Guillermo O'Joyce
He says: "I type on old typewriter because most of the year I live where there is no electricity: mountains of Dominican Republic or rainforest in Costa Rica. . . . [in regard to new work] I have a critical piece built around new play in London in which a writer blackmails his agent but my notion is that we are really dealing with massive breakdowns in language." For a bio he says: "Guillermo O'Joyce has published 11 books of poetry, fiction, and essays through small presses. They are all out of print. One of those--Miller, Bukowski & Their Enemies,essays, is supposed to be reprinted by Pinter & Martiin, London, Fall 2009. The sections here on Cuba are from a manuscript, When Cuba Was a Virgin, memoir 1995-1999. For June or July, O'Joyce is looking for any kind of work in any part of the country: teaching, fire-watch, waiter, dishwasher, house-sitter, gardener, pet walker, story-teller at parties. Reachable at guillermojoyce@gmail.com."
from
miller time:
on henry miller
Henry Miller is not a writer; he's a friend you turn to when your apartment walls close in on you and all the world begins to stink. When you're most exasperated, Miller is there with his alternately cajoling, absurd, sincere, outraged, sage-like, funny voice, ruminating and gassing in a calm way. Miller's voice always comes from the quietest comer of the bar. The rest of the occupants are slaughtering each other, offering polemical speeches, toasting their various diseases, and gouging their own thighs and arms with their fingernails in an effort to rid themselves of the itch of being truly alive. Unlike his distant cousin Celina, Miller never gets clobbered by thew barroom brawlers. He gets close enough to the action to observe the lice and the whispered endearments between blows, but he never gets whacked by a piece of flying &fumiture. "Don't struggle; get in the flow," he advises in book after book. Much of this "flow" for Miller is in the flotsam-all sorts of deranged and eccentric characters-who are both more lively and can tell us more about life than comfortable citizens at the center. He doesn't see the same divisions the rest of us have been taught to see. Wealthy hoarders or bourgeoisie hoarders may be deplorable, but the feeling I get after 30 years of browsing through Miller is that he'd knocked aside all compartmentalization; he would sit down for a meal with anybody who was unaffected and learn from him, provided of course that the companion sprung for the meal. Miller is the greatest of all freeloaders, surpassing even that other Joyce. In return for his presence, his attentive ear, and perhaps a three-page carbon of his latest writing, all Miller asks is that his host "would open all the windows leading to his heart" (about the Greek poet George Seferiades). And so people do. That is his secret-Miller was a great listener, though he has the reputation of a monologist.
He will rage, but he is never weighed down by alienation. He is a master of language, but literature doesn't mean a damn thing to him. I feel equally at home opening a Miller book on Page 7 or Page 57. It is like picking up the thread of a conversation I had five years ago with a trusty and trusting friend. The hermetically closed systems of the modem masters such as Joyce or Kafka mean little to him; they are only further evidence of The Machine that has reduced us all to atoms bouncing off our lonely apartment walls. Like Whitman, he advises us that all we have to do is open our arms and accept the world as it is. He echoes Thoreau in telling us to get off the conveyor belt and live simply. Yet, Miller has not an ounce of Whitman's optimism about the future of the United States, and his frenetic search for money and an audience kept him on the conveyor belt more than he would like us to believe. But it is that voice of his we always come back to. Even when I realize Miller has made a wrong turn, I stick with him. I do this because Miller takes the freedom to say anything that is an his mind at any given time. There is no holding back; he never falls for the echo of his rhetoric as many other good writers do. He is a singer for sure, but it is not his melody he becomes enraptured by, only the desire to be faithful to what he has seen and felt in his heart. If this seems a small order, listen to Chekhov: "I cannot remember a single new book in which the author does not do his best from the very first line to entangle himself in all sorts of conventionalities and compromise with his conscience. Deliberateness, cautiousness, craftiness but no freedom, no courage to write as one likes, and therefore no creative art." This remark covers most of the writing of our time, as it did in Europe in the late 19th century.
