© Burrow Press and its contributors, 2014

Illustrations by Alex Lenhoff

Book Design by Tina Craig

ISBN: 978-0-9849538-3-7

E-ISBN: 978-0-9849538-9-9

LCCN: 2014938739

Burrow Press

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Orlando, FL 32853

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The story “Jamokes,” written for 15 Views by John Dufresne, first appeared in Tri-Quarterly.

The characters, brands, and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ABOUT THE 15 VIEWS SERIES

The 15 Views series features anthologies of loosely linked fiction set in Florida as told by authors who live (or once lived) in a given city.

One author sets the sequence in motion, and the fourteen authors that follow must (1) set their stories in a new location, and (2) link their story to one of the previous by something as concrete as a character, insignificant as an object, or as abstract as a metaphor. The result is a sprawling literary portrait of a Florida city.

This series is inspired by the late Jeanne Leiby. Though she passed away on April 19, 2011, her work as an editor (at Black Warrior Review, The Florida Review, and finally at The Southern Review), a teacher and mentor (at Alabama, Tennessee, UCF, and LSU), and a fiction writer (the collection Downriver), will certainly be remembered for many years to come.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Jaquira Díaz My Miami: The City that Gave Me Stories

ONCE Ricardo Pau-Llosa Wynwood Arts District

ANGELS OF EDEN Phillippe Diederich Homestead

IMELDA’S LULLABY M. Evelina Galang Coral Gables

THE JUNGLE Melanie Neale North Miami Beach / Aventura

MORNING GLORIES Lynne Barrett Upper Eastside

RUINS Susanna Daniel Stiltsville

IN PLAIN SIGHT Corey Ginsberg North Bay Village

MY PEOPLE Geoffrey Philp Ives Dairy

NOT WITHOUT FEATHERS Leonard Nash Key Biscayne

SINKHOLE M. J. Fievre Little Haiti

WHAT COMES BEFORE THE GHOST J. David Gonzalez Allapattah

95 SPIN Ian Vasquez I-95

BISCAYNE Patricia Engel Downtown, Biscayne Corridor

FROM THE DESK OF DAVID J. HERNANDEZ, SECURITY OFFICER, WESTLAND MALL Jennine Capó Crucet Hialeah

JAMOKES John Dufresne Ojus

MY MIAMI: THE CITY THAT GAVE ME STORIES

Jaquira Díaz

Introduction

As I was bringing together the fifteen authors that make up 15 Views of Miami, my goal was to make this list as diverse as possible—writers both established and emerging, essayists and fiction writers and poets. Fifteen different voices. Some Miami natives, like Susanna Daniel, J. David Gonzalez, Jennine Capó Crucet, and Leonard Nash. Some transplants, like Patricia Engel, M.J. Fievre, and Lynne Barrett. Some who haven’t lived in the city in over ten years—like Phillippe Diederich and Ian Vasquez—and some who have never left.

These stories are linked—sometimes by a character that returns in a second story, sometimes by an image or a place that appeared in a previous story, sometimes thematically. The links are often subtle, and sometimes they sneak up on you. You’ll find in these pages writers and characters from different cultures, a variety of languages, of styles, of neighborhoods. You’ll find ugliness and pain, but also beauty, art, ghosts, love. You’ll be overcome with nostalgia and laughter and longing. And if, like me, you’ve spent the last four months shoveling snow in the Midwest, you’ll find yourself dreaming of the sun, the ocean, scorching-hot cortaditos.

These fifteen views explore the ugly truth. They are portraits of a city in which characters are not stereotypes, not victims or villains, but flawed and human and sometimes brutal—characters who cling to their humanity even during moments of great pain, and find meaning in unexpected places. These stories are playful and evocative and multifaceted and dangerous and strange. Just like my Miami.

*

My family moved to South Beach from Puerto Rico in the ‘80s, before the modeling agencies and five-star restaurants, before gentrification, before the city’s emergence as a gay mecca, before it became the tourist destination it is today. There was no glitz and glamour, no waiting in traffic for three hours because another action movie was being filmed on the MacArthur Causeway. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, my neighborhood was mostly populated by Hasidic Jews, Latinos, Haitians, white-haired retirees, and the working poor who lived in the rat-infested, run-down, art deco slums. For the most part, the models and musicians and talent scouts steered clear of our neighborhood, unless they were looking to buy dope, which sometimes they were.

