My uncle looks so strange, almost fully reclined on the marble table top in the middle of his outdoor kitchen. His arm is twisted under his chest to support him and, with his little paunch and fiendish little grin, he looks like one of those little baby angels on an Italian marble fountain. He is careful to perch his wineglass on the table in front of him, but in his excitement he threatens to bump into the bowl of fruit behind him as he wriggles over the marble surface.
Trying to tamp down his giddiness, he tells Rama immigrants deserve to be jailed because they committed a crime, that it would have been better if they had stayed in their countries and tried to improve their homeland instead of sneaking into this country in order to take advantage and live off of what we built. He tells her that they do not share our values, that they want a free offering and, in a gesture of direct incitement, he implies that they carry diseases.
But Rama is the one who is actually calm. She never interrupts my uncle, even when he begins to repeat himself, because she knows that trying to interrupt him would constitute an emotional reaction. Rhetorical weakness. Instead, she lets him get carried away. So much so that everytime he says something truly vile, he deflects by saying that he appreciated that she has a sense of humor. You know your generation can’t take a joke anymore, but you know I’m mostly joking. Mostly.
As for me, I’ve retreated into the rhetorical corner. Partially overwhelmed by the enjoyment of getting drunk for the second time, this time on something that tastes good, and partially unsure how to navigate between two people who, honestly, I don’t know very well. I can’t believe I thought it would be a good idea to bring Rama to stay in the house of my dad’s even more cretinous sibling. What a weird thing to do. Rama said we’d stay with her great aunt in San Juan, I thought, I have relatives too, I didn’t emerge out of a cocoon.
The sun has set and the pool has turned into an illuminated white box and casts an upside-down shadow on our faces, making all of our facial expressions indecipherable. My uncle is smiling and talking about a tv news segment he saw about migrant caravans and Rama is frowning and matter of factly calling him gullible. They’re both being increasingly direct, and increasingly vicious. I’m becoming increasingly quiet. But I’m the one who started it.
It all started with my naive question. I had sort of half expected a boring, civil evening. Rama and I had both had an understanding that we would be nice and listen to him talk about all of his possessions and trips to Europe, but that we wouldn’t give my uncle what he really wanted, a chance to spar with his ideological enemies. Everyday I’m sure he spends hours watching cable television, the pundits riling him up as they argue out loud with themselves, showing again and again how to win in an argument against the democrats and the feminists and the cultural Marxists with cool disdain. Facts over feelings. What he really wants, but can’t buy. There are no cultural Marxists at the pool club. Instead, he gets my out of the blue request for me and Rama to stay with him, and now I know why he was so welcoming, he is hoping to goad us after a few bottles of wine into talking about politics.
I could see that Rama loved the challenge, peaking out despite that look of hers when the conversation is beneath her intelligence, she assumed it would be easy to play the game. And she would keep her cool because There were no stakes in convincing some rich guy out in the suburbs of anything. Not like a grad student was going to barge in and use her skills leading seminar sections to overcome a lifetime of experience of corporate media and privilege. But I think she underestimated what it would be like to have an argument on two completely separate wavelengths.
I watched it happen slowly, through the empathetic clarity of my own drunkenness. The last time they spoke the same language was in his above ground wine cave, perusing the stacks. My uncle asked if we preferred red or white, and Rama said it depended on what the red was and what the white was, he laughed and mentioned some different French and Italian words (names of grapes? Names of places?) and she knew what each of them meant. They leaned into this shared vocabulary. But I could see the look of frustration for the first time on her face when she asked which of the wines were natural, and he answered well they were all natural. It was all downhill from there.
My uncle poured each of us a fish bowl of red wine, and we clinked our glasses together. Here’s to a respectful conversation, he said with a grin, like announcing the start of a wrestling match. He immediately began by asking sooo, were we were mad that the primary was rigged against our candidate. I looked at Rama. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Our candidate? Rama didn’t know either, or maybe she just didn’t let on. She was very clear to me about being above electoralism. That was a share for my uncle, because his concept of politics was informed entirely from watching cable news. The presidential election was all a ruling class distraction. To Rama the election was the only thing that was in fact unpolitical. It was instead everything else, highway construction and housing tax credits and the public financing of golf courses, that was political.
