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Coney Island, Cuba
(for Nina)

bart plantenga

    The juke in the Atlantis Bar furnished its complimentary share of the bar’s repressed hostility. Stocked weekly with 45s loaded with all the bitterness of conjugal failure by sawed-off men of resentful aimlessness and miraculous pompadours. And, the juke could, from certain angles, be mistaken for a coffin.
    Errant shards of third-hand sun, light that’d been laying around in bad puddles awhile, no longer spooked patrons. Hundreds of askew framed shots hung behind the bar reminding us of a glory Coney Island had once basked in. How had we forsaken dignity for the right to be declared paper-crowned kings and queens of convenience?
    The hollow laughs framed the current murder yarn and one dull guy lifted his head and said it was HER fault. The jollity, they were certain, but were not revealing, had gone rancid.
    “She ain’t gonna find her way to heaven.”
    “Betchu there’s alotta empties up dere in heaven.” One beverage vet offered.
    “There aren’t any empties in heaven. Tha’s why they call it heaven.” Nina corrected. “Besides, it’s how we measure time.” Nina’s mien wedged somewhere between Dorothy Parker and Mae West. THIS explained the Stonehenge replica we’d managed with our 15 empties on the table thus far – yeah, 15.
    “AIIEEAIIEE!” The woman danced too ferociously for this heat. Her head (with its man-eating flora, that fever-inducing visage) tilted back as if Maraschino cherries were being flung from the greasy ceiling fan blades into her mouth.
    The “so-called men” hid their decline into the indignities of age behind a Maginot Line of brag and truss, hair weave and swagger, liposuction and the running shoes of a misplaced youth. They turned on their stools with characteristic dyspeptic grunts.
    “Hey, it’s Carmen Fuckin’ Miranda.”
    “But she don’ WEAR the fruit, she MARRY it.”
    “Hehehehehe.”
    But her hips (bloated with the pollen of her effusive presumption) had already transcended the tension inherent in the elastic waistband. Hips reminiscent of hummingbird wings that floated her among the wobbly tables and mismatched chairs, around the juke, where her “poetry in motion” extracted much sustenance and nectar from the moment.
    These hips of extrapolated prominence glanced and careened deliriously off the deli display glass, sending mounds of glistening scallops into disarray and heaps of potato medallions into avalanche.
    I skimmed the juke for “Poetry in Motion” — pressed A-7 the way an addict presses needle to vein or cinematographer presses “rewind” over and over. I hid from the glances I thought she might be casting my way by placing the sweaty bottle to my forehead.
    She slid three lascivious quarters into the juke slot with a special acumen that converted everything mundane into everything sensual, manufacturing a static electricity that dilated the hair follicles along your spine. She knew all the codes — A-12, Ray Barretto; M-13, Tito Puentes; O-16, Willi Colon; R-4, Gloria Esteban — to all her faves.
    “Merengue! Merengue!”
    “She loves to dance in front of others.” I said to Nina.
    “No, she jus’ likes to dance. There jus’ happens to be’n appreciative audience — me and you.” Nina countered.
    Her ole man — their “Fruit” — a squashed sandwich maker at a bodega on Mermaid Ave., looked suddenly ancient, maybe 20 years her senior, holding onto the bar for dear ... death. All the laughing gas had long ago leaked out of him.
    The lines of face had been carved deep by ... a divot tool used on linoleum blocks or potatoes. And if she were to dip his face in ink, then stamp it to a living room’s wallpaper, it’d imprint a constellation of sad squashed faces; a wallpaper heavy with exhausted chrysanthemums about to lose their petals.
    He had probably been wallowing in this luxurious thrill of speculation for some (many) years been trying to keep himself enamored (cologne, platform shoes, weight training) to her.
    He sat pasted to his stool on the periphery, a zone of no consequence, less light. There’s a wobbly slouch to him that may indicate a deteriorating central nervous system. His head deflated back to the bar as if this were the womb of all his woes. The battle had grown unseemly: head vs. beer + gravity. His periodic sips of beer were to be his last noble tics of perseverance.
