A Dust Up With Fidel

This morning I woke up with a hangover, and I knew I had to clean. It is an urge that visits me with a particular urgency after a night of drinking. Having relinquished some control the night before, I feel an almost religious compulsion to recapture it, to grab the reins and prove that my life is on a stable path. It helps, too, that my hangovers usually fall on weekends, when my apartment is in a state of mild squalor after a week of neglect. So it was this morning; the stress hormones surged through my veins, and I was out of bed to take stock of the task at hand.

I had to dust. There were several clues: The sun streaming in the window illuminated the dust particles wheeling through the air. Was it true, as I had heard, that they were simply dead skin cells? As I breathed, I was sure, I was sucking them in, canceling the lung benefits of whatever exercise I had recently done. My apartment has cheap hardwood floors, and dust accumulates at an alarming speed. It had gathered in small dunes behind cabinets, and in thin films atop books, speakers, and the cowbell that has sat at the head of my bed since I moved in two years ago. It had accumulated in clumps among the tangle of extension cords beside my desk, a bizarre matrix of dog hair (a roommate keeps an irate Chihuahua) and what appeared to be lint. In homes with carpeting, it must somehow be absorbed, but in my own it had once again piled up for all to see.

In a sense, the act of dusting is the ultimate expression of the human urge to make a place. In wide open spaces, or in places not our own, we seldom have the urge to dust or do other maintenance, to keep up appearances and beat back the natural forces that will eventually reshape these places forever. Yet with a sense of ownership comes the urge to care for a place. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes this process in the context of setting up a civilization in the wilderness: “With the continual extension of clearings the forest eventually disappears,” he writes. “An entire landscape is humanized…Henceforth the integrity of the place must be ritually maintained” (166). If we neglect the ritual of maintenance, the forces of nature will take our places from us. We must be eternally vigilant, for the moment we stop dusting, the dust begins to accumulate again. If we sit still for long enough, it will bury us.

To begin with, I tried paper towels, scrubbing my desk so that dust billowed up from its surface. These captured almost nothing, spreading the dust around and leaving a faint grey streak on the towels. I would have to resort to the Swiffer Sweeper, which for anyone atop a hardwood floor is one of the most useful products to come out of a New Jersey laboratory since Viagra. The Swiffer a sort of glorified wet wipe attached to the end of a pole, which somehow picks up dust and grime that brooms and towels miss entirely. The wipe has a smell that cannot be described by referencing natural objects like trees or flowers, a sort of sickly sweet chemical aroma. The device uses the infamous “razorblade model,” where you buy the stick and then replace the wipes. A pack costs about $10. I decided to use the wipe alone and do the job by hand, but a label on the side of the package caught my attention: “In case of eye contact or prolonged exposure to skin, flush with water to reduce irritation.” I put on gloves and began to wipe.

In my room, on top of my radiator, there is a tall bookcase, and on the second shelf, things accumulate. It is the place where I unload my pockets when the day is over, where the wallet, keys and headphones go, where I keep a bowl of spare change. It is the place for the bits and pieces that have no other place. Dusting the shelf, I quickly realized, would require removing everything from it. Had I ever moved some of these objects? I couldn’t remember. That they were covered in dust didn’t mean much; it could have been a week, or several months, since I had touched them. In the context of my daily life, they had all been forgotten. “The home place is full of ordinary objects,” wrote Tuan. “We know them through use; we do not attend to them as we do to works of art. They are almost a part of ourselves, too close to be seen” (144).

There was a silver Sony tape recorder, the type that records onto miniature purple and white cassette tapes, and has scrolling numbers to keep track of minutes and seconds. Two tapes sat on top of it, containing, among other things, the voice of Fidel Castro. The recorder was broken now, but as I stood examining it I remembered the streets of Cordoba, Argentina, a city of about a million people in the north central part of the country, where I had gone in 2006 to cover a regional economic summit for a political magazine. On the dusty grounds of a university outside of town, Castro had taken the stage one sunny afternoon after the official business of the summit was over. In a thin voice, before a rapt crowd of thousands, he had railed against his archenemy George W. Bush, or, as he called him, “El Imperialista Norteamericana,” and had extolled the virtues of the Cuban educational and medical systems.

As Castro spoke, I held the silver tape recorder aloft until my shoulder began to ache, drawing snickers from many of the banner-toting activists around me, who must have wondered what the tall gringo in a suit jacket was doing there. After Castro had pontificated for about two hours, many in the exhausted crowd began sitting down in the dirt. Although I spoke Spanish, I could barely understand Castro’s thick Cuban accent, and I decided to leave. When I returned to my hotel two hours later and turned on the TV, he was still speaking. Just weeks later, Castro would fall ill with stomach problems, and he hasn’t appeared in public since. The tape on my shelf may have captured his final public speech.

On the shelf, atop a box of business cards, there was also a small Cuban flag pin. The design of the Cuban flag is simple: a white star inside of a red triangle tipped on edge, and four alternating blue and white stripes. I had bought the pin in an army surplus store on Broadway in NoHo, just days before Halloween in 2007. It cost $3. That year, I was dressing up as Fidel Castro. Along with the pin, I had a pea-green military style trench coat, green khakis, a pre-worn military cap, a dry cigar, and a black beard that I had purchased at a costume shop and decided to trim in my bathroom sink to make it resemble Castro’s. While many Latinos are quick to insist that they wouldn’t want to live in Cuba, many also revere Castro as a symbol, and as I rode the subway on Halloween I got countless smiles, bows, and friendly calls of “FIDEL!”

There was also a drum key on the shelf, a small, silver, T-shaped implement imprinted with the word YAMAHA that I used for tuning drums. I had used it on the evening of Halloween 2007, when, dressed as Fidel Castro, I played with a band called The Cigarettes at a bar, antique shop and sculpture garden called Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn. The guitarist was in costume, dressed vaguely like a clown, with a purple suede jacket and a top hat. The bassist, who was completing a Ph.D. in Yiddish at Columbia, simply wore a suit. Two songs into our set, I was already dripping with sweat. Playing in the beard was stifling, and it took a certain concentration to keep the cigar in my mouth as I hit the drums. I no longer play with that band.

Beneath everything else on the shelf, folded and crumpled, was a bit of paper with a logo in the corner that said “NYU Student Health Center.” It was a referral for a chest x-ray, dated January 28, 2009. I had begun having chest pain the previous fall, on the right side whenever I exercised. So far, all the tests for inflammation and other irregularities had come back negative, but that didn’t stop the hypochondriac in me from rearing its head. Was it a cancerous tumor? The beginnings of liver failure? Whatever the diagnosis, it was a stark reminder of mortality at an age when I often felt immortal. I took the paper from the shelf and put it on my bed.

When I had removed everything from the shelf, I ran the Swiffer over it, then moved on to the other shelves and the rest of my room. When I was done I threw the wipe away, then put the objects back in their places, one by one. It was a bit disconcerting to think that if the objects on my shelf were any indication, the most coherent unifying theme in my forgotten life was Fidel Castro. I had long wanted to go to Cuba, but what were these objects telling me? Perhaps that I ought to hurry up and get on a plane before Fidel died, or I did? I wasn’t sure. But my shelf was clean. I had dusted. 

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