Miguel Mejides - Havana Noir

“You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say.

“Fuck crazy. You gonna lend it to me or not?”

“Trouble, man.”

“No trouble. Bring it tonight and in three hours I’ll have it back to him.”

“You don’t even know where those black guys live.”

“I’ll find out — where they live, where they drink their beer, where they bet on cockfights, where they play the lottery, where they smoke pot, where they steal hens. They’re two dead black guys. Just lend me the fucking gun. Look,” he says, and he sticks his hand in his pocket and pulls out six bullets. He takes another chug of the rum with the last two pills.

“You’re crazy, Alexis,” I say, but I don’t think he hears me.

Yovanoti got a movie and we’re gonna watch it in his room on the VCR. First, there are two blondes. It looks like they just got home from work, cuz they’re carrying purses and that sort of thing. But they start undressing each other right away and they get a really good lezzie thing going. Just when they’re getting hot, a mulatta comes in, pushes them apart, and joins them. The mulatta has a red pussy which is practically hairless and must weigh about ten pounds. The two blondes lick the mulatta all over, until one of them pulls out a dildo and straps it on. She sticks it in the mulatta until she comes. While all that’s going on, El Cao is the first to take out his dick and start jerking off. Then me. Then Alexis. Then Yovanoti. Then the other blonde in the movie, so she’s not left with nothing to do, starts jerking off too. The worst part of all this is how it smells like jism in the bedroom now.

I keep thinking about the mulatta’s pussy. Just for a while. Cuz now another movie has started and El Cao has brought out a bottle of liquor. I wake up during the night. I think I’m still in Yovanoti’s room. Alexis is still sleeping, on the bed now. Vanessa is naked and sleeping too. El Cao and Yovanoti are gone. Vanessa, the blonde, is between Alexis and me. That seems odd cuz Vanessa never fucks us, much less without protection. She says we’re savages, that we’re all gonna die from AIDS and that we leave bruises and what she wants is a Yuma to give her dollars and let her live in Paris. I don’t know what her deal is with Paris. But that’s Vanessa, and the truth is she’s hot. She’s got a little lock of blond hair on her fat pussy and two tits that are even hotter. All of a sudden, I get a hard-on. I touch Vanessa but she doesn’t even flinch. I stick a finger inside her and realize her crack is all slippery. It seems to be jism. I rub my finger on my dick, to get it wet. Then I shove it in her. She remains the same. How’d she get like this? I keep on fucking her until I get bored and then I pull out. I suck her tits for a while. She laughs, asleep, and I stick it back in her and this time I come. But not much.

I look out the window and see that it’s raining. I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know what time it is. It must be very late cuz there’s no one on the corner and I’m a little hungry. There are some burned papers on the floor. Of course, we must have smoked some pot. But I don’t remember. There’s a liter bottle with three fingers of rum left. I drink it to calm my hunger then lay back down. But beforehand, I suck Vanessa’s tits again for a little while, thinking the whole time about the mulatta’s pussy.

Since El Kakín hasn’t shown up, we take off for the coast, where the water’s just fine. The drag here are the rocks on the bottom. One time, I almost cracked my head open. Of course, I dove in drunk. You can still see the scar: They gave me sixteen stitches, and since I was so drunk, the anesthesia didn’t take. Better to forget about all that. I drink some more rum and listen to El Cao, who just yaks on like a fucking parrot.

“So I go up to the Yuma and say, Míster, guat yu guan? Girls, rum, tobacco, marijuana? And the guy’s a little scared. Since he was blond and pink, he got red. Nosing, nosing , he tells me, and I say, No problem, míster, yo tengo lo que yu guan . And the guy, Nosing, nosing , but by then Yovanoti was right behind him and I just landed one, and Yova got one in behind his ear, and I grabbed his backpack and kicked him in the balls so hard, I think one came out his ear... I swear! So we took off and when I turned around about a block later, there’s the guy still shaking on the ground, so we slowed down a little. We went through the backpack and trashed all the crap, until we found his wallet and realized the sucker was German. And you know how much money he had? Ten miserable dollars. Yovanoti had to hold me back, cuz I just wanted to go back and give him two more kicks. What the fuck is that, all the way from Germany with only ten dollars on him? That’s what we used to buy these liters...”

We laugh, a lot. And we drink more rum.

Then Yovanoti says, “Let us drink to the solidarity between the German and Cuban peoples!” And we drink some more.

Alexis doesn’t drink this time. He says, “So you gonna get me your father’s piece?”

“You’re still tripping on that?”

“Are you gonna get it for me or not?”

“Fuck, Alexis, you know he doesn’t let it out of his sight, not even when he’s taking a crap.”

“He sleeps with it?”

“Of course not.”

“Then...”

Alexis laughs when he sees the gun. It’s a Makarov and it’s so clean, it looks new. I hand it to him and he just stares at it. He really does like pieces like that. Not me.

El Cao and Yovanoti also look it over. “That’s a nice one,” they say.

Alexis takes out the clip and empties it. He puts in his own bullets, one by one.

“Tomorrow, the whole world should pay me tribute,” he says. “There are gonna be two fewer black guys. Let’s go,” he says, and we leave.

But first we take a couple swallows of rum. Or three.

“I’m sure they’re there,” Alexis says, and he shows us the house. “That’s where they go to drink beer.”

And so we wait at the corner. No one speaks. While we wait, I look at the moon. Tonight, it’s round and very bright. This corner’s shitty, I like mine better. It smells of piss here. Yovanoti is smoking cigarette after cigarette. Richard El Cao is sitting on the ground; he’s singing, softly. Alexis just stares at the house.

“That’s where those mothafuckas are,” he finally says.

The two black guys come out and head for the other corner. We go after them, unhurried. We turn the corner and see them make like they’re looking into this one house. They’re probably gonna pull something there. All black guys are the same. Well, almost all. My father says not all black guys are thieves but that all thieves are black. And he says black people have five senses, just like whites. Except that they have two for music and three for stealing. He should know, since he’s a cop. That’s why he laughs so hard when he tells these jokes and when he talks about the black guys they’ve arrested. When they’re in jail, he says, those black guys aren’t so tough.

We continue along the sidewalk and when we get near the black guys, they feign indifference and light cigarettes. Even though there’s so much moonlight, they don’t seem to recognize us. As soon as we’re in front of them, we jump them and Alexis shows the piece. The black guy who held the knife sees it first. What a black rat he is. He takes off and that costs him his life: Alexis lets fly some lead and the guy falls to the ground. He starts thrashing, like a rabid dog, and Yovanoti and I kick him and yell at him, Black faggot, you got scared, huh, you black faggot. We do that until he shivers really weird and gets stiff, with his tongue hanging out. The other black guy’s just standing there, frozen, seeing how his buddy’s dead as a doornail. Alexis stands in front of him.