Neal Pollack

The tiny coffee maker, stout and metallic, hissed, cradled by fire on the stove. Destiny shot up from her kitchen table to extinguish the blue and orange flames before the crude sprayed all over. No one at the bodega where she’d bought it would ever consider it was anything other than Cuban, certainly not provident from the island but from Cuba nonetheless: diasporic, exiled, absolutely imaginary. Using an oven mitt to hold the hourglass-shaped coffee maker, she poured herself an exact thumbful in a wee cup that sported a raised pink and green floral pattern. Destiny lifted the cup to her lips and let the heat rise like a wet, gentle fog around her mouth. She stuck her tongue out, a marsupial peeking from its pouch, then tucked it back in a flash.

“Fuck Cuba,” she said aloud, in shamelessly accented English. She paused to regard the coffee’s approachability. Fuck fucking Cuba—and Mexico too.

Then in one cranelike swoop, she snatched up the demitasse, opened her wide mouth even wider, and tossed the scorching black bracer down her throat.

It had been twenty-five years since Destiny, a/k/a Dagoberto Fors Arias, a/k/a Dago Fors, had landed on American shores. He arrived in South Florida from Cuba on a blistering summer day in 1980 in a small yacht named San Dimas which carried a beneficent Catholic dissident to Key West and was piloted by the meanest-looking priest Dago had ever seen, a bulldog of a guy named Mariano Delgado. It had been a lifetime since that journey and Destiny was in no mood to look back. But the Mariel boat lift had been both historic and controversial and, on its twenty-fifth anniversary, she was one of its stranger success stories.

Now a newspaper reporter, a young Cuban-American dyke with misplaced nostalgia and a predisposition to all things Cuban, had tracked her down and wanted an interview. Destiny had tried to demur but the girl was insistent. She’d seen her on TV, an intense but pretty tomboy, disarming in a way but with the ferocity of those small dogs who clamp on and never let go. Somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to the interview; somehow, she’d gotten Destiny to agree to meet her at the one place in all of Chicago Destiny had vowed never to return, La Caverna Club on 26th and Kedvale, so deep in the heart of the Mexican barrio that it seemed, but for the cruel cover of snow, that it wasn'’t in a northern enclave at all but at the very center of some lawless border town.

Destiny sighed and ground out the Romeo y Julieta on an ashtray in the shape of the island, a long pink caiman, hollow inside.

***

Dago Fors had gotten out of Cuba because in 1980 Cuban authorities let open the island’s borders, causing a gush of refugees to force their way north on anything that would float. Almost immediately, hundreds of exiles had begun racing boats south to pick up their seafaring relatives. When the avalanche of refugees was so great that it embarrassed the socialist government, the Cubans emptied their jails and mental hospitals and forced the exiles to take along former inmates and other undesirables. It was their “lacra social,” their catch-all category. Indeed, the snarling priest who’d brought Dago to safety had been promised the release of the Catholic dissident, who was his brother-in-law, as it turned out, only if he agreed to take a bunch of fairies back with him on his roomy boat.

Dago Fors, café au lait, pouty-lipped, a catlike twenty-four-year-old drag queen, was doing his best to be one of them. When word got out about the goings on, he put on the trashiest orange blouse he could find, the tightest, most worn jeans (with nothing underneath, naturally), and immediately set himself to slapping his flip-flops up and down the Malecón in the hopes of getting arrested. Within twenty-four hours, he found himself with an itchy crust of salt from the sea spray on his skin but at last standing in an official line of so-called “social scum.”

By his own calculations, Dago knew it might be days, if he got out at all, unless the official system was interrupted in some way. A bribe was impossible for him, with a life’s fortune of less than forty pesos in his pocket. So Dago screeched, his back arching each time. And the more he began to loudly comment on this or that part of the guards’ anatomies, the more irritated they became, and the more anxious they were to get rid of him. When Mariano the priest pulled up, the guards figured they could exact a double price: rid the revolution of the insufferable fag and make him pay for his unrelentingly bad behavior by sticking him with somebody big and mean and morally imposing.

To their surprise, Mariano sternly shook his head and touched his clerical collar every time one of the Cubans signaled for him to let Dago on his boat, but the brother-in-law, already on the deck and perhaps delirious from his prison trials, beckoned otherwise with his hand. That’s about when Mariano threw open the throttle, sans scum aboard.