“You’re too high as it is.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Lenny. “I need to smoke myself down.”
“It’s all in your head,” said Serge, unzipping a pocket and pulling out his Life List. “You have to learn how to master your quirks.”
Lenny chewed and pointed with his chili dog. “You left off with time travel.”
“Let’s see, what’s next? Ride Shamu, tend the Jupiter Lighthouse, dive the Atocha, perform my one-man salute to Claude Pepper at the Kravis Center, become a surf bum in Jensen, join the harvesting of the oysters at Apalachicola, take a billfish on flyrod, double-eagle at PGA National, ride with the Blue Angels from Pensacola, deliver peace and justice to my Cuban exile community…”
“I didn’t know you were Cuban.”
“Lenny, my name’s Serge.”
“So you’re part of the Miami Mafia?”
“No, Tampa Cuban, different gang, much earlier. We’re the group that came up by way of Key West when they opened the cigar factories in the 1880s. My great-great-grandfather was the noble Juan Garcia. Used to be a reader in Ybor City.”
“Reader?”
“They sat in tall chairs and read stuff, newspapers, magazines, so the workers wouldn’t get bored rolling stogies. Then he started reading D. H. Lawrence,
“What’s bolita?”
“The old Latin street lottery. Illegal but winked at. They put a bunch of numbered ivory balls in a sack and Juan would reach in and pick one. No way to cheat, right? Wrong. The crime bosses would tell Juan which number they wanted, and he’d freeze that ball in an icebox. At drawing time, he’d just feel around in the bag for the cold ball.”
“You said there was trouble?”
“One Friday he thought they said thirty when they actually said
“They shot him?”
“No, they stuck him in an icehouse. One thing about Cubans — we love our irony.”
“Froze to death,” said Lenny, nodding. “I hear it’s like going to sleep.”
“What about you?” asked Serge. “Any interesting background?”
