Excerpts from "The Soul Pilgrimage," the picaresque novel I've been working on this summer

 

 

 

 

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.