Memory Mambo Read online

  Strangely enough, it’s exactly this kind of thing which made it easier for her to hang out with my friends and me than with straight girls. With us, there was no competition; we just didn’t care. When she told her stories, we laughed and asked questions; sometimes we were incredulous, convinced we’d never put up with what she puts up with and we’d roll our eyes so she couldn’t see; sometimes we’d get grossed out; other times we’d slap her shoulder and tell her how right on she was. But mostly, hers was another world. We loved her and celebrated her, but we didn’t want her—and there was a certain freedom for her in that too.

  That’s why when Jimmy said Caridad couldn’t hang with us anymore, we really missed her, especially because she’s one hell of a dancer. Since she’s one of the older cousins, she actually learned to dance in Cuba, where they play the really authentic music—not just Celia Cruz, but Beny Moré, Arsenio Rodriguez, Celeste Mendoza and Los Van Van too—so she got assigned to teach all of us younger cousins how to dance. Patricia’s the oldest of all, but she was born in New York, which we joke is the reason she can’t dance worth a damn.

  Caridad taught us the mambo, the cha-cha-cha, the rumba, even the tango. She tutored us in the movement of our hips, how to close our eyes and toss our heads back as if we were in ecstasy and the music had completely invaded us. Since then, most of us have figured out how to really get in the groove with the rhythms, so we don’t have to think about looking suave anymore.

  Of course, in order to teach the boys how to lead—like my brother Pucho, who’s a real flat-foot—Caridad had to learn how to lead herself. This is a unique talent—a girl who knows how to move another girl with just one touch to her lower back, one little glide off her hip, a graceful tug here and there. (Gina, a lover I’m still aching over, dances likes that.) In a lesbian bar, this is a big deal. We loved Caridad—we used to fight among ourselves to see who’d get to dance with her, which she just ate up.

  But after Jimmy prohibited her from hanging out with us, we’d see her cigarette at the window just as we drove off on Friday and Saturday nights, a firefly trapped in a mason jar. She’d watch us, all sad and angry with Jimmy, and he’d look out, stupid and satisfied. He’d get a big kick out of screaming at us, “Hey, have a good time tortilla-makers! Suck some pussy for me!”

  Then Caridad would yell at him and they’d get in a fight. He’d win by slapping her, or sometimes just threatening to. He has this way of holding his hand stiff, like a karate chop, and checking it up almost to his chin and across his chest, as if only his desire can keep that backhand from snapping.

  Another time, Jimmy tried to ban me completely from their house but he wasn’t very successful. Pucho, who’s considerably bigger than him, heard about the ban and went up to see him. I don’t know what they said to each other because my brother does not raise his voice. Pucho’s one of those quiet types, the kind that carry knives with which they casually pick at their cuticles, like they’re just having a chat and there’s nothing wrong in the whole world. Pucho and Jimmy just stood on the stairs up to Jimmy and Caridad’s apartment, two black figures with their heads close together. Their shadows fell across a pair of mangy neighborhood cats lapping from a bowl of fresh milk that Caridad puts out (along with expensive all-natural tuna) under the stairs every night.

  So the compromise—although nobody says there was a compromise, but we all know anyway—was that I wouldn’t spend too much time with Caridad alone, just the two of us. It was ridiculous, of course, because she’s my cousin; there’s never been any mystery.

  Caridad told me that she once asked Jimmy qué carajo his problem was with me. It was a rhetorical question because she thought he was going to say that it was my being queer, since that’s what he’d always said, even the first time I met him and he felt like he had to sit and talk all night about “which one of us has gotten more pussy in our short lifetime.” It was the kind of thing only a heterosexual man would consider, and probably only a barrio boy at that.

  I’ve never told Caridad this but that first time she left us alone in the living room at her parents’ house, those twenty minutes it took her to get dressed and get her make-up on, Jimmy just sat there on the couch and stared at me, his legs wide open, his hand rubbing his dick until it was practically jumping out of his pants.

  “You ever want one of these?” he asked me. He rested his head on the back of the couch, his cheeks all flushed. His penis pushed at his loose dress pants as if trying to erect a tent. “Not inside you, but like, one of your own?”

