The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (26 page)

Mamá—and Abuela—drove me to Anita’s house the night of the dance. When we arrived Anita was still getting ready. Her mother chitchatted with my mother and Abuela in the living room. Anita’s two younger sisters pranced around me, asking dumb questions:
How old are you? Are you on the football team? Do you like our sister?
Finally, Anita stepped into the room. “Wow—beautiful,” I said. Anita no longer looked like a girl; she was a woman in her antique lace gown and satin pumps, clutching a purse inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Her hair was in wild ringlets, her eyelashes were thick with mascara, her lips red and glossy. But her beauty and sexiness also made me feel oddly uneasy. I giggled as I pinned the corsage on her, and moved clumsily trying to get into the right pose. While our mothers snapped photos, Abuela badgered us: “
Ay, Dios
—those eyes! You’ll have beautiful children. You know,
mi’ ja,
I wasn’t much older than you when I got married.” Anita’s mother interrupted Abuela and ushered us to the car; she drove us to the dance at the downtown Hyatt.

For hours, we danced to almost every song: rock, New Wave, punk rock, or ballad. Exhausted,
I suggested we take a stroll along the riverside promenade to relax and cool off. Earlier that day, I had snuck a bottle of Moët & Chandon out of El Cocuyito, took a bus downtown to the Hyatt, and stashed the bottle, together with two plastic cups, in one of the planters along the promenade. When we reached the planter, I turned to Anita. “Oh, what’s this?” I said coyly and pulled out the bottle of champagne. “Ricky! Oh my God—you’re so sweet! How romantic,” she said. I popped the cork; we made a wish and tossed the cork into the river. With cups in hand and arms wrapped around each other, we took a sip and sat down on a bench. The moment was perfect; it was time: I looked into her eyes, then kissed her softly. I caressed her back, smelled the perfume on her neck, and ran my fingers through her hair—imitating kisses I’d seen in movies. I felt like I
was
in a movie, like I was acting. I was there and yet I wasn’t. I felt the tenderness and intimacy, but not the passion that Julio had described. I knew it should be one of the most beautiful, unforgettable moments in my life—my first kiss—but I also knew in that moment that I wasn’t, and never would be, like other boys.

After that night, my relationship with Anita changed. I recognized I could never be who I had thought I could be with her; and I sensed she felt the same way. Surely she could tell I was different, even if she did like me. I drifted away from her slowly, and she let me, though we never officially broke up; we simply ended up becoming good friends. But it couldn’t be the same as it had been. The nothingness and aloneness returned.

Several weeks later, I walked into my advanced algebra class and our teacher, Mrs. Carrillo, announced, “Today we are going to study imaginary numbers.” I sat up at my desk, my curiosity piqued.
How can numbers be imaginary? They are supposed to be
c
oncrete, rational, calculable
. “Okay, class, what’s the square root of negative four? Well?” she asked smugly. Silence. No hands went up. It seemed we were all as perplexed as if she had asked us to define God. She had our undivided attention. After a pause, she let out a little chuckle and said, “Ah—there is no real answer. So we have to imagine one.”

I was totally stumped. Mrs. Carrillo explained the concept of imaginary numbers as one of the limitations of math—one of the mysteries that we can’t explain, exactly. “The only way to find an answer is to get on a rocket ship and zip to infinity—where all the answers to everything lie. So for now, we have to imagine an answer. And that answer, that number, is what we call an imaginary number.” She took to the blackboard, writing as she spoke: “The square root of negative one is
i;
therefore the square root of negative four is 2
i
. . .”

I was a whiz at math, and had come to trust it as something unquestionably precise, rational, reliable, true. The idea of imaginary numbers made no sense; it made me question the reality of everything else for the rest of the day. Imaginary or real cells dividing in biology? Imaginary or real French fries at lunch? Imaginary or real boys undressing in the locker room? An imaginary or real God speaking to me in Father Octavio’s religion class? Was Julio somewhere in that infinity where all the answers to the unanswerable lie?

This lasted right into final period, Honors English. Our teacher was out sick, and the substitute instructed us to take out our textbooks, read something—
anything
—and write about it until the bell rang. I flipped through the pages aimlessly. Perhaps because I was tired and wanted to read something short, or perhaps because I was in an
imaginary
mood, I was drawn to a poem—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—the moment I scanned its first line: “Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky . . .” I could hear Prufrock’s voice in my ear as if he were sitting right next to me telling me his story. I read the poem three times, each time spiraling
more deeply into his world of sadness and longing coming to life word by word, line by line. It was the first time I had ever been moved by a poem the way I had by songs. It became part of me: my breaths, my heartbeats, my blood.

