BIG FOOT by Peter Nolan Smith

In 1977 I moved out of my SRO room in Greenwich Village to the East Village with my hillbilly girlfriend. The third-floor walk-up on East 10th Street had a bathtub in the kitchen and a water closet off the living room. I carved Alice's name on the wooden window sill. We lasted until 1979. The lack of privacy was not to blame for our break-up.

Alice rented a bigger place on Avenue A and I kept the apartment, working at various nightclubs the next ten years. It was easy money and drinks were free.

I rode a 1964 Triumph Tiger and 1970 Yamaha 650 XS. My mechanic was Dmitri from the East 6th Street Bike Shop. The Russian emigre introduced me to Tim, who owned a bar south of the Holland Tunnel. The Californian had a Ducati and Norton. Our bikes were the loves of our lives, for neither of us had girlfriends.

Tim and I traded nights cooking dinner for each other, after which we would play gin rummy. He was a better cook and I was lucky at cards as long as the play didn’t involved money. Dmitri joked that we were man and wife. It was only funny the first time that the mechanic said it.

When Tim mentioned to a neighbor living farther into Alphabet City that I had been brought up outside of Portland, Maine the middle-aged woman extended an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at their tenement building and I showed up on time with flowers at their building between Avenues B and C.

It was a cold night and a huddle of vagrant junkie warmed themselves around a trash an fire. The north side of the street was dominated by a row of abandoned buildings and rats lurked in the shadows. I checked the block for trouble and pressed the buzzer.

A scrawny Puerto Rican opened the door and pointed to a narrow set of stairs.

"Top floor." His voice was dusty with dope.

I climbed the steps past offices and bedrooms. The decor was late-20th Century suburbia, as if this one family had failed to heed the call for White Flight in the 60s.

Jane and Carmine were older than the rest of their guests; an ironworker from Montana, an anti-Zionist writer, a female cop from the shooting range, a marine historian from the Natural History Museum, Tim, and me.

Their two kids were high school age.

Neither the tall boy nor the skinny girl looked much like Jane, who could have passed for a Mormon diesel dyke at the Cubby Hole in the West Village in her calico dress, but they didn't bear much resemblance to their bald cigar-chomping father.

Carmine wasn't a pretty sight in his tobacco-stained tee-shirt and baggy jeans and judging from the thickness of his glasses I doubted that the thick-bellied ex-merchant marine saw any reason to shave his scruffy beard.

"So this is my fellow Mainiac." Jane hugged me, as if we had been separated at birth, and handed me a full glass of red wine. It was a pricey Barolo. "Where are you from?"

"Falmouth Foresides." My town was across the harbor from Portland’s Eastern Promenade.

"That’s almost like coming from Massachusetts." Jane elbowed Tim in the ribs. "I'm from Columbia Falls in Aroostock County, which is the last place God created before his rest."

"Way Down East." I had never been there. The nearest city was Ellsworth, the gateway to Bar Harbor. "Only Lubec is farther Down East."

"You do know Maine."

"Then you know Maine has the ugliest women in New England." Carmine stashed his unlit cigar in the top pocket of his shirt. He sucked on his teeth and the upper deck came loose from the gums. His physical warranty had lapsed on several parts of his body.

"Thank you." Jane seemed inured to this remark. “And there isn't anyone Down East uglier than you."

"But they try." Carmine smiled without his upper teeth. He could never be a Christmas Santa, but that grin showed a streak of humanity more deeply-seeded than his hard facade.

"The key to triumph is in the first syllable," I said without hesitation.

"It’s not everyone who can quote a Salada tea bag, you sit next to me.”

During the dinner of turkey, yams, pea, creamed onions, turnips, squash, and more wine Jane recounted her history.

"After graduating from University of Maine I had moved to New York to become a beatnik." She looked to the head of the table. "Instead I met Carmine at a poetry reading."

"It was Ginsberg’s queer lover reciting MARRIAGE 'O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded 
just wait to get at the drinks and food."

I applauded his memory.

"Sounds almost like this dinner." Carmine carved the bird with a vengeance. The inner cavity was stuffed with raison, nuts, and garlic.

"Now you see why I married him." Jane beamed at the first generation Sicilian. The two opposites were very much in love, but the cigar-chomping plumber regarded Jane's friends as weirdos and growled, "I feel like I’m serving turkey at a Bowery shelter."

"Shut up, old man. This is Thanksgiving, not Pearl Harbor Day."

"I know what day it is."

"My younger brother was born on December 7." The juicy turkey smelled of over the river and through the woods, even though the only trees in the East Village were shivering in Tompkins Square Park

"In 1941?" He was looking for the right answer.

"No, 1960." I could only give him the truth.

"You want white meat or dark?"

"Both."

"What do you know about Pearl Harbor?" Carmine loaded my plate with meat and passed it down the table.

"Just that none of our carriers were sunk there?" I had minored in history at university. "And we were lucky that the Japanese hadn't carry out a third attack."

"They couldn't, because the returning planes would have had to land at night and no one knew how to do that.”" Carmine showed his knowledge of that Day of Infamy, then finished serving the rest of his guests, after which we ate to our hearts' content. I pushed away from the table and undid my belt. The third helping had been overkill.

Waiting for desserts we discussed the 1948 Israeli-Arab War with his friend Ira. The slouched contrarian believed that the Zionist State shouldn't exist until the arrival of the Messiah. If anyone knew weirdos, it was Carmine.

For post-dinner entertainment Carmine put on THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY followed by EL TOPO. We lounged around the cool glow of the holiday TV in turkey comas.

Carmine mumbled stories about the East Village from the 50s interspersed with racial epitaphs. The marine historian's girlfriend called him racist.

Rick defended his pseudo-uncle. Racism was a serious accusation.

"Carmine is an equal hater of everyone." Tim knew that Carmine supported a number of blacks and Puerto Ricans. His bad mouth was a shock to squares. Their disapproval gave him great pleasure.

"That's right. I don't have a good word to say about anyone.

Carmine lifted from his chair and motioned for me to follow him into his den. The ground-floor room smelled of old cigars and dirty feet. War books covered the walls. I picked out THE ENEMY AT THE GATE.

"What do you know about Stalingrad?" He was testing me.

"Just that in 1944 DeGaulle came to the ruined city and said to a Free French journalist, "Stalingrad, they are great people." The journalist replied with a nod, "Yes, the Russians.”" DeGaulle corrected him by saying, "Not the Russians. The Germans, because they got this far."

"Where you read that?"

“I think John Tolland’s book on Hitler.”

"You’re not as stupid as you look, scumbag."

After that dinner Carmine and I saw each other from time to time, trading war history books. I gave him GUNS OF AUGUST and he let me borrow ENEMY AT THE GATES.

The East Village native had learned pipe-fitting in the Merchant Marines. Plumbers from the five boroughs sought his advice. Carmine had pull with City Hall. The connections were a gift from his father. The old man had been a bookie.

Tim met a lovely jeweler from the Upper West Side. He moved out of the neighborhood. I was on my own. Dmitri called it a trial separation, but I knew the split was for keeps.

Tim was in love and I inherited his role as surrogate nephew for Jane, although at holiday time he resumed # 1 position at the table. He was family more than me.

She had me drive her to dog shows. They raised Neapolitans and grand mastiffs. Carmine and I dined at a small Italian restaurant on 1st Avenue. The two of us drank red wine and ate pasta, arguing over Lee's second invasion of the North versus the relief of Vicksburg or the British surrender at Singapore. One night he looked around the dining room and asked in a low voice, "Can you hold your sand?"

"I know when to keep my mouth shut." I had been arrested for working at an illegal after-hour club. The precinct cops had been on the take. I had said nothing to Internal Affairs.

"Good, then I have a proposition for you."

He lowered his head and mumbled like the FBI might have wiretapped the restaurant. His scheme didn't sound risky and I agreed to help him in a venture. We kept Aunt Jane and Tim out of the loop

Every month I dropped over to his cluttered office and handed him an envelope. He never counted the money.

Around that time I stopped the nightclubs and worked as a diamond salesman on 47th Street. Uncle Carmine bought jewelry with his extra earnings. He became a fixture in my life along with his wife.

Jane had tickets to the opera and Rangers game.

"I got another proposition for you," Carmine mentioned the next autumn. We were heading out to the cheap Italian restaurant on 1st Avenue. "Jane needs someone to go with her to the hockey games and opera."

"Ranger games?" I was pure Boston, but also loved the slash of steel blades on ice.

"They're good seats." Carmine played with the end of his cigar. It hadn’t been lit once. "But if you want to go to the hockey games, then you got to go to the opera, because I ain’t going to neither."

"Opera?" I hadn't ever seen any opera.

"Yes, opera. You can be the old lady’s walker." He laughed to himself, as we left the house.

"The Lower East Side ain't no Palm Beach." 11th Street between B and C had no palm trees.

"Don’t I know that."

I wasn't too sure of this accommodation until I saw that the Rangers were playing the Bruins at home. Jane was adamant about Carmine's deal. "One hockey game. One opera."

"I don’t know." Fat people sang forever.

"Bruins-Rangers at Madison Square Garden and Pavarotti at Lincoln Center. It won't be so bad."

"Which comes first?"

"The opera." She was too smart to play it the other way around. "And I want you to wear a jacket and tie. I'll pay the taxi. You have ten seconds."

"I'll go." I loved the Bruins that much.

I picked up Aunt Jane on East 11th Street and Avenue D. I was wearing a dark-blue pinstriped suit from Jaeger. Aunt Jane was in a flowing gown and a battered mink, which her husband called 'dog'. We exited from the building.

The dealers on the street said about us. Aunt Jane's husband had taught them better. Uncle Carmine had laws unwritten by courts.

