Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

Author:Carlos Eire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

21

Veintiuno

The air was a huge, all-enveloping knife. Even through the thickest layers of wool, the wind coming off Lake Michigan, two blocks away, would plunge the blade deep into you. It was about minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. Cold enough to freeze your spit in two minutes or so. I knew from empirical observation. I had just timed it, right there on the elevated train platform, after I’d coughed up a huge jade green wad of phlegm.

I’d come a long way from Havana. A very long way.

I was standing at the Bryn Mawr El station in Chicago, waiting for an A or B train to take me all the way past the Loop, to the Harrison subway stop, where I’d get off and walk the four blocks to my night job at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

Long underwear, two sweaters, gloves, ear muffs, wool socks, fleece-lined shoes, and a long, hooded woolen coat weren’t enough to keep me from getting stabbed. My face took the brunt of the assault. My nose was gone. Couldn’t feel the damn thing, though I could taste the snot that dripped from it onto my lips.

The elevated train platform lurked over Bryn Mawr Avenue and all its lousy shops at second-story level. Most of the platform straddled the street, but the rest of it looked out upon the gritty, rear façades of buildings that stood tightly pressed against each other. I was facing the brown bricks of the Bryn Mawr Theater, which screened second-run films at a price that was just right for refugees.

ALL SEATS FIFTY CENTS read the permanent sign on the marquee, right under the movable letters that spelled out GOLDFINGER. SEAN CONNERY AS JAMES BOND 007. The Bryn Mawr Theater was a poor substitute for the Miramar Theater, but it was good enough. Especially on those rare days off from work.

Goldfinger was one of my favorite movies. Right up there with The Vikings. Oddjob’s killer hat was every bit as cool as Kirk Douglas’ flying axes. And Sean Connery was cooler and smarter than Kirk Douglas. He didn’t burn for any single woman. No. He burned for all good-looking women, and he knew how to get them to burn for him, at least for a few hours. Which was all he wanted to see of them, anyway. Detachment, shaken not stirred.

The elevated train turned into a subway just a little bit south of the Armitage station. The tracks plunged rapidly and deeply into a dark tunnel, and the dank smell and the noise of the steel wheels grinding on the steel tracks in that deep gloom made you feel as if you’d plunged into the Underworld.

That’s what I felt, anyway, on the way to my dishwashing job at the Conrad Hilton, in January 1966. I counted every lightbulb on the way as I prayed for the perverts to stay away from me, especially at two a.m.

Two thousand, four hundred and thirteen lightbulbs.

What a long, long way from Havana I had come. It was a

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