Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (10 page)

Using the criteria of (1) duration and type of foreplay, (2) duration of intercourse, and (3) probability of subject's staying the night, Latin men consistently scored lower than all other groups in the first two areas.

“Slam, bam, thank you ma'am” was the phrase characteristic of most participants, with several subjects occasionally falling into the “slam, bam bam, thank you ma'am” category. Though one “bam” was by far the most frequently encountered.

Several subjects did show some signs of recognition of the concept of foreplay, but even the most highly advanced in this area had never put the idea into practice and had discarded it as a theory with about as much validity as the Lamarckian concept of evolution.

To the subjects' credit, Latin men continually scored higher in the third category than any other group; however, given their consistently low performance in the first two areas, who the hell wanted them to spend the night?

I woke up the next morning in a foul mood. I was still exhausted from the previous evening and the amount of effort it had taken trying to get Alberto into my room—not because I had found an unwilling partner (after all, I had made sure he was pretty liquored up by the time we left the club) but because of the strange law that forbade any Cubans from staying in my hotel.

It had been a ridiculous scene. Earlier that evening, we had persuaded the hotel manager to let Alberto join me for a drink in the restaurant on the fifth floor, on the condition that he didn't accompany me back to my room. But as the empty glasses piled up and the image of the wall in front of us became more and more blurred, so too did our understanding of the Cuban government's logic.

Laws, as I saw them, were good for things like preventing robbers from entering my house, stopping gang members from shooting my neighbors, and keeping shirtless people from being served in restaurants. The law, however, was not supposed to infringe on my innocent attempt to have a good time.

Besides, how hard could it be to sneak Alberto in? All we had to do was quietly pay the bill and saunter out, go down one flight of stairs, and turn the corner. Who would have the nerve to follow us? It was a question I would repeat five minutes later as we headed toward my room.

“Who would have the nerve to follow us?” I asked again, this time not rhetorically. Someone was definitely trailing us.

“I don't know him.”

“Should we run?”

“I think we should run.”

So we sped up our pace and continued out of breath until I slammed the door of my room shut behind us, slightly aware of how ridiculous it was to be twenty-five years old and still trying to sneak men into my room. What could they possibly do to me? Ground me? Deprive me of Cuban TV for a month (not much of a punishment, I might add)? They couldn't take away my drinking rights, could they?

There was a pounding at the door that left Alberto and me unsure what to do. The knocking came again. We looked at each other and with a deep sigh, I realized that the moment of truth had come. Now my mom was gonna call his mom and they were going to talk about the condom they found in the backseat of the Plymouth Voyager—wait, I wasn't a teenager anymore. I was a grown woman leaving condoms in the back of Plymouth Voyagers. No one could do a damn thing about it—except maybe that guy pounding on the other side of our door.

Feeling like an adult forced to confront the high school principal, reluctantly I removed the bolt and looked out into the hall. The hotel manager was there, looking very communist.

Alberto muttered some excuse about having come up to explain to me the finer points of Castro's agricultural plan and then with his head facing toward the ground, he quietly allowed himself to be led out of the hotel into the early morning rays of a humid Havana morning.

The rules at the hotel where I was staying were pretty much in force throughout Cuba. Hotels, restaurants, and shops that admitted tourists wouldn't allow in Cubans and vice versa, a result of the double economy that functioned on the island. Visitors had to purchase everything in dollars; Cubans patronized stores and restaurants that only accepted pesos and where the tab was about twenty times less than what a tourist would pay, which made me start to rethink this sneaking-around-hotels thing. If one of us was going to be entering every establishment clandestinely, we might as well be sneaking me into Cuban places, where our bill was going to be one-twentieth of the price. I wouldn't have to change my dollars on the black market—I'd get the best exchange rate on the island by handing all my money to Alberto and having him pay for everything.