  I’m tall, kind of big-boned and flat-chested—tomboyish too—and I’ve got my father’s jawline, so I could see how, in his ignorance, he’d gotten confused. Still, I really should have been ticked off, or maybe scared. Jimmy isn’t too big—kind of short really, with a smooth, hairless chest—but he’s strong. Yet, when he talked to me like that, instead of telling him what a dumb question that was, or how homophobic and insecure he sounded, I just laughed and told him no, that I didn’t need one of those.

  “I get what I want; know what I mean?” I said to him, all cocky. He smiled from under hooded eyes, then took his hand from his crotch and sighed.

  We were quiet like that for a minute or so, him with his eyes closed just letting the tent slowly collapse, me watching intently. It was like a stand-off: dangerous, yes, but also just plain exhilarating. I went home that night and got off a dozen or so times just playing that scene over and over in my head.

  So even though he was totally out of line, sitting there rubbing his cock, I couldn’t very well tell Caridad about that without also telling her, one way or another, how it’d affected me. She’s my cousin, she would have known; I figured, better let sleeping dogs lie. Besides, it would have just confused matters, because she’s used to me being a lesbian (and she has very definite ideas about what that means) and she probably would have felt that she had to be jealous, which would have been all wrong.

  When she asked Jimmy what his problem was with me—now that they were already married and he had her totally under his thumb—he said, totally serious, “Juani’s just like me, we’re two of a kind.”

  “What do you mean she’s just like you?” Caridad asked him, incredulous.

  So he told her, “She’d do anything.”

  “Like come on to her own cousin, is that what you think?” Caridad asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, “maybe, depends on the circumstances.”

  When Caridad reported all this to me I thought, Yeah, he would do that, that asshole.

  On my way home from Caridad and Jimmy’s, where the argument about the new car is still going on although it’s quiet because Caridad’s smoking in the kitchen and Jimmy’s taking a shower, I stop downstairs at our family’s laundromat and play a couple of quick games of Lethal Enforcer.

  The laundromat’s closed but I have keys and can let myself in anytime. I’m the assistant manager but since I got back from visiting my sister Nena in Miami, where she now works doing PR for an all-news Spanish-language radio station, I haven’t been hanging around here much.

  As I step inside, I turn the lights on but make sure the sign outside that reads Wash-N-Dry Laundry/Lavanderia Wash-N-Dry stays dark. I’m not looking for customers at this time of night, just a little entertainment, a little distraction.

  When Nena was the assistant manager, she thought it’d be a good marketing move to put in pinball and video machines because people got so bored all the time doing their laundry. It took some convincing, though, because my father—the official manager, although it’s always been Nena, our Tía Zenaida or me who has really known what was going on—thought the machines would attract gangbangers. But Nena’s attitude was that even gangbangers have to wash their clothes (she’s a real good capitalist, my sister) and then she figured out the real magnet for them wasn’t the games anyway, from which we eventually made tons of money, but the public pay phone, from which we never did pull much. So we got rid of the phone and put in a whole bank of games along t
he back wall.

  After Nena moved away, I took over the laundromat and when it came time to re-evaluate the games, I got rid of Centipede, which she loved but I thought was so inane, all those little beads tumbling down the screen. I replaced it with Mortal Kombat, which is probably even more idiotic, and certainly bloodier, but so popular that the only time nobody’s jerking the controls and ripping heads off virtual bodies is when the laundromat’s closed. I kept Ms. Pac Man because, even though it’s sexist, I like the whole idea of eating a path through the maze. I also brought in The Simpsons and a vintage Fireball pinball machine with the spinning rubber disk in the middle (I once read somewhere that it was Hugh Hefner’s favorite machine at the Playboy Mansion, but it’s such a great game I try not to hold that against it) and, of course, Lethal Enforcer, which is vicious and which, I admit, I just love. It’s just a shoot-’em-up game: You get a gun and a screen full of bad guys and you try to kill them. That’s basically it, except that after I play, I always feel really loose, ready for anything.

