Keep Your Eye on the Marshmallow by Joachim de Posada & Bob Andelman

Author:Joachim de Posada & Bob Andelman [Posada de, Joachim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101622407
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

8

No Man Is

a Marshmallow

Island

In the years that followed Clemente Vivanco’s first introduction to Jonathan Patient, the older man discovered that he had developed a philosophy of life that wasn’t apparent until Jonathan himself identified it.

Mr. V recognized that its roots were not, in fact, with him but with his father. Which was somewhat ironic, in that when he was in his late teens he reached a point where he felt he had to choose between two distinct paths and spheres of influence.

On the one side, there was his father, a man who worked hard from sunup till sundown but always had time for family. He never had an unkind word for anyone and treated everyone he met, friend and stranger alike, with kindness and respect.

And on the other side was the infamous Dominican ambassador in Cuba and ultimate playboy, Porfirio Rubirosa. Rubirosa—who was a dear friend of his father’s despite the wide difference in their personalities and makeup—was a womanizer of the first kind, a gambler and a heavy drinker. He took chances—very often risks—every day and lived a life that was bigger and more colorful than anyone else’s in all of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Clemente considered his father’s quiet, steady life and compared it against Rubirosa’s loud style, the ever-present company of the island’s most beautiful women, the daily political intrigue and rumormongering. For a young man in the heady, pre-Castro days, there was no choice really. Clemente Vivanco chose to follow Rubirosa and live every day like it was his last.

Totally different values, utterly different principles.

That was the choice he made. And it was fun—for a few years. But the lifestyle—and the resentment it created among his friends and family—ironically pushed Clemente to go in a different direction at roughly the same time he bid a heavy farewell to his father and fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba for the United States.

But he still wanted to go his own way, leaving behind family and friends. Unlike most Cubans, Clemente went not to Miami, the final destination of so many emigrants of the era, but to Southwest Florida and Fort Myers, where he could reshape his persona out of sight of people who knew him the way he once was.

As owner of a series of progressively bigger and better bars and later, nightclubs, Clemente made a fair living using the nightclub skills he learned at the bent elbow of Porfirio Rubirosa—but tempered his personal lifestyle by at last emulating his father’s best characteristics of respect, restraint, and thrift.

Over time, Clemente allowed people from his old life to know the man he had become and welcomed them back into his current existence. To a one they were surprised by the way he had altered his life’s trajectory through sheer force of will and determination. The people who were once his friends wanted to be his friends again. And he found creative ways to support his father—who never left Cuba—and took pride in demonstrating that he had become his father’s true son after all.

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