A taxi took us far uptown. The crowd before Lincoln Center was excited like it was a Who concert. I searched the crowd for a pretty face. The women were wrinkled as turtles and Aunt Jane at 55 was the youngest in our section.

The seats were good and made myself comfortable. Aunt Jane elbowed me with the power of a defenseman’s forecheck. "No, snorting or sighing. This is something special and I wanted it to be for you as much as me."

I had never heard of Pavarotti, but when the curtain raised, the audience wildly shouted his name. The big man appeared in the first act. His strong voice was on the money. Aunt Jane was crying, because it was so beautiful. I didn't look at my watch once and when the first act ended, Aunt Jane asked, "Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

"No, how more acts are there?" The first had lasted about 40 minutes.

"Three, but each gets shorter."

"Three." Heaven would become purgatory somewhere in the second and hell during the third.

"Don't worry, let’s get some champagne."

"Champagne?"

"Yes, you didn't think I'd let you stay sober that long, did you?"

"You know what I like." And the rest of the evening passed pleasantly with each intermission celebrated at the bar. Pavarotti received a standing ovation for about ten minutes. I shouted like he had scored a hat trick.

Carmine lent me his station wagon to visit my mother during her last days. Jane lit candles at the local church for her passing. It was good having about family in your life, especially since mine was distant.

Tim and his wife had a baby, then another. Jane called herself their grand-aunt. Carmine thought that his wife was a kook, but wanted to buy her a pearl necklace for Christmas. I found one of South Sea pearls. It wasn't cheap.

"How much you make on me?" He was eating his cigar.

"50%." The real number was 10%

"Thanks, scumbag." Carmine meant nothing by calling me 'scumbag'. He called people who he didn't like a lot worse. We had a profitable run of scores. Only a few of them skated across the line. We never got in trouble. It was a good sideline to my day job.

I thought that the old man would live forever, except in the mid-90s he started complaining about a stomach ache. He refused every entreaty to submit to a doctor’s examination. I supplied stomach medicine with fake scripts. The pills helped a little bit, but not much, because Carmine had something worse than a stomach ache. Neither of us said what.

In 2000 I left for my annual trip to Asia and Carmine said, "You take care."

He handed me a small envelope. It felt like money.

"What’s this?"

"You have a good time in Bangkok for me. I was there in the 50s. It was a good time then and it's probably a good time now."

"Why don’t you come with me?"

"And leave all this.” He waved his hand in the air. “I already been everywhere. Just don't go crazy, scumbag."

Two months later I received a phone call at room 302 at the Malaysia Hotel.

It was Aunt Jane.

"Carmine’s dead."

"Dead, you want me to come back?" I was only a little shocked by the news.

"No, he’d want you to have a good time, but we're burying on October 12th.

"Columbus Day."

"He wasn’t Italian.”

“Carmine's father came from Sicily."

"Not Carmine, Columbus. Carmine always said he was a Jew from Genoa."

“Everyone comes from somewhere.” Aunt Jane actually was a Jewish orphan from Russia. A doctor in Maine had taken her brother and her for his own.

"We’re planting him in the blueberry patch above Schoonic Bay. I'd like you to be there. He liked the view from the hill."

"I’ll be there." I scheduled my return for late-September. The flight stopped in LA. I continued on to New York. My subleasee, a Swedish male nurse, had cleaned the place before leaving. Everything seemed to be in order.

I dropped my bags on the floor and walked two blocks over to Jane’s compound. Carmine had bought two buildings and a vacant lot for $15,000 back in the early 70s. The property was now worth millions.

Jane gave me a big hug and said, "Carmine wanted you to have some books.”

The best were 1st editions of TRUE GRIT, NAKED LUNCH, and THE ENEMY AT THE GATE.

"You're going to help drive up to Maine?" Jane sat down heavily. She was not in the best of health.

"Wouldn’t miss it." This trip would be a home-coming for both of us complete with lobsters and a funeral. She opened the closet in Carmine’s office and held out a ceramic urn.

'The old man." Two identical urns were in the closet.

“And the other two?”

"Those are the dogs. Carmine wanted to be buried with them."

No markings were written on the urns to distinguish them from each other. Jane saw my eyes and said, "No, I don't know which ones are which."

"Never said you didn't." Jane was almost as near-sighted as me.

We went to dinner at the Italian restaurant and she outlined the funeral arrangements.

Burial was planned for atop a blueberry hill. Family consisted of Jane, her son and daughter. The latter two were not on speaking terms.

Tim, Steve the iron worker, Carmine’s workmates, and Ira the anti-Zionist would present a strange gathering for Schoonic Point any time of the year, but Jane said, "We'll be welcome. It's off-season."

Two days before Columbus Day our convoy took off from the East Village under overcast skies. The rain held off throughout the journey.

We stopped in Brunswick for lobster rolls at the Chamberlain Inn. Tim and Steve were enthralled with the Maine delicacy. It meant more to Jane and me.

Maine was home and every mile was more like heaven. Pine trees lining US 1 broke open on long coves linked to the sea. The foliage was a little past prime, but the crisp air was champagne from Canada.

Jane had picked Ellsworth for our stay. The hotel was on the strip leading to Bar Harbor. The road had seen hundreds of thousand customers this summer. The rooms had yet to stop vibrating from the vacationers' comings and goings.

"Nothing is open in Schoonic Point this time of year."

She distributed room keys. This trip was on Carmine. We had a great lobster at the bridge leading to Bar Harbor. The pound was closing after this weekend. The lobsters were soft-shelled and delectable. We agreed that Carmine had made the right choice about being buried in Maine. Anything was better than some hole in Queens.

Upon re-entering Ellsworth, Jane said, "I checked out the bars for you and Steve."

"What about me?" Tim was married with a kid.

"You’re a good boy." Jane turned to us. Steve was divorced and I was perennially single. "There’s one that's a fern bar and the other that is always in the police reports. I'm not letting you drive, but here's a twenty for the taxi."

We said our good-nights and headed to the fern bar. It was good for a single drink. The same taxi took us to the bad boy bar. The driver told us to watch out for the girls.

"They like strangers."

Steve and I stood outside. Loud rock music blasted under neon lights. We had drunk beers on more than one occasion and he knew my tastes as well as Maine's reputation for the ugliest girls in the USA.

"You can have all the skinny ugly ones and I'll have all the fat cute ones."

"It's a deal."

He opened the door and then shut it.

"What about the Big Foots?"

A she-man grabbed him before he could explain his comment. The two women dragged is inside the bar and was immediately set upon by a large woman. Steve was dancing to Deep Purple with a 200 pound-plus human version of a moose in heat. She wore size 14 boots. The men at the bar appeared relieved to drink without any female interference.

We were new meat.

Steve shouted one word. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew the word was 'help'. The faces on the men at the bar said that we were on our own. They were wrong. We were with the Big Feet.

We stayed three beers too many and were driven back to the hotel in a van loaded with four seriously masculine women in flannel shirts. Steve was groping one of them and whispered, "I'm checking to make sure they don’t have any dildos."

"Dildos?" Steve’s date asked with a smile. She wasn't just trying to scare us.

The Big Foot women were talking dirty. Sex was a Sumo wrestling event. I told them that we couldn't do anything and they said, "Date rape."

Their station wagon braked before our rooms. Hands unbuttoned my shirt. Steve was dragged out of the car. We were doomed, until Jane appeared in a celestial nightgown.

"Leave those two men alone. They're with me."

"Gigolos," they muttered, reluctantly letting go of us. Jane stood her ground until they left the room and then asked with a smile, “You boys have fun.”

"Yeah." We were glad to have escaped Big Feet’s grasp.

"I'm sure Carmine would appreciate it, now go to bed. We have a busy day tomorrow."

She was right. We buried Carmine without a priest on a blueberry hill overlooking Schoonic Bay. The sun came out as we lowered the urns into the earth. Jane cried and her children hugged her. They almost seemed like a family.

The post-funeral lunch was in a small restaurant and two of the waitresses were from last night’s Big Foot tribe. Work clothes tamed their savage side and they made no sign of recognizing us. We gave them a good tip.

Jane couldn't help but tell Tim about last night's scene and he was happy to tell everyone in the East Village that Steve and I had mated with moose.

Jane knew the truth, but said, "It's funnier the way he tells it and Carmine would like that ending too."

I had to agree with Aunt Jane, for Carmine was the kind of Uncle only a Big-Footed woman could love and Jane loved him forever. After all she was from the Great State of Maine.

The Elegance of the Wampanoags

The Wampanoags were not the savages.

The people of the dawn were near extinction from a bacterial infection carried the settlers and wars with the Micmacs and Pequots.

Despite these calamities the natives living near the Plymouth supposedly helped the Pilgrims celebrated a good harvest in 1621.

The event is poorly documented by the colonists, but the legend lives in the minds of Americans as a cherished moment of peace between the Old America and the New.

Within forty years the Wampanoags would suffer through the King Philip War.

Only 400 survived the fighting.

They sought refuge on Martha's Vinyard.

Today the Wampanoags number almost 2000.

I know one.

Big Ralph.

6-8.

A big man.

Wampanoag and proud of it.

Happy to be alive.

And me too, because I'm half-Irish.

Happy Turkey Day.

One and all.

Times Square Redux

Since the onset of Covid in March 2021 New York has been cut off from the rest of the world and also the USA. Americans were scared by the reports of crime and foreigners were banned from flying to JFK, however in the last months the restrictions have been downgraded to allow vaccinated international travelers to enter the States.

On Friday my godson Edward Brial arrived at JFK airport en route to visit his girlfriend studying at Cornell. He was traveling to Ithaca by bus and we met at the Port Authority once the most wicked bus terminals in America. I was surprised by the sheer volume of people coming to New York and departing for destinations near and far. Times were changing, although I preferred the void of last winter, when the city began to us again. That desolation never never destined to last long.