The plan worked brilliantly. My former thirty-five-dollar dinner bill got reduced to two bucks; instead of buying liquor in the expensive tourist stores, we'd get a liter of homemade rum on the black market for a couple of dollars. This fortuitous turn of events came about none too soon. I was running out of money and there wasn't a Wells Fargo anywhere in sight.

My account was full of money, but suddenly I didn't have access to it. Given the economic embargo, Cuba had no links to any U.S. banks, making my ATM card about as useful as Vicodin past its expiration date. I thought I had arrived in the country with plenty of cash; however, things in Cuba had turned out to be far more expensive than I had expected. I was staying in a rundown hovel with no hot water in a bad part of town that was running me forty-five dollars a night (this same place would have cost two dollars in Honduras).

Luckily, though, in addition to making the switch from dollars to pesos, Alberto moved us both into a private home where they charged just twenty-five dollars for a room. I was slightly curious as to why Alberto didn't just offer to let me stay with him at his place, but a few days later when he invited me over for the first time, the reason became painfully clear. It was on my fourth day in Cuba when we stumbled in around two in the morning after a long night of drinking.

“Take a seat,” Alberto said, turning on the lights and the music.

I would have loved to, but there didn't seem to be any space. Everywhere I looked, sleeping people were lying all over the living room.

“Wake up, guys,” Alberto said. “We have company. Wendy, I'd like you to meet my relatives.”

As if this sort of thing happened all the time, Alberto introduced me to his half-awake cousin, her husband, and their two-year-old son, who were visiting from out of town. Hearing all the ruckus, his aunt Mercedes came out of her bedroom and I wondered how many other people this tiny house held. Alberto hadn't told me he didn't live alone.

I was feeling terribly self-conscious about the scene we had created and was expecting a shouting match to begin at any moment, but I was the only one in the room who seemed to think anything strange was going on. In a matter of minutes everyone was up, shaking my hand, drinking coffee, and acting like it was a privilege to be woken up in the middle of the night to sit around with a foreign guest. And within an hour, we'd pulled out the bottle of rum and were sitting around laughing, joking, and telling stories.

My new Cuban friends explained the matter to me: Why sleep when you could be having fun?

A week into my ten-day trip and my favorite thing to do in Havana was to sit around drinking rum and smoking strong Cuban cigarettes with Alberto's aunt Mercedes—my Cuban mother, as I jokingly called her. This was my kind of authority figure—she spoiled me rotten, was nurturing and kind, and was always ready to slug another shot of rum at any opportunity.

In fact, she was so entertaining that I didn't even miss Alberto while he was off dealing with his relationship drama. His ex-girlfriend had found out about me, and in an attempt to get Alberto's attention she had downed a bottle of pills. Now she was recovering at home in a weakened state, while Alberto was racked with guilt and remorse, nursing her back to health.

Alberto would show up distracted and distant at night and we'd engage in a total of about ten minutes worth of lousy sex before falling asleep. I wanted to attribute this to Alberto's anxiety-ridden state, but the truth was, he had been a selfish lover from the beginning. I would have kicked him out, but I kept hoping that things would get better. Besides, I didn't want to jeopardize the friendship I was forming with his aunt.

I spent hour after hour with her, never getting bored. Sometimes we'd talk politics, a subject she loved to educate me on, but she never mentioned Fidel Castro by name. Fearing that a neighbor would hear and report the slightest criticism, she would simply mouth the words “the bearded one.” Other times, we'd discuss mundane things like the color she thought I would look best in or her plans to do my astrological chart.

One morning, Mercedes even got it into her head that she was going to teach me how to dance. Loosened up a little by an early glass of rum, she turned on the sounds of Celia Cruz and my first salsa lesson officially began.

It was all in the hips, she explained, somehow managing to move her large flanks with grace to the complicated drumbeat. I watched in awe as my sixty-year-old friend, heavyset and wearing a polyester muumuu, still managed to move to the rhythm like a young girl. I tried in vain to imitate her steps while Mercedes continued swaying to the music, succeeding in lowering her body to within inches of the floor.

