I ran into her in the East Village. I knew her from Flatbush High, but back then she was from the over-achievers, and I was from the under-achievers, and we’d never interacted… but now she was a nurse who’d seen too much horror, so she said, working the E.R. way uptown; and I needed a break from dealing weed and staying high on the same. A was smart, looked even better now than back in High, and had a mordant sense of humour. Enthralled by my trip tales, and feeling the spark between us as I did, after we spent some nights together at my Alphabet City walkup (she roomed with two other nurses up near the Cloisters), she volunteered to quit the E.R. and fund a trip for two with her savings, “anywhere out of this world,” up for going places she’d never venture as a lone female. The subtext was we were both still youngish, unattached, up for changes, and immediately hot for each other. The rest is history or herstory, tho she’s no longer able to tell her tale if she wanted to.
We spent some time on Crete, and it was, looking back, idyllic, our little rented floor over the shimmering bay of Xania. But we were finding that when we settled in anywhere, we had to face the fact that we were apples and oranges, and except for mutual physical attraction, not all that compatible. Of course, I’d always been apples-and-oranges with anybody, if truth be told. A was very organised, precise, reliable, liked a daily schedule… and I tended to improv, was more casual (read slovenly and erratic), and we were only in synch in bed, it seemed. But our Cretan pad was neat, way cheap, and outside our door was a winding alley of whitewashed walls and plants in pots where every morning stout ladies in black dresses sprinkled water on the paving stones and swept clean the public space outside their homes. It was Europe, boys and girls together, yet with an ancient ethnic vibe.
One night, after an action movie at the roofless Apollon cinema, and some slo-mo bedtime lovemaking, I woke up in the darkest hour before dawn, slipped out of bed, went into the little kitchen, poured myself a glass of the raw, tangy, and cheap local wine we bought in the agora. I sat there spacing and sipping for maybe five minutes, when the silent, naked form of A came gliding from the bedroom, spooky in the shadows. She knelt near my straight-back chair, put her face close to mine, and asked, “what’s the matter?”
Matter? Nothing was the matter. I was just zoning out over a glass of wine.
“Come back to bed,” she whispered. “I sleep better with you next to me.” She held out her hands. I put down the glass and let her pull me to my feet. She pressed her bed-warm body to mine, then led me back into the bedroom, as I thought “What am I, a teddy bear?” Something like 40% of me wanted to baulk and say, “Hey, leave me alone to do my own little thing for a few minutes in the middle of the freaking night!” But the 60% won out, the side of me drawn to her body and even pleased by her need.
A few hours later, when I opened my eyes, A was propped on her elbow next to me, like she’d been watching me sleep. She turned away, shook her head, and sighed: “You might be the love of my life.” I couldn’t help laughing.
“And you might be the love of my life, but hey, your life ain’t half over yet!”
*****
A had the money, and I knew how to live and travel on the cheap, so there were still bucks to spare, but she started talking about going back to work, planning ahead, while I was just taking it day by day. It was her bucks; she could call the shots. Now she wanted to see Mexico, because I’d told her about my times there, it sounded good to her, and she wanted to see what I’d seen, to be where I’d been.
“Let’s go!” she said, trying to be spontaneous.
“Okay,” I said, always agreeable to moving on.
In Manzanillo, on the warm, dry Pacific coast of Mexico, our room (with a shower/toilet hole in a partitioned corner) was just up from the blue bay, the colours of everything stronger than in Greece, even the faded pastel paint on the shacks up from the beach. By now, not to get on each other’s nerves, we had our private hours. Each dawn, before the heat set in, I took a long solo walk around the fetid lagoon, at the back of town. Then A & I went for coffee and shopped for room food in the morning market. After that, she went down to the nearly empty Las Brisas beach for a swim while I lay up in the room. A was a good swimmer. She told me how she saved a fat girl from drowning, and fended off the relatively non-aggressive come-ons of the laidback local vatos. This wasn’t Araby, after all. But she let herself be befriended by a rich old German dyke who called herself “Tommy,” sported dyed, Elvis-coiffed hair, and told us “Each vinter I follow ze sun somevere else” as we ate turtle soup with her near the mercado. At dusk, the grackles gathered in the trimmed trees of the Zocalo and filled every wire overhead. Without Tommy, we ate ceviche from an open stall, took a slow paseo stroll on the long pier, came back to our room, showered and fucked, or fucked and showered, then lay in bed, wondering where we’d go from here.
