Learning to Die in Miami Read online

  When I get to my house, I can’t believe my good fortune: My house parents are people I know, friends of my mom and dad. Familiar faces in a strange place: the Angones family. My brand-new foster father has known my father for many years. My dad called him Panchitín, a diminutive form of Pancho, the nickname for Francisco. But I can’t call him that. Calling him Señor Angones sounds too formal, so I end up trying not to call him anything. Their son Frank had been to many of my birthday parties, back in Havana, before the world changed. I don’t know any of them that well, but at least we’re not perfect strangers. I know deep inside that they’ll look out for me with extra care.

  Frank’s mom hugs me, and his dad reassures me that everything will be all right.

  I can’t believe how many kids are crammed into this house. We’re packed tight in there, on bunk beds, and Frank has to share his space with all of us. He’d come on the airlift too, without his parents, and had been through all this before. And then his parents came, and they chose to stay at the camp and serve as foster parents for wave after wave of us. So Frank has to wait quite a while before he gets his own room.

  We’d come and go through that house and all the others at that camp like heads of lettuce being picked, packed, and trucked away at some top-secret farm. And so did the teenage boys at the other camp, at Kendall, much closer to Miami, but still out in the bush. Kendall was so remote back then that the teenage boys cracked jokes about Tarzan being their closest neighbor. No one would notice us. We’d dribble in, invisibly, noiselessly, and be ferried out in the dark of night to camps in the jungle. Journalists would have no clue this was happening, or they simply didn’t care. We were only Cubans, after all, aliens from an exotic location that most Americans couldn’t even locate on a map. Who would want to read about us back then, in 1962? Nothing would change later, either: To this day, hardly anyone in the world knows that all of this happened.

  Fourteen thousand and sixty-four boys and girls, some as young as three years old, were shipped off to the United States by desperate parents, warehoused out of sight, redistributed at lightning speed, scattered to the four winds. To me, this seemed normal. It’s what nearly all of my childhood friends were going through too. It seemed so commonplace that it took me twenty years to come to grips with its monstrous abnormality, the questions I should have asked at the time, and the rage I had to bury deep inside.

  But that night, as I drift to sleep in my bunk at the Angoneses’ house in the Florida City camp, all I care about is the fact that I’ve escaped from Cuba, which is the same as escaping from hell, and that I’m in a new land with marvelous vending machines.

  On the ride from the airport, as we zipped through Miami and out into the Everglades, I was in shock. Here I am. Estoy aquí. All of my life I’d longed to be here in the United States of America because the place had thrust itself upon me through movies, television shows, comic books, and a thousand and one products, from baseball cards to model trains and soft drinks. I’d been seeing images of this place, playing with its toys, and consuming its goods and entertainment since the day I was born. I’d fallen in love with its women on-screen, long before I ever fell in love with a real girl. It was the ideal world, and ours seemed but a pale reflection of it. Later, when I’d first learn of Plato’s allegory of the cave, I’d understand the concept instantly, without any difficulty, because I’d already lived in such a cave and escaped from it. Once Fidel and his crew set out to pulverize everything that was a mirror image of the United States in Cuba—mostly out of sheer bilious envy—they’d make our cave much deeper, and darker. They’d succeeded in blocking the entrance to the cave and destroying our physical contact with the ideal world, but they couldn’t take away what was stored in our memories, or at least in my memory.

  In many ways this new place was home, and perhaps more of a home than my own native land. Or so I thought as I looked out of the van’s window.

  Yet, I recognized nothing. No images of Miami had ever entered my field of vision in Cuba, for America exported very little of Miami, if anything. Back then, Miami was a kitschy tourist trap that didn’t figure much in American culture. The cityscape I saw buzzing past me on expressways and highways looked nothing like what I’d imagined. There were no skyscrapers, no mountains, no deserts. No cowboys, for sure, and no Marilyn Monroe. It looked shockingly familiar, a whole lot like the newest neighborhoods on the outskirts of Havana. But those Havana neighborhoods, which had suddenly stopped growing as soon as Fidel showed up, were already looking shabby and older than they really were. Without paint and constant repair, tropical homes deteriorate very fast. This place was different, all right. Nothing was old here, or shabby. So it seemed, anyway. All the buildings hugged the ground, as if afraid to rise too far from it. And the vegetation seemed very thick and jungle-like. But I really couldn’t see much after a while. It was nighttime, and I could make out only whatever was lit by streetlights or the traffic on the road.

