Train Tracks (7 page)

In the beginning, the 1940s, the men at the market
earned their living primarily by buying merchandise that had been left in the
subways, unclaimed merchandise, unclaimed steamer trunks and the like. I was
told that in those days, if a trunk was unclaimed it was sealed at the wharf and
then put up at auction, unopened. Which means in the good old days of the
thirties and forties, you used to bid on the trunk according to what the trunk
looked like in value on the outside. If it was an expensive leather with brass
fittings, you bid accordingly. You could never tell what was going to be inside.
But the men liked playing the game. It was interesting to them because it was
taking a chance. They'd bid maybe seven dollars for a good trunk; four or five
dollars for a poor-looking one. And they'd buy six, seven, eight trunks at
auction, take a little truck, and haul them into the market, usually late at
night. As they proceeded to open the trunks up, everyone who went to the
auction, they'd have a kind of free-for-all, comparing who did better in the
game of chance.

One trunk story in particular sticks in my mind.
One trunk had belonged to a nun. They could tell it was a nun's trunk because of
the photographs inside. They had also found her habits in there—a few old nun's
habits and articles indicating she was also a nurse.

As they were rummaging through, looking for a few
valuable candlesticks or whatnot to put up for sale and get back their seven
bucks profit, they found a strange object at the bottom wrapped up in muslin.
Being inquisitive sorts, they proceeded to unfurl the muslin package. What would
be at the heart of this onion-like skin but an embryo. A human embryo, all
wrapped up neatly in a nun's trunk.

TWELVE

Hegira from New York

M
y first hegira from New York was a bus ride to Miami.

The dining highlights I recall were the chicken bones in a greasy bag, thrown under the seat by an old lady going to her retirement; and chicken again, this time the “Southern Fried” variety at a bus rest-stop in the middle of an Atlanta winter night. I always loved fried chicken as a boy, and this was really going to be a treat. To gorge on greasy chicken thighs and breasts in the heart of Dixie, where I had heard they had first perfected the recipe.

The only factor limiting my enthusiasm was the time. I was asleep like Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman's grizzled drifter in
Midnight Cowboy
) on his death ride, sweaty and in a fit of sorts, when the jouncing Greyhound abruptly stopped. The lights were flashed on. “Rest Stop, everybody out,” shouted the bus driver, and he came down the aisle prodding each and every one of us, even the old chicken-bone lady, reminding me of the cartoon cop of the past who cracks his billy across the soles of the sleeping park bum.

Maybe he got a kickback from the rest-stop owner, I really don't know, but everyone on that bus was hounded into that eatery, the doors to our carriage locked; there was no escaping it. I would have Southern fried chicken, even though I was slightly nauseous beneath that three 
A.M.
Georgian night sky with stars as sharp as fractured mollusks in a barrel.

It was OK, that's all. Too crusty, too greasy. Of course, today I know it was probably cooked in lard, and that the saturated fat would account for my early death had I kept on with my dietary ignorance. But the slight case of indigestion I nursed all the way to Jacksonville gave me that slight something to think about, which oh so softly pushed me into the arms of Morpheus.

Miami

In those days (c. 1958), you could get a full breakfast for thirty-nine cents. Two sunny-side-up eggs, fried in butter, one slice of grease-ridden ham, two slices of white toast suffocated in butter, coffee, and juice.

I loved every bite, but have never again eaten anything like that. Now it's one healthful (and bland) dirge after another. But I'm still alive, which is an achievement in this world. Balancing your wants against your needs without becoming homicidal or suicidal is success, though I will admit to approaching both states several times along the road.

Kerouac's
On the Road
had just surfaced at Queens College. Harold, the older, fat boy in the crowd, smilingly fished it from his tentlike trench coat one rainy autumn day in Flushing. He told us younger guys, milling around between classes, that the book portrayed a wild car ride across America. Free sex, saxophones, and drugs on every page.

As they say today, it was a real “page-turner.” My first, really—unless you count that book I read when I was about eight about some guy who flew a seaplane into Arctic lakes, saving Eskimos and trappers.

Kerouac's odyssey was not about saving others; he was on his own road of salvation, seeking drama through thrills, not yet knowing that peace within came only when the trips were over and you could sit on a balmy pier watching the gulls while thinking about where you had been and what you thought you were doing there.

