Chapter One: A Prelude
to Failure
The idea was to
land. To reach the land. To reach the land and to fulfill promise. To reach,
fulfill promise, and basically make some positive stuff happen. To kick myself muchísimas veces and to keep heading
eastward. Madrid to Moscow, nay, Seville to St. Petersburg. A celebration of
life, tennis, Spanish guitar, and perhaps even women and spirituality. Life’s
meaning would not be pre-ordained but fought for. Such was to be the purpose
embedded in a forlorn life.
What got me to
Smolensk was a chain circumstances that, if rendered metaphorically, might best
be described as a water lily being shat upon by a vulture. The East has
beckoned since childhood, since rainy nights in Bucksnort reading Dostoyevsky.
My crimes are extensive, my karma a churning piece of coal, but somewhere
inside me, there is something like hope.
As I scribble this
reminiscence, we have reached the middle of a winter night in Smolensk. On the
frozen steppes outside the prison, wolves are howling at the moon. Somewhere in
a forest izba, a wide-faced witch is
calmly slicing up the innards of a fox and ciphering my fate. Here, inside the
concrete monstrosity, the ugliness of reality shouts into my ear. The guards
are buttering toast and grinning at each other at candlelight. They’re
exchanging pleasantries in Russian. They’re laughing about my impuissance, both literal and sexual. They’re
thinking that slitting my throat would be like cutting through warm butter. They’re
thinking they could come over and rattle their billy club through the bars of
my prison cell and make me feel bad about myself, maybe wish I’d never been
born or something.
I don’t want to
understand them anymore, even though I probably could. My Russian was once
formidable enough to read Pasternak in the original and woo woeful women
online. Breakfast will suck tomorrow, as usual. It is officially porridge with
salt and powdered milk that stays clumpy but unofficially it is whatever the
cooks decide to maliciously toss in. A few inmates have lost their teeth from
calcium deficiency. One guy was trying to catch pigeons in the courtyard with a
homemade slingshot. He caught one and was about to open the sucker up for its
pigeon meat and then some former Red Army wrestler threw a rock at him and told
him to get the heck away from his bird.
My hygiene, never
good even in freer days, is now frighteningly shitty. I once thought about
putting up an online dating profile from here, just to have a little fun with
the online community, maybe post a webcam pic of me. My fingernails grow
outward in irregular patterns and have lots of grub. Some here eat that grub
for extra nutrition. The vitamin supply is running low. I swallowed my last
Omega 3 pills months ago. My triglycerides are no doubt out of control. But as
some Roman said, dum spiro, spero. I write for posterity, for the chance to share
something special with somebody who may chance upon these modest scribblings.
The circumstances of my incarceration in this
assface of a Russian prison will be revealed in due time. But before I delve
into today’s nastiness, let’s turn back to pre-history, for you might well find
in those adverse circumstances compelling reasons for my generally sordid
existence.
Chapter Two: On My Parents
and their Unfortunate Union
When a sperm is lucky enough to eat its way
through the outer lining of an egg, it feels pretty good about itself. I
suppose that the only moment of happiness that I enjoyed until the age of 12 or
so was this ebullient spermazoidal
dance.
Now I have very
limited memories of the man whose sperm engendered this dim cellular happiness.
By limited memories I mean approximately seven days of life together, and that
in the days when I was a pink turd of pain, a perpetual whiner and crier, the
straw that jacked the back of my parents’ matrimonial camel. Now father has been
a Facebook friend for 3 years. He’s a spiritualist in Thailand. His status
updates are pithy and spiritual, motivational and meditational. When not chewed
on by the Cerberus of cynicism, I find strength in his words.
And then there is
the other father—the one I know second-hand through Mother’s journals. The
woman wrote extensively and with a poison pen. Despite her New Age obsession,
she detested mankind and one man in particular—my father. There is something
about hatred which inspires the most breathtaking eloquence, and if you were
ever unlucky enough to chance upon Mother’s memoirs at a garage sale or
something, you might appreciate how much venom she injects into her
descriptions of the man.
She describes my
father was “a lying mule of a man,” a swindler with an obscene mustache and
eyes that twinkled engaño. The
pictures I have seen of him in his youth confirm that his glance was dubious.
Woe to ye who trusted him! He was a traveling tradesman, a confidence man, a
poet/janitor, a Marxist and a feminist, a man of modest economic means and
unbelievable verbal virtuosity. His genius was undeniable, clear both to the
women he wooed and the toilets he plunged. If represented in an oil painting, he
might be one of the phallic goblins in Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell. Such
was his love of disorder and lovemaking.
My father has
called himself by various names through his strange career: El Duque, Tito,
Jean Paul, Johann Sebastian. He remains fond of telling people he is descended
from Spanish nobility, a distant cousin of Charles V or some crap, but if
Mother is at all accurate, he was nothing but a street urchin, a picaro, a
scrappy dog of a boy that toughed his way out in the mean streets of Seville. His parents were killed in the Civil War and
he grew up in a Fascist orphanage (their last wishes). He came to America under
dubious circumstances. The Andalusian mafia was likely involved. There was a
boat full of orphans, children of Fascists killed in the Spanish Civil War.