We had time to kill and I suggested he may a beer.

"You're not bothered by my drinking."

"Not at all. It's been over a hundred days since my last drink and I'm quits." I haven't had the least urge to reclaim by life as a hard drinker. My life depends on this strict regime and I was happy just to be with Edward, who called me the Brown Ranger in his youth. We chose the Beer Authority. Ed had a draft and I ordered a cranberry juice. He had just been in Glasgow attending the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

"There was a lot of hope, but the corporations have no interest in stopping their rape of the planet."

"Sadly the vast majority of people reject any action that would result in the end of cars and potato chips. The entire capitalist system has been ruined by the shifting of industry to Asia. We have no factories. No industry and no control over the production of everything other than more pollution. Everyone wants to think they are not the problem and that type of thinking is a barrier to a real solution. World population 2050. 500 million."

Edward shared the hope of his generation. He didn't need to hear my pessimism and I changed to subject to my coming to London to be the writer-in-residence at Goodenough University for the Head Chancellor, my good freind Alice Walpole. His departure was scheduled for 6 and we walked over to the bus station. I was surprised to see an advertising poster for XXX films and books at the stairs leading to the entrance of the A Train.

Edward took a photo of me and I explained that Mayor Guiliani had closed most of these shops to allow Disney and various other family-flavored franchises to replace the streets of sin, but not the 300 Video Center, where time resisted the will of an evil Mayor.

As the Spanish director Luis Bunuel once said, "There is no pleasure without sin."

And while I have stop drinking 100%, I might participate in some wickedness in the months to come.

Nothing like his film BELLE DU JOUR with Catherine Denevue.

The Ghosts Of Time Square

Throughout 70s and 80s the Times Square thrived as a haven for XXX theaters, go-go girls, pimps, whore houses, rent boys, hustlers, thieves, dealers, and lowlifes on the make.

Police and city authorities declared the area as DMZ for crime and sex and the 1977 debut of Show World across 42nd Street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal was the high-water mark for Times Square's Era of Errors.

Successive mayors attempted to clean up 42nd Street, but the Mafia-owned establishments relied on the Free Speech Amendment to protect their wicked fiefdom. Finally in 1995 Rudy Giuliani enacted in radical adult zoning laws and the Deuce's magnificent wickedness ended the following year with the closure of every XXX theaters and porno shops.

I happened to be walking on West 42nd Street on that rainy day in 1987.

Aficionados of perversity cried on the sidewalk, as the moving crews loaded their salacious merchandise onto trucks. Urban planners had rented spaces to major retailers and restaurants, including Disney. The disgrountled XXX patrons stood outside in tears chanting, "Fuck Mickey Mouse."

Later that evening a friend of mine lamented the disappearance of Times Square.

"NYC has been thrown into a blender and homogenized into a bland and boring urban pastiche. This city once had character and disparate neighborhoods. Now it's just numbingly the same wherever you go. I was driving around the city yesterday and occurred to me that downtown-uptown, west-east, it all looked the same now. Same store fronts, same hideous developer apartment buildings, same gourmet coffee, same gentrifications, same same shame."

My friend wasn't speaking about egg creams and luncheonettes, although those hallowed institutions have been replaced by Starbucks and Burger King.

While Times Square's wickedness disappeared like the Wicked Witch of the West melting in the WIZARD OF OZ, we still retain our memories.

Divine Wickedness.

ps Fuck Guiliani.

THE END OF TOMORROW By Peter Nolan Smith - Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The November sun flashed off a West Village window and the wavering reflection stalked the Christopher Street pier to a lone youth tuning a battered guitar. His skin pallor rivaled the paleness of the rising moon and no suburban mall stocked his ripped black leather jacket, torn T-shirt, or battered engineer boots, but the blonde leather boy broke into a sly smile, as the sapphire shimmer transformed the twenty year-old into a fallen angel regaining his halo.

Nearly every mother and father in America would have ordered their children to avoid this aberration of the Nation's Bicentennial Spirit. Most teenagers were born to obey their parents' command, but a few were destined to answer the divine temptation, especially once the guitarist slashed the steel strings of his Les Paul.

Picking out chords Johnny Darling repeated the song in his head, then shut his eyes to envision a small stage. The overhead lighting enveloped a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. A teenage Lolita rasped words of love and no tomorrows in imitation of the Velvet Underground's Nico. The imagined feedback of Marshall Amps buzzed in his ears and the audience almost materialized within his eyelids.

"Hey, man."

A young boy's voice shattered Johnny's trance.

This time of night only gay bashers and leather freaks frequented the derelict docks. None of them were dangerous, but the guitarist waited for the last chords to fade before slipping his hand inside his jacket for his knife before turning to address the intruder.

It was Frankie.

The Puerto Rican teenager in a distressed leather jacket was two inches shorter than Johnny and his slanted eyes hinted the taint of Chinese blood and Times Square johns found Frankie Domingo pretty, despite the scars crisscrossing his seventeen year-old body.

"Thanks for letting me finish?"

"I been waiting thirty minutes."

A gust of wind blew a shank of greased hair across Frankie's face.

"That a new song?"

"Just three chords strung together." Johnny thumbed his calloused fingertips.

"Doesn't get more basic than that." Frankie rattled off a drum roll with frayed sticks. "I snagged these from Jerry Nolan at Max's Kansas City last night."

"How were the Heartbreakers?" Johnny had skipped last night's show to entertain a customer.

"Great and they got paid $100 each." Frankie hunched his shoulders against a frigid gust and added, "When we gonna have a band again?"

“Now I have my guitar back, we can audition for the other members."

Frankie stepped from side to side. A cold damp seeped through his sneakers' paper-thin soles and he stammered, "Johnny, you have ten dollars?"

"I gave the pawnshop my last fifty." Johnny slapped his guitar.

"Damn, I wish we could get out of here." Frankie moaned like a runaway in need of a dime to phone home.

"To go where?"

"What about Florida?" Frankie glanced south, as if the Sunshine State lay beyond the New Jersey docks. "How far away is it? Five hours?"

"More like twenty four by car."

"What about by plane?" The young Puerto Rican's teeth chattered at a 10/10 beat.

"Where are we getting the money for two plane tickets?"

"We could hijack a plane. Tell them to give us a million dollars like in DOG DAY AFTERNOON?" Frankie had seen that movie five times on 42nd Street and pumped his fist in the air.

"Attica, Attica."

"Aren't you forgetting how the cops shot Pacino's friend in the head?"

"Movies aren't real."

"DOG DAY AFTERNOON was based on a real bank robbery."

"It was?"

"Yeah."

"Your parents live in Florida. If you called them, they might wire you money to come home."

"Sure, we catch a bus now and tomorrow night we be eating my Mom's homemade apple pie."

"I love apple pie." Frankie licked his lips.

"Only two problems." Johnny gestured toward Manhattan.

"Don't say what I think you're going to say."

"Firstly Ratzo Rizzo died on the bus to Florida in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and number two I'm not leaving this behind."

"Fuck this city?" Frankie chucked the battered drumsticks into the Hudson. "All I have here are hustles, an empty stomach, waking with the smell of old man's hands on my skin, and you don't have it much better."

Johnny stuck the guitar into its case and walked toward the elevated highway.

Frankie trailed behind him.

"I ran away from Florida for the same reason you want to run away from New York." Johnny stopped on the curb of West Street and turned to Frankie. "Me and you will make it here as rock stars."

"But not tonight." Frankie kicked an empty beer can into the gutter.

"No, not tonight." Johnny couldn't lie to Frankie. "Tomorrow Max's will serve a turkey feast for us punk orphans."

"And what about tonight?" Frankie could handle anything as long as he was with Johnny.

"Tonight we go to work." The uptown light on West Street changed to green and suburb-bound cars accelerated to match the synchronized signals.

"53rd and 3rd?" Frankie had had his fill of the sissies at those piano bars.

"No, we're not competing with midnight cowboys tonight."

"The docks?"

Across the street men prowled the sidewalks in search of nameless sex. A few lurked between the trucks parked underneath the elevated highway. How they were celebrating the night before Thanksgiving was no mystery.

"They never pay, because they get whatever they want for free."

"So it's Times Square?" Frankie sighed with resignation.

"The Strip is all about luck."

"With luck being heads I win, tails you lose and never give a sucker a break."

"That's the game there and everywhere. How I look?" Johnny slung the case’s strap over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his torn leather jacket.

"Like a prince." Frankie blew on his numb hands.

"Where anyone from Jerome Avenue see a prince?"

"My grandmother read me fairy tales. They really have princes and princesses?"

"Real as you and me, except they were born in a palace." A chill air scrapped over Johnny's right lung like a boat striking a reef.

"You meet one?" Frankie was oblivious to his friend's discomfort.

"Not this side of the silver screen." Johnny fought off the rasp, figuring his 'jones' was knocking on the door. "Princes and princesses are like any suckers. We meet one and what we do?"

"We take them for everything." Frankie snapped his fingers.

"And leave them begging for more." The ache faded from Johnny's chest and he draped his arm over the younger boy. "Just one more thing."

"I know what you’re going to say. For me not to trust anyone."

"Rule # 1 in New York." Times Square killed people who broke that rule and he turned to Frankie. "That means me too."

"I’m a big boy." Frankie’s childhood had revealed the worst of what the New York had to offer the young.

"Then let’s head uptown." Johnny dashed onto West Street. "Watch out, Johnny."

Two taxis swerved to avoid hitting the guitarist.

"For what? I'll live forever," Johnny shouted from the other side of the street, because believing in anything other than his immortality would have been a sacrilege, at least until he reached twenty-one and that birthday was more than a year away and a year was an eternity when you were only twenty.

