An American Son: A Memoir (7 page)

My father came home near the end of May 1979, just in time for my eighth birthday, which we celebrated with a surprise trip to the Kennedy Space Center. Later that summer, we said our good-byes and left for Las Vegas. My sister Barbara had decided to stay in Miami. She was nineteen, working and had been dating her future husband, Orlando, for four years. Her decision terribly upset my parents, especially my mother. When Barbara was growing up, before Veronica and I were born, my father worked late nights, and my brother was a socially active teenager and seldom at home. Barbara and my mother were often alone together in the house, and they became very close. The thought of leaving Barbara behind, alone, terrified my mother. Her decision was the subject of a very heated disagreement between them. If Orlando truly loved her, my mother argued, he would marry her now or follow us to Las Vegas. But more than her relationship with Orlando kept my sister in Miami. All her friends lived there. It was her home. And as painful as the separation would be, she would not change her mind.

There was no turning back for my parents, though. In early June, dressed in a brown suit and tie, I boarded a plane with Veronica and my parents, and flew west to our brand-new life in fascinatingly strange Las Vegas.

My first impressions of the place were of its striking physical qualities: the sun-glazed reddish brown mountains surrounding the Vegas Valley that looked like painted cardboard scenery; the blast of hot air that rushed us as we emerged from the airport, so unlike the still, humid heat of Miami. It was all alien and intriguing to me.

Strange, too, were the complicated relationships between my mother’s sisters, which I was exposed to soon after we arrived. We lived with Aunt Irma and Uncle Enrique for our first two months in Las Vegas.

Irma was the fourth of my mother’s sisters, and in childhood she had been the most generous and protective sibling. My mother recalls Irma often taking the blame and the punishment for her sisters’ misbehavior.
On a few occasions, when my mother or another of her sisters found themselves on the wrong end of my grandmother’s belt, Irma had jumped between them and taken the lashes herself.

But Irma’s compassion was one facet of a sensitive nature that could make her touchy and querulous over the slightest injury, intended or not. Irma viewed Lola as a rival for our affection, and she had wanted my parents to buy a house near hers. When my father informed us he had purchased a home three blocks from my aunt Lola’s house, Irma was not pleased.

Our new home at 3104 East Lava Avenue was situated on the corner of a U shaped cul de sac in a working-class neighborhood in North Las Vegas. The one-story house had three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a curved driveway with a covered carport. The front yard had a single tree in its center. Sliding glass doors led to a covered porch and a small backyard enclosed by a wooden palisade fence. In my child’s imagination, the fence served as the walls of an Old West fort. The semicircular driveway was an Olympic speed track for roller skating. The low-traffic street became a football field with a tall street lamp marking the goal line, and sidewalks indicating the sidelines.

We quickly made friends with the five Thiriot boys, who lived directly across the street from us. Their father worked for the Clark County juvenile justice office, and their mother stayed at home. The Thiriots were members of the nearby Mormon Church and had become friends with Lola’s family. They were a close-knit and lively family who were always doing things together. They represented the kind of safe, respectable family life my parents wanted for us.

Veronica and I began our new life in earnest in September 1979, when we entered second and third grade at C. C. Ronnow Elementary School. Our new school was only a few blocks from our house, close enough that we could walk there every day with the Thiriots and other neighborhood kids, while my mother trailed a few steps behind us. In Miami, our schoolmates had all been like us, the sons and daughters of Cuban exiles. But C. C. Ronnow had an ethnically diverse student body. We went to school with white, non-Hispanic kids like the Thiriots, with African American students who were bused in from a neighborhood several miles away and with Hispanic children, mostly of Mexican descent, as well. At first, it was an unfamiliar environment, but one we quickly adapted to and enjoyed.

After we finished our homework in the afternoon, we went outdoors to play with the Thiriots. Our games were the kind of innocent activities my parents imagined would occupy us in our new surroundings. Sometimes we pretended to be settlers defending our frontier fort from an Indian attack. Other times we pretended our neighborhood was a country called Ingraham, named for the cross street next to our house. The four older Thiriots and I were soldiers in Ingraham’s army, Veronica was our queen and the youngest Thiriot, only an infant at the time, was heir to the throne.

My parents, especially my mother, attributed the neighborhood’s wholesomeness to the influence of the Mormon Church. The neighborhood church sponsored a Cub Scout pack, father-and-son camping trips, and various other family activities.

Mormons are encouraged by the church to recruit converts to the faith, and almost as soon as we moved to the neighborhood, Lola started converting us. Her son, Moses, discussed the church’s teachings with me.

I had been baptized in the Catholic Church, and when I was very young had regularly attended Mass with my mother. But ours had not been a very Catholic home for some time. By the time I had entered grade school, weekly Mass was no longer part of our family routine, and I had yet to receive the Church’s sacraments that were granted to children my age.

I don’t believe my mother ever really understood Mormon theology, but her intense desire to be part of a community with upstanding values and caring, cohesive families made her an eager convert. My mother, Veronica and I were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and began attending Sunday services at the church next door to my school.

Sunday services lasted the entire morning. They began at nine o’clock with a general assembly of the entire congregation, where we would sing hymns. Our bishop would deliver a sermon, and then members were encouraged to give personal testimony before the entire assembly. Following the testimonies, the children left to attend Sunday school, and the men and women divided into separate meetings. My mother attended meetings of the Relief Society, the church’s official women’s auxiliary. We usually returned home a little after noon.

