Alejandro placed his mouth inches from my ear and issued the following declaration:
“I am going to open the door now.”
I understood him perfectly and said nothing. Alejandro repeated his declaration. I nodded and gave another thumbs-up.
Alejandro reached over and unlocked the latch on the Cessna’s small side door. The door flew open, and a blast of cold air rushed into the cabin with enormous force. My heart leapt. The sound was tremendous. I was now facing the open door and the empty sky. I slid my goggles over my eyes.
Alejandro positioned himself behind me. He put his mouth up to my ear once again and shouted the following command:
“Step out onto the wing.”
Remarkably, I inched toward the edge. There didn’t seem to be any other choice. Alejandro was behind me, pushing gently. The ozone layer was whipping against my face. A.B was getting married that day. It was a special occasion. People went skydiving all the time. It was all perfectly safe. There was nothing to worry about. The important thing to do was to just have fun. The hardest part was jumping. The rest would be easy. Alejandro had a chute, a backup chute, and an AAD (automatic activation device), which would deploy the chute automatically at an altitude of three thousand feet in the event that he somehow slipped into unconsciousness during our descent. The system was reportedly foolproof.
Now I was at the threshold. The bar attached to the wing, where my feet were to be placed, was right there in front of me. Below the wing, there was nothing. Below nothing, there was earth. Below the earth, there was more nothing.
I had to step out onto that wing. I had to step into that nothing.
I placed my feet on the wing. It was the most unnatural moment of my entire life.
My feet were now on the wing of an aircraft that was flying at a cruising altitude of approximately ten thousand feet.
Alejandro asked me if I was ready. I said nothing. Perhaps I nodded.
The next thing I knew, we were dropping, flipping, spinning out of control, a mad rush of air. I didn’t know which way was up. I no longer heard the plane. I was disoriented, didn’t know where I was. I was tumbling out of control, plummeting toward earth at terminal velocity, and then, suddenly, vwoompth, I flattened out. My belly was facing the earth, my arms and legs were outstretched. I had achieved some kind of equilibrium. I was flying. I could see my arms, my hands. I could see wisps of white clouds in the distance. I heard Alejandro let out a battle cry. He was still with me. He had righted us with his expertise.
I looked down. I could see everything. Playa del Carmen. Las Palapas, the resort we were staying at. The Gulf of Mexico, bleeding blue to turquoise as it neared the shore. Hotels tucked among the trees. The beach looked like a long line of cocaine. Inland there was nothing but green.
I didn’t feel Alejandro pull the rip cord. I felt only an enormous tug on my harness when the parachute opened and grabbed the atmosphere. We rushed to what felt like a sudden stop. The next thing I knew, everything was silent. The chaos was over. My chute had engaged. My chute was working. I was alive. I was not going to die. I was floating toward earth at a gentle rate of speed, no longer plummeting. Parachute technology had succeeded. Alejandro was manning the toggles, steering us earthward. I didn’t have to do anything. I was hanging at twenty-five hundred feet. Provided the elaborate system of clips and harness held fast, I would be arriving on the sandy beach below in a matter of moments, physically intact, completely uninjured.
I looked down, liberated. I thought I could see my friends. I had not soiled my jumpsuit, and I was not dead.
Also, it had just occurred to me that I was laughing hysterically, like a child.
The wedding went off without a hitch. A.B. and Jenny were married in a beautiful seaside ceremony at sunset. A small Mexican priest presided. A mariachi band played over the sound of crashing surf. Margaritas were served.
Two days later, I found myself alone, at the Aeropuerto José Martí in Havana, Cuba. I was relieved, having made it through customs without getting my passport stamped. A gloomy, bespectacled gentleman had handled the transaction. He was in his middle thirties, and the crown of his head was oily and bald. Just to be safe, I’d asked him politely in Spanish to refrain from stamping my passport, aware that getting one’s passport stamped was inadvisable in Cuba, where traveling was a direct violation of U.S. trade law. The man said nothing to me in response. He looked at my passport quickly and handed it back to me without a word. When I thanked him for his assistance, he yawned and buzzed me through the security door.
There were guards in green fatigues in the baggage claim area, stone-faced men wielding firearms. They were directing a spastic squad of black cocker spaniels sniffing for bombs and drugs. I’d never seen cocker spaniels doing this kind of work before.
My bag was waiting for me when I arrived at the conveyor belt. I picked it up and walked outside into a swarming horde of taxi drivers. They were all talking to me at once, trying to win my business. It was disorienting. In the end, I negotiated transport with a rail-thin, silver-haired gentleman for the flat rate of US$20. According to my guidebooks, this constituted a fairly reasonable deal.
Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the backseat of his taxi, cutting through the countryside on my way to Havana. The terrain was tropical and unfamiliar. There were tenement building carcasses, laundry hanging from their crumbling balconies. There was a stoic farmer steering a bull-pulled plow through an upturned field. There were dilapidated schools and uniformed children giggling in the littered schoolyards. There was a city bus, impossibly full, arms and faces hanging hot out of the open windows. There were three people on a motorcycle and six in a ’57 Chevy. There were weathered men smoking cigars on the sides of the road, trying to flag rides with smiles.
Nobody was wearing sunglasses.
It was illegal for me to be there.
Within minutes, we entered the city. My driver motioned to a bus station on our right and said something in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. We passed the Plaza de la Revolución. My driver told me in broken English that the large stone monument in its center stood, like the airport, in honor of José Martí. We made a left turn and wove through the neighborhoods. There were strange faces in the narrow streets. The buildings were Spanish colonial, old and falling down. Children playing stickball on the pavement. Old men smoking on the balconies above. Vintage cars rattling by. Golden era Cadillacs. Buicks and Fords. I rolled down my window and lit up a cigarette. I felt like I was in a time warp.
This was good.
Later that night, I found myself seated at a table in a nightclub. On the advice of my hotel concierge, I had wandered over to a place called the Oasis, on the Paseo de Martí. The Oasis consisted of a long, loud room. There was an eight-piece band on a small stage, and the dance floor was packed with salsa dancers. I was drinking my third mojito. There were girls everywhere. Most were prostitutes, most were dressed in skimpy outfits, and most were very young—teenagers and girls in their early twenties.
Here’s how you make a mojito:
Ingredients:
3 fresh mint sprigs
2 tbsp. lime juice
Dash of simple syrup
Club soda, chilled