So she didn’t mind spending most of the first bottle of wine having the Iowa Caucus explained to her. To be honest, she just hadn’t been following closely. I had been busy for the last month thinking only of Rama. Our candidate was doing great, but they were going to steal it from him. Our candidate? My uncle clarified that he meant Bernie, we were going to vote for Bernie weren’t we, your generation loves Bernie right? We both agreed that we probably would.
My uncle’s eyes lit up, he had found his in. Off he went on his prepared speech, asking us how we could vote for a socialist when communism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Socialism is evil, and even more than that it’s stupid. It only works until you run out of other people’s money. Human nature is inherently selfish, trying to go against human nature leads to the gulag. You of all people should know that, he said pointing to me. Rama looked at me mildly confused, but didn’t say anything back. My uncle asked us how we’d like having to share all of our possessions with the state? To this Rama gave a simple, unsatisfying shrug.
My uncle realized he was striking too early, and did a tactical retreat by offering us another bottle of wine, apparently something really good and expensive this time based on how Rama squeezed my leg under the table. Instead of proceeding, right back into politics, he asked me how I liked life as a farmer. I laughed obligingly and told him it was going well. It was more of a teaching job, showing kids where their food comes from. We were going to get the beds ready soon, but we weren’t planting anything at the moment, it’s much colder up in the big city than here, no growing citrus up there, but that I was looking forward to a school group project in the spring, teaching students about incorporating local fruits and vegetables, things they could even grow at home.
Rather than ask about any of that he used it as another opportunity to ask why, if I was so interested in biology, I hadn’t become a doctor. You’re so bright, you could have gotten into a great school, your dad was so disappointed. I used Rama’s same deflective shrug.
There was a pause. We used it to each take a thoughtful sip from our fish bowls. This next bottle of wine tasted expensive, well did it? I don’t have any idea. All I know is I wanted to slosh it around in my mouth longer before swallowing, I felt its complex flavor on my tongue once I had swallowed it, certainly an improvement from the SEXUAL ALLIGATOR. Rama asked about who the winemaker was, but my uncle answered by instead telling us how many cases he had bought of it. Even unable to see her facial expression, illuminated by upside down pool light, I could tell how much that annoyed her.
I stood up to feign admiring the pool area and looked out again at the golf course to look for any birds perched for the night, or any nocturnal animals that might be wandering around. My uncle said they had recently caught and killed an alligator in the golf course pond. I said that was terrible. He agreed, he said it made it dangerous to golf. I meant that it was terrible for the alligator, killed in his own home. Rama said I should tell my uncle all about the plans for the Florida Wildlife Corridor, the one I had just been enthusiastically telling her all about in the car. Now she was the one trying to goad me.
It’s great really, environmental institutions are trying to link up conserved land to create a contiguous belt of conserved land. Once they get the last land purchased and conserved, it should be possible for a Florida Panther to walk uninterrupted from the Florida Keys to Pensacola without being stopped by cars.
No more alligators killed in their own homes, Rama says, trying to rile up my uncle. It ended up riling only me up. I finished my fishbowl and poured myself another. I am not good at pouring and leave a ring of blood traced by the bottle on the table. I think about the vultures, their freedom, I want to be like them, I am no longer talking to my shithead uncle, Im no longer being judged by him, I’m talking to the animals. Think of it, shut down a few sugar cane farms, stop one or two tract home developments, and we could have 1.7 million contiguous acres of high-priority conservation, and the need for new acquisitions to combat the arrival of between 900 and 1,000 people in Florida each day. Every new car, every surface, and irrigated lawn represents a new barrier against the genetic diversity and survival of 131 endangered animals and 567 endangered plants. Save the beauty of Florida from the squalor of sprawl and scatterization. I realize where I’m getting this attitude from.