Inspired, I began writing about the mermaids in the poem—
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me—
how they represented man’s most unattainable dreams and desires and how people—like Prufrock—spend their lives afraid to act—
Do I dare . . . Disturb the universe?—
trapped in a delusion and unable to face their true selves. There were still about ten minutes left before the bell. What else could I write about? Mrs. Carrillo’s lesson popped back into my mind. I compared Prufrock’s life to the world of imaginary numbers—how perhaps there weren’t any
real
answers to anything, not even in mathematics; how Prufrock had to make up answers to make sense of his life—and that was just part of being human. I wasn’t sure if what I had written was any good, or if it even made sense, but I figured Mr. Peterson wouldn’t grade the assignment too harshly—hopefully he wouldn’t count it at all.

Regardless, something felt different as I turned in the assignment and stepped out into the bustling breezeway. The textures of the world seemed more imaginary, yet more real than before: the feet shuffling across the gritty terrazzo floor, the locker doors slamming like cymbals, the boys loosening their neckties and giving each other high fives, a sheet of paper afloat in the wind like a giant white butterfly. At home, later that afternoon, I lay in my bed thinking about Julio again, just as I had done for months. But it was different this time. Julio’s life and death started to make a little more sense. Julio wasn’t a fearful, doubting man like Prufrock. Julio dared to disturb the universe—and I began to take comfort in that. He had lived every moment to the fullest, chasing his rock ’n’ roll dreams in his Corvette. He had heard the mermaids speak to him. If there was no
real
answer for his death, then I’d just have to make one up for now, or spend the rest of my life waiting to reach infinity. The square root of negative 9 is 3
i
—and there had to be a reason why Julio died—I just had to accept that. Words and numbers began healing me that day, but they also began to haunt me: Could I hear the mermaids? Would I ever dare to disturb the universe? Could I not imagine any answers to the questions I had begun to ask myself?

MY SOPHOMORE YEAR ENDED AND I GLADLY RETURNED
to full-time work at El Cocuyito for the summer, hoping for grounding in my village of
cubanos
. So much had changed in me, as well as with my body. I had been lifting weights at the school gym, and doing sit-ups and push-ups at home before dinnertime. My baby fat had completely leaned into thick muscle, my biceps had grown a few inches, and I had stretched into the tallest Blanco ever at five feet nine, towering over my five-foot-four father. As I’d been given such obviously poor genes, Don Gustavo attributed my height to
los jambergues—
McDonald’s hamburgers—and to hard work, of course. “
Viste,
what an
hombre
I’ve made of him,” he would brag to the customers, slapping me on the back as I’d whisk by carrying a twenty-pound bag of rice under each arm or pushing a cart loaded with boxes of plantains stacked four tiers high. Abuela praised me too—her little
machito,
she called me, claiming it was all her doing, not Don Gustavo’s.

Tía
Gloria also took notice of my emerging manliness and maturity. She began relying more on me and giving me more responsibilities. Eventually she unofficially made me her assistant manager in charge of all the items that needed constant restocking or rotating: sodas, baby foods, dairy products. And I was the only one she trusted with the restocking of the wines. But my favorite new duty was baking; it was like playing with my cousin Marlene’s Easy-Bake Oven. Twice a week the truck from La Estrella Panadería would deliver boxes of raw, frozen loaves of Cuban bread, thin and stiff as broomsticks. I’d pry the loaves apart one by one, placing them on
wax paper, five to a tray, and then brush them delicately with drawn butter until their pallid white flesh blushed yellow. They went into the steamer for almost the entire day, where the dough would rise into clammy snakes. Then I’d peel them off the trays and slide them into the fiery mouth of the gas oven. Within a few minutes, the irresistible scent would spread through the store, luring customers to the back door of the storeroom, where they waited, watching me pull the loaves from the oven one by one with my mitt, then sliding each into a yard-long paper bag printed with the Cuban flag.

