-absent presence of my father in the empty seat.

  “Tremenda sorpresa, no?” he whispers inside my head. What a surprise, huh?

  Doctors Sigmund and Carl, you gnostic guides, bogus high priests, you and your disciples have nothing to offer us here, at this well-lit table with its fake wood-grain finish, paper place mats, and scuffedup stainless-steel forks and spoons. Your insights are as valuable as the smoke curling up toward heaven from my brother’s Camel cigarette, which I bought for him on the Internet from a Native American reservation in upstate New York. Tick tock. Shut up and go away, headshrinkers. I’m sick of you people.

  This is not the way it should end. But this is the way it’s ending, all right. And there’s a blessing in this wretched dénouement, a glowing otherworldly gift. Each of us at this table has been reduced to the barest essentials, under these bright, bright lights, which remind me so much of those above the table at the Pedro Pan camp in Florida City, that first night of mine in the United States, when I ate my first and last chicken sandwich.

  Marie Antoinette and Tony have been stripped clean, down to the core of their souls. It’s all they have left, really, the spark of the divine in them, and their lingering faults and quirks, so human, irksome, and inevitable. Their bodies are a great burden to them: noisome, painful, unsightly husks. They’ve had no choice but to let go of their belongings and their flesh: It’s a self-denial that’s been imposed on them, and their plight, which is also mine in a very real sense, has forced me to empty my pockets, draw inward and upward and outward and backward and forward and to be stripped clean in a different way. Watching them disappear this way—so far away from where their exit point on the map should have been, so far from all other kin, so far down at the very bottom of the heap, so destitute, so crucified—rubs my third eye raw, and it allows me to see what’s most essential, here and beyond, through a blissfully painful haze.

  We’re seeds sown in fertile, stinking soil. No doubt about it. Dying is our lot, but not our end.

  It’s only the beginning. It has to be.

  Or else that number tattooed by Nazis on the Holocaust survivor who accused the three of us of ruining his country might as well be the cruelest, darkest joke in the universe. And his words nothing but an echo of God’s summary judgment:

  “I’m sick of you people.”

  Twenty-five

  How about this one?”

  It’s a real Christmas tree, like all the other ones in this parking lot. The lightbulbs strung above our heads cast the blurriest and flimsiest of shadows, as insubstantial as the warmth that emanates from the steel barrel in which a lazy fire burns. All but a few of the trees look acceptable. None is perfect.

  There’s no snow on the ground. It hasn’t snowed yet, at all, and it’s already late December. What kind of cruel hoax is this?

  Par for the course, here in Chicago, where nothing has gone right for the past two months. Until now, that is. Shopping for this Christmas tree is the best thing that’s happened since we met up with our mom back in early November.

  We had to leave Bloomington in a hurry, almost as if we’d committed a crime. Our mom arrived in Chicago on Halloween, and we were tossed aboard a Chicago-bound train three days later. No chance to say farewell to anyone, really. No time to get ready for this death.

  The sweet flame wasn’t very sweet this time. It’s still burning me up, in fact, and it hurts like hell. I didn’t want to die; couldn’t let go. Still can’t. I don’t want to be transfigured this time. No. Jesus H. Resurrected Christ, why have you abandoned me? Corn Belt Jesus, above my uncle’s chair, what have you done?

  All of my friends were shocked by the abruptness of my departure. “What? Tomorrow?” I’m sure it was no different for Tony’s many friends. Our uncle and aunt and our cousins seemed stunned too. Who wouldn’t be?

  Oh, but this Christmas tree might be the turning point. We pick out a very nice one and carry it for a block and a half to the basement apartment we’ve just rented at the southeast corner of Hollywood and Winthrop. It’s a beautiful building, English Tudor style, red brick, with turrets and bay windows and limestone trim everywhere. Once upon a time, it was an elegant residence, you can tell. Top-notch. But the basement was always the basement, and now it’s our home. Our radiators are on the ceiling, which is crisscrossed by pipes. We have very little furniture, all secondhand: a sofa bed, where Tony and I sleep, a cot for our mother, and a folding table and chairs. We’ve also just picked up an old television set from a Puerto Rican lady we met at a secondhand shop, down in Uptown, the nearest slum, which is brimming over with junk shops.

