Transits (10 page)

I can't see his eyes. Mirrored shades. In his lenses, I look so tired. Too tired to finish this.

Two officers of the
Policia Nacional
in their heavy blue uniforms and black boots cruise by in a van with a low cabin in back. They'll never hassle a guy like me. I'm money. Permitted by authority.

“Here, have some reading material. Like I said, watch your shit,” Don says before briskly walking off.

I look down at the flyer:
Cuba Libre! Free Cuba from North American tourist-colonization and pop culture exploitation.
No names printed on it. Just a fist raised in the air. On the other side, the same message in Spanish, Angel confirms.

The officers get out of their van and talk to us. Their English isn't bad. They ask questions about the shoot, the talent. They recognize the flyer and tell us student protestors, posing as tourists (not hard to do) come down, move from one cheap hotel to the next, causing shit.

As the sun drops, shoot over, me and Cindy walk most of
Playa Santa Maria Del Mar
, staying on the wet sand—more stable under our feet. I bring a few of those watery Cristal beers in a plastic bag.

Cindy's still pretty pissed at me for yelling at her and butting in when she was handling Don the Protestor. If that's his name. Cindy goes home the next day. Usually we screw every night after shoots end – in our room with the sliding door wide open. The moonlight turns everything in our room blue, including Cindy's ass.

Angel goes too. He's eager to see the film, his work, before I get back and editing starts.

So now I'm on my own, feeling sorry for myself.

I decide a couple days of drinking and forgetting on the beach will do me good.

We've stayed at this resort before. There used to be trees lining the entire length of the resort's beach. The owners thought tourists wanted unobstructed ocean views while they got drunk on the sand: so they cut them down except these ones I'm sitting under now. The wind can pick up and spray you with as much sand as water.

The last stand of trees.

Maybe this is my last stand shooting videos in Cuba. Don the Protestor got to me, the little prick.

I start boozing as soon as the bar opens at eleven. Mojitos to kick off.

“Hey, no, no, none of that shit, man.” I stop the bartender before he dumps mint syrup into the rum and soda. “Look, you got one of those, you know, plants, use that. It's not for show, for chrissakes.”

I want fresh mint leaves crushed in my mojitos. I tip the bartender a few U.S. bucks, even though he looks all bent out of shape.

The whole morning I drink mojitos. The rum cakes my mouth, gut, head, soul with sugar. Who needs syrup?

I switch to beer eventually. Then straight rum—dark is best—and chase that with beer.

“I keep my eye on you,” the bartender says, winking. Trying to be friendly, but I know he's serious too.

I don't really swim. Just let my body fall into the water. I sit and piss dark yellow in the bright, shallow blue water.

Couples frolic in the waves. They feel sorry for me. Especially the women. They think I'm alone. I am, but I got Cindy back home. I come close to hitting on one really hot woman. But I'm here to chill, not cause shit, I convince myself.

I sleep long hours.

One morning, I wake up restless. I shower fast, pull on jeans, flipflops and v-neck white t-shirt. I grab a Shoot Now ball cap.

Almost out the door, I remember I can smoke now. I grab the pack from the dresser drawer. Cindy never lets me smoke during shoots: “You're already tense enough, Stevie.”

“Hola, senor,” greets the cleaning lady, pushing her cart of coarse white towels that she twists into shells and birds to decorate the bed.

“Hi,” I respond. I don't speak Spanish.

Walking out front, Sinead O'Connor's “Nothing Compares 2 U” plays on the sound system. What's with the pale Irish chick music, I wonder, walking on the footbridge over the pool. I'm up too late for breakfast—food's shitty anyways—so I go for the bar.

“Hola, senor,” the bartender says from under the straw awning.

“You make film, no?” the bartender asks.

Hung over, I don't feel like chatting. “Yeah. Do you have any guava?”

Disappointed, he nods. He pulls a bowl of fruit from a small fridge. You can get smoothies and fresh juice.

He slices the guava, the knife sinking easily into the fruit. He slides a chipped white plate with five or six boat-shaped pieces. The pink, creamy fruit makes me squint.

