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started drinking again.
    Before that last fight happened, just after I started my amateur boxing career with Ronnie working my corner as an assistant trainer, he went AWOL from the gym. He disappeared for a few days. We filed a missing person report with the police and finally another trainer found him strung out on Hastings surrounded by other junkies and drunks slumped over park benches in Pigeon Park. My gym’s owner helped him get into rehab, but Ronnie couldn’t stick it out. The owner tried a couple more times getting him back into rehab, but it just never worked.
    Once it became clear that Ronnie wasn’t coming back, I wasn’t sure what to do next with boxing, let alone my life. I stumbled across Ronnie just before he fought his last fight, a few weeks before I flew to Havana for the first time to look for a new trainer. I heard later he contracted HIV and a lot of other viruses on the street. He’d ended up in the hospital a few times after being beaten pretty badly by kids looking to thump someone defenseless. Ronnie was always so hard on himself, I wonder if he even bothered to fight back. Maybe he felt like he deserved it.
    When I saw him he’d grown out a beard and his toes poked out of his shoes and he looked broken and lost. I barely recognized him. He barely recognized me. Some part of me kept hoping it was all just wardrobe and makeup for a movie part he’d gotten. As we stood looking at one another, I could almost feel him absorb the sadness between us like some mournful breeze rattling a wind chime.
    I didn’t know what to say and wasn’t sure what to do, either. I’d tried with him as I’d tried to help my own father to quit harming himself with alcohol, but in both cases nothing worked. You have to get past the pain of knowing who someone isn’t to accept loving them for who they are.
    Finally he did recognize me, without remembering my name.
    â€œHeya, look at this, hey kid?” he said, exposing some lost teeth. “Look where I ended up, huh? Can you believe it? Look where I ended up. Ah, Jesus. Look at me.”
    â€œAre you okay, Ronnie?”
    â€œLook where I ended up. Can you believe it?”
    â€œAre you okay?”
    â€œI’m real sorry, ’cause I know I know you. I do. But I can’t for the life of me remember your name. My head ain’t too good. It would really help me out if you could spare anything. I swear I won’t buy any dope.”
    I gave him what was in my pocket and he kept repeating the same thing over and over: “Look at me.” Then, instead of saying good-bye, he just moaned with his voice breaking, “Guess I’m all washed up, ain’t I?”

 
    5
    HURRICANES AND BREEZES
    In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns on the passing wall.
    â€”Vladimir Nabokov
    M Y HOMETOWN HAD BREEZES it treated like hurricanes; Havana had hurricanes it treated like breezes.
    In 1492, Columbus first described looking upon Cuba as “the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld.” On the way over, Columbus was the first man from the Old World to record an encounter with a hurricane. The very word “hurricane” was invented by the native Taino population of Cuba as the name of a deity they feared and sought to soothe, Hurakan. Soon enough Columbus and the Spanish were convinced the worsening hurricanes they endured in Cuba were their Christian God’s curse for their overwhelming cruelty against the island’s inhabitants.
    After all those Tyson biographies, The Old Man and the Sea was the first novel I ever read. It introduced me to Cuba. I was fifteen and the first keyholes I peeked through toward the island were Ernest Hemingway’s novelization of his twenty years there, the enigma of Cuban boxers who casually rejected offers of vast