Most writers are attracted to craft because it's a chance to be evasive while romanticizing themselves. Even as most lawyers come to law not to serve justice, but to cut the pie of a legally sanctioned swindle, and as teachers come to the classroom to yak non-stop, thereby advancing the cause of impotency. Part of the definition of "human being" would include the unique ability to choose the vocation for which he is least suited.
Miller had risk, he had it in abundance. This was not a matter of using shocking sexual detail, as he was often accused of. It was a huge need to make his voice grow flesh. In the first 39 years of his life, before he fully committed himself to writing, Miller felt that everything we call "progress" was separating us from ourselves as well as each other. The "literary" voice was cut off from the body, and to eliminate the body was to eliminate the soul as well. Every new building, every new invention went a step further toward slicing people into strips of potato falling from the shredder. To reconnect himself, Miller felt he had to start from scratch, disconnect all the plugs that supposedly gave him sustenance but in reality sought to make him a galley slave and slowly inch himself back to being a whole person. To read Miller then, is to listen to the first and last man on earth. Words aren't tools of the craft for him, as they are for most writers. Miller was as suspicious of them as he was of books. No, words were blasted from his liver and spleen and funny bone; they came rushing in measured torrents with lymph nodes and chunks of flesh stuck to them. There are considerable lumps in each of Miller's books where he goes off the deep end and makes no sense at all. This usually happens when he can't resist playing the new messiah and metaphysical poet wherein he trots out the stars and our relationship to the black holes in between. But always with Miller, I feel I am dealing with a man, not a code of conduct some publisher has put his stamp of approval on.
Of course there are other writers tapping away under a black firmament as if no one had ever thought to buy a typewriter before. Beckett comes to mind, with his heroes playing with their bedsores, mumbling asides to a mother who isn't there, their only company the bedpans and a few strands of aborted consciousness. Kafka is another, whispering from behind a closet door which in turn leads to another closet door that finally opens on the MLA convention in Toledo, Ohio, where K, Lucky, and Malone enter to modest applause and the pedants rise to chant, "Oh Blessed Depression, Oh Blessed Symbols." It's gotten so bad that applicants for graduate-school English departments as far away as Cameroon have to write an essay on "How My Alienation Rendered Me Comatose." Pluckier souls are relegated to teaching remedial composition and running out for cheap sherry when the visiting poet comes to town.
It is true that only the courageous ones with unique voices offer themselves up for parody (is it possible to parody Saul "Give Me an Intellectual Smooch" Bellow or John "Count the Whorls in the Bannister" Updike?), but Miller took several important steps beyond what is called "modem literature."
First, Miller said there was no reason to despair. We ought to welcome breakdown, because the moral underpinnings of society indicate no morality at all but merely a devotion to ball bearings and cotter pins. If the legacy of the 20th century is war after war, chaos, corruption, incompetence, a will toward accumulating tidy comforts, the slaughter of everything vulnerable, root it on, says Miller. Let the whole cardboard house filled with pus collapse and ooze into the streets. "Suddenly inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders," he says in Tropic of Cancer. As to what Miller offers to replace cars, phones, soda pop, aspirin bottles, plastic drawings, and "enriched" bread, let him speak from a Greek island in 1939. He has no money, though he has published three books, no prospects, no home or homeland:
"I would set out in the morning and look for new coves and inlets to which to swim. There was never a soul about; I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; the problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenetic activities...."
