An American Son: A Memoir (10 page)

My father was older than most of the strikers. I remember watching him ride in a jeep with a younger striker. Bouncing along over the hills near our desert camp with a serious look on his face, he seemed so old and out of place there. Eventually, our small savings were gone and the union checks stopped coming. My parents had to dip into the modest college fund they had started for us. Many of the hotels settled with their workers.
But Sam’s Town wouldn’t. Every day, the camp became less crowded and the picket line thinner as more strikers gave up. We denounced them as “scabs” when they crossed our line on their way back to work.

The excitement and euphoria of the strike’s early days gave way to anger and bitterness. One day, a confrontation between strikers and returning workers turned violent, and my father stopped taking me to the camp. Not long after, he informed me he was going back to work. I accused him of selling out and called him a scab. It hurt him, and I’m ashamed of it. He had had no choice.

He returned to work for a smaller salary and fewer benefits. All the good bartending shifts had been taken by new bartenders hired during the strike, and his tips were smaller. To this day, Sam’s Town remains a nonunion hotel.

My grandfather usually went back to Miami right after Thanksgiving and returned early in the spring. He didn’t come back to us until the end of May that year. I had missed him terribly, and when we met him at the airport, I knew instantly something was wrong. He had always managed the trip on his own, but this time my uncle Manolito had traveled with him. He needed a wheelchair to get from the plane to the airport exit. He looked much older and tired.

Papá had suffered from bladder cancer for years, and the disease had progressed significantly that winter. Veronica and I had never been told he was ill, and neither had he. His daughters had kept the diagnosis from him for fear he would become depressed and rapidly decline. He knew something was wrong with him now, and despite his weakened condition, and protests from his daughters in Miami, he insisted on coming back to Vegas. He wanted to be at home with his daughter Oria and his son in law Mario and with Veronica and me, his favorite grandchildren.

He complained of back pains, and asked my mother, and sometimes Veronica or me, to rub Ben-Gay on his back. He didn’t smoke as many cigars or sit on the front porch as often. My parents told us he was sick but would get well, and in other respects he seemed normal to me. He still loved for me to sit with him and pick his brain. He still hated football and wanted to watch the Dodgers games. Ronald Reagan was still his hero.

One morning that August, just as I was waking up, I heard a thud outside my bedroom door. I heard my mother scream, and I bolted from my
bed to see what had happened. I found Papá on the floor in the hallway, where he had fallen on his way to the bathroom.

We helped him to his feet and back to his bed. He was clearly in excruciating pain. We called the paramedics, who took him in an ambulance to the hospital. I went with him to translate for him. When we arrived at the hospital, he was taken immediately to the X ray room. As the technicians maneuvered him into the right position for the X ray, he cried out in pain so loudly and pitiably it terrified me.

The adults began to arrive not long after, and within an hour a doctor informed us Papá had broken his hip, which didn’t sound so bad to me. I had broken my leg not long ago, and I was fine now. I thought they would put him in a cast, send him home with us, and within a few weeks he would be back to normal. My parents explained to me he would have to stay at the hospital because his hip required surgery to repair. Still, I wasn’t too concerned. I began to make plans for his rehabilitation. I would put him on a regimen of diet supplements and help him do daily exercises on the Universal that he believed was wasting electricity.

He passed his first night in the hospital uneventfully. The next morning my parents dropped Veronica and me off at the hospital on their way to work. They were worried he would become frustrated by the language barrier at the hospital, and wanted us there to translate for him. We were alone with him for much of the day. We made a point to talk with him about things we would normally talk about with him. We watched TV with him. I remember watching the
Brady Bunch
episode when the Brady parents put a pay phone in their kitchen to discourage the kids from spending too much time on the phone. We tried to make him feel everything was as normal as possible under the circumstances. Late in the afternoon, he began to change. He complained of ants on the ceiling and spider- webs around him. He thought the hospital sprinklers were cockroaches. We thought he was being funny, and laughed at him.

Irma and Enrique arrived after work around six in the evening, carrying a thermos of Cuban coffee. Papá asked Irma for a sip. Right after she gave him one, he began to have difficulty breathing. We called a nurse, who, after consulting with a doctor, put him on an IV. I know now it was a morphine drip, and that the hospital staff was easing him toward his death and not, as I had believed, treating his injury.

He began to slip into unconsciousness. I knew something was wrong, so I grabbed his hand and told him I loved him. I swore I would study hard. I would do something with my life and make him proud. He squeezed my hand to let me know he had heard me. He took his last labored breath less than twenty-four hours later.

He was buried in Miami next to my grandmother Dominga in a joint plot Papá had purchased for them before I was born. We couldn’t afford to travel to Miami for his burial because of the financial difficulties we were in after the strike. But we had a viewing ceremony at the funeral home in Las Vegas where his body was prepared. When I approached him, I was taken aback because he looked so different to me. I had never seen a dead person before then. My mother cried, and called his name repeatedly. She kept touching him and sobbing. Near the end of the viewing, as everyone got up to leave, my father, who had avoided the viewing stand the entire night, approached it to say his final good-bye. Then he broke down and wept inconsolably, and begged my grandfather’s forgiveness for the times he had teased him.

I didn’t keep the promise I made to my grandfather on his deathbed, not for a long while anyway. His death had a pronounced and debilitating effect on me. I was miserably unhappy and stopped caring about things that had been important to me. I quit Pop Warner. What little interest I had shown in schoolwork disappeared. I still went to class, but I didn’t participate in discussions, and all my assignments went ignored. I failed my exams, and didn’t care. I didn’t want to do anything besides socialize with my friends, flirt with girls and follow the Miami Dolphins.

