Have Gun, Will Travel

by Zip Livingston

Cuba itself was the last gift my father gave me, in a halfhearted attempt to get to know each other as adults, as friends, as people. He assumed we would bond over rum and women and how cheaply both came in the third world. It was a goddamn disaster.

To un-complicate the entry procedures at the Havana airport, I carried twenty pounds of aspirin to qualify myself as one going under the guise of humanitarian aid. But for the most part, my carry on was over filled with American currency, photography equipment, condoms, and fake press credentials that I had a friend print up in case I ever needed to be more official than merely the holder of the mighty American dollar. With everything splayed open on the customs table like an autopsy of a cheap porno, the guards smirked and waved me through the terminal.

I abandoned my father as soon as I could, after getting into argument after argument; I explained to him the bitter truth, that I was there strictly for the scenery and that I had arrived with high hopes for his heart to explode on foreign soil where the 5th rate doctors of this communist vacation destination would leave him to swell in the sun.

Once alone, and seeking cheap transportation, I blended in and boarded a bus with some whites. Traveling through the barrio’s version of upper-class suburbia, I heard a tour guide whisper that we were passing Elian Gonzales, the famed tug-of-war child custody case of the late 90’s, playing in his front yard. I snapped a picture of him jumping rope and at the next possible stop, left the white people to their own devices.

Finally feeling the calm of being on my own, I spent a few days doing recon, learning the coming and goings of the locals. I watched them buy random goods, studying their mannerisms, their fashions, their vulgarities to know what does and does not fly without repercussion in the house of Castro. Much flies, but when busted, little bargaining occurs. I watched more than one belligerent drunk get thrown into the back of an army jeep and disappear into the distance.

Economically in Cuba, like many other countries living just under the poverty line, they have a unique sales policy for tourists/outsiders. It isn’t that hard to figure out, just add a zero. Occasionally, two. That isn’t an exchange rate mind you, same currency, just ten, maybe a hundred times more if you walk in with white skin, wide doe eyes and a full wallet.

The best advice a man can get in a situation like this is to become damn fast friends with a local, and in essence, transform into that guy’s ATM. You can buy yourself, him and three of his friends whatever you were going to buy for yourself, at half the cost of you alone, and live high on the hog with your new comrades.

Looking to get lost one night, I bought an ass pocket of whiskey to keep me warm in the crisp evening air and started walking east.  After drinking and wandering and wandering and drinking, I eventually stumbled upon a record release party at an open-air bar in the depths of old Havana. The record was a mash-up of classic Jackson Five tracks remixed with Jackson’s later pivotal work from the late 80’s. It was as bizarrely American as anything I’d heard since deplaning and everyone was going bananas for it.

I ended up with a group of loose and animated 20-year-old locals who were sick and tired of going broke for drunk. We bonded immediately over the injustice of bar prices for the workingman. (The bars in Havana are geared towards ripping off the tourists. They maintain all the creature comforts of the industrialized world in that way. However, if a local, who makes 45 dollars a month, wants to drink nine or ten drinks at a bar where a rum and coke costs 3 dollars… do the math.) So we pooled our cash, walked across the street to the liquor store, got a couple of bottles of rum, and snuck them in.

These brothers in hidden arms were the best friends money could buy. They openly used me to score their own tail under the auspicious guise of landing me a Cuban beauty, God love them. They introduced me to strangers unabashedly; I was their “human curiosity” on display and I was netting them attention that only throwing American money around could buy.

Two hours later, snapping out of a sugar-rum blackout, I found myself making out with a blonde Cuban teenager who was wearing a light orange v-neck nightshirt she had turned into a dress. This magic trick covered about 3/4ths of her ass and made all my self-control disappear. As far as slight of hand goes, she was more than inviting. I looked at her and smiled, not knowing who she was, or what was going on, just that a beautiful young girl was hungrily kissing me and pulling me against her with all the might her skinny arms could muster.

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I looked to my new friends who were all grouped around a picnic table with our bottles of rum boldly scattered about like flags, claiming that table for self-reliance in the face of tyrannous bar backs. I owed nothing to these new friends, not a handshake or farewell embrace, I felt no guilt as I said no goodbyes. I eagerly ran with her out onto the street as soon as she whispered, “I know a place we can go.” And we were gone.

I gave the last of my money to the cab driver, my reserve “in case of emergency, break sock” 5 dollar bill I had hidden from my friends at the bar, as we pulled up to a house deep in the middle of a rickety, yet main road adjacent, shantytown. I felt like a genius, having found the hidden funds to hurry us to her home.

As she led me to the front door, she looked back, smiled shyly and said, “You have to quiet, don’t talk. I the one who talks. OK?” I nodded at her broken English, without a drop of blood in my brain. She walked a few steps more and I squeezed her hand, excitedly. She paused mid-step, threw herself against me and started kissing me again. She tried walking us towards the entrance backwards, still kissing, stumbling towards the door for a few steps, and then she started giggling. She whispered, “Shhhhhh, we have to quiet!” and smiled so big I could see her back teeth. She was hypnotic.

She knocked and immediately an old woman with a baby in her arms opened the door, stared past her, and looked at me. “Spanish?” She asked, eyeballing me with restrained contempt. The girl pushed past her into the house and started whispering to her in a high-speed dialect. I was left on the porch for a minute as they spoke in hushed tones in a language I knew little to none of.

Finally we were let inside and I saw a living room full of cots, where the woman’s children were sleeping. We walked past them to an empty room with a nightstand and a single bed with a thin sheet stretched over the mattress. We threw ourselves on the bed and started pulling each other’s clothes off. She stopped us, took a big breath, and said, “You must to pay me first.”

to be continued in the next issue...

Illustration

Martina Fugazzotto

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