NAKED IN LA
Book 2 in the Naked trilogy Colin Falconer
Chapter 1 Miami, 1961 Please don’t read this. I wrote this just for me to remember. I didn’t want anyone else to find it. Besides, you won’t want to read it; you’ll only get angry, or disgusted. You’ll say: ‘Who is this woman? Who does she think she is?’ I’ll tell you who she thought she was. She thought she was a princess. She thought the world owed her. Here I am--if you’re interested--in this photograph. I was ten years old. It was taken in Havana just before my mother died. That’s my father. He was a good man, as far as the world will allow any man to be good. Look at me: chubby, ribbons in my hair. You see that tiara I’m wearing? I have no idea whether it’s plastic or real. Knowing my father, those could be real diamonds. He would do things like that. Anything I asked for, I got. Anything. I thought that was just the way it was.
So now fast forward ten years or so and the tiara is a waitress’ cap. Not so chubby anymore because I’m worked off my feet, trying to make a buck waiting tables in a greasy diner a few blocks from Key Biscayne. Well that was all about to change. The rain was whipping in gusts against the windows. I heard the doorbell ring as a new customer walked in, the wind slammed the door shut behind them. Frank was cutting salami. I took the cigarette out of his mouth and tossed it in the trash on my way out. ‘The boss sees you doing that, you’ll be out of here,’ I said. ‘Haven’t heard of smoked ham?’ There were two of them; shirts open to the third button, chunky gold rings, fancy shoes, t was like they were in uniform. They were sprawled over one of the banquettes like it was the Hilton. I checked out front, there was a black Plymouth right where it said NO PARKING, some other wiseguy sat behind the wheel. One of them looked me over like I was a used car. ‘Where’s the non-smoking section?’ he said. ‘Do you smoke?’ I asked him. ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘Then this is it.’ The other guy liked that. He tossed the menu back on the table. ‘You got any recommendations, sweetheart?’
‘I recommend you don’t call me ‘sweetheart’ unless you want a fork in your eye.’ That amused him, too, we were getting along well. They ordered three coffees. ‘Why three? One of you not getting enough caffeine?’ It was then I heard the washroom door slam and Angel walked out. ‘Magdalena?’ he said. The look in his eyes. I supposed it was how a buzzard looked when it saw a mouse running across a bare field; the slow blink of the eye, a slight flick of the wings. They can’t smile or show satisfaction because it isn’t in them but you can tell from the attitude, the way they tense up, just how they’re feeling. It was like that. I couldn’t believe it. The last time I had seen him was when he tried to rape me at his wedding. He was just an excitable kid then, too much money and any brains he had were between his legs. Looking at him now, I couldn’t believe I ever loved him. He still had too much money. He looked like a banker or a lawyer in that three-piece suit, and the watch was worth more than I made in a month. Diners like this were a dime a dozen in Miami. What the hell brought him in here? ‘I don’t believe it! It is you. What are you doing here?’ I could feel my cheeks burning, he was last guy in the whole damned world I ever wanted to see. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ I saw him staring at the grease stain on my uniform. He might as well have found me standing on a street corner turning tricks. ‘You know this broad?’ one of the gorillas said. He talked over the top of me, straight to his two associates. I guessed they were his bodyguards--they sure didn’t look like they could be the intelligent part of any operation. They didn’t even look sophisticated enough for the diner. ‘Her old man used to own a nightclub in Havana, before the Revolution.’ ‘Every busboy in Miami says they used to own some action in Cuba.’ ‘Not like this. It was a classy place, Lena Horne sang there one night.’ ‘Fuck’s Lena Horne?’ ‘Maracón,’ Angel muttered and shook his head. He turned back to me. ‘Hey, you’re looking real good.’ I was near the end of my shift, I hadn’t washed my hair in days and I’d torn a nail on the door coming out with dishes. I looked like hell and I knew it. ‘When was the last time we saw each other?’ hesaid. ‘Let me think. Was it the night you ran away from the cops and left me in the street? No wait, I got it, it was when you tried to screw me in the garden at your wedding.’ The goons chuckled; they thought I had just made it up. ‘How’s Amanacio?’ ‘He’s dying.’ ‘I’m sorry. What happened?’ ‘Life happened. Fidel happened. Your friends happened. These three coffees, you want cream?’ ‘I’m watching my waistline,’ one of the gorillas said, a real card. He patted his gut, which spread over his belt like someone threw a sack of flour over a wall. ‘I’ll be right back.’ I went into the kitchen and put my face against the tiles just because they were cold. Frank put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You okay?’ ‘Time of the month,’ I said, to deflect the attention. This was all I needed; Angel, seeing me like this, in a uniform, working for tips.
