My Imaginary Cuba

“S” and “R”

S and R lived illegally above the museum. D’s father bought the building and gifted it to him. D met S and R in art school I was told. As a effort to hold onto his rebelious roots he let them live rent free above the museum, which he saw as his ultimate conceptual project in breaking societal taboos.

“S”

I first met S on a cash run to the office. I had heard infamous stories of her running wild through the museum during operating hours. She was five foot tall and 90 pounds. She looked more like a teenage boy then a historic figure. She smelled like a mixed of gasoline and garlic (B explained to me she would eat raw cloves because of its anti-bacterial properties). Her husky voice seemed a mismatch for her diminuetive stature. It seemed effected and authorative trying to hard to fill up the  elevator’s air.

I fumbled with the five one hundred dollar bills in my pocket as she introduced herself. I had never met a drag king before but as a drag admirer I welcomed this turn of plot.I quickly exited the elevator and made my way to the safe. Anyone I mentioned to that I met S to rolled their eyes with equal distain to my excitement. She began to seem like the secret child born out of wedlock no one wanted to talk about.

The following months I noticed her turquoise moped parked in front of the museum with more frequency. I looked up on multiple occasions to see her walking into the men’s room. Like clock work the dance began and men lined up in front of me to complain about having to use a urinal next to her. How could I not laugh at that? I would nod my head and say not to worry that I would talk to her assuring them their masculine secrets would be kept safe from gender bending ladies in the future although I had no intent to do so.

I enjoyed seeing her and the edge of uncomfortableness she brought. It pushed boundaries and any good New York place housed eccentrics in my opinion.

Towards the end of my employment  she roamed the maze like structure in full safari regalia complete with a floppy khaki hat. A young butch woman in her twenties trailed her laughing at anything she said. B told he she was working on a documentary about the bred of monkeys that is the closes to humans in DNA. These chimps exhibit homosexual behavior for pleasure and she felt by exposing this it would once and for all end the nature vs nurture debate. B laughed loudly saying she saw some of her footage and one bold monkey throw a rock at her proving to B that even the animal kingdom found her distasteful.

“R”

N  and I sat in the nearby park having lunch. I asked her who the scruffy looking drunk guy was who wandered around the outside of the museum and hallways was.

“Oh that’s R. He is a friend of D. He is a painter. You know all the cheerleader monthly magazines that are around the office? Those are his”. She told me D felt bad for him and tried to  hire him as a handy man.He was to pick a t-shirt from the giftshop as his uniform, making it official. He proudly wore a woman’s pink baby tee two sizes to small for his torso and completed the look with a logo-ed mug filled to the rim with bailey’s and coffee. Once when she was showing the space for a possible event he tumbled out of the video closet in a fog of weed smoke,smelling as she describe as a “three week old christmas ham left in the sun”. She pushed him back into the closet, apologized to the potential clients explaining sometimes this homeless man breaks in but not to worry because she was taking care of it and by no means would he be in attendence to their party. R was promptly told he would still be paid but had to work during the hours that the museum was closed.

One morning while counting out the morning tills R walked into the office looking distraught. No one ackowledged him from their desks. I saw the huge pile of dollars bills sway with a breeze and looked up to find him standing over me.

“Can you help me fix my sewing machine?” I ask E to call to police if I was not back in five but figured I would probably be safe as my attire was less cheerleader-ish and more pin-up. Not his type I should be safe I thought as I followed him up the stairs. I tried to thread the needle on his industrial sized sewing machine and not too look obvious as I gawked at his apartment. I couldn’t help it. My foot sat next to a large roll of raw canvas. R was building a covered wagon roughly the size of the space he lived in. It would never fit out the normal sized door although that seemed the least of his concerns. We concluded our encounter in agreement that he would have to get a professional in here to solve the machines issues and I quickly made my way downstairs to unlock the museum for the day.

R later moved into the basement with a woman he got pregnant accidently. I met her once while in the stock room. She was a severe german in her 40s. It seemed that her  sterness  could provide the boundaries that he needed as a new father. I left before the baby was born but acknowledge his efforts to make the basement more home like in the expectence of their child and wished them well in the future.

“M”

The cost of light

M is my tiny elvin bohemian. She works with me at the cosmetics shop. During quieter times she asks me to do her makeup. I cup her doll like face in my hands and can feel the age in her soul. She seems fleeting and not of this world despite her human suit. Being close to her I know this intensely. She opens her eyes like a sleepy ancient cat and looks in the mirror approvingly.Despite her small size M is all fire. Her laughter can echo an entire space.

