The Domino Diaries (23 page)

Just then I heard the cheering subside for the fight that was going on and noticed an enormous, towering man in Cuban track pants stroll across the gym floor alone. I didn't have a good look at him.

“
¿Qui
é
n es
é
l?
” I asked the dad, to make sure it was who I thought it was.

“Oh that's just F
é
lix. He's a good friend.”

“
Sav
ó
n?
”

Sav
ó
n, like Te
ó
filo Stevenson, was a three-time heavyweight Olympic champion. Don King had offered him a lot more than the five million Te
ó
filo Stevenson rejected to fight Muhammad Ali, for Sav
ó
n to turn pro and fight Mike Tyson. The figure was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty or twenty-five million. He turned it down flat. I'd seen an interview with him where he slowly made his way, speech impediment and all, to explain, “I may not be a millionaire because of what I turned down, but it's possible I made a million friends with my decision here.”

F
é
lix Sav
ó
n was famous for being a little slow, but also the sweetest and baddest man in the country. There he was, all by himself, waving graciously to a few people who called out his name.

“F
é
lix is working with one of the teams?” I asked.

“
Claro.
”

“He's a friend of yours?”

“
Familia
.”

“
¿Familia?
”

“Jes,” the father broke into English, to emphasize his point. “I will introduce you.
F
É
L
IX!
¡OYE!
”

“Fuck! Man,
don't
. What are you doing!”

“
¡OYE!
F
É
LIX!” Then leaning over to me, “
Familia
. My berry goo' frien'. Berry goo'.” F
é
lix, still in stride toward an empty chair near the ring, raised his hand to acknowledge the piercing scream of the man sitting next to me in the stands. Clearly he had
no
idea who he was looking at.

“I really think F
é
lix wants to be left alone.”

“
¡Qu
é
va!
Bullshit. F
é
lix i' like my
hermano
. Let's get him over here and you can have a photo with F
é
lix. F
é
lix!
¡OYE!
” The pitch of this
oye
was pleading and defiant at the same time.

“Man, I don't even have a camera,” I pleaded. “Let's leave him alone.”

“
I
have a camera.”

F
é
lix waved again, but you could tell he dreaded what was to come next. Though it was unlikely he dreaded it half as much as I did.

The father abandoned his son's hand and got to his feet, shoved both hands in his mouth, and whistled with such ferocity F
é
lix stopped, turned, and glared in our direction. It was a glare I had never seen F
é
lix offer any opponent during the fourteen years he was flattening
everybody
in his boxing career. Right then F
é
lix flashed the Lenny dreaming-of-the-rabbits grin.

“Please God stop,” I pleaded with this man. “For the love of your child.”

“
¡OYE!
”

“Your son.”

“
MADRE MIA, ¡F
É
LIX!
”

F
é
lix squinted until he spotted us and frowned.

The father waved him over and grabbed me by the arm. “
Co
ñ
o
, grab my fucking camera.”

I did as he instructed, though I didn't even want a photograph with F
é
lix Sav
ó
n.

“
¡F
É
LIX! ¡OYE!
Don't pretend like Miguel Antonio Torres has not known you since you were a child of seven! Get over here, you!”

F
é
lix Sav
ó
n, all six-foot-six and 240 pounds of him, one of the greatest fighters the world had ever produced, dropped his head and began the walk of shame over to us. The child of Miguel Antonio Torres could not have been more pleased with this glorious day, the day his father regained the heavyweight championship for daddies
everywhere
.

“Miguelito, wait here for us. Papi must take care of this.”

I was grabbed by the elbow and hauled down the stairs toward the first row. We were on a platform as F
é
lix arrived, so I was eye level with the Cuban legend.

F
é
lix sheepishly apologized and Miguel, five-four in sandals, reached up and slapped his cheek gently. I was introduced as a close family friend and F
é
lix extended his hand, which looked as though it could palm a beach ball. As we shook hands I tried not to feel like a Muppet in the exchange.

F
é
lix asked softly how I'd liked the tournament. His speech impediment wasn't quite a stutter, though he did have trouble enunciating his words.

The father mentioned a photo, and F
é
lix warmly put his arm over my shoulder, which cued me to put mine over his. We had a considerable section of the crowd enjoying my awkwardness over holding Sav
ó
n hostage. Miguel Antonio Torres stood before us with his camera pointed, and both F
é
lix and I smiled at him. Our fixed smiles extended to nearly a minute until F
é
lix, not breaking his grin, asked if there might be a good time to take the photo.

“
¡Hijo de puta! ¡Mierda!
” Miguel screamed.

I asked if the disposable piece-of-shit camera was broken. F
é
lix looked over at me and clenched his massive jaw, striations spread out over the cheek like a cracked windshield.

Click …

The comedian Mitch Hedberg once opined, “I think Bigfoot is blurry,
that's
the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me.” So are certain freakish moments in your life. Miguel's blurry photo of F
é
lix and me standing together captured the moment crystal clear.

I asked F
é
lix if I could speak to him after the fights and he gave me a strange look and took my notebook to write down his phone number. As he strode off toward the ring, he said he was free that evening and to call.

I went outside Kid Chocolate for some air. The portrait photographers who worked the front steps of the Capitolio with their century-old cameras were packing up for the night when a fleet of bicycles carting birthday cakes raced down the side of the road in front of them. Every kid in town was entitled to a free cake until they reached fifteen (plus a free cake on their wedding), and the state delivered the cakes to your door. It was always one of my favorite sights around town. But they also reminded me of a very strange day in my life, my twelfth birthday.