My uncle sets down his glass and coughs. This could have been the start of an epic fight, a screaming match over land use, degrowth, industrial agriculture, but none of that was legible as politics to my uncle. After coughing he just said he hoped there’d still be places to golf. Rama has A big upside shadow of a frown. She tries out her own provocation. Golf courses are pesticide-poisoned status symbols for the privileged. She too sounds like the field guide. But she said it with a slightly teasing voice, plausible ironic deniability, like she was also coming around to the idea that a good-spirited fight with my uncle might in fact be fun. He laughed, undisturbed. You’re right, golf is a status symbol, it takes a lot of pesticides to make the grass look good, what’s your point?
My point, she said, is that the land would be better used as literally anything else: a library, public housing, restored habitat for pumas.
My uncle asked her who should get to decide how the land should be used.
Rama said it should be determined democratically.
My uncle said he remembered voting for mayor and city council and that he was pretty sure they decided who got to build the golf course.
At this point She was stuck . Rama couldn’t counter this without being critical of what was meant by democracy, how limited and impoverished his conception of it was, an explanation which for her would most certainly require her to use the term ‘bourgeois democracy,’ which would be dismissed, fairly, as silly. They were at a standstill.
Looks like we could use another bottle. By my count, that would work out to each of us having drank an entire bottle ourselves. My uncle gets up and Rama follows him. Rama tried out teasing my uncle again, saying what she actually meant but pretending it was a joke. She told him she could come along to supervise, she couldn’t trust his taste. He replied by saying I’m sure there’s nothing in here you wouldn’t end up drinking. That is supposed to be an insult, but it doesn’t quite make sense, it actually sounds kind of lecherous, but he laughs loudly over our trying to make sense of it. I also get up to supervise their interaction, which is quickly becoming hazardous. I don’t know what I can actually do. They stand in the wine room talking about wine, now using obscure adjectives rather than foreign names. They seem to be having fun again, but I stand just outside in the hallway trying to keep my ears on them. My eyes fall on an enormous triptych painting, abstract, hanging in an adjacent room. It’s beautiful. The way certain pattern of color repeats in complementary colors, how a terse arrangement of angles works itself out to a generous synthetic loop by the third panel, I sip the dregs of my glass, and sigh in pleasure, it’s like an abstraction of history itself, a landscape over time, modes of production.
Rama comes out with a bottle under each arm, looks up at me and winks. I have no idea what the wink is in reference to. My uncle comes out next, he also winks at me. There sure is a lot of winking going one.
Are you okay?
Yes, I just, these paintings, I’m overcome, they’re so beautiful, who made them?
Which paintings?
I point into the other room.
Oh, he stares along with me with a look of unfamiliarity.
You know I have no idea, the designer put those up. He pats me on the shoulder and walks back out to the patio.
When I make it back outside he is showing Rama the grilling station and the second refrigerator for his outdoor kitchen, and I asked him if it had to work twice as hard keeping food cold when it spent all day out here in the Florida sun. He opened it up and waved his hand around inside as if to show that it was nice and cold. This is where he mainly kept his breakfast stuff anyways, he liked to have his breakfast milkshake each morning outdoors. I peered into the fridge, and it was a wall of milk jugs on the bottom and thickly packed bananas on the top. America’s pathological predilection for hoarding.
As he hoists himself awkwardly up on the outdoor kitchen counter, I asked why he had both whole milk and skim milk. Which is for the milkshake?
Both!
It turns out he mixed him together to get the right consistency. Rama covers the laughter coming out of her mouth with her hand. Like he’s telling me a business secret, my uncle explains how he pours one half of each jug down the drain and then combines the two half empty jugs. I look down to see a trashcan filled with empty milk jugs. Jesus.