  Except for the gas stations, which seemed like widely scattered galaxies that filled the empty space with their own light. There seemed to be a lot more of them here, and they seemed bigger, more brightly lit. It was the first noticeable difference that caught my eye, along with the strange brands of gasoline being sold: Phillips 66, Cities Service, Sunoco, Union 76. Their illuminated signs were practically all I could see once we got past a certain point and there were fewer and fewer buildings. And these oases of light were strung out at great distances from one another, like the bread crumbs in the Hansel and Gretel story, marking a path through the woods. But this was no fairy tale, and there were no witches in sight.

  This was the real world, and I had finally crossed over into it.

  I was alive, at last. Really alive. As I saw it then, Cuba had become some other dimension, far from earth: A parallel universe not unlike that of Bizarro World in the Superman comic books, where everything was the opposite of what one might expect on earth. And I couldn’t wait to escape from it, no matter what. Losing everything, including my family, seemed like a small price to pay. Or so I thought.

  Being in shock didn’t help me gain a sense of perspective. What caught my eye most intensely were the soda-pop vending machines at the gasoline stations, all lit up in colors much more eye-catching than I had seen on any of their Cuban counterparts. Like everything else we’d missed for the past two years, these machines were way ahead into the future. These were space-age models. I wanted to jump out of the van, drop nickels in their sweet, sweet coin slots, fill my arms with their bottles, and sample those drinks I’d never, ever seen or tasted before, such as Bubble Up, and all those familiar ones that had once been available in Cuba, before Che Guevara made them disappear, such as Coke and Pepsi. Nothing seemed more desirable, more worthy of my attention. But I had no money at all, and the van was on a nonstop mission.

  Where I’ll end up and what might become of me doesn’t trouble me much that night, at least not on the conscious level. I’ve just died—without knowing it—and am as stunned as Lazarus must have been when he emerged from the tomb, entangled in his burial shroud, his hair a total stinking mess.

  Whatever Tony is thinking and feeling at that moment is hidden from me, and doesn’t worry me at all. He’s always been so headstrong, so daring, and so cocksure of his invulnerability that I can’t imagine him hurting in any way, or being scared. I miss his company, yes, but I can’t admit it to myself. God knows what might happen if I do. I tell myself that this is a great adventure, and that for once in my life I don’t have to share anything with an older brother who, like all older brothers, is an expert tyrant.

  Back home in Havana, my adopted brother Ernesto must have been celebrating his good fortune. Now, at last, he was the only child, the Dauphin, first in line to inherit everything. He must have surely relished his new place on the totem pole, and our absence, despite the fact that under communism one can’t really own anything. He was clever enough to dodge all rules and get his way, and he knew it. As for our spinste
r aunt Lucía: Who could ever tell what she was thinking and feeling in her room at the rear of the house? She always rivaled the Sphinx when it came to opening up or displaying emotion. Our father, the man who not only believed in reincarnation, but claimed to remember all of his past lives, the onetime king of France, his majesty Louis XVI, the king of self-deception at all times, must have been hugging his pain, the way I’ve hugged mine so often, cursing and thanking God all at once. Our mother, the only sensible person in that house, and the most affectionate, probably contemplated what step to take next, the following morning, as she wiped away a flood of tears.

  And the lizards, those goddamned ugly reptiles that ruled the island, and that I desperately longed to wipe off the face of the earth, they were laughing their heads off, and partying in their own inimitable lizard way. Tony and Carlos—their largest and fiercest predators—were gone. No more torture, no more lizard holocausts. Let’s dart our tongues in and out like yo-yos at a yo-yo tournament, they said to one another, wordlessly. Let’s change colors with abandon, screw our brains out, and repopulate the neighborhood. Be fruitful and multiply, and gobble up as many insects as possible. Eat away, and mate away, as mindlessly as ever, oblivious to God above or the Evil One who hovers so menacingly all the time here below, like a roaring lion, oblivious to the little evil one with the stupid beard who thinks he can usurp our throne.

