The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (15 page)

Mamá opened her eyes like an owl at Caco and me. “How much?” she burst out, appalled.
“Noventa y ocho,”
Caco answered her in Spanish, speaking like a ventriloquist trying not to move his lips, signaling her to remain discreet and restrain her voice. “
¡Qué va!
These people
están locos,
” she yelled as softly as she could. “We’re not
los Roquefelas
. Let’s keep looking. Anyway, a hotel is only to sleep.” But on the way out she grabbed a bunch of complimentary postcards that pictured the hotel’s two-story waterslide, the giant color TVs, and humongous rooms with mirrored closet doors. “How beautiful,” she said. “I’ll send these to your
tías
in Cuba. Let’s go.” Caco and I dragged behind, out through the fancy glass doors, with no choice but to continue scouting the strip of hotels until we could find one we could afford.

Every year, usually right after Easter, Mamá would start planning and budgeting for a weeklong vacation in the summer. But only someplace a few hours away from Miami, only as far as Papá was willing to drive us in
el Malibú
. We had been to Clearwater Beach near Tampa and Marco Island on Florida’s west coast. This year, Mamá had talked about going to Walt Disney World again. But after the tuition hike at St. Brendan’s, and after having to buy a new refrigerator and repair the TV in the Florida room, a few days at a reasonable hotel in Miami Beach—
reasonable
was Mamá’s way of not saying
cheap
—was all we could afford.

The St. Moritz was cheaper than the Seacomber, but they didn’t have kitchenettes. Mamá planned to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner in our room so we wouldn’t have to spend money on eating out. The Sands Hotel was even cheaper, but they didn’t rent out any
pin-pan-puns
—the funny name Mamá gave to roll-away beds for how one half unfolded (
pin
), then the other half (
pan
), and there it was (
pun
). Squeezing all four of us plus Abuela and Abuelo into one room was impossible at the Sands; we’d have to get two rooms, and that was out of the question.

Our next stop was the Copa, one of the many run-down art deco hotels along Ocean Drive that had been converted into pay-by-the-week apartments. The Copa, like the other languishing hotels, had been painted gunmetal gray, concealing the bright pinks and blues that wouldn’t resurface until South Beach’s renaissance in the early nineties. We stepped onto its front veranda, lined with vinyl patio chairs as old and broken as the hotel’s residents sitting in them: rows of retirees, the men’s bald heads glowing in the sun and the women’s silver hair, teased into thin nests, shining like halos. Rows of feet in gummy orthopedic shoes rested as if glued to the ground; canes leaned against the balustrade; chorus lines of loose panty hose sagged at the knees and socks crinkled around swollen ankles. Their eyes were stiff, like dolls’ eyes, hardly noticing us as we walked past them and into the lobby.

The lobby was the size of our living room, crammed with dark, lumpy sofas made of scratchy polyester and brown laminate tables adorned with plastic flowers stuffed into dusty glass vases. The grimy tile floor was cracked and spotted with gum blotches. “Yuck,” I told Caco, but Mamá heard me.
“Cállate,”
she admonished. Worst of all, there was no air-conditioning in the lobby—only a jittery ceiling fan circulating hot air laced with a mildew smell like wet towels. “Do they have AC in the rooms?” Caco asked me. “They better,” I said, as concerned as he was.

At home, to cut down on the electric bill, we were not allowed to turn on the air-conditioning until after dinner, no matter how much we’d complain or beg. Some afternoons, after walking home from school drenched in sweat, I’d strip off my polyester uniform, bathe in rubbing alcohol, dust my body with talc, then lie on my bed like a floured drumstick under the ceiling fan to cool off. Regardless, not until around 8 or 9
P.M.
would Mamá give us the okay, and Caco and I would storm through the house closing all the windows before turning on the AC to super-duper high and sitting shirtless in front of the vents, enraptured by the ice-cold air against our sweaty temples, hypnotized by the hum of the compressor fan, intoxicated by the clean scent of the filtered air.

The thought of spending a week sweating at the Copa without air-conditioning—not even at bedtime—was terrifying. “What if they don’t have AC in the rooms?” I said to Mamá as Papá approached the front desk. “
Bueno,
we’ll see,” she replied, adding, “
Air-condichon
is a luxury, not a necessity. We had no
air-condichon
in Cuba and no one died.” Papá returned with good news: the room was only thirty-two dollars with a kitchenette. The bad news was that an AC unit would cost five dollars extra per night. “Is not so bad.
Está bien,
put a deposit,” Mamá instructed Papá, and then paused, Caco and I anxiously waiting for her next words. “With
air-condichon,
” she added. “Yeah!” I exclaimed quietly, bouncing on my tiptoes. Caco put out his hand: “Give me five!” he said. I slapped his palm and then he slapped mine. The thought of AC blasting all day long for a whole week made up for the crummy lobby and all the old folks.

