The Domino Diaries

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  “What did he say?” I smiled with relief.

  “He said how could anyone be nervous about Yankee Stadium after pitching at Latinoamericano. That’s what he said after he’d left. This experience is going to ruin the rest of sports for all your life. It is going to molest you like a priest! Baseball is the highest religion in my country.”

  We joined the immense crowd marching its way into the entrance, liquor and cigars in hand. Latinoamericano could hold over fifty thousand fans and there was not a parking lot in sight. After we paid two Cuban pesos (about ten cents) for our seats, a vendor pushed two raffle tickets toward us from a barred window as if they were crack pipes. “Good seats?” I asked.

  “No designated seats inside.” Jesús laughed. “No luxury boxes. No commercial breaks. You’ll see.”

  Before we’d gotten inside another clap sounded: tin cans being smashed together, echoing throughout the stadium. A drum started pounding and thousands more people clapped behind its thud. Another siren wailed. We crammed through a narrow tunnel with hundreds all around us and then the expanse of the diamond and outfield unfolded before us, sprinkled with that immaculate constellation of ballplayers and their mitts standing under several furiously burning lights extended by concrete at the angle of fire engine cranes toward a burning building. A three-story logo of Industriales dimly shone from the side of a blue-painted building just beyond the outfield. A ribbon of camouflage green uniforms circumnavigated the crowd where the military had been called out in case anything beyond the usual rioting occurred. As we found our seats behind the reserved government seating, the beat of the drum reached a crescendo and three well-built teenage girls in spandex turned their backs to the field and stuck their asses out to twerk with abandon. Those around them laughed and hollered approval.

  “You see that man?” Jesús asked as he raided a tray of peanuts from a vendor. “The only one out of uniform, in the opposing team’s dugout?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does his profile look familiar?” Jesús laughed.

  “No,” I confessed. “I have no idea who he is.”

  “Their team doctor is Fidel’s son.”

  “Him?”

  “Oh yes.” Jesús giggled. “None of Fidel’s children followed him into politics. I wonder why that is? None of them wanted anything to do with this mess confronting the United States.”

  At that point I gave up entirely on trying to follow the game in front of us.

  “How hard is it for you to stay here, Jesús?”

  “Some of these athletes, when they first got to Florida, did things that amused Americans.” Jesús smiled, cracking open some peanuts. “They bought dog food for their children because they saw a child smiling on the can and had no idea there was special food just for dogs or cats. Some fainted the moment they walked into an American supermarket. Some kept million-dollar checks in their back pocket for days because they didn’t understand anything about banks.”

  “You’ve never been away from Cuba?”

  “I left with a delegation of engineers to Toronto once. For a week.”

  “Was it what you expected?”

  “Is Havana what you expected? I was born the same year as the triumph of the revolution. My father was always so proud of this. What he risked his life for in so many ways came true. For the first time since Columbus we were in control of our own destiny. Extreme poverty does not exist. Have you seen any homeless on our streets? I saw many homeless in a rich city like Toronto…”

  “I’m waiting for the but.”

  “The but is two very precious things. My father and my son. Two very powerfully opposing forces in my life, Brinicito. My father was able to provide me a better life than he enjoyed in so many ways. Can I offer that to my own son here in today’s Cuba?” And then Jesús took a deep breath and concluded the topic the way I’d hear so many fathers sum up the calamity of their albatross. “The greatest joy any Cuban man can know is becoming a father, and our deepest anguish, no matter how hard we try, is not being able to provide for them here. I have never told my father this, but I send in our family’s names to the lottery each year.”

  “What lottery?”

  “Every year the United States lets twenty thousand of us enter through a lottery to avoid the rafts that leave. All those horrible deaths from the balseros or smugglers’ boats. It’s all so feo. So each year I send in a letter with our names. And if they ever select us I will have to live with the betrayal of my father, which I don’t know how I will ever do. He might never forgive me. But the alternative is betraying my son. And that is something I could never forgive myself for.”

  Someone from Industriales hit a home run and everybody in the stadium but us jumped to their feet to see how far it would go.

  13

  SAND CASTLES

  I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  AS THE PLANE MADE its final descent and sunk beneath the clouds, the first lights I could discern coming from Toronto were bank insignias atop skyscrapers. There was relief in being home, trading in the hysteria of communism for the perversion of capitalism. Exchanging the uncertainty of questioning everything that happened, was happening, and would happen in Cuba for where I came from, where people could accept the world blowing up sooner than any real change to the status quo.

  Cuba had José Martí, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Fidel on their culture’s Mount Rushmore. It’s exhausting sizing those people up. My culture’s Mount Rushmore growing up was seemingly carved by Andy Warhol: Britney Spears (sexpot masquerading as a virgin), Michael Jackson (the strangest man on earth as most successful mainstream star ever), Hulk Hogan (fake athlete in a fake sport and the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s number-one-requested celebrity for dying kids ahead of Michael Jackson and Mickey Mouse), O. J. Simpson (the fifth estate’s wet dream), Lance Armstrong (Cancer Jesus selling his inspirational lie while raising half a billion dollars in cancer research), and Mike Tyson (our favorite world-class victim posing as victimizer). How many Cubans had I met ashamed of not being able to live their culture’s broken dream? The culture I came from was constitutionally incapable of shame.