  And if they’d known that I’d just eaten a chicken sandwich, the lizards would have laughed and partied with even greater abandon.

  “Poetic justice,” they surely would have said. “Carlos hasn’t just kissed a lizard, he’s eaten one, and now he’s one of us.”

  And I, what would I have said to the chief lizard, if I’d been able to talk back to him?

  “No me jodas.”

  Two

  The sprinklers woke me up: sh-swish, sh-swish, sh-swish. A sound I’d never heard before. I jumped out of bed and ran to the nearest window.

  What I saw floored me. It was a flat landscape, flatter than any I’d ever seen before. I had no idea the earth could be so featureless, so much of a pancake. Lush fields of green, kind of gray in the pale light of dawn, stretching all the way to the horizon, with a tree here and there, scattered about as if they were feuding or fearful of one another. Between me and the horizon, all I could see were scores of nozzles spraying water with a circular motion. Off to one side, our camp stretched for quite some distance, in a straight line, behind a tall chain-link fence. All I could hear was sh-swish, sh-swish, sh-swish. The graceful arcs of water shooting from the giant sprinklers were quite a sight, like nothing I’d ever seen before, in terms of size. I’d seen small sprinklers, of course, but none as huge as these.

  Fountains, I thought. Americans are so advanced and so wealthy that they can dot the landscape with fountains, just for the hell of it, simply because they look so cool. Or maybe they were a secret weapon, spraying lethal acid to keep the Russians away. To me, it didn’t matter what they were. They were simply there, like everything else in nature, a puzzle to solve, an easy target begging to be attacked. I hadn’t read Don Quixote yet, but I’d seen the film on television once, back in the days before Fidel turned all entertainment into brainwashing. So I thought of windmills, and giants, and the need to wage war against them.

  I had no Dulcinea to impress, no American blonde, yet, but I still felt the urge to tilt against the sprinklers, just for the hell of it. Even if they were keeping the Russians at bay, the sprinklers were asking for a fight, and deserved it. I could have had some fun with them, save for one fundamental obstacle: the sudden realization that I was now an orphan, at least for the time being.

  That thought sent me reeling. And it didn’t feel like something that had come out of my own head, but rather like a huge dark wave that had just crashed on me. All of a sudden I was swept away to some unfamiliar place even stranger than the landscape on the other side of the window—a realm so utterly void of anything or anyone as to make me feel smaller than an atom. Suddenly, I no longer saw or heard the sprinklers. Instead I felt totally alone in a dark void, crushed by a great force from all sides, annihilated by something totally impersonal and uncaring: the force of nothing, of nothingness itself. Worst of all, this oppressively vast emptiness felt eternal, and inescapable.

  Existential vertigo, I suppose one could call it.

  I prefer to call it Hell.

  To be utterly alone, forever, and to be painfully aware of one’s eternal loneliness, this is Hell, at least my Hell, the one I entered that morning for the first of many times. Nothing has ever scared me more, not even my kidney stones or the worst, most boring, most pretentious, and longest paper at a scholarly conference. Jean-Paul Sartre had it all wrong, lousy existentialist that he was. Hell is not other people. Hell is being utterly abandoned, forever and ever, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Hell is being by yourself forever, having no one to love and no one to love you back. Hell is eternal unrequited love, eternal absence, eternal unfulfillable longing.

  Flash forward, nine years. I’m in a Chicago hospital, on the operating table, about to be knocked out by the anesthesiologist. I’m there to have an injury repaired.

  Surprise, surprise. Next stop: Hell.

  “Count back from ten,” someone says.

  “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

  Bonk. I leave my body and float over it. I’m looking at myself, and at the doctors and nurses, and I hear everything they’re saying. My body doesn’t look too good without me in it. I look dead, or hungover, or both at the same time. I see and hear everything in great detail, including the jokes they’re making about me. They laugh; I don’t.

  Bonk. I’m out of there, going down a spiral tunnel very, very fast, headfirst. It’s a long way down, down, down. It seems to take hours, maybe days, or some timeless measure, and as I plummet it gets darker and darker, and I can’t see anything, and my falling speeds up.