Henry Miller understood it was rare to meet a man or woman who was at home on this earth. So he sought to show them the way by example and word. Ina 1952 letter to Edmund Wilson, he explained that there was only one hero in his books-himself. If Miller carries the most gargantuan of egos, he also shows us how he made a mess of his life before he left for Paris in 1930. More important, he understands we are all feeling the same pressure, the same remoteness from our toes and genitals, trees and rivers, birds and other people. Yet, not only does Miller not feel alienated from other people, he assumes the world wants to hear him. This is a huge leap of faith when you consider that most people didn't want to hear him, that few publishers or agents would deal with him, that much of his best writing was banned in this country and most of Europe for 25 years, that he was so poor most of his life that he regularly had Frances Staloff, owner of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, run ads for donations for him on her bulletin board. Miller had the rash assumption that he could convince Time magazine to run the same ad. And they did, free. He believed he could catch anybody's ear, and sometimes he was right. Such odd faith contributed as much as anything to grant him a fully bodied voice and convince me he's on the barstool next to me. Neither his misery nor his joys are exceptional, he infers; either can be had for the asking. Because it's impossible to put any kind of label on him, Henry Miller continues to be both a puzzle and an embarrassment to thousands of cultural arbiters in this country.
from
When Cuba Was A Virgin
The Cultural Institutions of Cuba
The UNEAC building sits in a mansion behind a wrong t-iron fence on manicured grounds in lower Vedado. It could be a museum for Viennese knicknacks. The literature component is tucked in a broom closet on the second floor. Just go up a winding staircase, turn to the left, and tap at a half-open door. A black secretary who did not smile said she would advise the director I was here.
I was ushered into an office that had just enough room for a desk and two chairs. The literature director was female and the equal of a thousand Nondescript directors of Culture I had met across The Empire. That is to say she was not too fat and not too tall, not handsome but not ugly either. Give her the right opening and she could be what any potential group of constituents wanted her to be. Had she bothered to smile, she would have given off a hint of youth but this wasn't one of her cheekier days.
"Yes?" she said. In English. How could she tell?
I tenderly placed my four books, resume, and some re
views on her desk. It was a very clean desk. Except for a tele
phone there was nothing else.
She glanced at the books and the resume.
"What do you want?"
"Whatever."
"Whatever???"
"Yeah, whatever you feel like. Whatever you're in the mood for."
There was silence. She scanned the book titles again.
Then I knew. I knew everything. This woman before me was the summation of 30 years of experience, at least my experience with arts councils, universities, grants committees, small, and large presses, literary magazines--even those that had published me, literary agents. Not all thirty years. From 1965 to 1980, the door had been open a crack; there was hope for silly, cavorting mavericks like me. Then a virus took hold that spread like the bubonic plague to anyone who had a nameplate labeled "arts" or "culture', over their office door. The irony was that this virus was most pronounced among the poets and dancers themselves. It said simply that whether you danced with splayed toes or wrote with a left-handed contrarieness, the arts were now the province of political and economic leverage and be careful what you submitted. Like everything else. Let truth or beauty or comedy rise on its hindlegs. As long as it kept its sense of joy or despair in carefully wrought proportions like the wrought-iron fences that surrounded its elegant compounds. The story, poem, or choreography had to be useful and useful so as to pad the insulation of the bureaucracy that sponsored it. No rough edges please in such a world there was room for everything as long as it tippytoed and poked. No frontal assaults. No skewering over an open fire. Art would be kept in-doors, domesticated, and if art should travel let it be in a SUV with the cell phone waiting in the passenger seat should the driver spot anybody or anything suspicious and need to dial 911. The woman running literature at UNEAC was not a person but a type. it could be found in Pine Bluff, Arkansas or Springfield, Ohio. In the seventh grade she was on the school Honor Roll; by the eighth grade she had entered menopause. There was no turning back.
I broke the silence.
"A reading, a workshop, maybe just to meet some Cuban writers and see what they're up to. Whatever."
The woman looked up from the book she was holding, First Born of an Ass, a novel.
"Who sent you?"
"Who what?"
"You heard me. Who sent you? What organization?"
It seemed to me a strange connection... writer... organization. I was so caught off guard I found myself reflecting on some of the organizations that had backed me, briefly: boy scouts, Demolay, Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, Coca Cola salesman at the ballpark, Presbyterian Youth Fellowship. I was fishing. But I had tried.