    His head continued to deflate, pass away as I rose to venture to the toilet. And she, meanwhile, sidled onto my stool next to Nina. Let’s call her “Charo,” Nina preferred “Carmen.” But Carmen cut me off, grabbed my paw, spun me around so hard that had my toes been pointed right I’d have been drilled right into the wooden floor. The spin cast me adrift, away from the toilet, headed, instead, for a huge flowerpot with a dusty plastic palm punched into real soil. When out of the wood-paneled nowhere a couple (she’s a nurse on break) with stubby limbs and plenty of flesh, re-orient me toward my destination with a shove and forefinger.
    And there, in this tropic of crumbling wall, hissing pipe and dripping spigot I think of a witty comeback for Nina. (These snappy rejoinders never happen the way they do in Hollywood movies.) “If no one witnesses her dancing, can it thus be said there is then no one actually dancing?” I compose. But just as quickly, I compose her retort; “If you had a neighbor you saw dance in the same window to the same music over and over and over, can’t you just assume that whenever you hear that music but DON’T see her she’s probably dancing in another part of her apartment?”
    Nina, who was almost always right, was not one to gloat, just as one doesn’t seek praise for breathing properly. Besides, the only times she was ever “wrong” was when she deemed it humane and judicious to agree with me, to nurture the open festering sore that were the remains of my soul. That is as altruistic as love gets.
    When I re-entered the arena of fetid, inside-a-slimy-aquarium light, I saw Carmen’s ole man (a man who’d once perhaps been smart but whose surroundings had made the appeal to the reigning stupidity irresistible) and in passing, as I was about to lay palm on her ole man’s shoulder, I spotted the blue tattoo: a sneering skull in the beak of an eagle inside a chevron; 1967, 102nd Infantry.
    Nina had meanwhile been yanked onto the floor. I watched their bodies glance and wrap around one another. They spun off one another like joyous bodies of celestial fabrication. Carmen aglow, bioluminescent.
    Her ole man slouched ever further than far into the bar, into its very grain and away from himself. His dogtags emerged from an unbuttoned camouflage fatigue shirt, grazed the gleam of his half-mast pant zipper.
    He had begun to have trouble with zippers, three-syllable words, and government forms. “Maybe it’s Agent Orange,” Nina suggested. Carmen shrugged her shoulders. And suddenly I saw him as a study for a sculpture called “Neglected Suffering.”
    This reminded me of the laconic vet of two wars in my small Wisconsin hometown, who, on Memorial Day, despite the pomp of his crackling pride, could be most snide during the climax of the parade; “Thank God,” I remember him saying, “for wars, cuz what else we got to celebrate?”
    As I waited for my next beer at the bar I wrote down on a coaster: Like a grunt in fatigues, out cold and blue face in a rice paddy.
    “CUCHI! CUCHI!” She spun Nina out into no tomorrow then reeled her back in to catch her in the quiver of her embrace, an embrace of enormous and bottomless anticipation.
    “She wunnerful! Your girl!” And when this song died in a scratch, the blur of her contours continued to stir. I think of a stuttering film; its climax has just jumped the projector’s sprocket teeth.
    She sauntered up to the bar and swept all the quarter tips from the sticky bar and rifled through her ole man’s pockets for more. She plugged in one, hip move, looks at us, two, three, hip thrust, four, five, six ... 15 more tunes!
    “I come out my mother dancing,” she announced. Her face looked oddly waxen like a used voodoo candle or like perspiration dammed up behind pancake make-up.
    Her son returned with sugar packets and a blow-up globe. Carmen grabbed her son, held him tight to his world. He gleefully let her choreograph his steps, his inarticulate arousal, and rising temperature.
    “She’s got such ample exuberances.”
    “You mean protuberances,” Nina corrected as we watched her son punch the inflated globe up toward ceiling fan, in absolute mesmerizing unison with her every syncopated bounce and sway — what she does with what she has. The portfolio of my bodily fluids is a toxic cocktail gurgling with hormones, pheromones and other moans – I noticed a bitter taste (sympathy, pity, lust, reflux vomit, envy?) on my tongue.
