We waited in the Cancun airport entrance for hours. It was too dark to go to the beach. About the only good thing about Cancun airport is that we could use my American credit card. JetBlue has a strong presence there but we couldn't get our boarding passes until they posted our flight.
We had dreamed about Cancun airport since Wednesday. "It'll be great. We'll go to like Taco Locos or something like that and we'll have the guacamole that's half sour cream and we'll both get a salad and a margarita that appears to be served in a birdbath!"
Again we couldn't enter the actual fun, mall-like part of the airport and were saddled up at the coffee bar. I don't want anymore coffee. I want to eat a non-canned vegetable and get my girlfriend a salad. I want to eat chips in a sombrero. Leigh gets up to go to the bathroom and shouts, "Brendan! Brendan! Halfway through the airport." She's giggling and imitating the swagger of the chic, goosestepping employees of JetBlue.
I had lots of girlfriends before and really the best you can ask for in a relationship is to be in love with someone whom you can have fun with. Lots of fun. The more synchronized dances and inside jokes you can do: the better. We spent the next half hour giggling about what the JetBlue employees are like. ("Are they open yet?" I asked. "No, they're all in back blowing lines and fixing their neckties." "Can you imagine? You show up to work a little tired and your boss grabs you by the necktie, 'Am I in the fucken Frontier Airlines office here or what? I feel like I'm back on USAirways.'")
If you're ever in an international airport and you're trying to figure out which flight is bound for New York: just look out for which line is no moving at all or even posted yet, but which is full of punctual assholes. I was the eighth New Yorker to get fed up of waiting for information to be posted and who found a guy who could tell me where the JetBlue Flight to New York would eventually be.
By the way:
Mojitos
Pad Thai
Crabcakes
Flying Jet Blue.
I am adding them to my list of first-high experiences. I am powerless to my addiction to these things, but I have to be honest with myself and know that I have no control over my affinity toward them.
I used to love JetBlue. I have been known to take expensive out-of-the-way flights just to ride on board with them. I have also decided to go on trips to strange islands just to see why JetBlue might be flying there. A couple years ago I was DJ'ing in San Francisco and I took Nikki with me. It was a great trip and by the end of our first day our favorite part was riding on JetBlue and watching "Meatloaf: To Hell and Back" the story of Meatloaf, his music, what he would do for love; why he won't do that.
But lately flying JetBlue has just been like riding on an expensive airline that proudly features nothing on TV for free. When I left the Obama Campaign I flew back on JetBlue and was bored to tears by post-election History Channel coverage. It is, however, a great terminal at JFK where they have all these weird hippie furniture that you can lay down on and comfortably sleep. They also have five wicked nice restaurants and a nice bookstore and a college cafeteria-style area with big troughs of food.
Anyway, I consider myself a very lucky person to be able to be so unnecessarily opinionated about an airline.
This flight was difficult. I didn't want to go back. Plus we were completely surrounded by the mens and womens Rugby team from some bullshit state college. They were loud, sunburnt, smelly and obnoxious. They wreeked of cheap tequilla and acted exactly how you'd imagine. The DirectTV wasn't turned on until we got in the air so they listened to Satellite Radio and shouted out song recommendations to them.
I think part of the reason I hated them was because I never got to go on spring break in college. Who the fuck are these kids whose parents just give them money to go drink in Mexico? You're in fucking college! They should call the whole second semester of every year "Spring Break." What do you need a break from? Reading shit? Fuck you! You know what I need a break from? 12 hour work days, dealing with this economy, and now I need another vacation just from dealing with you in the fucking airport in Cancun with your stupid foam sombrero. And the fucking pharmacy won't even give me Oxycotin!
Anyway, my senior year we did take a road trip to Key West and I had $100 saved for food, gas, tolls and the $1.50 packs of gramma cigarettes I bought.
Anyway, so as we entered the Cancun airport we headed to our gate and found all the shops closed. I walked back to the security desk and all the shops there were closed. All the tacos locos were gone! All the guac! Fuck!
I trolled around looking for food. There was just one stand open. And they don't take credit cards.
We've had an apple to eat since breakfast. It's midnight.
But then I discover that I have some miscellaneous Mexican change in my pocket. I find a vending machine and se vende Powerade. This is perfect! I've got a sick girl with me and some powerade will be just what we need to get home. On the plane we can have weird JetBlue snacks.
Long story short: I had the same problem everyone whose ever used a vending machine ever has had. Only I had the Telemundo edition.
I get back to the desk and with my final pesos I buy Leigh a V8. We watch DirectTV. We sleep. We smell the fratfucks.
When we land the customs agents are so concerned about these spring break losers that we pass through. It's also the next day so no one in Customs cares why we flew into Cancun on 3/20 and flew to JFK on 3/21. Just about the only thing that happens is Leigh and I get separated in Customs and I worry that she's been taken. I also want to exit the airport as soon as plausible. Homeland Security Stamps me in and I go through to the next desk after baggage claim. "Eh, where's your luggage?"
I show him my little shoulderbag. "That all you got? Welcome to New York."
Another guy starts heckling me, "Looks like you lost your girlfriend."
"You just let her run off like that?"
They were so busy hooting at Leigh that they didn't even bother to check why we had flown to Cancun last week and somehow landed twice without entering into any other countries. So that's all the advice I have. Going to Havana is as easy as going to a George Plimpton Party: it's easy if you're Truman Capote but if you're not: just bring a pretty girl.
We hopped on the airtrain. At Broadway Junction Leigh switched to the L. I stayed on the C and ended up having to take a Bus Transfer from Bedstuy because the MTA insists on only doing track work at odd hours in ghetto neighborhoods. We both went home, showered, napped and went to work that night.
Once again we enter Cancun Airport. Once again we land and our departure gate is next to our arrival gate just a few steps away from the pharmacy that I was asked to leave.
But we cannot get our boarding passes until we exit, go through customs and then reenter the airport.
At the Mexican border Leigh told me she was nervous, I promised her we'd be fine. "Will you go with me? What if they have questions?"
"I will. It will be fine. Mexico isn't the problem. It's New York. But we're just two tan spring breakers coming back from Cancun. It's fine. It's not like we're sunburnt in Toronto."
We step up to the desk and Leigh surrenders her passport, visa, landing card, etc. I have all of mine out. I've rehearsed and over-googled what to say. I'm just going to politely ask in my best schoolboy Spanish if the usted would mind not re-stamping our passports.
And before I could even do that I hear two heavy and determined thuds in the florescent lit hell of boarder guards. He stamped Leigh's landing card. And then he stamped her passport.
I do not have a backup plan. It is possible to get back into the United States with your driver's license but Leigh lost hers in Miami. I have mine, but that's kind of a dick move.
I ask the guy if he would mind not stamping my passport and he said, "Why would I do that?"
"You understand. We are Americans and we have just come from Havana and we could get into trouble back in the US." This is all in English, by the way. I am not capable of speaking any more espanish.
"You flew in from Havana?"
"Yes."
"And now you are in Mexico?"
"Yes."
"When you enter Mexico I stamp your passport." I hear the two determined thuds and he hands me back the indelible State of Quintina Roo Mexico Stamp on my passport.
I have a problem with not getting to the airport on time. Actually, I don't have problem with it. The airlines have a problem with it. The airlines have a problem with me tearing through the terminal and leaping over strollers in order to board an international flight in five minutes. The only reason I actually know how to make an Irish Coffee is because I spent a month in the Dublin airport one weekend.
But in Cancun and in Havana they take all the fucking time they want before letting you board a plane. I dutifully showed up three hours before each flight and each time I had to wait in the seat-less airport entrances for the flights to be posted. I tried going to the Mexicana airlines desk and when I tried to get on the flight the flight desk guy just dimly pointed at the cardboard numbered sign above his head, "a789F"
As if I'm supposed to respond, "Oh, how stupid of me! I just came from a wonderfully romantic week in beautiful, historic A7996! It reminded me of J7875 in the 'twenties."
I then realize that he's really pointing at a sign that says "Panama." I realize this is the stupidest stupid American thing I've ever done and I can't believe I'm about to write this out loud. But seriously, half the fucking airlines in the world are named after their country of origin (Mexicana, American, etc) so don't you think it might be a wee bit confusing to have an airline that flies to a city named after a country?
I would spend the rest of the day annoyed by this as I waited for my Mexicana Airlines flight to Cancun with continuing service to Ciudade Mexico.
So I paced up and down the Havana airport for two hours before a yawning crew trailing rollerbags strutted up tot the empty counter, straightened their neckties, logged into their computers and slid the printed cardboard placard into the big board. "A7986 - Cancun."
We got boarding passes, we paid the airport tax and we sat around the Havana airport and with my last few pennies I got two apples, a cocacola and a water. I never want to see another jamon y queso sandwich again.
At the airport bookshop they sell hundred and hundreds of paperbacks about how awesome Che was and how the revolution happened. You can get almost anything RTW with his face on it. But they don't accept Moneda Nacional. I ended up leaving $12 on the urinal outside of the Mexican customs desk.
For my final act I wanted to be taken to the airport in style. When you are white and you walk around Havana everyone just comes up to you and says, "Taxi?" Guys in chevys, guys on tandem bikes, rickshaws, guys driving the lifesized version of your barbie convertible, there is a small army of men who drive three-wheeled vespas with a retrofitted back seat. There's this one guy who stands at the head of Obispo with a motorcycle whose sidecar window reads, "Taxi?"
There's also guys who drive Yugos and fold the front seat forward and invite you to crawl into their two-door special, "Very cheap, my friend." I'm 6'2" and about to spend two days on airplanes. I'm not cramming into shit.
I keep trying to hail one of the beautiful plymouth taxis. But, somewhat hilariously in that Havanese way, non-taxi drivers are offering us rides meanwhile actual taxi drivers have their kids in the car and are taking them to the beach or to visit mom at work.
Eventually this one guy pulls up in an 1956 Chrysler Imperial. Red. Gorgeous. Utterly destroyed. The window cranks have been welded on as door handles. The entire ceiling is gutted leaving a terrifyingly jagged rusty shell. We slide into the back seat and Leigh's first words are, "I can see how our grandmothers would lose their virginity in something like this."
The backseat is a couch. The windshield is a picture window. The front windows have that little triangle window that you can swing outward so you can smoke with some kind of dignity and without offending the backseat passengers. This model was discontinued because, upon impact, the metal glovebox had a habit of popping open and decapitating the front passenger.
I got to put on my seatbelt. There are no seatbelts.
He asks where we are going in Havanese. I actually have no idea what he said, but it included that Peso/Peso Quiero/Quiero $PN/$CUC I Want/I Love problem where you just need some common sense that you'll never attain. I think I said, "I love to go to the airport."
"Which airport?"
"What?"
"Which airport you going to?"
"To the Havana airport."
"Which Havana airport?"
"In Havana there's airport plus more than one?" (my Spanish gets moronic due to exasperation.) "Havana International." I forgot that the airport, like almost everything in Havana, is named after Jose Marti.
"Okay." Also, I should note something about language. I should introduce myself to the Habanese people as Vrendan so that they can pronounce it and write it down. I should say Habana. They drink bodka and the hotel serves vreakfast. In Habana my website is called Vreakfast Anytime. I never got used to it. Educated Europeans tourists come to my parties and order "Wodka redbull" and I think they're stupid.
"No pay in front of airport. You pay before." I understood what he was going for. He is not a licensed taxi so he cannot take us to the airport. You would think they didn't care but tourism is the biggest taxable part of their economy. A sugar cane worker can go into the fields for a month or a bartender can make one American one daiquiri. They both get a dollar. If you go out in the countryside and meet a family and stay with them they can be fined $2000 for not being a registered guest house and paying taxes on overnight guests. There are lots of stories of men having "chance encounters" at Discoteques and waking up the next morning with a houseguest and a tax problem.
I was starting to get worried about traveling back home. We were each faced with a $75,000 dollar fine if caught. We could be imprisoned. But we wouldn't be imprisoned in Cancun or Havana. We'd be imprisoned in Brooklyn. Como Tupac y Beegy. I've spent enough time in Brooklyn jails.
Then I started getting paranoid about the airport. We didn't have any money or valuables if this stranger was going to pull anything. I recognized some of the route from our drive in but that was late at night. Then he got off the high way and took some back roads. This doesn't look like the way to get from the center of the capital to the nation's international airport.
Eventually I see a sign. I see a row of dwarf palm trees that make it look like the government is putting in a little effort to make Havana presentable. I see the airport.
I'm still nervous about what's going to happen next. I'm so nervous, infact that I hand the goddam guy $50CUC instead of twenty. He looks at it twice. Then he thanks me. Then I realize that I am stuck in Havana for life if I don't get that $50CUC back to pay the departure tax. Fuck!
"Momento, amigo. Dame lo. La moneda."
For no other reason other than confusion and the wonderful nature of the Havanese people he gives it back to him. I hand him the $20CUC we agreed on.
Just as we get to the airport and armed revolutionary guard steps into the road and waves him over. He starts motioning and making hand gestures. The guard wants to know what the fuck he thinks he's doing. "Leigh, we have to get out of here." I hurry her out of the cab and shout back in Spanish, "Thanks, Uncle! Say goodbye to grandmother for us and I appreciate the ride to the airport. Too bad this rooster has to crow good and early tomorrow."
On the way out of the car Leigh bangs her head on the jagged metal ceiling. I know exactly where she hit her head. Right there on the piece of metal I noticed on the back passenger side. It was a piece of metal that stuck out like a sharp pen clip and should be holding up a soft cotton ceiling made in 1956.
"Honey we have get out of here. I'm sorry. I know how much that must have hurt. Get in the airport." A military truck pulls up and they pull the guy out of the car.
We enter the airport and I try and pay our airport tax as soon as possible. I am informed that I cannot do this without a boarding pass. We buzz around the airport until we can find the right ticket desk.
An armed guard stops me. "Pardon me sir. I need to ask you some questions."
I played the dumbest dumb American I possibly could. My goal is to get us both out of trouble. The taxi driver is, after all, my Cuban uncle and he still has to say goodbye to grandmother for me. "Tiene ay una pregunta? Si si."
"How much you pay for the car to the airport?"
"Hotel Telegrafo. En Parque Centrale de Havana Vieja."
"How much you pay for the taxi?"
"The taxi? En Parque Centrale at the Hotel Telegrafo."
"And how much did you pay?"
"For hotel?" (holding up fingers and drawing letters in the air) "$1-0-0 C-U-C, si?" I smile because this charade (literally) is working.
"Y taxi?"
"Viente." I say. 20.
"Have a good trip."
I am sweating and I feel bad but hopefully the worst thing that will happen is he will pay taxes on the twenty dollars I gave him. They can get in bigger trouble for undercutting the prices of the licensed, tax-paying cabs. I certainly hope that some good-old fashioned Latin American efficiency will take over and he will let the guy go in exchange for my $20CUC.
When I look outside ten minutes later he is gone and the guards are back at work.
I converted my last USD$70 in the hotel. Thank god I set that money aside and didn't blow it on something local. It only converts to $56CUC. The thing is I should've converted all of my money into Mexican Pesos or Canadian dollars but then I would've paid an 8% fee twice. If I had that money in Canadian (CD$86) I could've gotten $64.50CUC without paying the American penalty. This would have been completely possible if my goddam bank would just give me the goddam Canadian dollars I need or if AAA weren't a bunch of bastards about converting money. I have HSBC "The World's Local Bank" which is a very annoying slogan if you're trying to get foreign currency. "HSBC--We've Got All Kinds of Money All Over The Fucking Place and We're Going To Keep It That Way."
Anyway, I needed $20CUC+ for a cab and--thank god I remembered Ben's horror story from leaving Dominica--$25CUC/person departure tax. If you lose your wallet in Havana you have to walk to Guantanamo Bay for assistance. So there's $70CUC. Because of the whole Leigh getting sick/SOL on tickets to The Tropicana I actually had some money left. Not alot but $18. So we went back to El Floridita.
