Walking Through Walls (31 page)

The cold metal pressed hard against my forehead.

My eyes felt as if they were bulging out of my head. Even though it was approaching midnight, the kitchen seemed to suddenly brighten with a harsh, brilliant light I had never seen before. Everything appeared in stark, high relief. I felt as if I was seeing out of every pore in my body.

Bob was crying as he pushed the gun harder into my head. “You're going to die. You deserve it.”

I couldn't breathe.

“And then I'm going to die.”

As he said that, he closed his eyes and started to cry. He was leaning heavily on the gun pressed against my head to support himself. To my surprise, I had enough of my wits about me to quickly step backward. As Bob fell forward, I grabbed the gun and threw it right through the window, shattering the glass. The noise startled him. As his eyes opened, he seemed unsure of where he was or what had just happened.

Because Bob had probably been spending time with his two close friends—vodka and Valium—he offered no resistance as I shoved him hard against the wall and ran for my life down three flights of stairs and into the street.

Certainly I had been eager to leave home and be on my own. But this was more than I had bargained for. This was my first year at a liberal arts college in a small New England town. I had settled into a top-floor apartment of an old wooden house off campus and at the age of eighteen endured my first winter without Cuban
tostones
or fresh sugarcane juice. It wasn't easy—cold weather and steam heat didn't come naturally to this tropical native.

Having volunteered as photographer for the school paper, I attended all the lectures, seminars, and cultural events at the college. One day the official school photographer, Bob, started kidding me about being his “competition.” I just wanted to take the pictures and get out of there. Bob, who must have been in his early forties, told me that his wife worked as a bank teller and would not be home until around five. He invited me over to their house for a drink. I was new at school and hadn't really made any friends. “Wow,” I thought, “the school photographer is inviting me over to his house for a drink.” I was honored and also too young or stupid to know that married men with kids could also be gay. Our interactions consisted of drinks and darkroom sex and lasted all of a few weeks until he broke into my apartment to try to kill me.

After I left the apartment, I ran three long blocks to the college dean's house. I banged on his front door until I woke him up. Out of breath, I told him what had just occurred. Through triple-thick glasses that magnified his eyes, he stared back at me in shock. He had known Bob and his family for fifteen years. Here was a sordid accusation of attempted murder and homosexuality that was impossible for him to digest.

I knew immediately from the way he looked at me that either he didn't believe me or, if he did, it was all my fault, and I needed to be gotten rid of.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“I guess call the police and put Bob in jail.”

“No, I'm not ready to do that.”

“I can't go back to my apartment. He knows where I live. He'll come back and kill me.”

The dean thought for a moment. His enlarged eyes twitched behind his glasses. “It's late. I'll put you somewhere safe for the night. Then we'll see what we are going to do in the morning.” I followed the dean across the street to the girls' dorm. There was a maid's room in the basement where I would sleep. I was insulted that I was being put in the girls' dorm. It seemed to be more of a judgment on his part rather than a safety strategy.

At six the next morning, two local cops—overweight lugs—woke me up. I assumed that they would be comforting and concerned. Instead they were accusatory and hostile. They
told
me what had happened the night before without asking for any information. “Why did you make all this up? To get Mr. Malina in trouble? You wanted his job, didn't you? Get him fired, and they'll hire you to be the school photographer. We've never had anything like this happen until you showed up. Wait till the judge hears your story. He will not be pleased. If I were you, I'd pack up now before he gets wind of this. If you stay, we have no choice—you're not too young to go to jail.”

I got the message. Briefly, I wondered what my father would want me to do. However, I was too ashamed to call him or my mother for advice. I didn't know how they would deal with my situation with Bob and the police. I had made a huge mistake getting involved with Bob and was now paying the price. With great apprehension, I went back to my apartment, packed a knapsack with a pair of jeans, my checkbook, passport, and toothbrush, and left everything else behind. Summer vacation was just a few weeks away. At this point in the semester, it didn't matter whether or not I attended any more classes. I knew I had to leave and get away.

