Voyager: Travel Writings (6 page)

In the fall of 1958, ten weeks into my first semester at Colgate, came the second—or fifth, or tenth—time I deliberately can
celed control of my life. Confused and intimidated by my role as grateful beneficiary of the college’s attempt at affirmative action, I walked away from the scholarship, stole off-campus in the middle of a snowy autumn night, and to make sense of what I had done, hoping to avoid being called a dropout, which would have shamed my mother, who had finally recovered from my runaway with Morelli, and angered the high school teachers who had worked so hard to get me the scholarship, I declared that I had left college in order to join Fidel Castro and his men, who were holed up in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, which I had read about in a long, glorifying article by Herbert Matthews in the
New York Times
. Which is how I washed up in Miami, on the north shore of the Caribbean Sea, a few months too late for the revolution, and moved to St. Petersburg, on the Gulf Coast, where I met and married Darlene.

I told Chase that I remembered Darlene sobbing inconsolably facedown on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. I was sure this had happened early in our marriage, and it may as easily have been the bathroom floor of our garage apartment back in Lakeland as our third-floor flat on Peterborough Street. It happened early and often, however; I knew that much. It was always in the gray predawn light at the end of a night that had seemed interminable. Her nightgown was tangled around her body like a flimsy shroud. I saw the pink bottoms of her bare feet, her freckled shoulders and arms, her swollen wet face turned away from my gaze, half hidden beneath her long, blond, matted hair. More than weeping, she was keening, crying out from deep inside her chest for . . . for what? For something I could neither imagine nor give. My mother had always sobbed like that, as if panic-stricken, gasping for breath, flailing her limbs like a grieving widow, all but rending her clothes.

I had learned early on to harden my heart to her cries. Even before I was twelve—before my father informed me that I was now the man of the house and walked out the door, leaving my mother and his four children behind—I had learned to stand just outside the bathroom or her bedroom or wherever my mother was having
her weeping fit and silently wait for the storm to pass. I had learned that if I entered the room and threw my arms around her shuddering shoulders and wept alongside her or tried in vain to comfort her, which as a small child I had done many times, it would only extend her seizure long into the night. But if I did nothing more than stand by the open door and watch, while my two younger brothers and my little sister huddled together in the background like scared puppies, she would soon regain her composure, wipe her face, and smile bravely up at me, like an actress who knew that her performance hadn’t quite come off. It was the same with Darlene. So I watched and waited in silence, like a bodyguard, instead of a husband. Or son.

I remembered telling Darlene—just before she agreed to leave me and return to her parents—that I no longer loved her, even though it was a lie. It would have been easier for both of us and for our daughter if it had been the truth, however. Because I loved Darlene then and for the rest of her life. Which would not have comforted her then or ever. But I think she knew it anyhow, because our daughter, Leona, must have believed it and could only have acquired that belief somehow from her mother, or she would not have had the courage as a fourteen-year-old girl to seek me out and eventually come to trust me enough to live with me and let me take care of her until she could take care of herself.

“Each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote Wilde. I did not understand then how that was necessary or even possible, and certainly it was not desirable. The sentence didn’t make sense to me. But it was what I was doing. Or rather, what I tried and failed to do, kill the thing I loved, which was my love for Darlene and our baby girl. And so I not only permanently wounded Darlene’s heart and Leona’s, I wounded my own as well.

I remembered staying out all night, playing chess for hours with my fellow beatniks at the Zazen Coffee House on Hemenway Street and later telling my troubles to sympathetic women in their apartments—not sleeping with them, at least at first, just talking
and drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes and sometimes pot. One of the women was from Colombia, an artist, petite and pretty, who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and beat me regularly at chess. To my surprise she revealed to me late one night, probably to keep me from coming on to her, that she was a lesbian, and while she thought Darlene was beautiful and sexy, she was not intelligent enough for me. Feeling somehow wronged, I left her apartment and never returned or played chess with her again.

Another was an older, tall, blade-faced woman in her mid-twenties who had a long, thick, roan-colored braid that hung to her waist. She was rumored to be the mistress of Gerry Mulligan, a famous jazzman in his mid-forties, which is why, when she invited me into her bed, I said I couldn’t because I was married.

