An American Son: A Memoir (6 page)

The yard had two large palm trees standing a few yards apart. My father bolted the ends of a metal pipe to each tree, then drilled holes in it for metal hooks from which he hung two swings. The yard was a paradise in my imagination. It served as the football field where I pretended to be Bob Griese leading the Miami Dolphins to another victory, and as Gotham City, where I fought crime as Batman.

We had a great life at Toledo Plaza. I was in the first grade at Henry M. Flagler Elementary, and had plenty of friends. My father worked where we lived. He dropped us off at school every morning and picked us up in the afternoon. My mom helped in the office, but was always home with us. Because my father was the building manager, we had the run of the place, and we made the most of it. I was in thrall to the first of my two abiding temporal passions: football and politics.

I was football crazy. I still am, but with a somewhat more restrained and mature appreciation for the sport than I had as a kid, when I thought it was the most important thing in my life. I loved the Dolphins. I loved Don Shula, who was hired as the Dolphins’ head coach the year before I was born and almost immediately turned around the team’s fortunes. I loved the unselfish, thoughtful and heroic play of the great Bob Griese, who quarterbacked the Dolphins throughout the seventies, led them through an undefeated season and to three consecutive Super Bowls, winning two of them. And later, I would love Dan Marino, whose dazzling performances would ease the heartache Bob Griese’s retirement had caused me. My father took me to my first Dolphins game in 1977. They beat the Seattle Seahawks and I was delirious with joy.

My obsession with football originated in my admiration for my brother. I never lived with Mario, yet he lived in our lives as a legend in the tales my father would tell about his exploits at Miami High.

He had played varsity football in high school in the late 1960s, having attained some acclaim as the first Cuban American to play quarterback for the Miami Stingarees. Miami High was a perennial football powerhouse in those days, and their games in the Orange Bowl often drew crowds of over twenty thousand fans. My father’s interest in the game began when his son
was the star quarterback for the school. Dad sat proudly in the stands at Mario’s games, beaming whenever the announcer described a play by Mario Rubio. After each game my father would meet Mario in the stadium’s parking lot, holding a Cuban sandwich he’d brought for him, and he would smile as he watched his son, the young, handsome quarterback, hold court amid a circle of adoring girls vying for his attention.

Everyone in my family became football fans, except my grandfather, always the individualist. He told me he thought it was a vulgar and pointless game, and if anyone ever tackled him the way they did in football games, he would punch the tackler in the nose. He loved baseball, which he had played as a boy despite his disability. The elegant symmetry of baseball gave it purpose, he insisted, and beauty.

I grew up listening to my father’s stories about Mario’s exploits on the football field. I kept a picture of him wearing his football jersey in my room, and I imagined myself leading Miami High as quarterback—another Rubio at the helm, and a worthy successor to the famous Mario, my brother.

Life was good. Then suddenly everything changed. My father’s employers sold Toledo Plaza to new owners. Their representatives appeared at the front office one morning without warning. They changed the locks to the office, informed my father his services were no longer needed and asked him to vacate our apartment within seven days. Virtually overnight, my parents had lost their livelihood and our home. We had nowhere to go since we had sold our other house. And my father had given up his bartending job at the Roney Plaza.

I am a father and provider now, and can appreciate how worried my parents must have been over their sudden misfortune. While we were a little upset over the disruption of our happy lives at Toledo Plaza, Veronica and I were oblivious to the fears that must have troubled my parents at the time. They were exceedingly careful not to betray the slightest trace of anxiety in our presence. We never noticed a worried look on their faces or overheard a single word of concern in whispered conversations between them. My only vivid recollection of the entire experience was the day the moving truck arrived to collect our belongings.

My parents were worried, of course—I’m sure they were devastated to have their world turned upside down in one moment. But things turned around for them fairly quickly. My father found a new job managing an
apartment building in Hialeah. After a short stint in a rental home, we found a house right across the backyard from my aunt Adria’s house, where my cousin Manny, who was only two years older than me, was my new neighbor.

The house had a big yard that reminded me of the yard at Toledo Plaza. Plus it had an extra room, so my grandfather, who had been living with my aunt since we didn’t have room for him at Toledo Plaza, could move in with us again. We lived across the street from my new school, Kensington Park, where Manny was a student.

Not long after we moved, I had a severe attack of stomach pains. It wasn’t the first time. When we were still living in Toledo Plaza, Barbara and Orlando had taken me to the movies, and I consumed a large box of Cracker Jacks. Within hours I was doubled over in excruciating pain. That night my father took me to the emergency room. My parents blamed the episode on the Cracker Jacks and forbade me to eat them again. This time, though, there had been no sugary snacks involved. The pain set in suddenly, and the only way to find relief was to bend into a fetal position. I made another trip to the emergency room. When the next attack occurred, the pain was more severe and nothing relieved it. The emergency room doctor, unable to diagnose my condition, suggested I might be faking it. Without speaking a word in response, my father lifted me from the examination table, carried me in his arms out of the ER and drove directly to Variety Children’s Hospital in central Dade County.

A few hours later, the examining physician informed my parents that I was suffering from intestinal intussusception, a serious but treatable condition. If treated promptly, the prognosis was excellent. If left untreated, it could cause severe complications, even death. Only surgery would correct the problem permanently. My abdomen would have to be opened and the affected area resected. After surgery, I would be fed through a tube for three days, and would need to spend another week to ten days in recovery. As the doctor explained the procedure, Barbara began to cry. I don’t remember my mother’s reaction, but I do remember my father’s. He told me he would promise to give up smoking in exchange for God seeing me safely through surgery. I learned later he had returned to the other hospital and searched for the doctor who had claimed I was faking the ailment, intending to give him a piece of his mind.