  I’m not doing too well tonight, though. My right arm’s a little numb and a line of dull pain circles my breast. I get past the screen with the bank robbery, but I miss all the bad guys in the Chinatown sequence. I try to duck, but I keep getting hit. I twist and turn, leaning into the screen, but to no avail. I’m using the pink pistol but just can’t get past Chinatown without being blown away. My wrist’s a little sore, as it sometimes gets, and my fingers are tingling so I finally give up and turn off the machine without even finishing my turn. I walk around a little bit, decide to get a Very Fine from the pop machine, toss on my jacket and go outside, where I’m greeted by a crisp and silvery night.

  The fact is, I miss Gina.

  As I lock the door, I see lights upstairs in Caridad and Jimmy’s apartment. It’s the overhead light, not a lamp. I hold the Very Fine against me with my arm and feel the cold come through to my breast. It feels good, like a balm. I turn the laundromat door key and walk over to pull the burglar gates together. Even the screeching and scratching against the sidewalk as I drag the gates and roll the chains into a big knot between them doesn’t drown out the noise from upstairs. I can’t quite make out what Jimmy and Caridad are saying, but they’re loud. Every now and then, there’s a thud or a crash, things falling and breaking. But after I finish locking up, I just walk away.

  When I get home to my apartment just a few blocks away, the light’s blinking red on my answering machine. One, two calls. I hold my breath and hope maybe one of those calls is Gina saying she’s changed her mind, all is forgiven and she’s coming over. I press the review button, listen to the whirl of the tape, take off my jacket and walk over to the fridge, from which I grab a pear and bite into it. I crunch and crunch, listening to all the chewing inside my head, barely making out my messages. The first is from my cousin Patricia, nagging me about stuff I have to do if want to go to Cuba. The other’s a hang up. I decide it was Gina, wishing me sweet dreams (I let my breath out, surrendering). Then the phone rings in earnest and for a split second, I’m hopeful again.

  “Hey… Juani…” But it’s Caridad, sniffling into the tape machine.

  I pick up the receiver. “Hey…”

  She coughs. “Anybody over?”

  “No, I’m alone,” I say. Outside my window, a solitary car drives by. It’s well past midnight.

  “So then, whatcha’ doing, huh?”

  I shrug, as if she could see me. “Waiting for your call, I guess.”

  She laughs a little, embarrassed. “You coming over?”

  “If you want me to,” I say.

  “Yeah…” (Sniffle, sniffle.)

  “Is Jimmy gone?”

  “Oh, yeah…” And she laughs again, a little bitter this time.

  I put down the phone, take a last bite out of the pear and pitch the core, in the dark, bull’s-eye into the garbage under my old-fashioned kitchen sink.

  CHAPTER 3

  MY FATHER BELIEVES HE INVENTED DUCT TAPE.He sees it as the great tragedy of his life because, if the Americans hadn’t stolen it out from under him, he’d have been rich, and we’d have been much happier. If things had gone the way he believes they should have, we’d never be running the Wash-N-Dry Laundry/Lavanderia Wash-N-Dry in Chicago.

  The way my father tells it, he invented a formula for a strong, durable black cloth tape, ideal for packing, and immune to rain and snow (although this, of course, was theoretical because, never having been out of Cuba in his life at the time of this great discovery, he didn’t really know). He called his breakthrough cinta magnética, even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with magnetics, electricity or power of any kind.

  I don’t know how much any of this is true. I have a vague memory of shirtless men in the patio of our home in Havana brushing whole strips of black cloth with some horrible, stinky glue. I remember it as infernally hot, and made hotter by the flames cooking buckets full of my father’s goo, and the men, hairy-chested and thin, wearing loose black pants and hard shoes with laces. When they bent over the buckets, we could see the white line of their underwear hanging off their hips, broad elastic bands wet with sweat.