To read more of THE END OF TOMORROW, please go to the following URL

$6.99 on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HYEMNM8

NOVEMBER 10, 1978 - JOURNAL ENTRY - EAST VILLAGE

Alice's show at Club 57 was a su

Alice's show at Club 57 was a success thanks to Tom Scully and his bony evil girlfriend, as the first performers their high school drama shows with the same lack of talent, but accompanied by twisted reworkings of old dramatic ghost. None of the troupe, not even Alice has asked me to perform, even though I have scores of badly-written poems in my journals. Susan considered me a 'drunken bully'.

The audience applauded the singers and I sat at the bar with Alex, a recent Polish Emigre and co-manager of the club and the bartender. Josef looked at the stage and laughed, "America is the best. Freedom like this you do not get in Poland."

I downed two bourbons before the second act. They hit me hard on an empty stomach. I had no money and hadn't eaten anything all day. I leaned into the bar and glimmered into a time warp away from the present, the fags and punks, who proudly see themselves as the true culture of America. I agree with them. I hate the suburbs. I barely noticed the second act. Alice glowered at me. She hates my drinking. At least I don't pass out everywhere like a hillbilly Girl Scout. Not that it matters to me as long as she gets home safe.

The second act must have good. People were requesting an encore. Despite our rejection of Capitalism and Church and all our hometown beliefs, everyone in Club 57 dreams to be a star and a STAR in big letters performing before thousands.

I needed air. A holocaust was brewing in my head. I staggered through the crowd, remembering the date.

November 10.

Forty years ago the Nazis persecuted the German Jews, as the police watched the carnage by the stormtroopers.

Kristellnacht or Crystal Night.

"Never again." could happen anywhere in the world against the Jews or any race or tribe. No one at Club 57 cared about the past other than those they were trying to escape and they rejected any history, unless it the study of theater or movies. Lance Loud from the Mumps stood at the door. I love this band. He grabbed me and said, "Isn't her great?"

He meant my friend Klaus who was signing an aria.

"Yes, he's more than great."

Outside I sat on the steps and at the end of the show watched the happy crowd stream from the basement club to other bars around the East Village. I had no one and lit a joint to enter the void alone. Explorers always relish desolation, even sexual adventurers.

LATER

Never again. The Jews reject any forgiveness of the Germans, but drive Mercedes-Benz, while persecute the Palestinians thousand of years after their living in the Levant. The Nazis are old men in their sixties, having failed their mission seek to create a new generation of followers through the skinheads, KKK, and right-wing fanatics.

No Bookee No Fuckee

Throughout the centuries the Vatican has maintained an Index of Prohibited Books comprised of proscribed authors such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John Locke, and Galileo. Nazi Germany extolled the SA and SS and Hitler Youth for submitting offensive and subversive books to bonfires. America has long been a bastion of banned books and publishers were guaranteed a sales surge by any tome with BANNED IN BOSTON emblazoned across the book sleeve. Presently the country still upholds the tradition of demonizing the books and reading.

In 2008 the Washington Independent published a list of Top 10 Banned Books in America based on the American Library Association's findings of the book most requested to be withdrawn from a library along with the reasons.

1. AND TANGO MAKES THREE by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson Synopsis: Tango, an orphan puffin at the New York City zoo, is taken in by a loving penguin couple — both male. Reasons: sexism, homosexuality, anti-family, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group 2. THE CHOCOLATE WAR by Robert Cormier Reasons: sexually explicit, offensive language, violence 3. OLIVE OCEAN by Kevin Henkes Reasons: sexually explicit, offensive language 4. THE GOLDEN COMPASS” by Philip Pullman Reasons: religious viewpoint 5. THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain Reasons: racism 6. THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker Reasons: homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language 7. TTYL” by Lauren Myracle Reasons: sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group 8. I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou Reasons: sexually explicit 9. IT'S PERFECTLY NORMAL” by Robie Harris Reasons: sex education, sexually explicit 10. THE PERKS OF BEING NORMALS OF ” by Stephen Chbosky Reasons: homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language, unsuited to age group

I haven't read most of the books on this list, however I was glad to see that Huckleberry Finn hasn't lost its dubious reputation, but actually I'm surprised that Americans even bother to ban books anymore, since many of the houses that I have visited in recent times are devoid of books.

The only reading material are magazines in the bathrooms and the only reading by these householders seems to be that of a text.

We are living in very illiterate times, where opinions are formed en masse like jello casseroles quivering on a picnic table. What people know they know thanks to the talking heads of TV telling them what to know, so they can say they know something and we fight for the right to tell you that they know what they know, so they can challenge anything to might say by asking, "Where you hear that?"

"I didn't hear that anywhere. I read it."

"Read it? In what?"

"A book." You call tell them the title, but they suspect that you're lying since real people don't have the time to read books, unless they're welfare cheats or commie teachers retired on a pension.

Books are deemed useless by the masses.

Owning book speaks of evil for the Despicables.

According to Baptists reading them leads to Satan's backyard.

Thus lives America as the Land of the Unread, because books will endanger whatever you are told to know.

Illiterati of the Modern Age # 1

Back in the early 1960s I attended a good Catholic grammar school on the South Shore of Boston. Dyslexia was considered a sign of the Devil by the Nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills along with writing with the left or sinister hand. The inability to decode words has been declared incurable by various speech and reading therapy experts and I have to admit that they are probably right. I read the page from the outside in and my typing matches my consonant mispronunciations; gh distorts to hg ad infinitum. I can not read a poet aloud without changing the sentences to suit my impediments, but friends and family emails from the Internet have proven that people aren't dyslexic, then they are horrible spellers and grammarians. Their illiteracy had risen to a new level unrivaled since the Dark Ages, when there were only 3 books in all of Christendom.

The Bible and two holy treatises on pornography.

One male and one female with a small pamphlet for the perverse.

But little concern needs be shed about this collapse of intelligence.

You only have to read the following to understand why we no longer need geniuses. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Like I said who ndees samrts?

Thankfully none of us have to read porn.

Modern American Illiteracy # 2

After a four-day stay at NYU Hospital in August I was signed out for release. I dressed in my street clothing, thanked the staff for their care, and descended by elevator to the ground-floor to hit the streets. I spotted a gift store in the main lobby and stopped to get a newspaper or a book having read Cookie Mueller's collection of short stories WALKING THROUGH CLEAR WATER IN A POOL PAINTED BLACK as well as Tim Mohr's amazing history of punk under communism in the DDR.

I was shocked to discover the store offered no newspapers or novels other than coffee table books.

I caught the subway south to Chinatown and stopped in the 169 Bar.

Dakota was behind the bar and greeted me with a smile.

"How you feeling, old man?"

"A little tired, but otherwise not bad," I recounted everything in 100 words or less and ordered a cranberry juice and soda.

"So no more drinking?"

"Nothing if I want to live. It's been four days. The longest I've been sober since my climbing Kilimanjaro before the pandemic. Actually this was the first time I stayed in the hospital since my birth." I said nothing about my condition or future. I had a ways to go before I knew anything, but I mentioned about the gift store's lack of reading material, since Dakota is an avid reader."

"No books?"

"None."

We spoke about our favorite writers and poets; Hart Crane, James Elroy, George Orwell's DOWN AND OUT IN LONDON AND PARIS. The other drinkers at the bar failed to join in the conversation and I said aloud, "America is technically illiterate."

Two out-of-state slummers glared at me. They were in their 40s and one with glasses said with a Midwestern accent, "Everyone who isn't a foreigner knows how to read English and if not English most can read their own language."

"Actually the literacy rate in America is 79% according to Wikipedia." I had checked that site on the subway ride.

"Can't be!," his friend exclaimed and Dakota countered, "I'm a substitute teacher and most students in New York City are struggling with reading, although probably because of the curriculum of Shakespeare and English poetry."

The four of groaned remembering reading the Bard's plays.

"Worse was having to discuss the meaning of it all," said the first speaker, who introduced himself as Blair from Iowa.

"Enough to put you other drama for the rest of your life."

"On the train only a few people read books," said Dakota.

"But they all read and write on their phones."

"Badly." Text messaging has proved that not everyone can write, but they do understand the hieroglyphics of emojis.

"He's right. I can't remember the last time I read a book," admitted Blair's friend, "All the libraries near my town have been closed due to budget cuts and the book selection at Walmart is horrible, plus I don't have the time."

Dakota and I suggested books and I said, "New York's libraries are open, but there are much fewer books almost as if millions had been burned to make space with empty shelves. Even the main library at 42nd Street isn't what it was, because the trustees wanted to open a retail space in the stacks and removed most of the volumes to New Jersey or just shitcanned them."

"Like the crumbling books in the library in HG Wells' THE TIME MACHINE. The Eloi didn't read, because they didn't have to," said Blair about man's future. "We might be like them, but in the movie they were all beautiful blondes raised to feed the subterranean Morlock overlords."

"Ignorance is easier to achieve than enlightenment and oblivion even more so. Dakota let me buy these guys a drink. I can't anymore, so you're my designated drinkers."

They toasted HG Wells with well whiskey and the prurient value of old stroke books with beer.

I told them all about THE ITCH, Steven Hammer's masterful voyage through perversity on Olympia Press.

"I must have read it a thousand times."

"To THE ITCH."

"I just ordered it from Amazon. Thanks for the recommendation."

"My pleasure," I offered leaving the 169. I was heading back to Clinton Hill. I was looking forward to my own bed and a book between my hands leading me to sleep. Nothing too serious. Maybe Ian Fleming's THUNDERBALL. It's always good to read an old friend.

Chapter 1 - TAKE IT EASY, MR. BOND.

A WALK IN FOG by Peter Nolan Smith

On a murky November evening in 2011 I attended the opening of the "Dream' exhibition at Luxembourg's Mudam Museum. Madame l'Ambassador bailed early for a formal affair. I was not invited for the dinner.

