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comes to
higher education. There are only three types of people who get into a
school like Yale: the children of the wealthy, students on full
scholarship, and those willing to accept student loans that can take
the rest of your life to repay.
    My family—Mom, my aunt Maria, and myself—owns property
near the beach, and that is supposed to be a gold mine. But that
property happens to be a battered, leaky, cracked and patched motel
built in 1959, and every month we're less sure we can hang on to it for
another year. After taxes and upkeep, the wages we pay ourselves put us
well
below the poverty line. So there's no doubt about it. We are poor. But that had nothing to do with my not studying hard enough.
    So try again. How about The System? It's always safe to blame the
system. It is politically fashionable, it makes you feel better about
yourself, and it is (at least partly) true. Did it really speak well
for the Department of Education that a guy like me who attended
regularly, did the work, and even graduated from Gus Grissom High
School in the top 5 percent... did it make sense that after twelve
years I wasn't up to entry level in the state university system?
    No, it didn't make sense. The system really sucked, no getting
around it. But it sucked just as hard for some of my classmates who
were now going to school at Cornell and Princeton.
    If it ain't the institution, and it ain't the money, then it's got
to be the color of your skin or the language you speak, right? It
has
to be racism.
    I even mentioned it to my mother one day when I was feeling particularly put-upon and sour.
It must be because I'm Latino,
I griped. Well, half Cuban, anyway. When she had stopped laughing, she came close to getting angry.
    "I hope I didn't raise a crybaby," she said. "Don't you ever blame your own shortcomings or anything else on racism...
not even if it's true
. When you see you are being discriminated against, you just make the best of it. You
deal
with it, or else you see racism every time you turn around and spend
your life moaning about it. And besides, you're hardly any more
brown-skinned than I am, and my Spanish is a heck of a lot better than
yours."
    Which was the simple truth. I got most of my looks from her side of
the family, which was Italian. My hair is dark brown and curly. I
wouldn't look out of place wearing a yarmulke. Only around the eyes,
which are dark and deep-set and sometimes rather bruised looking, like
Jimmy Smits, do I resemble the pictures of my dad. Sad to say, the rest
of me doesn't look anything like Jimmy Smits, but I get by.
    Like Jimmy Buffett said, it was my own damn fault.
    In a mediocre system, the talented have no need to excel. I'm a fast
reader, I have a good memory, and I'm quick with figures. With those
qualifications, about the only way you could fail at Gus Grissom High
was to never go to class.
    After twelve years of that kind of schooling, both Dak and I thought
we knew how to study. You go home, you read the material for tomorrow's
classes. Thirty minutes, an hour, tops. Then you've got the rest of the
evening and all weekends to do whatever you want.
    In my case, doing whatever I wanted meant working about sixty hours
a week in our family business, the Blast-Off Motel. That is, it was
what I wanted if I also wanted to eat and have a roof over my head.
    Dak and I got together to study in the hope of improving our
self-motivational skills, which were sadly lacking. Sometimes it
worked. If the weather outside wasn't just too damn gorgeous. If the
surf and the wind weren't just so perfect it would be a sin to spend
the day inside when you could be riding your windboard. If the college
girls from up north weren't too plentiful and beautiful stretched out
in scantily clad rows, trying to bake a Florida brown before spring
break was over...
     
    ME AND MY family had what you'd call a love-hate
relationship with the Blast-Off Motel. Without it we'd all have been
looking for jobs instead of working