An American Son: A Memoir (11 page)

The Colts were the only social activity I had that year. I didn’t like West Miami Junior High any better than I had liked Miami High. It was every bit the culture shock Miami High had been. Again, the student body was almost entirely Hispanic. Veronica adjusted quickly to our new circumstances. I did not. The few friendships I managed to form effectively ended when the bell rang at the end of the school day. When football season ended, I had virtually nothing to do after school. I became an afternoon recluse, and spent almost all my time alone. I pined for my friends in Vegas, and wondered what they were doing.

When I finished ninth grade, I was glad to put the experience behind me. I hoped I would fit in better at South Miami High, and from my first day there I knew I would. I made the South Miami Cobras’ junior varsity team. Half my teammates were African Americans, and, at the time, I was more comfortable in their company than with my fellow Cubans. There was real tension between the black and Hispanic players, something I had not experienced in Las Vegas. They didn’t socialize off the field, and even on the field they huddled in separate groups.

Unhappily, my first football season in South Miami came to an abrupt end before it began. I dislocated my shoulder during a preseason practice, and it took eight weeks to heal. Pain from the injury still bothers me from time to time.

Even without football, I found it easier to make friends at South Miami than at West Miami Junior High. I socialized mostly with my African American teammates. We spent most of our time “cracking,” sitting around cracking jokes at another’s expense. It usually took the form of a contest between two students who traded insults back and forth until the winner was decided by acclamation of the audience. My father was always teasing people. The practice had rubbed off on me, and I was good at “cracking.” I was happy to have finally found a social circle in Miami. It was the first time I had felt at home since we had moved back.

Socially and geographically, Miami is a deeply segregated city. When school finished for the day, my black friends returned to their homes in a South Miami neighborhood known as “the Creek,” and I went home to
West Miami. After school, I was every bit the loner I had been the previous year.

Football came to my rescue, as it often did. In May 1987, when I tried out for the varsity team during spring practices, I did well, but it was clear I wouldn’t be a starter. The starting safety, Dakari Lester, was a senior and Division I college prospect. The secondary coach, Otis Collier, was frank with me. He told me not to expect much playing time my junior year. But if I used the opportunity to learn from Dakari and hit the weight room to build muscle and strength, I might start my senior year.

I had a good spring training camp. I made some interceptions, and the hard tackles our coaches wanted to see us make. I earned the respect of the other players. When we broke for the summer, I couldn’t wait to get back on the field my junior year.

Yet it was not to be. At practice five days before our first game, I broke my finger during an interception drill. I spent a lot of time the first week after my injury with our trainer and the students who volunteered to assist her. One of her assistants was nicer and more attentive to me than the others. By the middle of September, we were going out. What that meant in practical terms is we would hold hands in the hallway between classes, eat lunch together in the cafeteria and hang out together with the same group of friends after football games. It was the kind of innocent first romance kids seem to skip these days or start much earlier than they should.

I had a new girlfriend and plenty of friends at school, and I played varsity football. I had finally settled into life in Miami, and was happy we had moved back. But in October, our family’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse. I came home from school one day and knew from the look on my mother’s face that something terrible had happened. It was a look you expect to see when someone has been told they or someone they love is dying. And that’s exactly how I felt when she told me that earlier that morning Orlando had been arrested on drug charges.

I was stunned by the news. Like my parents, I had never suspected Orlando was involved in a criminal enterprise. His arrest and subsequent trial and imprisonment distressed the entire family, but Barbara and my parents bore the brunt of the hardships it caused. Even decades later, my sister and mother would be forced to relive the shame of the ordeal.

My family’s troubles didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for the upcoming
football season. I was as eager as ever for it to begin. I didn’t get a lot of playing time my junior year except during blowout games. The team had a great season. In our last regular-season game Coach Collier put me in early in the fourth quarter. I noticed that the opponent’s tight end ran only two routes when he lined up to our left: an out pattern and the seam route our offense ran in practice. On one of the last drives of the game, I saw the opposing quarterback drop back to throw and look to his right. I made a beeline for the spot where I expected him to throw the ball to the tight end. I drove my face mask into the tight end’s chest just as he grabbed the pass, knocking him flat. I heard the crowd roar its approval. I then realized I had popped the ball into the air and our cornerback had intercepted it. My teammates mobbed me when I came off the field. Coach Collier was giddy over my performance as if it was all he needed to convince our head coach, Sam Miller, to give me a shot as a starter. We won our first play-off game the following Friday; then we lost the sectional title game the following week. It was a close game with several lead changes and a last-minute miracle play by our opponent. I didn’t play a single down, but to this day I still dream about the game.

I enrolled in summer school that year to improve my math skills and my prospects for admission to college. South Miami didn’t offer summer school, so I took an algebra class at Coral Gables High. I began serious weight training that summer, working out daily at South Miami’s gym as soon as my algebra class finished for the day. In less than two months, I added ten pounds of muscle—a noticeable transformation that would impress my coaches. It impressed the girls at Coral Gables High, too.

For the first time in my life, more than one girl showed an interest in me. I began to have doubts about staying in a committed relationship, and imagined what it would be like to spend my last year of high school dating several different girls. I felt guilty, though. My feelings alternated throughout the summer between appreciation for the great girlfriend I had and not wanting to hurt her feelings to wishing I were free to date other girls.

I began senior year with the wind at my back. I was the starting free safety on the varsity football team. I had gone from being a social recluse to being pretty popular, especially with girls. My relationship with my girlfriend didn’t survive the first week of school.

