in the late seventies felt like a small town compared to Miami.
My aunt Lola and her husband, Armando, had moved with their children to Vegas in the early seventies. Armando was employed at the Sands Hotel as a room service waiter, and made a good living. Lola often promoted the quality of life in their new city to her Miami relatives, and two more of my mother’s sisters, my aunts Irma and Elda, moved there, too.
Las Vegas would offer the security and community values my parents sought, but our life there began discouragingly. My parents made the decision to move in the fall of 1978. The following January, my father traveled alone to Vegas to find a job and a home for us, promising to return soon to collect us. Almost five months would pass before he could keep his promise.
Unlike in Miami, hotels were flourishing in Vegas and jobs were abundant. But it was a heavily unionized industry that didn’t welcome outsiders looking for work in anything but entry-level positions. My father was fifty-two years old, with twenty years of bartending experience and excellent references. The hotels were hiring younger bartenders and promoting employees who had worked in junior positions.
He stayed in a spare bedroom in Aunt Irma and Uncle Enrique’s house. Day after dispiriting day he searched for work with no success. By the end of January, he was desperate and considered returning to Miami, when Enrique tipped him off to a possible opportunity at a new hotel.
Enrique worked in the maintenance department of the California Hotel. The owners were about to open an Old West–themed resort hotel, Sam’s Town, in Sunrise Manor, a Vegas suburb. My father applied for a bartending job there, and was offered a position as a bar back, a bartender’s assistant, with the promise he would be considered for a bartending job in the future. He took it. With two young children and a wife waiting in Miami for him, he wasn’t in a position to turn down a job, even one that didn’t pay enough to allow us to join him.
He went from being a top bartender on Miami Beach to being an assistant to a twenty-one-year-old bartender just out of school. He lugged supplies from the storeroom to the bar. He cleaned glasses, disposed of empty bottles and mopped the floor behind the bar. When the bartender got an order for a drink he didn’t know how to make, he would ask my father to make it. Sometimes he shared his tips with my dad; sometimes he didn’t. It was a humbling experience for a proud man. Fortunately, after a few months in the job, he was offered a better-paying position as a bartender in the hotel’s room service department.
My father’s absence was difficult for me, especially so when I saw my friends enjoying time with their fathers. I missed him a great deal. In the days before cell phones, e mail and Skype, long-distance phone calls were very expensive. He could afford just one brief call a week on Sundays. Veronica and I wrote to him a few times, and sent him pictures. I know now how fortunate I was to have parents who were married and a constant presence in my life except during this one temporary separation. As upsetting as it was at the time, my experience seems trivial compared to the deprivation of children whose parents are deceased, divorced or disinterested intheir lives. Nor was my separation from my father as extended and worrying as the experience of children whose fathers or mothers serve overseas in the military. But when I encounter children in such circumstances, I remember how painful my separation from my father was, and how difficult it was for me to understand it.
My father came home near the end of May 1979, just in time for my eighth birthday, which we celebrated with a surprise trip to the Kennedy Space Center. Later that summer, we said our good-byes and left for Las Vegas. My sister Barbara had decided to stay in Miami. She was nineteen, working and had been dating her future husband, Orlando, for four years. Her
My aunt Lola and her husband, Armando, had moved with their children to Vegas in the early seventies. Armando was employed at the Sands Hotel as a room service waiter, and made a good living. Lola often promoted the quality of life in their new city to her Miami relatives, and two more of my mother’s sisters, my aunts Irma and Elda, moved there, too.
Las Vegas would offer the security and community values my parents sought, but our life there began discouragingly. My parents made the decision to move in the fall of 1978. The following January, my father traveled alone to Vegas to find a job and a home for us, promising to return soon to collect us. Almost five months would pass before he could keep his promise.
Unlike in Miami, hotels were flourishing in Vegas and jobs were abundant. But it was a heavily unionized industry that didn’t welcome outsiders looking for work in anything but entry-level positions. My father was fifty-two years old, with twenty years of bartending experience and excellent references. The hotels were hiring younger bartenders and promoting employees who had worked in junior positions.
He stayed in a spare bedroom in Aunt Irma and Uncle Enrique’s house. Day after dispiriting day he searched for work with no success. By the end of January, he was desperate and considered returning to Miami, when Enrique tipped him off to a possible opportunity at a new hotel.
Enrique worked in the maintenance department of the California Hotel. The owners were about to open an Old West–themed resort hotel, Sam’s Town, in Sunrise Manor, a Vegas suburb. My father applied for a bartending job there, and was offered a position as a bar back, a bartender’s assistant, with the promise he would be considered for a bartending job in the future. He took it. With two young children and a wife waiting in Miami for him, he wasn’t in a position to turn down a job, even one that didn’t pay enough to allow us to join him.
He went from being a top bartender on Miami Beach to being an assistant to a twenty-one-year-old bartender just out of school. He lugged supplies from the storeroom to the bar. He cleaned glasses, disposed of empty bottles and mopped the floor behind the bar. When the bartender got an order for a drink he didn’t know how to make, he would ask my father to make it. Sometimes he shared his tips with my dad; sometimes he didn’t. It was a humbling experience for a proud man. Fortunately, after a few months in the job, he was offered a better-paying position as a bartender in the hotel’s room service department.
My father’s absence was difficult for me, especially so when I saw my friends enjoying time with their fathers. I missed him a great deal. In the days before cell phones, e mail and Skype, long-distance phone calls were very expensive. He could afford just one brief call a week on Sundays. Veronica and I wrote to him a few times, and sent him pictures. I know now how fortunate I was to have parents who were married and a constant presence in my life except during this one temporary separation. As upsetting as it was at the time, my experience seems trivial compared to the deprivation of children whose parents are deceased, divorced or disinterested intheir lives. Nor was my separation from my father as extended and worrying as the experience of children whose fathers or mothers serve overseas in the military. But when I encounter children in such circumstances, I remember how painful my separation from my father was, and how difficult it was for me to understand it.
My father came home near the end of May 1979, just in time for my eighth birthday, which we celebrated with a surprise trip to the Kennedy Space Center. Later that summer, we said our good-byes and left for Las Vegas. My sister Barbara had decided to stay in Miami. She was nineteen, working and had been dating her future husband, Orlando, for four years. Her
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