She was the daughter of a British diplomat and she lived in a huge, failing stone mansion. I cannot tell you how much that impressed me. She had an accent so delicate that each word she spoke seemed to unfurl from her mouth like a flower, like a fragrance. Oh, how I was crazy for her, how I ached for her lips, but she preferred the bad boys. She liked them wicked and unpredictable. Boys who were born under punches, boys that didn’t ask questions and liked to fuck. I played tennis and coached T-ball.

I remember having my arm around her once when we were returning from a cottage. She was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. It was autumn and the lake we were driving by was so beautiful, the leaves an astonishment reflecting off the water, like a choral reef turned into light.

And Louis Armstrong, the forever of Louis Armstrong, was playing in the car, as if narrating, and I had my arm around Rebecca Harris who was so wonderfully asleep and safe and nestled into me, and it was a perfect moment that I wanted to sustain for eternity. Yes. This was it. Yes. And then the car hit a bump and I bounced up and hit my head on the roof and Rebecca woke up, startled. For the rest of the drive home I kept my arm around her, but it was different now, all wrong. It was like my arm was pinned behind her back and neither one of us was comfortable, and the Louis Armstrong that was playing became the crappy, sanitized Louis Armstrong and the lake fell behind us as we entered into the junk land that ringed the city, passing hamburger joints and lonely, broken homes, places and things that weren’t quite where they wanted to be.

In the booth behind us sat two women. One of them had a tattoo of Tinkerbell– sluttily composed on all fours– inked on her back, while the other woman had a tattoo of a several dollar signs on her back.

“I don’t know what was wrong with the bitch,” Slutty Tinkerbell said.

“She’s always had an attitude,” Dollar Sign agreed.

“Well, I wasn’t going to let her get away with it, so I told her, but before I knew it bitch had me by the hair and whipped me to the floor!”

The waitress was about 7 months pregnant, had sweet but tired eyes, and was an utter ace at her job. Flashing about, she was like some serving telepath, predicting needs and wants long before they were actually articulated.  When she brought us the bill it occurred to me to ask if she’d come up with a name for her child. She seemed a little bit startled by the question, and then a little bit sad, “No, no, I’ve been too busy to think about it, I’ll have to just wait and see, I guess,” and then she spun off to another table, her life now receding like a partially glimpsed ballet.

Crossing the pedestrian overpass to the Market, we were greeted by a tall, thin black man in a frayed dashiki. He gave me a quick appraisal, “Hey there Little Man, how’s it going?” In front of him he had an array of mysterious oils and dyes that I had paused to inspect, “The Little Man’s day goes well, how does the Tall, Thin Man’s day go?” He laughed and banged his fist into mine, and I felt proud, like I had just passed some sort of Detroit test.

Not far from him a woman crouched near to the ground in a position that seemed almost predatory, as if she was planning on springing up and pouncing on all who passed by. She was wearing a complete, black Burqa that she’d accessorized with a pair of impenetrable wrap-around sunglasses. Somehow, I knew that she was stunning beneath the intimidating cover—you could feel strength radiating from her and it was obvious that her concealment was a function of pride rather than modesty. Beside her a handsome man with a Thelonius Monk beard sat on a pillow chanting Muslim prayers. They were rock starts to me–perfect in their alien beauty, as if pulled from the cover of a Miles Davis album.

In the open-air market we bought some blueberries from a pair of fussy, 60 year-old gay men.

“No, it’s three dollars each or two for five dollars!” the one with the beard and mustache corrected. The other man sighed and closed his eyes for a second, and then with an edge in his voice that was directed to his partner, said to us, ‘That will be two-fifty, please.”

Down Russell Street we saw heavy men with diabetic limps. Clustered in a group in front of us, one wore the jersey of Detroit Tiger slugger Prince Fielder, while the others arrayed around him, leaned on canes, wore t-shirts from rib joints or hats tilted at a jaunty angle.

Boisterous and playfully combative, we could hear them bantering. The closer we got, the more clearly we could hear one of the men shouting out every five seconds or so, as if part of an unfolding musical improvisation, variations on a riff:

“Leave the white girl alone.”

“Now you be leaving the white girl alone, you hear.”

“Don’t be messing with that white girl’s business.”

“Just leave the white girl alone.”

As Rachelle and I passed, one of these men stepped out and scowled back at his buddies, “Ah,  white girls can’t cook worth a damn!” Winking at Rachelle, he gestured us away with his hand, his pals all laughing and tossing high-fives.

Well, it wasn’t like that at all. The city itself looks like it’s been run over by tanks. Rubble is everywhere, and the majestic architecture, now torn and largely disregarded, gives the place a feeling of battered antiquity. Although chaotic and confusing, nothing happens quickly or with purpose in Havana, it’s as if some torpid cloud had settled permanently upon the place.

Neither Rachelle nor I speak any Spanish, and soon enough Havana began to feel like some surreal game show where the goal of all the other contestants was to take all of our money. The visible expression of poetry I anticipated in the humming arteries of the ruined city was quickly replaced by the feelings of anxiety I get when trying to have my computer fixed by speaking to a techie over the phone. It was a grind, and nothing resolved without a battle.

I suppose you get what you deserve, and as we were taking “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery, “it came at a cost. Needed yet resented, we were the unwelcome other who were lost in the time and space of a culture we didn’t understand. A multitude of humiliations, scams and difficulties took place, and it became exhausting and demoralizing.

Near the end of our trip Rachelle and I stumbled upon a small fairground. There were bumper cars, a little roller coaster, a merry-go-round and the like, and it felt like stepping into something kind. We went on all the rides, yelling alongside the children, and I felt somehow restored. As we were walking through the grounds we came upon a batting cage. A line-up of Cuban men and teens waited to take their turn and I joined in at the back. It had been years since I’d been in a batting cage, and I could tell from the looks I was getting– and all the words muttered but never explicitly understood– that I was considered a joke.

When I eventually got into the cage I hit every ball that the machine threw at me, the last one with such certainty and force that a little girl of 4 who had been watching, jumped into the air and yelled “Opa!” As I walked out of the batting cage the Cuban men, surprised, smiled at me and gave me the thumbs up, and for a moment I felt returned to myself, like I belonged.

And then later Rachelle showed me the video.

Sweet Lord, what I had imagined to be a heroic athletic assertion against great odds, you know, grace under pressure and all that, was actually the pitiful and frail sight of a small man in glasses and flip-flops awkwardly dropping his bat on a bunch of different pitches. Each “swing” was like the bat was too heavy for me and I could hold it no longer so I just let it fall. It was entirely “special,” but I guess it just shows you that we see in this world what we need to see, and when we most need to see it.