We could still fly half-price on those student IDs. We’d have to go back to NYC before the bucks ran out. I’d have to look up my connections, stop droning off her money. And she’d either go back to her old hospital, or go to an even better-paying hospital… “but since we have to go that way, I’d like to check out the Caribbean on our way back,” she said. Why not?
*****
In Port au Prince, the swarming, hot, little dusty or muddy streets around the old central market had tall mounds of shimmering garbage heaped too close to dark women squatting behind baskets of homegrown produce they may have carried miles down the mountainside on their kerchiefed heads. A constant din of car horns covered the musical French-African Kreol of sellers, buyers, and passersby. On the sunstruck signs of the Restaurant Sans Raison, the Epicerie Dieu Tout Puissant, the Magasin Quatres Saisons, the Restaurant des Fanatiques, and the Boulangerie La Perseverance, even the proudly printed proprietors’ names seemed fancifully storybookish: Voltaire Cherfils, Dominance Francoeur, Robert L’Union, Simeon Brutus, Hippolyte Mont-Joli. As a backpacking couple of blancs, we were duly noted but never importuned, bothered or assailed. We took a small room in a shabby, Lebanese-run hotel, which doubled as a whorehouse, and went up into the hills of Kenscoff to hear the voodoo drums, then got out of the dilapidated capital as soon as we could.
The bus depot near the port was a muddy-rutted expanse where Land Rover diligences as well as tap-taps (gaudily painted buses converted from trucks) came and went in sporadic bursts of commotion not quite stifled, as we were, by the steambath atmosphere and white-heat glare of early autumn under a mid-day Caribbean sun. Skirting a mob of dark hawkers, gawkers, bus hustlers, and baggage-laden travelers whose belongings were tossed and lashed atop revving vehicles due to depart, we found a tiny office where a harried fellow in a yellow sport shirt told us that the costlier, more comfortable diligence was complet, but we might venture (he smiled and then grimaced) the tap-tap just leaving for Cap Haitien. We bought the cheap tickets and let ourselves be seized upon by the most forceful of the jostling freelance baggage handlers, who propelled us past everyone else onto an already full tap-tap, the sides of which sported primary colored scenes of country life in primitive detail. All tap-taps featured these bright side panels, perhaps to compensate for the squalid reality within. And all of them had nicknames carefully lettered on their bumpers, often droll phrases such as on ours: La Vie Drole. The next eight or nine hours were anything but droll.
Tap-tap seats, we quickly found, were hard, narrow planks with the least possible legroom. The aisle was barely wider and was soon packed (we’d squeezed into the last two seats), bundles and bags set down and squatted on while a last-minute legion of raggedy kids somehow slithered around the baggage and standees, selling cigarettes, sweets, lottery tickets, and sad sandwiches on crushed baguette sections heaped in worn thatch baskets. Only when the tap-tap finally began to move did these kids slide, climb, and tumble out the still-open front door. The driver, a cool dude in shades and loose pink shirt, honked out an assertive rhythm on his horn to clear the way, lit himself a cigarette, and turned on a maniacally monotonous carnival/disco/soca tape which blared from little speakers flimsily mounted just above the windowless windows and the passengers’ heads, the wiring all exposed and looping down slackly from speaker to speaker, as we rolled out onto the road with a great thumping of baggage settling overhead. The engine backfired, and the tap-tap got in gear.
