¡Oye, Lucy. This is a picture of one of my profesores in el colegio in Havana. I didn’t understand much of what was saying. I kept thinking that I wanted to go out and shoot some craps, and he’s always showing us these snake-eyes. Or a refrigerator, and it made me hungry.
Sometimes I would gaze out the window, and el profesor would come and hit me with his stick. I would get so mad. Later, though, I started my first big band, and it turned out that he played a mean trumpet. At first, I wanted to tell him to go jump in a creek, you know, but then I thought about maybe we could do one another un favor. He passed me in that class and I gave him a chair in my band. You never met him, because I didn’t bring him to America with me. I still remembered that stick, and good trumpet players were 12 to the dime.