I had a cigar left so I ordered a Papa Hemingway and sat in the air conditioning watching the band. I tried ordering a Papa Hemingway con azucar, but the guy refused to acknowledge that an augmentation of the recipe could still be called by the same name. I looked over at the life-sized statue of the actual Papa Hemingway. The dude is one big fat fuck. Hemingway aged like Rabbit from the Updike novels or anyone who was a jock in high school. He was once a man of appetite and stature and slowly just melted into a guy who was used to eating alot and being able to drink too much. I'm pretty sure Hemingway took his daiquiris with sugar. But what do I know? I've only read everything by or about Hemingway and the Nick Adams stories. But this old bastard actually probably served Hem his last daiquiri in Havana.
Think about that for a second. Hemingway is in Havana, sweaty from the heat and bullshitting with the fisherman. His two typing fingers are sore from writing those two good books. He's old. He's tired. He's tapped out and depressed. He's going to go back to Iowa and blow his brains out. Hemingway steps into El Floridita, one of the only air conditioned places in Havana at the time. The bartender--a young buck probably my age--is there apprenticing under and older Havanese bartender. "Hot one out there, boys. Stay inside here as long as you can."
"I'm freezing my old Cuban ass in here in this electric refrigerator."
"Old men get colder as they age and women get warmer. It's just not fair." Hemingway has a bag on the floor and inside is the original typescript of A Moveable Feast. It's a funny story about being young and learning not to care about what other people think. It also alleges that Zelda told F. Scott that he has a small dick. But that may just be a metaphor. He keeps it hidden because it is a sentimental tale about the happy memories he is left with from his first marriage. His fourth wife will kill him if she ever reads it. The manuscript is several hundred pages long and after his death it will reappear freshly typed and only 190 pages long with almost no mention of that first wife. (Six other drafts will surface and they will all include an extensive apology to his first wife.) Hemingway Scholars will point fingers at the wife. Feminist critics will point out that Hemingway scholars, like Hem, always blame the wife. Classics professors will compare it to how the Odyssey was probably written by blind Homer's scribe--his daughter. It's not plagiarism or theft. It's an apprenticed mashup. And if they don't they should.
"I'll have a--"
"Si, si, un daiquiri. Sientense." The old man goes to the GE electric blender and starts to make the four millionth daiquiri and with the momentum of muscle memory he reaches for the bowl of sandy sugar that has the flavor of Cadbury Eggwhites. He heaps in the two spoons.
"Alli!" the boy shouts in a voice somewhat like mine and with limited and seemingly stereotypical present-tense Spanish. "Papi no azucar para 'Emingway. Estas frio en la cabeza, Tio." He pulls out a fresh blender pitcher and he and Hemingway exchange little smiles. "Sorry, Papa. My uncle forgets sometimes. He knows how you like it."
"Someday you'll be as old as we are and you won't know what to do with yourself either."
His wife walks in the door, dressed for their return to the United States. She notices his heavy brief case."What're you working on, sweetie?"
"Nothing."
So that boy is now an old bastard bartender in a red apron. He spoons the sugar into the blender. I order un agua con gas for the lady and a tuna sandwich because it appears to be the cheapest filling thing on the menu. We sit and we write in our moleskins. And I am left with a wonderful, meaningful trip to Havana.
I'm pretty sure Leigh would never agree to return with me. It's alot of trouble to get there. The food isn't that great for her diet. But that was how my trip to Havana was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.
Whenever I plan a trip I like to plan on having a full day for the last whole day. I always take the red-eye out if possible and wake up in New York. This way I don't have to work on getting back in the New York groove because I'm already pissed off and ready to get in fights.
On our last day in Havana I had decided I want to stay there forever. Anything worth doing is worth doing better a second time. If I could do it all over again I would eschew the $200 Canadian dollar hotel and find a family to stay with. I met alot of them and some people have old Havanese mansions with private guest entrances. At night you have dinner with visiting diplomats and they even drive you to the airport. All for $20/night.
I understand the dining situation is a little more upfront that way, which would have meant that Leigh wouldn't've gotten sick and in fact would have had a better trip with better meals.
Anyway, the good news is that I was walking down the street and I figured out how to find the state-run coffeeshops. On Obsispo, which is a mostly pedestrian street coming off of Parque Centrale I passed a shop that had a sign "Jamon Medianoche $25.00." And I was like, "That's alot to pay for a shitty ham sandwich." And it dawned on me that I had finally found a place where I could use my goddam $4000Pesos Nacionales. (I can't remember if I mentioned this but Cuba has two currencies. One is a Cuban Peso equivalent to the American dollar--although to convert $1USD you get $0.80Pesos. There is another currency which is roughly $50pesos=$1USD. They're both called the peso and both use the $ sign. Only common sense prevails when you have to reason with yourself that a cigar is probably $1CUC. But ice cream can be either. So can coffee. In the nice hotels coffee can be $2CUC to sit out on the patio. That's $2.40USD. For a coffee. In a country that produces nothing but coffee, sugar and rhetoric.)
So I pass this sign and decide that they either accept the cheaper national pesos (of which I cannot unload for the life of me) or they have the best fucking ham sandwich in the Caribbean. I line up with the rest of the muchachos and it seems that in this Italian-style coffee bar the etiquette is the same. You belly up to the bar. If you're old you get to be rude and get in everyone's way and take up too much space. If you're young and foreign you get elbowed. I looked around and saw how everyone played it. They stand there waiting with a single peso out and ready. The peso nacionale is probably the coolest coin in circulation. The back is a nautical star and the front is a relief of Che Guevara.
The barista works in swoops. A new group of people line up and hold out their money. When he sees you're ready he puts down a saucer and a spoon for you. Then he goes about the business of making twenty espressos at once. Two at a time from those big espresso machines that are somehow not available in England or Rhode Island.
The whole coffee shop is full of old bastard sailors and dudes who clearly meet there everyday around the same time. It was darling. One of the old sailors was so old an sea-blind that he started stabbing at the white sugar bowl with his spoon until one of his friends laughed at him and pulled off the lid.
I actually wasn't swift enough to get in on the first shot of coffee. I stood too close to the $25 ham sandwich portion of the room where a guy just stood there waiting for someone to need a sandwich while the coffee guy was too busy to speak (yay communism!)
He came back on another swoop, "Por favor dos cafes, un cafe express y un cortado."
"No tiene leche, amigo."
"No es possible cortado?" I turned to Leigh. "They don't have milk." The guy got me my two coffees in exchange for two Guevaras. I also noticed another thing that was kind of fun. The local nurses all came in with cocacola bottles and ordered, like, nine espressos each and filled their bottles with sugar. By the way, the sugar in cuba is as amazing as you would expect. The closest relative in the US would probably be like the finer raw sugar that you use for cooking. It has a light, sandy color and it tastes like a pure form of the eggwhites in Cadbury Eggs.
Leigh is somewhat unsure of her Spanish and whenever possible she had me do the talking. I already mentioned that Cubans speak impeccable Spanish but they also speak a completely unintelligible Havanese language and they are just darling when it comes to trying to understand what you might be trying to charade out in Spanglish. I've also mentioned that I speak a dialect known as "kitchen Spanish" so I am confident and adroit when it comes to ordering food, selecting liquor bottles, asking for ice or yelling at someone for making a mess.
I have to admit that this is a two-way thing. I remember touring Italy with Annie before I knew any Italian and I felt kind of captive. There's this slight feeling like a little kid when you go to a restaurant and tell your order to your girlfriend because you're too shy to try it on the waiter. Sometimes it was fun overhearing a conversation in Spanish and then relating it to Leigh or giving her a little giggle by translating the jokes I made.
We took a walk to the water again. Havana has an unutterably beautiful water front where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Atlantic at the mouth of a natural harbor. Across the way is a hilly green barely built up area with a big ass statue that might be Jesus and might be Jose de Marti (they're both saints here). We went back down to Plaza Vieja where Leigh had gotten sick the night before.
There was another coffeeshop down there with the sign "Venta en Moneda Nacional" which means they take the cheaper Pesos. We ordered another coffee and one of the muchachos tries to sell me the state-run newspaper in English for $1. I gave him $1MN and he asked for $1CUC and I informed him that he was crazy in the head.
"Where you frum?" the barista asked, enthusiastically.
"Nueva Jork."
"Nueva Jork!" this is what every says. New York! So much enthusiasm! "Nueva Jork como Dupak y Beegy."
"Si, si amigo. Vivo en Breuklyn. En la nacione de Biggie Smalls." He then put his two fingers in the air and I was like "Yeah like the guns and violence. Brooklyn!" To most of the people we met rap music is like Pro Wrestling or Westerns. It's entertaining violence that seems to get a pass in an otherwise peace-loving existence.
The whole trip we didn't have watches on us because our phones didn't work in Cuba so for the most part we slept until we woke up, we ate when we were hungry, we drank whenever we were awake and we went to bed when we were tired. It was wonderful.
But we didn't want to miss our plane. Havana was ending and we were in for a stressful day of nation hopping and border crossings. We went back to the hotel, showered, packed, etc. I got all of our stuff out of the safe and made the sign of the cross for remembering the combination. That coulda been really bad.
Stupid American Tourist Bitching About How Havana is Not Like New York City.
A couple of days before I was walking and I saw a sign that said, "Mojitos $1" and I immediately thought, "I should go there so I can tell that to people when I get back to New York."
Mojitos are one of those things on my short list of first-high experiences. These are things that were unbelievable that first time and ever since then I have been chasing that experience. Pretty much every time Ben and I get Thai Food one of us will crack and end up ordering Pad Thai because one time we had it and it was really, really good and we're waiting to find that good Pad Thai again. Other things on this list:
crab cakes
Everyone said that the mojitos in Cuba were just plain amazing and would ruin me for mojitos in the future. However, drinking mojitos has already ruined drinking mojitos for me. We ordered mojitos all over and they were just okay. In my bar mojitos are $13. Nobody in any of the many, many bars I went to in Cuba ever muddled lime into them. Some people, however, would mash up the mint a little with a pestal.
I am going to put mojitos on another list as well.
When you drive through the midwest all you can see or smell are cows and all you can find to put in your coffee at gas stations is non-dairy creamer.
When you go to Kentucky you find that mint grows wild on riverbanks. When you go to Keeneland Racetrack they don't serve real mint juleps and all you can get is Early Times Mint Julep-flavored Whiskey which is 60 proof, pre-sweetened and as refreshing as a chilled cup of mouthwash.
When you go to a forbidden island in the Carribbean most of the bars have weird powdered lime juice. You see the bartenders doing the polaroid-shake on the little paper packets as if it were hot cocoa mix.
So we went to this bar that had the $1 mojitos. They were fine and they had Mayabe Beer too for $1 and (inexplicably) they had eleven TVs in the bar all playing a VHS taped Beyonce concert where she would introduce each song in a breathless bought of ugogirlism.
"How's your mojito sin azucar, amiga?"
"It's good. It's like a very refreshing vodka soda." (Because of the powdered lime thing: mojitos without sugar are just mint leaves drowning in bubbly rum.)
"Hm."
"Are you upset that we couldn't get tickets to the Tropicana?"
"Who needs the Tropicana? I've got rum, I've got a snack, prime seating choice and genuine Cabaret Parisien," I pointed up at the TV where Beyonce was shimmering in a sequined dress. "I'm like Beyonce, baby. I'm a survivor."
"Maybe the waiter will take a souvenir picture?"
The bartender/waiter was a very big cuban guy and a very big fan of Beyonce. At one point his three daughters came in a wrapped themselves around Papa's legs as he tended to his tables. We ordered Quarto de Pollo for $2.50 and he brought us a gigantic plate of chicken, vinegar potatoes, canned vegetable and infidels and believers. Neither of us were very hungry. We're also white, so eating chicken parts isn't really in our systems. I have no idea what the chicken was cooked in or coated with, but if we had more napkins we probably would have dried it off. It had the flavor of lemon lard. We tried cutting up different parts and I think the most romantic thing said was, "Try over here it's just regular chicken."
That's it. Dinner was $4.50CUC.
We walked by the bar we had gone to the night before to get another cigar. This, again, is the bar with the jagged metal BeingJohnMalcovich door. In this bar they are forever cleaning the floors with a hose and putting the stools on the counter. When you walk into one of these bars you look around and realize that this used to be a busy, wonderful place. It's not my inner capitalist talking here, either. I'm not one of those guys who hears about a shooting and thinks and the prices of real estate. But this was clearly once a grand affair of a bar with lever-latch refrigerators and a cigarette counter and waitresses. Now it's just one old bastard pouring rum and opening canned beers.
"Hello, my friend. You look sad today."
"It's probably the chicken I had across the street."
"Javier's quarto de pollo? Tell me you didn't eat that. It's the worst. Ugh. What does he cook that in? Lemon lard?"
"Seriously. This must be a communist country if a guy like that can be a cook!"
"Something else the matter?"
"I just really wanted to see the show at the Tropicana tonight but we couldn't."
"Why you want to go to the show? They no have dancing girls in New Jork City?"
"They do but they're either coked up Russian prostitutes or they're doing it, like, ironically. I wanted to wear my nice clothes and drive out there in a 1956 Chrysler and strut in with my girlfriend arm and arm and get shown to my table by a man in a tuxedo."
He looked at me blankly and I realized, once again, that I had mixed up the subjunctive form. My syntax relied far too heavily on the present tense.
"You want cigar?" He went back behind the counter and brought out two gorgeous boxes of cigars again, with certificates. The whole room smelled like Huck Finn on a raft.
"I would love to take these cigars from you, but..."
"I give you good price. My brother, he--"
"Your dad got your brother a job there now?"
"Que?"
"It is not possible to return to my house with this many cigars. I only need one."
"Solo uno?" I thought he would come back with another box of those cheap Cohibas he had but instead he had a paper bag of Bauzas. These are the ugly cigars that get made by accident. All cigars in Cuba are handmade and it turns out that cigars are like waffles and semi-fictionalize novels: you usually have to throw the first one out. I took one and gave him a peso.
Walking home we went by the movie theater to go buy a beer on the street. All of the locals were there and the sugar cane workers had just come in from the day's harvest. Everyone was standing around bullshitting and eating midnight ham.
We got a beer and a water and I smoked my ugly cigar. I was thinking of maybe getting a sandwich when I heard a voice call out, "Nueva Jork!" It was the nice guy from the second night who took us to the BeingJohnMalcovich bar. He waved enthusiastically and begged us to come over and visit.
I still had no idea what he was frying and serving and I had no interest in finding out. But it's nice to see a friendly face.
"How is your night going, my friend?"
"Just fine. It is our last night in Havana. Tomorrow we return to Nueva York."
"No! Stay longer, my friend. You stay in Cuba."
"Maybe your brother could get me a job making cigars?"
"Your girlfriend is very pretty. Es una modella?"
"Si, si."
"Wow. She looks like a model. Who is it?"
"Camaron Diaz?"
"No, no. Sandi, Sandi Crawfor!"
The other muchachos agreed. I was traveling with Cindy Crawford. Leigh smiled at the boys, but her lights were on low like a magneto powered headlight in Havana traffic.
"Esta enferma?"
"Si, tiene dolor de estomago."
"Uh-oh! You lucky man!" The muchachos started hooting and man-giggling. "That's just how my wife was when she first got pregnant."
"So that's good luck in this country? Huh, that's cultural."
"You'll feel better in a few days." he bent his belly out and patted an imaginary baby bump. "Where you go tonight?"
"I went to Javier's."
"Ugh, I hope you didn't get the chicken." One guy said.
Another guy grumbled, "What's he make that shit with? Lemon lard?"
"I just came from visiting your friend." I said, holding up my ugly cigar.
A bright smile came over his face, "Uno momento!" he disappeared down a treacherously greasy set of stars in the back of his tiny little stall. In a momento he came bounding up, proudly clutching a fistful of ugly cigars. "This for you. My friend. A present for you to please take home with you."
I was really touched. In fact, now remembering Havana I just have a pleasant glaze about it. I don't think of it like I would think of a restaurant to recommend. I think of walking around the warm crumbling streets. I think of the wonderful things I saw. And I think of the fry cook who gave me a fistful of reject cigars just to be nice.
I didn't get to see the cabaret parisien. But on my last night I had dinner and drinks. And it came complete with a souvenir cigar.
"If this doesn't work out you are going to put us in your coach and drive us to the Tropicana yourself and we are going to party together."