"It's a diplomatic thingee." Madame l'Ambassador explained, as we walked through a thickening fog to the waiting Jaguar.

"I understand." A writer-in-residence had to accept his place in the scheme of world politics.

Francois the driver opened the right-hand rear door for Madame l'Ambassador. It was the safest seat in the car. He asked if I needed a lift back to the city.

The museum was located on the opposite side of the gorge running through the city. I had traversed it several times on foot and refused his offer.

"You go with Madame. I'll be fine." After all I am simply the guest writer.

I lingered at the soiree for another half hour. The crowd was young and artistic. The curator waved to me. The amiable Italian was chatting to an aristocratic couple in their 70s. Patrons of the museum were much more important than a well-unknown writer and I ordered a Duvel.

The bartender poured the triple-strength beer into a special glass with reverence. Mittel Europe worshipped its beers.

I leaned at the bar and studied the passing faces. The queue at the bar seemed contently unconcerned by the chaos of the Euro, then again Luxembourg has the highest individual income in Europe and even the poor are rich in comparison to America.

The first beer went down quick and I ordered a second. No one commented on the speed of my drinking. The grand duchy marked the highest beer consumption per capita in 1993 with an unbeatable score of seventeen beers for each man, woman, and child in the tiny country.

A light-weight in my late-50s I called it a night after my third beer.

I had a good walk ahead to the upper city across the canyon of the Petrusse.

The I.M. Pei structure was shrouded by a spectral fog and I remembered my High School German teacher's translating fog for our German class.

"Nebel." Bruder Karl at Xaverian High School had spoken the word with the muted thunder of someone whose wrist bore the tattoo of the camps.

Nebel coupled with Nacht became night and mirrors, a mystical combination for the intrigues of the Gestapo.

I heard no jackboots and descended into the reconstructed fortifications with the night's cold on my skin.

The Mudam disappeared into the gray murk. I followed the switchbacking trail like a man going blind. A train sounded its whistle on the tracks below. It was the 7:43 from Troisvierges.

During its reign as Gibraltar of the North Luxembourg had housed thousands of soldiers and the path from Fort Thungen would have been travelled by hussars, dragoons, and mercenaries back in the 17th Century.

Tonight my footsteps ricocheted unanswered against the stone ramparts and I thought about a movie that an actor friend had made here several years ago. Bill had played a blood-lusting Nosteradu. The city's medievalism had lent the exterior scenes an unexpected aura of horror and I glanced around me with a rising apprehension.

I was all alone.

While I no longer believed in God, I had seen enough vampire movies to know that I offered a fairly easy target for a bloodsucker. Were-wolves were not a worry, because the earth was in the middle of the synodic month.

A twig cracked in the surrounding woods. Something was out there in the forbidding shadows. I wished for a sword in my bare hand.

A single pinpoint of light broke through the swirling overcast.

Venus.

I salvaged a little confidence with the sighting of a familiar object in the night sky, then a lisping wind scrapped the bare branches to chant an incantation from a time before the invention of electricity.

Meeting a woman under a light was too much to ask from this evening.

This was Luxembourg and not Paris' Rue St. Denis.

My pace accelerated through the tunnel underneath the outer bastion. A shiver scrapped a dull razor against the skin of my spine. My cellphone dimly illuminated the black passage of stone. Running would have been a sign of fright to creatures of the night preying on the weak.

I crossed the tracks before the 7:45 train to Wiltz raced beneath the steep embankment. The smooth cobblestones gave way to gravel and the trail bore the ruts of wagons.

A rusting grate blocked the tunnel under the railroad tracks. I hopped over the metal fence and bushwhacked through the underbrush to the tracks. I looked both ways and clambered across the double set of steel rails to the other side.

I reached the street ten seconds later.

A streetlight glowed overhead.

The fortifications along the Petruche were in sight.

My cell phone rang.

It was Francois the driver.

He asked if I was all right.

I had reached the safety of the old city.

"Okay." The word meant the same in English as in French.

"Sure?" Madame l'Ambassador was concerned that something bad might have happened to me. She was a longtime friend.

“Fine, I'll be back at the residence within fifteen minutes. Thank the ambassador for asking."

It was a nice feeling to know someone cared and also that a good scare made a man feel alive, which is 100% better than being killed by a vampire any night of the week.

Lobstah Roll Badger's Island

My younger sister called from her drive to Maine. She was heading north to spend some time on Watchic Lake. I had hoped to join her on the ride, but financial obligations required my staying in New York. She asked me about the Red Sox and I snapped, "I don't want to talk about them until next year."

The 2011 collapse against the Orioles and the disastrous 2012 opening had soured my faithfulness to the hometown team.

"A little grumpy these days?" My younger sister warned that I was starting to sound obstreperous and I had to agree with her assessment. She also asked me to kick her in the knee, if she was ever short with people.

"This I can do."

"I'll talk to you later. I'm at the Portsmouth rotary and I'm getting off to find a McDonalds."

"I have a better idea." I was at my desk and hit Google maps for Portsmouth. My new connection is fast and a satellite image of the Piscataqua River. "There's a lobster shack on Baxter's Island. Not Warren's. I've stopped there a few times coming back from Maine. It's the last place to get real Maine lobster."

"I don't want to waste a lot of time."

It was a beautiful afternoon in Fort Greene. I could only imagine how nice it was in Maine.

"I know, but you don't want to eat at Mickey Ds either." The younger sister ate well, but still subscribed to fast food on the road. In most cases there wasn't much of a choice, but I said, "Cross the Route 1 Bridge and then drive over to the old bridge. Ignore the signs saying the bridge is closed, because you're only going to Badger Island. The lobster shack in on the right."

It was a short distance and I guided her through the turns.

"I see it now. It's called the Weathervane."

"That's it."

I'll let you know how it is."

"Love from old Grumpy."

Thirty minutes later she sent a photo of her lobster roll. The bun wasn't grilled, but it looked better than good.

I'm sure it was.

ps my younger sister phoned back to say that the pizzeria on Badger's Island was selling lobster rolls for $6.99. My last lobstah roll was out at Lunch in the Hamptons. $24.99. Of course everything out there is more expensive, since Montauk is so close to Europe.

A FLYING DIME by Peter Nolan Smith

On an June evening in 1939 my uncle and three of his teenage friends exited from Portland's State Theater’s western matinee of STAGECOACH and JESSE JAMES. The gunfights in the cowboy double bill had had a funny effect on their blood, for while America was still peace, the threat of war loomed across the Atlantic.

Europe was a long away from Maine and weekend shoppers exited from Benoits with full bags. College boys from Bowdoin and Bates protectively escorted their bobby-socker girlfriends along the sidewalks, as drunken shipyard workers and men from the SD Warren paper mill careened from bar to bar.

"What now?" asked Russ’ best friend, Hugh, who played left field for the Deering High School baseball team.

"We could get a pizza." My uncle was hungry and an Italian restaurant on Congress Street served the best pizza this far north on the Eastern Seaboard.

"Pizza?" Hugh was more ambitious with his adventure. "We can have pizza anytime. What about a beer on Fore Street?"

"Only sailors, tramps, and fisherman go to those dives," Russ protested knowing no good came from slumming on the docks.

"Are you chicken?" Hugh challenged and Russ said, "No."

The four friends walked down High Street to a bar offering dime beers and they drank 'Gansetts', watching sea-toughened fisherman arm-wrestle with iron-hard East Yard ironmongers, until a Portugee fisherman picked a fight with the young boys and the teenagers fled the bar to catch a trolley to the quiet safety of their homes in Deering.

The long summer sun was two hours from setting, but the east a full moon topped the low skyline of Portland.

"That’s that," Russ looking at the tree tops lit my a silvery moon. Less than a mile away a girl lived he had met at a dancer hall on Peak's Island and he wondered what Sally was doing.

"There has to be more to life than this." Hugh kicked a can into the gutter. A light flashed on a second-floor bedroom. Their neighborhood was used to quiet nights.

"Not in Portland."

"My cousin went to Boston once." Hugh’s family came from Westbrook. The brothers worked at the SD Warren paper mill. It was only a few blocks from that girl's house, but her father was a doctor.

"And?"

"He said Scollay Square was fun and no place was more fun than the Old Howard. Its motto’s 'Always Somethin’ Doing .”

“Not like here.” Randall, who field center for Deering High, looked around the quiet neighborhood.

“Boston’s a long way away.” Russ had heard about the burlesque theater, where the dancers appeared on stage almost as naked as Eve.

"We need a car to get there," Hugh said and the three friends looked at Russ.

"I don’t have a car." Russ had gotten his driver’s license this winter.

"But your brother does and we'll leave him a full tank of gas." Topping off the tank cost about $2.

"He'll never let us take his car to Boston." Russ thought that this was starting to sound like a bad idea.

"No, but he will, if we’ll tell him we're going to Sebago." The big lake was less than twenty miles from Portland and there was a popular hamburger stand in the pines off Route 25.

"I don't like the idea of lying." Russ’ older brother was a better friend than Hugh.

"And you like the idea of sitting around here and doing nothing?"

His silence answered that question.

"So are we in?" Hugh was the leader.

"When?” Russ had a date with the doctor's daughter the following Saturday.

Burgers at Pine Grove.

"Next Friday night.”

"Friday's okay with me."

The following Friday night Russ borrowed his brother's Studebaker Champion, telling Doug, "I'll be back by 9."

Russ started the car, picked up his friends, and pointed the car south. The ride to Boston took almost three hours. The teenagers spent the afternoon touring Scollay Square's various attractions. One boy hocked a gold ring at Simpson’s Loan to finance their adventures. They got their hair cut at Tony Ruggiere's Barber Shop, ate lunch at Waldorf's Cafeteria, played pinball at the Amusement Center on Washington Street, refilled on hot dogs at Joe and Nemos, and then they went up to the entrance of the Old Howard. They were sixteen, which was old enough to pay for the tickets. The usher sat them in the darkness of the back row. Only bald men sat in the front row to admire the sights and sounds and smells of the curvy showgirls.