One morning I walked into the storeroom to find a man about twice my age whistling and listening to music on a Walkman while he sifted through a box of
my
frozen loaves. He returned my peeved look with a warm smile and removed his headphones. “
Hola, tú eres
Riqui, right? My name is Victor,” he said, and then extended his hand to me. “Yes, I’m Ricky. Who are you? What are you doing here?” I asked, thinking he was a customer snooping around the storeroom. “
Ah, sí
, I’m new,
compañero
. Here to help you,” he replied, and patted my back.
Tía
Gloria came out of the store office to explain that she expected business to pick up that summer. “
Enséñale
how to make the bread. And then show him around,” she said.

I said nothing as we arranged the frozen loaves on the trays. I resented his intrusion into
my
store; the threat he posed to my status as
tía
Gloria’s favorite. I listened to him answer questions about his life that I wasn’t asking: he’d been in the United States only a few years; he loved
our
beer, but hated
our
filtered cigarettes; he was from Camagüey, the most beautiful province in all of Cuba, he claimed, where he had done time in prison, though he didn’t say what for, and I didn’t ask. He sure looked like an inmate, I thought—a sexy one, though I couldn’t admit it to myself. He wore a skintight tank top, a thick belt, and a red bandanna half tucked into the back pocket of his Levi’s. As he spoke, I eyed him: his scruffy beard and slicked-back hair; his thick, hairy forearms; his brawny chest.

After we finished the first batch of Cuban bread, he asked me if I wanted to have a cigarette out back with him. I told him I didn’t smoke, but he insisted I join him anyway—and I agreed, I wanted to learn more about him: What was he up to and why had he been in prison? He rolled a cigarette, which I’d never seen anyone do. “This is how we did it in Cuba,” he said in response to my bewildered look, then lit the cigarette and offered me a toke. “I don’t smoke,” I told him again. “Well, it’s time you started,
compañero,
” he said. The authority in his voice, together with the contrasting kindness in his light-brown eyes, let me trust him. I took a puff and began coughing violently; my eyes watered. He laughed, but said tenderly,
“Papo, coño
.
Tranquilo, tranquilo.”
He ran into the store and returned with a beer. Not what I was expecting, but I took two good swigs. When my coughing eased up, we both laughed, as if we’d been friends for years. “
Compañero
, you’ve got a lot to learn,” he said. “And so do you,” I bantered. “Come on—I’m supposed to show you around the store. I’m your boss—remember that.”

As
tía
Gloria had done with me years before, I walked slowly down each aisle, pointing out how the store was organized and stressing the importance of presentation and cleanliness to Victor: “Pull all the stock forward. Align everything in neat rows—labels always face out. Remove damaged goods. Wipe the shelves down every time.” After every instruction he’d reply with,
Sí, Papo. Está bien, Papo. Como no, Papo
. I figured that would be his nickname for me—Papo; I liked it—it sounded manly yet affectionate. Finally I warned him: “I’m in charge of the wines—don’t touch those or I’ll fire you,” I joked. “
Sí, sí, sí, Señor Jefe
. Whatever you say,
Capitán,
” he came back at me with sarcasm, giving me a soldier’s salute. We laughed again—the way I used to laugh with Julio.

I then gave Victor the rundown of the stockroom and took him up to the second-story loft where
tía
Gloria stored the
americano
foods that hardly sold, like canned cranberry jelly and broccoli soup; and also the bulkier but lighter boxes of toilet paper and cereals. “
Oye,
does Gloria come up here?” Victor asked. “Usually on Mondays—when she checks inventory,” I explained. “
Ay, qué bien
. We can
hanguear
up here,” he said, and started rolling another cigarette. He lit it and passed it to me, and that time I didn’t cough at all. We sat on some boxes, and he began divulging more details about his life, blowing out smoke with his words: “
Sabes,
I had to leave everyone
en
Cuba. I can never go back—
nunca,
” he said with a certain vulnerability in his voice. I expected to hear the same nostalgic story I’d heard before from other Cubans like Don Gustavo and Raquel, but then Victor added, “Cuba was hell anyway—it was
de pinga
.” I found that odd—I’d never heard anyone compare Cuba to hell, unless they were referring to Castro. But before I could ask him more, Victor looked away into the distance: “
Bueno,
that’s a story for another day,” he said, then put out his cigarette on the floor. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Papo.
Vámonos
, I need to get to work before you fire me,
Señor Jefe
.”