[Note: Did your grandparents ever tell you just how easy you had it growing up compared to them? Did they tell you about walking five miles through the snow to get to school? This is something like that, only it is true.]
My grandfather John Samuel was born in
Cuba. He grew up on the Isle of Pines. His mother and father,
my great grandparents, lived there long before Castro was ever born.
In those days Cuba still had a colonial government. My great grandfather
was Spanish. My great grandmother was Caribbean Indian. My
grandfather grew up in a culture full of talk about social revolution.
He had to flee Cuba and the Isle of Pines
when he was still a teenager. He went to a dance with a beautiful
young senorita without the permission of her family. One of her brothers
was a Cuban police officer. Spanish culture demanded he teach my
grandfather a lesson for taking his sister out without a chaperone and
without permission. He waited on the path outside of the village
for John to walk home. When John came along the police officer jumped
him. The two struggled and fought. The police officer drew
his gun because he couldn’t overcome John in a fair fight. John closed
with him too quickly for him to use it. John Samuel drew a knife
and killed the police officer in self-defense. The policeman was
only one of many brothers, though. Fearing for his life my grandfather
fled to the United States with nothing but a suitcase and one hundred dollars,
which was a good bit of money back then.
He lived in New Orleans after he arrived in
the states. His father had friends in New Orleans. He soon
began to make his fortune. It was in New Orleans that my grandfather
met a group of people who transported drugs from Cuba to the United States.
When the Cuban communists began to arm for the fight against their government
John Samuel Day was one of the people who smuggled guns to them across
the Gulf of Mexico. Two police officers in Louisiana stumbled onto
a boatload of his guns at a dock outside of Morgan City. My grandfather
killed both of them rather than risk a lifetime of imprisonment, or death.
He was involved with some very heavy people. He had powerful friends,
and an even greater number of enemies.
Before any of that happened he married a Cuban
woman in New Orleans. By her he fathered his first two sons, my uncles.
He divorced her in the 1930’s. That was when he moved to Baton Rouge.
He married my grandmother Wilma, and fathered my dad, John Gilbert.
He worked for the petrochemical industry. By all standards his visible
life was a model of good citizenship. Despite smuggling drugs and
guns he continued working for the Ethyl Corporation until he retired.
Very few living souls knew the truth about his secret activities.
You might say it was a family secret.
All of these things wound up making a direct
impact on my life. My father traveled to Cuba when he was still a
boy to visit our relatives there. The history of the place and the
plight of the people impressed him. While he was in Cuba he made
contributions to the Benjamin Franklin Brigade, who had fought Francisco
Franco in Spain. The Benjamin Franklin Brigade was later labeled
a communist organization. I will come back to that in just a moment.
My father, John, attended a Catholic elementary
school. When he graduated from there he was sent to a Catholic boarding
school called St. Paul’s in Covington, Louisiana. The school was
popular with Hispanic and Italian crime families. A lot of the attending
students had behavior problems because of how tough they thought they were.
While he was there he learned how to fight.
At St. Paul’s John met a young man from Guatemala
named Raphael Vides. The two remained best friends for many years.
John even traveled to Guatemala to stay with Ralph’s family on their coffee
plantation. The Vides family trafficked in coffee and fantastic marijuana.
My dad went to Louisiana State University
when he graduated from St. Paul’s. The McCarthy hearings were in
full effect when John was at L.S.U., and so was the draft for the armed
forces. At his draft intake hearing he admitted that he had contributed
to a communist organization. The U. S. Army recruiting officer called
him to the side and told him that there were some people who wanted to
talk to him. He was led to a room occupied by two federal agents.
The agents gave him a proposition. In
exchange for spying on his fellow students they offered to pay him and
make sure he had an easy time at school. He told me he felt as if
he wasn’t being given too much of a choice, and so he refused. They
told him that if he didn’t do it he would be branded a communist, blacklisted
and that he would never get a good job in the United States. I heard
he felt as though it were a challenge to his manhood, so he told them to
“stick it where the sun don’t shine.” They didn’t like that at all.
They promised him he would have a hard life.
Faced with retaliation by persons in the federal
government, and almost certain draft into the army, he said he saw no other
option but to flee. He went to Alaska and made a good living working
on the Alaskan pipeline. He told me that the mosquitoes in Louisiana
were sluggish, domestic creatures when compared to the giant, man-eating
tundra mosquitoes of Alaska. John didn’t like Alaska too much.
