An American Son: A Memoir (9 page)

In the summer of 1981 an older kid in the neighborhood became upset with me for reasons I no longer recall. His name was Bruce. One day he came by and started kicking and breaking the wooden fence in our backyard. My mother heard the ruckus, and came outside to confront him. Bruce told her we were trash, and she should take us on her boat back to where we had come from. I had no idea what he was talking about. My mother didn’t swim. She was terrified of the water and, as far as I knew, had never been on a boat in her life. My parents later explained to me he had been referring to the Mariel boatlift, which had occurred the year before,
when Castro had emptied jails and mental wards and sent their inhabitants to Miami, along with many genuine political refugees.

My parents told me later I shouldn’t blame Bruce for his behavior. He must have watched the news about the boatlift with his parents and overheard them make racist remarks about Cubans, which he then repeated to us. My mother told me I should feel sorry for him—that he had problems I didn’t have, that it was his parents’ fault he behaved the way he did. Bruce’s parents worked at a hotel casino, and they often stayed to gamble after work late into the night, leaving Bruce to fend for himself. A few weeks after the incident, he came to our door and asked for something to eat. My father drove him to Burger King and bought him dinner.

Las Vegas structured its public school system differently than other cities. Sixth grade was considered a bridge year between elementary school and junior high, and students attended a “sixth-grade center,” a separate, one-year school that prepared us for junior high. In 1982, I enrolled in Quannah McCall, a sixth-grade center in a predominantly black neighborhood. African American students had been bused to the elementary school in my neighborhood. Now I was bused to my new school in their neighborhood. It seemed fair to me, and the newness of the experience had more to do with the distinction of being a sixth grader than the unfamiliar neighborhood where it was located.

I began my third season in Pop Warner football that year. I still wanted to play quarterback, but my father and I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to play the position if I stayed with the Sooners. My dad asked that I be allowed to play for another team, and I joined the Cavaliers, sponsored by the Young Electric Sign Company. Not long after the season began, my father became convinced the coaches’ sons got more playing time than others. He didn’t know enough about football to coach it, but he volunteered to be the team’s equipment manager in the hope that his official role with the team would encourage the coaches to give me more playing time at the quarterback position.

The kids I played with on the Cavaliers were from a different neighborhood than the kids I had played with on the Sooners. I was one of a few non–African Americans on my team. Yet we seemed to fit in better with the Cavaliers. The parents of my new teammates were friendlier to my father than the Sooners parents had been, and he seemed more comfortable with
them. I’m not really sure why that was. My dad was older than most of the other fathers, and maybe his age or accent had been more of a social barrier to the Sooners parents than it was to the Cavaliers parents. When I played for the Sooners, the parents often hosted casual get-togethers at their homes after the games. We had never been invited. After Cavaliers games, the parents hung around the field for a while, drinking beer and joking with each other, and my father was welcome in their company. He joined and eventually led an effort to collect money to give as cash prizes to players who scored touchdowns or made the hardest tackles.

My teammates on the Cavaliers had an edge to them. They were tougher and more intense than the kids who played for the Sooners. Their aggressive play and attitude took me aback at first, but I adapted to it. By midseason, I had the same attitude and approach to the game.

I got to play quarterback, sharing time at the position with a kid named Larry Cook. Larry was a better athlete and a better player. When I came on the field, he shifted to running back. My job was to hand him the football and let him run, which he did very well. My dad liked Larry. He promised to buy him a Burger King Whopper after the game for every touchdown he scored, and was astonished that Larry could consume two Whoppers in one sitting.

Larry and I became friends. Most of the friends I made at my new school were black. In order to fit in with my new social circle, I started listening to R&B music. I watched
Soul Train
on Saturday mornings, and became a big Michael Jackson fan. By the end of sixth grade, I had begun enjoying a new kind of music, rap, and I’ve been listening to it ever since. My white friends liked hard rock acts—Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne and others. I didn’t care for that kind of music anymore, and they didn’t care for my preferences, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash.