Now, it is true that Tolstoy died in his eighties, covered with snow on a train station bench after setting off on one more journey. And that there is something defeatist about saying you're through traveling while still young and healthy.

This attitude is true sacrilege in a nation obsessed with motion. But, like Kerouac, America too will learn her limits and I hope it's before we burn out in an old armchair in front of a television, drunk and drugged, watching another one of our endless foreign “peace” missions.

But Harold's book was just the kick I needed to unchain myself (so I thought!) from clan and caste. So during midsemester break, it was my first bus trip to Miami, followed in later seasons by a wild nonstop car ride, eight of us packed into a fast hemi-Dodge, and later still, an army surplus DC-3 that taxied on a tail-wheel from Newark. Tilted at 45 degrees, you felt like Buck Rogers about to take off on a space adventure. Until the stewardess, not yet a “flight attendant,” distributed those box lunches that smelled of cardboard.

Other than being robbed in a fleabag hotel by a midget bellhop, who pulled some kind of trick on me by making my bankroll of eighty dollars disappear from the hotel's safety box, nothing much exciting happened down there.

It is true I got my money back by causing a bad scene, provoking seedy Orson Welles types to slowly close in on me in a circle, only being saved at the last minute by the Dade County blue boys. They came, mind you, because the midget had called them in an attempt to intimidate this Yankee into backing off on his crazy demands. But when the six cops arrived, as I say, I was surrounded by an assortment of perfectly fine carnival geeks, and the
midget
suddenly discovered that my money was somehow still in that steel box.

Must have fallen down in back somewhere, that's all.

Charged with pulling victory from what would have been fiscal disaster on my first solo flight from the nest, I took my friends to dinner.

And I don't remember the meal, and that's all I've got to say about eating in Miami.

THIRTEEN

An American Gangster in
Spain

Majorca

T
he first
respectable middle class “bum” I met was a soon to be high school principle from
Brooklyn who smoked “dope,” danced the mambo like a Cuban, “had” lots of women,
and walked with a minstrel smile at all times. Very dark-skinned for a
Caucasian, and with thick lips and curly hair, he was the Hebraic male version
of Abraham's wife, Sarah, said to be comely and black.

Anyway, Donny had just come back from a very
faraway place, where the wine, women, and
danzóns
were said to flow as freely as in Impressionist Paris days. I, right then,
decided to go there. That summer, or as soon as I could afford it, I'd go to
Spain and get over to Majorca.

It was a converted troop ship, the MV
Waterman
, that carried my friend Marty and me on our
pilgrimage to Donny's paradise island. Two years it took me to save up for that
trip. When we first escaped our moorings with deep foghorn vibrations not
matched by today's jet whine, all of my past seemed to slip beneath my feet.

This was going somewhere!

The last person in my family to ride a ship was my
father on his immigrant journey to America. Turning around on the stern, drunk
with Marty and a couple of hundred other budget-minded travelers, and feeling
New York's West Side recede as in a dream, I knew I'd cut the umbilical cord for
good.

Out to sea and seated for my first meal, I knew the
next ten days would be bad news for food. Cheap German food served by surly
waiters not older than you are does not make for an appetizing prospect.

So I took to sneaking into the first-class lounge
each night and heaping the tasty little sandwiches into my raincoat. Those ham
and other cold cut sandwiches beat the sauerkraut and potato soups served in our
class, but also served to make me impotent just when I met my first
international beauty.

She was coveted by all the boys. Tall and pale,
rarely smiling, Karen was the daughter of some World Bank executive. Brought up
in Swiss and English boarding schools, she was the dream of every working-class,
would-be poet on that tub.

The first guy to win her attention was Andrew, a
tall ugly screwball who imitated the French existentialists by throwing potato
salad at ship lecturers.

After five days of this brilliant joker, we took up
together. Slowly at first, she telling me she liked me because of the way I
walked. Something about my feet hitting the ground in a positive, assertive way,
she told me in a Paris hotel room weeks later.

It was all innocent hugging and kissing on the
Waterman
for us. I pretended to “respect” her
too much to proceed, but in reality I couldn't get excited in the right part of
my body.

