Alex - 11/26/16

My best friend when I was a young kid was Cuban- Alejandro Enrique but we called him Alex. His Mom was Jewish from New York. The revolution happened the year I was born. I had a vague outline of their family history. I don't know how they met but Alex's father was a wealthy Cuban, a big estate, horses, pool, servants, the whole nine yards. Mr. C (I'm not going to put their last name on here) took Mrs. C down to Cuba where they had Alex's older sister, and they lived the life of the Cuban upper class. Then of course the Revolution happened, the year Alex and I were both born, and the C family had to leave Cuba and landed in the suburbs of DC, down the street from my house. You could tell they felt it was a big bringdown in their social station. Even though the public schools in my neighborhood were considered the best, they still paid for both kids to attend a fancy private school. You could tell they thought of themselves as a cut above the middle-class suburbs where they had been exiled.
Mr. C ("Pepe") had an unusual deep gravely voice with a Cuban accent, very exotic to me. He loved chess. Everything Alex did I wanted to do. Alex and his Dad went fishing, so I asked my Dad to go fishing with me. Alex had tropical fish, so I had to get tropical fish. Alex and his Dad started keeping chickens in the garage, but we didn't do that. One day local dogs got in and tore them apart. Pepe missed Cuba. I remember seeing how he made Cuban coffee and also he took avocado pits and sprouted them by putting toothpicks in them and placing them in glasses- these cups with avocado pits in them were all over the house. One time I made the mistake of saying Alex wasn't Jewish while in the back seat of Mrs. C's car with her driving, and boy did she get mad. She set me straight. Alex was Jewish! One of the neighborhood kids called Alex a "kikey spic".

As we got older our political differences began to surface- Alex's family were the only people I knew who supported Nixon to the bitter end, and we had arguments about that. As I became more of a hippie the distance between Alex and I grew. Finally the breaking point was when I got Alex to smoke some pot with me. He had claimed (one of his typical outlandish claims) that pot didn't get him high. He said he could smoke as much as he wanted with no effect. Of course, this was a challenge. I found a secluded spot and had him smoke bowl after bowl, making sure he held it in. A week later he calls me in a bit of a panic, asking "When will it wear off?!" He told his Mom and that was the last time I ever saw him.