  The French Canadian plumber sitting next to me on the flight home spent three hours, uninterrupted, detailing how he got over his divorce by regularly flying to Cuba to binge drink, fuck, and “look after” a series of eighteen-year-old girls—with their family’s full support after being paid off—until one got pregnant and he could safely marry her off the island and have her to himself back home. He looked like the bloated, heartbroken Kerouac from his famous William F. Buckley interview.

  “None of this bullshit back here with women,” he continued. “Tabernak! Our way of life is fucked up. All the pressure to have enough to offer a girl to get married until you do, and then everything around you, day after day, conspires to get you divorced. You’re suspect if you aren’t married and once you get married you can’t seem to find anybody married who is happy. Your wife blames you for everything and she takes everything. Fuck that. I threw away half my life on that scam. You’re young but you could learn a lot from me. It’s why our society is so scared of prostitution. The institution of marriage is far less honest a transaction than spending a couple hours with a whore when you feel lonely.”

  It’s not hard to identify the people who fall for the kind of beauty that subtracts rather than adds something to their lives.

  When I got back home from Havana my father had something terribly wrong with him. He’d been collapsing to the ground again and again with mysterious “attacks.” Nobody knew what it was and he refused to do anything to find out. Because of a real estate crash he’d battled a mountain of debt throughout my childhood. We all knew how much he smoked and drank every day. But like all highly functioning addicts, it had always felt like a tease. No smoker’s cough or hangovers. Like so much between my father and me, everything hid in plain sight. How much does the line between privacy and
secrets really matter if the only secrets you keep from people are the ones everybody already knows? He’d drink daily and I was resigned to the fact that he’d never stop, but then he’d never officially started in the first place. His alcoholism was always treated as a kind of tourism of the place where real drunks doing damage to their loved ones lived. The self-destruction he carried out without obvious consequences gave him a strange power over his own life and mine.

  That’s why for so long it was okay when I went to get fruit with him at the market as a child and he ducked off to the liquor store, leaving me a twenty to pay for the groceries. We both pretended to ignore the brown bag inserted into the plastic grocery bags: his crudely conspicuous sleight of hand. We both pretended to ignore my role as witness to his ritual. We ignored how his shame of my witnessing this spiked the punch bowl of his process. We couldn’t ignore how much fruit went rotten by neglect in his house. But nobody launched any inquiries into why. We just always had another reason to get more. And then more. And more.

  As soon as I got back from the airport my mother told me my father might be “leaving the earth plane.”

  “Might?” I repeated.

  “Darrr-ling,” she said. “It’s just he might be ready to leave.”

  Translation: he was dying. All scary things for my mother were spun into a positively reinforced excuse to discuss how compassionate the universe was. That was the law. And the law wasn’t for her the same as the one my father explained to me when I first asked him to define his profession. “The law is artificial order from total chaos.” He laughed. My father, a child protection lawyer, married a Hungarian gypsy refugee who looked into crystal balls and probed into the endless desperate lives that rang our doorbell and sat with her in our living room, channeling spirits from the spiritual plane. Day after day I’d answered our door while my mom meditated and aided all these wounded souls who’d exhausted every other conventional remedy to their problems and reluctantly found their way to our doorstep.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked her.

  “Bwinny, we don’t know what it eez.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Zat is zee zing!” She snorted. “He won’ zee a doctor.”

  “He lives across the fucking street from a hospital.”

  “You know your father.”

  It was as though knowing someone meant tolerating everything that might kill them. She said he’d fall and complain that it felt like an elephant was on his chest. He wouldn’t let her call an ambulance. He said if he was dying he didn’t want to die in any fucking hospital.

  “You should go see him, Bwinny.”

  So I did. Before he let me in the door, I had to swear an oath not to tell him to cross the street and go to the hospital. An hour later he suffered the same mysterious “attack,” collapsing and complaining of the elephant on his chest. Then more every hour or so. Each time I had no idea whether I was witnessing a dress rehearsal of his actual death or the real thing. Each time he asked for my hand and I held it until whatever it was gradually subsided. We tried to pretend everything was normal until the next attack. After a half dozen attacks my father suggested we do an inventory of the possible culprits. Cigarettes triggered it, walking up the stairs, masturbation, the miscellaneous-spontaneous variety.

  “Don’t worry, Brinny, I think I have a remedy to lick this thing.” He smiled reassuringly.

  The “remedy” consisted of two frozen towels, one for his forehead and the other for his chest, that he had stored in the freezer.

  I don’t remember how long this went on for. Obviously nobody could live in a constant state of emergency so, at some point the following morning, he announced we required groceries. Not pricey groceries from the closest supermarket, mind you; our destination was reasonably priced bulk items from Costco twelve miles away. He’d drive.

  When we got there my father handed me a shopping list after announcing his intention to get the eggs. The world could go on spinning. He was getting eggs and I had a list for the remaining items we needed.

