On The Miami River

Chapter One

Where does one even begin, they made movies about this place, the people, the city, the streets, you name it, I've seen it all. This isn't one of those happy go lucky stories where every one finds their happiness, sure it's like Scar Face's Tony Montana meeting his fate at the end of the film falling to his death as the world never ends or some bullshit story. But honestly this is my story, a story I know to well and for that, we have to go back to where it all started. 

I was born on the 5th day of November in some year I can't remember at Mt. Sinai just a few blocks of my fathers business headquarters in Miami Beach. See he was a humble Jew like most other Jewish family men. Attended Synagogue every Saturday, quiet, humble, very much a family man. But there was something special about him. He ran a bakery off of Prairie Avenue and often times I'd spend endless hours watching him masterfully bake Challah bread whilst my grandmother decorated the cakes and pastries that everyone came in for. 

You can say the same went for my mother. She was a Gentile, a non Jewish girl, Catholic by birth and from Cuba, she was a beauty, blonde haired, blue eyed, I could see why my father fell for her , but it was one of the things I overlooked as a child. She was gone a lot, she worked closer to downtown Miami at a bank. Often times leaving for weeks and months on end traveling over seas. I never put too much thought into it because she would bring back beautiful dolls, toys, snow globes, and magnets from each place she visited that I'd proudly stick upon my fridge. I wanted to be like her, she was a dancer before she broke her leg and took on a different career. 

Like most Cubans her family came to America in search of a better life and one that involved staying away from the likes of the Castro's. But there was something different about my mom and dad. My dad was humble, my mom not so much. By the time I reached my seventh birthday they divorced and I was taken to live with my mother and her family overlooking the Miami River in my grandfathers apartment. He was very sweet to me, but as I grew older I realised how and why he was so rich. 

At first I thought we where royalty living so high up in a shiny building with so many security guards. But soon as my grandfathers only grandchild I learned that he was a business man like my father but dealt with other kinds of things, the illegal kind. By the time of my Quincenera I had become an enabled business woman like my mother, but learned