When she hears I am an artist she attaches herself to me like a kid sister. I feel undeserving of this attention or the admiration that comes from her when she wants me to describe what its” like to be an artist”…She talks to me about “the village” and twirls around in her vintage mushroom print dress. One day after work we head over to her favorite bar. It looks like a crumbled church overgrown with vines. I take a card from it that I still keep in my wallet to this day.Its creased and worn but the image of the stained glass windows is still vibrant.

When I hear of her passing I cry for three days not because we are close anymore but because the world needed her purity. I look at my inbox and see the email she sent me over a month prior saying we should catch up that I never had a chance to answer.

Her red hair is still as bright  in my memory as the lightness she brought into the shop every morning. I am thankful that I was lucky enough to share her brief time here.

“D.P.”

D.P. is a beautiful,elongated Egon Schiele. Next to her I feel like a brutal Jenny Saville crude in shape and mannerisms.When she enters the room everyone stops.She is unaware of the effect she has over people laughing loudly with a crooked sky blue wig sitting atop of her head.Her curly black hair is sometimes visable on  the sides.

We met while working at the museum. D and I bond over hot blooded immigrant fathers and the statement “I really am a gay man inside”.It not something alot of women might resonate with by to us it is who we are.

On our first non-work hang out she takes me to her favorite book store. I smells like aging paper and dust. She tells me of her dreams to live in a place like  this although she adds it is a fear the floorboards will collapse under the weight. I picture her in a crooked house made entirely out of first edition poetry chapbooks. We wander over the LGBT Center for a drag film fest. Both poor we put together our collective money and buy a heinekin. With our shared beer we sit on folding chairs amongst a group of 70+ queens in askew lipstick. When one romanticizes about the good times of their youth I will taste that warm liquid and smile.

With D.P. I feel at home. Not the home I’ve know but the one I’ve always wanted. She is my New York. She is my community.

2010

D.P. takes me out to dinner and we exchange christmas gifts the night before I go in for the test to determine if the nodules in my throat are cancer.There is really nothing that makes this night not awkward but we are trying. She photographs me in my leopard print coat holding outrageous high heels smiling. You would never know from the picture but I am scared for the future for the first time in my life. We walk around Union Square Park. She tells me everything will be alright and I try to believe her intensely because she is always right.

“B”

Sailor’s Wife

I have listened to B’s records on constant repeat since 2005. The discs were worn and painted splattered. My old boombox from a neighboring hardware store skipped over the scratches and barely worked unless closed just right . This was the music of my new life.Her warbly voice filled my ninth floor studio turned pink by the NYC sunset filtering through the windows. Ska and punk was better left for South Florida. That music needed space. Piled up like a concrete and red brick cake she felt like the right fit for here. Hers is a sound of a tiny inside cat meowing confessions rather then a wild parrot after a rainstorm.

I had never paid attention to what she looked like until one day M dropped by the studio. “Are they lesbians? They look like it”. I shrugged, “I have no idea”. For the first time I really look at her picture. She looks like all my awkward fifteen year old kisses. She looks like all the boys whose house I would spend lost afternoons smoking with  under black lights on inflatable furniture. She is both the past and the present simultanously.

The “art world “is small I sometimes see her out.She sees me also. Her eyes are scanning like a feral animal. Her energy is unreadable and in her company I want to both stay and flee. D hits me in the arm saying she keeps looking over. I turn pink and grab D’s hand to ground me.

I wonder if I look familiar too.

“D”

I had the great fortune to be invited to D’s house through a residency I was participating in. “Just your typical artist loft” as he referred to it , was a modern day NYC’s artist dream. The kind you only have because you have lived in New York for 40 years and bought it when the city streets of Soho were still tumbled dirty with a collection of pre- Giuliani homeless and the artist’s community I read about existing but have never experienced.A slobbery yellow lab met us at the door along with a smaller wirey dog dressed for the occasion in a petite bomber jacket.We left our coats in guest bedroom filled with plastic painted pumpkins although I don’t remember it being around Halloween.It seemed quirky and home-y filled with antiques and plants.Not what I pictured a prominent artist’s house to look like although I’ve never been to any artist’s house that look like what I imagine it would look like, which is a mixture of the self consciousness of starched minimalism and three shades of white.During an informal dinner he sat next to me and talked about his love of animals and activism in protecting their rights as he petted the lab on the head, loving looking up at his owner.I found him gentle in spirit, thoughtful in his words and humble. He seemed to enjoy being around the lot of emerging artist numbering around eleven spread out around his table and couch.If I could describe his energy it would be the fragile strength of a man in his 70s who has lived a full life and the quiet knowing I’ve felt when amongst the Buddhist monks I have occasionally crossed paths with. I left feeling in love with the city I have chosen to form me for providing an experience I would have never had otherwise.

