Driving My Tías Through Miami
I woke up at 10 AM by the grace of the gods and my drunk-resistant internal clock powered by anxiety.
I put on whatever, maybe didn’t change at all, and teleported to my black 1998 Nissan Altima to burn through the twenty miles of highway between my sketchy apartment complex in West Kendall and the location where I hoped my tías would still be waiting for me two hours after their cruise docked: the Port of Miami.
I didn’t call my parents—I didn’t wanna hear it—and I had no way to contact the tías. They had Peruvian cell phones, which worked in Miami only when they connected to Wi-Fi, unless they turned on their data, and they talked about that the way we talk about health care. I raced.
It’s likely my car was blaring the Mars Volta, very likely the entirety of the Frances the Mute album, while I swerved away from slow fucking assholes trying to catch every red light on Kendall Drive, evaded hopping in front of stupid fucking idiots blazing ninety down the four-lane thoroughfare of our 80,000-deep suburb, and zoomed the fuck off at the exact millisecond the light outside Miami Dade turned green. Somehow that intersection, gateway to the largest campus of one of the nation’s biggest community colleges (which admitted the highest number of undocumented students before DACA), and two of Miami’s premier food purveyors (Sonia’s Patties and the Hungry Bear sub shop), always made me the most impatient. I wanted to be past it, on to the 874 North ramp, far away from the shouting strip mall sign that rotated Chicken Kitchen–wannabes and soft-serve yogurt franchises every few months. That location may have been my first real, paying job under the table, where I mixed curry sauce in an empty cylindrical trash can on wheels and curved the owner’s sixteen-year-old son-manager until his mom took me aside to break the news that she was selling the business, and after closing tonight this would be my last paycheck. I can’t remember if the money came under my name or a citizen friend of my mother’s. I see now that she took me aside because she knew it would break me.
Ah, the on ramp. One of the best feelings in the world is speeding up against the steepness just enough to get momentum, then giving the brake pedal a smooth, gradual, very brief lick before letting go and simply riding the physics with just the butt of your right palm following the cues of the steering wheel to keep yourself coloring within the lines. I could spark a grit even now just thinking about it.
There are bigger and badder tolls along the 874 now, and probably every single highway in Miami-Dade County, but in 2011 this was the back road. The uncrowded highway you took to the Palmetto on nights out if you knew how not to pay higher tolls for no fucking reason on the Turnpike to the 836. The 874 cuts through the golf course outside Killian, my prison of a high school in an affluent Cocaine Cowboys neighborhood, and merges in La Sahuesera (from the English “Southwest”) with the Palmetto Expressway, the 826 if you know your shit, offering a westward view of Santa’s Enchanted Forest in the winter, but it may have been too early for that, who knows.
It was November 1st, because I had gone out for Halloween, to a bar that was on a side of the Bahama Breeze shopping center that I never had reason to go to, right in between the Chuck E. Cheese and Nova Southeastern University, which I’m pretty sure is one of those scam schools. It was fairly new and had a driveway the way hotels do, I guess they must have had a valet because it was the townie chic cocktail bar of the moment, like a Blue Martini for scene kids. That’s why I was there with my roommate, a skinny West Kendall-popular server-bartender at Bonefish Grill, her boyfriend the line cook, whoever their friends were, and the chubby guitar virtuoso weed dealer nerd in her high school clique—my husband, who no one knew was my husband.
I had been looking forward to the outing. Or maybe I spontaneously and obliquely bailed on my burner cokehead friends to be there. Either way, I had five chocolate espresso martinis on an empty stomach, and I had never tasted a drink so delicious, and I had never felt my roommate be more welcoming of me, and I had never felt less stupid and weird around her boyfriend and their beautiful preppy-grown-into-effortless-indie friends.
It was a great night. I remember it fondly, if only just flashes of me laughing loudly after adding to their banter and getting open-mouthed laughter back instead of raised eyebrows and smirking eyes.
