The Domino Diaries (17 page)

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. Gaud
í
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, Vel
á
zquez, Goya, and Salvador Dal
í
easily accessible at the Prado and Reina Sof
í
a 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 the 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 caf
é
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.

Along the way she told me she enjoyed the walks to the boys' houses more than the boys.

Sometimes the wrong people have your number and I needed to put some miles between us.

I hadn't told anyone when I borrowed some money from my uncle and flew over to Madrid and stayed out all night Christmas Eve until that strange hour when the Chinese step out into the copper streetlight haze and huddle on hundreds of street corners across town clutching dozens of shopping bags full of to-go food for a few bucks. Chance being stuck over a toilet for ten hours and go sightseeing through the nighttime streets that get started around 3 a.m. Walking until the Chinese have abandoned the street corners and turn off the Gran V
í
a and head down to Puerta del Sol along a path where all the Africans are waiting for you, peddling movies and music and scarves and sunglasses on blankets, so that if a whistle echoes down a corridor that
la polic
í
a
are approaching, the blankets are packed up by the hundreds, swept up as quick as dominoes tip over, and two seconds later a thriving black market economy is a ghost echo of footsteps haunting eighty different directions, weaved into all the other squeaky Windex-scrubbed reflections on storefront windows of urgent men casting glances at their fake designer watches.

A lot of strangers close in on one another to nurse their respective hangovers with scenic strolls down the streets near the statue of a bear reaching up into a tree, looking just like a boy going for his first kiss. For entertainment I gave reading
Don Quixote
another half-assed try in Spanish on a bench nearby, until the tourist buses rolled up and the Gypsies moved in like a kicked-over ant nest and set up their coordinated strikes.

Then someone knocked on the door of my room.

“
¡El guapo! ¡Correo!
”

I opened the door to one of the transvestites with half her makeup off. I was pretty sure her name was Daisy. She handed me a letter. I opened it.

Just a date and a time and a place. A little quote beneath as a flirtatious fuck-you:

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope they won't.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

She had cigarette-stain eyes. I prefer dark eyes even though most girls who possess them dismiss them as common. They aren't. You look
into
brown eyes, while you look
at
all the other colors. With no buildup or wind-down, apart from us nearly fucking, we'd said good-bye. She'd just finished doing some handstands for no particular reason.

I went to see her at the caf
é
but she'd stopped working there. I was leaning over a table writing in a notebook when I heard some roller skates smack the pavement. I looked up and saw her.

“Can I sit down?”

I stood up and we looked at each other for a while. I pulled out her chair and she sat down.

“The first time we met you were writing a story about a guy who falls in love with a prostitute.”

I nodded.

“It's strange, it happened to me.”

“Hold on a second.” I tried to process this. “You fell in love with a
gigolo
?”

“No.” She smiled. “I was the hooker.”

“When?”

“For the last five years.”

“You were a hooker when we met?”

“Yeah.”

“But you were working
here
.”

“Part time.”

“But you were in school.”

“How do you think I paid my tuition?”

“Your stepdad was a dentist!”

“It's creepy you remember so much. Are you in love with me or something? I came so close to telling you but, you know, it just sort of took care of itself.”

“Well,” I said, “I still don't even know your name.”

*   *   *

In Madrid my phone rang.

“You know who this is?”

“You're the only person who has my phone number.”

“I'm at Plaza Mayor.”

“Okay. You're close by.”

“I'm high on ecstasy.”

“That's great.”

“I'm drunk, too.”

“Come over.”

“You're sure you know who this is?”

“I already answered that question.”

“Where do you live?”

I gave her my address.

“I'll call you when I leave.”

4 a.m. Phone rings.

“Still up?”

“No, I'm fast asleep.”