  My father, Alberto José Casas y Molina, directed traffic, his reading glasses on the tip of his nose, a handsome, absentminded fellow with long, fleshy arms. He’d stand in the middle of all the activity, taking mysterious notes on his clipboard, and squinting in the sunlight. To check his masterpiece, he’d stick the little finger of his left hand into the buckets and burn himself. Then he’d curse under his breath and wave his little finger around hoping that somehow the wet tropical air would cool and heal it. He’d instruct the men—always named Felo or Cuco or Cheo—on how to roll the cloth together into big black wheels: They’d stand on opposite ends of the patio, one guy—say, Cheo—holding the tape on a spool and rolling it in, while another guy—probably Cuco—held the end of the tape and walked toward him until they practically touched noses. Then they’d start again, as soon as they disentangled themselves because, inevitably, Cuco would get stuck on the tape, or Cheo’s fingers would glue themselves together, so Papi, very frustrated and impatient, would order Felo to cut Cuco free from the tape and get Cheo some Ajax or Lava soap, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

  I remember all this, but I don’t know if I remember it for real or because I heard the story a million times. My brother Pucho doesn’t remember anything, but he was just a baby then. Nena says it’s all true, although her memories aren’t quite the same as mine, but my cousin Patricia says it’s just a fantasy created in exile, a group hallucination based on my father’s constant retelling of the story.

  Of course, everybody in the family has heard my father’s duct tape story at least a million times. And anybody who’s ever come to the house has gotten the entire tale, from beginning to end, whether they liked it or not, at least once. Most of our pals are nice about it; they nod and ask a few questions to make Papi feel good, but we know they’re incredulous, laughing inside the entire time.

  I think it’s fair to say that, of all our friends, it was Gina, who’s a fierce Puerto Rican independentista, who had the hardest time with the duct tape story. Mami, Nena and I knew it took an incredible amount of willpower for her to sit through it and not challenge my father, to just bite her lip and say nothing.

  “Sweetie, your father’s got some serious damage,” she whispered to me in the kitchen during a break in the storytelling. She hugged me close to her, not caring if anybody saw us pressed up against each other. “It’s a miracle you’re sane, honey. It’s a miracle you have a grasp on reality at all.” She pushed my hair back and kissed my forehead. If she hadn’t been a communist atheist, I think she would have blessed me right there and then and gone straight to church to light candles for our family. I swear there was pity in her eyes, which I resented.

  “Look, Gina, my father’s not crazy,” I said, defensively. I had a hideous fear that she’d think it ran in the family, that I might be carrying the same fau
lty DNA.

  “No, no, he’s not,” she said. “I believe he’s not crazy.”

  “You do?” I was amazed at how quickly she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “He’s delusional because of what exile has done to him—just look at what life in the U.S. has made of your father!”

  I glanced back at him. My father was sitting on the couch in the living room, chatting with my mother and Nena. He had a slight paunch, a robust laugh, a twinkle in his eye.

  “He looks pretty okay to me,” I said with a smirk.

  Gina grabbed a pair of beers from our refrigerator, one for her and one for my father. “You know, you’re the sick one,” she said, rolling her eyes at me and going back in for the rest of the story. “Your denial’s worse than his!”

  If Gina had the hardest time, Jimmy had the easiest. My father told him the duct tape story one Sunday afternoon while they lounged around waiting for Mami, Caridad and me to make dinner. My father drank beers with Jimmy and offered him Nicaraguan cigars grown from Cuban seeds and imported through Mexico. Jimmy, perhaps afraid that the male-bonding he sought wouldn’t take if he rejected the sleek brown phallus my father offered him, accepted. He spent the rest of the evening looking pretty green, which probably had a lot to do with the ease of his surrender to the story. All the while my father yakked on and on, Mami and I made boliche, moros y cristianos, and fried malanga, which Caridad had sliced into paper thin chips—one gigantic cholesterol feast.

  Depending on who’s listening to the story, my father says that either he was a prosperous businessman recruited by the CIA after the Cuban revolution (what he told Jimmy, who he knew was anti-Castro), or that he was unemployed and, when the CIA came calling, didn’t have any other options (what he told Gina, because he didn’t want to be provocative). But either way, whether he ever implies Fidel Castro was a bad guy or not, in both versions he certainly believes working for the CIA was a good route into the American business community, where he hoped to market his cinta magnética.