Say Hello to My Little Friend

By Jennine Capo Crucet

Simon & Schuster, 287 pp.

By Lucy Posner

Shady business. Family secrets. Psychic Killer Whales. Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to My Little Friend has it all.

The novel follows twenty-year-old Ismael Reyes in a quest to turn himself into the stuff of Miami lore. Ismael lives in his Tía Tere’s garage and makes a living as a Pitbull impersonator, performing in the style of the famed Latin hip hip-hop star Pitbull, also known as Mr. 305 (a nod to Miami’s area code). When he receives a cease-and-desist letter from the legal team of Mr. 305 (who now goes by Mr.Worldwide)’s legal team, Ismael must find a new Miami icon to emulate, settling on the one-and-only Tony Montana, protagonist of the movie Scarface.

It’s a more ambitious undertaking than musical impersonation. To prepare for his new role, Ismael watches Scarface on repeat. Determined to “get hooked up with some shady dudes” who will proceed to hire him for “some job of some sort,” Isamel must find himself a right-hand man. He discovers his Manolo, Montana’s good friend in Scarface, in Rudy, a former high school classmate, whom Ismael ambushes one day at his workplace eager to inform him of his plan. Rudy is a dishwasher. Ismael takes this as a sign – the real Manolo’s first job in the U.S. was washing dishes. Tony washed dishes alongside Manolo for a while, too, before the pair got fed up and quit, moving on to bigger and better things. Bigger and better things, of course, being drugs, women, and murder.

Like a true, burgeoning twenty-year-old, Ismael believes the world is his oyster. His fatal flaw, perhaps, is his unwavering commitment to being the ‘main character’ of not just his own life, but the lives of all those who cross paths with him. He decides his “mistake with the Pitbull route was that he’d tried to become that man rather than surpass him. This time, with this plan,” he knows he will “have to surpass what he [cannot] yet imagine.” Whether he’s got the chops to not just embody all that is Tony Montana, but surpass the man, is something Ismael never seems to truly consider. Not only has Ismael been bombarded with “signs” of his kingpin destiny, he believes, but he has an origin story so gripping the universe would be disappointed should he become anything less than the ultimate protagonist.

Born in Cuba, Ismael came to the United States in 2004 on a raft made of rope, inner tube, and corrugated metal. He was seven. There were eight others on board making their escape. His mother, Alina, a bonafide revolutionary and purported Cuban spy, being one of them. Somewhere in the open waters of The Florida Straits, Alina lost her life – the circumstances of which Isamel comes to discover, through his desire to “embrace his Cuban birth and his huge balls.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Ismael and Rudy’s “shady business” of choice is the smuggling of Cuban refugees. Their plan? “Talk to the dudes who smuggle in Cubans on boats — figure out system – get involved in the system.” Miami, it turns out, has no shortage of shady dudes. Rudy’s sister, Julissa, introduces him to Danny, a petty criminal who carries thousands in cash and recruits the pair for an “‘entry-level”’ job of waking up at dawn to round up some iguanas. Julissa soon becomes the Michelle Pfiefer Ismael needs to execute his plan. 

Ismael and Julissa’s relationship is a highlight of the novel – the endearing awkwardness of youthful infatuation is captured to excellent effect. It’s in their at-once cute and cringeworthy interactions that Crucet explores the interplay between gender and Cubanidad, or the Cuban way of life, that profoundly shapes her characters.

Then, there is Lolita, a Floridian icon in her own right. She’s the aged orca imprisoned in the Miami Seaquarium to whom Ismael has been inexplicably drawn since childhood, and with whom he shares a mysterious psychic connection that manifests itself through migraines. It is Ismael’s “lack of depth, his basic-ness, his willingness to be so much of a type: it’s exactly what makes him open to Lolita…Like Tony Montana, Izzy has no creativity, and so he becomes who he’s around, a mirror, and this weakness compels her to help him.” What Lolita aims to communicate to Ismael via orca-induced migraines is vague. “[Lolita] is a metaphor. Of course she is. There is no escaping that, just as there is no escaping that tank,” Crucet says from the jump, as though her protagonist being named ‘Ismael’ wasn’t proof enough of the creature’s stand-in for the killer whale that is The American Dream.

Ismael’s lack of agency begets the question of whether or not, like Tony Montana, there’s a death wish buried in our leading man’s subconscious. It’s his yearning for greatness despite a dubious sense of self that ultimately results in his stumbling into a life worthy of a movie all its own. A movie that he may not have written, and certainly didn't direct, but in which he nevertheless takes center stage. Though occasionally heavy-handed, Say Hello to My Little Friend is a campy, heartfelt, and thoroughly entertaining read.

 Lucy Posner was born raised in New York City. She holds degrees in media studies and creative writing from Vassar College.