The Cat King of Havana Read online

  Dedication

  To those who have left and those who remain

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part One: This Cat Can Dance Chapter One: I Meet Ana Cabrera

  Chapter Two: I Connect with My Roots

  Chapter Three: Dance Machine

  Chapter Four: Ana Says

  Chapter Five: Salsa King

  Part Two: Rumba in Havana Chapter Six: Duct Tape

  Chapter Seven: Jesus Loves the Revolution

  Chapter Eight: Centro Habana

  Chapter Nine: Just Kiss Her

  Chapter Ten: A Real Dancer

  Chapter Eleven: Snag

  Chapter Twelve: Ricardo Eugenio Echeverría López

  Chapter Thirteen: Mr. Modernity

  Chapter Fourteen: Thugs

  Chapter Fifteen: All the Way

  Chapter Sixteen: Bed of Nails

  Part Three: Lolcats for the Revolution Chapter Seventeen: Nice Guy

  Chapter Eighteen: Trinidad

  Chapter Nineteen: Poet of the Revolution

  Chapter Twenty: A Special Thing

  Chapter Twenty-One: Regrets

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Lead and Follow

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Hospitality

  Chapter Twenty-Four: To Feel Nothing

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Casinero Mundial

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Salsa for Fidel

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Not Done

  Epilogue: Return of that Cat Guy

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This Cat Can Dance

  chapter one

  I MEET ANA CABRERA

  In a few pages, I meet Ana Cabrera.

  That’s called fulfilling your promise to the audience. Say I upload this video called “OMG cutest kitty evah can haz backflipz meow.” A title like that will get me clicks—it’s a hook. I don’t just want to catch a fish, though. I want it to go tell its friends how awesome it is, getting a fishhook through your lip. If I want retweets and shares, my clip had better feature Fluffsters getting his circus on.

  I can go a step further. You open my clip expecting catrobatics. You see a kitten on a trampoline. Fluffsters jumps, Fluffsters bounces, here comes the backflip—look at him go! So far, so good.

  Then “Eye of the Tiger” plays, the vid goes into slow motion, and you realize there’s something on the kitten’s back. Yes . . . yes, it’s a water cannon!

  Kitten paws pull levers. Water bursts from the cannon. Fluffsters shoots into the sky atop a pillar of glory.

  The vid cuts to black. Samuel L. Jackson growls, “I can haz backflipz meow.” And then, quickly: “No kittens were hurt in the making of this film.”

  That’s what I call a cat video. A million clicks guaranteed.

  Take this book. I call it The Cat King of Havana. Between felines and Cuba, that’s two different tags to maximize eyeballs.

  I’ll deliver what I’m promising—an edge-of-your-seat tale of the mean streets of Havana, full of adventurous salsa dancing, dangerous romance, and cats. Lolcats, specifically. But that’s an appetizer. That’s Fluffsters doing backflips. You want a jet-pack kitten blazing across the sky? Read the book.

  But hey, what do I know about it? I’m only Rick Gutiérrez, the Last Catbender. That’s the name I go by on my website, CatoTrope.com. We get 30 percent of all non-YouTube cat video traffic. Among my fellow students at Manhattan Secondary, I’m known as That Cat Guy.

  Which brings us back to Ana Cabrera.

  Two people contributed to my meeting Ana.

  The first was Rachel Snow, this punk rocker girl, my first and only girlfriend.

  “There’s something profoundly existential about waiting for the L train at three in the morning,” were the first words Rachel spoke to me.

  “Uhh . . . umm . . . yeah,” were the first words I spoke to Rachel.

  She didn’t let that stop her. We never took that L train. A few hours later we kissed on the Williamsburg Bridge.

  Rachel was a redheaded, Pabst-chugging, Ginsberg-quoting whirlwind. With her, nerdy me became the kind of guy who sang along to the Black Keys and walked barefoot down Broadway at 3:00 a.m. and licked clean the lid of a bucket of plain yogurt. Kissing was about as hot as our romance got over the next few months—but I didn’t try to rush things. I could imagine spending a lifetime with her.