Not knowing exactly where to go, I went downtown and caught the first Greyhound bus to New York City. I thought perhaps I would simply move there and never return to school. On the way down to the city, I decided that my best plan was to fly to Miami and then figure out what I needed to do. Once in New York, I took the next bus to Kennedy Airport. At the time, Braniff had a midnight special. At one minute past midnight, you could book a seat on one of its planes flying to South America with a stop in Miami. If you got off in Miami, the fare was $49. When I landed in familiar surroundings, I looked for any airline counter open that late. I lucked out: Ecuatoriana was open for business.

“Where do you fly to?”

“Tonight we are flying to Quito. Tomorrow, Lima.”

“Where's Quito?”

The woman in the soft navy blue uniform that was intended to make her look like an admiral in the Royal Navy looked at me with some annoyance. “Ecuador.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,
what
?” She was irritated by this skinny kid in blue jeans with no luggage wasting her time.

“I'll go.”

“When would be your date of travel?”

“Now. Do you take a check?”

“Do you have identification?”

“U.S. passport.”

“Fine.” She typed for a few minutes and then wrote out a ticket by hand, giving me the red carbon copy. “We leave in two hours.”

“Okay.” I was relieved and, for the first time in days, felt safe. Finally I was going to disappear.

For the next three months, I traveled by myself through the mountains of Ecuador and the deserts of Peru. There I swam in extinct volcanoes, hitched a ride to the Galápagos Islands on a cargo boat, saw Machu Picchu, fended off armed banditos and the policia looking for money from the gringo, sat with shamans, and listened to the monkeys of the Amazon. I had no contact with my father, my mother, the police, or the college dean. I lived on raw foods in the mountains, soups from the marketplace, and whatever simple meals I could find for pennies. For the first time, I felt that I didn't need my father's psychic antimissile shield. My travels took me into many dangerous situations, and I always emerged without having said a special prayer or asking the spirits for assistance. The trip allowed me to finally access much of the inner strength that I never knew I had or needed to use because of my reliance on my father. With my confidence restored, I felt that I was finally ready to go back home.

After the blue and white Ecuatoriana jet landed in Miami, I took a cab over to my father's office. We hadn't spoken in months. I thought I would surprise him. I knew he would be pleased with my adventures. When I walked in, he had a colored pencil in one hand and the pendulum in the other. I assumed he had been interrupted in the middle of designing an interior scheme with an urgent spirit message. Pop looked up at me and said, “Well, welcome back. I didn't expect you until this evening. Your plane got in early.” He dropped everything and gave me a big hug. “You're safe now; that guy won't hurt you again. I'm sorry, but things happen in life. You handled it well. Use it, learn from it; it will only make you stronger. I left you alone, just as you wished.”

As Pop looked at me, he commented that I now had a very strong chin. This is not something I had ever noticed, but it was his way of acknowledging that I had successfully grown from my travels.

It was good to be home, but I felt that my travels and my experience with Bob had cut the umbilical cord between my father and me. I was becoming my own person.

“I want to hear all about the trip,” Pop said, “but I have a little problem I need to attend to first.” He pointed to a stack of boxes that almost reached to the ceiling. The sides were marked “Japan.” “I don't know why I ordered these beads. They're too heavy to use in draperies. They'll pull the rod out of the ceiling. I've never done anything stupid like this before.”

I tried to lift one open carton on the floor. They
were
heavy. Each carton must have weighed at least one hundred pounds and contained sixteen boxes of white beads strung necklace style. They were innocuous, plain-Jane beads that at best could be sold at a five-and-dime for fifty cents a strand. I couldn't figure out why he'd bought these beads either. Probably some closeout deal.

Trying to be helpful, I said, “Well, maybe you can send them back.”