Grains of rice began to sprinkle down on our heads and necks: no ethnic ritual this, merely a split sack spilling through a cracked tap-tap roof. Across the aisle, in which a man in an iridescent suit hunkered, straddling his suitcase, a very large matron fed pieces of banana to her three little kids wedged in beside her. In front of us, a caramel-colored woman tied her headkerchief tighter (rice was sprinkling her too), and opened a small volume which I noticed was titled “Vers Jesus.” Her neighbour, a large older man with a rich chocolate skin, also noticed the religious book and emphatically engaged her in theological conversation above the noise of the grinding engine and soca tape. Through every open window a fine dust blew, and we were soon finely coated as well as flecked with rice. On the one-lane mountain roads, there were rump-bumping potholes, and huge boulders which had to be circumvented on switchback turns breathlessly close to dramatic cliff-edge dropoffs. It reminded me of riding the buses in rural Turkey, but this was Haiti, which looked like Africa West. We gritted our teeth and shifted sore hocks on the hard planks as the tap-tap coasted down a winding hillside road to the damp plain where palm fronds poked in at us, and when we forded swollen streams ever so slowly, the road completely vanished. In one of these streams, a naked bather, using a small Dixie cup to douse himself, covered his sex with casual modesty and stared at the bus as passengers stared back. Then, on relatively straight stretches of blacktop, the driver made up for lost time by speeding recklessly past banana plantations where seemingly endless clusters of ripening fruit drooped earthward from huge purplish pods.
Every couple of hours, the tap-tap pulled up to a lone gas pump in some shacky settlement or town, and sometimes there were two little concrete walls for riders to relieve themselves behind, women and small children behind one, men and big boys behind the other. At these stops, slow and dazed-looking locals in tatters tried, but not too very hard, to sell us a few shrivelled grapefruits or warm, bright-tinted sodas in recycled bottles.
Just before sundown, the tap-tap rumbled along the last weary miles to the cape, passing more and more packed-mud, thatch-roofed huts, and then small houses of concrete and stone, some with second-storey verandahs, and side-yards of tamped dirt where scrawny piglets followed sows scarcely larger than dogs. At the city limits, some folks got off, and the aisle was cleared enough for a spiffy officer to hop aboard and scope the travellers, the inevitable Security check. As the only pale passengers, our passports were particularly scrutinised, as everyone watched quietly. The officer politely inquired where we were staying en ville. We said we didn’t as yet know. He obligingly named the half-dozen hotels in town, hoping we’d pick one so he could write it down on his obligatory report. We caught on and complied, and his smile brightened. He strolled back down the aisle, waving us all on our way with a cavalier gesture as he hopped off, while the idling driver sucked on his kingsize cigarette behind his shades, as another Haitian dance tape played on.
*****
(Now I have to interject: I’m writing this twenty-odd years later, deep into a marriage coming apart – apples and oranges again – but with three great sons. I’ve changed my MO, I’m not the rolling stone cum contrabandist anymore, in fact I do no drugs at all, haven’t even smoked weed in 20 years; but one habit I retain from the roving years is I never “keep in touch” with people I used to know, I let auld acquaintance be forgot; and after A and I “amicably” went our separate ways, well, there was some talk of reuniting sometime, but I kept moving, didn’t try to keep it alive, and she moved on too, and I only now found out about that. As I started writing about our travels, I started thinking of A. I got curious, tried to locate her online, found nothing, but remembered she’d had a best friend from high school, they dressed alike and always hung out together, and I was able to trace this woman, and she had kept in touch with A. When I called her and identified myself, there was a long pause, and then it sounded like she was crying. “She really loved you,” she kept saying, and I sensed an accusatory tone, tho she was nice enough with me, even as she told me A had committed suicide ten years ago. In a rare emotional outpouring, A had told me her mother had committed suicide, her dad had died of a heart attack soon after, and she’d been brought up by her paranoiac Communist grandmother, who always told her not to answer the door because it might be the FBI. Maybe this had something to do with her asking me not to write about her, and I had honoured that wish in the main, but now that I knew she was gone, I’d have to write some more. I pressed the old friend for details, and she seemed reticent, yet wanted to tell me: A had married a doctor, a gynaecologist who got involved with more than one of his patients. A had two miscarriages, couldn’t conceive, grew despondent, but always talked of the time she’d travelled with me as “the best time of her life.” She had called this old friend just before she overdosed on prescription opioids. “She said it was just to say Hi, but she was really saying goodbye. And she kept mentioning you, and the places you’d been together. It’s a pity you couldn’t stay together.” So the old friend said, and there was another awkward pause. I didn’t know what to say. She had to go. I thanked her, hung up, and sat a long time staring at nothing. If I were the crying kind, I would have cried. So, before I go on processing the old travel notes, let me say that A was an A-one person, trying, successfully I thought, to deal with the early trauma of finding her unstable mom hanging in the closet as a kid, her dad dying soon thereafter, and her grandmother channeling Ethel Rosenberg and staunchly believing the Soviet Union was a worker’s paradise. A, with her Irish dad and Jewish mom, with her snub nose, small features, sad eyes, slim, buff bod. She never wore makeup and didn’t need any. Her hair was fine as feathers. Her body had a sweet femme smell, especially in the throes of sex. Now it can be told. She didn’t want me to write about her, but she’s gone and can’t care, and I’m here to tell the tale. Nuff said.)
