He asked the tailor, “How much will it cost?”

“Your dad has brought in a lot of people, good clients, so this one’s on the house.”

Orestes Loudón accompanied him to the waiting room where his other clients were grumbling, though he didn’t appear to notice. When they reached the doorway he pinched one of Argenis’s cheeks as one does a child’s and then suddenly completed his caress by pulling out a couple of facial hairs. Argenis jumped back in pain and the tailor, looking at the black hairs between his fingers, said, “Come back Friday and do me the favor of throwing out the beggar’s clothing you have on.”

He was thirsty. As he calculated what a Presidente might now cost at Luis’s bar, someone yelled his name and honked a horn three times. Argenis turned around to look and recognized Charlie Catrain, his bosom buddy, in a Nissan Xterra with a longboard on the rack. “Get in, man!” Charlie requested, lowering his window and pouring a welcome blast of air-conditioning onto the sidewalk and onto Argenis.

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Before the smoke coming out of his mouth could dissipate, Charlie passed the bong to Argenis for him to light the weed in the bowl and take a drag. The lighter had a woman with huge, pink breasts printed on it and the water in the bong’s base made a blub, blub, blub sound. In the background, the album “Nice Guys” by Art Ensemble of Chicago was spinning on Charlie Catrain’s record player. Next to the record player, on a polished teak table, sat some other analogue devices from the seventies. Opposite it a stone Buddha’s head was smiling stupidly.

He had known Charlie his whole life. Charlie’s dad, Tony Catrain, and Argenis’s father had sent them both to Cuba for the first Latin American Communist Youth Conference, a kind of summer camp whose slogan was “Be Like Che.” The food tasted like shit, and the discussions about the new color for the pioneers’ berets were a drag. The female hosts, however, were really hot, and they were in charge of the afternoon swimming lessons in the pool. One of those afternoons Charlie took him to an empty building in the camp complex and there, on a stinking mat, he made him lose his virginity to a girl from Matanzas who was very thin and pale, and who he had convinced to open her legs for a package of nail polish which Charlie’s mother had made him pack as a gift for his female revolutionary friends. Argenis stuck his dick into that bony pussy and came without thrusting even once. Then Charlie, with the bag of colorful polish in his hand, made the girl suck him off on her knees, telling Argenis, “Next time think of your grandma so you won’t come so soon, maricón.”

“So what’s your plan?” his friend was now asking, as Argenis remembered Charlie’s juvenile penis decorating the Cuban girl’s face with spiderwebs of semen like a Halloween skull. Waiting for a response, Charlie took off his shoes and passed the bong to Argenis again, as if to encourage him.