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RICKY PEREZ, a slow speaker, was always attentive to whomever he happened to natter away with. Tall and slender, his elegance was derived from an almost imperturbable serenity and a single piece of jewelry, a thin wedding ring. His three-ways-clean Colgate smile and twinkling eyes made him look more like a black-haired Gary Cooper than the Cuban scoundrel he actually was. Ungainly only in matters of the heart, he was a first-class tinkerer with a mind for numbers, for probabilities and risks, for profits and losses.
He could have been an actor, though—a really great actor. In fact, he had left Cuba for two reasons and two reasons only: first, Cuba was bad business and he wasn’t about to stick around and see what greater mess those mountaineers made of the country; and second, he was determined to join the theater scene in Chicago. Often, he was unsure which of the two reasons weighed more, especially when he closed his eyes at night and dreamt of Ricky Perez on a large marquee. But Americans weren’t ready for a Cuban Stanley Kowalski, although Ricky could have sworn that only he could have played the role the way it was meant to be played: with gusto. Unfortunately fate—so pretty and so fickle—was a brutish mistress and the only role Ricky ever managed to land was a Willy Loman understudy for a second-rate theater company that never managed to get on its feet. Willy Loman. Willy Low Man. Ricky Low Man. Nah, he’d been miscast, anyway. He’d always been more of a Stanley Kowalski, if you asked him.
Some nights, when Ricky laid his head on his pillow, he wondered if he should have gone to Hollywood instead. After all, if Ricky Ricardo had made it in Hollywood, why couldn’t Ricky Perez make it too?
It was raining and the low, gray sky over Chicago made him feel defeated, as if he were surviving a storm on fear alone. Fear that, even now, even in the Windy City, he was still running away. He was engrossed in sweeping under the thousand and three hundred movie seats at 54 West Randolph in the old Woods Theater building. The gig was not what he’d dreamed of but, as far as he was concerned, it kept him afloat. He sent small sums of money to Aurelia whenever he could, twenty dollars one time, fifty dollars another, and one hundred dollars every so often—whenever he managed to skip paying for his utilities and his trash bill. He knew it would make a difference, although he never did hear from Elio. He’d never truly known what had happened to the money—if they received it, they’d never even said thank you. It would have been nice to get a letter from Cuba. It was starting to get really lonely in Chicago.
While he swept, he thought about the leggy redhead he’d met that day. He’d gone out earlier to get an olive burger and a piece of apple pie with ice cream at the 17 Restaurant at 17 West Randolph. As soon as he’d walked up to the door and seen Sally hamming it up for Chicago’s finest—who sucked in their burgers like fleshy-lipped sturgeons in the back booth—he‘d been smitten. Se puso bobo, vaya. Tall and lean, with hair done up into a grand bouffant, Sally was a vision, a midwestern American beauty queen.
In Cuba, he’d have waited for her to get up. Then he’d pass by her, grabbing one of her nalgas as he walked away and he and Sally would have gone off into the sunset. But las Americanas were different. And what mostly had been a hit in Cuba, didn’t have the expected effect in Chicago. As soon as she’d felt his hand over her pants, she’d said, “What the fuck are you doing?” She’d thrown her drink, her shoe, and then her purse at him—if there’d been a cat nearby she would have thrown that too. When she was done, she turned to him and said, “Sally Rogers. I’m in the phone book. Next time, grab your own ass.” There were way too many people named Sally Rogers in Chicago, he discovered. But he’d found her number, finally, and called her. In any case, he learned very quickly that Sally would sooner cut off her right tit than put up with his bullshit. He loved that. But he missed Aurelia, goddammit. He missed the kid too. Tell anybody in Cuba that. For the time being, though, he was looking to forget about Cuba, and Aurelia, and the kid. It was just way too hard to remember.
He swept the floors and thought of Sally. When his shift was over, he changed into his street clothes, then went outside to hail a cab. ''Take me to the South Side,'' he told the cab driver. ’Cause I’m meeting with a peliroja with long legs and a sailor’s mouth, he added—in his thoughts.