The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (11 page)

It was the last thing I expected: taking a dump while thinking of Mickey Mouse as cars whizzed by on the turnpike and I nervously turned over my fears. What if something bit my backside? Even worse: What if I missed and soiled my new sneakers? How mortifying. But I emerged unsoiled, zipped back up, and handed the roll of toilet paper to Mamá, avoiding her eyes and steeling myself for the wisecracks from my brother. “Did an alligator bite your weenie off?” he yelled out the window as we approached. Just when I thought I couldn’t be more embarrassed, Mamá pulled her Kodak Instamatic out of her tote. “
Ponte
over there, by the tree. No,
un poquito
to the right,” she said—and snap: my first shit in the woods documented on film.

No matter how ridiculous, Mamá insisted on recording every part of our lives with photos. It annoyed the hell out of us, constantly interrupting the flow of whatever we were doing, and you
could tell from our grumpy faces and slouched bodies in the photos. Still, we’d try to please her most of the time, knowing it was important to her. She’d send the photos along with letters to her family in Cuba, which was the only way she could stay in touch with them and keep them up-to-date on our lives in America. I could only imagine the embarrassing narrative in the letter that would accompany the photo of me and the tree—an incident that would become infamous in our family. It became a Blanco family road trip game—
spot the tree where Riqui did number two
—that passed the time on every trip to Disney World that followed.

“
Ay, mira
, I forgot I packed this
por si las moscas,
” Mamá said, pulling a bottle of Pepto-Bismol out of her tote and shaking it. Indeed, she always thought of everything. “No-no-no,” Papá protested, “no drinking in the car.” But Mamá insisted it was an emergency and he let me take a swig—thank goodness. “Did I ever tell you”—she started with the same old story she’d told a hundred times—“when I was a
niña
in Cuba, we were so poor we had no toilet. I had go to
el baño
every day under the guava trees behind
la casa
. I wiped myself with newspaper, if there was even newspaper. Sometimes I had to use the leaves right off the guava tree. You boys don’t know how good you have it.” Somehow I was a little less grossed out by her story that time. I heard and understood, for the first time, that certain tone of pride in her voice as if there were something virtuous about defecating outdoors. Perhaps I had just gone through some bizarre Cuban rite of passage with my mother. Or perhaps it was because I was relieved, and
relieved,
that it was all over and we were back on the road to Disney World.

With each passing mile north of Miami there was less and less that reminded me of where we lived. The emerald lawns of the suburbs gave way to endless stretches of saw grass shining gold in the newly risen sun. The sound of car horns turned into a quiet wind easing in through the windows. And there was nothing in view to remind me we were Cuban either: no billboards in Spanish for El Dorado Furniture or Rivero’s Funeral Home’s discount packages—coffin, wake, and mass for one low price; no Virgin of La Caridad bumper stickers or Cuban flags hanging from rearview mirrors; and no bodegas or
cafeterías
at which to stop for
café cubano,
though Mamá had packed a thermos full of
café
, in case of the flies. The last thing to disappear was Papá’s favorite Cuban station from Miami,
Radio Mambí,
playing static-laced Cuban songs between hourly anti-Castro jabs and fist-pounding rants delivered by men whose every fourth word was
la Revolución . . . la Revolución . . . la Revolución
.

Speeding in silence along the edge of the Everglades, past stands of cypress trees rising from the plain like the buttresses of cathedral ruins, I felt we had entered another country. Papá broke the spell when he announced, “I have
una sorpresa,
” which usually meant gum or candy or money. But not this time. “Close your eyes,” he instructed all of us. We heard him click off the dead radio, followed by the sound of Papá sliding back his car seat, fidgeting with something, jamming something, then clicking buttons. Suddenly, the car speakers blared with the voluptuous voice of Celia Cruz belting out her Afro-Cuban hit:
“Quimbara, Quimbara Quimba, Quimba-ba, Eh mamá, eh mamá . . .”
“
¿Cómo?
How could this be? Where is the music coming from? We’re nowhere,” Mamá said. Papá explained he had bought a used eight-track player at the Tropicaire Flea Market and had it installed under the seat.