With Papá gone, Veronica and I were alone at home when my parents were at work. I would wander the neighborhood or ride my bike alone or visit friends’ homes, leaving Veronica behind. We were supposed to make our First Communion that Christmas, after preparing for the sacrament during Sunday catechism classes throughout the fall. I refused to attend them because they conflicted with Sunday NFL games. My parents persuaded our parish priest to instruct us personally on Wednesday nights. I reacted to Papá’s death by becoming more selfish, more irresponsible, more of a brat. I’m ashamed of that, and I think he would have been ashamed of me, too. In retrospect, I was a child struggling with my grief, and my parents, also grieving, might not have realized how distraught I was.

My parents watched these developments with increasing alarm. I was spending more of my time with friends they didn’t know from families they knew nothing about. I was bringing Fs home from school. They began to have doubts about Las Vegas, too. They wanted us to go to college, but most of my cousins had gone to work at the hotels right out of high school. It was hard to convince them that college was necessary when they could make $40,000 in their first year of employment. My parents didn’t want that life for us. That was their life, the life they had to live so we could live a better one. Vegas no longer seemed like a safe, wholesome environment for us.

My sister Barbara had met her husband in high school. I would soon be in high school, and had already become preoccupied with girls. They worried I might develop a serious relationship with someone and I would never want to leave Las Vegas, just as Barbara had refused to leave Miami. Our family would be divided forever. Just after Thanksgiving in 1984, my parents made their decision.

That summer, almost six years to the day since we had arrived in Vegas, my mother, Veronica and I boarded a flight to Miami, while my father and Uncle Manolito drove a U Haul truck across the country with all our belongings and our two dogs, Max and Marie, towing our ’73 Chevy Impala behind them. My parents returned to a city and culture they knew well and loved. After a failed attempt to convince my parents to stay in Vegas, I became excited to be moving back to Miami—the city where my Dolphins played, the city filled with people like us, the exciting city I saw on
Miami Vice
. But I was a fourteen-year-old kid from the West, and accustomed to living in a desert town, among people of various backgrounds and ethnicities. I would have to learn how to make Miami my home again.

W
HAT I REMEMBER MOST ABOUT MY FIRST DAY BACK IN Miami is the thunderstorm. I had never seen so much rain fall so hard and fast. Aunt Adria picked us up at the airport, and as we drove west on the Dolphin Expressway to Barbara’s house, hail began to hit the windshield. It rained all the next day, and the day after that. Miami summers follow a simple pattern. Sun and muggy heat in the morning give way to showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. I wasn’t in the desert anymore.

We stayed with Barbara until my father rejoined us the day before the Fourth of July. Adria had found a home for us in West Miami. My folks had already signed a contract to buy it, and they closed on it soon after my dad arrived. It had three bedrooms and a small family room in the back. Its biggest appeal was the garage that had been converted into an efficiency apartment. An eighty-one-year-old Cuban lady, Encarnación, and her even older husband rented it. I liked the idea of having elderly renters in our home. It reminded me of living with Papá.

I was zoned to attend ninth grade at West Miami Junior High School, but I had my heart set on attending Miami Senior High School, and playing football there as my brother had. I enrolled in summer school there to prepare for ninth grade. I was excited as I walked for the first time through the school’s arched entryway, and imagined my brother walking there a decade
and a half earlier. It took only a few minutes for me to realize it was unlike any school I had attended, and I wasn’t likely to fit in.

All the students were Hispanic. But theirs wasn’t the Hispanic culture I’d become accustomed to growing up among Mexican kids in Las Vegas. And while they could speak English, they spoke only Spanish with one another, and in an accent that was unfamiliar to me. It didn’t sound like the Cuban-accented Spanish our parents and grandparents spoke. It was an accent of their own, a Miami accent, and they used slang of their own device as well. They dressed in designs I had never seen before.

I spoke Spanish very well. I spoke it exclusively at home. But I had never spoken Spanish with my friends at school, not even with Mexican American kids I grew up with in Las Vegas. At Miami High, they laughed at my “American” accent. I dressed in Las Vegas casual—polo shirt, jeans and Reebok shoes. They called me a “gringo,” a term I had never been called before. In fact, in Las Vegas, because we were Hispanic everyone assumed we were Mexican. It was a massive culture shock. It lasted one day. When I got home that afternoon, I told my parents Miami High wasn’t anything like they had described it to me, and I wouldn’t be going back.

My dad painted houses with my uncle Manolito until Barbara found him a bartending job at a new hotel, the Mayfair House in Coconut Grove. Our new house didn’t have air-conditioning, so he installed a few ceiling fans and told us they would have to do for the time being. I spent a miserable summer suffering from the muggy Miami heat.

The only good thing about being back in Miami was that it was home to my beloved Dolphins. Every morning that first summer I walked three blocks to a convenience store and bought the
Miami Herald
for its Dolphins-dominated sports page. I returned in the afternoon to buy the
Miami News
. In the evenings, I watched all three local news sports segments.

I wanted to attend every Dolphins home game, and needed money to buy the tickets. Barbara and Orlando owned seven Samoyed dogs, a beautiful breed with long white hair that was hard to keep clean. They paid me ten dollars a week for each dog I washed, and I used my earnings to buy tickets to all eight regular-season home games in 1985.

West Miami Junior High didn’t have a football team, so I had to find a Pop Warner team. I joined the Tamiami Colts, who played at Tamiami Park. They were a great team. The coaches had recruited the best players
from several competing parks, and put together a team that went undefeated that season and won the city championship. I played outside linebacker. I wasn’t a standout, but I had fun. Winning is fun.