"Calm yourself, el Gallo. We will get it."
"You better."
The tourism agent was on the phone to the Tropicana Nightclub. They would be delighted and honored to serve two visiting Americans. Would they like prime seats? Yes. Would they like a bottle of rum each, mixers, cigars, a snack and a photo with the dancers? Yes, but only once cigar and one photo.
Okay. Bee-boo-boop--BONK.
"What the hell was that?"
"Your credit card will no work. Do you have another? Good."
Bonk.
"Another?"
Bonk.
"Sorry. That's it."
"I TOLD YOU they were American cards. You said, No problem El Gallo. I said if there is a problem I have a British bank. You said, No problem El Gallo. Well now El Gallo doesn't get to go to the Tropicana. El Gallo is pissed."
I walked away from the tour desk and logged onto the cybercafe. They had charmingly quaint dial-up internet for $6CUC/hr. I stayed away but Leigh had to spend a lot of time assuring her giant family that we were not taken by the Reds.
I emailed the travel agent back in Canada and told him the situation. I didn't have alot of time but if he could book us the tickets from there I would pay him extra money. There was no way to get them here. I only had eight minutes left on the card so I left and we walked to Hotel Sevilla down the street that had a pool.
It was a gorgeous blue kidney shaped pool surrounded by a cafe and beach bar just off Passeo de Prado with a guard at the locked gates to keep out the shit-smearing peasants. If we had planned ahead a little this place would be a pretty good deal for two reasonably budget conscious people looking to relax for the day. The guard said if we paid $20CUC each we could drink and eat and use the pool. If we just wanted to use the pool then it would be $5CUC/each. We went with the $5CUC, which is about $14USD and we spent another $13CUC on food and drinks.
We sat out on the pool and I was trying to finish reading Updike's Witches of Eastwick. Despite how much free time I had on this trip I had done almost no reading. The airport rides were stressful and full of phone calls. The flights were late and tiring, the beaches were too exciting to sit in, our hotel had satellite and the bars had cigars. Even on the busses I thought translating State Billboard was much more interesting.
After a while we loosened up and ordered a Pizza Hawaiiana, a mojito sin azuca y uno daiquiri de Hemingway. We both agreed that the pizza was a good choice. It was more jamon y queso but in a better form and with fresh pineapples.
I skipped out halfway through and ran back to the hotel to check on our tickets for the night. I only had a moment left on my card do I sent him one last pleading email and by the time the dialup Gmail loaded I had three seconds to read his response in the google-preview:
Hi Brendan: Sorry but there is nothing I can do from here.
Best Regards,
the first Dickhole Travel Agent you've ever trusted who is completely fucking worthless.
Goddamit. Well. I went back to the pool Poor Leigh was pretty low again. She was melting from her second enforced day in the sun and sleeked off to the shade. I guess it's not the most romantic way to spend a vacation: cured in the sun like bacon and left in the shade to dry out like tobacco. For the first time I knew that it was going to be okay to go home.
I love trips and adventure but there is always a time when you are ready to get back home and wear a different shirt and get back to a normal routine. I didn't want to go, but it would take a miracle to get us out of this rut.
Leigh was energized again and we took a walk to the Museum de la Revolucion. I decided to wear my red shirt to show that I was their comrad. We walked there along Paseo Del Prado, which is a gorgeous outdoor walkway flanked by two main roads and populated by gossiping locals, musicians and marble statues of lions. Havana in general has a very loose approach to sidewalks. Some are merely the steps up to a shop, others are useful as places to park the passenger side tires of your car. In the hotels and palaces the sidewalks are a continuous portico that can be shut down and cut off at any point. But the Paseo del Prado is a wonderful, uninterrupted Parisian affair that goes clear out to the water.
The pavement is not stone or cement but multicolored marble that gives the area the feel of a museum or like a monument dedicated to the people who walk on it.
I was halfway down the street when a Cuban streetpunk shouted after me, "Maradonna!"
People in Havana are always yelling things at you or at each other and since he wasn't selling ice cream I just kept walking.
"Maradonna! Numero diez! Maradonna!" I turned around and saw this harmless little Havana trotting after me. "Where you from?"
"Nueva Jork."
"New York Seat-E! I love New York City! And you love Maradonna, right? Number 10 Argentina!"
I then remembered that the shirt I was wearing was some thriftstore bullshit from college. It was the plain red t-shirt of the Fredrickstown Freddies and number 10 on some team was my size.
"Maradonna! Maradonna is the best futbol player in the world. I want to come to New Jork. I have my cousin he's in Bronx. And one in Queens. I live there all my life," he pointed to a balcony above where we were standing. There were three red argentina futbol jerseys hanging on their clothes lines. "27 years. But I go fucking die in New York City. You smoke the ganja?"
"No. no thanks."
"I smoke the ganja. I smoke the ganja like Bob Marley and I the lion." He pointed us to the really, really atrociously gay tattoo of a person in dreadlocks standing next to a lion while smoking a joint. He was a nice enough little rat and he was walking very fast to keep up with us. "Let me see your tattoos."
He pulled up my sleeves and stared at my birds. "Wow. New Jork City."
"Mostly."
"You have smoke for me? One cigarette?"
"No sorry."
"Okay." He stepped out directly into the traffic on a busy street and crossed. "Adios, Maradonna!"
Leigh turned to me, "What the hell did he say?"
"He said I was wearing his favorite futbol jersey. Maradonna, number ten from Argentina."
"I'm impressed that you actually knew that."
"I had to put it together. But I went to school in Ohio, so I'm used to guys yelling numbers at me if I wear them on a t-shirt. Then he said he loved Bob Marley and that he smokes weed with lions and wants to die in New York City."
We went into the Museo de la Revolucion, which is obnoxiously built in the palace of the dictator Batista. It has beautiful neo-classical details and genuine Tiffany windows. If you like boring, homemade dioramas and shoes and belts worn by Che and company--you'll love this museum.
It also has that charming Cuban touch: Cubans pay $3pesos ($0.06USD) and Foreigners pay $3CUC ($3.70USD). I tried, dutifully to pay in local pesos and they just laughed at me.
Like all the other museums I saw, this one is kind of pathetic. I was glad I was the only Kenyon graduate around because no one else would have stood for this kind of archival mismanagement. There were original documents written and signed by Che and left out in temperature negligent cases to bake in the sunlight coming from the open windows.
Leigh was started to fade again and so I let her sit in the girlfriend chair as I wandered the rooms. I would come back for her every few minutes like, a girlfriend in a department store in a Paul Rudd movie. Mostly I would fetch her every time there was another cute typewriter on display.
I wish I had written down more of the stuff but there was just plain embarrassing syntax all over the damn place. There would be signs that said things like, "The heroic leader was much loved by his countrymen until her was brutally mothered by the CIA." I think they meant "murdered" unless they are Shakespeareans and they meant "murthered."
They had a huge section about what a jackass JFK was and how he was stupid enough to try the Bay of Pigs, which had a very very surprising map.
I just couldn't get over how close it all was. As an American I had almost no concept of Cuba and I was very surprised to see that it was so close to where Hawaii and Alaska are on the map. But look at that closer. You can see the lights in Havana from Key West AND Cancun. Look at how much further away Puerto Rico is from all of this. And here's the really surprising thing. Think of Jamaica and its influence, think of the street rats with Bob Marley tattoos, think of all the music you hear from there. And then look at that tiny little island off the coast of Cuba.
That's crazy. I collected Leigh and we left. But there was one more thing I wanted to see. I had read about the revolution led by Fidel and Che to overthrow Batista. I had heard that it was up against huge odds and that it started off very small. But I also once read a hilarious account of how they were able to pull it off while in exile in Mexico.
They owe almost the entire revolution to the ski boat owned by a friend of theirs Grandmother. And it's called Granma in her honor. So outside the Museo de la Revolucion after the missiles and the tanks and the farm tractors that were hand-welded into fighting machines is this pristine ski boat like you'd find somewhere off Cape Cod.
For all the misdeeds of the museum the monument around the Granma is really quite impressive. It sits in a dry dock surrounded by tempered glass and an armed guard keeps watch.
The biggest problem with the whole trip was that we couldn't take out any more money than we'd brought. I also had no idea how much things might cost, but I heard it would be cheap. Our little jaunt into Cancun didn't help the trip's economy either. So after we got home from the beach I picked up our guidebook and just looked up a cheap restaurant.
Leigh was getting sick of Jamon Y Queso sandwiches and we both had barely eaten a vegetable since we got there. The guidebook said, charmingly, "In Havana Chinese and Arab restaurants are everywhere. Vegetarian restaurants are non-existent." I should also add that I didn't really think about what a big island Cuba is relative to the small scope of my trip (Havana and surrounding beaches on local busses) which meant that I had a completely worthless guidebook for an urban stay. I won't really mention the names of the books here because it's not their fault, although I will say that one should have been called Let's Go! Get Another Guidebook and the other was Eyewitness Travel. I lied.)
We were tired from the beach and so I just looked up in the guidebook the first restaurant that looked good and cheap and still had chairs. The very first one was listed at <$15. Sold. It is called El Santo Angel and it was a short walk through the dark streets to the gorgeously restored Plaza Vieja. Anyone can mush five nice restaurants and hotels into a city square and use the proceeds to renovate, but Plaza Vieja is tastefully done. The bare cobblestone square has several wonderful patio restaurants where people still tie up their horses. If you go there in the daytime you pass the open doors of schools, museums, and coffee shops. It's actually a delightful little area because you'll be walking and peek in one door and see a family cooking fish and in the next you'll see twenty 8 year old Cuban girls in their uniforms practicing the impersonal se form.
We got there just as the band was starting up. It was probably the most ideal place to have a chill dinner after a day at the beach. A salty breeze peeled off the Ocean on the next block. Adorable little stray dogs manned the street corners looking for food and friends.
Leigh ordered the Gazpacho and a Salad. I ordered Moros Y Cristianos (rice and beans is called "Moors and Christians." meaning you order dinner like this, "Uh, let's see the lady will have the soup and I will have the infidels and believers.")
The band was nice to hear and we drank Crystal beer and vino blanco. About halfway through we had both drained an entire bottle of water each. This is sort of the annoying part about traveling. Anywhere that's hot enough to dehydrate you at room temperature is also always a place where you can't drink the water.
Leigh said she started to feel light headed and I looked down at her salad. It was mostly cabbage with not-wonderful canned cucumbers and mayonnaise for dressing. "Do you feel sick? If you feel sick don't be shy. Get it out before it gets in you."
"Okay." she closed her eyes. "I'm starting to black out."
I got up immediately and grabbed her arm to take her to the bathroom. "You okay? Come with me. You'll be fine. Don't be embar--"
She passed out standing up. I caught her like a dead body. There was no response in her muscles. I was walking her like a wounded soldier and I am very glad that I caught her around the armpits. The bathroom attendant looked over, "Dame esta cambia!"
She got Janis Joplin sick when she passed out and I had to hold her head up. She came to and said, "Where am I?"
"We're in Havana, at a restaurant. We went to the beach today and you passed out at dinner."
"What's that smell?"
She was able to get up on her own and I walked her to the bathroom. I felt so bad for the girl. This trip was my idea and I thought it would be this wonderful getaway to a forbidden caribbean island. Instead it was just turning out to be an exhausting, dehydrating, smelly trek through a forgotten city.
The bathroom attendant brought me cloth napkins and I brought them in for her as the attendant carried over buckets of water to wash the stone floor. I put a $1CUC in her tip cup. This woman was very wonderful. She should have been furious at the stupid tourists for shitting all over her hallway, but she cleaned it up in stride, she got Leigh a bottle of water (no charge) and then she took me into the kitchen and had me wait for the cook to make Leigh a pick me up of sugar, bitters, lemon and probably salt water. I really wish I hadn't been so poor at the moment because I really would like to have given this woman more money.
As it was I was flush out of money. The bill was $29.50, including service charge and I paid it with my last converted $30CUC.
Leigh and I walked home down the dark streets. We skipped over to the slightly more populated street Obispo, where there was a little bit more light.
On our second full day in the caribbean we decided to go to the beach. We asked at the hotel desk about getting a cab and they said there was a $5 roundtrip bus, which is great. That's how much it costs to go to Coney Island. I'm kind of in a bad mood while I'm writing this (at the DMV) so I'll go ahead and add in the annoying parts: the woman at the desk sold us on the bus by saying that it stopped "right in front of the hotel."
After twenty minutes standing in the sun on the smelly street, fending off cab drivers I went back in and asked her "Right in front of the hotel?"
"Yes, right in front of the hotel."
"Like, standing in the doorway of the hotel?"
"Right in front of the hotel."
"So I wait for the bus on that vague stretch of already taken parking spaces, where all the cabs are idling and begging to take me to the beach and find me a pretty Cuban girl?"
"Right in front of the hotel."
Then I pointed at the door, "Aqui?"
"Nonononono, aya. Stupid American. You have to wait for the bus at the bus stop on Parque Centrale."
"Parque Centrale?"
"Yes. The Parque Centrale right in front of the hotel."
While waiting for the bus I got shaved ice cups from a man with a hand painted wooden cart on the side of the road. Leigh doesn't really eat sugar so I got her one too but of just ice. I ended up getting two or three while waiting. They cost $1peso (actually $2, but the exacting, handpainted sign listing the size, 355ml, was out of date apparently) or $0.02.
The bus looked like it landed from outer space. After barely three days in Havana I had forgotten what a proper automobile looks like. Havana is full of mismatched cars with mismatched parts and one of the hardest things is for people to figure out what to do with these things once they have them. Walking around I saw guy hoisting a tractor engine into a chevy. Motorcycles start up like lawnmowers. On one street there was a guy standing outside his 1946 Ford Taxi wearing a driver's cap and charging tourists $1 to take their picture with him. The car didn't run.
But this bus was huge, diesel and shiny with giant Bug's-Life mirrors.
On the ride to the beach we went through a tunnel under the river and ended up on the other side of Havana. It was a very quiet place with sunburnt grass and a crackling, bleached highway. All along the way were government billboards. One had a picture of a car engine and a spoonful of creamed corn. "The Less You Drive The More You Can Feed Your Family." Another was a picture of Che and it said, "Che Was The Example, But You Are The Revolution." Others made vague insults at the United States.
The bus dumped us out at a remote hotel on the waters between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. I remember thinking how happy I was that I hadn't gone on some bullshit beach vacation to a remote hotel. We walked down the beach and there was a little area with plastic chairs and umbrellas like you'd find in Miami. A waiter came right up to us and invited us to sit down. I said we would just keep walking and he made a good point, "Prices the same everywhere."
Thanks, Communism!
We sat down and rented two chairs. I was, once again, pretty surprised that my Spanish was holding up. I found myself remembering grammar rules and verb tenses. I was able to bargain with him for the chairs and tell the beach club guys that it wasn't, after all, worth it to me to have an umbrella since I didn't plan on sitting for long. I ordered Leigh a Mojito sin azucar and then I got whatever ridiculous drink they were serving in hollowed out coconuts. (There was a guy shaking palm trees and then machete'ing the coconuts into drinking vessels.) Leigh sat down to read and I took a walk.
At the first stop I found a little beach bar on the other side of the dunes and ordered a Crystal beer. They had coffee there so I got one and brought it back to Leigh, who was sleeping quietly in her chair. She was starting to get a little sunburned on her chest and neck so I sprayed some lotion on her and rubbed it in. Then I set out again and I didn't come back for hours.
If I ever had a Match.com profile it would include, "must love long walks on the beach. Must not be fucking around about this. Must love epic, unending beachwalks." I love a good long beach walk where you get hot an have to go swimming a couple of times. I like to walk along the beach and look at all the beach glass and the buoy parts and the nets and the lost lures. I love seeing other people along the beach. My mother also swears it is the best way to get an even tan.
I walked down the street to another little roadside beach bar where the locals had pulled over their motorcycles to have a beer in the shade. I got another Crystal and kept walking.
I went to another couple of beach bars for more $0.40 beers in the shade. I fielded baseballs for the kids playing on the beach.