My heart would pound, my thoughts would swirl, my
weight-lifted arms would nearly crush her breathless, but the right thing was
not being transmitted below my waist.

Years later, I would learn this bout of “impotence”
was directly related to the ham sandwiches I was filching from the first-class
lounge! Not as a result of guilt for my transgressions, but due to the sodium
nitrates and nitrites the ham was laced with. While these preservatives killed
off would-be bacterial colonizers, they also killed a man's ability where desire
was not lacking.

In sufficient amounts, the nitrates are used to
quiet libido. It is rumored that in the military they gave this stuff, in the
potassium form, to the boys—called it “saltpeter.”

Now, who would have guessed that a good old ham
sandwich, or other preserved meats—bologna, sausage, hot dogs—will ruin whatever
good fortune may bring your way during your travels. But should you be eating
some of these preserved meats three times a day, while also lacking
phospholipids necessary for sperm production, a simple dietary adjustment could
render years of psychoanalysis into the redundant torture that it is.
*

You've got to be careful when traveling. To know
what to eat and what to avoid must not become a full-time obsession, but you
don't want to end up in a garret with the bells of Notre Dame cathedral tolling,
white high heels askew on the floor next to a hastily opened lady's suitcase,
lying there in a sweat trying to explain away your failure.

Karen
was
understanding. And she did come all the way from London to be with me, after
all. But not knowing about the nitrate family and their vicious habits once
inside the human, we began to blame
ourselves
for
this unignitable passion.

As the days went by and my diet of good French food
drove away the German ham and white bread, I returned to that state of vigor
common to twenty-year-olds. The romance, once inflamed, burned on for a week or
two in a magical Paris I've never, ever since known.

Then, the long-legged pale beauty went north, I
went south, not to meet again except by chance in the mouth of a London
Underground tube years later.

About to descend the steps with my wife of two
weeks, Karen was ascending, arguing with a decadent-looking longhair. Our faces
met. We were startled to bump into each other so unexpectedly. I looked
healthier than I had during those days in Paris, fuller of myself, stronger in
my step, while she was emaciated, almost pimply.

We said a few words, quickly parted, and never saw
each other again.

But on that first “big trip to Europe,” I did get
to Donny's fabled Majorca.

The food was so unlike New York, the land and the
people somehow so much more alive, that I stayed on, missing the next semester
to sample all that the poets had promised.

Palma, 1966

Christmas Day in Shatzy's bar. I'd been
there since the summer. I was a regular among the expatriates, mainly English
retirees living on pensions, playing at art.

The eggy taste of
Advocaat
, a creamy yellow alcoholic slammer, was fashionable in the
Mediterranean port bar. One thing I liked about those English writers, they just
drank, without a wink, devoid of “cute” American names for their addiction.

(In Alabama, I once learned the craziest name for a
drink: “Slow Screw Against the Wall”—vodka and 7Up. These were glowingly taught
to me by a group of very sweet Alabamian college girls, welcoming me to the
Huntsville airport for a lecture I was giving the next day.)

So, again, another season of too much alcohol (and
of the wrong kind), and tasty but suicidal food. Years would pass before I
learned that diet was somehow related to my mood and performance, and which to
prescribe and proscribe for myself and others.

Shatzy, wiry and friendly, took a liking to me. One
rainy and windy afternoon, after I had motor-scootered in the 7 kilos from
Arenal, a beach town where I had an apartment, he told me to get off the
island.

“Kid,” he whispered, his eyes screwed up behind a
smoke cloud, “get out of here, off this island, fast.” I was shocked. Thought
the crowd liked me. “Why, what do you mean?” “Look, you're young. All they want
from you,” he said, lifting a shoulder in the general direction of the others in
that smoky bivouac, “is your money and your woman.”

Stunned, I looked around that tank full of human
fish. Were these angels and guppies really piranhas beneath deceptive
markings?

Over there, at the end of the mahogany counter, his
legs twisted over one another like a rubber man, an Ichabod Crane—a drunken grin
radiating from his fixed jaw—was an English “nature” poet, little known beyond
that grave circle.