"Periodically we do have writers knock on our doors
but they are always, backed by an organization. And you?"
"Lady, if I were backed by an organization why would
I come to this godforsaken shithole?"
"That's what I thought. Our country now attracts every loser from every corner of the earth."
I hopped out of my chair and grabbed my books and papers. Then I corkscrewed my eyeballs and leaned in real close toward her. She blanched and recoiled in her seat. I kept leaning, breathing the last of the Cohiba fragrance into her face.
"Do you know who sent me?"
"Who?" she squeaked.
"Jesus sent me!" I yelled and backed off toward the doorway.
"That's just what I thought. You're like all the rest. You've come here to take advantage of us in our hour of need."
"That's it," I cried back at her. I'd retreated to the doorway of the outer office. "Everytime I hump one of your vagabonds on the street, I cry, 'Jesus sent me.'"
By now I had backpeddaled into the hallway. She glared at me from the outer office doorway.
"Go to your own country and hump."
"I can't. They're like you. Unhumpable."
Her door slammed shut. When I turned to go, men stood glaring at me from other doorways. I glared back. The adrenalin was flowing. Suddenly my Spanish grew perfect. I said to the Black security guard now at the top of the stairs, "How's the family?" and smiled.
He smiled back. "My family's fine." he said.
At the top of the grade on 23rd Street, I found a small outdoor cantina and ordered a beer. I lit a cigarette. I didn't feel miffed. I felt grateful. Now I understood why I had come to Cuba. To avoid menopause.
The Especialista
After two months in Habana much of the novelty of reedy supply of sexually available girls wore off. As soon as it got dark they could be summoned from every other street corner into our taxi. But in my case, they just knocked at the door at one of the large houses I was renting. Neither my guide Rodolfo nor I ever asked them what they wanted. They were just let in. There wasn't even the courtesy of asking them their names. They wandered through the many rooms of the house commenting on the furnishings like veteran real estate agents making a careful appraisal. They passed as many as five tourists I might have corralled that day and rented rooms to. My cigar seller, Emilio, might, with his two sons, be displaying boxes of cigars in one of the rooms to a tourist. In a long, skinny sitting room with windows that faced the FOCSA apartments and retail stores (the center of Vedado in Habana and really the center of all of Cuba), a poker game would be in progress. There would be the slap of the cards; the girls would enter and be casually appraised and then forgotten. Having made a circle of the vast house, they would again encounter Rodolfo who had let them in.
"Coca Cola," they would announce to him.
After he had handed them their refreshment, they resumed their wanderings, in this case commenting on the sumptuousness of the furnishings which belonged to Gerard, a middle-age homosexual who claimed to be an heir of the original Coca Cola family. Gerard had rented me the massive museum of a house for $400. a month. He slept on a cot in the hallway, two enormous German shepherd dogs tied to the legs of the bed. He was enraged that there were always so many girls in the hose but there was nothing he could do about it. Like so many Cubans, he was desperate for cash and I always paid my rent on time.
In addition to the cigar-seller, there might be a movie poster seller, one or two baseball-card dealer (The Topps chewing-gum cars of the 1050s had been discovered in Cuba), and a Cuban hawking stolen Habana Club rum in any of the rooms. Plans were being made to head for one of the elegant garden paladars (12-seater family restaurants then springing up) in one of the elite suburbs of Habana. Thus, unless the pair of girls who'd entered 20 minutes earlier were truly exceptional in looks, they were relegated to the background in the general hoopla of an impending party.
Around 7 p.m. we'd gather by the entranceway of the museum-like house ready to grab a taxi and head out for dinner. At that point someone would remember the girls. This day, in addition to Rodolfo and myself, I'd collected a pair of Harvard dropouts, Carl and Dan. Carl said, "what happened to the two girls that were wandering around?"
I turned to Rodolfo. "You gave them drinks. Didn't you see where they went?"
"How in the hell am I supposed to keep track of everybody who comes in this house?"
