I spent a lot of time with my mother’s side of the family when I was a kid. My father didn’t interact with them very much aside from waving at them from the car when he dropped me off. Probably because he divorced my mother for being a lot of things, which I’m not going to mention, because this is Writober. Not therapy. Sometimes, if I was over a long time, he would get pizza for me and my cousins as a thank you for them having me over. The expectation was that once he agreed to get pizza over the phone, I was to hang up and wait outside for him to arrive at the curb. As the car approached, I was expected to run my fat ass out to the street to immediately retrieve the pizza. It was important that I did this quickly as he had many tasks to accomplish. This was the price of pizza. And he waved as he drove away, the outline of his glasses the only thing visible in the darkness of the car. It was this way at night or during the daytime because of the shade from the giant banyan tree in front of my aunt’s house. I think he would use the times I was away from the house to listen to the baseball game on the radio at home and recover from dealing with a pain in the ass little boy by himself most days. Or maybe he was banging somebody. Who knows?
Naturally, my younger cousins wondered about this man who delivered the pizzas long before pizza delivery was a thing. What was his job? He was a metal polisher. Was he nice? Yeah, but he didn’t talk much. What about his time in Cuba? This is where I came up with the legend of the Cuban Machete Force. I explained that in Cuba, they didn’t let people have guns because they might rise up against the Communist government, so they trained the best of the best to be lethal with machetes. I also told them that I wasn’t supposed to know about this. That I found out because I’d found some papers in boxes. If he knew I knew, my life might be at risk. So they never brought it up and just waved back, afraid.