After what was probably 2 hours I came to a railroad bridge that was repurposed as a car bridge (a dirt road led up to it and people were just driving over the railroad ties). The bridge went over a freshwater stream that flushed out to the ocean. I waded into the blue water. It was cool and wonderful. Across the stream I saw an armed guard of the revolution. We chatted about the heat and he directed me to a nearby street in the little fishing village where they had a grocery store.
Most of Cuba is dry and treeless. It looks like they're trying to grow some of the trees back but it isn't lush like Puerto Rico. Most of it is covered in yellowing grass and I'm surprised it holds up that well. This means that when I was walking around the fishing village I wasn't fantasizing about how wonderful life could be if I just had a little shack down here on the water where I could relax and get writing done. It also means that the rainwater doesn't get absorbed by much and it washes a cloudy kind of silt into the ocean.
I turned around and realized that I couldn't even see far enough to where I had left Leigh. I went back.
When I got to the chairs I saw Leigh sleeping there and I realized that I had left my bag open. You could see my passport and money in there. There were a couple of times on the trip when I realized that I was in an obscenely safe place. I never felt threatened. I never worried about getting mugged. And I never worried about that boring kind of crime that happens in Latin America where shiny things that are left unattended seem to walk away.
Our hotel room had a safe in the closet where you pick your own code every time you lock it. I never once was convinced that I had it correct. I opened it today and found the last of my Mexican Pesos in there mixed in with some American money and the goddam Royal Bank of Scotland money that no one would fucking accept or convert.
I had about an American fifty and a twenty in there but I needed to save that for the airport tax ($25CUC/person to leave the country) and the twenty for the cab to the airport. I found our last $1400MXN pesos and converted it to $89.05CUC or $98USD after the fees. If I had converted $98USD to CUC they would have given me $79, which is complete bullshit. As it is I probably lost 8% converting to MXN and another 8% going to CUC, which is a currency (before fees) that is listed as $1USD=$1CUC. I would do anything to be able to do this trip all over again with a Canadian bank account. Then I could just pull out $100CUC and have it take out $120CA and deal with the goddam math problem like a democracy and not like a goddam trading post.
Anyway, I'm not really angry about this but I was very disappointed later on for another reason.
Anyway, at the weird hotel breakfast that they day served fresh cut fruit, silverdollar crepes, spaghetti alfredo, chopped hotdogs and water. The water was my favorite part. I made Leigh drink about nine glasses. Each one went down into the thirsty sponge of her soul.
She was very tired so I brought her back upstairs while I did my errands. I got a gigantic jug of water for $1CUC (very proud of myself) and when I went to the bank they had some exciting news: they would help me take out more money! Yay! Money! I was so excited because the trip was going fine but I really wanted to do something special.
I wanted to see the authentic Cabaret Parisien at The Tropicana. On the way back from the bank I surprised Leigh with a little taste of home. There was a guy selling Redbull on the edge of baseball park. It was $1.50CUC and I carried it home to her triumphantly.
I went downstairs to the door desk lady and I asked her if she would be able to book us two tickets to the Tropicana. She could! They had two levels of seating. One you sit in the back for $75/person, the other you get to sit up from for $85 and the last one you get to sit front row for $95, you get your own table, each of you get a bottle of Havana Club rum, a mixer, a cigar and after the show you get a souvenir photo of you with the dancers. Sign me up! She told me to come back at 1 when her credit card machine was working again.
Habana has 200 movie theaters. This is an insane number. However, most of the theaters are out in the 'hood. I asked at the desk of our hotel for directions to any nearby and she said that most of them were way out there. Cubans love movies, especially older movies. There are Buster Keaton film festivals and they love Charlie Chaplin. I was really excited about this, but since it was my first night I didn't exactly want to taxi out to Guantanamo just to see a talkie. Mostly I was worried I couldn't find a cab back.
I checked the movie listings and they looked like this:
4:15 Homemade Cuban Films Sponsored by the State. 6:30 Bullshit Romance That Would Be on Daytime TV Anywhere Else in Latin America 8:15 A Silver Print of the Last Film Imported Anterevolution. 8:30 Closed.
The movies in Habana were more of a populist escape. They were dark places of leather seats where teenagers could make out and men could smoke cigarettes. Above all they were cheap airconditioning. At the theater in the heart of what some would call a tourist trap the movies only cost $2CUC. The tickets were handwritten and on the back you were asked to rate the movie from 1-5 on your way out.
Like everything else the theater was a once grand affair. The curtain over the screens stayed closed until showtime, ushers in flashlights roamed the aisles, and the walls were covered in reliefs of Doric columns and statues of the nine muses (it looked like a Greek Restaurant). It had a beautiful lobby and a hanging marquee, but all of the concessions were farmed out to nearby vendors. Men and woman sat on the sidewalk selling small paper funnels of pop corn and candy.
We decided to just go see whatever movie was playing. I can't remember it very well now but I wrote down a summary of what I think was happening in my notebook:
A professora and a sleezy guy who drives a doorless open-top Jeep Wrangler have a weird relationship. Later through flashbacks we discover that Professora was drugged and passionately, sweatily raped by Wrangler. She's angry. Wrangler has a feisty dark-fro'd girlfriend who sees him talking to professora one day and she beat the living shit out of her for five minutes on screen through several market squares. The cuban men in the theater loved this and there was lots of scratching and tearing open of shirts, revealing bras. Later the professora sends a man (her brother? Husband?) to kill Wrangler (who otherwise comes off as a really nice guy). Feisty jumps in while Wrangler is bleeding on the floor and as Brother/husband raises his gun to finish him off the camera cuts away and you hear a single shot and the camera shows a single blackbird take off in flight. Later the two women meet up and express condolences. But then. Oh, then Feisty says something which is then revealed in a flashback: just as Wrangler was dying and Brother/Husband was about to finish him off, Feisty grabs Wrangler's gun and shoots B/H in the head. Wrangler takes the gun back and dies with it in his hands.
After the show we went back to the cafe from our first night. The waiter recognized us with a smile and he found us a little table where we could hear the jazz from the bar next door.
It being St. Patrick's day and all I greeted him with a big smile, "Hoy es mi Santo Dio, amigo."
"Felicidades, amigo," he put his pen and paper away and shook my hand. Your saint's day is the day of the year that the catholic church honors the saint you were named after. Saint Brendan's day is actually May 16, which is two days after my birthday and rather inconvenient. However, there is a celebration of St. Brendan discovering America (Columbus later followed this path and ended up in some place called Cuba) is March 22. Most latin cultures honor their saint's day by taking the day off from work and getting drunk. "Something something something celebrate?"
"Quiero un Yameson Irish Whisky sin helo, uno bucanero y uno mojito sin azucar para la muchacha." He dutifully brought me hefty shot of Jameson, a beer and a mojito without sugar for the maid (I keep fucking up that word).
We were getting hungry again and ordered a tuna sandwich (sandwich de atun--I love inside-out translations!).
After that we walked home arm and arm. Sometimes there's nothing more wonderful on a great trip than to share it with someone special from home. We were in love. We were full. We were having a wonderful Saint Patrick's day as we walked through the empty streets, passed the silent Baseball Park and through the lobby to our hotel.
All over Habana you get the sense that an alien force picked up one day and left, tossing the keys to the nearest schmo. You might take a walk and find yourself at a former jewelry store in the foyer of a once-grand casino, which is now a state-run grocery. It has gorgeous, chipped ceilings and all the light fixtures are retrofitted with florescent lights. The scant supplies (usually corn meal, beer, water, white bread and rice) are arranged in the display cases that once held Russian diamonds.
It's like getting breakfast to go at Tiffany's. Old tile signs advertise 50s era products in a country that only just imported bicycles in the 90s.
Hotpoint, the company that made your grandmother's iron, is still a hot property here in this pre-helvetica world.
Almost without exception there is no shopping. If you want a water or a beer or a cigar you select it from a glass case or point to it behind the counter and they give it to you once you've paid. This makes all commerce feel like you're in a bar.
I originally thought this would mean that there is very little street life or consumer culture but I was wrong. Between no-refrigeration and that untamable Caribbean attitude and the state forces of communism there is a vibrant street life. At 6PM everyday sugarcane workers come in from the hills and bring their harvest to the factories to get juiced. At the same time, locals line up outside the factory to get a fresh cup of sugarcane juice.
This, again, is an outdoor, over-the-counter affair. At most of the street stalls if you want a cup of orange drink or sugar cane juice you pay your $0.02, get a thick glass (which always looks homemade and has bubbles suspended in its thick, icy glass rim) and stand there and drink it until you're done. Then you return it and they wash it in the sink right in front of you.
Another weird thing was how sanitary everything was. Otherwise dirty local bars always had a bathroom attendant to give out toilet paper and soap. When you order a drink that comes with a slice of fruit or mint the bartender picks it up with tongs.
On our first full night in Habana we decided to eat like the locals. All of the hotels were overstuffed with fat German tourists and the ubiquitous long haired curly bleached blond Australians. We walked down Passeo de Marti, passed the dark, empty Capitolio in the waning orange of the sunset.
The only light on the streets then came from overhead windows and passing cars. Streetlights seem to be nonexistent, although most businesses that are open will have a bar florescent tube shining outside their doors. Some of the nicer hotels and bars have large glowing orbs that shine out to you in the night, giving you something to go by.
Everywhere around us there were people begging us to get in their taxi. In Habana a taxi might be a '57 Chevy Convertible. It might be a bicycle rickshaw. Most of the time it is a cramped 80s deathtrap like you see in Mexico. More than once we were offered rides in licensed taxis that earnestly expected you to get in a two-door Yugo by folding down the front passenger seat. Some taxis were the side-cars to early 70s motorcycles. Some were retrofitted 3-wheel Indian Vespas with two seats in back and a yellow canopy above.
None of these had a meter of any kind.
We walked down to Av Simon Bolivar and stood outside a sandwich shop looking at whatever they had. Leigh really wanted a diet coke to settle her stomach, so we made that the goal of the evening. At the first shop they didn't have her soda, but we were hungry and we ordered a bacalao sandwich (fried codfish). The sandwiches are always already made and wait at room temperature in glass cases until you order them. Then they take them out and put them in a Hotpoint Sandwich Press for maybe 40 seconds to toast the bread.
Then (remember sanitation) they pull it out and hand it to you in a thin napkin of what appears to be notebook paper. The bread is nice and toasty, the insides are whatever temperature the air was. I am honestly shocked that I didn't get sick from eating what is essentially a mayonnaise and cold fishstick sandwich.
We kept walking and got a Mayabe beer for $0.40 and drank it on the street.
Later we stopped again and ordered a Jamon Medianoche sandwich, which means "midnight ham" and it is what Cubans call a cuban sandwich. Ham, pork (rarely), pickles, cheese, mayonnaise. As we were standing there a guy at the fry station at the next window smiles happily, "Where you from?"
"Estados Unidos, amigo. Nueva York."
"Ay! De Bronx?"
"Brueklyn."
"Brooklyn!" he dons a Pacino accent, "Brooklyn como Beegy."
"Si, si, como Biggie Smalls."
"Quieres comer?"
I looked down at the spread. I have no idea what these things are. No idea. Maybe fried sausages? I politely said no and he said, "Quieres cigarro?"
"Si, amigo!" I thought maybe he had a few to sell. Maybe one of his brothers worked in a cigar factory. Improbably, he left his post, took off his apron and walked us down one of the dark streets. I balked a little, "We have the boarding passes for a movie theater in minute."
"Just watch, just look." he banged on the outside of a sheet metal gate. "Amigo?" and a tiny Being John Malcovich door opened. We entered a small cantina that was already being cleaned and closed for the night. "Quieres mojito or daiquiri. Sientense." he started tearing barstools off of the bar, spilling the canned beer I had walked in with. He apologized profusely and I just felt bad for interrupting this bar closing.
"No, no amigo."
He then introduced us to a friend of his and--would you believe it?--that friend of his has a brother who works at a cigar factory! He checked to see that the gate was down and unlocked a series of cabinet and pulled out boxes of cigars (which were, somehow, from all different factories). A fresh box of cuban cigars is a beautiful sight. The come wrapped and ready with a certificate of authenticity. But they are untransportable.
"Thank you, but it is not possible to smoke this many cigars in one week and I am Americans and cannot return home with them."
He figured it out right away and came back instead with a pack of Cohibas, which were the cigars that everyone begged me to bring them back. I bought two and they only cost me $2CUC. On the way out I palmed our new amigo a dollar.
About halfway through our first day I went off for a walk and I started noticing the different prices that places had posted. First of all let me add that for a third world country things are very exact. When they run out of a sandwich at a food cart they will take the placard off their sign. When you get a cup of shaved ice from a man on the street his cart has a hand painted sign that says, “355ml $1.”
Price controls are also heavily in effect. Certain things like water and canned beer are the same price in the grocery store as they are in a bar or restaurant.
I had heard about this dual economy and the introduction of the second currency, the convertible peso, is one of the biggest changes in Cuba since 2004. Before then the American dollar was everywhere and oftentimes more reliable than the local currency. But they still have their own Cuban Peso.
Confusingly both currencies are called “Peso.” Just to see what this was all about I went to the bank and converted $20USD to $1000Pesos, even though that money in the new currency only $16CUC.
It is very hard to find out who takes what. Especially since the prices are already very low and my Spanish was never ever good enough to be able to ask which currency they accepted. The only way I figured was that if I walked by a shop that had a $25.00 crappy jamon y queso sandwich then I might find something else cheap with the National Peso.
Thus you could walk around Baseball Park and get a slushy for $0.02. You could get an ice cream at one shop for that price but then at another you might pay $1CUC ($1.20USD) and both places would list the price as “$1.” Some would laugh at you if you asked them to accept the national currency. At a select few places you could get an ice cream for $1peso, pay for it with $1CUC and get $0.98peso back.
There is no telling how many things I bought that week for 50 times their face value. Either way it was not really a rip off, in my mind.
The problem was that with it being $0.35USD for Mayabe or Bucanero beer I spent the whole week trying to get rid of that goddam $20USD worth of National Pesos.
The walk and the tour and the cruel sun were starting to weigh down on us and I knew we needed to go somewhere and sit down. I had read about a restaurant down the street called Floridita and I saw its blacked out neon sign on our walk the night before. What a fucking treat.
It has darkened windows and a doorman who actually mans the door. Not for checking IDs or maintaining a guest list but to seal in the airconditioning. There are about twenty seats at the bar and at the very end, where Hemingway used to sit and work in his notebook is (no joke) a lifesized bronze bust of Papa Hemingway. It’s life like and adorable. Hemingway is like the Elvis of Cuba.
The menu is simple. By Cuban standards it is expensive (the “Papa Hemingway Daiquiri” is $6) but even by LES standards that’s fair. They give you a plate of homemade potato chips and you can smoke a cigar and listen to the five piece band play there for lunch or dinner. In the back is a fancy version of the restaurant with beautiful leather banquettes and crisp white tablecloths where waiters who probably have names like “Ignacio” serve lobster for insane prices, like $20.
Next door is a very well known cigar shop. But if you’re really looking for cigars, my friend, the bartender has a brother who works in a cigar factory…
The first semi-touristy thing we did after the shave was go tour El Capitolio. I first heard about El Capitolio back when I was researching my failed Castro’s 80th birthday story. When he got sick later that week I saw an amazing piece about it on CNN and I knew I had to go see it.
In 1929 the dictator Gerardo Machado commissioned it to be made as a competitive likeness to the Capitol Building in D.C. It was the seat of the legislature until Castro took over and inside is still a completely empty room that looks eerily like the one you see on CSPAN.
Everything about this grand building stinks of “future former empire.” The 55 steps to the entrance are lined with Italian sculptures. This building is 80 years old and was used for barely 30. In the front room is the 50 foot tall Estatua de la Repulica. It is done over in gold leaf and weighs 1 ton per foot.
It is unbelievably beautiful if you like decay and falling powers. It is designed like Grand Central to be stunning but with the changes of fortune each hall is lit by a grand light fixture of a few, bare, mismatched compact florescent bulbs. The windows stay open in most rooms for ventilation and light. 80 years ago artisans hand painted the walls with the values of the republic (“Historia” “Ciencias” "Letras" “Etc”) and now they are bleached from the sun and chipping off from the humidity.