Back then, the Beach was under development. Real estate investors had started buying and renovating the art deco apartment buildings and historic hotels that had flourished during the Beach’s golden years. And while we lived in a place where money was revitalizing an entire city, we were poor. We lived within walking distance of Flamingo Park, where I played basketball with the neighborhood kids, hung out in the public pool, tagged all over the piss-soaked handball courts. My father worked two jobs, seven days a week, barely managing to support a family of five. We were always behind on rent. Every month our phone was disconnected. We never had cable. We sometimes lived without electricity. My brother and I took turns killing the mice that lived in the hole behind the fridge, whacking them with our abuela’s cast-iron skillet. We were grateful for free school lunches, sometimes our only meal of the day. We went without air conditioning in the summer, without heat in the winter, without mousetraps ever.

This was not the Miami Beach most people know. This was the Miami of Cocaine Cowboys, during the Drug Wars, and shootouts in the street were a real thing. Most of us back then knew someone—or knew of someone—who had been marked by violence. Everyone had these stories: a kid they’d known from the neighborhood, a kid they’d grown up with, barely seventeen, who’d been shot outside a nightclub. A boy they’d been on a date with, killed by some gang members, his head cracked open with a metal pipe. I also had these stories: an uncle who was stabbed in front of a crowd while at a salsa concert in Calle Ocho, a friend who was stabbed in a street fight and ended up in Jackson Memorial Hospital with a collapsed lung. Growing up in Miami, I saw these stories multiply. There would be another friend stabbed in a fight, a boyfriend’s best friend killed in a drive-by shooting when we were barely fourteen, a classmate’s brother shot in the face, a girl I’d known since third grade found murdered in her bathroom.

We learned to live with these things. We assumed that this was the way the world worked—some of us lived, some of us died. Even if we were just bystanders. Even if we were just kids.

Over the years, I’ve scoured many bookshelves in search of my Miami—a Miami where people of all races and cultures and backgrounds and languages are the main characters, not just sidekicks or criminals or Others, not just caricatures, but people with flaws and dreams and desires. As a kid, even when I was fighting or playing basketball or skipping school to spend the day at the beach, I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on—Dracula, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and whatever else the Miami Beach librarian put in my hands—but I never saw myself in books. The stories I read were full of adventure, vampires, heroes, mystery, murder, and characters who were nothing like me, who didn’t share my experience, or my background, or my language, or my anything. It was clear that these writers weren’t writing with me in mind, or people who looked like me and loved like me, who lived in neighborhoods like mine. So I started writing for me.

I wrote terrible stories and screenplays, mostly rewrites of movies like Back to the Future, The Neverending Story, and The Goonies. Except in my versions, the protagonists were always nine-year-old Puerto Rican girls traveling through time, or singing “Twist and Shout” at a Puerto Rican festival in Bayfront Park, or saving Wynwood from pirates. These girls were from my Miami, and they kicked some serious ass. And for some mysterious reason, they were always named Maria.

As I look back at all my Marias, I realize I was writing them out of necessity. The Marias were my way of revising these worlds where people like me were invisible, where my Miami didn’t exist.

Over the years, I lived in several Miami neighborhoods: South Beach, North Beach, Normandy Isles, North Miami, Miami Shores, East Hialeah, West Hialeah, Kendall. I’ve left Miami half a dozen times, but I keep coming back. It’s a strange city—never the same place for long. It’s always changing, evolving, reinventing itself. The Miami Beach of my childhood and adolescence is long gone: Nautilus Middle School and Miami Beach High were completely demolished, new buildings erected in their place. Rolo’s Restaurant, where I held my very first job? Gone. With the gentrification of Miami Beach, once-famous landmarks like Wolfie’s, The Fontainebleau, The Carillon, and Penrod’s are now either gone or “renovated” for a different clientele, low-income families and the working-class displaced. Since the beginning of this project, Shuckers Bar & Grill, the setting of Corey Ginsberg’s “In Plain Sight,” closed down due to an unfortunate accident: the waterfront deck collapsed, injuring at least two dozen people. We still don’t know if there will be a reopening. Yes, the narrative of my Miami is sometimes sad, but there is also growth, progress, and, of course, a plethora of stories.