I'd then have to announce: "We'd better go back in and check the place out."
After prowling the rooms, we found the two girls sitting in the passageway on folding chairs, talking to Gerard. He was showing them his collection of Delft China but the girls kept a considerable distance from his cot. Periodically the two German Shepherds growled at them. Gerard claimed his dogs were trained to smell out and roust "jiniteras" (Cuban girls on the prowl for tourists) from his elaborate house.
He took the occasion to berate us.
"You guys have no interest in the history of Cuba unless it's something you can sell in your country. But these girls," He said, pointing to the two wannabee hookers, "understand the elegance and beauty of their country."
"Thank you, Gerard, but make sure the girls don't tell their pimp about all the valuable stuff you have in this house. Next week it might be gone."
Quickly pimps had moved on the great mass of countryside girls showing up each day at the Habana train station. In addition to squeezing whatever they could out of visiting foreigners, they were trained to "case" a given house for its valuables and feasibility of entry.
"Don't worry, I've got the dogs."
In addition to both dogs being severely underfed, they imitated their owner in their affection for the odor of any male. Thus, two men with several pounds of ground meat could have hauled off Gerard's vast collection of antiques which he once claimed before me were worth at least two-million dollars. A month after he threw me out of his mansion that's exactly what happened. Because Gerard rarely left the house in the evening, the burglars must have been casing the place around the clock for weeks on end. When Gerard returned late one night, he found his house emptied out and his two watch dogs snoring beside an enormous pile of ground meat.
But that's getting way ahead of my story.
The girls whose timing was off--meaning we hadn't had our food and booze yet--were relegated to the back burner. The cry went up, "should we take these two to dinner with us?"
"Naw, we'll find better ones later on. Take their phone number and tell them we'll call them tomorrow."
But when tomorrow came we had forgotten what they even looked like.
There was nothing wrong with such girls. Like many of their kind, they totally defied the popular press notion of prostitution or what was commonly called "jiniteras". They rarely pushed the notion of a fixed price. Rather they relied on us to be grateful benefactors with some sort of gift at the completion of their services. In bed, the majority of them were loving and warm--at least on the first go-around. Seldom did I or the crew of tourists I'd rounded up from the hotel lobbies (Where they were forbidden to bring Cuban girls) get the feeling we were being used for money. Many of the girls had half a notion of picking up a sugar daddy--someone who would periodically supply them and their families with some gifts and money. The more attractive ones might be on the lookout for a boyfriend, one who would fall hard for them and get them a visa right out of Papi Windmill's, never occurred to them. And beyond prices for particular items, they never asked about its nature or who its true spokesmen might be. I often had the feeling that it was all kind of a race.
But against who or what?
The tourists I entertained were no different. Though they increasingly revealed that they'd been to Cuba before, it didn't slow them down. They might have a week or ten days to spend. But there was so much to see and do that they couldn't spare a moment for reflection. Like the girls, I often got the feeling that not in their entire 20 or thirty years on earth had they ever sat down and taken the measure of what they were dealing with. For a visitor unacquainted with the mechanics of the bureaucracy, Cuba had such a savory flow in all its aspects--girls, wind, sun, water, garden restaurants, tasty cigars--that introspection felt inappropriate. That was something for the cold winters of Europe and the northeast of the Empire.
It was into this wall of mild revelry that the girls who tapped at my door had to try to penetrate.
Early one evening a highly unusual woman did penetrate our raucous gathering by the front door, ready to blast out on the town for a garden repast and who knew what frolicking afterwards. Dan and Carl were back in town. Carl's mother brought to Habana every few months a group of Cuban government sympathizers from The Empire who called themselves, "The Friends of Cuba." The two college dropouts caught a free ride with Mom and her Marxist devotees. They were doing a last sprucing up in the bathroom and I and Rodolfo stood by the front door urging them to hurry when we heard a tap. Rodolfo reached for the door but it opened by itself. The bitch was letting herself in.