*****
Okay. We were in Haiti. We ate peanut butter with avocados. Mamba-la. When local men hailed us, “Eh, blanc!” it might translate as “Hey, Whitey,” but it was said in a friendly way, and no one tried to get in our face, unlike, say, in certain parts of Araby. Then, with funds fast dwindling, we took a cut-rate air hop over to San Juan, P.R. We might not have the wherewithal to go back to NYC, but in P.R., maybe there were temp gigs, and at least we’d still be warm.
We never got to see the island outside of San Juan, but half the island’s people live in greater San Juan. A sprawling jumble of neighbourhoods which were once towns and villages, the city wasn’t such a much, in fact it was a mess. Traffic jams, people parking their cars on the broken sidewalks (when there were sidewalks), and you needed wheels to get anywhere, which for us meant riding the crowded guaguas (as the local buses were onomatopoetically called). The climate, referred to nicely as ‘marine-tropic’ in the brochures, meant wet heat, constant sweat, crotch-rot, skeeters up the gazoo. A guagua, which looked like a Manhattan bus of previous decades (and probably was), took us out to the university in Rio Piedras at the edge of San Juan, where we flashed our fake student IDs and got to peruse a list of local rooms rented cheaply to students. The cheapest room, at the bottom of the list, was the one we went for and got. It was a cubicle in the dark second-floor apartment of a lone, old widow we always called The Senora.
At one end of The Senora’s rooms of gloom, a big-screen TV was left on, rather loudly (The Senora was a bit deaf) from about nine in the morning to nine at night, you could count on it. At the other end of the apartment, a surprisingly small, big-billed bird sang its few notes piercingly during the same hours, from the time The Senora took a heavy cloth off its cage to when she replaced it before retiring to her bedroom for the night. We were out a lot, so the daily noise wouldn’t bother us much. Nor did we mind the shudder and hum of the big old fridge positioned in the hallways just outside our room, to which The Senora slap-flapped in her plastic sandals and floral-patterned housecoat remarkably often to eat sparingly from one of many small jars of tropical-flavoured baby food which filled most of the shelf space. We felt lucky that The Senora hadn’t demanded a month’s deposit as well as a month’s rent in advance, since we had little cash to spare by now. A had slipped on a plain gold band, her mom’s marriage ring she carried for just such occasions, and we looked like “a nice young couple” to The Senora. Her creased tan face under her blue-permed hair smiled on us, and we were in. We ate bread and cheese and fruit in the room, and the next morning we took the guagua back downtown to the Condado tourist strip to look for work. We hadn’t gotten much sleep, though, for swarms of skeeters kept bugging us, coming through the screenless window from the damp, weedy backyard where a chorus of coquis (tree frogs) chirruped after nightfall. The coquis’ distant sounds couldn’t keep us awake, but those sketers did, just as they’d ruined my sleep in the Yucatan. Back there, I’d bopped myself in the head with a rolled-up Donaldo Duck comic, and at dawn, when the fuckers disappeared, I’d lapse into an “exhaustipated” sleep. Here as there, the tiny, whining squadrons of little bloodsuckers were kamikaze-bold and nigh invisible. But A, with her can-do, problem-solving energy, ducked into a downtown drugstore the next day and slipped a can of “Off” into her pack. We didn’t have the money to spare for such things. “Tonight we sleep!” she trumpeted. And the Off did work, but smelt vile, and was probably toxic to humans as well as skeeters. We didn’t find any jobs that first day downtown, but tomorrow was another day. We heard The Senora slap-slapping by in the hallway beyond our door, heard the TV start spouting Spanish, heard the bird begin its trill… the humming fridge opened, baby food jars clinked… and in our small student-size bed we rubbed our warm Offed bodies together to welcome the tropical day, closing ranks in You & Me Against The World mode.