At the foot of the steps were a couple of guys selling black and white souvenir photos from a Polaroid camera made in 1925 (that’s older than the building!) I went up to one of these guys and he asked me where I was from.
“New Jork! So’s this!” He pointed to his old, taped together camera on the wooden tripod. “Rhachaster.”
“Rochester, NY?”
“Si! Si!” He was very excited to take our picture sitting on the steps and he shooed away an old Cuban lady so we could sit in his sweet spot. He took our picture first and we had to hold very still, even in the bright Caribbean sunlight. He put his head under the taped-on blankets and focused the shot. “One, two, tres!”
Something clicked. He fuddled around with the camera, placing different boards in front of the lens and exposing the film again. He dipped it into some chemical in a water pitcher tied to the wooden tripod leg. He gave me the negative as well as a hand cut 3x5 of us sitting on the steps of the Capitolio (wicked out of focus) with another picture above us of what the Capitolio looks like atop the steps. It’s a wonderful little souvenir.
In the morning I struck out on an adventure walk. One of my favorite things in traveling is to watch a city wake up for the day. I like seeing busses full of tired souls. I like watching the greengrocers arrange their oranges for the day as the waiters next door wipe down their tables.
Anyone can go to a strange city and eat fancy dinners and go dancing, but this is the few hours where you really get the sense of what life must be like here. I had the end of last night’s cigar in my mouth and every few blocks someone would stop me, “You like cigar?”
“My friend, you like cigar?” “My brother work at cigar factory. I give you good price.”
I walked back through Baseball Park and listened to the men flail the sports page of the national newspaper in each other’s faces.
Leigh and I met up for the free included breakfast. Sometimes you go somewhere and they give you toast and eggs. One time I stayed in a hostel in London and your bunk included a bowl of Wheaties. I’ve also stayed in a wonderful B&B in Rincon, PR where they served you fresh fruit and a full breakfast on the patio by the pool. One time in Ireland Pete and I snuck into another hotel for Irish Breakfast, which is an orgy of meats and sausages and baked beans.
At the Hotel Telegrafo in Havana breakfast includes sliced toasted government bread, silver dollar crepes, spaghetti and sausage (?), grapefruit, honeydew, chopped hotdogs, mystery sausage, and eggs cooked anyway you like them. It is served in the cavernous two-story dining room that once housed a full casino.
After breakfast we walked down San Raphael to a barbershop we’d seen on the walk last night.
I forgot to mention this before but in preparation for Cuba I grew a mustache. (My thinking was that if girls get a Brazilian before going to the beach then I should grow one). This is my first mustache. I actually had no idea that it would come in red and blond.
I walked in and immediately forgot the verb forms I would need to get a woman in the barber shop to hold a blade to my face and not kill me. The woman, Sule, understood and through a series of hand motions and essentially fingerpainting in shaving cream my expected sideburn, mustache, Erol Flynn patch, etc she got the point.
The entire salon tittered at the sight of me. She gave me a good trim and I was pleased to see that even a professional had to go over my boney jaw twice to get all the stragglers out of the corners. Then she said she wanted to trim the hair around my ears to clean up my sideburns. Then she said she wanted to trim all the way around my ears and trim my neck too.
She grabbed ahold of my long, ratty Mohawk, “This too, right? I cut this shit off?”
“No thank you.”
“Are you sure? Seriously. This is disgusting.”
“I’m from Brooklyn. It’s totally okay to look dirty if you’re white.”
“Que ridiculo!” And so it went for about fifteen minutes. Hot towel, hot soap, lather, shave, trim, hot towel, aftershave, talcum brush, electric mustache trim, sideburn tailoring, symmetry adjustments, hot towel, neck shave, mullet trim, head massage (manual and electric) and neck rub.
I went up to the front desk to pay. The price they asked me was $6CUC, I went back to Sule before I paid and quietly slipped a $1 coin in her hand. When I came back to the desk the price had changed. Now they only wanted $5CUC.
This would continue to be one of the great mysteries of the trip. Were we getting better service because we tipped? Had they included gratuity and then cancelled it because they saw me tip her? Had they seen me give her the dollar and did they expect her to turn it in?
At 11:55 we arrived in Havana. Through the magic of airtravel we flew back in time for a full beach day and then appeared just before midnight in Havana, which is the same timezone as New York. This was a very long day if you think about it, and I tried not to think about it. I was up before 6AM, confused and scrambling, I drained my phone battery trying to resuscitate the trip. But we did it!
We touched down in Havana. Customs welcomed us both to the city and they didn’t stamp our passports. At the currency exchange I converted my Mexican Pesos for $177CUC, which is a Cuban currency that is tied to the American dollar, although they charge you a high rate to convert it (it's a standard 8% to convert other currencies and 20% to convert American dollars to a currency that is worth the same as American dollars.)
We were approached by a “taxidriver” and he said he would take us to Old Havana for $30. This sounded right, but it turned out he was one of those airport barnacles that just hangs on to legitimate businesses, helping people out and politely demanding tips from tourists who have just converted their money into big bills. I gave him $3CUC to walk us through the automatic door and knock on the window of an awaiting taxi.
Havana was dark already. The highways and roads have blacked out streetlamps, full of houses with closed shutters. Horses pulled carts that had repurposed tractor trailer tires for wheels. The magneto powered lights of the motorcycles around us dimmed as their idle-screws wade through traffic jams.
I cannot believe we made it.
I was just so happy, so thrilled to look out onto the dark island that I’ve been reading about all these years.
The cab driver dropped us off in front of a brilliant caribbean blue hotel on the corner of Parque Centrale. It was the first one in Havana to be restored to its original splendor and a before and after picture of it graces the cover of a Cuban book called “Lest We Forget” about the revitalization of Havana.
The whole hotel is run by a very friendly bunch of tuxedoed Cubans. Miraculously, they didn’t give our room away even though it was technically the next business day. We went upstairs, put our shit down and I opened the door to the ironwork balcony. To my right was Parque Centrale. To my left was the Caribbean.
Whenever I get to a new place I just can’t wait to explore it. So I take a walk. This walk usually gives me the complete wrong impression, but it’s usually the first thing I look back on and laugh. This was no exception.
We took a left out the hotel door to find someplace to eat. The city was dark and shuttered but the first people we saw were a group of teenagers who said in English, “Hello! Where you from?”
“Nueva York,” I replied.
“You looking for some place for nice restaurant? Get a drink? Salsa dancing?”
“No thank you.” And that was the end of it. This was the first of many times this would happen. The guidebooks say that these people get a commission from restaurants and bars for taking you there, but I think that any decent person would be willing to give a dollar to a nice local who safely delivered them to a bar in a strange land. We walked away from them into the dark, smelly streets. In the morning I would discover that we had stepped into the alleyway on trash day. Live and learn.
Even in Havana Vieja the streets are neither commercial nor residential. They are just urban. Fancy tourist restaurants will be on the bottom floor and a civil service uniform will hang next to tiny little baby dresses on a clothesline upstairs.
We arrived at a little café down the street and I ordered a daiquiri and a mojito without sugar for Leigh.
Language note: Cubans speak impeccable Spanish. Most of the ones I met and conversed with are like the Kansas, accentless, Tom Brokaws of the language. They don’t have that gay hiss like Barcelonans, they don’t hammer their T’s into blunt D’s like Puerto Ricans. You could read a sentence out of a guidebook phonetically and never have any trouble. This was convenient for me because I speak an obscure dialect called “Kitchen Spanish” which means I surprised myself at how adept I am at ordering drinks, asking about food, and telling people to get out of my way. However, I cannot understand street directions and I forget numbers very easily. I also became known as “El Gallo” around the hotel because although I spoke like a migrant laborer I had a series of idiomatic expressions including, “El gallo tiene que cantar bien tempranito.” (As in, “I’d like to have another drink, but could you just bring us the check? This rooster has to crow good and early tomorrow.”)
At that café I asked the waiter if they sell cigars. No, my friend. No. And he looked kind of insulted. I immediately realized that this was one of those things that I would just have to understand. People come into my bars all the time asking if we sell cigars or cigarettes and I treat them like you would treat anyone who treats you like a convenience store clerk.
I paid the check at the waiter brought me my change. A $5CUC bill. I asked him to change it out for me and (I was trained in this) when no one was looking I put a $1 coin discreetly in his palm and said thank you very much. His eyes lit up. He smiled. That is the amount that a sugarcane fieldhand makes in a month. “Tomorrow,” he said. “You come back tomorrow.”
We went to the hotel bar after and ordered more of the same drinks. The entire staff of the hotel was crowded around a television watching a Cuban National Television broadcast of that day’s baseball game.
I didn’t know this before leaving but Cubans are fanatical about baseball. Nothing else is that important to them. I think when Castro gives his stirring speeches about those evil “Yanquis” he’s actually talking about the over-paid Yankees. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have been completely avoided if JFK weren’t such a Red Socks fan. There’s a corner of Parque Centrale called “Baseball Park” which is not a diamond, but a place where men go to meet other men and yell about which team is a bunch of pussies.
At the hotel I went up to the front desk and asked the clerk if there was anywhere to buy a cigar. He told me to hang on and after conversing with one of the other employees he found me a delicious aluminum tube which unscrewed to reveal a gorgeous, genuine Cuban cigar. “I only have one,” He said.
“That’s fine. I only need one.” I sat in the hotel bar with this cigar, enjoying my life.
Another hotel employee came up to me, “You like cigar.”
“It’s actually just okay.”
“If you want, I have a brother. He works down at the Romeo Y Julieta cigar factory. I can get you good price.”
At about five we hailed another cab and headed back to the airport I got out and, without asking the fare, handed the guy 200pesos and $10USD. There is a steep learning curve on these trips. That turned out to be 342pesos, which to me seemed like a steal and to him seemed like he was driving an American moron to the airport. (I was mistakenly thinking that pesos were 10-1 when instead people were willing to take American money 10-1. 10pesos is actually $0.71. I should also point out that the original cab ride, which I insisted on paying in American dollars, was “500pesos or $50” yet 500pesos is only $35; I paid $50, which is 709pesos plus that stupid tip which brought it to 909pesos or $64. I had bargained my way into paying $4 more for a rip off cab ride.)
We triumphantly went up to the check-in desk and I, in my best schoolboy Spanish, told the man that we would like to have our boarding passes for Havana.
“Just give me your visas and passports.”
My heart sunk. My sunburned brain couldn’t figure out where this had gone wrong. Visas? Didn’t they just give them to you? I didn’t have the tickets. I had changed them via phone today.
“We don’t have them.”
“You must have them.”
“We can’t get them. We are Americans.”
He gave me that look that should follow any single use of the above phrase. Who gives a shit? I then said something in Spanish that probably sounded like, “May I please where can I go to have tickets?”
He pointed to the ticket agent on the other side of the airport. Calm down, Brendan. You’re in a second world country that still does things like sell tickets at the aiport. People here probably go into the back to take out money and do other absurd, quaint, non-New York things with their time. Breathe, Sullivan, breathe. You’re not screwed out of your trip. You’re just stupid.
At the ticket desk we were the only people still having a good time. However, everyone else’s travel woes were crowding us. A group of sunburnt Americans behind us were cursing the boarder agent who demanded a bribe of $50 each to not stamp their passports. The guy in front of us was crying on the phone because he had lost his passport, tickets and wallet and was stranded in Mexico.
I’ll make the next part go quickly: because I changed the tickets day-of there was a fee, although not as big of a fee as I was told over the phone. It would be $111.87 to switch us to the later flight. They would give us visas for a measly $15 each. A $142 unscheduled dollars later and I was back at the same gate I had sat outside of only seven hours before.
In the airport I shopped around the pharmacy for all the medicines my poor uninsured ass can’t afford. I got Claritin for a ridiculously low price. Then I was asked to leave when I asked about Oxycotin.
When I got to Cancun airport it was exactly the time that I had booked to fly to Havana. Our arrival gate was the one next to the Havana departure gate. There was a 1:15 coming in from Mexico City on Mexicana Airlines. I stood patiently outside the gate and begged the guy to let me on. I pleaded with him in my present-tense Spanish. I said our flight was delayed and we were connecting and could he please let us on the plane?
“If you land in Mexico you have to go through Mexican customs. If you can do that in the next twenty-five minutes I will get you on this plane.”
This turned out to be one of those hilarious second-world bureaucracy jokes. I stepped into the back of a never-ending line. He went to Havana without us.
There was just not enough time to go through this line, prove we weren’t carrying any livestock, get out of the airport, check-in, go through security again and make it back to the international terminal.
Part of why I was so upset is because I value my propensity for enjoyment. I don’t have children, I’m not married, I don’t have a mortgage. I should be having fun. I should be having this kind of fun. I should be having so much fun that it will tide me over when I’m older and frustrated and getting fat like Uncle RJ.
Somewhere between the terminal and customs we made up. I’ll never know what she was upset about and I’ve been informed that it’s not important. I honestly really did not care. If you’re upset about something that is going on in New York then please, by all means, stay in New York and be idly upset about it. But if you’re going to Cancun at least find things there to get upset about.
We struck a deal. We’ll forget the whole thing AND we’ll beat this stupid system. Cancun is on Mountain time, meaning that it was still morning when we arrived. Instead of getting to Havana in the late afternoon or midnight and missing a beach day we’ll just have one here.
We walked out of the airport, all customed and with all our baggage and took a cab to the beach.
This immediately changed the tempo of the trip. Havana is a forbidden place. Cancun is an American shithole sponsored by the Jimmy Buffet restaurant chains. It is loud and crowded and full of T-shirts which exclaim the virtues of partying in the manner of the person wearing them.
I figured this out in the cab within five seconds. “Can you take us to the beach?”
“Which beach?”
“Any beach. We have six hours in Cancun and we just want to go to the beach.”
The two guys in the taxi dispatch looked at each other and one said, “Did they tell you the price?” No. “It’s, uh. $60 or 600pesos.”
I could tell that this was their little arrangement. I should’ve asked before. But instead I just said, “Can you make it 400?” They agreed so fast that I knew I should’ve gone lower.
The driver (who first of all speaks better English than cab drivers in New York) took us on a long journey through Cancun. We went past all the Chilis and TGIFridays and the rest of the Times Square bullshit. We passed plenty of beaches on the way, but I rather enjoyed the car ride and if he took us to a central beach I wouldn’t be worried about catching a cab back. I tipped him 200pesos, not knowing that that was about $20 (it was the smallest bill I had).
He dropped us off at a taxi stand and told us to get back there by five and he’d pick us up (yeah, right). There was a poster with a list of flat-fare prices. The airport is 250pesos, which turns out is something more like $17.
But, again, I must say that I am committed to having a good time. I rolled up my jeans and took off my shoes. I walked along the beautiful beaches with their calm waves of gin bottle blue water.
We found a nearby beach club called The City, which looked like some of the places in Miami. It had a pool with chaise lounges and towel-covered beds you could rent. It was 100pesos each to get in and I paid it gladly. We ordered a sandwich and laid out by the pool.
In most of Latin America they still have original formula Cocacola, which is made without corn syrup. It is delicious and I had maybe three of them. They charged us another 200pesos to take one of the sunbeds (all the chairs were taken anyway so there’s another $14) and again I paid it gladly.
On the beach there were women carrying milkcrates full of cut mango for sale and children played in the waves. There are worse places to be in this world.
For once, though, I had a little time to enjoy myself before my trip to Havana. I had my first Sunday off since the Bush administration. I went to the Eugene Mirman comedy show and saw friends I hadn’t hung out with or seen perform in a while. Afterwards Leila came by and we caught up and I told her about the young adult novel I’m working on.
She had just come back from Kentucky, which is my spiritual home.
When I got home Leigh had just gotten out of work and waiting at my door. She was tired and wanted to go to bed. Something was wrong. I couldn’t tell what. I never can. Sometimes something is very wrong and sometimes people just need to go to sleep. But I was in my pre-vacation high. The next day I would be in Havana.
I went to bed sipping whiskey and watching documentaries about Cuba. Leigh set her alarm and I decided to get a few hours of sleep before I had to get back up at 4:00 AM to catch my 7:25 to Cancun.
