Raul Castro strolled into the Havana hotel I was staying in at three-thirty in the morning. I noticed him all right---along with the two body guards and three blonds---but I didn't know him by name. The bartender told me. And I gave him a harder look and recognized the puffy eyes and the Castro gestures---turning his finger into a hamster on a wheel with little points he was making here and there---while he made the rounds with security staff and maids cleaning up the lobby. It was the president's grandson. And he was a born flirt.
But then so's everybody. Everyday's Valentine's day. You can't walk anywhere at anytime without somebody blowing kisses or whistling to somebody. Nobody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, makes sense to me he'd be a Cuban.
Havana's an alley. One huge alley or gutter with a gasoline rainbow tricking down. Art Deco ruins everywhere, crusty and mangey, but alive. The whole town rips your eyes out and stuffs a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other. Every five blocks is the bust a poet who went to war to free with this place. Every face over here is a poem. This one great big community of a shipwrecked island made Home. It's kinda wonky coming from a town like mine where the central ambition is to live in a family that relates like strangers in a home that is joylessly yet hygenically unlived in, lives unlived---reduce the poem of your life into a riddle and grind it up into some cornball crossword and make art of your artless by fucking a whore now and again behind your wife's back while she pretends not to notice and blah blah blah---a fucking ghost town haunting souless everywhere but behind a wheel screaming at Chinese people.
But there's boredome here too. Monumental boredom. The expression of disillusionment that I can only imagine some guy set adrift has guzzling seawater by the gallon has trying to solve thirst.
And I kick around with a lousy wife-beater tan making taxodermy of some girls I know---KNEW, maybe---in my notebook. By girls over here are like tripped down an elevator shaft and finding mermaids waiting for you. The smiles and eye contact staining you like the dawn gets sponged up by clouds and rims the beizbol stadium and skims the houses and sillouttes the people hustling and dragging on foot for the morning commute.
And I'm one footnote trying to mainline them and it. And like any girl I've ever fallen for the longer I'm here, the more questions I ask, the more slips, the more Moments---I know less and less and less. And more trap doors open. And more anchors spash.
Somehow, as fucked up as it is, and IT IS, it just turns every other city you've ever seen into that endangered species airlifted over to some Vegas petting zoo.
I'm in the studio audience watching this girl of a city falling down the rabbit hole trying to make sense of the screwy pattern on the wall and for whatever reason I don't need the electric sign to know when to clap. Because what stinks stinks. And when the first dance recital innocence gets to everybody and your little girl starts dancing but doesn't want to smile because her teeth are rotten---it feels like home. Emotionally where you pick up your mail.
Even tho I can't get a motherfucking plate of food over here that doesn't change my fixed address to the bathroom for 24 hours over a toilet.
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