It was the sweet days of summer, mid-July, 1983. The kind of day where heat disabled the loiterers on every street corner.
Henry in front of his typewriter looking at the cracking wall in in front of his desk, looking at a framed poster of Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the wall.
Lucia's prone on the living room floor,f sipping rum and coke, exercizing, opening and closing her legs in a V-shape, bending at the waist alternatley.
She turns the radio on; Samba music, WKCR 89.7, exercises arobically to tighten her levator ani muscle, the muscle that passes behind the rectum and surrounds the vagina, which would increase vaginal control, so she could grasp and let loose of a cock with her vagina during intercourse, some call the ability, gripper pussy.
Henry gets a call from Dave Spleen asking him to write a story on Gabriel Garcia Marquez for HEADBANGER Magazine.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in Columbia and grew up poor in a small hardscrabble banana village. His father was an uneducated telegraph operator. Gabo, as his friends called him, showed signs of brilliance at a young age and at 12 he earned a scholarship to a Jesuit secondary school where he was known to recite long works of poetry from memory.
At 13 he lost his virginity, and by 15 he had an affair with an older woman who wouldn’t have sex with him until he finished his homework. He goes on to graduate with honors from the Jesuit school, winning a scholarship to one of the top universities in Colombia. Then, dropping out of college and getting a job as a reporter with the liberal newspaper, El Heraldo during a period of bloody civil unrest in Columbia. While working as a journalist he wrote novels on the side.
Later he moved to Cuba he was pals with Fidel, they drank Chevis Regal 12 year old scotch, talking late into the night about South American Literature.
In 1961, Gabo moved to Mexico city,with only 20 dollars in his pocket, working as a car salesman to support his family while he continued to write.
Finally, in 1966 his breakthrough novel, 100 Years of Solitude was published, it was a huge success and he burst onto the international literary scene.
Gabo gave voice to Latin America and its literature and much of what he wrote was the stuff off his life, in his own words,
If I had to give a young writer some advice, I would say to write about something that has happened to them. It's always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to them or something they have read or been told.
Gabo’s books long, full of sublime adjective weaving back and forth from, now to then, to there, and to the heavens and back.
Once, when the life long journalist was asked how he started writing fiction he to told the Paris Review,
it began with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis— the first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised when Gregor awoke that morning from uneasy dreams transformed into a gigantic insect. When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
His prose is known as magic realism, he writes of a Columbian general who's followed by butterflies wherever he goes.
One day his room fluttered
Like neon is full with butterflies
That followed him,
A herd of vague motion
He came to think
Was a cloud spread thin
And bearing
A blank message of rain.
In Latin America magic realism is part of everyday life, in Gabo’s words,
In Mexico surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.
Marquez was known for his left-wing views spending time in Cuba with Fidel Castro, who was a zealous fan of Latin American literature. Gabo would send Fidel drafts of his latest work and they often met in Havana at Castro's house enjoying long talks, drinking Chivas Regal and smoking Cuban cigars.
Gabo’s books don’t reference politics directly either through dialogue or the movement of events, instead, he approaches politics shrewdly in his writings like a mother attempting to convince her child to eat oatmeal by saying;
children who don’t eat their oatmeal are sold to Gypsies for rags!
Instead, Marquez writes of the effect of politics on the people, which points at something bigger. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, he writes about a US-owned banana company that takes over a small village in Colombia, controlling the output and price of bananas in the village, pointing out how the invasion has changed the peasant's lives.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Nobel Prize winning author who spun graceful yarns on politics, love, humanity, and magic— his novels are heartfelt poems encapsulating the gods at play in the daily up and down life of penurious Latin American banana villagers.
As Henry is putting the finishing touches on the Marquez bit Lucia walks in, she was akin to the character, in Gabo's book Remedios; the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude who in Marquez's words,
was the most beautiful women ever seen in Macondo, Remedios the Beauty is not entirely in her right mind, she is so ethereal and not of this world that eventually she floats up to heaven in front of her whole family.
And,
She was becalmed in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities...
Anyway, Lucia the Beauty says,
bebe, let’s take a trip to the country!
He says nodding his head as he faxes the story on Marquez to HEADBANGER Magazine.
wonderful darling lets pack!
Henry owned a low milage 1973 Chevy Malibu Wagon with a 350 V8 engine, white with wood paneling and performance shocks for a comfy ride. Most of the time it was parked and covered in the basement of his Queen’s apartment. He didn’t care for the tight-fitted-slow-moving feeling of driving in the city.
As a kid, Henry’s deaf nanny Silvia would walk him to the 63 Street Station on school days. From the age of 5 on he rode the subway alone to and from Holy Hill Elementary in Flushing. Hungry with eyes and ears wide open he took-in the street-happenings as he rode the subway, things things the nuns didn’t teach at Holy Hill. Particularly raunchy language, exciting words such as, mother fucker, puta, cock sucker, words which evoked and expressed powerful feelings, wanton words more and more titillating as he imagined their meanings
On the subway he's sit next to a bum who smelled of vomit and wine. Or contrarily, sitting close to a toothsome secretary on her way to work, feeling her heat, smelling her perfumed boot—dy, feeling turgid between his legs, enjoying the sensation but not understanding it. The subway rides were a tour of an underworld where anything could happen at any minute.
Lucia and Henry packed lightly, she wanted to go to a nudist colony and he wanted to go the Green Mountain National park and visit the Robert Frost Stone House, The Norman Rockwell Exhibition and The American Museum of Fly Fishing.