Caco and I didn’t agree on much, but we did agree on one thing: we both hated Cuban music. We thought it was tacky, especially when our parents really got into it. Mamá poured herself and Papá the last bit of Cuban coffee and they sang along to a cheesy bolero by Olga Guillot, glancing at each other and dueting like Sonny and Cher. Mamá had a pleasing voice and would often sing
while doing the dishes or hanging the laundry on the clothesline; you couldn’t make out the difference between her singing and Olga Guillot’s singing. But Papá must have been tone-deaf; he sounded like someone was pulling at his sideburns, the way Sister Mary Jane did to me during hymn practice when I didn’t sing loud enough. Annoying us further, he played air bongos on the steering wheel. We couldn’t take it anymore.

“Papá, put in another tape—pleeez,” Caco begged. With a tinge of shame in his voice, Papá said that after buying the eight-track player, he didn’t have enough money to buy new tapes. So we were stuck with the same old
Hoy como ayer—
the compilation of Cuban hits from the fifties and sixties played at every family gathering for years. Unless we did something, we’d have to endure it yet again for the rest of the trip. Caco and I looked at each other, silently trying to devise some new act of defiance, but instead we resorted to the same old tactic: Caco stuck his index fingers in his ears and hummed, and I followed, both of us blathering
bla-bla-bla-bla
. It was the best we could do, but not enough to drown them out. Those songs were unstoppable.

There was something bizarre about Celia Cruz’s soulful rhapsodies and Julio Iglesias’s crooning as we sped past billboards advertising Motel 8s and Shoney’s All-You-Can-Eat buffets. The sound track in the car didn’t match the names on the highway signs—Johnston, Brooksville, Lehigh—which conjured images of general stores and bowlegged cowboys. Miles away from Miami, everything felt so exotic, so American; but inside
el Malibú
everything was still as Cuban as ever. “Come on, Papá, let’s stop here,” Caco and I pleaded with him as we passed the sign announcing the Fort Pierce Service Plaza ahead. We wanted a break from the barrage of bongos and congas. We swore we had to pee, but he wasn’t quite persuaded. Then Caco added, “And we can wash the dead bugs off the windshield.” “
Verdad,
good idea,” Papá agreed.

It had taken Papá two years of twelve-hour days as a butcher at El Cocuyito to save for the down payment on
el Malibú
at Anthony Abraham Chevrolet, a landmark famous for its humongous American flag, which you could spot a mile down
Calle Ocho
. “What a country,” he said, teary-eyed, when he drove
el Malibú
off the lot. It was his first car in America, and he was in love with it. Every Saturday he’d wash and wax it, then stand back to admire its metallic copper finish glittering in the Florida sun, the beguiling grin of its front grille, and its headlights as bewitching as cats’ eyes. No one, not even Mamá, was allowed to eat or drink in
el Malibú;
if we slammed the door, he’d make us open it again and close it softly; if we forgot to roll up the window and it rained, he’d hand-dry every inch of the car inside, stroking the dashboard softly, memorizing its beauty, and staring into the neon-green dials as if he were gazing at the stars. He pampered
el Malibú
more than he did Mamá, she would complain, which wasn’t terribly far from the truth.

When we pulled into the service plaza, he fished a rag out of the trunk and before pumping the gas wrapped the rag around the neck of the nozzle to catch any dribbles of gasoline; then he checked the oil three or four times to make sure he wasn’t running low; then he pulled out the pressure gauge from the glove box and checked the air in each tire, twice. The squeegee was useless on the bugs splattered all over the windshield and chrome bumper; he started scraping them off one by one with his fingernail. That’s when Caco and I lost our patience and bolted out of the car and into the store to scope out the candy and bubble gum aisle. By the time Papá came in to pay, we had picked out a handful of Bazooka bubble gum squares. “Please . . . we’re on vacation,” I begged him while sliding the gum onto the counter. “Okay,
pero nada más,
” he said.

“What?” the clerk asked Papá, looking at him quizzically. The space between his eyebrows bunched up in confusion. “
Notin, notin,
” Papá replied in his best English, and then asked the clerk, “Do you have
winchil wacher
?” Caco and I knew what Papá was trying to say, but the clerk
had no idea. He obviously didn’t speak Spanish and wasn’t Cuban, judging from the falcon tattooed on his forearm, the size of a watermelon, and the dark-red beard that came to a sharp point several inches beneath his chin. His belt buckle was the size of my hand and depicted a strange flag that, while red, white, and blue, definitely was not the American flag—the stars and bars were in the wrong places. I had never seen anybody like him, and he had probably never seen anybody like us.