“No, they won't take them back. I'll just have to figure out some way to use them. Maybe I'll give them away. You must be hungry; why don't we get going?”

I put my knapsack in the car and was looking forward to getting home. I also had not seen my mother for a long time and missed her. I knew she'd be unhappy that I had disappeared without letting her know, but she would be thrilled to hear about my journey. She'd want to know every detail.

For some reason, Pop took the long way home, driving down Biscayne Boulevard, which was lined with shuttered office buildings like ghosts from another era. We passed the long-defunct stark white Art Deco Sears Tower. Its roof was collapsing from termite damage and the summer monsoon rains. The last time I had been in that store was fifteen years earlier with my mother, looking for “necessities.” That was the first and last Sears she ever visited. Mom didn't believe in shopping with the masses. Even though she was now leading a different life than she had envisioned, she maintained her dignity, her character, and her moral compass, and still dressed like a million bucks. I can't imagine how hard it was to have her ex-husband continue to live next door to her. Why neither of them picked up and moved on was beyond me. I guess they both felt they had a right to be there. Perhaps they were secretly hoping that this emotional freeze would eventually thaw, and they would pick up where they had left off.

The car windows were open, and the twilight breeze was coming up off the bay, kissing our faces as we headed down the boulevard. Thanks to Miami's never-ending stream of corrupt politicos, who gave away the city-owned bayfront for bags and bags of sweet, crisp, unmarked bills, this simple pleasure of life is now long gone. Miami's Bayfront Park once featured the odd combination of the pristinely white, marble-clad main library and a notorious cruising ground for pedophiles who lurked behind the lush tropical vegetation for underage bait. It seemed that Miami pedophiles preferred smart underage children who actually could read rather than the dumb-hick kids who hung out at the rifle range. Or maybe kids who read were less dangerous than kids toting guns. Eventually the library and the pedophiles gave way to sports arenas and tourist malls with daiquiri bars. Progress.

Just across the street from the Freedom Torch, the eternal flame in memory of JFK, which was unlit due to the continuing local Cuban resentment toward John F. Kennedy for failing to provide air cover during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion nearly ten years earlier, my father pulled up to the curb of an anonymous office building with a white marble lobby that looked like an oversized airport men's room. A woman standing on the sidewalk smiled in an aggressive and almost painful manner at my father. She was smoking one of those long liberated-lady cigarettes. I disliked her instantly.

She opened the door and climbed into the front seat. I noticed immediately that she was wearing navy blue stockings. This was something new to me. What little I remembered of the stockings that my mother wore was that they were sheer or coffee colored. But blue? Even in the swinging sixties, no one wore blue stockings. Pink, yes. Yellow and fluorescent green were okay. But never,
ever
blue. This must be something that was sold at the grocery store in those egg-shaped plastic containers cleverly called L'eggs. Stockings are not an item that should be sold at grocery stores to begin with, much less
blue
stockings. In a million years, my mother would never buy stockings in the grocery store. In fact, my mother didn't believe in grocery stores, except for staples such as detergent or milk. She would drive miles out of her way to find a butcher or a small fruit stand. But stockings? I think she would have rather faced electrocution or deportation than buy a personal item such as stockings at the supermarket. These blue stockings told me all I needed to know about this woman sitting in the front seat of my father's car.

As best as I could understand, this woman was aiming for a kind of Flash Gordon–a-go-go look. Instead she achieved one of chilling morbidity. There was something about the blue that gave her legs the appearance of a cadaver—dead flesh without circulation. Her legs told me that this woman was all about the wrong place at the wrong time. As she nestled into her bucket seat, she mechanically rotated her head like a ventriloquist's dummy and turned to face me, saying,
“Hiiieeeeeee.”
Her lips did not move from her frozen smile as this greeting jumped out of her mouth. What her smile really said was, “I wish you were dead.” I was not my father's son for nothing. What little psychic genetic material had been passed on allowed me to read people instantly. I could see right through her.