Russ and his friends stayed through two shows of dancing girls in skimpy costumes and they came out of the bawdy theater into the evening's crowded street. Men in uniform were on a weekend pass. Boston was preparing for war. Men had money in their pockets and Scollay Square was the best place to spend it.

"What next?" asked Hugh. He wanted more.

"What time is it?" Russ asked hurrying to the Studebaker.

"6PM."

"Then we have to go."

"But the night is young. Heck, it isn't night for three and half-half more hours."

"My brother said be back at 9." Russ jingled the keys in his hand. "And I plan to keep my word.

"It's three hours home." Randall had a 9 O'Clock curfew.

"If I drive fast."

"Let's go." Speed was always an adventure.

The boys jumped into the car and Russ stomped on the accelerator. The Studebaker passed every car on Route 1 and hit 80 mph along the hilly straight-aways of Topsfield.

He didn’t slow down until the Portsmouth rotary. It was 8PM. Deering was one hour away and the Studebaker picked up speed approaching the steel bridge spanning the Piscataqua River.

"Darn, we have to stop to pay the toll," Russ shouted over the roar of the engine and the whip of the wind. "Give me a dime."

“Here.” Hugh handed him a coin and Russ flung the dime at the toll booth.

The booth collector ducked and the dime plunked into the wood with an audible thock.

Russ swore the sliver of silver was buried in a pine timber. His friends backed him up. It made a better story.

The boys arrived in Deering at 9:30. Russ dropped off everyone before returning home. Reaching home his brother was sitting on the steps. Doug felt the hood and checked the mileage. There was no sense in lying and Russ wasn't allowed drive his brother’s car again until he returned from the War in 1946, but he went out with the doctor’s daughter the next night. Dough drove him everywhere.

Sal became his wife and they live together in Marblehead.

As a young man I loved hearing my uncle’s stories over and over again.

Last year at the Barnacle Clam Shack on Marblehead’s inner harbor I asked Russ, “How fast were you going through the toll booth?”

"I don’t recall." That night had been over sixty years ago.

"80?"

"No."

"60."

"No, more like 90," Russ admitted without guilt. "Studebaker built a good car back then.”

"I know. I drove a Hawk across country in 1996.” Meg Grosswendt had been hot to be with her beau and had driven over a hundred across most of the Midwest. They married and had two kids. I understand that people drive fast for a reason.

"That was their last good car."

"We blew a carburetor in Colorado. Amazingly the mechanic had the part."

"Probably the last one in America." Russ held Sal's hand. She smiled at him and I said, "That was probably the last Studebaker carburetor in America."

"I guess you made them extinct."

"For a good cause."

It had been a good trip.

Five days from coast to coast.

Meg drove the same as Russ from Scollay Square.

Fast with a destination, which was the only way to travel, when you had to be someplace.

Beware of Moose

Several Christmas Eves ago I traveled north from New York to Boston on the Lucky Star bus. My sisters and I attended a party at our old next door neighbors from the South Shore. Everyone was in good spirits. I drank a little more than more but not more than everyone. It was a time of good cheer.

The next morning I woke at my eldest sister's house and we handed out gifts around the Christmas tree. The dinner table was set for eight. My sister, her husband, their two kids, her daughter's boyfriend, and my aunt and uncle. A baked ham was a departure from the traditional turkey, but a welcome change from the Big Bird.

Old stories of Maine dominated the table.

My mother putting my brother and I on a train alone, my uncle throwing a dime at the Portsmouth tollbooth, my watching bears at the dump were only few of the legends reworked by the gathering. My niece's boyfriend was new to our family and the logging trucker didn't say much, although everyone was impressed by his present to my brother-in-law.

A set of gigantic moose antlers.

"Find them all the time on the back roads. They fall off in the fall. Thought you might like them."

"Like them?" David was ecstatic.

"They're great." I was jealous and said, "Back in 1995 I was on a good trip with my old girlfriend."

"Ms. Carolina?" asked my brother-in-law.

"Exactly." I knew he was partial to her cooking. She was a good woman. "We stopped at Govonis Italian Restaurant outside of North Woodstock."

"On Lost River Road." My uncle Russ knew the place. The little restaurant sat on a rocky gorge. It was the only good Italian restaurant between the White Mountains and Quebec.

"We had veal and a couple of bottles of wine. The place was packed, because it was Laconia Biker Weekend. We hadn't been able to find a motel room in Woodstock and I told the waitress that I was driving over to North Conway."

“Be careful about the moose," a biker warned in dead seriousness.

"I'm from Maine. I know moose." They were big.

We paid the bill and walked to the car. Ms. Carolina stopped in the parking lot crowded with Harleys.

“You want me to drive?” My driving scared Mrs. Carolina 1995.

“I've been riding these roads since I was six.” Most of them as a hitchhiker or backseat driver behind my father. "Gimme the keys."

"Only if you drive slow." It was a moonless night.

"I'm in no hurry."

The Kancamagus Highway was under construction and I drove at 30 mph over the mountains. Nearing the pass I spotted movement in the underbrush.

"Yeti?" My brother-in-law joked at the Christmas table.

“Moose?” Mrs. Carolina 1995 eyed the passing herd.

“Moose.” The bull was 10 feet tall with 15-foot broad antlers. An accident with him would have been a fatality and the bikers back at Govonis could say, “He said he knew all about moose.”

I drove away from the pass convinced that moose were the king of the road.

"Lucky you didn't hit one. They come through your windshield and you're dead man," my uncle spoke trucker spoke with authority. The thirty year-old had had several near-accident on the back roads off the West Branch of the Penobscot.

"Yeah, your next-door neighbor on the Lake had a patient who had hit one while driving a motorcycle." I was speaking to my brother-in-law. I needed him as back-up, since my family considered many of my stories to be myths.

"We had been sitting with Carrie at the end of the dock, watching an August meteor shower. He worked at Maine Medical taking care of recovering drunks. A postal worker had been missing in action for several weeks and when he showed up again, Carrie barely recognized him. The man said he struck the rear end of a moose and his face was brushed away by its bristles. Said it cured him of drink for the time being."

"That would do it for me." My niece's guest said succinctly. Someone people might have thought Mike was brusque. They didn't know Maine or its way of speech.

"That can't be true." My aunt doubted the veracity of my tale, but my brother-in-law interjected, "I heard the same story. I don't know it to be 100% true, but Carrie doesn't tell stories like some people we know."

All eyes but my those of my niece's boyfriend gazed at either my uncle or me.

We were guilty as silently accused, however as I always like to say, "All stories are true if interesting."

Moose in Maine are traffic hazards. The big relatives of elk are responsible for hundreds of accidents in the Great State of Maine. The DOT suggest the following measures to avoid collisions with moose.

* Drivers should reduce their speed when it is dark.
* Use your high beams where it is appropriate
* Always have everyone buckle up
* Search the roadway ahead to identify potential problem

If you feel a moose-vehicle collision is inevitable, follow these suggestions from the Maine Warden Service:

* Apply the brakes
* Let off the brakes just before impact
* Aim to hit the tail portion of the moose
* Duck down to minimize injury

TRANNY TRICK OR TREAT by Peter Nolan Smith

My friend Richard is teaching school in Saudi Arabia. He says it sucks, but he's coining good money. He asked if I want to join him.

If all else fails, "Why not?"

Saudi Arabia is closer to Thailand than New York.

He sent an old joke yesterday.

A man is in bed with his Thai girlfriend.

After great sex, she spends the next hour just stroking his dangly bit, something she had lovingly done on many other post-coital occasions.

Rather enjoying it, he turns and asks her: 'Why do you love doing that ?'

She replies: 'Because I really miss mine...'

Erk!

Ladyboy slipped under the radar.

It's so easy to be fooled especially when your lust blinds the shrouds of deception.

Years ago I worked at a bar in New York. The name was the Milk Bar. The decor was an imitation of the Malchek Milk Bar in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. White Lucite and gelled light. The crowd cut across the layers of New York. The good, the bad, and the in-between. One of the customers was a narcotic detective. He led raids in Brooklyn. Whenever he walked into the bar, people walked out."

"Friends and colleagues." Rob would shrug off their departure. "I'm not here for work. I'm here to have a good time."

He was only 24.

Good times at the Milk Bar meant something else than Disney rides and one night I see Rob drinking with Dove, a lanky brunette in a slinky Azzadine sheath. An hour later they're holding hands and shortly thereafter both of them are kissing with an audience. I knew Dove as Dave. He was more beautiful as a woman than he had been as a man. Dove fooled most of her prey. She liked her men straight. When Dove visited the ladies room to powder her nose I sidled next to him.

"So what you think?" His face shined with an eager redness. Few women could match Dove's passion.

Normally I would have let Rob find out for himself about Dove's sexuality, but he had become more a friend and my job as a doorman necessitated a little violence from time to time. Having a cop in your pocket was a good card to hold.

"Dove's great, if you like guys."

"Guy?" Rob choked on his beer.

"Dove's been a girl for a couple of years. Beautiful and sexy, but a guy no less." I was worried about Dove's reaction to my snitching her out. She could be very mean.

"A guy?" Rob looked around the bar, as if he were trying to spot a familiar face. The crowd consisted of perps, dealers, politicians, models, musicians, diplomats, actors, and starlets. None of them were saints. He swigged his beer. "I can deal with that."

"You can?" I thought my warning would steer him to clearer water.

"Dove's the best looking woman I've seen in years. Man or woman. And she wants me."

