Naked in LA (2 page)

Miami was just a small tourist town then, not the drugged-out and oversexed place it is now. Getting a job wasn’t that easy, and I was glad for every shift I could get at the diner. There were plenty of other Cuban girls who wanted my job, even though the pay was lousy and I relied on tips to pay the rent. Anything left over went to hospital bills.

We lived west of downtown in Little Havana, about four blocks from the Orange Bowl stadium, surrounded by vacant lots and rundown pastel-front homes with scorched paint and shotgun roofs. There were dance clubs and bodegas along Flagler Avenue, men in
guayabera
shirts played craps in empty parking lots, and guys in bright pastel shirts stood on soapboxes railing against the evils of communism. All everyone talked about was when the next invasion was going to happen.

Lansky and Bobbo Salvatore and their friends had been wrong about Fidel. He didn’t want their money and he really didn’t want
gangsterismo
. He even arrested Trafficante and some other mob guys, banged them up in Tricornia. Lansky himself had left Havana just in time. Cubans who had co-operated with them were put up against a wall at La Cabaña fortress and shot.

Within a year, the Beards, as they called them, had nationalized all the casinos as well as Texaco, Goodyear, Kodak, and General Motors. Fidel eventually proclaimed himself a Marxist. A Massachusetts senator I’d last seen drinking
Cuba Libres
with Bobbo Salvatore at our club in Havana was now the President of the United States. He was taking a hard line but the Bay of Pigs had left us all shattered. We didn’t want to believe that it was over.

We talked about it all the time, Kennedy was going to try again one day soon, this time he would bring in his own soldiers and throw Fidel and Che out of Cuba. We all thought it would happen any day and then we could all go home. Living in Miami was just a temporary thing.

We had heard rioters had broken into our villa in Vedado a few days after we left Havana and ransacked it, burning Papi’s books in the library, dragging all our furniture out into the street, they even ripped up the plants. We couldn’t find out what had happened to Maria.

Then when the rebels marched in, a colonel in Che's battalion had commandeered the house and used our Bel Air convertible for his private use. They said he had had a machine gun mounted on the bonnet and rode around in the back in his green fatigues, smoking cigars. Like Papi had always said, every revolution just changes one tyrant for another in a different uniform.

But the villa, the club, they were still ours. The deeds were in our bank in Havana. We just had to get to them. We weren’t going to live like this forever.

And then there was Papi's life savings hidden in the safe, in his study, behind the photograph of Mama, right there on the wall.

Still, I’d registered with the Cuban Refugee Center, and that got us an extra hundred dollars a month and an allotment of powdered milk, a slab of American cheese, and a ten-pound can of cooked meat that looked and tasted like Spam. When we first arrived we had thrown it out or given it to our landlady’s dog. As the medical bills piled up, we forced ourselves to like it.

It was two and a half years since Papi’s first heart attack. The doctors said they didn’t think he would make it, but as he always said, “the Fuentes are tough,” and he pulled through the operation. But he was never the same. For a while he got a job washing dishes in a restaurant out on Miami Beach, but then he had another heart attack and ever since he hadn’t been able to get out of bed.

Our flat was out back of an old single-storey place, we had one room and a back porch. There was a tiny bathroom separated from the main room by a green plastic curtain. It doubled as a kitchen and there was a gas range with two burners and a small oven right there next to the bath. Papi’s bed took up the rest of the space. It wasn’t exactly the villa in Vedado, but hey, it wasn’t forever.

We were going home soon.

I caught the bus home from the diner, it was just getting dark when I got home. I rehearsed what I would say when I saw him.

“Hello, cariña. How was your day?”

“Great.”

No, that would sound too forced. He’d read between the lines. “Great” we won some money on the lottery or “great,” like you got through the day without some sleazeball you used to love pinching your ass? What kind of great?

“Not bad.”

No, then He’d frown and say, why what’s wrong?

“Fine.”

Fine was the best answer. I wouldn’t have to smile too hard, and he wouldn’t frown like there was something anyone could do about it.

But when I walked in he was still asleep. I put a hand on his forehead to check his temperature and then put my cheek next to his lips to make sure he was still breathing.
Dios mio
, his skin was the colour of cement.

I kicked off my shoes. I sighed, that felt so good. The flat was a mess, last night’s dishes were still in the sink, I’d been too tired after I’d cooked dinner to do anything about them. I always regretted it the next day--it left a smell in the house, stale food and sick people. The TV was on, some game show, I turned it off. Then I went to the window to draw back the shades and the curtain rod broke.

“
Mierda
,” I said, and then winced and looked around at Papi. I’d woken him.