“Wow, that's good, like, like pussy.” I laugh, just as an older couple walks by. The woman glares at me.

I walk back to the building, through a small courtyard and out front to an airy lounge area. Fuck, I'm bored. Today and tonight, then home.

A sign in the lounge announces a shuttle bus's schedule to and from Havana. Fuck it, I'll go. I can always hang out and have a few drinks and take a taxi back.

The bus surprises me. A Benz. The cushiony passenger seats—a dozen or so—up on a platform, so you're looking down front at the driver. The AC is on before we get rolling. The air feels, smells, cool and foggy.

“One stop only, amigas e amigos, an' then, La Habana!”

I fall asleep about five minutes into the drive, waking when the bus comes to a stop and the tinny Son recording comes on again. The driver gets out to greet the new passengers at another resort.

Crashing again, my head against the window, I wake up. We're passing a stadium,
Estadio
-something. No cars in the parking lot. No players in the field. No one in the seats. A huge banner with a black-silhouette image of Che Guevara stares from one end across the empty field.

I fall back asleep and dream a roaring crowd, sounding like waves. Then one voice getting louder, cutting through the noise. Commanding, demanding attention.

I jerk awake. Down the aisle, Don the Protestor and a couple neohippie looking friends.

“They drop you right off at these so-called markets. We'll each pick, say, three or four vendors to talk to, and…”

Donny Boy catches me staring at him down the aisle. He grins slightly before continuing in Spanish, his friends nodding. Little fuckers.

The bus arrives at the craft market, very near the water, in Old Havana. I stretch in my seat. Don and his friends leap energetically off the bus.

I wander the streets to sweat out the booze. At least I can look at the old city with my own eyes, not through a lens.

Avenue de la Puerta
leads me along the harbour, traffic exhaust increasing the heat and turning my feet black. A wide paved path and low wall runs the whole shoreline. A sign says it's called
La Malecón
. Teenage couples make out and jump off the wall into the water to cool off. I feel like joining them.

The wall juts up into the grey-stoned fortress.
La Cabaña
, the sign reads. I sit, leaning against the fortress, and smoke for a while.

In need of water, I head back inland into the tight avenues of Old Havana. I stop at
Calle Cuba
and
O'Reilly
at the
Café Paris
. I remember someone saying the writer Ernest Hemingway hung out here. I don't read, so it's no big deal to me.

I get bored listening to a jazz trio, who wear matching purple-and-white striped shirts and white towels draped around their neck.

After a couple tarry coffees and watching people buy these disgusting looking pork sandwiches on thick bread from a window counter, I wander out of
Café Paris
into the late afternoon sun.

Of course, I realize I'm very near where I first ran into Don the Protestor. Fuck, like I summon him, I see Don and his entourage stride toward me. He's talking, as usual. Shooting his mouth off.

He sees me. That grin. “Oh hello, Steve, is it?”

“Yeah, Don, right? Well listen Don, go fuck yourself, okay? I'm on vacation now, unlike you telling people how to live.”

Don's friends look at me sternly. He's told them about me. The shoot.

“Yes, this is Steve. Who shoots now, asks questions later, isn't that right?”

Don's persistence, his friends' stance, unnerves me. “I'm too fuckin' hung over for your crap alright?”

Leaving Don and his gang, feeling their eyes on my back, I walk deeper into Old Havana. I remember once coming in town with Angel and sitting on a wide stairway leading up to some government building… the
Capitolio
, right. I actually find it on my own. Tourists
slowly climb the stairs in the heat. Dogs, dozens of them, beg for food and sleep on the steps and plinths beneath some statues. Mixed up breeds. Sad, clownish faces.

One keeps begging me, sniffing at my feet. “Go on, ya dumb animal. Go on.” I flick a butt at it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I think a sheep is coming toward me. But it's a dog with some kind of growth, fungus all over it. I feel like puking.

I descend and go looking for a park to sit in.
Parque Centrale
, that's it. Me and Cindy sat there once watching other tourists and local kids getting out of the
escuelas
, the elementary schools.

Amazingly, I find
Parque Centrale
. I sit on a bench and pull out a smoke. Only a few left. Maybe a cigar later.