*****
(Since learning about A, I haven’t been able to type these notes up without stopping, staring at nothing for a while, remembering this and that, and getting sentimental – and I’m not a sentimental guy. I keep hearing her old friend saying, “It’s a pity you guys couldn’t stay together.” Of course, the neediness which A tried to keep under control kinda scared me back then, when it came out. I didn’t want anybody to need me, thank you very much. I was some kind of narcissist, if you want to pin a label on my self-absorption. A was easy to travel with, she was happy to be going anywhere with me, and it was a novelty for me, until we spent so much time together in little rooms here and there that our differences loomed large. She hoped I’d come off the road, do something legal, and (tho she never said this outright) make babies with her. I saw how she beamed at young moms with their newborn infants, a certain look in her eye which she’d cancel if she saw me digging her. So: miscarriages, unable then to bear children, a philandering hubby, a history of a mom who hung herself, and she ended it all. I couldn’t have “saved” her. I could just about save myself, and it wasn’t until I was well into middle age that I knew I needed to get beyond myself, to have a family. The women I knew were not likely breeders… so I went for a pen-pal bride from P.I. She wanted a Steady Eddie Gringo provider, which I wasn’t, and I wanted a pliable, exotic helpmeet, which she wasn’t. Never mind. The three boys we had made it more than worthwhile. But back when I was with A, I didn’t think family, didn’t think long-term togetherness, didn’t think much at all, just went from one thing to another, and the feelings A might have, well, that was her red wagon.)
*****
In Crisis Mode, with only a few bucks left, we’d both have to get busy downtown, looking for work. There was now the grim edge of necessity driving us, but we tried to make light of it. One thing I noted. Earlier in our travels, when the cheap hotels were complet, we missed the last bus, or the food was putrid, A would buck us up by saying, “Life is an adventure, dolling!” She didn’t say that anymore. But as we lay in The Senora’s room, doused with smelly Off, before getting up to take the guagua, we nostalgized over places we’d been, already looking back rather than ahead, and falling into mock-Brit accents (I don’t recall how that started, but it kept things light).
“That little glorified goatshed in that apricot grove in Mitilini – we should have stayed there longer, dolling, it was so effing cute!”
“Yeah, but do remember, dolling, that right over the hill, the whole beach facing Turkey was land-mined, with those red death’s-head signs every twenty feet, and soldiers on the cliffs sometimes, since the most recent dispute.”
“That’s true, dolling, that was disgustipating.”
“Our two rooms over Xania bay were pretty cool…”
“With the sun off the sea sending rippling rays across our ceiling in the morning through the big window…”
“No skeeters there, were there dolling?”
“Not while we were there.”
“And the shorba d’adz, that yellow lentil soup with chopped greens we ate every morning in Alex…”
“…Those fat, sweet apricots falling off the trees in Lesvos…”
“…And the figs drying on newspapers on that hotel roof on Rodos…”
“… Which we ate too many of, dolling, and got the shits…”
“Which reminds me, The Senora’s in the kitchen, so I’ll hit the loo!”
