by Simon Ings
‘It’s time to go, Papa.’ Mo opens the curtains to the blinding Miami sun.
‘But men are walking on the Moon, Moisés!’
Mo brushes the cookie crumbs off his father’s best shirt and adjusts his tie. The men hardly know each other; there is a nine-year separation dividing them. They connect best in the dumb-show of gesture, the grammer of touch and nudge.
‘Come along, Papa, you want to look your best for the St Patrick crowd,’ says Moisés, hustling him out of his rundown Collins Avenue apartment. Mo wanted to do better by his father than to install him in this semi-derelict thirties hotel, but Anastasio is happy here. He can walk down the street and smell the ocean and the garbage and drink rum and eat roast pork sandwiches. He picks up a little pin money writing numbers for bolito, and around here no cop would ever dream of pressing charges. This place, in all its growing squalor, is a kind of Havana for the old man, now that the original is lost.
‘St Patrick’s?’ Old Anastasio is scandalized. ‘St Patrick’s?’
‘It’s the only church on the Beach, papa. We don’t want to go far now.’
It was his father’s idea that Man’s first steps on the Moon – an event that commands a TV audience of one-fifth of the world’s population – might be conveniently combined with an exposition of the Holy Eucharist. Anastasio’s regretting his decision now, of course, in thrall to the mission and its enormity, but he can’t be seen to ignore the call of the Holy Hour, not in front of his tearaway American son. He spent nine years battling the revolutionary authorities over his freedom to worship. So, muttering, he follows Mo into the unreliable old Deco lift. ‘How long have I waited to receive benediction among my countrymen, and now my son takes me to an Irish…’
Mo glances at his father, amused, as they cross the dusty lobby. Heaven only knows where this objection has sprung from. Another piece of Yankee folklore his father has somehow misconstrued. Anastasio only got out of Cuba eight months ago, and his desire to acquire the local US colouring has something desperate about it. A strong man growing old, Anastasio expresses his vigour in anxious, opinionated outbursts. He hasn’t the patience to soak up America, no, he must forage for it, he must stitch it out of scraps like a naked Adam covering himself with leaves.
What he ends up with – a motley of overheard conversation, misdirected sentiment and poorly comprehended talk-radio – says less about the old man’s American present than about his Cuban past: the way Castro’s UMAP labour camps stripped his ordinary human dignity away. When people look at Mo’s father, they see what Mo sees: a powerful old man, bullish, a survivor. The camps taught Anastasio to see past all that – past his personality, history and character – to some bare, grub-like, essential man. They taught him to be ashamed of himself, so now he is free, he is trying to be someone different. He is trying to be an American.
‘Welcome to Florida, Father,’ says Mo, baiting the old man a little. ‘The melting pot.’ This front of easy sarcasm is Mo’s antidote to the pity and anger which would otherwise overwhelm him, thinking of his father, for years shackled to the worst dregs of Havana’s lowlife, the winos and the queers. For nine years, in prison and out of it, since the day in 1960 he put his fourteen-year-old son on the boat to freedom, Anastasio has paid the price for his treason. Mo can never let him know how seriously he honours this debt.
Father and son leave the shadow of the dilapidated Greystone Hotel. Mo’s automobile is at the kerb, a Thunderbird with brilliant ice-cream bodywork that contrasts obscenely with its cherry-red leather interior. God forbid his father ever catches wind of its nickname among the blades of the corporaçion.
The old man makes a big production of how difficult it is to climb into a car so sporty, so low-slung, tan desrazonable, and he is messing with the radio before Mo can get to the ignition. Valuable minutes are wasted while Mo hunts for the station, and they are past Lummus Park and its ocean views before the familiar voice of NASA’s public affairs officer returns to the air.
‘You see?’ says Mo. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’
The two astronauts are still sat in their Eagle, doing whatever it is spacemen do once they have landed on a new world. All month the TV and the radio have been talking about how much rehearsal has gone into this. There have been talk shows, cinema newsreels, pull-out souvenirs in the magazines. But there must be some element of chance, there has to be, a part of the mission the astronauts make up as they go along. Or why would they bother to volunteer?