  Rachel dumped me on the twentieth of January, my sixteenth birthday.

  She had come over to my place with a surprise present—two tickets to the Amazeballs Groove, playing at Birdland that night. “They’re the new wave in punk jazz,” she explained, perched on the edge of my desk, long legs swinging, small bare feet poking from torn jeans. “They’re amazing and they’ve got balls and they know how to groove. Show starts in an hour. Let’s go.”

  “That sounds awesome,” I said, though I would have preferred to stay in and snuggle. I clicked away at my website. “I just need to upload a CATastrophe of the month.”

  “Look,” Rachel said fifteen minutes later while practicing a handstand against the wall, “I know this website is like a tribute to your mother and everything. But can we—”

  “The video’s processing,” I said.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have cut Rachel off, but I didn’t want to discuss Mom with her. Sure, the inspiration for my site had come from the folder full of cat videos I’d discovered on Mom’s desktop after she died. She’d spent hours looking at the things, and it turned out she’d saved the best ones. I posted one on Facebook and got like a thousand shares—and so a business idea was born. But CatoTrope was a site full of cats pushing little carts across the floor. It didn’t feel right to call it a tribute to my mother.

  Even if she would have loved it.

  “I’ll go get us seats,” Rachel said after another while.

  “Would you?” I pecked her on the cheek. “I’m almost done here.”

  Five minutes after Rachel left the apartment, I received a Facebook message from her. I reproduce her missive here, because without it I may never have met Ana Cabrera:

  Dearest Rick,

  I’m dumping you.

  I wanted to see what it felt like, dating a geek. It’s not for me. I mean, Ewoks, Dr. Manhattan, Arya Stark, those guys are fun. I like a good lolcat as much as the next girl. But that’s, like, all your life. Every time I tried to drag you to do something fun, that’s what it felt like—dragging you, kicking and yelling.

  Fix your own life. Read less! Turn off your computer! Get off your ass! I haven’t got the energy to be your gung-ho manic girlfriend.

  Wishing you the very best in all your future endeavors,

  Rachel

  And that was that for Rick Gutiérrez and Rachel Snow.

  You might figure her final message sent me on a voyage of self-discovery, culminating in the realization that Geeks Are Good and Everyone’s a Special Flower and You Shouldn’t Let Other People Tell You How to Live Your Life. If so, you’ve been watching too many indie films with quirky teenage protagonists.

  I read Rachel’s message and decided she had a point.

  It took me a few days to accept it. A few days holed up in my room, binging on Battlestar Galactica and stuffing myself with schnitzel, my dad’s special recipe.

  “Schnitzel makes everything better,” was all that Dad said to me, which was about as much paternal advice as he ever gave me, now that Mom was gone.

  (Dad’s from Leipzig, where they take their schnitzel seriously. Perhaps I should mention that my full name is Richard Hahn Gutiérrez. Technically I should introduce myself as Rick Hahn, but I have sta
yed away from that name since this kid in middle school pointed out Hahn means cock—as in rooster. So I stick with the name Mom brought with her from Havana—my grandfather’s name—and leave Dad’s for special occasions.)

  But things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and nothing lasts, not even Battlestar Galactica. Soon enough I had to confront reality. Rachel had dumped me on my birthday. She hadn’t been nice about it. No, really, she’d been a little mean. But she wasn’t wrong.

  I was a geeky loner. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t even know why I’d resisted Rachel’s outings. They’d been some of the best fun I’d ever had.

  It was time for a change.

  Why should I be that quiet guy in the corner, always last to be picked for the game? I’d rather be the guy who started the game. The guy who had adventures instead of reading about them. And yeah, the guy who dumped instead of getting dumped.

  This is what I resolved:

  I would become that guy.

  Funny thing about resolutions. You make one, and it feels great and decisive and liberating. Then you look in the mirror and see the same old you staring back. And you realize you need a plan.

  Which brings us to the second person who contributed to my meeting Ana. The man with the plan. My pal Lettuceleaf Igorov.

