The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (12 page)

My reverie was broken by a booming
“Al combate corred, Bayameses . . . Que morir por la patria es vivir . . .”—
my parents singing along to a rendition of the Cuban National Anthem. Caco woke up in a panic, disoriented until he realized the noise was emanating from our superstar parents. “No, not again! They should go on
The Gong Show
. We gotta do something,” he said, looking at me as if it was my fault. “What if we stick toilet paper in our ears?” I proposed. Contemplating for a minute the astonishing fact that his younger brother had actually come up with a good idea, Caco finally responded, “Yeah, but how are we going to get the paper out of her bag, doofus?”

It was then that I noticed a wad of chewed bubble gum stuck to the seat. It must’ve fallen out of Caco’s mouth as he slept. I was going to tell Papá on him, but then I thought about Ernesto Suarez from my class, who’d stuff bubble gum up his nostrils for a laugh. “I’ve got it! Here, stick this in your ears,” I said in a flash, tweezing the gum off the seat with my thumb and index finger. “You’re crazy. That’s gross,” Caco said, but I could tell he knew it was a good idea. He put the gum back in his mouth to soften it up again, then pulled it apart into two pieces and plugged his ears. “Well? Does it work?” I asked him. He didn’t respond. I poked him and got his attention, then gestured the question silently with my face and eyes so Mamá and Papá couldn’t overhear us. He gave me a thumbs-up, and so I gave my Bazooka a few chews and then plugged my ears with it. It felt icky, like getting into a wet bathing suit, but it was a brilliant idea, and it worked. At last, a respite from the painful sound of Cuba’s undiscovered duet: Mamá and Papá.

My mind eased back to thoughts of Disney World as
el Malibú
zipped past the highway signs that counted down the miles to Orlando, to Disney, to paradise. Nothing but peace and quiet as the scent of orange groves drifted into the car, until a siren shattered the silence. Caco and I took the gum out of our ears and turned around in our seats to peer out the back window. A police car was tailing
el Malibú
. Papá slowed down and moved into the right lane to let the police officer pass us, but he didn’t. He kept right behind us until Papá realized we were being pulled over. Mamá, who was convinced she had never done anything wrong in her life, began hysterically tidying up the front seat as if cleanliness would get us out of a ticket. Caco and I had
turned around in our seats and were looking out the back window. “Cool!” Caco said, to which Mamá responded with a slap on his behind, shushing us both and making us sit back down.

Papá turned down the music, pulled over, and sat up straight in his seat.
“Cojones,”
he mumbled just before the officer stepped up to the car. “Howdy,” he said, and tipped his Stetson hat. “Do you know what the speed limit is here, mistah? Where are y’all heading?” Nervous, Papá seemed to forget what little English he knew. He
ummed
and
ummed,
until Caco had no choice but to help Papá out with translation. One by one, he translated the officer’s questions in Spanish and Papá’s answers into English. Swept away by the Cuban oldies and high on Cuban coffee, Papá had sped up to 75 mph, twenty miles over the speed limit, the officer informed him, then he asked to see Papá’s license and car registration. “Oh, y’all from
Miamuh,
” the officer drawled, the same disdain in his voice that had saturated the clerk’s at the service plaza. “This here’s a major violation. Y’all gonna have to follow me to town. We don’t take kindly to speeding ’round these parts Mr. Blank-o,” he said, pronouncing our last name in English, before tipping his hat again and walking back to his patrol car.

Keeping a safe distance behind the officer and pretending to be calm, Papá asked Mamá where she had put the gun. “
Ay, Dios mío,
that’s right!” Mamá exclaimed, scrambling through her
por si las moscas
tote bag. “I thought I put it here.” Papá had bought the tiny pistol a few years before, giving in to my mother’s
in-case-of-the-flies
paranoia. They kept it “hidden” in the top drawer of her armoire, buried under bottles of nail polish, tiny boxes of costume jewelry, and Papá’s cologned handkerchiefs. Whenever we were going somewhere Mamá perceived as potentially dangerous, she’d insist we take the pistol with us. But to Disney World? What had she been thinking? That the car could break down in a swamp and we would be attacked by alligators? That an escaped convict could be on the loose; a crazy
americano
who would hijack our car?

