Waiting for Snow in Havana (25 page)

And no one thought to call for an ambulance or a cab. Too expensive. So we didn't go to the hospital. Marie Antoinette thought it was way too cold to wait for a bus out on the street.

But it didn't occur to her that Tony waited for the El train and two buses each and every day, and that he'd be doing it the next morning, when it was even colder. He didn't miss a single day of work. He couldn't. Without his paycheck, we were sunk. I was earning $1.25 per hour. My take-home pay for a forty-hour work week, after taxes, was a whopping $35. My brother earned twice as much, or more with overtime. So we couldn't take time off, even though the coughing wouldn't stop. Never.

Both of us had whooping cough, but we didn't know it.

Whenever our schedules gave us a chance, we would go to a man known as Dr. Piedra, who always seemed to be playing poker with his friends in the backroom of his office. He did nothing except give us some shots and say, “You'll be fine, it's just a bad cold.”

I still don't know what he injected into us. We asked, and he said
“medicina.”
If we'd been back in Cuba, our mother would have pierced through his lame smokescreen in an instant. But she seemed to have lost her bearings so completely, she let this go. Just as she had let everything else go.

We'd cough all the way to Dr. Piedra's office, and all the way home, in the subzero cold. We'd cough all day and all night, and our coworkers would say, “Hey, kid, you need to see a doctor.” Both of us would say the same thing, “I just went to the doctor, and he gave me a shot and said I'd be fine.” Some of the wiser ones among our coworkers would say, “You should find a different doctor.” But poker-playing Dr. Piedra was the only doctor we knew, through our limited network of fellow refugee Cubans. God forbid we should dream of consulting an English-speaking physician. Marie Antoinette still harbored illusions about taking care of us, and she insisted that we see a doctor she could talk to. Tony and I just went with the flow.

One lady at the Hilton gave me the name of her doctor, but his office was in the wrong part of town. Somewhere on the Northwest Side of Chicago, where the Polish people lived. I didn't have time to ride the bus all the way out there after school and then make it to work on time. And it would have taken almost all of one of our precious days off to get there and back.

I finally got the correct diagnosis much too late, when the coughing had nearly stopped. It came from the guy who sat behind me in homeroom that freshman year of high school, who returned to school one day after being gone for nearly a month and diagnosed me on the spot.

“You worthless piece of scum, you know what you gave me? Whooping cough. I thought I was going to die. All that coughing of yours made me catch it. You gave it to me. And now I've missed a whole month of school. Damn spic.”

I didn't miss a single day of school. And I didn't miss a single day of work either.

My schedule was so simple, so predictable. Every day from Wednesday through Sunday I would work at the Hilton from four in the afternoon until two in the morning. Monday and Tuesday were days off. Every day from Monday through Friday I'd go to school, from eight in the morning until three-fifteen in the afternoon. A mad dash to the elevated station, six blocks from my high school, would get me to the train just on time. And the train always got me to work on time. Always. Chicago elevated trains stopped for nothing or no one. Not even four feet of snow.

I had no time for homework, except for Mondays, Tuesdays, and one period of study hall every day. Tests or assignments due on any day of the week after Tuesday were a challenge, but manageable.

Fortunately, a guidance counselor at Nicholas Senn High School had assigned me to very easy classes for all the wrong reasons.

“Oh, you did well on these placement tests. What a surprise! Amazing, for a Latin!”

“How well did I do?”

“Uh…uh…you got perfect scores on all the tests. Amazing! So unusual, for anybody. And your grades at that other school downstate were pretty good, too.”

“Yeah, straight A's aren't too bad,” I boasted.

“Well…I think you should go into regular classes. Honors classes would be too much for you. After all, English is not your native language.”

“I know English better than Spanish by now. I've forgotten a lot of Spanish.”

“Well, still, I think the best thing would be for you to take regular courses, just like all the other Latin kids.”

End of story. I wasn't about to argue with an adult, even though he seemed awfully dense.

The classes I attended that freshman year were full of troubled kids and led by teachers who should have been doing something else with their lives. I spent more time trying to survive than learning.

One guy in art class became my worst enemy within a week. He wore a leather jacket and steel-toed boots, and reeked of cigarette smoke. He punched me in class, tore up my homework, tried to extort money from me, and challenged me to fights daily. I think I must have been the weirdest kid he'd ever met.

“Sorry,” I'd say. “I can't fight you. I'm a Christian, and I'm supposed to turn the other cheek. You can insult me all you want, and tear up my homework every day, as you did today, but I'm supposed to forgive you, love you, and pray for you.”

It was just weird enough to work. You should have seen the look in his eyes every time I said this. After a while he stopped bothering me.

I learned early on never, ever to set foot in a restroom at Senn High School. This was where all the greasers, gang members, and troublemakers hung out, and where most of the stabbings took place. I'd wait until gym class and use the urinals in the locker room. Those were fairly safe because nearly everyone else was following the same tactic. Safety in numbers.

But not always. One day, one of the most violent guys in the school ran into me as he rounded a corner in the locker room. He smacked me on the jaw several times, hard, and barked: “Stay out of my way,” and added a long string of four-letter words to that sentence. Every single day, every year of high school, this guy had at least a dozen hickeys on his neck, each in a different stage of development. Some were bright purple. Others were kind of yellow, with a touch of green. His neck was one giant hickey museum. I'm sure he could have made the
Guinness Book of World Records
.

He was killed by the enemy in Vietnam a year or two later.