Eleven o’clock was Chato’s favorite hour. It generated a crest-of-wave lift then drop into the enduring mundane which others saved for the zodiacal minute of their first-born. Chato could be glimpsed smiling at his watch any time after 10:30 AM so as to not miss the roll and pass. He could always tell when it was eleven, watch or no watch. Chato, the snub-nosed, oddly noticeable short guy, was a romantic, he told himself, which is why he yearned to produce wine, in his Miami-Cuban factory, polyester, plastic-covered furniture hometown of Hialeah.

“Ay, Chato,” his mother would say to him as a boy, and Ay Chato would echo in his bulldog of a mind. The sigh of destiny: first professional basketball player of a certain height, a Nobel in this or that, a billionaire with a harem of models whose legs began at his ears, a speed record. In his mid-forties, no siblings, wife, or children, parents dead, Chato dodged a bottle of beer during a break-up with a fiancée when it occurred to him to pursue wine-making and make Hialeah the Rioja of Florida. No data about climate or soil could rend the curtain on this, his sober surrender to mission.

And what else could Chato call his wine but “Once,” which in Spanish means “eleven” but in English captures the wistful passion for re-puzzled pasts which drove his mother into a labyrinth of society-gossip magazines from a Cuba that died half a century ago. Chato conjured the advertising slogans and was pleasantly unsurprised to notice that the best ideas came to him around his favorite hours of the day. “Once There Were Eleven” was the one he settled on. Vaguely allusive to mystical twelves, it captured dualities he felt native. Was the bottle the twelfth entity that would complete the consumer’s happiness? He discarded the slogans he knew the advertisers would cherish, Once Upon a Wine, and in Spanish, Once onzas de oro para beber (eleven ounces of gold to drink). But as he dreamed of a great harvest, within him stirred the hairy back of guilt. These ploys disguised, even denied, the fervor which led him to dream of a Hialeah wine. Is it brave to nurture passions no one else could respect?

Chato had not taken the first step in planting a vineyard, not even learning the fine art of winemaking, and already he saw himself on the cover of magazines, clinking glasses with celebrities, receiving the swoons of a thirsty world. At first he thought this was the wave effect of the eleventh hour. The number was, after all, a double-code that celebrates the uniqueness of firsts. Eleven is also a vertical equal sign, the two rungs of a ladder that embody an infinite pattern, indeed all patterns—stairs and marching soldiers and braided hair, spirals and drumbeats, chords and painted geometries, chopsticks that turn into mandalas. Individuals facing each other as equals in a duel or in love. Chato realized that his wine would make all this clear, even urgent, to folks everywhere. It wasn’t the number that would make the wine, but the wine that would make the number.

After four months our dreamer had only managed to assemble some of the vats and instruments. The vineyard would rise on the shore of the nameless canal that split Hialeah from Miami to the south, a straight-edged extension that linked the Miami River to the Everglades, all the way up to Lake Okeechobee in mid-peninsula. Vino Once would christen Hialeah’s Grand Canal. But the words kept entangling him, much as the canals the US Army Corps of Engineers had dug through the Glades to regulate water flow and now caged the wetlands in straight lines. A rectilinear fingerprint, Chato mused as he googled a map of the region, curious to see where these blue strings came from and where they ended. He’d wrap his wine in a blue wire basket. “Vino Once” could be Spanglish for “He Came Once,” or bad Spanish for “Eleven Came,” or with missing words “He Came at Eleven.” Hialeah was the language butcher-shop while Miami was trying to hop on the global glamour train like an agile hobo. It was at 10:59 PM on a Tuesday in August when Chato realized he would open his storefront in the Wynwood Arts District and launch his brand on the opening night of the December fairs.

“Ay, Chato, Chato,” his brick-layer father would say to him as a boy, “tú siempre te las buscas.” Was Chato really always getting himself in trouble he didn’t need? Did his father mean that Chato would always get what he wants and find his way out of problems? Ambiguity haunted him from birth, and that no doubt led him to his love for Eleven. “Chato en camisa de once varas,” his father would say every time the old man had to bail him out of a crisis. What a clever saying, Chato thought, an eleven-yard shirt to describe troubles one could have avoided. My wine will instead be the flat golden land of grain and marshes from which flocks rise in white unison over the trains bursting with barrels of Once. Chato would tower over those petty mayameros bereft of undulance.