Months before that birthday, I had asked my parents for a poster of Muhammad Ali for my room. He was the bravest person that I knew and I wanted to see his face looking at me every day. When they took me to the poster shop, I couldn't decide between my two favorites. There were six or seven Ali posters in the store that I liked, but the choice was easy to narrow down to two. I had nearly saved up enough money on my own with my allowance to buy one, but I couldn't shake the premonition that I'd only end up obsessing over the one I didn't choose. I used to visit the shop all the time and drive the owner crazy asking him to unfurl the posters and hold each of them up for me. And then my bullying incident at school happened and I was afraid to leave my room, let alone step outside my front door. By the time my twelfth birthday rolled around, my family wanted to help cheer me up and gave me enough money to buy
all
the Ali posters at the shop. I didn't even have to choose anymore. After I handed over the vast fortune of $75 in my hand and bought all the posters in the shop, I felt something I'd never felt before. Maybe it was a child's version of buyer's remorse being channeled into something existentially more troubling that blew all my circuits. At first, I tried to pretend I was excited as I always imagined I was supposed to feel, not having to make an awful choice between the two things I most wanted in the world. In my magical thinking, the posters were going to fix everything that had gone wrong in my life. But the day after I put up all the posters in my room, I got so upset I tore them all down and threw them away. I took a pair of my mom's scissors and a rusty razor she used on her legs and cut off all my hair and shaved my head. I've never really let it grow back since.

*   *   *

Taking no chances on scheduling a visit with F
é
lix in case, as everyone warned, phone lines were tapped, I paid H
é
ctor Vinent a visit at Rafael Trejo the next day and got F
é
lix Sav
ó
n's address. Talking to important figures privately aroused suspicion so you had to be careful. “Consistency is based on surveillance,” billboards reminded you. Also, I wanted to film the interview, which made me even more paranoid about the consequences. As a further precaution, in case anyone was watching, I moved all of my belongings from the apartment I was renting in Centro Habana into another place two blocks away, one not officially registered to rent out rooms. I was curious to see if anything would happen at my old residence. I'd heard of journalists being escorted to the airport by state security for a lot less than unauthorized, illegally filmed interviews with notable citizens.

That night I hired a gypsy cab in Calle Neptuno and gave the driver Sav
ó
n's address. The driver laughed and asked if I minded paying double the fare he'd originally accepted. While Fidel Castro's residence was a state secret, every Cuban knew his address, along with all the other people foreigners might wish to pay a visit to. I agreed to the fare hike. Maybe every major name in Cuba had a camera trained on their house by that point. A lot of the neighborhoods were under constant watch by cameras already.

Sav
ó
n lived in a humble suburb of Havana, just a few minutes away from the airport. He shared a modest, three-bedroom home with his wife, mother-in-law, sister, and a handful of kids. Nothing about his house stood out from any of the others on his block; it looked like any residential, suburban home you might find in Edison, New Jersey. Evander Holyfield, about the same age but with about half the punching power of Sav
ó
n, had been able to purchase a 109-room mansion in Atlanta. Keeping that mansion, however, was a different story, since he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings and promptly went bankrupt, his home going into foreclosure.

Sav
ó
n had grown up in Guant
á
namo, the son of a bricklayer. Boxing hadn't come naturally to him, but he worked at it. He was turned down three times by the Gitmo boxing school before they let him in as a teenager. Sav
ó
n went on to win 362 amateur fights for his country, 6 world championships, and 3 Olympic gold medals, never suffering a defeat that he didn't avenge. According to Cuban media reports, he used to shadowbox while staring out at the U.S. naval base, dreaming of victories against Americans. Some Cubans joked that if the United States gave Guant
á
namo Bay back to Cuba, then they could have Miami back.

I opened the gate of the rickety fence outside Sav
ó
n's front yard just as his front door opened and music splashed out into the neighborhood. A child spotted me from inside the foyer and ran down the main hall, only to return holding the enormous right hand of a smiling giant.

“
¡Oye, campe
ó
n!
” F
é
lix howled.

He insisted that he had some things he could sell me. He said he had a book and a film others had helped him with about his career and life. He had an
agent
I should talk to. I must have raised an eyebrow at the prospect of a man who'd turned down a multimillion-dollar career hiring an agent to look after his financial interests, because F
é
lix laughed.

“An
agent
?” I asked. That was an interesting occupation in a communist state.

“A friend who helps me with things,” he clarified.

“Okay.”

“Come inside. How much time do you need?”

“Not long.”

“Is a hundred dollars for thirty minutes okay for you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I start my watch now.” F
é
lix reached over to fiddle with what looked like the world's first digital watch. Finally it beeped to his satisfaction and he winked at me. “Please come into my living room.”

Sav
ó
n's severe speech impediment was probably not helped much by the effects of twenty years of boxing, which made each syllable of the words he spoke remarkably difficult for him. His mouth and jaw worked impossibly hard just to complete brief sentences in less than thirty seconds, so I wasn't sure how much ground we could cover in thirty minutes.

Sav
ó
n's living room sat next to his extensive, glassed-in trophy room. He refused to allow me to look it over and tapped his finger on his watch.

“We're on
your
time, my friend. What would you like to talk about?”

I took a deep breath as I set up my small camera on Sav
ó
n's coffee table and began filming him.