I was operated on the next day. Those first few days after surgery weren’t particularly comfortable, but I was released from the hospital in less than two weeks and was back at school within the month.

For a few months all was well, or as well as could be expected, until my father lost his job managing the apartment building in Hialeah. The owners had hired a management company to maintain the place at a lower cost. My dad went to work for Adria’s husband, my uncle Manolito, who owned a small house-painting business. He would have preferred to work as a bartender again, but by the late seventies the tourist industry in Miami Beach was in decline, and the hotels weren’t hiring. While he was grateful for the work Manolito gave him, my father knew it wasn’t a long-term solution to our troubles.

The city of Miami was entering a difficult period in its history. By 1978, it was experiencing a rapid, significant increase in murders and other violent crimes. Cocaine traffickers had begun using Miami as the primary point of entry into the United States and as the distribution center for their highly lucrative trade. As rival gangs and dealers began competing for territory and business, they commonly employed violence to settle their disputes.

We weren’t directly affected by the increase in crime, but it was one more concern added to my parents’ growing fears that their changed circumstances would rob them of their hard-won security. The disco-centered social scene in Miami, which they considered a decadent lifestyle for young people, was yet another worry. Their predicament felt more serious than a temporary setback in a tough economic time. They worried my mother would have to go back to work and my father would again work weekends and holidays. They would have neither the time nor the resources to provide us a better childhood than they had given my brother and older sister.

It was never in my parents’ nature to become paralyzed or stymied by fear. They acted decisively, even precipitously, whenever they felt their aspirations threatened. A quarter century before, they had reacted to a stagnant economy and growing violence and instability in Cuba, leaving their family and the only world they knew to follow my aunt Lola to Miami. They believed emigration was the only course that would allow them to give their infant son a decent chance in life.

Now they concluded Miami no longer promised a better life for their children, and they would have to leave home again. They looked for a place with better job opportunities, better living standards at a more affordable cost and a more wholesome environment for children. Then they packed our belongings and followed Lola, once again, to Las Vegas.

L
AS VEGAS IS NOT OFTEN THE FIRST PLACE THAT COMES to mind for people looking to raise their children in a wholesome environment. Yet in many respects it would prove to be the family-friendly community my parents hoped it would be. It was a smaller city in those days, with 160,000 inhabitants, and about a half million people in the metropolitan area. Today, metropolitan Las Vegas is nearly four times as populous. Of course, it was the established capital of the gaming industry, with the less than wholesome reputation its nickname, Sin City, implied. But while it had many big-city amenities and vices, beyond the Strip, Vegas in the late seventies felt like a small town compared to Miami.

My aunt Lola and her husband, Armando, had moved with their children to Vegas in the early seventies. Armando was employed at the Sands Hotel as a room service waiter, and made a good living. Lola often promoted the quality of life in their new city to her Miami relatives, and two more of my mother’s sisters, my aunts Irma and Elda, moved there, too.

Las Vegas would offer the security and community values my parents sought, but our life there began discouragingly. My parents made the decision to move in the fall of 1978. The following January, my father traveled alone to Vegas to find a job and a home for us, promising to return soon to collect us. Almost five months would pass before he could keep his promise.

Unlike in Miami, hotels were flourishing in Vegas and jobs were abundant. But it was a heavily unionized industry that didn’t welcome outsiders looking for work in anything but entry-level positions. My father was fifty-two years old, with twenty years of bartending experience and excellent references. The hotels were hiring younger bartenders and promoting employees who had worked in junior positions.

He stayed in a spare bedroom in Aunt Irma and Uncle Enrique’s house. Day after dispiriting day he searched for work with no success. By the end of January, he was desperate and considered returning to Miami, when Enrique tipped him off to a possible opportunity at a new hotel.

Enrique worked in the maintenance department of the California Hotel. The owners were about to open an Old West–themed resort hotel, Sam’s Town, in Sunrise Manor, a Vegas suburb. My father applied for a bartending job there, and was offered a position as a bar back, a bartender’s assistant, with the promise he would be considered for a bartending job in the future. He took it. With two young children and a wife waiting in Miami for him, he wasn’t in a position to turn down a job, even one that didn’t pay enough to allow us to join him.

He went from being a top bartender on Miami Beach to being an assistant to a twenty-one-year-old bartender just out of school. He lugged supplies from the storeroom to the bar. He cleaned glasses, disposed of empty bottles and mopped the floor behind the bar. When the bartender got an order for a drink he didn’t know how to make, he would ask my father to make it. Sometimes he shared his tips with my dad; sometimes he didn’t. It was a humbling experience for a proud man. Fortunately, after a few months in the job, he was offered a better-paying position as a bartender in the hotel’s room service department.

My father’s absence was difficult for me, especially so when I saw my friends enjoying time with their fathers. I missed him a great deal. In the days before cell phones, e mail and Skype, long-distance phone calls were very expensive. He could afford just one brief call a week on Sundays. Veronica and I wrote to him a few times, and sent him pictures. I know now how fortunate I was to have parents who were married and a constant presence in my life except during this one temporary separation. As upsetting as it was at the time, my experience seems trivial compared to the deprivation of children whose parents are deceased, divorced or disinterested in
their lives. Nor was my separation from my father as extended and worrying as the experience of children whose fathers or mothers serve overseas in the military. But when I encounter children in such circumstances, I remember how painful my separation from my father was, and how difficult it was for me to understand it.