But that was not the word we would have used to describe her when we got a look at her. she was alone and bolted past us as if we were ushers at a concert where she had a reserved seat. she was older and much better dressed than the semi-motley girls we dragged home. If it hadn't been for the gym bag she toted with her, she might have been mistaken for a junior executive. She took a seat in the one large easy chair in the living room, draped one leg over the other, and said, "I want some Habana Club...over ice...no mixer. And I want a slice of lime with it."
Rodolfo and I stood in the doorway gaping at her. Rodolfo said, "What the hell is this?"
"You heard her, Rodolfo. Get the lady a drink."
Dan and Carl arrived from the bathroom looking like two boys heading out for their Senior Prom.
"What's this?" Dan asked.
"New arrival," I said. I was curious and took a seat on the sofa across from her. Dan and Carl followed. The woman--she might have been 28--glanced around at Gerard's antiques with a slight sneer. It was a look that said, "I've seen better."
When Rodolfo brought her drink she asked for a coaster to set it on.
Dan laughed and said, "A jinnie with airs."
Our new arrival caught the word "jinnie" and aimed a fierce gaze at us.
"I am not a jinitera!" she said and knocked down her rum in one gulp.
Without further ado she advised us she wanted $25. from each of us. She said she would neither take off her clothes nor f--- us. My god, what would she do? She certainly wasn't dressed for mopping.
In the background we could hear the two German Shepherds squealing and growling and straining at their leashes tied to the cot legs as if they too smelled meat.
Rodolfo was so caught off guard by her initial proclamation he couldn't think to translate. "What's she saying?" Dan and Carl kept asking.
When jinnies did occasionally issue absurd demands, Rodolfo would translate in a sonorous, pompous, mimicking manner. This he tried with the regal loner in our midst now but he found her demands beyond any previous ones from Cuban females that he was stopped in his tracks. The guide kept saying, "Oh my god..." and "...oh my God..." so that Dan and Carl were in the dark about what the woman did want.
None of us had any idea exactly what the woman was offering but she said that in addition to $25. from each of us she wanted $10 for the taxi because she lived quite far away. Then, at the conclusion for her services she wanted us to escort her to the street till she was inside the taxi.
With each sonorous bit of translation Rodolfo managed to get out, the eyes of my two guests got wider and wider and their jaws parted. The savvy trollop raised her index finger in the manner of Papi Windmill.
"I am," she said, "an Especialista."
It might have been the Princess of Burma announcing her promotion to the throne.
Everyone knew what an "Especailista" was. We sat back on the sofa and in our chairs and grinned. This woman was claiming to be what most men covet--a b--- job expert. Why I and other men should be so fascinated with such an activity on behalf of women is beyond me. Perhaps it is the Puritanical notion that governs the white races that the body and its demands are essentially evil and must be reigned in at every turn. Only then are men and women free to worship at the alter to technology. The c--- was dirty by implication. No matter what ordinances were issued it always seemed to have a mind of its own. It reared up at the most inappropriate times. A newspaper headline or at tabernacle might set it off. As the first and last line of defense in what had always been a dirty mechanism, harboring one disease after another, it was a sacrilege against civilization itself for woman to take it into her mouth and let it rub against her tonsils. In her passion for the male c---, she might be easily be labeled that kind of woman when everybody knew that in the most fierce of all the isms--capitalism--sexual favors from a woman were a bartering agent, even as a man's ability to be a good provider was his sexual bargaining tool. Curiously, the best-selling movie of all time is "Deep Throat" though presumably the female heroine had had her tonsils removed.
In my nine years in Cuba, several hundred men from northern Europe, Canada, and The Empire approached me to help find them a Cuban girl for the night. And once the girl was seated at his cafe table, they all turned to me with the same request: "Ask her if she's willing 'to give head?'"