‘Take a break for a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Go outside, get some air.’ I went out the back, sat on the steps next to the dumpster, watched the rain pouring from the gutter. There was a dog scavenging in the bins. I never saw such a sorry-looking stray, at least not since the last time I looked in the mirror. I put my head between my knees, took a couple of deep breaths. I lit a cigarette, a bad habit I’d only taken up since we left Havana. I really couldn’t face talking to Angel again. I sat there for as long as I could. Maybe if I stayed here long enough Frank would take them their coffees and they’d be gone by the time I came out. The smell coming off the trash was ripe, the rain was stinking it up even worse. A plane took off from the airport. I watched it disappear into the overcast and I wished I were on it, headed any place but here. I thought about those days back in Vedado--lying in till whenever I wanted, having Maria run my bath for me--they were like some sick joke now. I looked at my watch. I had to get back; if my boss came back and found me smoking when it wasn’t my break time I’d lose my job. I stubbed out the cigarette and flicked it into the wet yard. The mutt looked up thinking it might be some tidbit for him. Look at the eyes on him, he looked so bowed and desperate. We could have been soul mates.
‘It’s okay, they just left,’ Frank said when I got back to the kitchen. I went to the banquette and picked up the check, the bastards didn’t even leave a tip. I was taking their cups back to the kitchen when Angel stepped back in to the diner, he’d been waiting for me just outside with his goons. Now they were standing up I could see the bulges in their jackets. Angel was clearly a very important man these days. He grinned. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were hiding from me.’ ‘Still here? I thought you’d sneaked off so you wouldn’t have to give me my tip.’ He pressed a hundred dollar bill into my palm to complete my humiliation. That was just about what I took home in a week. ‘I didn’t forget,’ he said. ‘My number’s on there. Give me a call, okay?’ ‘Sure,’ I said. He pressed close and put his hand on my butt. I couldn’t believe it, right there in the restaurant in front of my regulars. ‘I still burn for you, baby,’ he whispered, and strolled back outside. One of his gorillas opened the back door of the Plymouth for him and he slid inside. I walked straight into the kitchen, screwed up the bill and tossed it in the trash. ‘Two more customers waiting for orders on table eight,’ Frank said, flipping a couple of burgers into the pan. I went back to the trash, took out the hundred and tucked it into my bra. ‘I got it,’ I said. ‘You know who that was?’ he said, as I pushed open the door. ‘Yeah, I know.’ ‘You want to stay away from that guy.’ ‘It’s too late for that, Frank. Five years too late.’ They wanted cheeseburgers on table eight. Side of fries and two coffees--black, no cream.