Mo and his father are headed for Garden Avenue, a stone’s throw from the 195 causeway anchoring Miami Beach to the mainland metropolis. The traffic, normally so heavy, has vanished. Mo takes advantage, and the Thunderbird trembles, roars and (eventually) accelerates.
Anastasio glances at his watch. Exasperated: ‘Moisés, we are early. We are much too early. Why didn’t we wait? Moisés—’
But Neil Armstrong has come on air:
‘It’s pretty much without colour,’ he says. ‘It’s grey and it’s a very white chalk-grey as you look into the zero phase line, and it’s considerably darker grey, more like ashen grey as you look up ninety degrees to the sun.’
It is the Moon, seen from the surface of the Moon, and it is grey.
‘Moisés, we are missing it!’
‘Papa, it’s fine, it’s under control, enjoy the radio, there won’t be any TV pictures until they leave the rocket.’
St Patrick’s occupies the whole block between West 39th and West 40th Street. There is a church, a rectory, a convent, a school, such an excess of space and ambition that, when Anastasio climbs (grumbling) from the car and sees it all, an actual mall of Catholicism, he struggles, unsure what attitude to strike. ‘Well, it doesn’t look Irish,’ he allows, as they climb the broad white steps to the door. Mo, in a brief, dissociated moment, wonders just what idea of Irishness a Cuban dissident entertains.
A small, malevolent-looking man in a broad suit is standing by the porch, a portable radio in one hand, listening intently.
‘Some of the surface rocks in close here that have been fractured or disturbed by the rocket engine are coated with this light grey on the outside, but when they’ve been broken they display a dark, very dark grey interior…’
You heard it here first, thinks Mo: the Moon is grey.
Mo isn’t too sure where this sarcastic inner voice has sprung from. He wants to lose himself in the poetry and majesty of the day, but this voice keeps tripping him up. This bleak voice reminds him, every time the public affairs officer comes on, that this is the Voice of official America, reporting the Daring Deeds of America, Land of Promises and promises and more promises, a superpower whose reach extends to the very stars, but a power so idle it is unable even to sweep a tin-pot dictator from an island not a hundred miles from its own seaboard. Maybe things will get better now that Nixon is in charge – Dickie Nixon who worked so hard and with such passion to make the Bay of Pigs invasion a working reality – but he is not holding his breath. Neither is the corporaçion. Even its CIA handlers – Dick’s men all, and veterans with Cuba in their blood – have been muttering mutinously into their shot glasses.
He knows today’s Moon landing should outweigh these matters. On a planetary scale his can only be local troubles. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than this: that three crew-cut middle-class boys are putting their lives on the line for the sake of an extraordinary adventure. And good for them, their bravery and dedication and undoubted skill. He salutes the adventure, Hell, yes. It’s the national symbolism that sticks in his throat. In 1961, at fifteen, he was too young to join the Brigade. He missed the sorry hash American planning and intelligence made of the Bay of Pigs landings. He was not martyred, as so many fathers of so many friends were that day in April, on the altar of expedience and deniability.
The astronauts, too, have put their lives in the hands of America, and Mo knows, with some bitterness, how risky this must be for them. He wants to see them walk on the Moon, and when he leads his d
ad into church, he’ll be as glad of the little surprise he’s been saving as, hopefully, his dad will be. Because there’s a television – the biggest you can rent, booked weeks ago from the biggest rental store in the city – hooked up to an aerial in the church tower. The priest is a rocket nut and plans to slip the Holy Hour into whatever dead space becalms the coverage.
There is another reason Mo chose this church.
A baptism party emerges from the portico. They are a miscellaneous bunch: the men tense, overmuscled; the women young, overdressed and at the same time underconcealed, more likely girlfriends than wives. The little man with the radio goes to join them.
‘I told you we were early,’ Anastasio grumbles, but Mo isn’t listening. Mo is shooting his cuffs, he is running his fingers through his hair. The party passes.
‘Señor Conroy!’
The mother, striking but pale under her garish white cake decoration – more of a bridal gown than an outfit for baptism – is walking arm in arm with a balding, heavy-set man, who tenses visibly as Mo calls out his name.