“No paradise,
pero bueno,
it’s better than nothing,” Mamá said aloud to no one in particular, scanning the row of travel posters that decorated the lobby, advertising places I’d never heard of: Aruba, Cancún, St. Thomas. Places with teal-blue waters, hammocks strung between coconut palms, and bays teaming with sailboats—all hung in gold plastic frames without any glass.

The day after we returned from our hotel-scouting trip, Mamá began tightening the family budget to save up for our vacation at the Copa four months away in July. She pushed back the AC hour to 10
P.M
., sometimes 11
P.M
. if she decreed it was a cool night. She also asked Abuela to start fixing more
reasonable
dinners and chip in the money she saved on the grocery bill. At least three times a week, we had potato omelets, boiled corn meal with
chicharrones,
or rice with a can of Libby’s Vienna Sausages that were no bigger than my pinkie and as mushy as dog food. The sacrifices hardly seemed worth a week at the crummy Copa. Except for the air-conditioning, I had little to look forward to, until the phone rang one night after dinner.

Abuela answered: “
¿Oigo? ¡Bien, bien! ¿Cómo están ustedes?
Still cold
en Nueva York
?” she began, and sat down at the kitchen table in the one chair with armrests. Her “throne,” Mamá had dubbed it, where Abuela spent hours on the phone shamelessly gossiping or calling in bets. As soon as I caught on that it was my
tía
Elisa from New York, I parked myself on the living room sofa with my cat, Misu, within earshot of Abuela’s voice. I loved eavesdropping on her conversations with any one of her sisters; whichever one she was talking to, they’d gossip about the other three. This time she and
tía
Elisa went on for twenty minutes about
tía
Susana’s latest
problema
with
Valium;
tía
Ofelia’s terrible vanity; and the usual disdain for
tía
Ileana, who still corresponded with her “no-good,” communist son-in-law who “chose” to stay in Cuba. The conversation was juicier than any of the telenovelas I watched with Abuela every weeknight on
Canal 23
.

Then I heard her say, “
Sí
,
en julio, en el
Copa, right on the beach.
Sí,
you should come and visit.” Could it be true? After another round of gossip, Abuela finally hung up and announced what I had been hoping I had heard: “
Oye, tía
Elisa and Paquito said they want to come with
las niñas
to
el
Copa with us.
Qué bien
.” I flung Misu off my lap and slid down the hall in my tube socks to tell Caco the good news. “Oh, brother—big deal,” he responded, returning his attention to the TV.

But it
was
a big deal.
Tía
Elisa only visited us once every few years, and she was my favorite great-aunt. She always had something nice to say to me, even when it was something bad: “You chubby,
pero
you look healthy”; “You need a haircut,
pero
you look nice”; “You’re too short for your age,
pero
you’ll grow.” And she cooked the best, most un-Cuban dishes: Sloppy Joes with shoestring potatoes; fried rice with tiny pieces of scrambled eggs; red cupcakes from a box, topped with cream cheese frosting and sprinkles—all the dishes that Mamá never made, claiming that gringo food was bad for us and would stunt our growth.

Tía
Elisa and Paquito had lived in New York City since leaving Cuba in the early fifties, years before the revolution. I thought of Paquito as the
real
Ricky Ricardo: a sharp Latin-lover type who had become a big success in a big city. He didn’t own a nightclub, but he had owned a grocery store on the Upper West Side, which had folded because Paquito had
“problemas,”
according to one of Abuela’s gossip sessions on the phone that I once overheard.

Their daughters, my
primas,
Carla and Denise, were born and raised in New York. They were big-city girls, as American as could be, and the coolest of all my cousins by far. I only got to see them when they came down to Miami—and I could never get enough of them. Denise was the hipper, flashier of the two. She sported headbands and hot pants, and wore false eyelashes that fluttered like black butterflies. She spoke with a thick New York accent whenever she said words like
wuater
and
doowr
. Carla was the more artsy, sophisticated sister. She played the piano and wore her hair down to her waist like Cher. She dressed in paisley-print minidresses and always seemed to carry a purse. I was fascinated by them and the stories they would tell about New York: standing at the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong, seeing
A Chorus Line
eight times, walking through Times Square’s ten-story billboards, and visiting the life-size dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History.