"Then you have my blessing."

The two of them left within the hour. No one noticed their departure. Dove showed up the next day with a smile and Rob's watch.

"He gave it to me."

"Really?" I almost believed her. It was a cheap watch.

"Really." Dove waited that night for Rob to show up. He never did. Dove went home alone. He was twice the woman I will ever be.

ROUGH ROAD by Peter Nolan Smith

Peru sucked in 1995.

The country was under siege.

The War of Drugs had replaced the War against the Shining Path.

The capitol city Lima was cool, but I had unsuccessfully spent the better part of two days trying to score a bag of cocaine. The airport police fingered me as a user and an undercover squad tailed my ventures into the slums. Their obvious presence had scared off any steerers. To the dealers I was either DEA or a fool.

Ms. Carolina didn't understand my mounting frustration. The golfer pro had been reared in a convent. People like me didn't frequent the 19th hole at country clubs.

The blonde southern beauty and I had been seeing each other for over five years. Her husband was in his late-60s. They had an understanding. Charles had given his wife space to take trips on her own, so she didn’t feel trapped after twenty years of marriage. Ms. Carolina came back to South Hills with a smile and the small town doctor had a monthly week of peace and quiet. The arrangement had worked for years, except Ms. Carolina had violated an unspoken tenet of her pact by falling desperately in love with me on a winter ski trip.

While the Ten Commandments had no influence over my soul, I had met the old doctor at a party in New York. Charles was a good old boy from the tar forests. He helped people black or white and my rule about never sleeping with the wife or girlfriend of someone I respected was stronger than any law from the Bible.

Charles and his wife were meant for each other and Ms. Carolina deserved better than a nightclub bouncer.

I figured nothing said an affair was over faster than a coke binge in Peru.

The Lima police refused to cooperate.

On our last night in our seaside hotel Ms. Carolina stroked my skin and mewed with pleasure. Convent girls were tough to refuse in the dark, even in their 40s, so I pretended to be asleep.

The next morning I left the hotel and there were no police on the sidewalk. A heavy fog was rolling off the Pacific and I headed over to a plaza in Miraflores, where I noticed several nasty pieces of work hanging on the sidewalk. I approached the one with the best clothing and explained my proposition. I gave him $20 and promised another $80, if he came back.

"Non problema." The dealer shifted his eyes left and right. "Trente minudos."

I sat at a cafe and ordered an expresso. The bastard hadn't shown up by my third. I swore under my breath, thinking I had been ripped off, then spotted the dealer across the plaza. He walked, as if he was carrying the mother lode. We exchanged smiles. My hand went into my pocket. A car screeched to the curb. An undercover squad of 'tomba' hit the pavement and threw us against the wall.

"I am screwed." I muttered several times, but the cops cut us loose.

"Bamba." The lead detective hefted the bag of powder.

"Bamba?" This word didn't register in my lexicon of Peruvian slang.

"Fake." The detective spoke English like he had spent time at a police academy in LA. "You got ripped off. Via con dios."

I returned to the hotel in a black mood.

Ms. Carolina and I had been together long enough for her not to question my mood.

After check-out we exited from the hotel. A black rental Nissan Sentra was waiting outside. I sat in the driver seat. The odometer read 70,000 miles. The steering wheel betrayed the real wear and tear. Lima's potholes had taken their bite from the suspension, but once out of the city the coastal highway was smooth as the surface of a frozen Maine lake.

We drove north along the Pacific, taking turns at the wheel. I acted 'nice' and put CDs in the stereo. Ms. Carolina liked my music as we passed through a desert without houses or no trees, only a few giant chicken farms with millions of chickens pooping out eggs into basket for capitol's consumption dotted the sand expanse far from the rare towns huddled next to streams flowing with the Andes glacial melt.

According the guide book the Sechuran Desert received close to no rain each year.

The ocean was a dark blue mystery. The Humboldt Current surged south from the Arctic. Balboa had named it 'Pacific' as a joke. The waves crushed ships on desolate shores, doldrums starved men to death, and storms sucked armadas to the fathomless depths.

I went for a swim at a nameless beach. The cold water stun my skin. Seals surfed the waves. Ms. Carolina took pictures. She was happy. It would have been easy to make her sad, but I kept my mouth shut, as she handed me a towel.

Back on the road Ms. Carolina handed me a Pilsen Callao. The bottle was icy cold and I thanked my passenger.

"You're a good traveler companion."

"Is that all, precious?" She only said the words precious to dogs, children, and people who annoyed her.

"Why?" It was a question a man is never supposed to ask of a woman.

"Because there's also this." She held up a bag of green leaves and explained with a southern accent, "Coca. I know it's not what you want, but it's the best I could do with my limited habla espanol."

"Okay, you're a saint too." I stuck a wad of dried leaves in my cheek.

Breaking up was hard to do with a woman this nice.

"That's what I thought too." She smiled and joined my predilection for epiphany.

The coca and the beer loosened my tongue.

I recounted Pizarro's conquest of the Incan Empire. His march in 1532 had traversed the coastal wasteland. "His troops numbered less that 200. They headed into the mountains and found the Royal Incan at a place now known as Baños del Inca. For some reason Atahualpa and his army of 80,000 were defeated by a sneak attack on the king. They later garroted the Incan when he didn't give them more gold."

"Nice people." Ms. Carolina loved hearing my shortened versions of history and smart enough to absorb the parts that sounded almost true.

"You know that coca makes you real talky, precious."

She was right and I said, "Pass me a beer, please."

Like Pizarro we left the coast and drove east into the mountains. The road to Huarez wound through an arid valley walled by ever-steeper cliffs to arrive on the high plain with the horizon blocked by snow-covered mountains.

This was the first sight of the Andes for both of us and Ms. Carolina lowered the window of the rented car to admire the sun gleaming off impressive peaks.

"Mind if I drive?"

"How are you feeling?" I asked Ms. Carolina.

Traveling in rural Peru was more dangerous than Lima, since the local motorists drove as if they were used to empty roads. They passed on blind corners and sped through switchbacks with deadly intent. Being a defensive driver I anticipated their every stupid move with an almost ESP alacrity.

"Fine." She sounded a little dreamy.

"Good, the coca makes it easier to breath at this altitude." We were 3000 meters above sea level, which was higher than most of the Rockies.

"You want me to drive?"

"No, I'm good." The surface of the valley road was impeccable and she said, "You enjoy the view."

She loved the mountains and we arrived in Huaraz in the late afternoon. Our hotel was cheap, but cheerful and we sat on the roof drinking wine and examining the map for the next day's travels.

Ms. Carolina held THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PERU. She loved reading about where she was to learn the history and geography. As the sun set the temperature dropped, but we were warm in our alpaca sweaters purchased at the city's farmers' market.

"Those mountains are the Cordillera Blanca.

About fifty miles north of here a road crossed the Andes to descend into the Amazon jungle.

"It's probably dirt and none of it good. I bet fewer than ten westerners travel it each year."

A couple of years before the trip would have been too dangerous. The Shining Path had ruled the Andean highlands. Their president had been captured by the military and there was no number two to take over the role of leader for the Maoists.

"What are you thinking?" She fluttered through the guide book without finding any references to the region. It was terra incognito.

"It might take two days from here and back to Lima." I spit out a gigantic chaw of coca, which hit the tiled roof below us with a splat.

"Then I'm all for it." Ms. Carolina tried to imitate by projectile gobbing. The green goop rolled down her chin onto her new sweater. Girls from convent schools were terrible at spitting.

"Good thing your sweater is green." I brushed the dregs from the alpaca with my sleeve. She laughed at the absurdity of this gesture and we clinked glasses to honor the possibilities of tomorrow's trip.

The Olluquito con charqui accompanied our excellent dinner of lake trout. The waiter hailed from Matibamba. He pointed it on the map. His hometown town was on the other side of the Andes.

"No one goes there. Only people leave." His eyes clouded with suspicion, as if we might be DEA.

"We're not the police." Ms. Carolina had changed into a lovely traditional dress. Her smile reconverted him to our side. She knew how to treat men and bought him a beer.

"How's the road?"

"Road? Malo. Muy malo e mucho peligroso." He begged us to only visit the twin glacial lakes east of Yungay. "Very beautiful same."

"Muchos gracias." She toasted him for braving his fears as well as his compliment.

Gringos were never good luck in Latin America.

As we retired to our room, Ms. Carolina hooked her arm with mine.

High altitudes played havoc with hard drinking. Now was not the time to say that we were over. I kissed her with the tenderness of a sailor about to leave his port and fell into bed as soon as we reached our room. I didn't have to fake going to sleep.

At dawn I stood on the veranda and watch the sun glow over marshmallow white glaciers cloaking the Andes. Some of the mountains rose to 6000 meters plus. Their names came from the Quechuan language.

Stone fireplace, hummingbird beak of ice, and the butcher were just a few.

Climbing those monster were for experts.

Driving through them was strictly for fools.

Ms. Carolina put on her explorer outfit. The pants and shirt had an excess of pockets. I wore jeans and a leather jacket. This was a road trip and not a safari, then again she was a woman and women like looking good in case they have to get dirty and handed her a wide-brimmed hat.

"I like that hat."

"You do?"

"The sun is strong up there."

"But I feel like I'm traveling with Indiana Jones."

"Sore sport." She threw me my Red Sox cap. "Jock."

It was a not good way to start the morning and we left the room.

While she ate breakfast, I filled the gas tank and had a mechanic check the engine and tires. When I told the mechanic my destination, he wished me luck.

"Mucho Gracias."

His comment reinforced my opinion that crossing the Andes in a rented car was plain old stupid.

But we weren't turning back, but it was asunny day.

Ms. Carolina got provisions for the journey. She had been born in the Adirondacks. Camping in the north woods required planning. Bad weather killed fools.