  Bonk. I’m out of the tunnel, and there’s nothing there. Nothing but me, without my body. Nothing but utter darkness and me, whatever I am: mind, soul, whatever, but certainly not a body. I left that behind on the operating table, looking poorly. No motion, no sound, no cold, no heat; nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing to feel, nothing to taste. Not even wormwood, or my own salty tears. I have no eyes, anyway, no tongue. Nothing but pure thought and the awareness of my own existence and my own eternal loneliness.

  Never, ever, have I felt such pain and terror, such pure panic. I pray for annihilation, but there is no one or nothing to pray to. All I can do is to wish for my extinction, and to know that I’ll be eternally unable to annihilate my lonely rotten self.

  Bonk. I’m out of Hell, and back on the operating table. I hear my own labored breathing, gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. It sounds as if I’m percolating very thick coffee in my throat. I’m shaking uncontrollably and feel as if I have ice running through my veins. Never, ever, have I felt so cold, so terrified. I open my eyes and see a masked face hovering over me.

  “Does he always shake like this?” someone asks from the other end of the room.

  “Only after surgery,” I reply in a raspy voice that doesn’t sound like my own.

  Everyone in the operating room laughs, loudly. I fail to get the joke.

  I’m tossed onto a gurney and wheeled into the recovery room, with only a flimsy sheet draped over me, all askew. The stupid open-back hospital gown I was wearing before I went into surgery—a garment that should be outlawed as cruel and unusual punishment—is nowhere to be found. I’m buck naked and shaking violently, out of control. But what I feel inside is far worse: sheer terror, and a kind of spiritual pain that I’d never imagined was possible. I shake for hours after I’m brought out of the recovery room, until, finally, I’m given a pill and the shaking stops. My roommate, a full-blooded Sioux recovering from a severe beating, has asked the nurses to do something. My shaking was getting on his nerves. But a different sort of shaking continues to plague me inside for some time afterward. I go home with a small
wound on the outside and a gaping, quaking hole in my soul. And it takes months to banish this memory to my Vault of Denial, which is the large vestibule to my Vault of Oblivion. This trip to hell is one item that can’t fit into that deepest, darkest of vaults. No way.

  Years later, I would come across accounts of near-death experiences that were eerily similar to what I went through that day, but they wouldn’t cheer me up at all. Just the opposite: They’d unnerve the hell out of me, literally. Most of them spoke of floating over one’s body and entering a long spiral tunnel, yes, but they also tended to describe a bright light and a paradise at the other end of the chute, a light I never even saw a glimmer of, and an incomparable feeling of well-being and companionship with God and all of one’s dear departed.

  I guess I took the wrong tunnel. Oops. I hope so, anyway, fervently.

  Bad trip, as we used to say back then, in 1971. Coño. Bummer, man.

  Back to the window in Florida City: What I felt that morning, there, looking at the sprinklers was but a foretaste of later visits to hell, including that most dramatic one during surgery. Much of the rest of my childhood would be shaped by these recurring attacks, which became as much a part of me as any of my physical features. From that morning forward, throughout my life, even up until now, the slightest, subtlest of cues will suddenly open the door from which this hell comes roaring out. Its unpredictability gives it a fearsome power over me that I can’t tame, no matter how much cold hard reasoning I apply to it.

  Reason alone can take you only so far, especially when you’re dealing with hell, or matters of the heart.

  Everyone in that flimsy house woke up immediately. When you’re packed in so tightly, all it takes is for one person to stir, and that’s it. Good morning. Buenos días.

  I have no memories of what followed, since I was still stuck in hell, inside my mind and heart. Nothing I saw or heard registered, save my own inner turmoil. I do remember what broke the evil spell, however: It was a surprise call from my parents in Havana, who somehow managed to get through to the Angones house. I still have no clue how that call was arranged. Phone connections between Cuba and the United States were very difficult at that time, since the Cuban government wanted to keep them to a minimum. But miracles happen. My parents called, and I spoke with them, and merely hearing their voices pulled me out of hell and back to earth again. It was a three-minute call, the only kind you could have back then, but those three minutes seemed much longer. They were a lifetime, in fact, my entire life up until then, for those three minutes reminded me of the fact that I had not really died and gone to some afterlife, but was still actually on this planet with all those I had left behind.