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Ezra Cruz (Preferences and Trivia)

Ezra Rafael Cruz maintained careful routines around food, music, grooming, recovery, parenting, and driving. His preferences combined his Puerto Rican and Miami upbringing with the intensity, movement, and precision that characterized both his musical work and daily life.

Food and Drink

Ezra’s comfort foods included Marisol’s arroz con pollo, mofongo, and Christmas pasteles. His Miami favorites included croquetas from Little Havana ventanitas, tostones, maduros, and a Cuban sandwich from a preferred Calle Ocho restaurant whose superiority he defended without compromise. He also regarded plantains as exceptionally versatile and had little patience for bland or lightly seasoned food.

Cafecito was his standard coffee, joined by café con leche in the afternoon and espresso after dinner. Coffee became especially prominent in his daily life after he stopped drinking alcohol.

Ezra was a capable and improvisational cook. He knew Marisol’s recipes, could make arroz con gandules from memory, and continued cooking Puerto Rican food for Raffie and Lia.

Music

Ezra listened across salsa, jazz, reggaeton, Latin trap, R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary popular music. He was a blunt listener who readily criticized music he considered overly safe or frictionless. Teen pop was never central to his taste, but a few songs and groups from his adolescence remained part of his selective nostalgia.

His listening and playing were physically active. He tapped, moved, or sang along while listening, and the trumpet gave his restlessness a structured focus.

Ezra defended the trumpet as the greatest instrument and objected to dismissals of reggaeton as musically insignificant. His standard karaoke choice was Elvis Crespo’s “Suavemente,” performed with full audience participation.

Colors, Textures, and Spaces

Ezra gravitated toward black and gold, with deep red and burgundy also appearing in his clothing and performance wardrobe. He liked leather in jackets, watchbands, and car interiors, and disliked cheap or quickly pilling fabric.

His preferred interiors were sleek, modern, and warm: clean lines, dark materials, gold accents, warm lighting, and carefully chosen objects. His Tribeca loft combined those preferences with exposed structural elements, musical workspaces, and a prominently displayed trumpet.

Favorite scents included sofrito and garlic from Marisol’s cooking, cafecito brewing, new-car leather, and the brass-and-valve-oil smell of his trumpet. He associated Nina with her jasmine perfume.

Shows, Films, and Reading

Ezra followed boxing, mixed martial arts, basketball, and other sports. He repeatedly watched the ‘’Fast & Furious’’ franchise without irony and also enjoyed the ‘’Rocky’’ and ‘’Creed’’ films. He and Charlie watched ‘’Coco’’ together in Spanish and shared an enthusiasm for reality dating shows.

He generally preferred podcasts, conversation, and video to sustained recreational reading, but he read musician biographies and memoirs. ‘’Miles: The Autobiography’’ remained a particular favorite and was kept on his nightstand.

Style and Appearance

Ezra cared about presentation from childhood onward. His clothing and grooming were deliberate rather than incidental, and his later performance routines accommodated inhalers and oxygen equipment when necessary.

His everyday clothing centered on fitted black T-shirts or henleys, dark jeans or joggers, clean sneakers or boots, a gold chain, a watch, and sunglasses. Formal clothing usually meant a well-tailored black or deep-charcoal suit with gold accents. He also wore the trumpet lapel pin Rafael had given him and incorporated Puerto Rican flag details into his clothing and accessories.

Grooming Routines

Ezra began some form of regular skin and hair care around puberty. He chose products by their results rather than by price and rotated products while keeping the sequence of the routine consistent.

After showering, he handled his hair first while it was still wet. He used a microfiber towel, leave-in conditioner, curl cream applied with a Denman brush, and a light gel or mousse. A wide-tooth comb served for detangling, a boar-bristle brush for dry maintenance, and a satin pillowcase protected his curls overnight.

His five-step skin-care routine followed in a fixed order: cleanser, toner, serum, eye cream, and moisturizer. The products changed, but the order did not. The predictable sequence suited his ADHD while still allowing him to adjust products to his hair and skin.

Ezra chose products by performance rather than price and favored Latino-owned and other POC-owned brands when they worked well for him. His cleanser rotation included Kiehl’s and CeraVe; toner included Fenty Skin and Drunk Elephant; serum included SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic and Augustinus Bader; eye cream was La Mer; and moisturizers included Tom Ford, Augustinus Bader The Rich Cream, and Fenty Skin. Rizos Curls, Ceremonia, and Miss Jessie’s supplied rotating leave-in and curl-defining products.

Signature Items

Ezra used tattooing as one form of artistic and emotional processing. His tattoos translated people, experiences, promises, and losses into body art that he could carry after the immediate moment had passed.

At nineteen, he received three measures of Travis Yoon’s string-quartet notation around his left wrist while Travis was alive. Travis called it a promise, and Ezra explicitly distinguished it from a memorial. After Travis died, Ezra commissioned a second tattoo from the same artist. The later design preserved the capital ‘’T’’ from Travis’s handwritten name inside notation from the same score page, making the letter visible only to someone who knew where to look. Ezra later added “Con fuego y fe” to his inner left forearm at twenty-one in honor of his maternal grandmother Teresa Dominguez.

Sensory Preferences

Ezra generally sought movement, sound, and active input. He was comfortable with a higher ambient noise level than most of the band and commonly kept music playing while doing other things. Stillness without an activity was difficult; his leg bounced, his fingers tapped, and he reached for his phone or another source of input.

His Audi RS7, Loba, gave him a private place for movement, sound, and thought. Driving sometimes served as a way to process emotion or regulate restlessness, although that use was distinct from the reckless driving that occurred during his 2050 psychiatric crisis.

Habits and Routines

Recovery added regular meetings, sponsor contact, and accountability to Ezra’s routines. These practices continued alongside music, parenting, and changing respiratory access needs.

His grooming routine was another stable sequence. He normally completed the same hair and skin-care steps even when tired, compressing the time rather than changing their order.

Ezra naturally kept late hours but adopted an early-morning household routine after becoming a father. He made Raffie and Lia’s school lunches himself and tucked handwritten notes inside. He normally contacted his sponsor before noon, including while touring and on holidays.

Comfort Items and Spaces

Trumpet playing gave Ezra a structured outlet for physical restlessness and sustained attention. His vehicles also provided controlled private space. In addition to Loba, he owned La Bestia and La Madrina at different stages of his life.

When Raffie was small enough to sleep on Ezra’s chest, the child’s weight and breathing were a valued source of calm during early recovery.

Public Life and Hobbies

Ezra used Instagram as both personal expression and professional presentation. His public account emphasized studio work, performances, clothing, cars, and carefully selected family moments. Photographs involving Raffie or Lia were screened to protect their locations, identifying details, and faces.

Outside music, Ezra’s major interests were cars, boxing, cooking, and family life. He followed Audi models closely, knew engine specifications, and spent Saturday mornings detailing his vehicles. He boxed recreationally rather than competitively and continued cooking Marisol’s recipes for his children.

His recurring pet peeves included failure to signal or merge properly, performative friendliness, and people offering him alcohol again after he had already said that he did not drink.

Characters Character Preferences Ezra Cruz