Two months later I heard of his sudden passing from liver cancer.I will always see him as the sweet crazy haired man with holes in the elbows of his sweater,sliding around in his sock on the loft’s concrete floors and be thankful for his grace in extending the art torch in a sense to us. Some of us can strive to be the “father of a movement” but in honesty I think it might be best to hope to be as generous as he.

“C”

I met C in undergraduate school. Both fine arts majors we shared a studio space in a leaky garage with eight other artists in our year. He had grown up in this rough Southern town parallel with the ritzy vacation ocean views of powder white sand just a few minutes drive away. C was the only son of a crack addicted mother and had a large crooked scar running along the left side of his 90’s style partly shaved head visible when he had his hair up in a ponytail.His darkly painted art depicted graying tortured bodies and Wiccan symbolism. Contrasting this he lightly loved to explain in depth the growth process of the orchids he hung from his shambled porch. The heaviness of his presence was mercurial and lifted with his tales of working at a local fast food restaurant. Everyone stood a bit uneasy in his company but as an overly sensitive person who has often felt outside I grew a protective soft spot for him and  offer kindness to him when I could.

On a thickly drunken night of our senior trip, J was throwing up in the bathroom I was vomiting in a trashcan when a knock came on the door. I opened it blurrily to whom I can’t remember as my mind sees just a shadow forming a person shape in my memory. A excited story tumbles into our room crossing the hotel door frame about a video lit by the red light of the hotel neon like some kind of sleazy movie. “As if Satan himself was standing there” was how it was describe to me. In it contains some kind of co-herced confession about a prostitution ring involving C. I take in the words, they rattle around my brain and feel too painful to process.I close the door laying down in the bed next to J . I feel both my world spinning in the tight concentric circle of the room and his moving, uncontainable in any space.I do not want this information.I didn’t ask for it but now it is here.Saddened and mad at those involved I fall asleep hoping this didn’t happen.

The next morning I see his broken face. Shit its true. It didn’t disappear.Now sober he knows about the video and he knows everyone know about what he has hidden from us everyday for a year.I am sludgingly coming to terms that this cannot be taken back and he is humiliated amongst the only family of people has he known.C rushes over to me to ask me if I “hate him” for what he has been doing. I awkwardly feel the fractures of a already broken person. I hug him and let him know whatever he has done or not done is his business and it doesn’t change they way I feel about him. Although I do not say it it does change the way I feel about the older couple he has hung around in the past months of whom I was told were friends helping him.

Two months later we are about to graduate . I am sitting on a bench by the bayou waiting for my last painting class,excited about moving to New York. C sits next to me in the sun and asks if I have to leave Florida. I laugh and say “yes honey” with conviction. I see his face get serious. ”If you stay I will marry you. We can have a family.” As soon as the words fall into the air we both know this will never happen. Not knowing what to say I look at the ants crawling along the cracks in the cement…

R

I woke up  in R’s purple victorian bedroom from a house party she had the night before. Having Goldschlager for the first time I vow never to drink the hot cinnamon liquid again even if I liked the gold flecks floating around the bottom. R leaves to go to the bathroom. I begin my routine of rummaging through her closet to take back the stuff she has been stealing from me. It is hidden under piles and piles of clothes,obvious that this isn’t an accident.I try not to think too much about it and pretend it is like shopping in a time capsule from the past two months.Every since she left school things have been different.

We walk to the kitchen. I clean up as she washes a head of iceberg lettuce meticulously.Gently separating six leaves and placing three each in bowls from the pile standing taller then me on the counter. R hands me our breakfast. We have had the eating disorder conversation before. She angrily denies it but looking at my bowl I can make a strong case to the contrary.

I hear her parent in the adjacent room doing construction. When did they get home? They have been furiously building a handicap accessible room in anticipation of the arrival of the teen they are adopting. Last I saw there was a large whirlpool with a harness hanging over it in the middle of the bedroom.”Did you know that the government pays you to take care of people?” they asked me knowing full well I didn’t. I am fifteen and have never thought about adopting anyone let alone another person my age.Given the shape of their family though it is hard pressed for me to imagine that this really the best option to help pay bills.

On the way to the living room I trip over a industrial size bag of cat litter.”Why do  you guys have cat litter” I inquire. “For the cat, duh”..I have known her for years and never had I seen even a hair on the couch so thinking it odd I ask “When did you get a cat?” “Oh we’ve had it since I was little it lives in the tool shed”.