There's a mangy mural of Kid Chocolate, a 30's Havana boxer, out front of his gym where the national boxing championships have been taking place the last 3 days. It's across the street from the Capitolio, the bizzaro Cuban replica of washington's most famous building. There's plenty of bizzaro take-offs. A friend of mine over here asked me to meet her the other day. "Where?" "I dunno, what about at 42nd and 5th avenue?" What the fuck is that? To get over there you have to walk by a tower straight out of Star Trek with black cuban vulture-eagles circling in the grapey sky. I waited on the corner while a couple whores approached me and asked if I liked mangos. The shy one asked me if she was strong. Which seemed an even more interesting approach than the other one. "Tu fuerte?" She was 5'1 and 100 pounds. "NO. Jew." Oh yeah, me. "Yep. I lift trucks."
But you get caught. I bought one of these goofy juice boxes of rum for the last of the fights on friday night. It was late, I was tired, I miss the movies. After the final heavyweight tussle ended without much excitement a fight broke out in the crowd. I was on the floor next to the Havana team's 2nd coach, the guy who takes a huge towel and whips and flaps as much wind as he can in his boxer's face between rounds, and we both were watching the cops race into the crowd and haul people out of the gym until we saw one girl in the crowd with this grin on her face. Ellen Barkenish face, only spiked and molested by latin curves and this Betty Page wink she kept giving to people looking at her. Innocence dipped in sleeze. Everything about her was provocative as an exposed tan line. Slaying us. Especially me all punch drunk on juice box rum.
Outside the fight was over, the icecream stand was dead, the girl got taken home by a tourist with a cane (a GARISH cane, mind you)---and there wasn't much to do but by a pack of smokes and make the 4 mile hike home throught the scenic route, along the Malecon sea wall. But I couldn't find cigarettes until some scumbag hustler pointed me in the direction of a bar. I get scammed twice the price on the cigarettes and accosted by 5 hookers all asking about my girlfriend---my girlfriend being an extremely popular topic over here despite her non-existence---they try and scam this and that but all I want is my cancer for the lonely stroll home.
Which I get, with all the kids folded into each other like oragami sillouttes. Strange shapes writhing until they spot you and freeze up---or not, tip over the edge of the cement and go a little further on the rocks...maybe all the way with the risk of a wave slapping you. So many kids out there and adults too... but my mind was way too g-rated and embarressed so I watched the fisherman cast into the black ocean, smoking along with them, hearing the pitter patter of what they caught tapping the cement beside their feet until the fish petered out and went limp.
I've been here nearly a month now. And it's weird on acct of it's the easiest place on earth to find a girl and every motherfucking time I get here I'm stuck in that shitty but very fine in other way position of knowing if I snag one here it'll only make me miss a different one, 1000's of miles away, more. The whole cure thirst with seawater phenomenon. But assholes like me are given a dimple for a reason. So the joke isn't entirely lost.
I got back late that night. I had my last cigarette of the night on my quiet little residential street. Right on the curb. It was a warm night. And across the street and up 2 floors was a girl on a balcony I'd never seen before just leaning against the edge of the cement rail. She cupped her face in two hands, and the street light had her in copper glow, and she kept leaning and longing for something I didn't know what it was, but she looked so pretty up there. Maybe it was the whole Romeo and Juliet angle. But this Juliet never spoke so I couldn't even THINK "she speaks!". But I wondered all the same what her deal was. Who the guy was. What he'd done to her to make her so poetic that night. So poetic it was cascading down waterfallish onto me, no filter on her or the cuban cigarette I was a few drags from finishing, and the shitty taste in my mouth that Colgate would soon make clean with the added scope tossed into the whitening formula. Gee whiz.
People disappear... sometimes forever... some of them, all it takes is them leaving or going back to a room. That was what happened with Juilet on her perch. I looked down at my shoes for a second and back up and she was gone. I was all alone until some stray dogs and cats in a pack moseyed on by, two of them limping but trying to keep up.
I went to sleep sober.
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