I am no authority on my father’s life, or
indeed the life of anyone in my family who preceded me into the world.
I want only to provide background information for why things happened the
way they did after I was in the picture. John told me that after
he graduated from college he was denied job after job. That was when
he made the decision to sell drugs. The money wasn’t that good when
he first got into the business, but during the seventies it became a huge
industry.
My mother and father lived in a wide variety
of locations. They lived in New York, San Francisco and New Mexico
together. After I was born they lived in a ghost town outside of
Santa Fe called Tecolote. It was nothing but an adobe. There
was no lights or running water. They had to walk down a short trail
to the stream for water every morning. Just a short distance up the
ridge on the other side of the stream lived a large family of Navajo Indians.
My father told me they had a shaman living there, and a bruja. The
bruja, or the old tribal witch, used to sit me on her knee and whisper
to me. She gave me the totem of the turtle. My father always
told me that I was special, that the old Indian woman had seen that.
My mother and father both claimed to have
seen unidentified flying objects while living in the adobe. They
said that one night, late at night, the whole adobe filled up with red
light. It only lasted a few seconds, and then it was gone without
a trace. I would like to think that I can remember that, but I can’t.
I was still just a baby. We moved back to Louisiana when the winter
approached because my parents feared for my safety in the bitter cold.
After my parents got divorced when I was six
years old I lived with my mother. My dad borrowed me to take me on
the first trip out west that I can remember. The mountains were so
beautiful. Unfortunately I was too young to appreciate the entire
trip. We were gone ten days. When we got back to Baton Rouge
my mom and my buddy wanted me to talk to police officers. My mother
tried to tell them that my father had kidnapped me, but she knew all along
that we were going on a trip to New Mexico. I told the cops she knew
about it. They left my dad alone. My mom probably thought John
kidnapped me because we were gone two extra days.
The next time
John and I went to New Mexico I was eight or nine years old. We went
through Austin on our way to Big Bend in South Texas. In Austin we
stayed with Lisa Pousson and Mike Roebuck. Mike had a large and very
old house on the outskirts of South Austin. It was full of antiques.
We left town with Mike and some other men in a group of trucks travelling
southwest. We arrived in a ghost town I won’t mention. There
was a warehouse and a main house. The warehouse was full of more
antiques. We hung around for a few hours. Then a Mexican arrived.
Shortly after that my dad and I left in a big hurry. We drove all
the way to Big Bend before we camped.
John told me that Big Bend wasn’t the way
it used to be. He told me it was full of tourists. When we
left there we went up through Alamogordo and Roswell. We stayed in
Santa Fe, which was fantastic. After that we camped in Cibola National
Forest. While we were out in the middle of the wilderness, where
only a rugged four-wheel drive vehicle could travel, John took out a huge
bag of white powder. He told me to stick my finger in the stuff and
rub it over my gums. My entire mouth went numb. I couldn’t
speak properly because my tongue felt swollen and thick. We drove
all around New Mexico with the dope before we went back to Baton Rouge.
I didn’t even know that it was illegal. I probably gave him a much
better cover than he would have had all by himself.
***
When I was thirteen years old I flew to Guatemala
to stay with my Uncle Ralph. Raphael and his wife Marta picked me
up at the airport in Guatemala City. We drove from there into the
mountains, to Antigua, where Ralph owned a coffee plantation. He
drove a BMW. He was an architect. He had part ownership of
the Antigua Hilton, which he had designed. He also designed the Antigua
Country Club.
Ralph had ties to organized crime. Soon
after I got there he took me to see someone who exchanged my American dollars
at a much higher exchange rate than was allowed by law. Dollars have
always been a much more stable currency than any of the local currencies
of Central and South Americal. If I remember correctly my five hundred
dollars made me an instant member of the lower upper class.
Ralph and I went drinking together.
The first time in my life I ever got drunk was in Antigua, Guatemala.
Raphael had been an alcoholic since the death of his father. He took
me on his usual route of cantinas in the surrounding countryside. I drank
about ten beers and six or seven oros con Coca-cola. I went to the
bathroom in the last cantina we drank in. It was out the back door,
off of a courtyard. The bathroom had holes in the wall to outside
the building. I remember it felt like I was swimming. The floor
wouldn’t hold still while I urinated. It was very difficult to remain
standing. It felt like being on a ship. After we got home Raphael
passed out, but I was forced to attend his youngest child’s music recital
(Ralph’s wife was angry, and she had to take it out on someone).