Reclining on the marble, sliding his wine glass in front of him, he admits that he usually didn’t get through a whole jug of that either. But that’s okay, it was all going to support the dairy farmers! And I even recycle them!
This makes me notice another black trashcan. It is filled with uneaten, blackened bananas.
The bananas? Don’t worry about the bananas, my uncle says trying to console me. They’re so cheap, you can get them in 3lb bunches for $1.50 at Costco. And you know, helping out the farmers.
I was genuinely surprised. Wow, how are bananas so cheap?
Rama perked up from her stool on the outside bar. Well it’s certainly not the Latin American farmers getting any of that money.
My uncle loudly scoffs, here we go.
Rama scoffs right back. Do you think there are family farms somewhere down in South America earnestly making these bananas? I bet you have some fantasy in your mind of a family farm, a dairy cow and a pig pen just like some old Looney Toon cartoon. It’s an illusion you no doubt hold onto because it justifies your wasteful lifestyle. This all sounds genuinely aggressive, no covering laugh, no scoff.
But she doesn’t want to miss this opportunity. Instead, she sets down her glass and takes on another tone, one I’m more familiar with but which would not serve her rhetorically.
She says that Bananas were a cash crop at the moment they were introduced, rural communities in Central America had their land bought up, and they become ruthlessly exploited by the American fruit magnates in a state of near-slavery!
No irony, no detachment, She can’t help herself. She just knew too much about the topic and was going to go for it. She was going to try to bridge the gap between his conception of politics and hers. She was going to try to talk about the political economy.
And she was well prepared for this moment. She had taken a history of the American Overseas Empire in Grad School as part of her research on Tiki Bars and the United Fruit Co. played a leading role. She had all of the most specific and accurate facts to draw on from memory: statistics, dates, names of Gilded Aged Fruit barons and congressional tariff laws, export volumes. My uncle took sips of his wine, practically lying down on the marbletop, giving a coy smile as Rama went on triumphantly about hurricanes and fungus, rusting equipment and the moving of production between the Atlantic and Pacific coast, stranded assets and babies born with birth defects. She never raised her voice, having come into possession of a confident and even pace of speaking. My uncle nodded along, as if receptively, as she quoted verses from early 20th century Parnassian poetry, makes reference from a Miguel Ángel Asturias novel, and is merciless in pulling up her phone and reading a long selection from the memoir of Dartmouth-educated and genocidal madman Victor M. Cater’s term “banana farming and negro management.”
My uncle seems tense, his even tempered release of fake laughter was trailing off as Rama becomes increasingly confident that she has cornered my uncle, playing on his field of facts over feelings. She has so many facts. But her deeply researched analysis of the global banana supply chain was only useful for the conversation she wished she was having. Because once she had finished making a point about how industrial agriculture methods had exhausted the soils and led to waves of migration away from ancestral lands, my uncle finally responded to the one word he picked out for which he had a script.
He says that immigrants don’t know how to take good care of their land, ruin their own farms, and then sneak into this country to do the same here?
Wiggling around on the marble counter, he says well, that just sounds like smart business practice. Maybe if some of these Central American companies had a little more sense and ran good businesses like the people who made this country, like those people,who went to Dartmouth and learned business management instead of being lazy and waiting around in the jungle waiting for handouts. But those people prefer to breed like rabbits. Bad breeding.
My uncle pauses and a glint of anger flashes across his cherubic face. A show of aggression to back up his revelation, admitting that ultimately, despite the corporate media spin, racism hasn’t changed since the gilded age.
One of these wine glasses is about to be smashed. I have to step in, but I don’t have any facts to offer myself. We don’t grow bananas on the urban farm, it’s all Mid-Atlantic crops, I’m usually teaching kids about the health benefits of brussel sprouts or blowing their little minds by showing them peanuts grow underground. But if I don’t say something soon Rama might try to shove my uncle into the pool. On the other hand, I can’t cut her off, that would be an even worse defeat, wrangling and silencing my woman, what a predictably paternalistic denouement, my uncle would love that. Or, worse, I could concede any point to my uncle. What’s there to concede that isn’t pure dark fantasy?! Nothing of what he’s saying or referring to exists in the real world, it must be nice to be able to draw an argument from that.