    THUMP! The ole man fell to the floor. The stool vet next to him stared for minutes before lifting him by damp armpits back up high and teetering for another round.
    Her son, now really hepped, punched his blue world; up and up and up again into the faces of the stool vets (who wanted nothing of THIS world) as he danced in mom’s arms. He peered over his shoulder at me with all the cumulative pride of a prepubescent boy who’d seen how men take to mom and maybe he’d seen some pictures (of her?) too.
    And in mid-dance, without allowing her hips to fall off the beat, she unhooked her necklace of pink shells and bad silver and strung it around Nina’s neck. “Here. It burn in my skin.” Her hips lunging into breathless atmos.
    “She can teach dance in a tornado,” I said as her hips went suddenly voracious, coming into immediate and necessary contact with beings, things, tables, Nina, counters, stools, Nina, me, son, tables, walls, Nina, juke and pillars.
    A paraffin-skinned guy who’d been abandoned, out of the way, in his wheelchair, fondled his bone-white cross, perhaps converting acts of onanism into benediction. He rocked back and forth; the amount of area his wheels covered increased logarithmically with his increased attachment to the spectacular blur that was Carmen.
    She’s that rare woman (a being superseding all corporeal limitation like a cartoon where the character can dance outside her own bones) who can gather all optics, all language, all effluvia, chaos, attention and consciousness around her the way a planet gathers errant rubble and wayward asteroids to make of them dignified moons, orbiting within her gravitational thrall.
    The bar rats (not roused much since ’45: Brooklyn Dodger betrayal, ’69 Mets, Jane Fonda’s treason, George Wallace, Howard Beach) are clapping, albeit in that odd tenuous manner where their hands only periodically traverse the thick perspiring air to meet the semblance of a handclap. Oh, if only she were a nurse in a VA hospital.
    The remains of her ole man killed his flat beer and deflated back down to the bar. He’d learned to kill her by killing beers. And as I stood in the seepage of his drooling realm he grumbled, “Fug ’er, ’er fuggin’ ass on fire.” His voice like a dusty sapphire needle set to the groove of a warped and worn 78. He took another sip or rather, the sip purloined yet another vestige of something from him.
    When I got back, Carmen, with gold high heels dangling from pinch of her outrageously long fingernails is inquiring of Nina, “You’s wann’ party? Ge’ a 6-pak?” She glanced over to what used to be her ole man with a face situated somewhere between sinister pity and gleeful resentment.
    He roused himself to go to the toilet. But this negotiation of maze proved too much for him. Halfway out, he splayed himself out on a faded Formica table like a carp ready to be gutted.
    “La Bamba” burst forth from the juke, a tune to which everyone has an idea of what the lyrics should be. And I noticed we had grown into a glint-eyed slouchy scrum of 20 denizens.
    Carmen’s finger, long and mesmerizing as a cobra’s myth, lured Nina back onto the floor. And Nina had, in turn, yanked me along and I had managed to drag her son along with his perpetual grip on his blow-up world.
    Carmen and/or Nina cast me out like bait on a hook, deep into the mottled light of setting sun. Then, just as suddenly, I am (and my eyes seem most confounded by this centrifugal vertigo) just as deliriously reeled in.
    I’m spun, I spin and spin ... and THUD — jostled the juke, which skipped disc all the way to the song’s very last note and rouses us all back to the realities of our own sense-resistant, grateful approaching deaths.
    “You wann’ go. Come. We go.”
    As if my jostle of the juke had killed something in the mirage (the way an inept projectionist can kill a film) and made her proposal seem like the logical next chapter.
    “Not with him.” Nina was quick to stipulate, as she nodded back to the ole man still fully splayed out rather peacefully on the table.
