Spiritual American Trash. Greg Bottoms

and pathologized. The mother knew better, though. She was releasing the bad spirits, letting them go back home and hoping, with luck, that she might be able to keep her physical daughter here. What one person—and the state, for that matter—calls murder, another calls a failed attempt to save a life.

      4.

      Bad spirits. Maybe that’s how Miami came back to Alfonso when he remembered it decades later. He was there in the late ’30s, as a percussionist and maraca player in Latin Quarter rumba bands. He was wild, man. Wild. People knew him. People remembered him.

      He even played for a while with Desi Arnaz, the guy who was later on I Love Lucy. Life was a dream of night and sound and alcohol and women. Women were everywhere. Whores. Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and even white chicks, real groupies with that mystified, cherished, overvalued Euro-American skin who hung with Desi and the band. Not dark, beautiful saints like his mama. More like tempting pieces broken off the white devil’s soul. All of it blurred through a haze of alcohol.

      Miami: Sleep all day. The roar of the band at night. Sweat. Booze and red lights and applause. Band members waking up in strange rooms, a new woman on the other side of the bed. A life of brilliant debauchery, a life, as his mama would say, of sin. Bad spirits, man. Enough, after a while, to make you dread the dark.

      5.

      There is no evidence that I can find that he saw heavy action in World War II, when he served on a navy ship in the Pacific. But you might have thought he had if you ran across him in the 1960s, when he was back in Key West with his mother. If you had known him when he was a boy, that little confident kid with the shiny hair and the smile and the drum, you might wonder what happened. Makiki, huh? Dude seemed a little off.

      He rode around Key West on a tricycle with big, fat beach tires, along the same route usually, and he worked moonlighting as a musician and selling tickets at Cuban numbers games—an illegal but tolerated form of gambling. He lived in the same ramshackle cottage where he grew up with his aging mother, who people called that old “Voodoo Queen.”

      You might have seen him in his matching tropical-print shirts and pants, his homemade knit fisherman hats, a new one almost every day.

      “Guy with the macramé hats?”

      “Mr. Take My Time on the Tricycle?”

      “Señor Tropical Threads?”

      By the ’70s, tourists had found Key West—found it big-time—and it was a different place. Young people and college students were walking up and down every street during the summer. Drugs were a regular part of American youth culture by then, and an even bigger part of the scene in Key West. Forget about all that idealism and mind expansion of the ’60s. Narcotics now were inseparable from our consumerism, our narcissism; they were quick routes to hedonism and escapism, a new and acceptable subculture based on wrecking your mind. Alfonso—Makiki—was just another trip in that context, as funny as he was sad to the tourists, a bit of local color, all dressed up on a tricycle with a blown-out mind.

      6.

      People get old. Their bodies fail. They die. Everyone knows this but something about the human mind won’t let us fully accept that it will happen to us and the people we love.

      But what if you get imprisoned by grief?

      When someone you love dies, it’s like the grief is deep, dark, cold water, and you’re in it. At first there is an anchor, a very heavy anchor, attached to your ankle. You sink, you struggle, you can’t get out, but most people find a way to keep their nose and mouth just out of the water, barely, to keep breathing and stay alive. Normally, the anchor holding you there gets lighter with time, dissolving like a slow-fizzing Alka-Seltzer, so you’re still in the water for a while but your head is up, and then your shoulders, and then, miraculously, you are up on the shore, a new shore. You can look around and try—even though you’re exhausted and confused—to imagine what to do next with the life you have remaining without your beloved, which you never imagined could happen. Not accurately, anyway.

      But what if it didn’t work like that? What if the anchor got heavier, the water darker and colder? What would that turn you into?