Then there was an actual consummated love affair with the daughter of a black photographer, who I learned many years later was as famous as Gerry Mulligan, but whom I had not heard of then. She was a gifted pianist studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I remembered and told Chase that she had a Steinway baby grand piano in her apartment and played Chopin for me. I had never seen a Steinway or heard Chopin before. It was a sexually fierce affair that briefly overlapped with the weeks before Darlene left with Leona for Florida. The affair continued for months afterward, until the woman abruptly quit school and ran off to Paris with a French art critic who was writing a biography of her father and with whom she had been sleeping whenever she went home to Manhattan on school holidays.

I could not understand why, or quite believe, such women were attracted to me and found me interesting. This was shortly before I met Christine, who was then a theater student at Emerson College. She, too, seemed exotic and rarified, a type of female human being altogether new to me, unlike any woman I had known or loved, or so I then believed. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and, despite her Christian name, Jewish, and with her reckless and carefree
ways—leaving her sumptuous Lord & Taylor winter coat in a taxi and showing up the next day with another, skipping her final exams for a road trip to Vermont, springing for meals for her impoverished beatnik friends and fellow students, living in an apartment on Beacon Street instead of a college dorm room—she let me know that her family was rich and she was spoiled. I didn’t care. I may even have been attracted to her
because
she was rich and spoiled. She wore her long chestnut-brown hair like Joan Baez and played the guitar and sang folk songs from the Weavers’ and Pete Seeger’s songbook. She was not melancholy in the way of folksingers, however. She was loud and had a raucous laugh. With her oval-shaped face held close to her listener’s face, dark brown eyes open wide, eyebrows raised, she spoke in a strangely affected Virginia Tidewater accent colored by long drawn-out vowels and swallowed consonants. She was verbally surprising and vulgar and funny, especially when describing her eccentric southern Jewish family, a mash-up of Aeschylus and Tennessee Williams,
Electra
meets
The Glass Menagerie
.

I could not believe that a woman like Christine could be attracted to a man like me. I was poor and by comparison uptight and boring. A very bad bet by anyone’s standards, I was a twenty-year-old divorced dropout and father of an abandoned child, a man who had made a mess of his and several other lives already. I had moved by then from Peterborough Street to a cheaper, smaller flat on Symphony Road, and to pay the $36 monthly rent washed dishes part-time at the Rathskeller in Harvard Square. I wrote terrible Whitmanesque poems and neo-Faulknerian stories and spent the rest of my waking hours reading all the books listed on the syllabi of a friendly Boston University English major.

Nonetheless, Christine was attracted to me. Obsessively so. Which astonished and pleased me. But that is another story, I said to Chase. I did acknowledge that my fourteen-year-long marriage to Christine and divorce were linked in important ways to the story of my prior marriage to Darlene and its brutal end, but they were complicated links, not simple cause and effect—even though my
second marriage and divorce would never have happened if not for my first—and could not be quickly described. It was late at night at Scout’s on the island of Saba; it was time to pack our bags so we could depart early the next morning for St. Barthélemy. The present and future beckoned; the past could wait.

But it can’t wait for long. Whether teller or listener, to get a story straight—which is, after all, one of the things I’m trying to accomplish here—one has to go back to its beginnings. Last April, my Miami friend, the poet Tom Healy, and I were biking the Overseas Highway from Key Largo to Key West and return—two and a half days, about two hundred miles of pedaling—when the past, or a crucial part of the past, came unexpectedly back to me. It was a tough ride. The Seven Mile Bridge between Knight’s Key and Little Duck Key was the worst of it, our bikes squeezed on the right by a low guardrail, while eighteen inches off our left shoulders, semis and RVs and tourist-laden cars blew by. Fifty feet beneath the bridge, the ultramarine waters of Florida Bay merged with the turquoise-blue Gulf of Mexico. It was very humid, in the mid-eighties, with a fifteen-mile-an-hour headwind and only occasional cloud cover.

At least once a year, especially since moving to Miami four years ago, I’ve driven down the Overseas Highway by car to visit friends or participate in the annual Key West Literary Seminar. So I was surprised to find myself deeply and oddly stirred by traveling the same route on a bike, at ground level. Then I remembered. Fifty-three years ago, a wheezing, round-shouldered 1950s Greyhound bus from Miami dropped me off at a single-pump gas station in the fishing village of Islamorada. The bus lumbered back onto the Overseas Highway, old Route 1, and headed for Key West eighty miles beyond. I was lugging all my worldly possessions in an olive-green army-surplus duffel. I hefted the duffel to my shoulder and crossed the now empty road to a two-story, Bahamas-style rooming house with a wide porch that faced the highway.