They docked in Miami. Father quickly became Marxist and unpopular. He and his
comrades crossed their fingers and prayed for Castro and his Russian friends to
friggin’ invade, even if the invasion meant thermonuclear ire. The revolutionistas infiltrated the
palm-lined streets of Key Biscayne. They hawked leather wares and conned rich
folks into thinking they were buying Louis Vuitton purses—all to fund the Cuban
military. Their pockets got thick with illegally-earned but
ideologically-charged dollars. They strutted about popping collars and
whistling at women. They were lewd and loud and basically full of shit, so they
basically fit in perfectly down in Miami.
After his Marxism
fervor had subsided, Father experimented with hallucinogenic mushrooms. This
fundamentally shattered his machismo and basically turned him into a
spiritualist. Mother makes mention of a spiritual journey to Mexico. He
wandered with Indians and enjoyed colorful quilts and exotic drinks. There is
talk of the founding of a cult in Guadalajara. He had Mansonian powers over his
subjects but none of the malice. He was a good man, a practitioner of free love
and propagating the species. Numerous children came into the world thanks to
Father, and these lost hermanos and hermanas no doubt people many parts of
Mexico. I will alas never meet them but I wish them well and wonder at times if
they, like me, have been messed up by that witch-doctor of happenstance,
genetics.
Father’s cult
activity naturally made him an enemy of the Mexican government, and more
importantly the Church. A task force of Catholic vigilantes known as Los Toros Verdes del Papá tracked his
New Age ass down in a Guadalajara dive bar.
They beat him to a pulp, spat holy water in his eyes and told him to
love the Lord, not Krishna, and basically told him he’d be crucified if he
didn’t get out of town. So Father went north.
I suppose I get my
polyglot predilections from my padre.
He was a man of many names and many
pretty palabras, could make magic
happen with his words. He was an itinerant Alpha-dog of a man, peripatetic and priapic.
After his travels through Latin America and the wild oats he sowed, he decided
to live with weapons dealers in Cambridge Mass. He himself was terrified of
gunshots and never fired a weapon in his life, but they were good friends and
they provided for him well. They paid him to make deliveries and he did his job
conscientiously. But his intellect whined like a little baby for attention, so
he decided to start plunging toilets in big-time academic institutions. For
kicks, he’d hang out in universities (usually elite ones in Cambridge), clean
toilets for bucks here and there and use his classroom and bathroom privileges
to pick up co-eds. But knowledge was as important to him as sexuality. He’d sit
in on poetry lectures and smoke cigars in scorn. He’d laugh out loud at the
incompetence of the Elders, the Sanhedrin of American letters. He could go toe
to toe with the Deconstructionists of Yale and Hopkins, could shout down
scholars of Mallarme and Rilke with equal fervor, could run circles around
their theoretical and pedantic arses.
Now enough about
Papa. He wasn’t even the most important person in my personal development. The
asshole abandoned us when I was crying misery into the universe after scarcely
a week of life. Mother was far more instrumental in my development, and I mean
that in negative way, for me turning out like this has a lot to do with her.
Dalia Fernandez
Whitfield first saw the light of day in Cuba, born into a family of
plantation-owning hidalgos. When Castro and Che screwed up their lives, they
naturally fled to Miami. She grew up in Miami but never met Father there. During
the Cuban missile crisis, they decided to flee northward, deeming colonial
Massachusetts the safest place on planet Earth (Kennedy would never nuke his
home state).
Mother was treated
like crap by the white elites of New England, but she no doubt showed their
asses up in the classroom. She was a brilliant student, could run circles
around her snot-faced New England teachers. My wealthy Cuban grandparents used
to drive an obscenely large Oldsmobile around Massachusetts and blow cigar
smoke out the window to celebrate her astoundingly high standardized test
scores. She spent four hours a day after school playing the violin and solving
chess problems for fun.
As she grew up,
Mother adopted rebellious airs. She began smoking Marlboros and wearing Cowboy
hats at sixteen. She threw her violin into the Charles River after botching a
difficult passage in Brahms. Her intellectual acumen got sharper but nobody in
school noticed or appreciated this. In high school, she’d slump in her chair in
class and think about chess problems. She hurled formulas and Greek letters at
her inept high school teachers, like poison arrows at helpless missionaries, and
she owned their sorry bespectacled asses in and out of the classrooms. They
were nonplussed, the SOBs, and after two and a half years sent her to Cambridge
to decide which learning shack to study at. She chose the uglier campus and
ended up at the one with the acronym, not the Kennedy club.
Mother’s drug use
began in earnest after M.I.T. Speaking of course as a former denizen of her
womb, I can testify that this drug use was excessive, even by Hippie standards. Her
mushrooms were hand-picked and fully organic. And those shrooms made haze of the
collective rationality of mother and fetus, rendering my brain relatively crappy in matters of memory recollection.