Most Cuban girls were willing "To give head." But it wasn't a preoccupation with them. They invariably answered, "Todo." That meant they would do anything. And most did. But to find a woman for whom c----sucking was her principle focus broke all the taboos. To hear that one in five thousand woman announce she was an "Especialista" hinted at obsession. Obsession in turn suggested a left-handed journey into pleasure that might nick the edge of what was truly voluptuous. Voluptuous could lead to ecstasy, that explosion that released a lifetime of self-doubt and made their overworked brains dribble into some sewer grate and their fingers, toes, and heart rise up as one to sing with the sun and the treetops before it sailed out to meet the cosmos. The bumbling tourist in Habana wanted a thrill that could put his entire life in perspective,
Drugs could do this. And most of the old jazz musicians could explain why pot if not cocaine or something even stronger was necessary to lift their music into the realm of the exalted...out there far beyond the inhibiting dictates of musical composition...way out there to where the planets copulated and new galaxies sprang up. But in the history of Jazz few musicians were willing to talk about the overwhelming price of drugs exacted.
The next best bet was a b----job expert.
An "especialista" could step easily to the Throne of the Exalted because a mystique surrounded her. Like Einstein, John Coltrane, and Amelia Earhart, she had the courage to step into the unknown and introduce her "John" for the evening to mystery. Mystery was the opposite of technology and as Cuban girls got hip to this obsession of the tourist they sent hundreds of Papi Ricis whirling around the streets of Habana like fruit loops for days after they'd gotten a terrific b---job from their Cuban honey. For the girls it was just a practical matter of getting out of Cuba--of winning over the heart of some marketing manager from Frankfort till her forked out for a letter of invitation($126), a visa, and an airplane ticket. Once she got there she might settle in to a life of comfort and security with the guy if he was anywhere near her age. But if her benefactor was a true Viejo Verde (old, old man with green) and she hooked up with another Cuban girl in Frankfort or Berlin, Madrid or Milan, there was a good chance she would run away. By 1997--six years after Papi Windmill had declared "Lost Tiempos Especial"--the cathouses of Italy were dominated by Cuban girls.
For us ex-pats living in Habana, the "Especialista" added a special flavor in our daily round of the latest news. While the "jinny" was often not significant enough to ignite more than a mention at the Happy Hour recitation of memorable events, the "Especialista" would be talked about at length, critiqued, celebrated, and chortled over and be the instigator of a dozen memories of similar talent so that drinks flowed without pause and a dozen again ex-pats stumbled home mildly delirious with the recapture of so much left-handed delight and a late afternoon of hilarity. Where the "jinny" at her best would offer memorable intimacy, the connoisseur of c----sucking reminded us of spectacle. The latter was singular and would go into lore. By contrast, a woman named Yordanka, with whom I had a lovely and romantic affair, I've never discussed with anyone and she's remained a private part of my joy and my sadness. Humanness is as good at escaping the daily conquests of men as it does the history books.
Our "Especialista" was well worth the $25. Plus taxi we each shelled out but for a reason none of us could have anticipated. The kicker was that she wanted her money up front--something we rarely did--and after we'd all agreed to chip in for Rodolfo and paid her her money, the fellatio specialist pulled a small silver bowl from her gym bag. It was probably silver coated over brass and it served as a receptacle for her to spit our sad puddle of seed. I say "sad" because when she climaxed the evening by dumping our collective juice from the bowl into the sink before our very eyes, we let out a great groan. "A million Papi Ricis down the drain!" cried Rodolfo and we groaned again as if serious breeding was our mutual forte. It was a ritualistic act designed to remind us how insignificant we were. She need not have done it as our collective ambition could have fit in a thimble.