Chapter 2
Miami was just a small tourist town then, not the drugged-out and oversexed place it is now. Getting a job wasn’t that easy, and I was glad for every shift I could get at the diner. There were plenty of other Cuban girls who wanted my job, even though the pay was lousy and I relied on tips to pay the rent. Anything left over went to hospital bills. We lived west of downtown in Little Havana, about four blocks from the Orange Bowl stadium, surrounded by vacant lots and rundown pastel-front homes with scorched paint and shotgun roofs. There were dance clubs and bodegas along Flagler Avenue, men in guayabera shirts played craps in empty parking lots, and guys in bright pastel shirts stood on soapboxes railing against the evils of communism. All everyone talked about was when the next invasion was going to happen. Lansky and Bobbo Salvatore and their friends had been wrong about Fidel. He didn’t want their money and he really didn’t want gangsterismo. He even arrested Trafficante and some other mob guys, banged them up in Tricornia. Lansky himself had left Havana just in time. Cubans who had co-operated with them were put up against a wall at La Cabaña fortress and shot. Within a year, the Beards, as they called them, had nationalized all the casinos as well as Texaco, Goodyear, Kodak, and General Motors. Fidel eventually proclaimed himself a Marxist. A Massachusetts senator I’d last seen drinking Cuba Libres with Bobbo Salvatore at our club in Havana was now the President of the United States. He was taking a hard line but the Bay of Pigs had left us all shattered. We didn’t want to believe that it was over. We talked about it all the time, Kennedy was going to try again one day soon, this time he would bring in his own soldiers and throw Fidel and Che out of Cuba. We all thought it would happen any day and then we could all go home. Living in Miami was just a temporary thing. We had heard rioters had broken into our villa in Vedado a few days after we left Havana and ransacked it, burning Papi’s books in the library, dragging all our furniture out into the street, they even ripped up the plants. We couldn’t find out what had happened to Maria. Then when the rebels marched in, a colonel in Che’s battalion had commandeered the house and used our Bel Air convertible for his private use. They said he had had a machine gun mounted on the bonnet and rode around in the back in his green fatigues, smoking cigars. Like Papi had always said, every revolution just changes one tyrant for another in a different uniform. But the villa, the club, they were still ours. The deeds were in our bank in Havana. We just had to get to them. We weren’t going to live like this forever. And then there was Papi’s life savings hidden in the safe, in his study, behind the photograph of Mama, right there on the wall.
Still, I’d registered with the Cuban Refugee Center, and that got us an extra hundred dollars a month and an allotment of powdered milk, a slab of American cheese, and a tenpound can of cooked meat that looked and tasted like Spam. When we first arrived we had thrown it out or given it to our landlady’s dog. As the medical bills piled up, we forced ourselves to like it. It was two and a half years since Papi’s first heart attack. The doctors said they didn’t think he would make it, but as he always said, ‘the Fuentes are tough,’ and he pulled through the operation. But he was never the same. For a while he got a job washing dishes in a restaurant out on Miami Beach, but then he had another heart attack and ever since he hadn’t been able to get out of bed. Our flat was out back of an old single-storey place, we had one room and a back porch. There was a tiny bathroom separated from the main room by a green plastic curtain. It doubled as a kitchen and there was a gas range with two burners and a small oven right there next to the bath. Papi’s bed took up the rest of the space. It wasn’t exactly the villa in Vedado, but hey, it wasn’t forever. We were going home soon.
I caught the bus home from the diner, it was just getting dark when I got home. I rehearsed what I would say when I saw him. ‘Hello, cariña. How was your day?’ ‘Great.’ No, that would sound too forced. He’d read between the lines. ‘Great’ we won some money on the lottery or ‘great,’ like you got through the day without some sleazeball you used to love pinching your ass? What kind of great? ‘Not bad.’ No, then he’d frown and say, why what’s wrong? ‘Fine.’ Fine was the best answer. I wouldn’t have to smile too hard, and he wouldn’t frown like there was something anyone could do about it. But when I walked in he was still asleep. I put a hand on his forehead to check his temperature and then put my cheek next to his lips to make sure he was still breathing. Dios mio, his skin was the colour of cement. I kicked off my shoes. I sighed, that felt so good. The flat was a mess, last night’s dishes were still in the sink, I’d been too tired after I’d cooked dinner to do anything about them. I always regretted it the next day--it left a smell in the house, stale food and sick people. The TV was on, some game show, I turned it off. Then I went to the window to draw back the shades and the curtain rod broke. ‘Mierda,’ I said, and then winced and looked around at Papi. I’d woken him. He opened his eyes. ‘Is that you, cariña?’ ‘Sorry, Papi,’ I said. He raised a languid hand. ‘You’re twenty-one. Swear all you want. You’re too old to spank.’ I threw open the window, went to the stove, found the coffee pot. Our one luxury was good coffee. We might be broke, but I wasn’t going to make him drink the dishwater the