I didn't know who was worse: my teachers or my fellow students. My English teacher, who was fresh out of college, rambled nervously most of the time. The rest of the time, she'd have us diagram sentences, or she'd scream at the top of her lungs for us to quiet down. The guy who sat behind me in English class loved to punch me in the back and call me names, but she never yelled at him. I tried the same trick on him as on the guy in art class, but it didn't work. He kept right on punching and taunting me all the way into June.

My history teacher also rambled and yelled a lot. He loved to address us as “Mr.” or “Miss” even as he insulted us.

“Miss Theodoropoulos, you miserable wretch, the Maginot Line was not imaginary.”

“Mr. Hashimoto, you miserable wretch, the bubonic plague did not cause people to grow boobs on their necks!”

My science teacher and math teacher both shared the same talent for making the simplest things seem complicated. I would walk into the classroom thinking I knew something and walk out confused. Then I'd have to straighten myself out in study hall later. My art teacher did little more than read at his desk. Rumor had it that he nestled
Playboy
magazines inside those large books of his.

Chicago. I hated everything about the place. Even the name was an awful joke. In Spanish
“cago”
means “I defecate.” I had made fun of the name when I was still in Havana.
Me cago en Chicago.
Now I lived there.

I should have known that all of those flame-throwing smokestacks I'd seen from the train were omens of woe.

Attending Senn High School was a delight compared to working at the Conrad Hilton, the largest hotel in the world. I despised the tens of thousands of dishes, glasses, forks, spoons, knives, cups, creamers, pitchers—all needing to be cleaned, sorted, and put away. Over and over and over, without end. It was just like the repetition my third-grade teacher,
el profesor Infierno,
had used to scare us into holiness.

If you've ever attended a convention or a large banquet, try to imagine what happens when the dirty dishes leave your table. Picture tens of thousands of items, all dirty and smelly, needing immediate attention. Those busboys just kept bringing them in through swinging doors. Tray upon tray of stuff for us to sort out, scrape, bring over to the giant dishwashing machines, pull off the conveyor belt, sort, stack, put away. Every night the same thing. Over and over and over.

The worst part was the smell. It's not that the food started to rot instantly, it's just that the odd combination of smells was a real witches' brew. Fumes from hell, worse than those at any butcher shop.

The only “good” job was that of pulling the clean dishes off the conveyor belt. But that was reserved for the foreman's favorites. He tried me out once, but I broke so many dishes that he never dared to pick me again.

My coworkers, all of whom were Puerto Rican, had taken to calling me “Cubita,” little Cuba. They all knew I had lied about my age, even the foreman. They put up with me, and ribbed me in a good-humored way, because they understood how much I needed the job.

I was a terrible dishwasher. Probably the worst dishwasher who ever worked at that hotel. I must have cost Mr. Conrad Hilton more in broken dinnerware than he paid me. It got to the point that any time something broke, my colleagues would shout,
“Tiene que ser Cubita!”
Must be Cubita! Or they'd simply start shouting, in unison, at the sound of breaking glass, “Cubita! Cubita! Cubita!”

On weekend nights I got to ride the subway and El home with my patron at the Hilton,
Señor
Mancilla, the elevator man, and it wasn't so bad. But on weeknights I was on my own. That was the worst part of the job—walking the four blocks to the Harrison Street subway station at two or three in the morning, past all the topless bars, flophouses, and missions, waiting for the train on that platform, usually with a few other weird-looking men, or all by myself, and riding the train home.

After a while, I got to know some of the winos on the way to the subway, and they got to know me. Those guys couldn't hurt anyone but themselves, but at the time I didn't know it. We learned to keep our distance, but every now and then we'd scare one another.

Looking through the large front windows of the topless bars was a sin, so I tried not to. But Mancilla got me into the habit of doing it. And some habits are hard to break. Especially habits that are a sin, when you're fifteen years old.

I couldn't figure out how those tassels stayed on the women's nipples. I'd never seen any glue that strong. They spun those tassels around like airplane propellers, and they never came off. Amazing.

Beneath the sidewalk, in the subway, this bad habit of mine made little difference to God. I must have had a squadron of guardian angels looking over me, as I rode that train home through some of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, night after night.

Only once did a pervert show up. I knew I was in trouble when he got on at the Monroe Street station and made a beeline for the seat next to me, even though the entire car was empty.
Please, God, please, make him go away
. I started praying.

Baneful little man. Degenerate. Miscreant. Lost soul enslaved by demons. He sat next to me and started squeezing my knee.

I froze. I didn't know what to do. I just sat there, mute, praying up a storm inside, ignoring the man and his squeezing. Just sat there, and looked out the window while he clutched my knee.

What if he had a knife, like the pervert who'd accosted me back in Havana four or five years earlier? A sharp, shiny knife, this time without lizards reflected in the blade?

He squeezed my knee for what seemed an eternity. About five station stops. That's all he did, that miserable wretch. He fondled a fifteen-year-old boy's knee on the subway for about ten minutes at two in the morning, way down under the earth, and then he got up when we reached the Fullerton station, the first one above ground, and, as the doors opened with a
whrackettetat,
he looked back at me before exiting and said “good night,” dolefully.

I looked him in the eye. I fired heat-seeking missiles into his depraved soul. I don't know if they hit their target, but I tried. I felt rage and shame all jumbled together. James Bond wouldn't have sat there and taken such crap. No way. Neither would Batman.

But I didn't have a license to kill, or weapons designed by Q, or a superhero's costume or a cape, so my fear got the worst of me. All I had was long underwear and a pair of corduroy pants. And my prayers took me far away from him and that subway car, so far that I couldn't even hear the screeching, rumbling, and squealing of the subway, down under the streets of Chicago. I was elsewhere, in another body.