He opened his eyes. “Is that you, cariña?”

“Sorry, Papi,” I said.

He raised a languid hand. “You’re twenty-one. Swear all you want. You’re too old to spank.”

I threw open the window, went to the stove, found the coffee pot. Our one luxury was good coffee. We might be broke, but I wasn’t going to make him drink the dishwater the yankees called coffee. It would take away his will to live.

“How was your day?” he said.

“Fine. How about you?”

“Oh, you know. I went down the club to play a few hands, then a round of golf, and this afternoon I went fishing and caught a big marlin. The usual.”

He had been watching the news; Fidel had told everyone in Cuba they had until Monday to exchange their pesos for new paper money, then the old bills would be worthless. So the money we had in our safe, even if was still there, all it would be good for now was lighting a cigar.

“We still have the deeds to the house, Papi. We still have the club.”

“I know, cariña,” he said and forced a smile.

I kept busy at the stove so he couldn’t see me cry. Quecabrón! That thief! He was just like Batista, all these men they tell you They’re going to make your life better, all the time They’re just looking for some other way to rob you. But I pulled myself together. I couldn’t let him see me upset. I put the coffee pot on the tray with two cups and carried it to the bed. He stirred, but he needed help sitting up these days.

I’d just settled him when there was a knock on the door. It was Lena, our landlady, who lived in the front part of the house. She was a widow and reminded me of Maria, our maid in Havana. She’d been born near the
mercato
a few blocks from where we had lived in Vedado, and perhaps once we might have hired her as our maid. Now both our circumstances were very different.

She had a big heart but not much to show for it. Even at twenty-one, I’d already figured out that God didn’t play fair.

“How is he?” she asked me, wiping the flour off her hands onto her apron. That was a hopeful sign, whenever she had a baking day she always brought us over a cake or cookies.

I slipped outside and pulled the door closed behind me so Papi wouldn’t hear us talking about him. “He’s the same.”

“He had a fall today.”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“I think he was getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. I heard him calling out. I put him back into bed, but you know, he didn’t look so good.”

“He seems okay now.”

“You best to check for bruises.”

“Thank you, Lena. I don’t know where we’d be without you.”

“You go on now, I’m just doing the neighbourly thing.” She turned to go. “I’ll bring in some cupcakes later. Lemon icing. It’s my secret recipe.”

I went back into the flat. Papi wouldn’t look at me.

“You should have told me,” I said. “Did you hurt yourself?” I pulled back the bedclothes to check for bruises.

He pulled them down again. “I’m all right!”

“Don’t yell at me.”

“Don’t treat me like I’m a child!”

He shouted so loud I took a step back. “Okay,” I said and poured the coffees. I changed the TV channel hoping to catch the news, but it was too late so I stared blankly at Huckleberry Hound and then settled on “The Price is Right.”

The picture of my mother was there on his bedside table. It was hard to remember her now, every day she drifted a little further away from us. But with the photograph it seemed like she was looking down on us, up in heaven with that beautiful smile. I wanted to make her proud of me.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Papi.”

“You’d be better off without me.”

“Don’t say that!”

“What good am I? I just lie around here all day, and you do all the work.”

“You’re going to get better soon.”

“You know that’s not true. It’s been three years now.”

I squeezed his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, and went to the kitchen cupboard and looked for something for dinner. I wanted to cry but I wouldn’t, not in front of him. Things
were
going to get better. The Americans would throw Fidel out of Cuba, we could go home, and Papi would get his strength back. If I said it fast it sounded easy.

We just had to hold on for one more day.

Chapter 3 

The diner was on Brickell Avenue. I walked to work the next morning to save money on bus fare. There had been two more hospital bills in the mailbox last night.

When I got there, Tony, my boss, was still cleaning up from the storm the day before. There was a board loose outside, rattling in the wind, and we’d sprung a leak in the ceiling and there was water on the linoleum over by the far windows. Frank was mopping up.

I went into the kitchen, took off my coat, got ready for my shift. Tony came in and leaned against the freezer, staring at me. Then Frank came in with his mop and bucket, and gave me a warning look.

“What’s up?” I said. “Somebody die?”

Tony nodded out front, so I went into the diner and looked out into the street. The black limousine was there and one of Angel’s gorillas was leaning against the bonnet. “
Me cago en la leche
,” I said, grabbed my coat and headed out of the back door. Tony stopped me.

“Where you going?” he said.

“I don’t want to see those guys.”

“You got to talk to them, I already told them you was coming in today. You know who those guys are? I don’t want no trouble.”

What was I going to do? If I ran out, Tony would fire me. If I didn’t, I’d have to deal with Angel. No choice was much better than the other.