“Is that legal?” I asked her, astounded.

“Querida,
everything is legal in Cuba. Except, of course, for drugs, prostitution, leaving the country, buying Nike tennis shoes, criticizing the government, staying in
Yanqui
hotels, drinking homemade rum, buying eggs on the black market, and making fake cigars. But dancing is 100 percent legal. Unless, of course, you do it on Sunday.”

“What?”

“Just kidding. You can do anything you want on Sunday.”

“You can?”

“Yeah, because being religious is illegal!”

Then she slapped me on the back and let out an uproarious laugh, guffawing as she rolled her head around in circles.

English wasn't exactly the most popular language in Cuba so I was forced to rely on my mediocre Spanish. I still struggled with the subjunctive, which was a verb tense we had all but edged out of our own tongue centuries ago at a time when we were busy incorporating lots of other tidbits from Romance languages, and it was a difficult concept to grasp.

In Spanish, there was a whole verb tense devoted to the concept of maybe. For example, when
cuando
vengo
a tu fiesta—
“when I show up at your party”—was converted to the subjunctive,
cuando
venga
a tu fiesta,
it was more like saying, “Maybe I'll come to your party” and you understood that this person was going to try and make it but was excusing himself in the eventuality of being hit by a bus, being mugged on the way there, or finding out that a much cooler party with more expensive booze was going on next door.

This seemed to express a weakness of character to me, and as I once explained to a teacher of mine in high school, I was philosophically opposed to a verb tense that expressed doubt. Of course, I just said this to get out of learning the subjunctive and now ten years later I was forced to deal with it on a daily basis.

It went right along with another view I had problems with: the whole Spanish concept of time.
Ahora,
usually translated in English as “now” meant “in five minutes” as well as “in an hour,” “in a day,” “in a week,” or “next month.” Tell people to show up at your house
ahora
and they might come next Friday, long after the cleaning you'd just given the place had had time to degenerate into a sinkful of dishes and a fresh layer of dust on the floor.

But having spent time in Central America, Mexico, and a whole week now in Cuba, I was finally starting to master all of these concepts. Every time I successfully used the subjunctive, I would raise my arms up in the air in a sign of victory, like a soccer player who has just made the winning goal in the World Cup, and would say to an unimpressed Alberto, “Yes! Subjunctive!”

I think this began to grate on his nerves after a while so I asked him as much, to which he said no, managing to complete the sentence in the subjunctive.

Two days before I was supposed to leave, Alberto bailed, never to be seen again, with a sappy note explaining that he wouldn't be able to make it to the airport, that he was secretly married to the suicide-prone girl but that he intended to file papers to get a divorce so that he and I could be together. He really believed we had a chance and hoped I would return so that he could prove it to me, blah, blah, blah.

Had this happened in real life, it would have been painful, enough to zap me out of commission for a couple of weeks, but as I folded up his note and packed it away in my suitcase next to my other souvenirs, I realized that this wasn't real life—this was
traveling.
In Los Angeles, I had to live with the consequences of my actions, but every time I showed up at a travel agency, I was buying myself another ticket to irresponsibility. No matter what happened to me in a foreign country, it was all over when I got on the departing flight.

Had Alberto turned out to be someone who really mattered, the end result was still the same: Two days from now, our romance would have been over anyway. And like it or not, I was even going to have to say good-bye to my good buddy Mercedes.

Realizing that I didn't have much time left, I headed over to her house and timidly offered up the note. She shook her head and cursed Alberto's name.

“Don't worry,
querida,
your Cuban mother will go with you to the airport,” she said, giving me a big hug.

And then the morning was just like any other. We chatted over coffee and rum as she gave me her drunken version of everything from communism to getting the best deal on groceries.

“Let's go to the market,” she said that afternoon after managing to intimidate me with yet another complicated salsa move.