So, the fun couple, les nouveaux modernes, take the elevator to the parking lot in the basement and load the Chevy Malibu Wagon. The sun is setting west of the Hudson River as Henry drives north on Highway 15, which would become Interstate 91 in Connecticut. It’s a 5-hour drive to Green Mountain National Park, once the home of The Green Mountain Boys, the rough and tumble militia of patriots who practiced guerrilla warfare harassing the sadistic occupiers— the British Colonial Army, during the Revolutionary War.
As Henry drives past Mount Vernon, where George and Martha Washington’s mansion is, Lucia lights a joint and he says,
Mount Vernon doll, on your left, the home of George Washington! Looking baffled she says,
Who? He answers,
The founding father of America? She laughs and asks,
oh I know nothing about American History baby, I'm Latino, he says,
OK, smart ass, George Washington, founding father of the United States, if you want to be a American citizen you need to study US history. Rolling her eyes, she says,
bebe, this shit es muy bien, I feel so high!
Henry grabs a random cassette tape out glove of the car, placing it into the player on the dash— the Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street, Happy blares as Lucia says,
la musica es maravillosa, I love it bebe, he asks,
what does your boyfriend Fidel like?
Lucia worked as a hooker in Havana, oftentimes partying with Fidel Castro, she answers,
puta Henry, Fidel was a trick, he liked Cubano music, pendejo!
It was 10 PM, having driven 4 hours, they pull-off 91 at Springfield, Vermont, population 10,000 and check into a Motel 6. Then driving the main drag, Clinton Street to a Mexican restaurant where they park. Sheri’s Place is in the basement of a brick building, the couple walk down a stairwell, go inside and sit at a booth. There are 3 or 4 couples in booths and some locals at the bar. Sheri’s was upscale, Vermont seemed pedestrian compared to Queens, a sparesly populated Shangri-la.
They order combination plates and drink a few pitchers of margaritas, the restaurant was dead quiet, and Lucia says,
Vermont, boring, boring, boring, zombieville, and he says,
we came here to experience nature!
The hushed and heavy-eyed feeling that filled Springfield sucks the couple in. Back at the Holiday Inn by 11 PM in bed, falling into a deep sleep, waking the next day 10 minutes before checkout time.
After checking out they pick up coffee and donuts at a mini-mart and take Highway 11 to Green Mountain National Park. As their Chevy Wagon snakes upwards, Lucia opens the car windows and they yoga-breathe oxygen released by the Balsam and Spruce pines.
In no time they reach the Robert Frost Stone House where the poet wrote many of his poems. After parking and paying 14 dollars to tour the house, they walk in the natural rock and redwood house and are met by a parched bald man with awful posture who will lecture the couple and a small group of tourist on Frost.
A few minutes into the tour, Lucia bolts, walking outside, getting into the car, lighting a joint, putting a Santana cassette into the tape deck and turning it up loud, so loud that Henry could hear the music in the Robert Frost Stone House, so he excuses himself and runs to the car, saying,
Jesus babe, you're ruining it for the others, OK let’s go, next stop The Norman Rockwell Museum, then The Fly Fishing Museum, staring pensively she says,
no that’s it, take me to a nudist colony or take me home!
He knew she wasn’t kidding, then the cue-ball headed tour guide knocks on the driver's side window, Henry opens the window and the guy says,
please turn the stereo off, it’s stonewalling the collective tenor. Henry turns off the stereo and says,
Sorry about that, um ah, I’m looking for a nudist colony, is it close? And the guy says,
Oh, your in luck, drive down the mountain on 11, when you reach Highway 16, drive south for 15 miles until you see a sign that reads, Abbotts Glen Clothing Optional Inn and Nudist Resort, can’t miss it, by the way, I’m a member.
Henry thanks him and drives down the mountain to 16, going south until he sees the Abbotts Glen sign, turning on a gravel road and driving to the front office, a cabin, just far enough into the bush to discourage peepers.
Henry and Lucia walk inside, there is a fully clothed couple behind a counter and one of them says,
welcome nature seekers, a cabin is 100 dollars a night, the fee includes 2 squares a day, use of our pool, tennis courts and recreation room, Henry says,
this is our first time, we’ll take a cabin for the night, and see how it goes?
When the paperwork is complete the innkeepers take off their clothes and asks Henry and Lucia to strip down, which they do, then going outside, getting in the car and following the twiddle dee bodied innkeepers who are driving a golf cart to the log cabin.
Inside the cabin, he asks her,
how u feeling babe, and she says,
I can’t wait, and he says,
OK, let's go to the pool, bring some towels.
They walk to the pool, the male nudist eyeball eyeballingbuxom, curvy, an inordinately sexed Venus who belonged on the French Riviera not at a cornball nudist resort for for freaks.
The couple sits at an umbrella-covered table by the pool, Lucia goes for a swim diving in and doing the backstroke, exposing her large natural tits which sway from side to side as she swims, people watch her.
darling, I came here to enjoy being naked outside, not to be eyeballed! Henry says,
I know babe, let's get outta here,
She wraps up in a towel, they walk back to the cabin, dress and get in the car— Henry guns the Chevy V8, driving past the front office, burning rubber as the spinning wheels churn dust and stones into the air.
Once they hit Highway 11, Henry wheels the Chevy Malibu Wagon right, southward on a B-line to Queens.