Within a week all the arrangements were made: Papá reserved another room at the Copa and
tía
Elisa booked the flights. I marked the day they were arriving with a red
X
on the complimentary wall calendar from El Gallo de Oro market that hung on our refrigerator. Each month featured a vintage photo of some Cuban landmark, each one captioned as
the oldest, the first, the tallest,
or
the most beautiful
this or that. Throughout the year, I’d imagine Mamá and Papá walking down the cobblestone streets of Old Havana, driving down La Gran Vía in an ice-blue Oldsmobile convertible with chrome fins, or sitting on the seawall of El Malecón, behind them the waves erupting like volcanoes. Month after month, with every opening and closing of the refrigerator door, I’d catch an imaginary glimpse of their lives years before me and the revolution that I knew almost nothing about.

But for the whole month of June, instead of the past, I imagined the future, counting the days until
tía
Elisa and my
primas
would arrive from New York City. Until age four, I had lived there with my family. Though I had some memories of the city, they were faint and vague. New York felt familiar and close, yet so far away, a larger-than-life place, like Cuba, which I knew only through
photos and stories.

THE DAY WITH THE BIG
X
—JULY 2—FINALLY
arrived. By the time Mamá came into my room to wake me up, I was already sitting on my bed, fully dressed in my Kmart best: my favorite red-and-blue checkerboard shirt and the white leather shoes that I kept in the original Thom McAn box; they made me a half inch taller, at least. “We going to the beach, not a
Quinces
party,” Mamá poked fun at me. “Get out of those clothes.” But I didn’t. I wanted to look extra-special nice for Carla and Denise. I took ten more minutes getting ready, parting my hair a half dozen times until I got a perfectly straight line, lacquering it in place with a generous spray of Mamá’s Aqua Net, and dousing myself with Papá’s orange-blossom cologne. “Look at you, Mr. Pretty Pants,” Caco teased me when I sat down to breakfast with him.

I barely had enough room for my bowl of Cap’n Crunch because the kitchen table was crammed with the groceries Mamá and Abuela had laid out to take to the Copa. As mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, Mamá and Abuela never agreed on much except two things: discipline, and food—lots of it. They had stockpiled a ten-pound can of El Cochinito lard with a happy little pig bouncing across the label, a twenty-pound bag of rice as big as a pillow but as hard as a rock, and a sack of yuca. They had filled at least a half dozen brown bags with cans of black beans, jumbo-size bags of plantain chips, a couple frozen pork shoulders, assorted flavors of Jell-O packets, and two-liter bottles of Winn-Dixie brand soda, which didn’t taste at all like Coca-Cola, as Abuela insisted.

What will Carla and Denise think of us lugging all this junk?
I worried as Caco and I reluctantly helped Papá load everything into
el Malibú
. We thought we were done when Mamá came to the car carrying a huge plastic tote stuffed with her cooking essentials: the pressure cooker, her Hitachi rice maker, the wooden plantain masher to make
tostones,
and the extra-big twelve-cup espresso pot. She insisted she needed to take everything. Papá knew better than to argue; he shuffled things around and crammed in her wares, pushing down on the trunk until it closed, and we drove off, only five minutes behind schedule, according to Mamá’s watch, Abuela and Abuelo following in the baby-blue Comet.

As the Miami Airport came within view of the highway, I began daydreaming of flying to Spain or Cuba in one of the jumbo jets on the runway, as big and dumb as a dinosaur, lifting magically into the sky as easily and gracefully as a seagull. I imagined the runway lights from above like strings of giant rubies and emeralds, or like colored stars against the ground instead of the sky. In the terminal, I took in the sweet, mingled scents of perfume and bubble gum drifting from the gift shops. Overhead, dreamy voices made announcements in languages I didn’t know, though I listened carefully, trying to guess: French? Portuguese? German? The fluorescent lights bouncing off the polished floors felt as anonymous as the droves of people bustling past us and each other, arriving and departing from places that were only black dots on a map to me. How many cities were there in the world besides Miami: Caracas, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Denver, Montreal? I began counting while gazing at the monitor until
tía
Elisa’s flight flashed
ARRIVED
|
ARRIVED
|
ARRIVED
.