    “No, we leave heem to wipe dee tables.” Carmen assured. We snicker as if we are a world of dignity apart and up the food chain from him. She scarfed her drink and scooped the remaining shards of ice from her glass and rubbed them across the profound contours of bosom. Topping off the cooling venture with a rub of her nipples.
    “Only t’ing that cool me.” She follows our eyes follow her hands.
    Barefoot and clutching gold high heels and golden purse, she led us through the tumultuous spew of twilight Coney Island, under the El, past the Aquarium, to Surf ‘N’ Turf Place, a 2-block dead-end off Neptune Ave.
    The basement apartment, was overwrought with the gaudy paraphernalia of a gruesome clapboard iglesia dedicated to the morbid flesh of famed saints. Dingy, in a word, as if frying grease had mugged the air of its oxygen. A tomb that smelled of bologna sandwiches lost under the couch years ago.
    Christs everywhere made of noodle, clay, and blacklight competed with Madonna, Julio Iglesias, and Lionel Richie. Wreaths of woven hair decorated with crude bleeding hearts of clay hung over doorjambs.
    “‘If I know of the sins of my waywardness dear Lord, I am, I assure you, already halfway back to redemption.’” Nina whispered in imitation of Carmen’s voice.
    She ordered us down on a couch covered in bright quilt, camouflaging two scalloped hollows that felt as if they’d been scooped out by a backhoe.
    “The look of pain,” Nina observing all the Christs. “looks a lot like the moment of ecstasy.”
    “Yo, they’re one and dee same glory,” Carmen agreed.
    “Like orgasm,” I added, for better or worse. Carmen plugged in the TV. “He ’fraid of storms.”
    “Power surges can explode yer TV,” her pudgy son, managing to momentarily remove his mouth from a Jumbo Coke bottle, added matter-of-factly.
    “I hate this smell in my house. It smell too much him,” Carmen observed with this cast-off contempt that was tempered by an immense compassion that she still managed to muster. But, upon pity a love cannot survive. Neither of us could remember who’d said that.
    She pushed a Madonna video into the machine (a frenetic orgy of mixed metaphors), the one where she French kisses the snout of a great dane, a dog it is intimated, she has just done it with — or TO. Then we see her rub its haunches and then ...
    We were not prepared for what followed: Carmen dancing in a club in spiritual harmony with the giddy lights, letting the music strip her brassy glory naked. What didn’t shake, wiggled; what didn’t wiggle she was sure to make bounce.
    Much hope of a future seemed pent up here in this 553 seconds of tape. Like a résumé. As if she’d come to believe desire to be her only commodity to bargain her escape.
    “The vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” Nina noted as Carmen sashayed to the kitchen to fetch more beer. She joined us on the couch, twisting the cold beers into our urgent pelvic sectors lovingly, like a rose twisted into an old wound.
    She rewound the tape so we could watch her watch herself in slo-mo.
    “This is boring. I seen this and all the others like a thousand times.” The resentment in pudgy son’s blurt made me think his count might be low. His eyes like a dusty, banged-up set of blinds.
    Perhaps he wasn’t so much bored as unable to articulate his uneasiness except through the irritating squeaks he made by strumming sticky fingers across the deflating globe, aimlessly outlining continents and land masses he perhaps did not know the names of.
    “Go to your room!”
    “I’m not no monkey in no zoo!”
    “Go!” Shortly after his departure, loud metallic dissonance began to emanate from his room and what seemed like howls. Carmen, in tenuous triumph, led us through a three-way clink of glass and can, a toast to this...our...well, this...with her free hand she bound our hands together, as if she were initiating us into a secret society.
    She outlined Nina’s neck with her long, long nails to mesmerize her out of any lingering trepidation. While with her other she flicked the tab on top of her beer can held in the clamp of her aromatic loins.
    “I WILL forget, I HAVE forgot where I am from.” Half singing, half-confessing, half-comprehended.
    She swayed and swayed and her hips swayed and then...she began removing her top but the tight top stuck around her big inebriated head of hair. She she yanked hard to get it off, tumbling from her heels in the process. I caught her and set her upright.