We bused downtown and walked around. Just behind the skyscraper hotels were side streets of thatch-roofed shacks where cocks crowed. On nicer streets, there were masses of purplish bougainvillea falling over walls, the flaming red leaves of the extravagant flamboyan, and tall palm trees, including the towering Travellers Palm with its spreading fan of fronds. On the streets, there were P.R. faces in grades of shades from pink to brown, many of them urban- hard, weary or wary. And there were familiar signs in Santurce shop windows: “Use Nuestro Layaway Plan!” and “E-Z Credit.” A boutique called “Nidia of New York.” Here and there, squat white old colonial edificios back behind wild weeds, once stately lawns. There were girls in tube-tops and tight-ass jeans, casually stylish clusters of macho guys slapping palms, bumping fists, and tugging at their crotches; little old ladies in black watching from windows; kids running around; old men slapping down dominoes on little tables set outside doors on quiet backstreets.
Rude reality preempted sightseeing, and we split up to work our way up and down the hotel strip. A busboy was leaving The Steak Pit, and I was hired, starting tomorrow. And A, when we rendezvoused back at the Senora’s, had lucked into a cocktail waitress gig in the Playboy Lounge of the Cloud Room atop one of the biggest hotels. The way she told it, an oily, overweight, cigar-chomping Gringo Manager looked her up and down and asked her, “Ever done any cocktail waitressing?” She bullshitted about having some waitperson experience, and he knew she was bullshitting, but it didn’t matter. She was cute, Fatso approved, and she could begin ASAP. Of course, she’d have to wear lingerie.
“I gave him a withering look, like ‘What do you take me for, a hooker?’ And he assured me that this was a high-class operation, strictly on the up-and-up, no B-girl action, look but don’t touch, you never socialise with the clientele, just show off your nice figure while serving them drinks. ‘We prefer nice young ladies such as yourself’ – that’s what the man said – and when he told me how much I’d make with tips plus salary, well, I said I’d be glad to give it a try.”
She made enough to take a cab all the way back to the Senora’s round midnight when the Cloud Room closed, and the guaguas weren’t running. I’d already caught the last bus after my shift, and we compared notes, Offed and in bed.
“Cocktail waitress? Cocktease waitress, dolling. I wear a thong, see-through bra, and stiletto heels. But it’s true, it’s no touchee. If some Little Mr Bigtime Spender tries to stuff a twenty in your thong, one of the ever-vigilant bouncers comes right over, snatches the bill from him and presents it to you in your hand, then warns the customer politely to keep his hands to himself. I’ve never been leered at by so many trolls, and at first I didn’t think I could take it, but it’s like jumping into cold water; you begin to swim, and it’s not so cold. But you need the grace and timing of a ballerina to dance away from the hands of men who want to get their fingers in your cleft, or pull down your panties, while teetering on those god-awful heels. I did make a lot of tips, and I met the two other ‘waitresses’ who work with me: one is a blonde Jersey showgirl ‘between engagements’ whose gangsterish boyfriend picks her up, the other is a sweet-looking tan local girl who says she’ll make a date with ‘the right sort of customer’ because she needs the bucks for her family… I couldn’t wait to get dressed, come home, and take a shower. Can you imagine, dolling?”
I could imagine, all too well. And then I told her about the restaurant, a kind of bummer microcosm, where a semblance of quality provender and piss- elegant ambience was provided at minimal cost to the providers and maximum cost to the customer (i.e. sucker). The absentee owners were The Mob, or so co-workers said. The no-nonsense managers were two ageing, well-barbered, chain-smoking, poker-faced guys in tight suits. One was Irish, and the other was Jewish, both from NYC. The waiters, for some reason, were all plump Gusano Cubanos. The other busboy was a local smackhead, and they hired strays like me. And in the Hades-hot kitchen, two blue-black Jamaicans did all the cooking, knee-high in garbage and grease. The main floor was almost chillingly air-conditioned. The kitchen had no air conditioning and felt like an oven when you came off the floor. In the busiest hours, the older cook continually mumbled “Bumba clot!” and “I catch a fire!” as he made up four dinners at once. The younger cook, t-shirt soaked through and dark arms sweat-shiny, waved his meat cleaver at the fattest, loudest waiter, who was always pressuring the cooks to hurry up. Under flickering fluorescent tubes, there was sizzling smoke, the stink of singed meat and rot, and near-chaos… while right thru the swinging doors there was the frosty, low-lit dining room, soothing muzak piped in, little white-clothed tables where tourists or locals living it up were served their suppers with unctuous flourishes and could experience a facsimile of satisfaction after dropping big bux for fat steaks and stiff drinks. My small salary was enhanced not only by a share of the nightly tips, but by frozen meat and choice bottles of wine I slipped into the garbage bags I hauled out to the dumpster, one of my chores. When I got off, I’d step around back, retrieve my “perks,” and catch the last guagua home (such as it was at The Senora’s), there to wait for A and hope she’d get back soon and safe.