By early fall the buzz of the fairs was mounting and Chato got to work. He rented a Wynwood storefront near 29^th Street and Miami Avenue, where the fairs mushroom in their white, block-wide, air-conditioned tents on weedy fields surrounded by the quilt of sleek galleries and dumpy workshops that proliferate in the District. Deco café tables around a green marble-top curvaceous bar, and behind it teak racks for three hundred wine bottles. The slanted cradles swirled with the grains of tropical trees, all awaiting the bottles of ecstasy. Wiry lamps dangled like tungsten spiders against the burgundy and pumice grey walls. Vino Once was decked out for the crowds, but where was the wine? Chato had been raised to believe one had to work backwards from the goal to the original cause, lest the desired end escape like a bird from its cage at any point in the process.

One Saturday, as the workmen were wrapping up, Chato was surprised to see, standing on the sidewalk, a beautiful woman he found vaguely familiar. She cupped her left hand over her forehead to block out the sun and gaze upon the sign. Then she looked with delighted curiosity into the shop and crept in, asking if it was okay, and the workers said yeah, sure, at the tanned legs.

“Chato!” she screamed.

“Pica!” he screamed back, as they embraced. “Tanto tiempo.”

They pulled up chairs on the floor still sprinkled with sawdust and electric wire clippings. The workers kept their rhythm but listened in on the conversation. They knew for sure now Chato had money. They should have charged him more. How did gorgeous get that nickname? the workers asked themselves beneath the hammer blows and ladder racket and the chewing of rancid gum. Was Pica itchy? Was she the type to pick a guy’s wallet clean, like the bird she seemed?

“But what’s all this, Chato? Are you importing wine now? Divino.” And she chuckled, catching her own pun.

“Bueno, Pica, you know I’ve always liked to do things my way. I am making this wine, the Vino de Hialeah.” And he paused to let the name out like a sigh. “Once, which the americanos read as ‘once upon a time.’”

Pica looked at him the way a fish does into a mirror, with a bewilderment she knew she could neither fake nor shake. She didn’t know how to ask him the indelicate questions about where he learned to make wine, and where he was making it, and where he was growing grapes in this muggy wet. So, to fill the silence, Chato went on.

“When the fairs open, I’m going to throw a bash, with wine for everyone’s tasting. ¿Qué te parece?”

“What do I think? I told you, divino. I have to go, but just one question. Why the name Once?”

Chato figured the time was right to flirt. After all, Pica looked great, much slimmer now than twelve years ago when they dated briefly but passionately. “Mira, Pica, it’s a reference to size, you know. Eleven… Remember?” His grin filled in the rest.

“Not even centimeters.” Pica bounced up a swirl of construction dust as she left. The workers held their laughter until she exited.

*

It was the big night of the fairs. Chato bought a few bottles of imported spirits and put up a poster of the forthcoming Vino Once, the pride of Hialeah. But the van carrying the wines crashed on the way, and by opening time there was not a drop of vino in the store. The refugees from the openings across the street assembled. Their anticipation grew amid the store’s appointments. Pica showed up with her current boyfriend, a painter who was having a solo show in one of the fairs. Athletic, tall, ponytail and earring. Realizing the eleven-yard shirt Chato had gotten himself into, Pica asked her lover to plop her onto the counter where she could address the crowd.

“Señores y señoras, everybody, listen to me.” The crowd hushed and turned to her. “How do you like my debut as an artist?” She waved her right arm pointing to the empty racks. “Yes, this is a conceptual piece titled ‘Once There Was Wine.’ It’s an installation I’ve set up in the guise of a store that sells invisible wine. You all know how everyone dreams empty dreams in Miami, and makes up stories about their past. This is my statement about the empty rituals of our time and place.” She paused to feed their amazement. “Martí said of Cuba that our wine was sour, but it is our wine, and I’m saying our wine in Miami is invisible, so drink up!”