Roy met Tina at the Cuban Brotherhood Club and Dance Hall in Tampa, Florida, when he was fourteen. Roy was spending the summer with his uncle Buck working construction on weekdays, resting on Saturdays and fishing on Sundays. Tina was a local girl who went with her girlfriends to the dances at the Cuban Club on Saturday nights.
Roy and his friend Ralph were fascinated by the big-eyed, dusky Cuban girls who had come to Florida with their families in the first wave of emigrés who fled the island following the revolution. These girls wore make-up, bright red lipstick, large gold hoop earrings and short skirts. They danced only with one another and did not speak to white boys. Mostly they sat together in folding chairs in a corner of the dance hall and never stopped chattering and gesturing dramatically. Roy spoke some Spanish but when he got close enough to overhear their conversations they spoke so rapidly and without fully pronouncing most of their words that he could not understand anything they were saying.
Tina didn’t like the Cuban girls. She was tall and blonde, as was her friend, LaDonna. When Roy asked Tina to dance she asked him what he thought of the Cuban girls. Before he could answer, Tina said, “They’re cheap. They have big asses and dress like whores. LaDonna says her mother told her that their fathers have sex with them starting when they’re five.”
Roy found this hard to believe. He worked laying sewer pipe and shooting streets with Cuban men and liked them. They were good workers, glad to have a job, and they laughed a lot. Most of the time Roy didn’t get their jokes—they spoke as rapidly as the girls at the dances—but they always offered to share their homemade lunches with Roy. He loved the Cuban food: lechon and pollo asado, platanos maduros, black beans and yellow rice.
Tina had blue eyes with yellow spots in them, an almost pretty face and a terrific figure. She and LaDonna wore as much or more make-up as the Cuban girls.
“Are you from around here?” Tina asked Roy. “You don’t talk like you are.”
“I’m from Chicago,” he said. “I’m down here staying with my uncle for the summer.”
“I’m almost seventeen,” said Tina. “How old are you?”
“I’ll be sixteen in October,” Roy lied.
Tina was a little taller than Roy. She had slender, muscular arms and held him tightly, pulling him around during a slow dance. Her new breasts were as hard as her arms. She pushed herself against Roy and he got excited.
“I can tell you like me, Roy,” Tina said, and smiled. Her teeth were crooked and up close Roy could see the pimples beneath cracks in her make-up.
Ralph was trying to get one of the Cuban girls to talk to him and LaDonna was dancing with a big, heavyset guy whose ears were perpendicular to his head. Tina told Roy that his name was Woody and that he was one of LaDonna’s exes. “She’s got a lot of ’em,” Tina said.
After the slow dance Roy and Tina got cups of lemonade at the host table and stood off to the side.
“Do you want to walk me home?” Tina asked him. “I live four blocks from here. I don’t much like the music they’re playing tonight and my parents make me come home early.”
When they got to her house, a white, wooden bungalow set on concrete blocks with a wide front porch with a swing on it, Tina said, “Come in with me. My parents go to bed right after Perry Mason and then we can sneak out and go down to the river.”
Tina introduced Roy to Ed and Irma, both of whom Tina addressed by their given names, not Mom and Dad, which Roy had never heard a kid do before. Ed and Irma sat in separate armchairs in the small livingroom watching Raymond Burr be a lawyer on their black and white Motorola. Roy and Tina sat slightly apart from each other on a lumpy couch. Ed and Irma did not say anything until the program was over. Ed stood up and turned off the television set after the theme music finished playing over the end credits.
“Man never loses a case,” he said.
Ed had a huge belly and big arms. So did Irma. They both said goodnight and left the room. Tina put her right hand on Roy’s left leg and squeezed his thigh. As soon as Tina heard the door to her parents’ bedroom close and lock click, she turned to Roy and kissed him hard on the mouth.
Tina stood, took Roy’s left hand and said, “Let’s go down to the river and sit on the pier.”
The river was at the end of Tina’s street. She led him past a dwarf palm tree that was bent halfway over to a short pier and pulled him down onto the planks.
“Lie back,” she said.
There were no boats moving on the water and except for insect noises it was quiet. Tina lay on top of Roy and rubbed her body against his. They kissed a few times with their mouths closed, then Tina rolled onto her side and with one hand unzipped his fly. Roy’s cock popped up like a jack-in-the-box and Tina wrapped her right hand around it. He stared at the crescent moon as she stroked him slowly for a minute or so and then Roy tried to get up and lie on top of her. Tina pushed him back down, held him prostrate with her ropey arms, straddled his legs and put his cock into her mouth. Roy came immediately.
Tina rolled off of him and spat into the water, turned back to Roy and said, “You have a good dick, I think.”
She stood up, so Roy did, too. He zipped up his pants. Tina had already begun walking back off the pier. They walked to her house without saying anything. Tina stopped in front of her porch steps. No lights were on. She stretched out her arms and rested them on Roy’s shoulders.
“I won’t be at the Cuban Club next Saturday,” she said. “I’m going with Ed and Irma to Milwaukee on Monday. That’s where Mamie, Irma’s mother, lives. I have a cousin there, Ronnie. He’s the only boy I let fuck me. He’s twenty-one.”
“How long have you been letting him do it?” Roy asked.
“Since a couple of months before my thirteenth birthday. This will be the fifth year. I only see Ronnie in the summer when we visit Mamie. Ronnie’s getting married in September.”
Tina kissed Roy on the mouth and this time she stuck her tongue in. Roy watched her go up the steps and into the house. He saw Irma sitting on the swing in the dark, smoking a cigarette.
“Go on now, boy,” she said.