Well, what’s to say I can’t. Rather than contradict him, why don’t I exceed him. I’ll make things up too. My uncle is about to say that the images of immigrant children in cages is fake when I stop him, blurting out something without any idea where it’s going:
Have you heard of the Mosquito Coast Flotilla.
Both him and Rama look surprised at me, slumped in my patio chair. My uncle sets his wine glass down. He says he hasn’t, looking over at me surprised and annoyed.
I say You haven’t? I’m surprised, it was just on the news. You didn’t see the big sea caravan?
No, he hadn’t, but he immediately sounds concerned.
Some people are saying it’s a large exodus, a boat lift (هروب ماريل الجماعي) like the ones back in the 1980s, but others are calling it an invasion. We actually saw some of it today from this nature trail observatory we went to.
We did? Rama asks. Yes, remember the farmland we saw planted at those villas, that’s all part of it. Rama thinks I must be drunk or have lost my mind.
We went up to the observation tower today and while we were looking around we saw these villas on the water, but it looked like they were abandoned, they were covered in banana trees and corn plants, they looked more like a farm than someone’s house. So we asked the park ranger about what the deal was and she told us that those houses had been preempted. (إكتساب بالشفعة)
Preempted, my uncle asks, sitting up straight on the kitchen island.
Preempted I said. It’s this crazy scheme that someone figured out. There is this guy, I think he’s from Nicaragua, I think anyways he was running a landscaping business for a long time, cutting people’s grass, trimming hedges, and one day he figures out, he must have a nephew or something in law school or doing Florida history, he tells him about the Swamp Land Premption Act of 1833, which allows settlers to claim the title to swampland if they would agree to drain the land and turn it to productive, agricultural use. The thing is, almost all of the time there were native people’s living there, but it didn’t matter, as long as the land could be considered to be being used unproductively, the government would legally recognize it as the settlers.. As long as the colonist used it to grow crops, it was theirs.
I don’t get it, my uncle says. I can see that Rama is starting to get it though.
Well this landscaper and his nephew look it up, and apparently the law is still on the books. And it’s written vaguely, the law states that any settler has the right to lay claim to any land originally surveyed as swampland as long is not currently being used for the production of food. So many of those housing developments built on the bay were all originally swamp, so it’s all applicable to this law, because there may be people living there, but they aren’t using the land “productively” so it doesn’t count.
Just as the law intended! Rama chimes in.
It’s crazy, because the way settler is defined in this law, it only refers to someone coming to Florida, not someone already here, so this is something only immigrants can do. And that’s what many of them have been doing. This landscaper gets an old map, finds out which areas of Tampa were originally labeled as swampland, and gets a bunch of his cousins together, and they gets jobs landscaping in these developments, but instead of cutting the grass, once they unload their equipment they get to work digging up the lawn and planting beans and squash and bananas and mango and when the owner gets upset and calls the police, the nephew is there and shows them the law, and not only do they get to keep the yard, they kick the owner out of his house too!
What?! That’s insane, I haven’t heard this, my uncle says.
Well, lots of other people have, in fact, the news has traveled back to Nicaragua. A cousin told a cousin told a cousin, and now they’ve put together this flotilla, and they plan on all landing at the same time so that nobody can do anything about it.
Well, I’m the coast guard will have something to do about it.
No, here’s the genius part, I say as the idea comes to, they’re planning on all coming over right when it coincides with the Gasparilla Parade, they’re going to dress up like pirates and invade Tampa like they’re part of the parade!
My uncle looks at me, red in the face, like he’s going to get up and strangle me, but then he starts laughing. Hysterical, unabating, cherubic laughter. He laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.