Everyone was a pothead. I wanted so badly to be one. I tried—I hit blunts on every rotation, sometimes fully and sometimes just a wee puff so it looked like I did. I cleared bongs on my own to the acclaim of the dudes. I tried to remember not to camp but always forgot that was a thing and would keep telling inane stories with the instrument in my hand. I did all this even though I knew that never, not once (OK, just that once) did weed make me feel good.
No, it made me paranoid. Terrified. None of those people knew that at any given moment we could be arrested, smoking at malls and parks and by the canals in our neighborhoods, and when we got arrested, I would be punished a step further: I’d be deported. And not only would I be deported, I’d be deported in violation of the specific instructions of my dad, who would then beat the shit out of me in between SWAT team rifle proddings and TV news harassments. But I smoked weed anyway, not a lot for someone whose husband bought by the ounce, but way too much for someone who didn’t even like it. I had to fit in. I had to be normal because if I wasn’t I might blow my cover.
They knew I was born in Peru, that’s nothing to raise eyebrows in Vice City, plenty of us had been born in another country. But they didn’t know I didn’t have papers. That my parents drove with licenses that expired before 9/11. That the reason I didn’t take driver’s ed and didn’t have a job for most of high school was because I couldn’t—not because I was a spoiled Kendall princess. I wasn’t even from a princessy part of Kendall. My mother cleans those nice houses sprawling eastward to US 1, owned by second and third gens. Me, I was a ref. Not literally, we didn’t go through an official refuge-seeking process, we simply overstayed our tourist visa, which led to a much more challenging existence than actual refugees’ with legal status. Regardless, my standing on the social ladder of English-speaking Killian grads from the Crossings area was tantamount to that of a ref. A slur for newly arrived Cuban refugees with scarce socioeconomics, brandished generously by the descendants of immigrants who got here generations ago, don’t need food stamps, and speak fluent English (albeit with a pervasive Miami accent). So anyway, I pretended. Puff, puff, till it became even harder to form words than it already was with my baseline social anxiety, and my legs twitched.
Once you squeeze through the 874-Palmetto junction, perpetually under construction likely to make good on some commissioner’s nefarious promise, the skies clear. You can breathe again. Not because traffic lets up. Just because you’ve reached the eastbound 836, the Dolphin Expressway, and that means you’re halfway there. MIA to the left, American Airlines planes landing and leaving—but you shouldn’t really look—the Burger King headquarters to the right, just a few more exits to the scaffoldings of Marlins Park, nascent abomination of our tax dollars, and finally: The buildings start rising. The billboards are sexy. The road is a nest of concrete noodles. You better know what lane you need to be in `cause the I-95 ramps are on opposite sides, and if you don’t get off, you’ll be on the 395 East, the MacArthur Causeway, and you’ll end up on Miami Beach—unless you hawkeye the back-right blind spot, don’t stutter when you cross into the next lane, keep the blinker on even tho no one else does, and pretty much diagonally, decisively, cut through three lanes of traffic immediately after you pass the wall separating the street-level eastbound 395 on-ramp, and before hitting the next wall about three car lengths ahead, demarcating Exit 2B, Northeast Second Avenue.
Tailing them, passing them, making good time. My beautiful black Nissan did so good. We were practiced in running late and getting there on time. Enough.
I felt guilty. And exposed. The entire twenty-five-minutes-to-an-hour that I skipped and sprinted purposefully through the motorized crowd like the most graceful game of Need for Speed you’ve ever seen, my mission dulling my burning eyeballs and shivering limbs, I was trying to come up with a lie to cover up my debauchery.
I was a good niece, the youngest. My brother, the even youngest nephew. The perpetually cherubic children of the baby, their youngest brother. My doting, overbearing tías still make a show of calling my dad “El Bebé” every single time they walk into the house when they come to see us on vacation. When we last lived in the same country, I was eleven and my brother seven. We will stay that age until the last of our eight tías and one tío have died. I couldn’t tell them I got home at five that morning, stumbling and incoherent off sugar vodka and milk, completely forgetting or ignoring that I insisted on picking them up when they returned from their cruise because I was the pride of the family, I got us all papers, I graduated magna cum laude (from the commuter school, calm down—shout out FIU), I was married, freelancing for the Miami New Times, on my way to a real journalism job at the biggest regional newspaper, I had bought my first car! I drove it myself.