  His real name is Vladislav, but our resident bully Rob Kenna can’t pronounce that, and Lettuceleaf is so much funnier—because he’s fat, you see, haha, hilarious. Lettuce is into anime and video games. And he plays classical guitar.

  I’m not talking elevator classical. I’m talking Joaquín Rodrigo and Francisco Tárrega and Isaac Albéniz (look them up on YouTube). This intricate, beautiful, haunting stuff. He played a school concert once, did Rodrigo’s “Invocación y Danza.” I shivered listening to him. But in the back row, Kenna’s catcall brigade worked overtime.

  “Oh, man,” I told Lettuce afterward. “That was awesome.”

  “I know,” he said. “If only those imbeciles appreciated quality.”

  That’s the other thing about Lettuce. He’s modest.

  We’d been buddies for years. Both of us nerdy, both of us outcasts, and hey, getting picked on isn’t as bad when you’ve got company. Then, a few weeks before Rachel dumped me, Lettuce discovered rock.

  It took one show. One gig with the BlueNuts, our school band, where he went wild on a metal-ish version of the Pink Panther theme, fingers ripping through violent chord progressions and complex riffs, his massive frame shaking, eyes rolled up in ecstasy. The rest of the band looked like kindergartners by comparison.

  From that day on, Lettuce could do no wrong in the eyes of the school. His size gave him a rock star’s gravity. His arrogance became a stage persona to be admired. Kenna quipped that the school band should be called Lettuce’s RainbowNuts (Lettuce is gay), but no one laughed.

  After my dumpage, I turned to Lettuce for advice. I told him my tale of woe during a break at school. “I need a plan,” I told him. “How do I turn my life around?”

  Lettuce considered the issue, then nodded decisively. “You have to find your own thing.”

  “What do you mean, my own thing?”

  “I mean, something social. Something that lets you meet people. Like, maybe start a cat video appreciation society that actually meets in real life.”

  “Umm.” Running my website was fun, but I didn’t really want to find out what kind of people hid behind usernames like FurryMasterXY and BroomstickRiderTexas. “Maybe something a bit cooler?”

  “What else are you good at?” Lettuce asked. “Like, in my case, I’m good at guitar. Except you know, playing Bach and stuff is great, but that was me in a room, alone all day, practicing. Playing rock—a whole ’nother game.”

  “I can play the conga drums a bit,” I said dubiously.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. Then he got thoughtful. “Can you join a salsa band or something?”

  “I’m not very good,” I said.

  Mom had made me take lessons. “When Fidel is dead we’ll go back to Havana,” she’d told me. “My old friends will hear you play and they’ll say—Agua! That’s María’s son, all right.”

  That had been Mom’s dream, not mine. She might have claimed that she had given up on Cuba—“We’re Americans now, and don’t you forget it.” But a photo of Havana’s Malecón always sat on her desk, and a volume of poetry by José Martí on her bedside table, and she never tired of making plans for a future after Fidel.

  A future she hadn’t lived to see.

  To me, Cuba was a distant dream, almost mythical. A fascinating fantasy, not quite real. I enjoyed listening to salsa music because the clave beat spurred my imagination. It let me picture what it might have been like to grow up on the streets my mother once walked. But I didn’t love it enough to practice the congas every day.

  After Mom died, I stopped playing altogether. I had tried not to even think about anything Cuban these past two years. Whenever someone mentioned Fidel or Buena Vista Social Club or the bloqueo or what have you, visions of Mom flashed before my eyes and I heard her voice ranting against “those communist pigs” again. And, well, that was not how I wanted to remember her.

  Maybe it was time I got over it.

  “You don’t need to play the congas well,” Lettuce said now. “You just need to find others as bad as you.”

  I stared at Lettuce for a long while. Then cried out in sudden epiphany. “Craigslist!”

  Lettuce grinned. “That wonderful flea market of the internet.”

  A few days later, I found what I needed.

  We play salsa covers, nothing too complicated, wrote Patrick, the bandleader. We’ve got our own congas, but our guy broke his hand. Come by on Wednesday, we’ll try you out.