Palms and other trees line the park's perimeter. The bench is in the shade. A statue of some guy, Jose Martí, in stone, holds a hand up in a gesture of comfort and reassurance to Cubans, but I feel like it's for me.

Now I remember the name: same as the airport. Guy did something.

A group of three uniformed schoolboys—white shirts, blue shorts and bright blue and white kerchiefs knotted around their necks—rush into the park. They stop and pull out what I think are trading card—baseball is huge here of course—but then I think, ‘this is Cuba.' They're trading empty cigarette packs, foreign brands mostly.

One kid's got a new one. His little hands quickly prune the pack so only the front cover remains. His friends, holding their own packs in a fan, envy him.

Watching them makes me a little sad. They spot me,
turista
, smoking. They walk toward me.

“Where you from?” The kid with the most packs asks.

I exhale impatiently. “Toronto… Canada.”

“Si, si, Toronto Bloo Yayz.” The kid nods and smiles. His friends smile too.

The kid says something in Spanish, pointing at my pack.

“No, I've still got some,” I say, opening the pack to show him.

The kid insists. “Can I 'ave?”

“Fine.” I take the two remaining cigarettes out, lighting one off the one I have going now and putting the other behind my ear.

I hand over the pack and the kid goes to work on it. Then he and his friends look up, bewildered expressions erase their smiles.

“Senor…” One kid points behind me.

When I turn, Don's face flashes, enraged. The bottle of white rum he brings down on my head fills my eyes with alcohol and glass. I feel a slicing pain in one of them.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM THESE CHILDREN YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE?!?!”

The kids take off, as do Don's friends. “You're insane,” I hear—or think I thought one of them say—as they run off.

Pain arcs over my skull, sparking like a live wire at the back of my head. The warm rush of blood and rum down my face, in my mouth.

I listen to Don breathing heavy over top of me.

“Please, no more… please stop,” I gurgle.

“Yes, stop, exactly. Stop screwing with these peoples' lives.”

That was Don's advice. And I'm following it. To this day, I haven't been back to Cuba. And I haven't shot a frame of video for Shoot Now, or for anyone, since I got out of the hospital and back to Toronto. Cindy couldn't handle it the one time she saw me after I got back. My one eye is fucked and I got a major scar down one cheek. She looked down a lot while she asked me to sign off on Angel's cut of the film we shot. And to credit him as director.

I bumped into Shelley, the AD, once too. She's still with Shoot Now. She let it slip that Angel and Cindy are living together now. I told her to chill.

They were amazing at the hospital though. If you go to Cuba for this, and you're unlucky enough to get sick or bashed in the head by some psychotic guy, keep the Hospital
Clinico Quirúgíco Freyre de Andrades
in mind, okay? And tell them Steve says hi.

by Stacey May Fowles

For Thomas

Another clichéd, long-distance love story told via a collection of disorganized details, frustrating inner monologues and techno-dialogues. Including, for good measure, futile directions for an inevitably jaded reader

His and Her Prologue:

Before we begin, let us for a moment think about the rampant cliché of modern love.

Take note of the precarious nature of this kind of love. The kind of love made immediate by the promise of technology. Love that involves distance, love that involves lies, love that involves the promise of new beginnings, and then involves the bottom of a pint glass.

When you ask them later, will have a rather detailed and dramatic diatribe on the topic of them meeting. He will ramble on endlessly, if you let him (especially if he is drinking, which sadly is more often than not now).

He will use words like “destiny” and speak of “plans.” He will remember exactly what was wearing, what she said in what he would later refer to as “her endearing Canadian accent,” and how he plotted to ensure he had the majority of her attentions in the few weeks that followed. He will actually describe her as “the end of his road.”

will not remember things this way; she will instead blush when you ask her, despite (or perhaps because of) the number of drinks she has had.

She will relay fuzzy and vague recollections of what she will call “falling quickly” or “getting lost.” She will describe, in pointless detail, how she bought her plane ticket from Toronto to St. Petersburg, booked the time off work from her pointless, ass-grabbing bar job, and never once thought of what it would be like
away
, instead thinking only of the escape.