I awoke at 5:45. I was alone. I had no idea what was going on. I am never more inept then when waking up for an unscheduled reason. Why am I awake? Where is Leigh? What was I supposed to be doing today?
It hit me all at once that I was screwing something up. I opened Skype and called Leigh, “Where are you?”
“I’m not going.”
“Just meet me at the airport.”
“I. Am. Not. Going.”
I hung up, grabbed my backpack and guidebook and I hopped in a cab. It didn’t occur to me that I had no hope of making an international flight in 45 minutes. There are some people who crawl out of the ocean of sleep like shipwrecked sailors. Others come up triumphantly as if they been swimming laps. Today I awoke like one who had slipped off a bridge and resurfaced only to spend the rest of the day shivering and cursing.
I called JetBlue and told them I was going to miss my flight. They were very nice about it and only charged me $40. “Do you want to change the other reservation?”
“No. I have to cancel it.”
“You understand that it’s non refundable?”
I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry in my entire life. I’ve been beaten, I’ve been mugged, I’ve been cheated on and hit by a car. But this just infuriated me. I hated this feeling. It’s not like me to be this upset or to be in this situation. It wouldn’t go away.
I took a deep breath and tried to tell myself that I would go to Havana alone. I would drink coffee and read books and listen to music. I would play on the beach and it would be a little vacation and I would return and I wouldn’t ever feel this angry again. I was yoga-breathing in the cab as I called long-distance to Mexico to change my connecting flight to Havana.
And then I realized that I couldn’t take it anymore. I called my brother who is married with two kids and has had to keep his cool under many levels of frustration in his life. “I’m going to kill her,” I said. “I’m going to get her to Havana somehow and I’m going to rent and El Camino and I’m going to drive it off a fucking bridge and claim amnesia.”
“Now you’re thinking like a Kennedy,” my brother laughed.
“I can’t stand this. I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry at anyone in my entire life.”
“Are you going to go anyway?”
“Yes. My flight doesn’t get in until midnight and they won’t refund anything so I’m losing a day and I have to find my way to my hotel in a third world capital in the dark.”
He laughed. The great thing about having a brother is you always have someone you can complain to. After growing up so competitive it’s a wonderful thing to just trade, “I’m broke.” “My credit card got declined for an iTunes single.” “They repoed my car.” “I might move in with Mom and Dad.” “I’m getting fat like Uncle RJ.”
He calmed me down enough and I called Leigh back and said we could get on the 9:55 and still make it. She met me at the airport. We both stood there and watched our original flight take off for Cancun and had to wait in Terminal 5 for the rest of the morning.
This is the second time this year that someone has misdialed me about this.
Voicemail box. A drunk girl calls me. Message 1:
"Yo, boo, it's Tamesha AKA T-Dog in the house! Listen, I got some bad news fo' ya, baby. I got my test results back...and...uh, I got this shit called gonorrhea? It ain't good, baby. You gotta take these pills fo' like a fucken week and shit. But everything's okay after that. I just wanna let you know because, y'know, we be all up in the business in the crib and the bed. Bumpin' and grindin' to the breaka dawn. And, listen, I dunno. You be up in my coochie and shit and... I dunno. This fucken... this fucken shit be crazy. Listen. You take these pills and you be okay. I just wanna let you know because, y'know, I care about you. What we had was special and shit. For a white boy you be white chocolate smooth. Alright, kisses from Tameshi. Love you, baby. Bye bye. Love you long time."
Luckily? Wrong number.
I called back because, hey, someone out there fucked this girl after she fucked Oliver Twist and that guy deserves to know. I left a message with my best British-educated diction, "Good afternoon, Tamesha, I just received your message from Saturday night at 11:40 PM concerning gonorrhea. I just wanted to let you know that you dialed the wrong number. Okay? Thanks, love you long time?
Quick note: for all my sins I can't really think of anything I've ever truly been addicted to before. I like to drink and do it every single day. I smoke, but only when I've had a few in me. Sometimes I get home and I simply must hear "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" within minutes.*
However, last week I went to the cigar shop so that I won't look like an ass when I try to smoke cigars in Havana (I am the kind of person who would smoke it backwards if you didn't tell me otherwise). And I can't get enough of them. Cigars are sublime. They're one of those things like sky-cap luggage check in and valet parking: they're not just for assholes.
Cigars are all the great parts of cigarettes (little buzz, thought clarity, thinking you look like James Dean) without the lung part. Also you can smoke a cigar, leave it to burn out in your ashtray and come back to it later (for no apparent reason this is disgusting with cigarettes). When you leave it in your mouth it leaves a delicious taste and makes your lips comfortably numb.
Also, second-hand cigar smoke is often pleasant smelling. Cigarette smoke is always gross. When people smoke cigarettes in front of me at my bar I put them out on their faces**. But when people smoke cigars I don't really mind it. In fact, it already reminds me of Havana and I haven't even been there yet.
Bad cigars, however, smell like someone has lit their armpits on fire. But if you're outdoors and someone has a cigar going it's kind of a nice smell. There are worse smells in this city, especially for someone who lives between Flatbush and Chinatown.
You can really only smoke cigars when you're enjoying yourself. It's not like a cigarette that you sneak at work. You also fundamentally need it to be nice weather. The other day on my way home from work I had realized, delightfully, that I had some cigar left in my ashtray! I came home, poured myself a glass of Evan Williams, opened all the windows and sat in my chair reading. I was very happy.
At 4:32 AM I got a text from a roommate:
Dudes, the house is stunk of cigarette smoke that last two nights that I've come home and I just now woke up because it wreaks in here. Please take it outside.
I just woke up from another 13-hour day at work. I spilled whiskey on my sheets somehow in the night. I'm tired. I have a minor headache. My girlfriend is at work which means--Manhattan Horror!--I have no one to get brunch with.
But then I looked over at my ashtray and thought how delicious a cigar would be for breakfast.
*Ha! I really have a problem with this song. Just typing the title sent me directly to iTunes and now I'm sitting at home alone blaring it in my headphones.
**For the sake of parallelism and parity of plurals, please imagine me confronting two assholes, pulling their cigarettes from their hands and stubbing them out on both their faces. I am ambidextrous.
So, before I begin my series of essays assailing capitalism and describing the wonders of cuba: one more awful, awful sexist rant.
My favorite thing about Amy, when we were together, is that she would always admit when she's had been a crazy bitch. We'd be out in some pub and she'd have too much to drink and she'd go off on me. I'd like to pretend that this isn't a women thing, but it really is. I've never once been out with a guy and had him bring up off-topic shit just because he got drunk.
The worst part is that there's pretty much no way for guys to know when this is about to happen. The only way to be safe would to become one of those neutered couples who never have fun and spend their whole time gauging when the other might want to go home. I see these people out all of the time. Some of them are my best friends and they speak in that annoying couples-language where you have no idea what they're saying but minutes after you guys plan to do something they change their minds and go home at 10:30.
Amy and I used to fight, loudly and publicly and there was no way to control her. We'd be out and all the sudden she'd decide it's time for Amy to make a scene. By the time you've figured out that she's gone over the crazy-bitch edge it's too late. ("You wanna go home, baby?" "Why? So you can pass out while we're fucking again?")
This is terrible, but I'm tired enough to admit it: I'd rather date the crazy bitch who freaks out in public and apologizes the next day than date a girl who's just unstable.
Amy would wake up the next day, rub her eyes, immediately remember what terrible thing she'd done and then go make us coffee and think of things she could do to make it up to me. Me? I really didn't care and I'm such a whipped guy in general that I usually think it's my fault.
The other option is to date someone like Annie who thinks it's fundamentally your fault that she's tired. Pretty much any activity that involved waiting in like (snorkeling, ice skating, seeing Bloc Party) tired this girl out and offended her god-given right to do things. By the time we got through the hour and a half line she would ice skate or put on the flippers and then immediately decide she'd had enough. It drove me crazy.
Dating a girl like that suddenly turns me into Dad. I find myself saying shit like, "You should've thought of that before we left the house." Or. "We have a plan to stick to."
However, I have never, ever once met a single girl who could handle her shit when she's having her period. Not one. It's a terrible thing to think of yourself as a sensitive guy and be dating a girl who hates your fucking face once a month. The worst part is that right at the moment when you'd be upset with the way she's treating you, you can't really say, "Aw, you're just having your period. Calm down." That only makes things worse.
What's so wrong with saying, "Honey, jokes aren't funny to me right now. I'm bleeding in my pants?" That makes perfect sense.
I completely understand what a crappy time of the month that must be. I can't really think of anything more fundamentally unpleasant. There's a new book out about periods and the New York Times review is entitled "There Will Be Blood."
And that's all I'm saying. There will be blood, there will be fights and there will be drunken accusation of premature ejaculations, but so what? There are worse things in the world.
Preamble: One year my mother thought it would be fun to spend a summer vacation with my half-English cousins. Every summer of my life my brother and I would go visit my grandparents in the little-finger of Michigan just across Good Harbor Bay from the port of Leeland.
I can’t remember what year this was but I do have a very distinct memory of watching the funny ways that my Halfling cousins behaved. My brother and I took this 18-hour car trip together every year since we were in utero. We looked forward to playing in the woods and snorkeling in the lake, finding pieces of shipwrecked Canadian rumrunners from prohibition.
The biggest impression I have about the Halflings was how big of a deal everything had to be. It was as if to celebrate the decision to cook dinner or go swimming could not be consummated until every family member made a big deal about something. My auntie took this in stride. “Of course you have to fight. You have to have the night-before-you-leave-fight. You have to have the packing-the-car-fight.”
I couldn’t believe this. I was offended, downright offended that anyone could spend a single second of unhappiness when they were lucky enough to get invited to Good Harbor for a week. If you were homeless in Detroit for 51 weeks out of the year, but you spent one with my gramparents: you should be happy. My grandfather had seven bird feeders, a rowboat, snorkeling masks, five fishing poles. At night you could open your windows and fall asleep to the three-foot waves that came to shore from passing tanker wakes. Gramma had a hot cocoa machine.
Since then I have never felt anything but unending joy when it comes to planning a trip. In fact, I have made a point to feel extra joy in the planning. I love, absolutely love, going on the pre-trip book shopping trip. Is there anything greater than dreaming about the places you’ll go before you’ve gone there, gotten sunburnt, gotten lost, gotten arrested, got in trouble?
This means that if you go on a trip with me I immediately become everybody’s Dad. There is no dawdling, no screwing around, if you want to enjoy yourself and relax you better keep up. I’ve got three guidebooks of dog-eared pages of plans.
Also, because of my adherence to Vacation Diet, I have to admit that I’m not very much fun before the trip. I don’t go out, I work insane hours, I don’t eat, I barely drink. Sometimes I sell all my shit just to make sure I’ll have enough money for the trip. This means I spend the day before dealing with assholes on craigslist.
I think this started to wear on my girlfriend because right before the trip she started to get testy. I have to admit that the most chauvinist I ever get is right after I’ve paid for something. I’m a thoughtful listener in bed and over coffee and in car rides. But if I pick up the check I expect you to put out. Put out any evil thoughts you have about what a jackass I am and just say something nice about the food.
In general I get kind of sick of my own projects. When someone else makes something it's hard to tell what's wrong with it or what could've been done better. For this reason I love hearing pretty much any remix and hate my own. But. I thought of this at work last week and finally got around to making it. Enjoy!
I just spent a few hours working on a video and the goddam youtube overlords rejected it:
Your video, Obamahna mahna, may have audio content from Mahna Mahna by The Muppets featuring Mahna Mahna & The Two Snowths that is owned or licensed by WMG. As a result, your video is blocked worldwid
In some ways it really feels like I've been waiting for this trip my entire adult life. Senior year of college we took a trip to Key West and went to Hemingway's old place there. In Key West there is a fishing rod store that has Papa Hemingway's old boat. You can climb a ladder and walk into it, even go below decks. There is his desk and typewriter.
At the time I was very poor. I had spent my tax return on the down payment for my future apartment in Chicago and the restaurant I worked in had closed, suddenly. I was poor (HOW POOR WERE YOU, BRENDAN?) I was so poor that I volunteered to be the designated driver on St. Patrick's Day in Key West. I ate peanut butter sandwiches and had a great time.
I was on this trip with my ex girlfriend, my ex F buddy, and various other college romance partners. There was a guy on this trip who was a very good friend of mine and roommate for many years, including senior year when he boinked my girlfriend. He was also and England Major and a one-time aspiring writer.
I believed in my hear that if I ever sat down at Hemingway's desk that I would be eternally cursed. I would never write again. There is a difference between scholarship and wannabe-ism. All world religions have gods that smile on hard work and curse imitators. I turned to this fake awful friend of mine and said, "Wow, that's it. That's right where Hem sat and pounded out The Old Man and the Sea with his two hardworking fingers."*
"Amazing."
"Want me to take a picture of you sitting in his chair?"
"Would you?"
"Absolutely!"
A year later I took a trip to Vieques, Puerto Rico with a girlfriend. Actually, I had a good job for once and I save up my money and bought us both plane tickets and a very nice hotel. And then I got fired for mouthing off. I spent the week before departure filling in shifts at a club downtown for no money. And everywhere I went I tried to get a true Hemingway Daiquiri.
1 1/2 oz Light rum
1/4 oz Maraschino liqueur
3/4 oz Lime juice
1/4 oz Grapefruit juice
Pretty much no one made one, but in PR most rum drinks are $2 anyway so who the fuck cares?
Another year later I went to Rincon, PR and tried again. This time I was on the West Coast in a fun little surf town. I only went because Jet Blue had a $99 flight.
They still couldn't make the drink. One place gave it to me with Rose's lime and canned grapefruit.
For a while this drink became quite trendy in NY when classic cocktails were cool. But no one--no one--in NY makes it right. At La Floridita, the bar where Hemingway and his friends perfected the recipe in Havana they make it with a blender. You're just as likely to see a blender in a bar in NY as you are to see a working video poker machine.
I sent another email to Esquire yesterday
Thanks Brendan, but I’m going to pass on this. Best of luck.
Ryan
And then, just to be sure, I got the another editor's email address from a friend of mine who works for a [adjective] Traveler Magazine. I cannot believe this worked. But within hours of writing and with just a few days before my trip he wrote back:
Hi Brendan,
Yes, please do a [Magazine demographic-specific Report] in Havana for [us]. It should be about [X] in length, and we pay 50 cents a word. Due March 31. Thanks.
Best,
So while this country is going to hell and the magazine industry is in the field covering that story I am going to get paid for my trip. It's not alot. But this is a magazine that cannot pay for articles like this that they might want.
I'm wicked excited.
*Just as I think it's important to know that Homer wrote with dictation, I think it's important that something as secretarial as typing was too-gay for Hemingway to learn. Imagine all that sparse, beautiful prose he wrote. Most of it was predicated on him saying, "Goddamit. Where's the question mark? Okay it's SHIFT and
The thing about committing to Vacation Diet is that you have to let it become part goal and part reward. Right now I have a pinched nerve in my back. It hurts like a bastard and if you stand on my right side and ask me a question you will only get a vague rightward scowl.
I'd like to get it looked at, but I have no health insurance. I'd like to maybe go to the bath house and work it out or get a massage in Chinatown. But instead I'm going to hold on and hope someone can give me one in Cuba, where the warm weather and the ocean might help me out as well.
The last thing I'm going to say about the sailors over at The Ear Inn is this. At the end of the night I left $30 in tips to the bartender who gave me all the good info. And the guy who had his honeymoon there four years ago said this:
"It's not technically illegal to fly into Havana and stand in the streets, walk back to the airport and fly home. It's only a Treasury Department law that prohibits you from spending money while you're there. Could they nab you for it when you get back into JFK? Yes. Could you spend a night or two in jail? Yes. Could they try and make you pay a very big fine? Yes. But if you get to go to Havana and have a Daquiri and a cup of coffee and see the wonderful people and walk around in a city that is very, very happily stuck in time: it's all worth it."
Five minutes after I left the bank, cursing I walked to Trader Joe's. When I have exciting news I am like a four-year-old about it. I want to walk up to everyone and shout, "I'm going on vacation!"