  Things were going to turn out okay. I started walking down an aisle but found I couldn’t read anything on the piece of paper my father had given me. Even before I realized I was crying, a woman working in Costco offering samples to customers asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know where to begin so I turned around to point toward my father, by way of explanation, but instead saw an avalanche of Lucky Charms boxes in mid-collapse burying my father, who was laid out on the ground. He was trying to protect himself from more boxes falling on him, so he wasn’t dead.

  Hemingway said the only difference between people is the details of how we live and how we die. Gaudí got hit by a bus, Nick Drake overdosed on antidepressants, Lennon was shot in the back outside his apartment by a Catcher in the Rye fanatic, Plath stuck her head in an oven—you can’t look at their lives or their art the same way ever again. My father was going to die under a pile of Lucky Charms.

  I ran over to him.

  “Go!” he gasped, like a soldier dropped at D-Day. “Don’t worry about me! Go back. Get the milk. The milk! Keep going. Milk is the priority!” Then came my breaking point and his life’s moment of triumph. “Not the regular bullshit—get the 2 percent milk!”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I told him. “I tried. I can’t. I can’t do this.”

  “Okay,” he whispered, glaring at the new marshmallows Lucky was offering in the cereal box. “Help me up and we can go to the hospital.”

  It turned out one of his arteries was almost entirely clogged. I couldn’t stay with him in the hospital, even though the rest of my family arrived immediately. After I took him to the emergency room, I went back to his house and slept for two days. While I slept, doctors opened his chest and catheterized his artery, saving his life.

  When he got out, he stopped drinking and smoking for almost a year. Within a month, the most perverse thing my family discovered about him during his dry period, which none of us spoke about, was just how much easier he was to deal with loaded up on all the things that were killing him.

  I took whatever work I could find to make enough money to leave town and get back to Havana as fast I could. I taught boxing in parks. I worked for a few weeks in football pads as an extra in a Disney TV movie called Angels in the Endzone but was fired for reading books in the locker room instead of hurrying out in front of the camera. I hustled tourists at speed chess downtown. I worked, sheepishly, as the only bouncer at nightclubs in Chinatown without a Kevlar vest (they were expensive). I collected garbage until I backed a truck into someone’s roof and was fired. Nothing panned out so I gave dealing drugs a whirl and lasted all of three days before I chickened out and gave the backpack with two pounds of weed back to the guy who’d originally handed it over. The person who’d hired me to deal drugs, miraculously, took pity on me and offered to stake me a couple grand a month to turn professional at boxing. That scared the hell out of me. All I wanted to do was leave.

  I borrowed some money from my uncle to run away to Spain where a fighter had written me about a possible job helping a trainer at another boxing gym in Madrid.

  14

  WET MATCHES

  You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.…

  Maybe a small part of it will die if I’m not around feeding it anymore.

  —Lew Welch, “Chicago Poem”

  I’D FOUND THE ONLY ROOM I could afford in Madrid sandwiched between the Prado museum and the Atocha train station in a pension that was being run as a transvestite brothel. It was a cheap place to stay and the boxing gym where I got the job was only a few stops on the train, and on the way back you could walk with El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, and Salvador Dalí easily accessible at the Prado and Reina Sofía before you got home.

  The transvestites and I shared a bathroom. The boys called me el guapo when they passed me in the hallways. They worked outside the gates of the Parque del Retiro while the Moroccans sold hash inside the gates or near th
e pond with the rowboats. The Moroccan dealers even had business cards. It was all very civilized.

  Then it was four late one night or early one morning. I hadn’t talked with anyone or slept for so long I’d lost track. There was another argument cooking up from behind a wall in my room. The police had come the night before and left after a few minutes.

  I leaned out the window looking over the little courtyard and lit a cigarette, staring at the dresses belonging to the skinny South American boys hung on the laundry line. There was an ashtray on the windowsill with a train wreck of cigarettes scattered in its palm.

  I’d fallen for a girl back home and written her a letter and she’d promised she’d come see me. On the night I’d first met her I’d thought she was a little nervous to sleep with me because she was a virgin.

  It only lasted three days.

  The last time I saw her was on her porch:

  “What’s wrong, Brin?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t have anything to ask you and I don’t have anything to say to you. I don’t know why.”

  “Well, that’s when you say good-bye.”

  She was right.

  The night I met her I’d been working on a story about someone with the awful luck of falling for a prostitute. When we were eighteen and first visiting Europe, a painter friend of mine had sketched a portrait of a haunted and haunting girl standing behind a window in the Red Light District and had given it to her. The real girl didn’t especially care, but the girl in my story did. And I was trying to figure out a way for them to kiss and have it mean something because I liked the poetry of prostitutes withholding a kiss and giving up all that other stuff. I wasn’t even really sure if they really did.

  The girl behind the counter at the café followed me outside where I was smoking and asked what I’d been writing about, giving me a startled look when I told her. I asked if I’d said something wrong and she asked if I could walk her home when she got off at 3 a.m.