    “I am not a crime of who I am and where I am coming from!” Sung out-of-tune to “I Will Survive.”
    Her bright floral bikini top was courageously assigned to contain Carmen’s ampleness. And from here, coaxed along by song #&035;2 – Something like “I’ll See You in Cuba”: “I’m on my way to / Cuba there’s where I’m going / Cuba there’s where I’ll stay –
she removed her skirt and drew us in to reveal her ... tattoo, a big blue sprawl of territorial bruise.
    “This Koobah. My Koobah.” She drew us in even closer, on our knees, into the innermost portion of her inner thigh.
    “Looks like Cuba. I can see Havana.”
    “I no’ from Havana.” She placed her long forefinger nail on a spot east and south of Havana. “Bayamo.” She took one of each of our forefingers and placed them there, on the spot where she’d grown up, “... until 9. I am from here. Bayamo. But I like to go here to forests and wildness of mountains, the Sierra Maestra.” She dragged our obedient digits up and ever inward into her bush.
    “Like Columbus.” She said from inside a huge sigh. She clamped our digits to trap us in this Cuban...“wildness” with both of her hands and began to gyrate in front of us, wobbly in those golden high heels.
    “... And where dark-eyed Stellas / Light their fellers’ panatellas / where all is happy / Cuba where all is gay ...”
    “Go deep, cuz now you know how we go to explore these forests too.” And she was high and gone into big hair-shaking climaxes, emitting words she’d perhaps never put together before: “As a woman my country is a bed, floating down rivers of world.” While continuing to clamp our digits to her quick, moaning or humming a song, perhaps “Lambada.”
    “They say always I am a wild dancer, maybe it is the disease.” And then she fell back on to her couch in total trusting abandon the way we used to make angels in snow. You remember. Perfect choreography and still managing to hold onto our hands.
    “You lick me there?” Nina stared at me bug-eyed and me at her. We’d collapsed even closer into the velvet, pulsing, gasping altar and both of us pressed our heads upon her thighs and collapsed into a hypnagogic chiaroscuro of awareness. “And now you reach my peak Pico Turquino!”
    Did Carmen then, by the way, rub the zipper along my crotch? With her nails and breath speaking to it the way Shari Lewis spoke to Lambchop? And then something about crimes she was not responsible for. Or something about being born was her crime. And how here — in Coney Island? — you can be somebody and also disappear at the same time.
    “Oh, you man. Serpent.” And was she not with her other hand struggling with Nina’s belt buckle? Did she not first gallop upon my kneecap to leave a salty glaze behind? The room became a swirl of inebriated and melting holy candles. I was not there. I could honestly say I was not there.
    Meanwhile, did her son not crawl from his room to rifle through my wallet and Nina’s purse? And wasn’t I powerless pawing at the television screen to stop it all? Did I not hear Carmen call to him in Spanish? “Hurry! Apú rate!”
    Did she not slither out from under us somehow? Did she not put on her high heels and apply lipstick, using my mirror sunglasses (which still sat on the bridge of my nose) as a mirror? And then, in high heels and lipstick and map of “Koobah,” did she not traipse off to the toilet?
    And then I heard her pee, right? And pray? “Jose! Jose!” And bicker? On the phone? Comparing notes? With whom? Strategies? But, by the time she emerged from the toilet confessional, Nina and I were both up, dressed and vigilant. Although my head felt more like a wobbly top in its last spins.
    And her place felt suddenly like a trap where betrayal could pose for something else. We gathered up our composures, tied our shoes, or something.
    We sat down, upon her suggestion, at her dinner table. She idly (or actually with some degree of calculation) took an empty beer bottle, screwed her forefinger down into the neck and said, “Tha’s the way I am.”
    Nina lit a cigarette, took a drag and intuitively handed it to Carmen. I slid the bottle over in front of me and placed my thumb atop her bottle, nudged thumb into neck and said, “Tha’s me visiting your ‘Koobah’.”
    “Koobah is a small place.”