This Conroy was a strong man in his day, old Anastasio sees that. A strong man who has applied his strength against other men: the signature of combat is written indelibly in his poise, his hand reluctantly extended to brush Mo’s.
The girl blushes and smiles. ‘Very many congratulations, Deborah,’ Mo says, and bends to coo over her baby. Anastasio is not so old that he does not notice Mo’s attention shift fleetingly to the girl’s breasts.
‘Mr Conroy is a sports promoter, Papa, he holds cards in all the big venues, the Auditorium, the Convention Center. Mr Conroy, I’d like you to meet my father.’ Mo’s solicitations are so proper they border on parody. This is obvious to everyone, and Anastasio feels shame on his son’s behalf.
Conroy waits patiently, holding Anastasio’s hand, until the old man looks at him. When he speaks, his accent is soft, not American – Irish? ‘Your son tells me you enjoy Jackie Gleason.’
Anastasio shrugs.
‘Come to next Wednesday’s match and I’ll introduce you.’
Gleason works out of the Auditorium. Anastasio saw him coming out of there once, beaming blindly into the sun, hand half-raised to greet a crowd, or fend it off. Expecting a public that, for that brief anomalous moment, had vanished, the street and sidewalk empty. Gleason dropped his hand, noticed Anastasio looking at him from across the street and mugged up an act for him: a big shrug and a disappointed shamble down the street.
‘The Great Malenko versus Wahoo McDaniel,’ says Mo.
‘What?’
‘The match. At the Auditorium next Wednesday. Right, Dad?’
This from the girl, Deborah, and straight away the alarm bells are ringing in Anastasio’s head. Because if this is her father, and this bundle in her arms is her baby, then where, in the name of decency, is her husband?
*
Hours pass. It is twenty to ten before Armstrong begins his moonwalk, and Harry is drinking in his usual bar down by Woffard Park. The bar is packed and silent, everyone transfixed before the screen on its shelf above the optics. They are wrapped in an atmosphere more profound and deep-felt than church and his own granddaughter’s christening.
Harry raises the beer glass to his lips but forgets to drink.
‘Neil, you’re lined up nicely... toward me a little bit…’
The restricted environment of the lunar module means that Armstrong will enter the history books arse-first, the way his granddaughter Stacey entered the world.
‘OK, down…’
Everyone is moved in some way. Harry feels his jaw tighten, but there are men around him weeping into their beer. The wonder of it is, these are his people, men whose profession it is to beat the living shit out of each other. These Mexican hardcases have so little left to prove they can afford to let themselves be children when the occasion suits. Harry has learned to admire their easy sentiment – but from a distance, Belfast still strong in him. Tears can never be Harry’s way, brought up as he was under a strict Falls Road ethic, the rod thrust firmly – as his late wife once so delicately put it – up his Fenian backside.
‘Roll to the left… put your left foot to the right a little bit… you’re doing fine.’
Still no live picture yet.
Beside Harry, below him – he is only five feet six to Harry’s six-two – Benjamin Donoso is making the sign of the cross repeatedly across his chest. Donoso is a former ice-house navvy Harry discovered moonlighting on the Guadalajara circuit. This was just a few weeks after Harry arrived in Mexico, wrestling’s new El Dorado, Deborah bigbellied on his arm and the pair of them out to start their lives again as far away as possible from ‘swinging London’.
The second time they met, Donoso handed Deborah a charm against the devil, a sugar-and-straw trinket Harry didn’t understand and, more than that, suspected. Only the sadness in the little Mexican’s eyes prevented him from ramming the little juju thing down his neck.
Over time, Harry has come to understand that Benjamin Donoso’s superstitions are real to him, turning his every performance in the wrestling ring into a Mystery he could, if he was put to it, explain to any priest. Every Wednesday Donoso puts on a black cloak, white face-paint and a cardboard half-mask painted like a skull, and climbs into the ring with men a foot and a half taller than he is.
Back in 1969, before Donoso came on board to explain it to him, this sort of caper was a closed book to Harry Conroy. Arriving in Mexico, he’d been dismayed to discover that the wrestling scene there was a circus. Literally: there were costumes. Masks. Capes. There were props. In Tijuana the fights were, if possible, even more brutal than those he remembered from Belfast, but here there was an added grace to every bout, and a kind of fairy-tale logic Harry despaired of ever understanding.