  At least here in Chicago we get about seven channels. Now, finally, I’ll get to see shows on networks other than CBS.

  You’ve got to look at the bright side. Tony has found a job at a print shop. He’s quit high school and works there full-time during the day. I’m looking for a job too. I’m too young to drop out of high school, like Tony, so I’m supposed to find a full-time job at night. It’s what the social worker downtown told us to do. Our mom is also looking for work, sort of. The truth is she has no clue how to do that. She means to, but doesn’t know what to do.

  My mom’s friends, Luis and Ada Serrano—the ones she didn’t know too well—put us up at their tiny apartment for a month and a half while we looked for a place of our own. They’re wonderful people, and their son Luisito—who’s about ten years older than me—is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He’ll be my older brother, and a damn good one, as Tony vanishes down his abyss.

  It takes a month and a half to get our own place because no one wants to rent to an unemployed handicapped single mom with two teenage sons, especially as soon as Tony and I switch from English to Spanish as we translate what is being said to Marie Antoinette. Many a door has been slammed in our faces, impolitely, Chicago style.

  We bring the Christmas tree into our empty living room. Save for the sofa bed, the tree is it. No competition. It dominates the room. With money from Tony’s first paycheck, we buy lights, simple solid-color glass ornaments, and tinsel at Woolworth’s, on Bryn Mawr Avenue. We also buy a cheap, but very well made, Italian porcelain Nativity set. No real Christmas would be complete without one.

  While we’re making these purchases, a fellow Cuban approaches us and makes small talk. Before you know it, he’s solved my job-search problem. He tells me that right after New Year’s he can get me a full-time job as a dishwasher at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where he works as a freight elevator operator.

  Back in Cuba, his father owned a sugar mill, which he thought he’d inherit.

  I’ll work at the Hilton for nearly a year, full-time, at night, as I attend high school during the day.

  The tree is more than wonderful. More than heavenly. It’s the only nice thing in the world. I know I’ve reverted to my idolatrous ways, but hell, once we hung the ornaments and plugged in those lights, and the living room lit up just the way our living room in Havana used to at Christmastime, I had no choice. This is no hollow idol, like the one in that upper room in Coral Gables, or the one in that basement i
n Bloomington, or all the others I’ve seen since then. This is my idol, and it’s full of my memories, which, at this time, is about all I have that can make me happy. This Christmas is all about returning to the way things used to be. Our mom came here and uprooted us just so we could go back to that: the golden past we lost.

  So what if no one else from the family is here? At least the three of us are together, and we have a Christmas tree. In English class, where our very young teacher screams constantly at us, I concentrate on images of our Christmas tree in order to block out her rants. The way the Christmas lights paint a bare wall with splashes of color is really like nothing else on earth, especially when every one of those splotches is linked to some distant memory.

  All I need is an army of angels, like the ones on Coral Way. Here, in this gritty place, I sure could use them. Little do I know that a whole legion of them will soon walk with me through skid row and ride the subway with me every night, unseen, their bright shining weapons joyfully unsheathed.

  Christmas Eve. Christ, yes. We dine with the Serranos. It’s something of a homecoming, returning to the apartment where we lived up until a fortnight ago, during our first trying weeks in Chicago. It’s so good to see Luis, Ada, and Luisito. So what if they don’t have a Christmas tree? We do, in our basement apartment, two blocks down Winthrop Avenue. It’s a real Nochebuena, with all of the traditional Spanish and Cuban goodies. Each and every one of them, down to the walnuts and filberts and four or five different kinds of turrón.