"You know I've been thinking about this trip." We had another fifteen days in Peru. This drive might eat two or five.

"Thinking what?"

That it might not be a good idea."

"Listen you always play that Steppenwolf song for me." She got in the car and motioned for me to get behind the wheel. AS I snapped on my seatbelt, Ms. Carolina said, "That singer sings 'looking for adventure and whatever comes our way. I didn't come here with you to stay at the Holiday Inn and drink chardonnay. Let's see whatever comes our way. What the worst thing that can happen?"

"We get stuck in a remote town and kidnapped by banditos."

"I was thinking about something less worst."

"We get stuck in the remote town and have to tow the car back to Lima."

"Now that's not a worst worst."

"What is?"

"Running out of coca leaves."

We supplemented the coca in our cheeks and I started the car, thankfully we were set for an emergency.

The road to Yungay was well maintained by work crews. They were happy for the work and good at it. Ms. Carolina lay the map on her lap and held the guide book in her hands.

"Yungay was destroyed by a glacier avalanche in 1970. Over 70,000 people were killed. The town was buried under ten meters of debris." She read the facts and I spotted the slide.

Twenty-four years later a mile-wide scar marked the slope under Mount Huascarán.

"Looks safe today." I turned right and the dirt road weaved through the fertile farmlands into a pine forest and then a series of switchbacks. I kept the speed under 20 to avoid potholes and roads. Several battered cars covered with dust came from the other direction. A relic of a bus appeared at a corner. The passengers waved to us. There were no towns at the lakes, so they had to be coming from the other side of the Andes.

"That's a good sign."

"What?" Ms. Carolina studied the valley floor for car wrecks. She suffered slightly from vertigo, but the coca was working a miracle to calm her fear of heights, however when the Sentra squeaked around a hairpin curve and it was my turn to feel the fears.

We rose into the chasm with the sensation of sinking, as the twin giants topped with millennia of snow and ice loomed over the road. They were close enough to shiver from the cold trembling off their unattainable summits.

More vehicles came from the east.

"Those cars are coming from where we want to go."

"Good." Her lungs were wheezing from the lack of oxygen.

"Are you okay?" I played three hours of streetball every day back in New York. My chest rivaled the width of Henry VIII and he was a fat man. Aided my the coca leaves I was fine.

"A slight migraine that's all." Ms. Carolina was a sport, but high altitude sickness was no joke.

"If it gets worst let me know."

The road leveled out for two azure lakes glistening under the high Andean sun. We parked the Nissan by the side of a creek spilling into Laguna Llaganuco. Shredded clouds fingered the cliffs and the sun blistered the lake surface with mirrored flashes of light. I stripped off my clothes and told Ms. Carolina, "I'm going for a swim."

"It has to be cold." The water was straight off a glacier.

"It's a purification rite." My anti-Catholicism didn't interfere with my spirituality. I wore my shoes into the water. The beach was water-smoothed stone. I leapt from the shore. The cold was deeper than a plunge into a Bar Harbor beach in March. Ice crackled my capillaries and I stroked back to the shore. Ms. Carolina spread a huge towel on the stones. I shuddered for several minutes before regaining the power of speech.

"Cold?" She handed me a glass of pisco. Ms. Carolina knew how to treat a man.

Stupid ones too.

"Fucking cold." I lay on my back.

Ms. Carolina lay next to me. She was warm. We were close to the sun. Ten minutes later I was on my feet. I pointed to the top of the pass.

"Beyond that the unknown." I dressed in my dry clothes and sat behind the steering wheel. I turned up the heat.

"You want me to drive?" Ms. Carolina was genuinely concerned about my condition.

"No, I'm good." My hands were shaking from the effects of exposure and I chewed more coca leaves. They weren't helping and I put the car in drive. "I'll take it slow."

Several cars passed us. They knew the road and I increased the speed to 30 mph to keep up with them. I looked out the window. The valley of lakes disappeared under a cloud bank. We were at flight altitude.

"Precious, keep your eye on the road."

"Yes, boss." I turned my head to scowl at her. The car scrapped over a rock with a screech of metal. The stench of gas filled the car. Ms. Carolina smelled it too.

"Damn."

I got out of the car and lay on the dirt. Gas spewed from a gash in the tank. My attempts to staunch the flow with electrical tape were failures. I stood up and looked up the road. The pass was obscured by a thick fog. It might be snow.

"We have to turn back. We have a full tank and it should get us back to Yungay. At worst we can roll down the mountain."

"On the road, I hope." She lifted her hand. "Just trying to be funny."

"Ha, ha." My humor was diminished by the prospect of having the rental car towed back to Lima. I gave up trying to estimate how much that would cost in my head. "That was my bad. I'll pay whatever it cost."

"This is not a 'me' world, but a 'we' world. 50/50. Let's get going before I have to push us."

I drove down past the lakes. They were as beautiful the second time as the first, but we didn't stop for photographs and the Nissan rocked through the potholes and shivered across the ruts. The gas meter read half-full.

We made Yungay with a quarter tank to spare.

I asked a local woman about a mechanic. She pointed around the corner. The building was surrounded by wrecks and scavenged hulks. There was no way that I was leaving the Nissan here. The three men in the garage lifted their heads from a V8 block. The oldest man was sealing a crack in between two cylinders with an acetylene torch. He sniffed the air with a knowledgeable nose and turned off the torch.

I stepped out of the car. The boss signed for his young helpers to take a break. They lit up cigarettes and the older man shouted at them in rapid Spanish. Admonished by his tirade they put out the cigarettes.

The older man shook his head and wiped his grimy hands on grimier overalls. His eyes squinted in the bright sunlight like his mind was calculating the price of his solution to my problem. The passenger door opened behind me and his eyes shifted over my shoulder.

“Senora.”

The boss bowed his head with a polite deference.

Blonde hair the color of the sun was an abnormality in the high Andes and the boss offered her a chair, then quickly examined the gas tank after which he explained in passable English, “This not big problema. Road bad. Rock cut tank. I fix. Take out tank. Empty petrol. Seal hole with solder. Turn tank back upside down. Car OK. Good idea.”

“What is plan numero two?” I asked to re-establish my standing as the man here, not Ms. Carolina. It was a futile effort.

“Plan two?” The mechanic smirked at my question. “Plan numero two I go to Lima. Get new tank.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“Si mucho caro. Plan numero uno est better.”

“Very good idea. How much?” Carolina got to the point.

The man held up two fingers. I thought $200 was a rip-off, but he smiled and said, “$20.”

“Very good idea.” Ms. Carolina shook his hand.

None of his grime came off on her hand.

Goddesses were above dirt.

The man introduced himself as Chocho, “I like Chocolate.”

“Who doesn’t,” Ms. Carolina told our host that I was her husband. The lie was easier than explaining the truth.

“Bueno.”

Chocho ordered beers.

The two young man jacked up the Nissan and yanked off the tank, as Ms. Carolina shot photos of the mechanic and his children. He laughed hearing about our wanting to see the other side of the mountain.

“Nothing there. No hotels. No beer. Nada. Everyone leave there. Come here or go to Lima.” He clapped his hands and ordered his children to leave the garage, as the young men drained the gasoline into a plastic bucket. They hauled the empty tank into the courtyard and our new friend advised that we get something to eat.

“Senora, better you not here, if tank go boom.”

His fingers flicked up to aid our visualizing his plan # 1 going bad.

“Not worry. If go boom. We do plan two.”

The two young men didn’t join his laughter. I didn’t think it was funny, but Ms. Carolina laughed so hard that she swallowed her cud of coca leaves, which stuck in her throat. Chocho slapped his palm on her back and she expelled the wad across the street to strike the wall with the intensity of a bazooka shell hitting the side of a Panzer tank.

“I guess I went boom boom.”

Her joke got a rib-ripping chortle from Chocho and we had a classic Peruvian lunch of cuy chactado and olluco, roasted pig and Andean tubers along with roasted peppers. After several glasses of pisco Chocho looked at his watch.

“Car finish. You can go now. You go to other side of mountain?”

“No, I think we’ve gone far enough.”

"Si. a gas tank can only be flipped one time."

The repair looked good to my eyes and Ms. Carolina paid Chocho, then tipped the two young boys $5US, which was a good day’s pay in this part of Peru. I thanked them for their help with two baseball caps. The three of them waved good-bye, as we pulled out of the garage and Ms. Carolina checked the air with a quick sniff.

The air smelled of the ancient Andes.

“No gas.”

“And they put what they took out back in the tank.”

The Nissan had a quarter tank.

“So what the plan?”

“Head to the coast and then back to Lima. Chilbote is a city with two bays."

"I’m sure they have good fish.”

“Me too, but you know I came down here for a reason and it wasn’t a coke binge.” I had to tell her my feelings. The word love was dead on my lips.

“Honey.” Ms. Carolina lifted her hand. “We’ve been together five years. I think I know what goes on in that little head of yours. Not everything, but sometimes you’re easier to read than a comic book.”

“I am.”

“You’re a man. I’m a woman. You’re a comic book. I’m a mystery.” Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but there were no tears, despite the hurt warbling in her voice. “We had a good time. We can still have good times, but only on two conditions.”

“Which are?” My mind shuffled through the possibility of conditions like a card shark.

“No explanations. They don’t change anything and second as long as you never introduce me as a ‘friend’, I can live with being an ex-lover.” She caressed my hand. “Can you live with that?”

“I only want to make you happy.”

“You want to make me happy, then give me that bag of coca leaves.”

She stuck a clump of coca in her cheek and I put Jess Winchester's’s YANKEE LADY on the stereo and sang the words with Ms. Carolina joining me on the chorus. The insurmountable mountains paraded down the valley to the sea and the sun dazzled off their peaks. It was a good day to be on the road.