“
Winchil wacher. Winchil wacher,
” Papá kept repeating, embarrassing us with every syllable of his terrible English. The clerk’s blank look turned to one of disdain: “Listen, mistah, I can’t understand one iota of what you be saying. You people need to get learning English. You’re in America.” Finally putting an end to it, Caco blurted out, “Do you have any windshield washer?” enunciating every consonant that Papá couldn’t. “Yeah, over there, bottom shelf,” the clerk said. “Anything else, mistah?” Papá was as humiliated as we were embarrassed; he paid for our bubble gum, the gas, and a jug of windshield washer without saying a word to the clerk, who put Papá’s change on the counter, instead of handing it to him, as if he were loath to touch Papá’s hand.

We got back in
el Malibú
and drove to the restaurant and gift shop at the other end of the service plaza. Mamá stepped inside slowly and cautiously scanned the crowd like a dumbfounded
señorita
Dorothy in the land of
los americanos
. No one looked Cuban, much less
felt
Cuban; none of the men smelled like cigars, none of the women had their hair up in rollers, and no one was kissing anyone on the cheek or yelling to each other across the room. There wasn’t a single word of Spanish in the air and all the signs were in English only. Mamá and Papá were at our mercy; they didn’t dare engage anyone without us as backup translators, and that was fine with us. It gave us a linguistic upper hand, which we had learned to take great advantage of. Back home, at our local Kmart, we’d always maneuver Mamá into the checkout line with the most American-looking, freckle-faced, strawberry-haired, English-only cashier we could find, knowing Mamá wouldn’t be able to argue over the true price of items she had agreed to buy for us because we said they were on sale.

At the fast-food counter in the service plaza, Caco zeroed in on a middle-aged woman at the register. “Look at her name,” he whispered, nudging me with his elbow and pointing with his eyes to the lady’s name tag: Joanne. Besides her
gringa
name, she wasn’t wearing any jewelry, not even earrings. Clearly she wasn’t Cuban. That gave us an advantage over Mamá, when she asked us to order what we were usually
allowed
and could
afford
: a plain hamburger and a Sprite for her; a double cheeseburger and a milkshake for Papá; two cheeseburgers, small fries, and small Cokes for each of us—and nothing more. Speaking to Joanne as fast as we could, so that Mamá wouldn’t understand us, we sneaked an extra cheeseburger,
large
fries,
large
Cokes, and an ice cream sandwich into our order. When the food came, Mamá questioned us, but we just gazed at her innocently, casually explaining, “Oh, she must have made a mistake.” Mamá looked at us with pursed lips. Of course she knew the “mistake” was our doing, but before she could say anything, we darted away and sat in a booth. We knew she wouldn’t dare make a scene and refute the order on her own in English. By the time she came over to us, we had devoured our extra cheeseburger and split the ice cream sandwich. We deserved a treat after the two hours of Cuban music we’d had to endure—and the two hours left to go.

With full bellies and wads of Bazooka gum tucked secretly under our tongues (we were not allowed to chew gum in
el Malibú,
of course), we jumped into the backseat again. As soon as we left the service plaza and merged into traffic, Papá popped the eight-track tape back into the
player. Caco managed to doze off, his face smushed against the window, distorted into a drooling Creature Feature monster. He had already been to Disney World with our cousin Mirita the year before, so he wasn’t nearly as excited as me. He thought he was already an expert on the park, as well as everything else for that matter. But I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to miss one second of the trip. Instead I took out the pamphlets on the Magic Kingdom that Mirita had given me.

For months, I had kept the pamphlets on my bedside table, studying their glossy pages every night. Before bedtime, I’d quiz myself on the names of the attractions I had memorized one by one, as well as their locations on the park map. Now, in the backseat of
el Malibú,
browsing through the pamphlets for the hundredth time, I still didn’t quite believe such a magical place really existed: a place where buck-toothed bears yodeled while playing banjos; where openmouthed hippos rose from a river and hissing snakes hung from jungle trees; where pirates had gunfights in village streets paved with doubloons. How many hours had I spent coloring El Ratoncito Miguel’s ears, wearing down my black crayon to a stub? How many nights had I imagined El Ratoncito Miguel’s voice as Papá told me bedtime stories? How many times had I read my Cinderella storybook, engrossed by her lemon-yellow hair, her teal gown flowing like a waterfall, and her sparkling tiara, secretly wanting to be as beautiful as she was? How could Caco sleep?