After a few seconds paralyzed by her panic, she found the gun in her tote. “
Ay, mira
, here it is! What I do?” she asked Papá, who told her to hide it somewhere—and fast. In a flash she scrunched the pistol into a giant bag of plantain chips, secured the bag with a rubber band, and placed it on the floor of the passenger side, all the while looking straight out the windshield so that she wouldn’t look suspicious. “Okay. No one touch the chips,” she said, just as we exited the turnpike.

We followed the police car through a strip of gas stations and diners, then pulled into the parking lot of a municipal building with a flat roof and metal doors; it was no bigger—and much, much uglier—than our house. The officer motioned to us, and we followed him single file into a reception area. The walls were painted with a thick layer of high-gloss enamel; a faux-marble Formica counter stretched from one end of the room to the other. And behind the counter hung an enormous bulletin board pinned with posters of “wanted” men alongside photos of lost dogs and cats. Walking into that room was like walking into
The Andy Griffith Show
; I expected some Don Knotts–like character with bulging eyes to swing around in his desk chair at any moment. Or a girl in pigtails wearing a checkered shirt. Instead we were greeted by a pudgy, jolly lady wearing a sateen blouse with a large bow tied at the collar. She was completely made up: sky-blue eye shadow, long violent strokes of rouge on her cheeks, and powder too light for her skin tone, making her face look ghostly, jumping out at you before the rest of her body. “Why, hello,” the lady said, all sparkly as if she were expecting us. “Have a seat. I’ll be right with y’all.”

But my parents wouldn’t,
couldn’t,
sit down. Mamá kept tugging nervously on her blouse, which had the French word
OUI
printed in gold letters across her chest. Those shirts were all the rage that summer at the Tropicaire Flea Market, and though she knew
oui
was French for “yes,” she
seemed oblivious to the sexual connotation of having
YES
spread across her breasts. Papá kept clearing his throat and tucking in his shirt; he closed the two buttons to conceal the gold San Lázaro medallion nested in his hairy chest. I kept looking at my Mickey Mouse watch, trying to figure out how much time we’d lost already, nervous that we’d never get to Disney World. “Here you go. Now take your time and fill this out. Don’t forget to sign the bottom,” the lady said, holding out a clipboard.

Papá completed the forms with our help and returned them to the lady who immediately glanced over it. “Blanco? Where y’all from?” she asked in a genuinely curious tone, pronouncing our name in what was a close approximation of the Spanish.
“Meeamee,”
my father answered. She kept prying: “Oh, y’all must be on your way to Disney World.” “
Sí
—I mean
jess,
” my father said, loosening up a bit, though that’s all he could utter to the woman as she continued, “Oh, we catch you folks speeding all the time ’round here.” ( . . .
Jess . . . Jess
. . .) “But don’t you worry; you’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” ( . . .
Jess . . . Jess
. . .) “I can tell your little one is in a hurry to see Mickey.” ( . . .
Jess . . . Jess
. . .) She might have pinched my cheek if I’d been within her reach.

In his state of nervousness, Papá couldn’t understand a word she was saying, until she caught us all by surprise and threw out a phrase in formal but broken Spanish:
“Es muy bonita, Miami, ¿verdad?”
Papá responded with sudden glee,
“Sí, sí,”
instead of
“Jess, jess,”
and asked her:
“¿Usted habla español?”
She explained that she had loved the language ever since studying it in high school; how she dreamed of meeting Julio Iglesias and going to Spain someday. Papá told her we had lived in Spain for a few months after we left Cuba, and her eyes lit up brighter than her eye shadow. She introduced herself: “Oh, where are my manners?
Hola,
my
nombray es
Sharon,” and welcomed us formally as if we were guests,
“Bienvenidos. Bienvenidos.”

Papá went on and on about Spain, the beauty of Madrid, even in winter, and Sharon kept asking questions, taking the opportunity to practice her Spanish. For a change, the linguistic shoe was on the other foot with Sharon; it was she who couldn’t be understood, not Papá. He had trouble making out most of what she said, asking her to repeat words over and over again and then teaching her the correct pronunciation. He even taught her how to say Mickey Mouse in Spanish.
“El Rah-ton-ci-to Mee-gwel,”
she repeated clumsily after him with her heavy accent.
Oh brother,
I thought. Listening to gringos speak Spanish annoyed me as much as listening to my parents speaking broken English. It felt like Sharon was trying to be someone she could never be—she could never be Cuban like us, just as my parents could never really be American like her.

