Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos

Author:Oscar Hijuelos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Part 4 THE GAS STATION

sixteen

BY AUGUST, DOING not much more than just hanging around the farm on all those dead quiet days got real old for me. I can’t say that I was missing New York—hell no! But I missed some things about it: like walking down to Jack’s stationery store to look over the latest comic books, or having an egg cream soda and ketchup-smothered french fries at its counter. And I missed those stickball games, with those guys jiving on the street. And other stuff like running into the ladies from the beauty salon where my Moms worked, and all the cheek pinching they would lay on me.

I even kind of missed my part-time jobs—at the morning laundry with Mr. Gordon and at Mr. Ramirez’s used-bookstore, in the afternoons, where I could sit behind the counter and read for hours—and then, heading home, messed up as things could be sometimes, just bumping into my Pops on the street and walking up the block with him, my Pops offering me some Chiclets to chew, his arm around my shoulder, the two of us, just being together.

Once I’d start thinking about home, all kinds of stuff—Cuban stuff—would come into my head. Like the little altar to the Virgen de Cobre, patron saint to Cuba, that my Moms kept in the corner of her bedroom, then the dartboard with Fidel Castro’s picture on it that my Pops used to bring out for his friends’ amusement, the games of dominoes they’d play in the kitchen, my Pops’s pals—plumbers, superintendents, shoe salesmen—compatriots he called them, drinking rum until early in the morning and getting so wrecked I’d hear them singing Cuban songs as they went home along the street, dogs barking, people closing their windows or shouting complaints in their wake.

Then, out of nowhere, I saw my mamá hemming my trousers, me squirming and her telling me in Spanish how cubanos were good dressers, and had to be, and how special Cubans were, in her snooty opinion, as opposed to other Latinos. Puerto Ricans were really great, she’d say—nearly Cuban; Mexicans and Dominicans were good souls too, like all Latinos, but as far as she was concerned Cubans were in their own category.

That got me into remembering this presentation I had to do before my seventh-grade class in grammar school when I tried to explain to Sister Horrendous (yep, all the nuns got nicknames) and my fellow students what being Cuban was about to me. I’d kind of poked around in the school encyclopedia, but what I talked about mainly came off the top of my head. Barely able to stop stuttering because so many eyes were watching me, and because I was shy as hell and a wise-ass at the same time, my list/explanations went something like this:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.