Blanco - The Prince of Los Cocuyos: a Miami childhood

For Carlos Caco Blanco, El Guayo:

my confidant, babysitter, cohort,

superhero, ally, friend, and brother,

who has been and will be with me always

1
THE FIRST REAL SAN GIVING DAY

2
LOSING THE FARM

3
EL RATONCITO MIGUEL

4
QUEEN OF THE COPA

5
IT TAKES UN PUEBLO

6
LISTENING TO MERMAIDS

7
EL FARITO

NONFICTION

For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural

Poets Journey

POETRY

City of a Hundred Fires

Directions to the Beach of the Dead

Looking for The Gulf Motel

One Today: A Poem for Barack Obamas Presidential Inauguration

Boston Strong: The Poem to Benefit the One Fund Boston

RICHARD BLANCO was born in Madrid in 1968 and immigrated as an infant with his Cuban-exile family to Miami, where he was raised and educated, earning a BS in civil engineering and an MFA in creative writing. An accomplished author, engineer, and educator, Blanco is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College, and the University of Rhode Island. Following in the footsteps of such great writers as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, in 2013 Blanco was chosen as the fifth inaugural poet of the United States, becoming the youngest, first Latino, first immigrant, and first gay writer to hold the honor. His prizewinning books include City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, Looking for The Gulf Motel, and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poets Journey. For more, visit richard-blanco.com.

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M y childhood continues to amaze me as a constant reference point for who Ive been, who I am, and who I will be. It feels concrete and accessible but, on some level, also elusive and fractured. As such, these pages are emotionally true, though not necessarily or entirely factual. Certainly, Ive compressed events; changed the names of people, places, and things; and imagined dialogue. At times I have collaged two (or three) people into one, embroidered memories, or borrowed them. Ive bent time and space in the way that the art of memory demands. My poets soul believes that the emotional truth of these pages trumps everything. Read as you would read my poems, trusting that what is here is real, beyond what is realthat truer truth which we come to call a life.

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THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS. Copyright 2014 by Richard Blanco. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-231376-8

EPub Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062313782

14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that youre not alone, that you know theres something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.

CESARE PAVESE

T he act of becoming is one of two fundamental human acts, the other being loving. And we cant love without becoming, or become without loving. I have loved and I have become thanks to mi familia. My mother, Geysa, the woman with the prettiest name and one of the saddest and most beautiful stories in the world. My father, Carlos, who died before I could love him as much as I wanted to love him or thank him for naming me after Richard Nixon. My only brother, Carlos, a fixed star in my life who means more to me than I can express in these pages. My abuelo, Carlos (yes, all three of them were named Carlos!), who suffered through every one of my strikeouts at bat and yet kept cheering me on. And my abuela, Otmara: these pages have let me hate her, understand her, forgive her, and thank her for her failed attempts at making me un hombre, which indirectly made me a writer. Te quiero, Abuela.

Beyond them, all my tos and tas, especially Miriam, Toti, Emiliano, Magdalena, Olga, Armando, Pedro, and Elsa. Without themtheir stories, their longing, and their memoriesthis book of my memories would not exist. My thanks also to all my primos and primas, especially Helen, Brenda, Mirita, Normi, Gilbert, and Bernie. I am who I am because you are who you are. And beyond them, my neighbors, bodegueros, teachers (especially Miss De Vos), buddies (Angel and Alex), girlfriends (especially Anabelle), and boyfriends (Darden, Michael, and Carlos). In other words: my entire village, mi pueblo entero.

Fast-forward to the days when I first desired to translate my experiences from poetry into prose and discover what my life would read like without line breaks. My thanks to Stuart Bernstein and Ruth Behar, who ushered me into the genre of memoir, and to Bill Clegg, who helped me think about these pages differently. I am indebted to Frank Cimler, who found a perfect home for this book at Ecco. And so, my thanks to Dan Halpern for believing in this story and agreeing to publish it.

Fast, fast-forward to the days of shaping my raw words into this book with my editor Libby Edelson at Ecco. We began to finish each others sentences; she understood this book better than me, and at times, she understood me better than I understood myself. It was a literary love affair, still going strong. And later, Hilary Redmon, also at Ecco, who shed more light on these pages. In the final round, Leonard Nash, who scrutinized this book with an incredibly keen eye and tied up many loose ends that made a huge difference.

And there were others, as always, who helped me write and believe, believe and write. Among these, Alison Granucci, my literary fairy godmother, who continues to be a guiding light; Felicitas Thorne, who gave me much-needed time and space to finish part of this book; and, of course, my husband, Mark, who inspires me every daynot just to write, but to live and love.

COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN

BACKGROUND GRAPHICS COURTESY OF PAUL MALON

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY GREENFIELD - SANDERS

A ccording to my abuela, once the revolution took hold in the midsixties,