I grew to intensely dislike the big, fat bossy “head” waiter who treated everyone like shit except the diners and the managers, whom he fawned over. After he got on my case for not cleaning my station up fast enough, I began skimming part of the tips left on his tables as I cleaned up, if he was busy down the room. Like if a table left a five and some singles, I’d palm the singles and leave the five. This waiter was the kind who just might run out in the street to berate customers who didn’t tip, and it would be a real health risk if he found me out. It kept the adrenaline flowing, though, and added to our getaway fund. I kept a low profile on the job, but wouldn’t refuse to smoke a joint out back with the other busboy on my shift, the junkie with two missing front teeth who’d lived in the South Bronx and was always on a Spanglish rap about scores and scams and stings and burns as he generously shared a blunt with me around quitting time. He said he was just out of rehab, only smoking weed these days. But he shrugged as he exhaled a lungful: “Reefer be’s the same as Camels to me, it don’t do nothin’ for me no more.”
The Senora was asleep when I got home, and then, when A got home, I’d already fried a pilfered steak and opened a bottle of pricey wine. We ate, swapped gig tales, and then, after she showered, she modelled her Cloud Room scanties for me, as a prelude to our going to the mattresses. We figured that in a few weeks’ time, we’d have enough to buy tickets on the red-eye flight to NYC.
“Let’s face it, dolling,” A said, in one of our pillow talks, “this situation sucks bigtime. I’m going back to the hospital, if they’ll have me… and you?”
“Oh, I might go hang out at my man Jay’s weed farm in the hills a while, if he hasn’t been busted or moved on. I don’t think I can stand the city without a sou… or actually, I don’t know, but something will turn up, it always does.”
“And it’s usually something risky and illegal, no?”
“Maybe so, dolling.”
“I wouldn’t want to try and change you, dolling, heaven forfend, but roving here and there without funds isn’t romantic at all, is it? I mean, seriously, I can’t do with any more bouncing about from pillar to post, no matter how colourful the pillars and posts.”
“Point well taken, dolling. But then, I never promised you a rose garden.”
“Point equally well taken, dolling.” Silence. Those transatlantic accents we affected, like the couple in the old black-and-white “Thin Man” Movie, were not covering up our rifts now, only somehow accentuating them. We fell into a clinch, reeking of Off. A tried to hide her tears. We made love rather intensely. And tomorrow was another day.
The Senora had taken to singing the refrain, “No soy de aqui, no soy de alla” as she passed our door. She knew we weren’t students; we were coming back to her place late at night, and she didn’t know what we were up to, but she was glad to see us go, I guess. She stood in her doorway and waved a last goodbye after we paid her, shouldered our packs, and were on our way out of her life.
“Joo go home, joo make a nice baby!” she said, clapping her old hands.
A bit her lip… and when we were waiting at the parada for the guagua to the airport, she shrugged off the arm I put around her pack-humped shoulder and said “Life is an adventure, dolling.”
(Now, long estranged from my Filipina wife, our sons mostly grown, I think a lot about A, probably because I found out about her suiciding. She seemed like such a survivor to me, not the suicide type. But what did I know? If I’d found out she was a little old lady in Pasadena, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about her at all. Who knows? In Xania, when she said I might be the love of her life, she shook her head back and forth as she said it, as if she couldn’t or didn’t want to believe it. By not emphasising that detail, I twisted the truth, as I am wont to do in all I write. So be it. Like one old Spanish lady told the other, “Paso lo que paso.” What happened, happened.)
