Girl Peeled Off A Cigar Box

I was waiting in an empty bar to meet a Cuban for the first time over here yesterday. There might be two in the whole city. I had to meet one. I figured he'd be easy enough to spot: fourteen layers of clothing and shivering in pretty mild weather.

Some sunlight splashed through the windows into the bar, hanging in the air like suspended lemon-aid. The waitress kept calling me "sugar" out of spite because I'd ordered a bottle of wine and been drinking it out of the bottle like a schmuck. When I'm meeting someone for the first time---and it doesn't matter who it is---I get nervous and have to improvise with something goofy. Snatch a wheel chair at the arrivals section of the airport or steal the girls driver's license and keep it in my pocket over the course of dinner and slip it back into her bag before the night's over. You don't even have to tell her. Maybe it goes well and from whatever she's told you about herself somehow you know a little less. To get even you ask to read her palm as an excuse to touch her hand and tell her something's been missing and she plays along and asks what and you cough over the plastic to see how she responds.

For a long time I'd had some plans to meet a different Cuban over here, the one who really did look like a girl peeled off a cigar box. She was just my exact, perfect type: WAY out of my league.

For someone whose gone back and forth to Cuba for the last 10 years, I've only kissed one girl from there and it wasn't even on her home soil. Any filthy tourist will tell you, it's not shooting fish in a barrel over there, it's LOOKING at fish in a barrel. Which is not to say it's ALL economics either. Girls over there aren't doing their best emotional interpretation of a casino over there the way they do over here. They're deviously innocent in the same way all the best, most liked kids books by kids are the same ones most banned by adults and teachers. It never happened for me. I didn't have the guts to accept an offer without anything being said.

I was trying to come up with a way to account for this. Not for myself. I like the idea of being a few cards short of a full deck whenever I feel like playing solitaire. I wanted to have some explanation for the guy meeting me in that bar. Most Cuban men would fuck a lamppost. It's about the only thing in existence they're not philosophical about.

So what the hell are you gonna say then?

You could try something a little clumsy like: Reality is for people who can't handle their dreams and dreams are for people who can't handle reality.

Yeah, but chances are he's sat through about forty-thousand hours of Castro speeches over the course of his childhood and not all that interested in yours.

You could tell him about that first day you had in Havana stumbling onto a fruit stand on Calle Neptuno surrounded by pretty girls and getting this strange craving for papaya and asking if they had any and all eyes at once burning you to a crisp since "papaya" in Cuban is slang for pussy. And the fruit stand guy laughing his ass off because he was the only one who knew you didn't know.

Nah. He's going to want to know about that other girl you met over there. The one who lives in Playa in Havana. The one he probably fucked and just for amusement wants to see if you did too. If you talk about her you're going to have to explain about the other one peeled off the cigar box. This isn't someone to discuss her with. Because all he's going to do is tell you how many men she's slept with just to make all her men jealous since this is the Cubana's unofficial national sport and, what's worse, you're knowledge of her is going to confirm the stereotype. And be honest, partly that sorta stuff made you fall for her---they only keep a secret if everyone already knows.

So distract him.

Get him talking about the city. Boxing or baseball. Tony Montana. Or those chilling pet cemetery animals wandering down the alleys and scavenging for left-overs at restaurants. Get him talking about the tourist blonds famous for being warm at night and amnesiacs in the daylight. Get him going about the pickpockets. All those crews of Artful Dodgers working on the street with others up on the rooftops following the action next to all those wonky TV antennas piled on there like prehistoric discarded toothpicks. Or his family. The generational stuff. Something cute like the Guarapo stands all over the place with the stout women who grab a stock of sugar cane and take a run at lancing it into the cogs of a giant clunky machine that resembles the inside of a clock and produces this juice that the slaves used to drink and that everybody, of all ages, no matter who the surrounding company, sweetly encourages *you* to drink should you ever find yourself climbing over a girl.

That girl peeled off a cigar box is visiting a dad she didn't know she had, and the rest of his family too. And for a month you talked to her on the phone every night and the subject to be avoided was her more and more likely pregnancy back in that hotel room. After she (and her mother, for that matter) didn't believe that you went a couple months waiting for her in Havana and she never showed up so you flew back to see her and piled the sheets from the bed in the corner so the Russian maid could collect them because you were pretty sure she hadn't waited for you and it only took another four or five months to have her confirm it even though she lied through her teeth denying it in that hotel room. But somehow it didn't make a difference either way and you didn't even bother to pretend that it did. She was pregnant for real soon enough and not by you. But you got to have the four-hour post abortion phone call until you got her smiling again enough to sing something the way she used to. Some old song she used to listen to a million times on a record player when she was a kid. And even though it'd been hanging there for the whole conversation she asked anyway, "Are joo really in loov weeth la Nuevo York Chinita? Weeth a Chai-neez woo-mahn?"

He knocked on the window in fourteen layers of clothing and shades slapping the glass at me, "OYE! Brinicio, here we go... "