    We laughed a little – a tic of consternation raised Nina’s eyebrow – got up and with some effort shook her hand as I felt for my wallet and we backed out of her doorway, walked gimp-legged with Carmen to Nina’s right. We headed back toward the Atlantis Bar through streets that smelled and glistened of a million spilled colas spilled. I looked to Nina, she looked away and down. She looked my way and my eyes were cast out to sea.
    At Surf Avenue, Carmen suddenly stopped and stiff-legged aimed the question at us, “You no think I worth the $50 then you owe me?!” But luckily a rumbling screeching D-Train full of din pulled into the station overhead and we pretended not to hear. “We agree, or you no remembuh?!”
    Back at the Atlantis, the bartender and cook (sallow-skinned Navy buddies) were lifting upturned chairs onto the tables all around Carmen’s ole man.
    “You need help?” Nina offered. How to put this evening to rest? Depart in smooth retreat?
    “No, I kee’ a wheelchair here in back for dese times ...” Carmen was resigned to wheeling the ole man home.
    “OK, then maybe we should go.”
    “You no think I am worth eet, this money?”
    “You are. Really! But we’re TWICE as worth it and since you were ... getting off ... well, we’ll jus’ call it even, this time.” Nina could be an egg as hardboiled as any ex-Electrolux vacuum cleaner door-to-door salesperson ever was.
    “And so, but I nee’ this money,” she emphasized as we made signs of departure. “I tell him about chu! He come fug you’s up. My son is 14 and he and his frenz no care about nothin’ an’ nobody. They fug you up for almost nothin’.”
    “We don’t need no help being fugged up. But maybe we can help with somethin’ when you bury him.” My head clicked in her old man’s direction. He looked like a mop that had seen one too many floors.
    “You bettah watch you’ back!” She said with the desperate snarl of a dog on a leash. Her man perked up for a moment and seemed to make motions to shoo us away.
    Outside, I took stock of flight directions and distance. We watched Carmen pour flat beer over his head then take a comb from his fatigues and neatly comb his hair. It’s in gestures like this you think contempt and compassion are related.
    The cook and bartender helped her dump him deadweight into the wheelchair. And this seemed to rouse him from his slumber. He, or some hidden wad of himself, began to sing like an old 45 warped in the sun and played on his deteriorating dental work.
    “I got to go before his head explo’.” She snarled as she pushed past us. Her high heels like martial stick work on a snare.
    “We’ll buy yuh a drink next time,” I suggested.
    And from down the boardwalk she yelled, “Fug you. I am like Cuba, used by everybody, but nevah conquer by nobody.”
    Nina looked at me, “It’s lucky we spent all what we had.”
    I open my wallet and it is indeed empty. Unsure of where it all went.
    “Even token money. Ah, we’ll just jump the turnstiles.”
    “We should walk this off. Even though if we walked all the way to California ...”
    “Or Cuba ...”
    “... We’d STILL need to walk this one off.” Nina looked like a queen in the Paradise Garage.
    I was envisioning the inside of my wallet. Guessing it was $25 leaner and I would only tell Nina years later, after this story had reaped its investment value, as a script. Carmen could suddenly see herself on TV in one of those shows that previews new movies. And she would be played by someone who looks like a cross between Jennifer Lopez and Carmen Miranda and É
    “This life’ll wear out many more heels for us,” Nina declared, as if we were just going to triumphantly march like happy pumpkins through neighborhoods lined with sad windows. As we dashed for the F train that stood waiting for us in the elevated station propped up on wobbly splintery stilts.
    Our fantasies of triumph over inconsequence would have to compete for months with the paranoid gestures of keeping a cool watch on our backs. We wondered: had they managed to snatch something with her or my address on it? We kept a silent, vigilant eye on faces, gestures, suspicious movements, scanned the subway platforms, tried to remember what her son looked like. At some point, survival entered the realm of the cinematic with the survival component of paranoia crossing fading over into a kind of slo-mo modus operandi that afforded us a certain level of ennoblement that at first intrigued friends, but eventually began to annoy them.

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