Fortunately, Sharon became enamored by Papá’s Latino charm and slipped the speeding ticket somewhere under the counter.
“No problema. No problema,”
she said, handing Papá back his license and registration and bidding us farewell, “See you again,
hasta pronto,
” as if we were coming back anytime soon. On the way out, Mamá walked backward ahead of us. “
Pónganse ahí
and let me take a picture,” she demanded, making us pose by the flagpole in front of the Town Hall, recording the incident for all time. Caption:
Four Cubans with a gun escape conviction
.

Back on the turnpike, the tension eased up and Mamá pulled the now salty pistol out of the plantain chips. She was about to break the no-eating-in-the-car rule and pass the bag around, but Papá quickly raised his bushy unibrow at her and tsk-tsked. “Oh no!” Caco blurted out, and I shook my head when Papá cranked up the music again. We were out of Bazooka, so we had no choice but to suffer through the music and singing. I focused on the billboards announcing buffet
restaurants, fast-food chains, seashell shops, and bargain motels only “minutes” from the Magic Kingdom, offering discounted park tickets. We were getting closer and closer with each passing highway sign:
ORLANDO
45
MI
,
ORLANDO
32
MI
,
ORLANDO
11
MI
.

Suddenly, Mamá yelled, “Stop! Stop!” as if the car were on fire. Papá swerved onto the shoulder, almost going into the drainage ditch. She pulled her Instamatic out of her tote, and suddenly we knew what all the fuss was for. “No way,” Caco complained, “not again.” But for once I was eager to pose for one of her photos. I darted out of the car as Caco and Papá trudged reluctantly behind me, urged on by Mamá.
Uno. Dos. Tres,
and snap, standing beside the green highway sign at the gates of heaven:
WALT DISNEY WORLD RESORT
|
NEXT EXIT
. Papá with his small potbelly sucked in, Caco’s silver braces shining in the light, and me so overcome I couldn’t even crack a smile.

After we exited, everything began to change: the road got wider and the tarmac blacker; the signs turned from green and white to magenta and a deep Persian blue; the palm trees looked taller and fuller, their fronds like green pom-poms; and after two hundred miles of nothing but saw grass and palmettos, there were flowers everywhere. A fuzzy, cotton-candy feeling took hold of me as we drove by ficus bushes trimmed in the shapes of Donald Duck, Pluto, and Dumbo. I felt as if I were stepping into one of my coloring books. Mamá and Papá had told us we were going to stay at the
very
fancy and
very
expensive Contemporary Hotel right inside the park grounds, thanks to Abuela. Still, I thought they were kidding—we’d never stayed anyplace nice. But when I caught sight of the hotel in the distance, I could barely blink, spellbound by its sloping walls of glass and girding of balconies soaring upward like the layers of a gargantuan cake. My stomach almost erupted again in the parking lot when I saw the monorail zoom right into the hotel, like something right out of
Star Wars
.

Can I live here forever?
I thought, but the spell almost wore off when Papá began unloading all the luggage from
el Malibú
. For weeks Caco and I had pleaded with our parents not to bring any of their usual Cuban cargo. But they disobeyed us and must’ve secretly packed the trunk before they woke us up that morning. We watched in horror as the bellhop helped Papá load the luggage cart with a hot plate and our espresso pot for making Cuban coffee in the room; grocery bags full of mangos, oranges, and half a dozen loaves of Cuban bread; the ice chest; and a whole watermelon, just in case we got hungry in the room. Topping it all off: their rubbery pillows from home, just in case the hotel pillows were too soft or too hard.

Utterly humiliated as we walked into the hotel, Caco and I picked up our pace until we were a good thirty feet ahead of them and the luggage cart, pretending they weren’t
our
parents. We were way too cool for them: Caco sporting an Adidas T-shirt and matching yellow Adidas sweatband and wristbands that coordinated with the colored stripes on his Adidas tube socks; and me spiffed out in my Minnie and Mickey Mouse iron-on T-shirt and immaculate Thom McAn sneakers. We
definitely
didn’t know Mamá in her
OUI
T-shirt and faux Pierre Cardin handbag, pointing her camera straight up into the atrium and snapping photos, yelling to us in Spanish from across the lobby to come stand by Papá and the luggage cart so she could take a picture.