I hated the idea of paying for my own money but then I thought about it. If I bring dollars to Cuba they charge 10% to convert them into another currency which is locked to the dollar called the "pesos convertible." The prices in all the touristy areas are in these. You basically have to pay 10% to possess the same amount of money in dollars. Meaning every $20 hotel costs you something like $22.
But if you bring with you Canadian or British currency they will just exchange it for you. I thought about my paper trails and I would much rather have the big strong, thick headed British pound with me.
I looked in my desk and I found a Royal Bank of Scotland £10 note and another £5 from when I was in England in 1997. So I guess I'll take these little souvenirs with me and stop bitching about the cost of fees.
Since I'm still a small-town guy at heart I am very specific about the places I run errands. I go to the Target Pharmacy where half of Brooklyn is bleeding and sassing the counter girls and you see me coming down the aisle, "Hola Maria! Donde esta Lily?"
"Lily esta enferma."
"You know she's fucken faking it."
"She always does that." In New York it is common and also kind of fun to carry on a conversation in two languages. It usually comes across like Hon Solo communicating with a Wookie. (Me to a Mexican barback: "Tienes javes?" Mexican barback to me: "Keys are in the office." Me: "The fucken get'em."
If Maria passes me off onto one of the new girls I like to really freak them out. "You picking up?"
"No, I just need some allergy meds."
"Which kind?"
"Doesn't matter."
"You want Claritin or Target brand?"
Then I shout, "Whichever one I can make chrystal meth out of." And no one tries to cut me in line anymore.
But today I went to the bank. I hate the fucking bank. I have a tiny HSBC office next to the Radio Shack and right by the Vitamin Shoppe and probably another store that shouldn't fucking exist in the twenty-first century. But, I do know all the people there. "I need to speak with Beatrice."
"She's with a customer."
"What about Ahmed?"
"Ahmed quit."
"What? What the fuck?"
"I know, right?"
I deposited my money and then I said I needed to get Canadian dollars for my trip. And they said, "We don't do that anymore."
"What?"
"You gonna have to go to the desk and have them order it."
I go back to the receptionist. "I need you to order Canadian dollars."
"Me? How?"
"I don't know. You're the fucking banker. Get Ahmed."
"Ahmed quit."
"And he took all the fucking Canadian dollars with him? C'mon!"
Then she perked up. "You know what you should do? Go to the currency exchange on 42nd St. in Grand Central."
"You're my bank. I want my fucking money." The goddam girl laughs every time I say gimme the fucking money. It's terrible. "I'm not going to 42nd st. just to get my own money. You know how many fees they'll charge?"
After twenty minutes of waiting they said, "You can call and have them mail you the money."
"Seriously? That's the bank's solution? I need money from the bank and you're going to mail me Canadian dollars? Get serious. You know how hard it is to get a goddam DVD mailed to you in Brooklyn?"
I really sometimes wished that I were a plan-ahead person. It would be wonderful if I'd been saving a small amount for this trip all year. How wonderful would it have been if at Christmastime my whole family was buying me books and waterfilters for my Cuban trip?
Instead I'm scrambling around my apartment, trying not to turn on lights or eat much and hoping that Cubans like talking in the present tense about things that me gusta.
The only saving grace is that a couple of years ago Pete was the publicist on a book about Cuba. I reviewed it for some paper and then I pitched a tough sell to Esquire about it. For once in my life I actually got kind of far with a writing assignment.
I emailed an editor, told him how much I loved one of his books and about how many copies I sent to my family members at Christmas and launched into the pitch. This was May 2006 when Fidel was still el Presidente.:
The aging ruler is barely holding on now and a big change is ahead in Cuba, but no one knows what will happen. Under the Cuban Constition Article 94, the First Vice President of the Council of State (Fidel's youngest brother Raul) is first in line of succession. So little scholarship has gone to understanding Raul. He is the complete opposite of fidel is every way. Raul never finished college, he is not a gifted orator, and he has personally killed dozens of betrayers both civilians and soldiers within the regime.
I was hoping to do a story on modern Cuba. I have family contacts in Havana and a pretty good handle on how to get over there. It is very likely that these are the last few years where Cuba is closed to Americans. This would ideally be a few thousand word essay about the insular nation, the embargo, the way Cuba has learned to recycle everything from auto parts to home fixtures, the state of Fidel, and the future of Raul.
(My work has appeared in The New York Post, The Washington Post and The Moscow Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Calgary Herald and I covered the 2004 election for the Liverpool Daily Post)
He actually was very nice and gave me the email of another editor and told me to drop his name. I was very encouraged and I didn't want to sound stupid so I went out and bought a hundred books about Cuba and read them.
Hey Brendan,
That does sound interesting. I know very little about Raul.
I don't assign articles for Esquire anymore -- just a lowly writer. You might want to try Terry Noland and drop my name.
I wanted this very much.
Hey Brendan:
Thanks for the pitch and for your interest in writing for Esquire. It's an intriguing idea, but to be honest, foreign stories are a tough sell with us. Not that we never do them, but there really has to be a strong connection to American men in some way. I'm not sure that's the case here. I think this would feel too random. -Terry
I was maybe 24 at the time and, frankly, just flattered that they listened to me. I went away and tried to sell the story to someone else.
Then right before this story would have come out Fidel got sick and the whole news media turned around and said, "Who? What? Who the fuck is Raul?"
I would've been the goddam authority on this.
As of last night I had given up. As of today I am leaving Monday. Until then I am going to sit around my apartment and read these books and smoke bad cigars and drink Don Q rum from Puerto Rico just so I can appreciate it all better in Cuba.
Vacation Diet has nothing to do with losing weight and everything to do with not spending money here so that you can spend it over there. When I went to England last I spent two months on vacation diet. This meant every time I pulled over to get gas and wanted a coffee I had to tell myself, "Don't get the gas station coffee here. Get the amazing coffee and enjoy it with the Times of London."
I spent my senior year of high school on vacation diet. I delivered pizza three nights a week, babysat the kids in church and wrote for the local paper and saved all of it so I could drive cross country with a friend over the summer.
Vacation Diet in New York takes dedication. You cannot go out to eat. You cannot go out drinking (although, thank god I didn't start this yesterday). You can't take cabs no matter how late you get out of work or how drunk you got at work. Drinking at work is also cheating, I think, unless you drink so much that you sleep through the next day and therefore avoid having to eat food or turn on lights in your apartment.
Today I went grocery shopping for the staples. Carrots, hummus, chips, avocados, potatoes, cereal, soy milk, coffee. For the rest of the week I will be very boring. I will go to work. I will sit in my apartment and read about cuba and comb my mustache.
I have about ten cigarettes left and a six pack in the fridge. I've also been meaning to watch "Car Wash" and "Harry and the Hendersons" (they're both downloaded and waiting on my hard drive).
On Sunday I will pack my ugliest bag with a camera, a shirt, some books, and the rest of it will be full of food a medicine and picture of my friend Cuban John and his cousins in New York.
Last night I had a pretty shitty night at work. I made shit money and I spent half the night on my phone looking up flights for my trip next week in that slow, AOL-speed iPhone network. I even called a travel agent, which--although Adrianne swears by them--I find emasculating. Calling a travel agent is like calling your mother to plan your trip. And even though your mothers is frequently right and thinks of important things that you wouldn't remember: I'd rather do it my own crappy, possibly more expensive way.
The best ticket I can find to Cuba is through the jagoffs at Jamaican Air. They won't sell you the whole deal but they will book you a nonrefundable flight to Montego and then sell you another non-refundable (way, way, way more expensive) ticket to Havana. It's $1300/person just to get into the damn airport.
After work I went out to have a beer at the Ear Inn by the West Side Highway. Ear Inn is an old, stinky, sailoresque place that you would see in a Melville novel. The bar itself is actually two years older than Herman Melville. It reminded me alot of a bar I read about once in a Brendan Sullivan Novel.
I think of Her. And I think of what would happen when the bartenders here do their best joke. (Grab a bottle of white wine and one red and holler, “Here’s our fucken wine list!”) A girl like that can’t even revel in the simple joy of this place, which just might be the shittiest bar in the world. Can’t you get excited at seeing the greatest? Granted this bar is a shithole. It looks like an underground group’s resistance league to help stave off their Mormon conquerors. Failure lines the walls. From the retired Whalers Jerseys of Hartford’s only professionally retired team to the crossed, broken hockey sticks that never scored against the Breuins. This bar mind as well fill up with actual former whaling-men, cursing their salty eyes and whalebone prosthetics while they complain about Greenpeace and the goddam Japanese whale oil imports.
The other cool thing is that when you're in the middle of the block there on Spring and Washington there's a plaque in the middle of the sidewalk. "Here lies the original coast line of the Island of Manhattan." And some wonderful act of God or Robert Moses pushed that to the end of the block, past the highway and beyond the docks.
I walked into this shithole and ordered a Guinness and a Jameson. This guy was a proper bartender so he started my Guinness, let it sit, fed me the Jameson and walked away. His white friend said, "Vamos a la Cuba? Via con dios!" (in the stilted, literal way that a multi-lingual Hemingway novel sounds when you read it in high school).
I thought nothing of it because my friends had gotten their drinks and they were all waiting for Saint Patrick to finish pouring my Guinness*.
Solomon and I bullshitted about work and basically just talked shit about the people there who we don't like. Then we talked about how great it is to have these morons there because they will get fired way before they ever think of getting rid of us.
All the sailors were smoking cigars or rollies alone at 3:40 on a Monday night. I even lit up. There are worse things in the world than having a cigarette in your cozy seat with a well-poured Guinness and stout shot of Jameson you could drown in. I started to think that enjoying myself in Manhattan might be the only vacation I really need.
Solomon and I exchanged stories of getting arrested for dumb things. And then another of the bartender's friends walked out. "Goodnight. Have fun on your trip!"
I said, "Excuse me. Are you going to Cuba?"
"Yes. In the morning."
"How did you guess that?" Solomon asked (Solomon and I are work-friends so he doesn't yet understand that he only exists because I created him. Why else would I create the second oldest bar in Manhattan just because I wanted a drink)
The bartender glanced at the clock, "Actually in about 6 hours. I have to be at LaGuardia." My excitement drained when I noticed his English accent.
"You're lucky. You're English. You can fly direct. It's very difficult for us to get there."
"Actually," he said. "It's not going to be so easy on me. My wife's American and this is our honeymoon. We wouldn't've been able to go at all... except I found this great Canadian travel agent who specializes in getting Americans to Cuba from Cancun."
This guy not only gave me the personal cellphone of his travel agent but he introduced me to his friend (next stool) who had been to Cuba on his honeymoon via Jamaica (a route he did not recommend).
Then they both hand wrote me a list of places to stay and things to see. This list included the home addresses of people in Cuba who love having Americans over for diner. "Tell'em I sent you." Cafes, jazz clubs, beaches, places to drink coffee and read books.
He then waxed informatively on the proper way to tip a person in Cuba (always personal and direct, never leave money on a table because not only will it never get to the person or the restaurant--it will pave the sidewalks nearby).
He bought me my next drink and I stood there, basking in the light on the former coast of Manhattan, drinking a Carlesburg lager with a bar full of sailors all giving me advice on my trip. And I was glad I came.
*A surprising amount of people don't know this, but you can't pour Guinness all at once. In much of Ireland they half-pour about twenty pints at once and wait for someone to order one. Then they pour the other half and write your first initial in the foam. If you do it all at once it tastes flat and watery.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzling November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
-Moby Dick, page 1.
People don't wear hats anymore, but if using people's faces as ashtrays is any indication: I need to get out.
I want to leave the country. I want to go to one of those countries where people don't tip. I want to grow a mustache and dress like Magnum P.I. and go to an expat bookshop run by some burnt out couple.
In addition to which, everything is on sale in the world right now. It's $96 to get to Aruba. That's how much it costs to get to Hartford. That's how much it costs to rent a Zipcar. That's how much I spent at Motorcity on Thursday. And I didn't even get drunk.
In the running right now:
Aruba (for the price).
Cuba (Connecting flight in the the DR would make it a multinational tour).
Guatemala (I bought a book about Belize but the best thing about Belize is that it's right near the Mayan ruins.)
Belize (I already bought the damn book)
Ireland.
Brooklyn.
Anywhere that I can look fondly on later as I gaze at my passport.
There are a couple of things that get over-hyped from me and I just skip them. It took me two years to get into MGMT and Flight of the Conchords. Right now I'm being targeted to believe that Andrew Bird has already put all of my inner thoughts into beautiful words. But I haven't listened to a note of it.
This makes me irrelevant in conversation and to this list of great things that I skipped out on out of boorish snobbery I would add: The Ting Tings, bleach blondes, Vitamin Water, 30 Rock and sushi in general.
One time in college I had DJ'd a party on the south end of campus and I was waaaaaaasted. I lived about a mile and a half through the freezing cold from there. DJ'ing college parties is lots of fun but what ends up happening is everyone screams your name and loves you and then dances with someone else and goes home and makes out with someone else and you're stuck wrapping up cords and dealing with how to get the sound system back to the radio station.
So this one night I had a brilliant idea that I would just invite myself into some girl's dormroom and curl up in her bed and go to sleep.
The girl was vaguely a friend of mine and this was a friendly campus. Instead of politely asking me to move to the couch or, say, get the fuck out of her apartment, she logged onto IM and invited some other guy over. I remember her typing "B is over here. Come by!"
I knew this guy a little too well, actually, because he used to date a friend of mine and I used to have sex with her. In fact, I am the reason that they didn't become one of those inertia couples who just keep getting back together out of habit. I am the reason he was single.
So the girl in bed uses this guy to get rid of me. He walked me to the door and I told him how great it was that he and I could be friends. Y'know, what with me casually romping with his ex so soon after the break up.
Bed girl and that guy are getting married in two months. And who do you think isn't invited to the wedding?
Yo, seriously? They make padded bras with nipples now? What can't they cram into these things? If I were a girl I would expect all my bras to have wifi and lactate espresso on demand.
Last night I met up with Theo and Leigh to go see my friends' new band. I would love to mention the name of the club or the band or post links but they were so fucking bad that I can't stand the idea of them discovering this by googling my web site.
The club used to be a cool idea for a place back when it was called Remote Lounge. In the pre-friendster era you could go there, sit down at a camera and have a drink with your friends and then flip through the screens and find out who else was there. Then you could request a live videochat with someone on the other side of the bar. It was fun and dorky in a way that probably would've been featured in the movie Hackers had it been around.
Everyone in the history of New York Nightlife likes to glamorize the past and I don't want to become one of those people, but sometimes getting in the door can be ridiculous. People are so starved to fill their clubs with the right kind of people that they will go through ridiculous lengths. The door girl goes, "Where are you coming from?"
"My apartment."
"No, I mean. What are you here for?"
"I'm here to see to band for $5. I will pay. I'm too old to give a shit about being on your guest list."
"Do you know the code?"
"No. I don't give a shit about your lame club that will be closed next year and I really don't mind spending $5 to pay the soundguy for sitting through my friend's band. Furthermore, I don't really care to know a code to some kind of open-bar-bracelet that will bring me unfettered access to some crappy vodka."
It was $5 to see the Ramones play CBGBs in the 70s and $8 to get into Studio 54. Qui Bono? The bands and DJs and soundguys. Qui gives a shit? Not me.
This is terrible, but there is a certain social element to Mon-Thurs nightlife. We all work weekends so it is a tremendous amount of fun to go to a show and see your friends even if you don't give a shit about the unbelievably terrible band.
I know all the guys in the band but one of them is convinced that I slept with his girlfriend and so just-in-case he does everything he can to be a dick to me. The singer, though, is a great guy who is always nice to me just because one time Conrad threw M.T. out of St. J's and when he heard that he said, "I've got to meet these guys!"
The singer and M.T. used to have this amazing party together on the Sundays of three-day-weekends. It was the best. Some of my happiest, I-just-moved-back-to-New-York memories are actually just remembering my memories of those nights.
I remember one night standing in The Roxy while midgets Gogo danced on the bar and everyone was dressed up to a degree that you just don't see anymore. I was with a girl who wore a mini skirt and instead of wearing a top she glued cocktail umbrellas to her chest.
One time a friend of mine asked M.T. "What's the craziest thing people do to get into a Mutherfucker Party?"