I liked Sunday services. I got to wear my best clothes and see school friends who attended our church. Later, as I became even more obsessed
with football, I would complain about having to spend the entire morning in church, because televised East Coast NFL games would have already started before we got home. Otherwise I enjoyed the lifestyle our church encouraged. I joined the Cub Scout pack the church sponsored. I went with my friends to watch their fathers play intramural basketball games on the church’s basketball court. I attended daylong parades, where children dressed as early church pioneers and reenacted their journey to the West. I went with my uncle Armando on father-and-son camping trips to an estate Howard Hughes had bequeathed to the church. My father, who was embarrassed by his injured leg and the brace he had to wear, did not accompany me.

My father never really embraced Mormonism. He wasn’t particularly religious, and he was skeptical about the church’s teachings. I saw him pray only once. Mormon fathers are considered the spiritual heads of their households, and one evening not long after we had joined the church, my mother asked my father to lead the family in prayer. He had spoken for only a few moments, thanking God for his children and family, when he broke down and was unable to continue. He left the table and tried to compose himself. His tears shocked Veronica and me. We had never seen him cry before, and would only see him cry again on one other occasion. My mother tried to explain to us why he had suddenly become distraught. She told us his childhood had been a very sad one. His mother had died when he was a very young boy. His father had moved in with a woman who had mistreated him. He had never known a happy family life in Cuba, she explained, and he had cried that night in gratitude for the blessing of having one now.

Some of the church’s rules were difficult for my parents, especially my father, to abide by. The LDS health code, the “Word of Wisdom,” banned the use of tobacco. My dad had been a smoker since he was a boy of thirteen and working in the streets of Havana. He’d tried to quit several times but never succeeded, and eventually lung cancer and emphysema would claim his life. The church also strictly prohibited the consumption of alcohol. I never saw my parents consume anything more than an occasional glass of beer or wine, and we never kept spirits at home. But my father was a bartender, and while the church didn’t object to one of its members working in that occupation, it considered liquor poison, which could have bothered
my father with feelings of remorse for making a living by dispensing it. It certainly bothered me, and I admonished him for trading in the sinful substance, urging him to find other work. He ignored my tactlessness. Both my parents loved Cuban coffee, a staple in Cuban households, and could never permanently give it up in compliance with the church’s prohibition of caffeine consumption, although they did discourage us from drinking Coca-Cola.

These proscriptions and his doubts about Mormon theology were the reasons my father remained somewhat detached from the life of our church. Nevertheless, out of deference to my mother, he didn’t object to our church membership, and did what he could to support our spiritual growth in our new faith. In the summer of 1980, he took us on a family vacation to Utah, where we visited important LDS sites in Provo and Salt Lake City. Although we visited the famous Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, we didn’t enter it. To enter a Mormon temple, you have to have been a member of a Mormon church for at least a year and been deemed worthy of the privilege by receiving a “temple recommend” from your bishop and stake president following interviews with each of them to confirm your adherence to the church’s teachings. We would remain members of the church for just three years, and my father’s lukewarm embrace of Mormonism deterred us from applying for an interview.

In contrast to my parents, I immersed myself in LDS theology, and understood it as well as an eight-year-old mind can. Although my school grades were never impressive, I was a voracious reader, and I studied church literature and other sources of information to learn all I could about the church’s teachings.

All in all, the Mormon Church provided the sound moral structure my mother had wanted for us, and a circle of friends from stable, God-fearing families. When we left the church a few years later, mostly at my instigation, we did so with gratitude for its considerable contribution to our happiness in those years.

I began playing Pop Warner football that fall for the Caesars Palace Gladiators. I played quarterback that first year. The following year, I played on the defensive line for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Sooners. I wasn’t happy about the change in position, my father even less so. He suspected the coaches were favoring their own kids when
assigning positions. In truth, I wasn’t a very good quarterback, and never would be.

When football season was finished for the year, I looked for new pastimes to occupy my time. Veronica was the star student in our house. I was the avid reader with an aptitude for self-education. I borrowed books from the school library, and devoured magazines and newspapers for information about religion, the military, farming and other subjects that one time or another came under my enthusiastic scrutiny. After the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, I became fascinated with royalty, and made a study of the great European monarchies. I would never become proficient at math and science, and my school grades ranged from mediocre to poor. But my reading comprehension and vocabulary and knowledge of history and politics were the skills that would save me from a lifetime of underachieving. On Christmas of 1982, my parents gave me what I still consider the best present I ever received: a complete set of
World Book
encyclopedias. I still have them.

In addition to my
World Book
s, newspaper subscriptions and trips to the library, I had an invaluable living research guide in my home, who encouraged my amateur scholarship. My grandfather loved history and politics as much as I did, and was far more knowledgeable about them. He became my tutor, my companion and close friend and one of the great influences in my life. But for his encouragement, I think my life would have turned out very differently than it has.

M
Y COUSINS CALLED HIM OUR
ABUELO
—GRANDFATHER—but Veronica and I, imitating our parents, called him Papá. He lived with us for all but the winter months, when Vegas became too cold for him and he returned to Miami to stay with my aunt Adria’s family. He woke up early every morning, and dressed in a suit unless the day was very warm, when he would substitute a Cuban guayabera for the suit. Three times a day, after breakfast, lunch and dinner, he retired to our small front porch, sat in an aluminum chair and smoked one of his three daily cigars. I would sit at his feet, some days for hours.