yankees called coffee. It would take away his will to live. ‘How was your day?’ he said. ‘Fine. How about you?’ ‘Oh, you know. I went down the club to play a few hands, then a round of golf, and this afternoon I went fishing and caught a big marlin. The usual.’ He had been watching the news; Fidel had told everyone in Cuba they had until Monday to exchange their pesos for new paper money, then the old bills would be worthless. So the money we had in our safe, even if was still there, all it would be good for now was lighting a cigar. ‘We still have the deeds to the house, Papi. We still have the club.’ ‘I know, cariña,’ he said and forced a smile. I kept busy at the stove so he couldn’t see me cry. Quecabrón! That thief! He was just like Batista, all these men they tell you they’re going to make your life better, all the time they’re just looking for some other way to rob you. But I pulled myself together. I couldn’t let him see me upset. I put the coffee pot on the tray with two cups and carried it to the bed. He stirred, but he needed help sitting up these days. I’d just settled him when there was a knock on the door. It was Lina, our landlady, who lived in the front part of the house. She was a widow and reminded me of Maria, our maid in Havana. She’d been born near the mercato a few blocks from where we had lived in Vedado, and perhaps once we might have hired her as our maid. Now both our circumstances were very different. She had a big heart but not much to show for it. Even at twenty-one, I’d already figured out that God didn’t play fair. ‘How is he?’ she asked me, wiping the flour off her hands onto her apron. That was a hopeful sign, whenever she had a baking day she always brought us over a cake or cookies. I slipped outside and pulled the door closed behind me so Papi wouldn’t hear us talking about him. ‘He’s the same.’ ‘He had a fall today.’ ‘He didn’t tell me.’ ‘I think he was getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. I heard him calling out. I put him back into bed, but you know, he didn’t look so good.’ ‘He seems okay now.’ ‘You best to check for bruises.’ ‘Thank you, Lena. I don’t know where we’d be without you.’ ‘You go on now, I’m just doing the neighbourly thing.’ She turned to go. ‘I’ll bring in some cupcakes later. Lemon icing. It’s my secret recipe.’ I went back into the flat. Papi wouldn’t look at me. ‘You should have told me,’ I said. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I pulled back the bedclothes to check for bruises. He pulled them down again. ‘I’m all right!’ ‘Don’t yell at me.’ ‘Don’t treat me like I’m a child!’ He shouted so loud I took a step back. ‘Okay,’ I said and poured the coffees. I changed the TV channel hoping to catch the news, but it was too late so I stared blankly at Huckleberry Hound and then settled on ‘The Price is Right.’
The picture of my mother was there on his bedside table. It was hard to remember her now, every day she drifted a little further away from us. But with the photograph it seemed like she was looking down on us, up in heaven with that beautiful smile. I wanted to make her proud of me. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘It’s okay, Papi.’ ‘You’d be better off without me.’ ‘Don’t say that!’ ‘What good am I? I just lie around here all day, and you do all the work.’ ‘You’re going to get better soon.’ ‘You know that’s not true. It’s been three years now.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ I said, and went to the kitchen cupboard and looked for something for dinner. I wanted to cry but I wouldn’t, not in front of him. Things were going to get better. The Americans would throw Fidel out of Cuba, we could go home, and Papi would get his strength back. If I said it fast it sounded easy. We just had to hold on for one more day. End of Excerpt
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Coming Soon Book Three in the Naked Trilogy: Naked in Saigon
About the Author
Find Colin Falconer at: https://colinfalconer.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @colin_falconer
Born in north London, Colin Falconer worked for many years in TV and radio and freelanced for many of Australia's leading newspapers and magazines. He has been a novelist for the last twenty years, with his work published widely in the UK, US and Europe. His books have been translated into seventeen languages.
Copyright Page Copyright © 2013 by Colin Falconer
http://coolgus.com This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Colin Falconer’s blog at: http://colinfalconer.wordpress.com or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/colin_falconer