Everyone turns to the stage because some British band was about to play their first show in the US. "Who is this band again?" "I think they're called 'Black Party'" "No, it's Bloc Party." "Hm. Never heard of 'em."
Leaving The Roxy with the sun coming up to share a cab back to my loft in Williamsburg. Sam from Coyote Ugly was going home with a guy she met that night but I was her back up plan in case he creeped her out. The guy handed me a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels. "Where did this come from?" He pressed another half-full bottle of Jack Daniels to his lips, took a big swig, wiped his mouth and said, "Don't worry about it."
I was trying to think of a third memory but I just have this vague, happy impression of two thousand people dancing to "London Calling" and feeling like I needed to stay in this city. Also, one time Fancy and Nikki chose people for each other to go home with and Fancy left with one of the midget dancers.
Probably my favorite collateral-damage of Motherfucker was that since everyone went to them you could meet someone years later and be excited because you were also there in the room with them. "Where did they find all those midgets?"
So anyway, just before the band went on we were standing at the edge of the balcony. The bar was packed and very poorly designed. It was impossible to get a drink and even more impossible to sit at the bar or near the bar or go to the bathroom (which, moronically, is on the opposite side of the bar past the annoying throng of people).
Leigh turned to me and said she was tired and was going to go home. I wish that every girlfriend I've ever had could be this considerate. Sometimes when someone mentions a movie or a great band or a play I should know about all I can think of is the cab ride home that I had to take halfway through the show with a drunk, angry girlfriend who decided way too late that she was tired.
The other option is to drag this girl around and make her stand alone at the bar when you're trying to enjoy a cigarette and catch up with your friends. Meanwhile she is alone, fending off lame guys and brainstorming hurtful things to mention in her break-up letter.
Immediately when she left I looked over my shoulder and felt like something was a-bubbling behind my back. I saw Nikki. She was standing behind me enough that I could pretend not to see her.
This was terrible. First of all she looked great. I can't stand it when ex-girlfriends don't gain weight and get mom-haircuts! Nikki looked about five years younger, and--worst of all--she had this look on her face like "Where are my friends and why am I here all alone? I wish someone wonderful would come up and talk to me."
I then made the Friendster connection to her. Nikki--->(used to be friends with)Fancy--->(produced Phannypack's only record with)---->Colin--->(is friends with)---->The bassist who thinks I boned his girlfriend.
Of course! It all makes sense!
I really wish I hadn't let my girlfriend just leave. Because I am petty.
So I turned around and periodically pretended that something wonderful was behind Nikki and that I couldn't be bothered to look at her because my life is so fucking wonderful without her. My world is a water slide away from you that takes me further every day!
So be cool.
Then I caught myself doing something really stupid. I fixed my hair. I caught myself running my fingers through it just to make sure that I looked good enough in this dark bar with this terrible band playing.
"Theo, will you turn around and tell me if that's Nikki behind us?"
"I never met her."
"You never met her?"
"No. I was gonna give her the talk* but you broke up."
"You were a week late!"
He turns around and says, "From what I've heard, that's definitely her."
"I think I'll stick around for one more song."
The next song was clearly the one they thought would be their best. It rhymed "Manhattan" with "what's happenin'"
I turned around one more time and pretended to be really excited about something just a little to the right of Nikki. And I saw that she was staring at me. Even when I looked her way she didn't move her gaze or pretend not to be looking at me.
I didn't acknowledge her, though, because I don't care about ex-girlfriends. I don't think about them in my free time. I don't go to criminal lengths to run into them at parties.
Just as we were ready to leave I decided I would put on my jacket, head for the door and if I bumped into her while I was too unbelievably cool to be bothered to stay and catch up then that was fine. The terrible band was still going and I realized something. This girl did not have tattoos on her chest.
Instead I turned around to leave and this young, untattooed, blonde girl was looking back at me wondering, "Why does Andy Dick keep looking over by me?"
So we left and went to Chrisinda's birthday where the president of Jagermeister was giving out free shots in the second shittiest bar in the LES. Chrisinda is just about the awesomest girl I know and I'm pretty sure she left Boston because she was on the verge of turning "groupie" into a profession. She has a Jagermeister tattoo.
The bartender was this fiery red headed bitch who kept screaming at the Jagermeister assholes and Bad News Bekkka DJ'd with Alicia. Bekkka came up to me and was like, "Can you egregiously misspell my name if you write about this later?"
"Do you want me to?"
"Definitely. Make it as ungoogleable as you can. Also, try and hide the name of the band so they don't think you're being mean."
"Okay."
"Also, while we're on the subject: stop imagining you run into your exes all over town. It's getting creepy."
*Back in college whenever Theo had a girlfriend I would pull her aside and say, "I'm really glad you make my friend happy. You're really great together. If you ever hurt him I will fucking kill you." Serious threats are reserved for serious girlfriends.
Cats are terrible pets for people who are trying to learn to be good boyfriends. The more you ignore them and forget to feed them: the more affectionate they get.
Alright, who's the asshole? Fess up. It was a hilarious, hilarious prank one of you pulled on me. One of you posted this job on craigslist and then again on mediabistro just to fuck with me:
Overview: Love music, have blog, will travel. The Hired Guns need a few adventurous spirits -- into everything from instrumental hip-hop to electronica to mashups -- to scratch out a blog devoted to covering the hottest turntablists on this summer's music festival tour. This could go down in "best summer job ever" history.
Gun Profile: You are the hands-down, go-to authority on all things DJ. You're on top of all the latest music trends and in the know about what's coming down the pike. And you love to write. You'll be blogging from your laptop, sometimes from home and sometimes on tour, so where you hang your hat isn't really important. Be comfortable with social media, since your musings need to end up out in the ether, from Gorilla vs. Bear to MySpace. And when you're at a show, in the moment, you'll engage your fans via Twitter; tight, well-edited short-form content must be a specialty.
We'll need a chief blogger driving the site; to run this show you'll need considerable street cred already established and a strong reputation for developing and launching online content. You'll be posting every week -- missives between 50-500 words -- so speed and tempo count for a lot. Then we'll pepper the blog with regular posts from a few of you artists and experts who have something pertinent to say about the DJ world.
Wait, wait, professional blogging about bands that I would have to go on tour with? Can this be possible?
Nitty Gritty: Starting with the Winter Music Conference on March 24th and running through Lollapalooza at the end of August, you'll each cover around three shows, recreating the general scene and relaying the major happenings from the festivals you attend. You'll get access to the DJs themselves -- think DeadMau5, Z-Trip, a-Trak, Diplo, Chromeo, Kaskade, Steve Aoki -- for bigger profile-oriented posts (so it's important that you've interviewed artists in the past and won't get all star-struck).
Inside Skinny: If you've got an established, recognized name in the DJ circle or in the blogosphere -- with a loyal audience to boot -- let us hear about who will be following along with your escapades on this journey.
Then I figured it out. This is a job for some 22 year old who programmed at his college radio station and either lives with his parents or--
The blog is underwritten by the tour's main sponsor, a premium liquor brand, so it is essential that you be over the age of 25. No exceptions.
Are you kidding me? Free booze, party planning, DJ'ing and blogging on tour with all my favorite musicians and everyone cooler and younger than me is automatically disqualified??
I applied. I wrote the best cover letter of my life and I included my interviews in music magazines, my DJ resume, etc. The only person more qualified for this job would be Diplo and he can't read! So it's probably Z-Trip--nevermind, I would have to interview them both for this job.
Everyone more qualified than me is also disqualified because they have their DJ careers! So that leaves only me, right?
Wrong. I haven't heard back and the first assignment is Winter Music Conference, which starts in two weeks. And it can't be because I didn't get the job. It's because this job doesn't exist.
This is a cruel hoaxed planned by one of my friends (I'm looking at you, Pete!) just to make fun of me for believing that someday my dream job would come along.
Today is a very exciting day because today is the day that I got the very last issue to my subscription to The New York Review of Books! Thank god that nightmare is over! This magazine is the worst. It should be called The New York Review of Books No One Else Wants to Read Either. It also has this smug, self-important 60s tabloid size pages.
My cousin got it for me as a gift last Christmas, godbless her heart.
Every month it comes in the mail and I struggle to find interest in long, boring articles about the University of Kansas Press's take on Cleopatra or what Roger Cohen thinks about Gaza.
Just about the only interesting part is that this is a magazine that still has a thriving personals section. Personals for nerds.
EROTIC EXPLOSION. Let me blow your mind, your ultimate erogenous zone. Provocative talk with educated beauty. No limits.
Greensingles.com- Meet single book lovers who value green living, natural health, personal growth, spirituality.
PRIVATE CANDLELIT MASSAGE-- Experience the best of sensual and therapeutic bodywork. Private and by appt. only. UWS
SCIENCE CONNECTION has been catalyzing relationships since 1991. New reagents welcome
.
I had to wikipedia that last one and learned, hilariously, that: "Although the terms reactant and reagent are often used interchangeably, a reagent is more specifically 'a test substance that is added to a system in order to bring about a reaction or to see whether a reaction occurs.'"
Sizzling hot, nerd fuckbuddies! Baby, why don't you come down to the lab and see whether a reaction occurs?
MWM looking for a woman for extracurricular study of mind/body problem. No homework.
No homework? Well, I'll see you after class, professor!
Everyone looks forward to snow, where I come from. It's the best. Even at age seven you hope that some kids came before you in the snow storm and patted down the snow banks.
And then you move to NY And all the patted snow is dangerous and slippery.
Really Stupid Things I'm Doing to Make My Way Through the Recession.
Only shaving down. I hate shaving. I'd honestly rather shave my own legs than shave my face. I usually shave on mondays, which means that for the majority of my day off I have a smooth li'l baby face which sometimes makes me look younger and sometimes just makes me look flabby. Then this month in Esquire I read an article about up-shaving is only necessary for semi-literate Maxim-reading morons. And even then it's just for their knuckles. I tried it. Just down-shaving. It left my face smooth, but it didn't destroy the gradation of shading that you get from having a little stubble. Also I've found that upshaving is the harsh, face-hurting, razor-dulling stroke that I hate doing anyway. I also must admit that I am of that new generation of men who cannot shave without one of those Edward Shaverhands five-blade razors. I tried once in England to shave with a single razor. I cut the shit out of my face.
Juicing. For some reason in the winter I just stop eating fresh vegetables. There's no reason to do this at all, but I really can't be bothered to keep up with having fresh salad-components in my fridge, especially since I never know how long I'll be home for each week. So I buy an assload of carrots and apples and make juice. I do this so much that I ended up buying a new juice that can suck down entire apples. Everyone is warning me that I'll turn orange like Jack LeLanne or Denis Leary, but so far I just seem to have bolder freckles.
Making recession soup. I don't know if I've mentioned this: but my family is Irish. We are all from small island on the wrong side of England. Ever since St. Patrick collapsed the snake-tourism economy we've been in recession. From 1995-2001 they did alright but recently I've been informed that the Celtic Tiger is now a rug. So I make soup in my crock pot. My family is Irish-American the same way that the Quebecois are French, meaning we cling to outdated 19th-century notions. I learned this the hard way on my first visit to Ireland when I ordered corned-beef and cabbage and the proprietor of the restaurant came out to ask me what about his establishment made me assume that they serve hog-feed. I also have some very yuppie-tablescraps due to my weekly consumption of carrot juice. Now instead of throwing the pulp out I put it in the crock pot and make carrot soup. It's wicked good.
Getting my clothes fixed. I've written about this lots before, but I found this great guy in the LES who used to make superhero costumes for movies. Instead of buying new pants I bring my old ones to him. He's a good guy.
Working bullshit shifts. I know way to many people who are out of work. So since I got back from Miami I've been working sundays and mondays. They blow and I just end up reading the paper on my phone the whole time but it keeps me out of trouble.
Not giving my homeless girl any more money. I'm not really proud of this one but lately when she stops me I don't have enough cash on me. I've been buying all her prescriptions (asthma) and drugs ($5 crack cigarettes) for five years now. It's time to stop. I got her a job when she got out of jail and she quit it when they wouldn't give her a raise (she won't work for less than $8/hr). Whenever I have a good night of work I give her $20 but I think that has to stop. Also, I gave her $80 to buy needles and yarn to bring back to the prison so we could start a cool business of selling scarves made by prisoners (I was going to call the company "Shiv&Co") but she fucking stole the money and tried to give me a hat she found in the trash and said she made it herself (it had a pricetag inside).
Writing a young-adult novel. This isn't really helping anyone or anything whatsoever but it is a lot of fun and it gives Mercutio a little time off. I was halfway through adapting the Mercutio novel as a play when I got fed up with it. But young adult is fun. Normally I like to challenge myself to do a thousand words a day and it's helping my momentum to give myself that same non-judgmental goal. Instead of starting satanically-early and superstitiously avoiding any distractions I find I can get started, then make coffee, then take a shower and keep writing. Today I did 2000 words and I might just keep up with that.
Looking up odd-jobs on craigslist. A couple of months ago I leased out my Vespa for a photoshoot. Lots of old ladies need these new fangled TV antennae installed. But you would be quite surprised to learn how many people in Manhattan suffer from lower back pain. Many, many people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars just for a massage!
Not charging cover. I always hate charging cover anyway so at my new friday night party it's free to get in and you only have to pay to see the bands downstairs and the bands keep all the money. Also if you like shitty pizza there is free shitty pizza.
BYOB dinners. There are hundreds and hundreds of little restaurants in the city that are too small to have a bar or who don't have the connections to get a liquor license. Then there's vegetarian places like Angelika Kitchen that are just too anti- to serve booze. My etiquette with this is as follows: I put the bottle on the table and if the waiter brings over glasses I offer him a glass too. Lately I've been going to these places with a selection of my favorite cheap wines.
Yellowtail Champagne- you mind as well call it "Carbonated chardonnay" but I don't really give a shit about purity and it tastes way better than Andre.
Louis Jadot- at Thanksgiving he is known in my family as "Uncle Lewie." As opposed to funerals, which are presided for by "Father Jameson."
Red Bicyclette- I kinda hit the wall on this back when I was dating one of those obnoxious girls who understood all the inside jokes in Sideways. But it's good.
A guy called me up today. He said his youngest daughter is having a sweet-sixteen party and he wants the youngest has-been in the history of pop music to be the DJ. I said, "How did you get my number?"
"I am [musician]'s accountant. I've gotten him out of lots of trouble over the years. How much would you charge for DJ'ing two hours from 8-10 next friday?"
Now, I happen to know that this man is very, very wealthy. But I am not very good at taking advantage of people. DJ'ing is not a difficult job and I already have another very well paying gig that night at 10 across town. I realized that I could turn to this guy and say, "I won't take a penny less than $700." But that's not my style.
"I've heard you're quite a skilled accountant."
"Yes I am."
"Look, I already have a gig that night, but if you can promise that I'll be out the door at ten I'll DJ your daughter's birthday party for $50 and you just have to do my taxes."
In the background I heard the tiny youtube version of one of my old songs. "...Fifty dollars and...and...I...I think you'd better get your taxes together. It sounds like we have a deal."
Pop records come and the worst part is that they don't even end up in the used section anymore. Now they just disappear.
But rich, conniving accountants? They are hard to come by.
So next friday I am going to stand around in a leather jacket and sunglasses and play teen pop. And it won't be until later that I hand him my W2s from unemployment, from bartending, from DJ'ing at thirty different clubs, from appearing in my own music video, from being in that TV commercial, and then I get to let him declare headphones and plane tickets and other champagne-flavored business expenses. (I also still owe from 2006).
It's one of those cruelties of modern love. I don't ever think I'll ever be fifty and say, "Man, I wish I didn't have all these pictures of my wife and I making out in Venice when we were 24."
Instead I go through old photos and I'm like, "And her name was, uh...well that was 'Batgirl' and the one after that I lived with for a long time so that's why we're kissing in San Francisco and this...I guess that was another time I was in San Francisco and her name was..."
I envy my grandfather. He at least destroyed all of the evidence and then loved the photos he had.
Lately I've been drinking lots of Odwala Pomegranate juice. I like anything with antioxidants. I don't know what they are or what they do but I like to take a big gulp and say, "Fuck oxidants!"