With Donoso’s encouragement and Deborah’s medical bills to pay, Harry finally cracked it. He gathered together the best wrestlers Donoso knew of and showed them the kind of wrestling he knew: the sea-sick rhythms of Submission, the brutal groundworks of Collar-and-Elbow. The Mexican fighters watched, and grew pale.
What can we do with this? This was Harry’s question: no angle, no pitch, no promises. What can we do? Can we do anything? Is there anything here?
There was. When they were ready, Harry arranged a tour Stateside, and from the very first night, it was a rout, a massacre, an event to change the sport of wrestling for ever.
Harry’s outfit settled finally in Florida, integrating uneasily with the already strong promotion there. There were tensions between the natives and the newcomers, and by persuading both sides to let him exploit these tensions in closely scripted angles, Harry made every match he promoted part of a larger epic – a statewide grudge war with instalments every week in an auditorium or school hall near you. It was the birth of modern wrestling, with its storylines, its flawed heroes and irresistible villians, its catastrophic injuries and superhuman returns from the dead. It was pure gold.
Donoso is the most exciting heel on the Florida circuit and certainly the most unlikely. Whoever heard of a heel who was shorter than his opponent? Who, before Donoso, ever imagined that a crowd could be persuaded to bay for the blood of the little guy? Donoso has a way of lending true terror to his litheness, his odd, asymmetric moves and especially his short stature. He is everyone’s childhood nightmare of a puppet come to life. He makes even Harry shudder sometimes, even though Harry writes all the angles and keeps him supplied with rubber teeth.
Donoso the Vampyre, at five feet six the undisputed master of the figure four leg-lock, lays his hand on Harry’s arm. ‘The boy’s a blade,’ he murmurs as they wait for pictures, any second now: Armstrong’s first steps. ‘When Castro gets his joke-shop cigar from Uncle Sam, this boy wants to be there with the lighter.’
Christ. ‘What else?’ Harry asks. He has been turning cartwheels trying to keep his lovely daughter out of the shit, but the evidence is pretty bloody clear by now, Deborah has an unerring instinct for trouble. He had ho
pes for Mo, too. ‘What does he use his boat for?’
Donoso shrugs.
‘Weed? Is he shipping weed?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Every son of every Cuban martyr plies the coast of Cuba in a borrowed boat. It is like a rite of manhood. They are looking for something to tell their handlers back on shore, men they imagine belong to the Agency. They don’t even know what it is they are looking for. They missed their moment in history, too young to get butchered with the 2506, so now they wander the Florida Straits like derelicts foraging for scraps. Six months later the ones who don’t manage to drown themselves are tacking into the Keys with packets of emeralds and holds full of marijuana.
Still, this Moisés kid is doing a damn good impression of being smitten, and who else is going to look at Deborah now she has Stacey to look after? He’s persistent, too. Harry has made sure of that. He’s not given the kid the easiest of rides.
‘Thanks, Ben,’ he says. Benjamin Donoso shrugs, because thanks are nothing to him, he loves Harry fiercely.
Harry wonders what he has done to deserve such friendship. Without Donoso he would surely be down and out in Tijuana still, and Deborah, poor damaged Deborah, this child, the image of her mother, whose precious life he tries to save, but which pours through his fingers like water–
The balance in the room changes. He feels it, a shift of energies.
Above them, on the television, Armstrong’s boot appears.
At the same moment, across town, Moisés Chavez has taken advantage of Harry’s absence to steal a couple of hours with his love.
‘Careful,’ Deborah gasps, ‘careful.’
Mo lifts his body higher above her, teasing her, his cock inside her but only a little way.
‘Mo.’
His quick, shallow thrusts grow deeper, longer, he lowers himself over her, flicks at her lips with his tongue, and she begins to come.
They are still in the flush of things, still new to each other. Next to them, sleeping in her cot, Deborah’s baby Stacey stirs in her sleep, comforted by smells and sounds of human need.