I was certain of that much; those images were clear. But the rest of my memories of those early months in Islamorada and then later in Key West were vague and uncertain, even as to when I was there exactly, and for how long. I know that I was very young at the time, in my early twenties. I tried telling the story to Tom but couldn’t get it right. I must not have been paying attention back then. Or else paying attention to everything that wasn’t worth remembering now, more than a half century later.

I used to tell people that it happened in 1962 or ’63, when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. But a few years ago I gave a reading from a recently published novel at the Booksmith, a bookshop in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. It was one of the several stores and restaurants and contractors that had given me part-time employment in the early 1960s. It was a nostalgic event for me and a kind of triumphant homecoming, and I told the audience that many years ago I had quit my job at the bookstore and hitchhiked alone down to Miami and ridden a bus out to the Florida Keys, where I rented a tiny Airstream trailer in Islamorada, pumped gas part-time to pay the rent, and began to write my first short stories in the cool shadow of Ernest Hemingway, whom I associated with the Keys, although he had long since moved on to Cuba. It was a story I had told many times, whenever asked how I began my life as a writer. Although unsure of the exact date, I usually added that later that year Hemingway shot himself—as if to imply a slightly melodramatic connection between me, the apprentice writer, and Ernest Hemingway, the doomed master.

Later, while I was signing copies of my book at a table, a man appeared in line—a bony guy in his late seventies, slouch cap, thick mustache, Irish face. He leaned in and whispered, “That ain’t how it happened, Russ. That bit about you and the Keys.” Anyone who called me Russ was someone from my distant past, from before I divorced Christine and became Russell. I recognized him at once, Joe Kerr, a.k.a. Joker, who back in the early 1960s rounded up young Boston artists and beatniks like me and my friends to work as car
penters and stagehands in amphetamine-fueled thirty-day bursts for the Opera Company of Boston. Joker was a likable guy who we all knew was a small-time, but well-connected, mobster. We were his non-union scabs. “I’ll be across the street at the Tam,” he said. “C’mon over when you’re done signing. I’ll tell you what really happened.”

Joker told me, over drinks at the Tam, that back then I was having a nervous breakdown, he called it, over a dame named Christine who’d left me for another guy. I couldn’t get out of bed and come in to work, he said, so the bookstore manager fired me. “You was crying like a fucking baby, man.” It was the winter of 1961, he said. “Same year Hemingway stuck his shotgun in his mouth. Not ’62 or ’63, like you said.” Joker had taken pity on me and sent me down to the Florida Keys to work with some associates of his who were helping train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. He said he had helped get Rose La Rose, the famous stripper, out of Havana when Castro closed down the nightclubs in ’59, and he was still tight with the Miami mob. “You were a smart kid, Russ. You woulda made a pretty good gangster,” he said and laughed. “I made some calls and set you up at that rooming house in Islamorada where the Miami and CIA guys were staying. But I guess you got scared or something and moved the fuck out. They told me you disappeared. That’s probably when you started being a writer,” he said. “But it didn’t have nothing to do with Hemingway.”

There are three interwoven, underlying contexts to the story, the personal, the social, and the historical—as there are to all stories, true or not. The personal context, that weepy, disabling end of a love affair with a girl named Christine, was deeply embarrassing to me, somehow weirdly shameful, and I had forgotten it, so that later I could develop and elaborate the social context and make it into myth, the old story of a young artist’s solitary, dedicated apprenticeship in the shadow of a doomed living master. The historical context, Miami mobsters working with the CIA to arm and train Cuban exiles for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion—looking back
now, surely the most interesting part of the story—I left out altogether. It would have diminished the romantic, self-embellishing myth of how, in following Hemingway’s suicidal footsteps in the sands of the Florida Keys, I became a writer. Because I was mainly interested in shaping how I was perceived by others, by that audience in the Booksmith in Brookline, for instance, I literally forgot what really happened. Personalized myth displaced personalized historical reality. Until the night in the bookshop and at the Tam, when Joker made me want to get my story straight.