It could not be him. He was too drunk and too kind,
all the time. Collapsed on the bench along the right wall after cursing out some
old lady who dared say “Merry Christmas, Mike,” was a loud-mouthed Irish
novelist whose latest had just appeared as a film. His pretty, kindly wife and
their three-month babe were like a quiet painting next to him, she nursing the
infant while her husband slept off his latest drunk.

Definitely not them. Too honest.

Well, the Americans in the bar, sure. Highly
suspect, and therefore, no threat.

That left only Max. The ex–mob boss on the run who
I thought had befriended me.

Ya! The more I thought about him the more I began
to believe Shatzy.

“Listen. I know this doesn't seem real to you but,
I tell you, you're in danger.”

My eyebrows arched and he ordered a free
Advocaat
for me.

Max Roachman first attracted my attention because
of his heavy New York accent. As I thought about it, it was Carla who was first
drawn to him! I remember her saying with that tee-hee little giggle of hers,
“You remind me of my father . . .”

“Oh, that little . . .”

He had us up to his place after that first night.
His Spanish maid, a quiet older lady, cooked an authentic spread.

Brought over by successive waves of colonizers—the
Arabs, Berbers, and Moors—fruits are so prevalent that they accompany most
courses.

We began with local wine soaked in sangria, the
fruits coming from Maxie's own trees. Standing on the stone terrace and eyes
wandering up to Arenal Palace, I felt very much at home.

His lousy record player was turning
The Memory Years: 1925–1950
, as this stocky old tough
spluttered on about his wild days.

Well, what harm would it do for me to drink his
wine and eat his food? (My money and my woman!)

Chomping on my first boar, with potatoes and
artichokes, I listened as the old guy reminisced.

He sees me smirking and jumps up. “Here, you don't
believe me,” and he rummages through some old photo albums, his maid looking on
from the archway with a sad, knowing look.

Headline:
KING OF THE
HOBOS HAS PENNY RAIL PASS—TRAVELS ONLY 1ST CLASS.
He is shaking hands
with railroad officials.

Next: Two dark-haired sisters, one on each side of
Max in a nightclub: “Took 'em both home for four days.” Next: Max smiling in an
auto showroom, shaking hands with a happy salesman who just sold him a Jaguar MK
V
and
a Jaguar XK 120.

“A good time, kid, but my wife got mad when I
didn't come back home for nine months.”

We eat the paella Valenciana. All the seafood fresh
from then-clean bays.

The phono spins off speed.

Over flan and coffee, he worked himself up to his
true confession. A small news article tells us about his first murders: two boys
in a train yard.

Then, with a flourish, a letter from then New York
mayor Bob Wagner, inquiring about Max's recent operation.

“I got friends, kid.” The books, records, suits,
coats, shoes (I sneak a peek into his closets on the way to the bathroom), all
“from friends,” some items delivered by visiting U.S. warships, if we are to
believe this old crook.

“What happened? I can't go back. That's all. Kid,
it's all over now, all over.” (
The Memory Years
spinning off speed.) “Too much, kid. I was too young.”

But this story came to a bad end, though not quite
at that dinner party. I must have known that good old Maxie was fiddling with my
girl because, days later, I decided to get past his housemaid and snoop around
his flat. To find “material” for a story I decided to write about him.

Against her pleading will and nonbelieving eyes, I
talked my way around her objections, saying that Max had given me permission to
reread his scrapbook. I don't remember what I found, but I did invade the man's
privacy and was nearly killed as a result.

Served me right, I suppose, but I guess Max had a
shred of compassion left inside somewhere. Days after Shatzy gave me that
warning to get off the island, I would see Max everywhere I went. Sitting in a
restaurant or a café, or wherever I would be, there Max would be. Staring at me,
or visibly pointing me out to some of the notorious Guardia Civil, who we had
heard would kill for fifty dollars, the going fee.

That was it. I got the message. Shatzy was right. I
left. Oh, by the way. I almost forgot to mention what kept him imprisoned in his
little bar. He told me this on the day he warned me to leave and start a life
for myself while I was still young.

“Me, I can't go anywhere,” he told me, his
melancholic puppy eyes wet with emotion and smoke.

“It was my big night. I was lead dancer in London's
biggest ballet. The performance was on. It was my call, I froze in the wings
. . .  I was finished. Here I am, forever.”