What would they think?!!
What would they say to my dad? I had to play it off somehow. As I zoomed measuredly down Biscayne Boulevard, past the American Airlines Arena, home of our patron saints the Miami Heat, and launched my mighty little sedan over Port Boulevard, I thought, fuck it. Let’s improvise.
My tiny, round tías were loitering outside their terminal, luckily in a steady breeze, wrapped in pashminas and clad in shades to weather their abandonment in the tropics. They chirped and beelined to my little warrior when they saw me in the driver’s seat, full of “Muñeca! Preciosa! Qué gusto de verte mi amor!”
I babbled under their good fairy chorus, something like, “Me quedé dormida!” or who knows what the fuck. Tía Ketty scooted into the back and started to put me on blast when Teresa placed herself next to her and assured me I had told them I’d be there at ten, so as far as she knew I was right on time. I did say that, and I was joking, but bless my shithead self for knowing I’d have never gotten up early enough to make it downtown at 8 AM, martinis or not.
Quick—how was the trip? What did you see? As three scuttled snugly on the back seat and one buckled into the front, I turned on the public-facing self I usually reserve for interviewees and customer service reps, unless my tías are in town. As long as I didn’t actually face them so they couldn’t smell my fermented breath, they’d never know the actual reason I left them waiting.
They were blabbing two to three at a time, telling me about some bright island or innocent male employee they made up raunchy stories about, and I was hitting `em with the nooos and jajajas that still pour out of me like honey marinated in all these years of their cariños. But that honey went bad. It was about to pour out of me, like for real. Mid-perfect-niece-response, a bomb of sweet, sour milk exploded in my mouth and my nose burst to tears.
I had to speed up to climb the bridge holding my chocolate vomit in my mouth while Tía Concho screeched for a plastic bag from the front seat and the backseat screeched a bag or two right into her hands. She held it open under my chin and told me “bota, bota,” throw it all away. Before we made it over the bridge back to the mainland I threw up more of my shame in the pelican pouch she was still holding for me. The backseat tías were spinning the narrative: me cayó mal, whatever I mixed didn’t sit right in my stomach, it was a bad drink, a bad batch, a bad night.
This thought formed in my body without words that day in the car: How many times had they done something like this for my dad? Throwing up into my tía’s hands while driving after I got so drunk the night before that I picked them up two hours late felt like stepping into my inheritance.
I think about the time back in Peru that my dad was falling-down drunk and it was time for him to drive us home from a family party. My mom sat in the front seat, silently as always, and my baby brother, next to me in the back, was having the time of his life egging my dad on as he revved up like a racecar. Another tía, who’s gone now, leaned into the front passenger window and tried to tell her baby brother you don’t do this, you’re scaring the children. My mom said nothing. My brother squealed. My dad got on the expressway, and I made sure to keep my eyes on the road and willed the car to go straight the whole way home.
I guess one good thing about not having papers for such a long time is that it forced my dad to stop driving drunk. Deportation was too great a risk, and I am grateful for that.
Not grateful for the years-long crying spells undocumentation wrought. On a vacation before this one, my tías piled onto my bed with me while I cried about something. I lay my big heaving sobs across their soft, squishy bodies and smelled the potpourri of their old lady perfumes. They must have been joking about me getting married because they asked me if I was a virgin. I was shocked, but I said the truth. Teresa snarked, “Of course she’s not a virgin!” and I was honestly offended. But the wordless thought in my body was, “I’m glad she knew.”
Back on the mainland, I drank water from their flimsy plastic bottles and got us back on the 836, westbound. Altima hit seventy, I relaxed into my seat. I don’t know what I said after that, or for the rest of the car ride. I just remember their cooing: Meche scritching my left shoulder from behind with her long nails; Ketty ragging on me, calling me curse words and pet names; Teresa damning the drink to hell and forget about it; Concho tying up my disgusting discarded pelican pouch. We made it to my parents’ house, all the way by the Tamiami Airport, once upon a time bordering the swamp, and my tías never breathed a word to them.