  “I’ll be home late,” I told Dad early Wednesday evening. “I’m trying out for a salsa band.”

  “Good job,” Dad told me as he clicked morosely at his remote—cooking show to reality TV to soap opera and back.

  I’d hoped the mention of salsa, Mom’s favorite music, might stir his attention. But perhaps that had been wishful thinking. If I’d been avoiding thoughts of Cuba these past two years since Mom’s death, Dad had been avoiding thoughts of anything. Or so it seemed to me sometimes.

  The address Patrick had given me was for a community center in Gramercy. We were in a meeting room on the third floor. Low-ceilinged, carpeted in severe gray, lit by cold fluorescents. There were a couple of older, white-bearded drummers on bongos and timbales. Two women who looked like sisters handled maracas and trumpet. A lanky black kid my age had a bass guitar. Patrick himself, a tall pasty twenty-something with blond dreadlocks, waved about clave sticks as he talked.

  “This is Rick,” he introduced me. “Our new conga player.”

  People nodded, said hi. No one seemed eager to make friends and improve my social life.

  “Get ready,” Patrick told me. “They’ll be here soon.”

  “Wait, what?” I floundered. “Who?”

  “We’re accompanying a dance class,” Patrick said. “It’s their last practice together so they decided to pay for a band.”

  Blood rushed to my face, with all those eyes on me. “I haven’t played in a while—”

  “It’s a beginners’ class,” Patrick said. “We’ll play basic salsa. Do the tumbao, nothing more.”

  That’s the problem with leaving your apartment. You end up having to do things.

  The dancers trickled in. Fifty-something women in black slacks and pale blouses. Gray-haired men with silver belt buckles and summery polo shirts. They looked around uneasily, as if they didn’t know what they were doing here any more than I did.

  Then Ana walked in.

  She was poised and slim, with inky black hair down to her shoulders. It framed a heart-shaped brown face, smooth and soft, naive, almost childlike—except for her eyes, set unusually deep in her face. Those eyes seemed amused, like this girl knew things you didn’t and found it funny.

  Don’t get me
wrong—it wasn’t love at first sight. You see lots of cute girls in Manhattan, and you know they won’t ever feature in your life except as passersby. Besides, I was too nervous to pay her much attention.

  The girl had entered together with a stringy thirtysomething white guy who looked like he spent too much time at a tanning salon.

  “Hey, Gregoire,” Patrick greeted him, but he was looking at the girl. “How’s it going, Ana?”

  “Hey,” she said easily.

  The tanned guy, Gregoire, turned to the class. “All right, everyone. Let’s warm up.”

  “One, two, one two three four,” Patrick counted. He started on the claves—clack clack clack, clack-clack. On the next bar, the maracas came in, and the bongos.

  I realized I was still staring at Ana. Hurriedly, I attacked the congas. My first strokes went wobbly, off time, but then—face burning—I fell into the beat.

  Not that anyone noticed. We played a basic percussive pattern, steady and even. The trumpet came in with a simple, cheerful melody.

  The class rolled their shoulders and circled their hips, stepped forward and back and sideways, and turned around in place. Ana and Gregoire moved with a light, casual elegance at the front of the room. Everyone else plodded like a bunch of rusty Transformers in bad weather conditions. Jerky steps, now slower, now faster, and tripping over their own feet.

  Not that I had a right to judge anyone’s dancing. A few years ago at a school party, Flavia Martinez took one look at my dance interpretation of “Poker Face” and laughed. “You really Cuban, dude?” she had asked me, in front of everyone. I hadn’t danced a step since.

  The dancers paired up and shuffled back and forth, left and right in unison, like a roomful of badly made marionettes. It was painful to watch. So I watched Ana instead. The languid way she rolled her shoulders, a mesmerizing figure eight. The elegant shift of her torso from side to side in time to the beat. The way her hips rocked—

  My fingers tripped, and I missed a beat.

  “Focus,” Patrick hissed.

  In my defense, Ana’s hips.