The performance of the "Especialista" was talked about for years but not just for the physical pleasure it gave us. Rather it was the aesthetics via the peculiar gymnastics by which she pursued her trade that amazed us. She dove down at our baffled members from the most difficult angles; lifted her head from an opposite angle; shook her cheeks back and forth; attacked horizontally from one side, then the other; rolled her head this way and that so we didn't know what she was going to do next. All this she performed with an effortlessness so that it was as if her head were propelled by several ball bearings on a swivel. All this rolling and diving and a degree for such artistry from the Martha Graham School of Fellatio, and the week before approaching us she had practiced at home before a mirror with a hefty knockwurst and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the background. Seemingly disparate movements eventually flowed together into a harmonious whole. The ultimate effect was to make me forget sex altogether and stare horizontally along my torso: I wasn't naked in bed with a $25 trollop; no, I had a front-row seat to watch one of those precocious gymnasts from Rumania perform on the high bar.
Her large head gyrated, dove, lifted, spun about. If did a triple somersault and caught the bar coming down...then below...above men's trivial desires and their utter lack of true ambition...above the sullen inertia of centers of villages and towns or the swirling, buzzing mass of vanity congregated in the burgeoning cities. What thought, what risk, what devotion went into her performance. She would perform before four half-drunk, dopey tourists who would never have the patience or presence of mind to locate who or what she was. Tomorrow she would forget them as if they'd never existed and she would move on to new tourists, their sexual appendages no more memorable than the gymnastics equipment on which the high wire artist exercise her craft. What would this wench for the night take way from us other than a quick one-hundred dollars? The "Especialista" had anticipated her deepest needs and before we'd undressed, taken the mirror from the dresser and placed it at a strategic angle so she could
watch her performance. The mirror wasn't just to admire herself and it certainly wasn't meant for the suckee. It was there to help her perfect her routine, to add a twist here, a pirouette there, whatever little embellishment that thrilled her mouth and added a sense of visual completion to her c----sucking routine.
In her own notion of the hierarchy of values, her mouth was all she had. It was to her what feet are to a dancer, hands are to a sculptor or garage mechanic, what vocal chords are to a singer, wrist and baton for the enterprising music director. Her mouth was her reason for being. It was the mirror of her self's self, her entranceway into society, granted a society of men who in a hundred bars and living rooms would snicker at her antics as a droll appendage to a slightly dirty evening. She would pay no heed. The mirror made her her own audience--admirer and critic, artisan and celebrant. She would always travel alone. There are no unions for consummate c--- suckers. Always she would be searching for that series of moves that would raise her own and her recipient's pleasure to the level of ecstasy. She would be talked about everywhere but never for her intrinsic value. She would always be the "especialista" with the exaggerated hijinks.
Early in my stay in Cuba I witnessed early one morning a scene which must have been repeated thousands of times in Habana on a weekly basis. A cab dropped a woman at the apartment building directly across from me. She was stocky, in her late 20s, and very attractive. She yelled at the top apartment, "Maria! Maria!" And when Maria finally leaned out, the stocky woman cried, "Look! I did it," and she held high in her right hand a sheath of dollar bills--I couldn't tell how much. Then she shoved them back in her handbag and advanced on the apartment building.
The Especialista would never have been caught gloating over a night's haul from a tourist. The idea that she could gain a small living from her unusual art form no doubt gave her a quiet satisfaction but what would have been foremost in her mind were additional movements to complete her symphony of mouth, tongue, throat, and head. Like an Isadora Duncan, she would always be gauging the possible addition of one more pirouette which would make her performance unassailable. And having arrived home, she would take her place before the mirror with her uncooked knockwurst.
After she left, the four of compared us notes in a voracious way. What amazed us, in addition to her head movements, was her utter lack of sound. Not a pip, squeak, or moan to indicate pleasure. It would have spoiled the purity of her choreography. It was as if we had been treated to a silent movie. Carl claimed she had rolled her eyes. Rodolfo concentrated on her lush tongue movements. Each of us spoke of a maneuver that had captivated him. We laughed heartily at all the recountings of the vagaries of such an odd creature. Then silence stole into room; we were all quiet as if we had forgotten something but couldn't quite figure out what it was. All that could be heard was the gurgling of beer down sated men's throats.