I was exposed to something else I had been unfamiliar with before sixth grade: inner-city gang violence. Street gangs from LA were expanding to other cities, and spin-off gangs from the infamous Bloods and Crips appeared in my friends’ neighborhood. It wasn’t a problem at school, but I could see it distressed my friends. They often told me they had to be careful not to wear blue or red clothes, which were gang colors and could be mistaken as a sign they were affiliated with one gang and a target for the violent enmity of the other. Some of my friends had brothers who had joined gangs
and been hurt in a fight or jailed. Every afternoon I took the bus home to my peaceful neighborhood, while my friends returned to their increasingly violent one.

We had a pool party for my twelfth birthday. My uncle Aurelio, Elda’s husband, had given us an aboveground pool his family no longer used, and my father had reassembled it in our backyard. I invited friends from the neighborhood and my old school as well as some of my black friends from sixth grade and the Cavaliers. Everyone seemed to have a good time—I certainly did. But I later learned that several friends from the same family were no longer allowed to come to our house. They told me their parents would let them play with us outside but had forbidden them to enter our house again because we had entertained black kids there, and they didn’t want their kids making friends with them. I was mystified and irritated.

It was an eventful time in my life—a new school, new football team, new friends, new music and new interests. I soon had a new church, too. I had kept in touch with a friend from elementary school, a Catholic, though not a very devout one. Yet his religious identity piqued my curiosity about my former faith, and early in 1983 I began a new research project. I read about the Church in my
World Book
. I checked out books on Catholicism from the school library. I pestered my mother about her religious upbringing. During Easter Week of 1983, when the most sacred traditions of the Catholic liturgy are on display and a papal Mass is broadcast on television, I made up my mind. I wanted to be a Catholic again.

The depth of our commitment to the Mormon Church hadn’t progressed beyond attending Sunday services and social functions. My father had never felt comfortable there, and my mother had mostly joined the Mormon Church because she believed it was a safe and welcoming place for her children that would make us happy. So my parents posed no objection when I argued we should return to the Catholic Church, and in the spring of 1983 Veronica and I enrolled in CCD, the Catholic Church’s religious instruction program.

My aunt Lola was upset, as was her entire family. I think Lola’s family suspected my aunt Irma, a vocal critic of Mormonism, of convincing us to return to Catholicism. But it had really just been my decision. We left the Mormon Church with nothing but admiration for the place that had been
our first spiritual home in Las Vegas, and had been so generous to us. I still feel that way.

I’ve often remarked that my parents couldn’t give us everything we wanted, but they made sure we always had everything we needed. And when they could afford to give us more, they did. When Veronica and I were old enough to be at home alone or with only my grandfather to supervise us, my mother started working again. She got a job as a maid on the casino floor of the Imperial Palace Hotel. My father was doing well in his bartending job at Sam’s Town. They made a good living between their two salaries and my dad’s tips. It was not enough to support a lavish lifestyle, of course, but enough to afford a few extras. When I asked my parents to let Veronica and me attend the local Catholic school instead of the public junior high school, they agreed. The tuition at St. Christopher Catholic School was a stretch for them financially, but, as always, they wanted us to be happy.

Yet, from the start, I was anything but happy there. We had to wear uniforms, which I didn’t like. The schoolwork was much more demanding, which I really didn’t like. My biggest problem with the school, though, was its location directly across the street from J. D. Smith, the junior high I would have attended, and where every day I watched my friends from sixth grade and football come and go.

After one week at St. Christopher, I demanded my parents take me out of the school and enroll me at J. D. Smith. I made up all kinds of phony excuses. I told my parents the teachers were mean and the other kids didn’t like us. Our priest told them to ignore me. My whims shouldn’t override their judgment. I was a child and needed to obey them. But I made life unbearable in our house, and within a week, my parents had relented. I cringe today when I remember how selfishly I behaved.