The memory is a piece of pure hell. I sat in the audience while the
little girl sang "I’m a Little Teapot". I was wasted. I kept
hitting my head on the seat of the uptight Spanish lady in front of me
because I couldn’t stay awake. I have never been so happy to leave
a place, not even jail. When we got back to the hacienda I went straight
to bed.
The house was laid out in a line of rooms
that opened onto a long veranda. The kitchen and dining room were
opposite each other on either side of a short open air hall that became
the veranda. The bedrooms and the library were at the other end.
None of the rooms were air conditioned because it didn’t get hot enough
for that. There are a lot of active volcanoes in the Guatemalan Highlands.
The climate is tropical highlands, which means that it is beautiful almost
every day of the year. The whole area is like a little piece of paradise.
The people suffer through severe poverty, but it obviously hadn’t touched
Raphael. He was a member of the elite, the landowning intelligentsia.
Raphael had two older daughters, one of whom
was very beautiful. Even at that age I longed to be with her.
She spent hours teaching me the basics of Spanish. She was so pretty
when she smiled. I did my best to learn quickly because she liked
that. I felt so removed from the world that I knew. It was
a cultural shock. Even her smile didn’t make it go all the way away.
We travelled to all the ruins in the area,
and to the far west, near the Pacific. There is a breathtaking lake
in the west called Tenochtitlan. There was a colony of English speaking
Hippies there. Everywhere we went I saw beautiful textiles and Indian
art. I bought many fine things to take back home.
Even though I had been homesick I was really
sorry to leave. I did not want to go back home. On the plane
I took advantage of the thirteen year old drinking age and ordered several
scotch and cokes (I didn’t know that drink was frowned on by connoisseurs…
I was too young to know). I was drunk when my father picked me up
at the airport in New Orleans. I missed a lot of school because I
was late coming home. They tried to hold me back a year, but my father
had a talk with them and they let me get away with it. I dreamed
about being in Guatemala for years after I got home.
***
My father and I went hunting a lot. He
had been a hunter all his life. He was a very good shot. He
taught me how to hunt because, he said, it was a very important part of
man's heritage. I appreciated all of the things my father taught
me about being a man, even if most of them were chauvinistic, and condemned
by the egalitarianism of modern society. My father was so progressive
about so many things, but about others he was very old fashioned.
Guns were one of the things he was old fashioned about. He was vehemently
opposed to gun control. I followed in his footsteps for a while when
it came to guns and hunting. Although drugs eventually cost me everything,
when I was a teenager I was a fantastic shot with a rifle. I would
no more have sold one of the guns he gave me than chop off one of my hands.
We hunted all over Louisiana. I learned
all of the ethics and safety concerns of hunting because if I slipped he
became very angry. I didn’t like that. I also learned the techniques
and the strategy behind successful hunting. I can honestly say that
it helped me more in life than high school science ever did. I began
hunting when I was eight. I didn’t stop until I was too caught up
in sex and drugs to do anything worthwhile.
***
From a very early age I devoured books like a fire devours paper. I learned a lot from books, far more than I usually learned in school. My father didn’t like the kinds of books I read (escapist fantasy and science fiction). Nevertheless, that genre gave me an advanced vocabulary and an active imagination. I started writing a little poetry before I was ten years old. By the time I was a junior in high school all I wanted to do with my life was be a writer. At first a lot of the poetry I wrote was for the girls I loved. As I got older I decided to write only for myself. By the time I reached college I considered writing my art form. Today I know that no one can take away from me that which I have already completed. If I weren’t extremely antisocial and introverted, and if I cared about money, I probably would have tried to publish something by now, but, you see, I don’t believe in any of those things. I couldn’t give a damn if it ever gets published because I believe the human spirit lives forever. I believe that all of the good and bad things you do follow you for an eternity. I write for my spirit, and the rest of thje spirits of the world’s dead. One day all of us ghosts will sit around and have a discussion about my plot flaws and characterization weaknesses. We’ll have a very long time to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of what I have written after I am dead. I don’t believe living humans are worth my time, unless they happen to be very attractive females. So now you know just how shallow and hypocritical an author can be. I will tell you that all of my beliefs and ideals are subject to change on a moment’s notice if it will help my chances of having sex with someone beautiful. And wow, I said exactly what I meant.