Barry Gifford has been called a master of the dark side of American reality. He is the author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Wild at Heart, adapted in film by director David Lynch; Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems; Roy’s World, also the title of the documentary film about Gifford; The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea (2022); Writers (expanded ed., 2023); and Ghost Years (2024). In 2006 he was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction.

Photograph by Tiago Russo Pinto.

The Cuban Club

A Short Short Story

by Barry Gifford

Roy met Tina at the Cuban Brotherhood Club and Dance Hall in Tampa, Florida, when he was fourteen. Roy was spending the summer with his uncle Buck, working construction on weekdays, resting on Saturdays, and fishing on Sundays. Tina was a local girl who went with her girlfriends to the dances at the Cuban Club on Saturday nights.

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