The Cobras started off hot that season, winning our first four games
and becoming one of the top-ranked teams in Florida. But it fell apart after that. In our first game, I tried to tackle the tight end, and just bounced off him while he ran for another thirty yards. That was the end of my career as a starter. We lost a bunch of games and were knocked out of play-off contention. We missed the guys who had graduated. And we had issues in the locker room that affected our play.

African Americans were about 25 percent of the student body at South Miami High; the rest were mostly Hispanic kids. I had been the only non–African American starter on the Cobra’s defense, and one of only three white starters on the team. I’ve always considered sports to be a nearly perfect meritocracy, and I believed our coaches made personnel decisions based strictly on which players would give us the best chance to win. But some of my Hispanic teammates felt differently. They thought Coach Miller, who was African American, unfairly favored the black players. A few Hispanic players and students tried to stoke the racial-preference grievance as the reason I had been benched. That was nonsense.

I had been replaced by a bigger, stronger and faster kid who made more plays than I did. That’s all there was to it. Our defense required the free safety to do some pretty difficult things. The system was designed for Division I prospects like Dakari Lester. I was better suited to playing a traditional free safety, who roamed the deep middle of the field, read the QB and made a play on the ball. I wasn’t benched because I was Hispanic. I was benched because I wasn’t strong enough to do consistently all the things our defensive system asked of me.

There was some racial tension at South Miami. A few years earlier, the football program and the school were rocked by a racial split after a losing game that turned violent and made it into the newspapers.

When I rejected claims that my status on the team had something to do with racism and remained friends with my black teammates, I became an object of scorn to some of my fellow Cuban students.

Despite my encounter with racial turmoil and my disappointing football season, my senior year proved to be the time of my life. I dated several girls. I spent my free time, which I had plenty of in the absence of football and a serious commitment to academic achievement, with friends at the beach, wandering around Coconut Grove and at house parties. In addition to the friends I had already, I became friends with many kids in Veronica’s social circle.

I put my popularity to the test when I competed in our school’s annual male talent contest, King Cobra. I had a decent singing voice. Many of the contestants lip-synched their songs. I actually sang mine, Lionel Richie’s “Still.” For laughs, I adopted an obnoxious braggadocio personality. I strutted around the stage, smirked, threw my microphone and stalked offstage after I finished the song. My friends got the joke. The judges did not—they voted me second to last. They thought I had behaved like a jerk. I had. Were I to judge a contest like that today, and some kid behaved as I had behaved, I’d vote him last.

I was a frequent disruptive force in the classroom. One teacher wanted me out of his class so badly, he promised to give me a C minus if I didn’t come to class, and threatened to give me an F if I showed up again. I finished my senior year with a 2.1 grade point average. I hadn’t applied myself, but I hadn’t failed, either. I was allowed to participate in the commencement ceremony with my class, but I had to complete a social studies class in summer school before I officially graduated.

Despite the fun I had and my occasional obnoxious behavior, I still kept an eye on the future. I wanted to go to college, get out of Miami and play football. I did just enough not to ruin my chances. My grandfather and parents had convinced me that I had to go to college if I were to succeed in life. I knew if I stayed in Miami, I wouldn’t play college football and I probably wouldn’t take my studies seriously, either.

Two schools offered me a chance to play football: Wagner College in Staten Island, New York, and Tarkio College in northwest Missouri. I chose Tarkio for two reasons: they offered the most aid, enough to cover my entire tuition and room and board, and they would let me try out for wide receiver. I was tired of being an undersized defensive back, and I thought my skills were better suited for the offense.

Orlando was convicted and sentenced during the spring of my senior year in high school. My most powerful memories of that time are my recollections of my sister and parents in the difficult years after his conviction. One night, Barbara called me and invited me to her house to eat pizza and watch movies. I declined. I was enjoying my socially hectic senior year, and pizza parties and movies weren’t fun for me anymore. Barbara was lonely, and I avoided her. She had to move in with us a few weeks later. I came home late one night from a party, and saw my pregnant sister and my
nephew, Landy, asleep on our living room sofa. My parents would eventually ask their tenants to vacate the garage apartment so Barbara and her boys could move into it after the baby was born. The image of her the night I discovered her asleep in our living room has remained with me all my life: the older sister I had long looked up to, reduced to moving in with her parents and sleeping with her son on a foldout sofa.

I look back on that time with admiration for Barbara and my parents. I admired how tenaciously she fought when her world turned upside down, how hard she worked and how devoted she was to her children. I admired how faithfully she stuck with her marriage.

At a time in their lives when they should have been anticipating retirement and finally having time for their own enjoyment as the last of their children neared adulthood, my parents assumed responsibility for the welfare of their older daughter and her children. They helped Barbara raise her sons from infancy to adulthood. I think Danny, Barbara’s younger son, grew closer to my dad than I had been to Papá. While Barbara was at work, our parents fed them, changed their diapers, rushed them to the doctor when they got sick, picked them up after school and took them to baseball practice. They were in their late sixties and early seventies when they began raising two more children, and they never complained.

It was in these heartrending circumstances that the time arrived for me to leave home. I had to report for football practice in early August. I would live a great distance from the security and comfort of my family, in the unfamiliar Midwest, a place that would seem even stranger to me than Las Vegas had first seemed. I didn’t expect to return until Christmas break. I had no money, so I would have to limit my contact with home to one brief phone call a week on Sundays after seven o’clock, when the rates were cheaper.

I was more anxious than excited the day of my departure. My parents, Veronica and a few friends accompanied me to the gate, where we said our good-byes. Loneliness hit me as soon as the plane took off. For the first time I was separated from my parents and their protection, on my own and friendless.