I could be an insufferably demanding kid at times. I’m ashamed of it now, and I regret my parents so often gave in to me. I know they did it out of love, and it did make me happy in the moment, which they so badly wanted me to be. But they weren’t doing me a favor in the long run. I can still be selfish with my time and attention, even though I have children. But Jeanette won’t indulge my bad behavior as my parents had. She lets me know instantly when I am shirking my most important responsibility. I think I might have become a difficult person to like had I married someone else.

My football season that year was brief. The Cavaliers and the Sooners had decided to merge that summer, and became a Pop Warner dream team: a collection of the most talented players from two of the best teams in the area. I badly wanted to make the team, and the head coach of the new team was Coach Atkins, my former coach. I worried for weeks he wouldn’t select me because I had left the Sooners when he hadn’t let me play quarterback. So I was thrilled when he called in mid-July to tell me I had made the team.

The team had a great year. Me, not so much. After playing the best game I had ever played in Pop Warner, I broke my leg the next week in practice. I missed the rest of the season, including our victory in the city championship game.

We planned to spend the last two weeks of 1983 in Miami, and Barbara bought us tickets to the Dolphins’ last regular-season game against the New York Jets. I was overjoyed to see the Dolphins break open a close game to defeat the Jets and finish the regular season with a 12 4 record. I was sure they would make the Super Bowl. My father bought me one of those foam “We’re Number 1” hands at the game. I still have it.

We celebrated a traditional Cuban
Nochebuena
that Christmas Eve with Barbara and Orlando at their new house in a rural part of Dade County. Their house was small, but had an acre of land. Orlando was from a
guajiro
family, a Cuban term for country folk. He and his family slaughtered a pig, and on the morning of Christmas Eve they set it over a pit filled with charcoal and covered with palm fronds, where it would slowly roast for the entire day. The pig was carved and served at nine o’clock that night, along with black beans and rice and boiled cassava, a traditional holiday feast in rural Cuba.

That Christmas is my fondest childhood memory. It had been a long time since I had seen my parents so happy. My father had felt transported to his childhood in the years before his mother died. My mother was nearly overcome with emotion as she spent her first Christmas in five years with Barbara. And my grandfather was as close to our family’s rural Cuban heritage as he had been since his boyhood. Only Veronica has unpleasant memories of it. She had been appalled to see a pig killed and butchered, and terrified when Orlando chased her around the house with the pig’s head.

Our Christmas in Miami reawakened my affection for the city and the Cuban culture so prevalent there. But I returned to the familiar, pleasurable
routines of my life in Las Vegas with little reason to wish I lived anywhere else.

I became interested in girls that year and started to care about my appearance. I was popular at school, and had an increasingly active social life. My schoolwork suffered for it, of course, but I managed to get by making the minimum effort necessary. Life was great—and then it wasn’t.

In April 1984, the Culinary Workers Union went on strike. I went with my father to the union hall, where several hundred workers rallied on the eve of the strike. The strike became my new obsession. The strikers set up camp in a desert field across the street from Sam’s Town and took turns walking shifts on the picket line. I helped make their signs. When the hotel management sent one of their security staff to videotape the picketers, I held a sign in front of his camera to block his view.

I never grasped all the issues involved, but understood generally that the strikers were just asking to be treated fairly. They had worked hard to help make the hotels profitable, and were entitled to better compensation and benefits. I was excited to be part of the cause and join forces with striking workers from many hotels. At the height of the strike, it seemed all the kids at my school had a parent on the picket line. I became a committed union activist. I got to spend time with my father. I thought it was nothing but fun.

Initially, the financial strain on my parents was modest. They had set aside a little money in anticipation of the strike, and the union paid the strikers small sums from a strike fund. But it wasn’t much, and we had to live frugally. We couldn’t go to the movies or restaurants or roller skating. I remember going to the union hall with my dad to pick up government surplus cheese and peanut butter. Everyone assumed the strike would last only a few days or weeks before management would come to their senses and settle. As the weeks wore on, I began to notice the worry etched on my father’s face. I remained, however, happily committed to the cause.