Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

So my problem at the airport is to get the twenty bucks we need to let us on the plane to New York. I’d sell the camera but it is packed into my luggage, and the luggage is already checked for the flight, which leaves in fourteen minutes. I’m not very effective as a beggar. I circulate among others departing. “Please,” I say. “Please. We have a problem. We have tickets for New York. Our baggage is on the plane, but we are totally out of money because of the currency devaluation, and we’re missing the twenty dollars for airport tax. Could you help? I’ll send a check when we get to New York.” I pitch this to group after group. They ignore me. Do I sound sincere, obsequious, smarmy? I don’t know that I’d believe myself. I’ve given many readings and have confidence in being able to create the various voices and emotional tones. I studied the intonations of singers, like Little Jimmy Smith, Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra, Bessie Smith, David Allyn, Dinah Washington, but what do I sound like when twenty bucks is on the line? Maybe we look too Ratso Rizzo, too hippy, too delinquent? Other passengers wear suits and ties, or pressed leisure clothes. Our clothes look like hard travel. What do we smell like? Finally someone comes through. A blonde kid runs up and hands us a twenty-dollar bill. He runs back to his family. I try to wave and thank them, but they don’t want to see us. It’s like giving money to a bum on the Bowery, avoiding his eyes. Twenty bucks. Back to New York. We get to leave Peru. Bye bye, Peru.

My oldest son is marrying a girl from Muleshoe, Texas. He met her doing theater in New York City. At the time he was an actor, and she worked in stagecraft. Muleshoe is a West Texas town, not far from Clovis, New Mexico, where Sinda Gregory, the wife of Larry McCaffery, a critic and bon-vivant, grew up, as did her first husband, the astro-archaeologist Gary Gregory whom my son Avrum and I visited once in Peru. So I feel some vague connectivity. Muleshoe is famous for housing at the Mule-shoe Heritage Center the world’s largest mule shoe, and for the largest free standing statue of a mule anywhere, at the National Mule Memorial. It honors the contribution of mules to the infantry and artillery in World War I. Years earlier I admired John, one of the last muleskinners, and his mules. He delivered supplies to the remote Forest Service fire lookout we worked at in Idaho. Some connection there too. Mules!

The wedding unfolds in Brownwood, Texas, east of Dallas, where Mamma Franky, Fran’s mother, and Daddy Monkey, her stepfather, live in a trailer on Brownwood Lake. Much of the lake is dry so their little dock stretches out over the gravel, and their boat sits on the lakebed, ready to float again if the water returns.

We stay in a Brownwood motel. Fran’s friend Joanie has come from Brooklyn. She’s quite a pretty blonde who owns the restaurant where Fran works. Joanie is a mafia daughter, and always travels with a bodyguard. Enzio is gay and muscled and mostly good-natured. The motel receptionist advises us not to go into town to restaurants and bars, where we will probably not be welcomed. At the motel we are safe. Although we see that possibly as a ploy to promote their own business, we decide to take the advice.

The only other customers present as we push some tables together for our crowd are two Texas lounge cowboys at the bar, well on their way to blotto. They look at us sideways as we sit down and talk loud enough so they’re sure we hear. “I eat at the top of the food chain,” one says. “I eat red meat. Anybody got anything to say about that?” We stare at our bottles of Lone Star. One of them slips off his stool and staggers a couple of steps towards us. The other one points in the general direction of Joanie. “Look at that one!” Enzio grips his beer bottle. “I wouldn’t care if I got my ass whupped for a piece of that one.” I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he is grossly underestimating. Ass whupped could be the most pleasant part of it. The other lounge Texan lurches towards me. He gets down in my face.

“I’ll bet you spotlight deer.” He pulls back and waits for my response. It takes a few moments before I understand that this is a great local insult. Fighting words. I can only shrug. Spotlight deer might have been the least of my sins.

The bartender comes around the bar. “Now leave these folks alone, boys. They come down here for a wedding.”

“A wedding. Whut…? Who’s getting married?”

“I am,” says Avrum. This Texas action amuses him.

“You marryin’ a Texas girl?” My drunk approaches him.

“I’m marrying a girl from Muleshoe.”

“Well, you just better be good to her.” He shakes a finger in Avrum’s face. “Because if you don’t we will.”

“Now leave it there, boys. Leave ‘em alone,” the bartender says. “You’ve got some drinks at the bar. These folks have bought you a drink.” I don’t remember doing that. It could be a bartender’s ploy. They return to their stools. It’s clear that without mediation things can get ugly in Brownwood.

On the next day the wind picks up, swirling dust over the desiccated lake, and thunder threatens the wedding. Mamma Frankie and Daddy Monkey are good hosts, staging a tasty barbecue. The Texans and the Easterners mingle peacefully. While my sons and I are relaxing on some folding chairs Big John comes over. “What are you boys doing?” he asks cheerfully. “You hatchin’ a plot against the white man?” He has an unconcealed forty-five magnum holstered from his wide belt.

“Don’t mind Big John,” Fran tells us. “He’s in law enforcement.”

“I didn’t know what to think when I first saw Aver,” he confides in me later. “I didn’t know what he was. Thought he was some kind of bleached out nig.”

A gentle drizzle softens the ceremony, thunder disputing the marriage vows. Avrum and Fran get nicely hitched, though they don’t totally live happy ever after. They have a few good years and a wonderful son. About a year after the ceremony Big John gets cranky and in the middle of the night tosses a railroad flare into the trailer of his estranged wife and shoots her and the dog as they jump out the door, then shoots himself. All dead. The dog had been a friendly wagging presence at the wedding.

As I hotfoot away from the festivity for the Dallas airport at first I get lost on the winding roads from the trailer to the main road. I drive in circles for what seems a large chunk of forever. It’s one of those panic moments. I’ve known them before. I’ve met them in dreams. I can’t break loose, drowned in Texas drought. I’ll never get out, lost forever, alone, abandoned in a rental car, circling, circling like a buzzard, circling in Brownwood.

The walk back to the pensione was a penance. The kids were exhausted, and screamed the whole way. I carried Nik, Jingle carried Rafael, and we swung Avrum by his arms between us. This looked criminal to the Romans on their passegiatas — two immature yanks torturing three babies. It took forever to get up the hill to our room near Termini. My pocket had been picked on the way to the Vatican. Who would have thunk? We had no money for a cab, or even a bus. That evening I had to plead with the woman who owned the pensione . The pickpocket had taken all the money, and left us the train ticket back to Lecce. We had to get food and pay for the room. My kids, my wife, we have to eat, I pleaded. We’ll send money as soon as we get back to Lecce. The woman didn’t trust us. She had no idea what these Americans were doing in such a remote town in Puglia. Her alternative was to call the Carabinieri. She didn’t trust them either. We could have ended up in some dismal Roman lock-up. She was as kind as she was mistrustful, and gave us our cena , and our piccolo colazione in the morning, and let us go. She never expected to hear from us again.