Miguel Mejides - Havana Noir

“What you say, you little white shit?” the black guy asks, then hits his jaw with the gun’s butt.

Alexis doesn’t say anything. The other black guy has a knife in his hands and is looking around at everybody else. The two black guys laugh. Nobody moves. Should I do something, given that Alexis is my friend? I make my move.

“Let it be, bro,” I yell at the black guy. “Alexis, forget the cash.”

“Fine, big guy, you win,” Alexis says, and the black guy pushes him and laughs. The other black guy joins him. They leave without turning their backs. I like black guys less and less all the time. I swear to God that’s true.

Alexis talks even less than usual. And he drinks more. Between him, me, El Cao, and Yovanoti — that’s what we call Ihosvani now — we’ve downed two liters and a third’s almost gone. There’s one more. Here, on El Cao’s roof, there’s no fear: We’re encircled by a Peerless fence and, even if we get drunk, no one can fall off. Then somebody calls El Cao from the street corner.

“Richard, Richard!” a woman shouts. Or two women.

It’s two: Niurka and Betty. El Cao tells them to come up. They come up. They already know the black guys hit Alexis, cuz the whole neighborhood knows. They’re thirsty so we start the fourth liter.

“Either of you got anything?” I ask, but they play dumb. These two love to play dumb. “Don’t play dumb,” I tell them.

“I’ve got two parkisonil left,” Betty says, so I ask her for them. They’re two little white pills. I think I wanna have one. But I give them to Alexis, who swallows them with a gulp of liquor.

“Stop thinking about those black guys,” I say.

“I’m gonna get them back,” Alexis says, then lays down on the ground, closes his eyes, shakes a little, and starts to fly. That little parkisonil is a rocket when it’s fueled by liquor.

It’s nighttime and, since there’s no sun, I stare at the moon. I don’t like it as much, but it’s better than nothing. Betty is still sucking me off, and though I’m hard and the head is red hot, I don’t feel like coming. Sometimes it’s like that: It just feels swollen. Alexis is still sleeping on the floor while El Cao is sticking it up Niurka’s ass and Yovanoti rests. I think he’s singing, softly. I have the seventh bottle from our ordeal in my hand and I take another swallow. Suddenly, I don’t wanna be sucked off and I take it out of Betty’s mouth.

“Get on all fours,” I say, and I start to fuck her up the ass, and I think about movies in which men are sticking it up the ass of some woman. But nothing happens anyway; I’m not gonna come tonight.

“Here, my man,” I say to Yovanoti, and he comes over and Betty sucks him.

I start to look at the moon again, take another swallow, and fall asleep.

When I open my eyes, I see the sun. I’m alone on the roof.

I don’t know why there are days I like to come to church. Not to pray or to think about God, cuz I never learned to pray and I was spared the whole speech about God and the saints and the angels. I just like to come. My parents don’t care anymore if I come, cuz it’s not seen as a bad thing anymore. A few years ago it was really bad, and they didn’t like it when I came here. You don’t believe in squat, they said to me. Don’t you know that could get us in trouble? What the hell do you think you’ll find in church anyway? they asked. I just shrugged: I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Well, I do know one thing: I like it cuz I feel calm. But I don’t pray or think about God. I just look at him, nailed up there.

This car runs really well. El Kakín spends the whole day cleaning it, tuning it up, putting little things on it. Whenever El Kakín’s father’s abroad, he gets the car all day. Sometimes he lets us know. Everybody, go to the beach , and then we all go to the beach. Like today. Alexis is still pissed off about what happened with the black guys. He doesn’t even wanna get in the water. He just drinks rum and every now and then mutters, Fuck those black guys. Me, El Kakín, Yovanoti, and El Cao all get in the water. The water’s wonderful today. We get out and drink a little rum, and then I go back in the water and shit and the turd follows me around. But we go back in. Then we go back out, drink more rum, and Vivi and Annia show up. Since we’ve been drinking so much, we talk for a while. Annia says she’s leaving for La Yuma [1] Cuban slang for the U.S. , her and her entire family. Some people from a church — Jehovah’s Witnesses — got them the visas. They go to that church once a week. They sing, they pray a lot, and everybody thinks they really believe in all that, now that they don’t smoke, or drink, or curse, or harbor ill will in their hearts, as Annia says. But my brother’s always losing his temper, she says later. Well, it doesn’t really matter that they don’t believe in Jehovah, since what they want is to get to La Yuma, just like a bunch of other people I know. Not me, though. They say there’s everything over there, but you have to work like a dog. El Cao says he doesn’t wanna go either; he does fine with moonshine and pills no matter where he’s at. El Kakín wants to go: He wants his own car, with five-speed transmission, four-wheel drive, eight cylinders, diesel motor, hydraulic suspension, cruise control. He knows that car like he already owns it. Alexis says he wants to go too: He says you kill a black guy over there and they give you a thousand dollars. He’s obsessed with black guys.

But the one who likes La Yuma most is Yovanoti. He’s always talking about it, about how well everybody lives over there, about his brother who owns the racing track in Miami, and that other cousin who, just two months after arriving, was already sending his mother a hundred dollars a month, and about his ex — brother-in-law who has a restaurant, I think, in New Jersey. He says if he ever gets there, he’ll give up alcohol and pills and marijuana, even cigarettes, so he can earn a lot of money. Then he takes another chug of rum. And he talks some more.

Since I haven’t taken any pills in two days, I’m gonna have fun now. Vivi has a very narrow little ass. At first, you don’t think you can get it in, but she opens up good, tickles herself with her finger, and then takes a deep breath and says, “Put it in me.” And then you just push a little and it goes in all the way. The downside is that I wanna go a little longer before coming but I come really fast, and then I can’t get it back up. El Cao always gets it up: He’s come twice in Vivi and once in Annia. I don’t know how El Cao can come so much. He hardly ever eats. Alexis didn’t wanna do anything. He wants a pill. It looks like he jerked off and drank some rum so he wouldn’t get bored.

“Look,” Alexis says, and he shows me a strip of pills.

“Where’d you get that, man?” El Cao asks, dazed.

“I stole them from my grandmother.”

El Cao cracks up. “Man, what if something happens to the old lady?”

“She can die, for all I care,” Alexis says, and he takes two with a chug of liquor.

He gives me two and hands two over to Richard El Cao and two for Yovanoti and he keeps two more for himself.

The good thing about pills is that you really don’t have to keep drinking. They multiply what you already have in your belly, I think, by, like, ten. They’re also good cuz if you’re not drunk, then you wanna talk, fuck, listen to music. Well, for a while at least. Alexis starts talking.

“I need you to lend me your old man’s piece,” he says to me.

El Cao cracks up again. “You’re gonna kill those black guys over one hundred shitty pesos?”

“Yeah, one hundred shitty pesos and cuz they’re mothafuckas, those shit fuckin’ black faggots. I need the gun,” he says.