Sweet as Spring Rain

 

Henry spent a month in Mount Sinai Hospital, seriously ill with leptospirosis he contracted from a sewer rat walking home on a drunken, weird night in Harlem.

A rat the size of a chihuahua crossed his path and bit him in the calf. 

While convalescing in Mount Sinai Hospital he caught pneumonia, and the doctors prescribed—intravenous fluids, antibiotics, as well as oxygen therapy in a hyperbaric chamber, which increases air pressure three times higher than normal, so his lungs could gather more oxygen.

Lucia often slept in Henry's private room on the sofa at night and provided him with ganja brownies she baked. Getting high was cosmic relief from the bodily and mental strain of treatment.

Henry kept 300,000 dollars, ganja money, in the couple's Harlem apartment bedroom closet, in a suitcase. 

In 1983 the dollar's market price was low. 

Consequently, Henry's hospital bill was 60,000 dollars, the hospital cashier granted him a discount for paying cash, and the final bill came to 56,000 grand.

As the couple walks through the bustling entrance of the hospital, Henry felt healthy, feeling as if a thousand-pound guerilla was off his back. 

Outside they flag down a taxi with no air conditioning running so they roll down the backseat windows.

At home in their Harlem apartment by 5PM, they sit in the kitchen, tuning their small-sized Sony boombox on, listening to the radio, Jazz 90.1 broadcasting sides A and B of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain.

Lucia makes a pitcher of Cuba Libres with crushed ice , Coca-Cola, and dark Havana Club rum telling Henry a story about Cuba.

My father owned a sugarcane plantation on the outskirts of Sugua La Grande in the fifties. We were one of many cane farmers in Cuba supplying our country's rum companies who distill rum nonstop. Henry asks,

did you work in the fields, Lucia? 

Sure we all worked the fields as kids in our village. I left the plantation for Havana when I was 17 working as a waitress and bartender in the city.

When I was twenty I met a Cubano diplomat in a local bar and he helped me obtain a nonimmigrant visa from the US Embassy in Havana so I flew to New York City, where we met.

Henry met Lucia in the early 70s when she worked as a waitress in a Cuban restaurant in Harlem. 

She fell for him because he threw money around like a gangster, and was slim and handsome with waist-length hair and high cheekbones.

By 1983, the lovers had been married for ten years, going through a brief separation when Lucia shacked up with a black woman, a dancer in the New York City Ballet, giving gay sex a try and realizing she preferred dicks.

As for politics in the eighties, the couple didn't like President Reagan, believing he was over opinionated shit with had hair a hair full of greasy kid's stuff.

They didn't like Carter either, who was POTUS before Ray-gun, thinking Jimmy was a hayseed and good ole boy.

And, they absolutely despised Castro. 

They didn’t support any government, feeling governments should keep their nose out of the people’s business, they were card-carrying members of the Libertarian Party, New York City chapter.

Henry did business in cash (selling weed), had no credit cards or bank accounts, had never filed an IRS return, and was off the US government grid and liked it that way.

Lucia never filed a return because she only worked a few months in America.

To her credit, she did go through the hops to become a US Citizen, eligible because she married Henry. 

US Immigration interviewed Henry with Lucia in their city office. He told them he was looking for a job, and they let him off the hook.

Lucia spoke good English and was an avid reader, enjoying writers Henry turned her onto — John Cheevers, William Burroughs, James Baldwin, John Irving, and articles by Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone Magazine. 

He gave her a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She was moved by the writer's otherworldly spirituality after reading Death in the Time of Cholera.

Gabo as he was called, lived most of his adult life in Spain and owned a house in Mexico City. Occasionally he took a plane to Cuba to visit Castro while in Mexico. He and Fidel would drink Chivas Regal Scotch and talk about the contemporary Latin American Literature scene. 

In 1967 Gabo won the Noble Prize in Literature, a few other big-name winners throughout history were Gunter Grass, Kafka, Haruki Murakami, H. G. Wells, and Stephan King to name a few.

Anyway, Lucia paid her dues, going a couple of evenings a week to classes for four years and eventually taking the US Citizenship and Naturalisation test with questions on it like—

Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?

The answers are—

tax, regulate trade, control the currency, raise an army, and declare war.

Lucia was given a practice test to study at home which Henry took for fun and failed.

When she was awarded US Citizenship, she was allowed to work and live freely in America.   

It’s summer in New York City, July 4, 1983, Henry’s birthday, that evening the couple brings a pocket full of joints, a large straw mat, and a couple bottles of good wine, catching a taxi to Central Park where they watch fireworks set off from barges in the Hudson River, later dancing the night away to live music played in the park band shell by the Ramones.

Life for the couple since Henry's release from Mount Sinai Hospital was as sweet as spring rain.

Henry, Lucia & the Iguana

 

Henry’s up at 10 AM, making toast and coffee. National elections in the US are going on, he doesn’t know or care who won. He listens to blues, Lucia Spann, and Little Walter on WXXY, all blues out of New York radio.

He takes a hot shower and dresses, it’s a cold, fall, October day— he wears kakis, a black leather jacket, and a Mets stocking cap with his waist-length hair wrapped inside. 

His first stop is Jimmy’s Bar in Harlem, it’s noon, ordering a beer with lunch, fried grits, beans, a ham steak, and mashed sweet potatoes.

Henry minds his own business as he eats, an odd character, an art student type, wearing a toupee, polyester pants, and shirt asks if he can sit down, the kid brings his drink, sitting and saying to Henry, 

dude this country sucks, as soon as I graduate from Pratt I’m moving to Morocco, Henry asks, 

why don’t you rent an old flat and paint, or get a job designing logos, there's no work in Morocco. The kid says,

I  want to hang out in Tangiers like Burroughs, Henry asks, 

are you gay? 

yes. 

Henrys tells him,

You'll find plenty of action in Tangiers, Morrocan boys dancing on cafe tables, but the Beat thing is done, finished buddy, trekking Morrocos' Mount Toubkal is dangerous— it’s infested with the ISIS army, they will cut your head off, you’re safer in Harlem. It’s your call buddy. Look, I wanna finish eating, good luck whatever you do. 

The art student moves to the bar. 

Henry is in his 40s, he’s been a ganja dealer for a long time, as well as writing late into the night, short stories, blogging them online, he's no Steven King. 

It's a sunny and semi-cool Indian Summer day. A sweet time of the year with plenty of delicious apple cider and rare apples available. Henry places Indian corn on a shrine in his apartment to ward off evil spirits, which show regardless. 

From Jimmy’s Bar, the next stop is the infamous Whitehorse Tavern. It's the oldest bar in New York, the one where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. 

The one-time hang-out for Beats, Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Burroughs, who would pack a pistol, a few abstract impressionists, Motherwell, Jackson Pollack, and the writer James Baldwin. Hunter S. Thompson wrote part of The Rum Diary there while working as a copyboy at The New York Post.

Henry finds an empty table outside because it's cool overlooking the Hudson River.

He manages to sell 6 ozs, clients sit and talk a bit, and the trade-off is done on the sly. 

His x Cuban wife Lucia shows, dropped from the heavens perhaps. 

They embrace, overjoyed to run into each other, ordering Irish coffee, enjoying being outside on the grey Hudson River which gives off a fishy smell. Apparently, there are fish in the city portion, and people fish there. 

Henry invites Lucia to his apartment for a drink. She recently broke up with her black girlfriend, a ballet dancer.

They take a taxi to his flat, he lives on the 11th floor. It’s an old building with large rooms. Thankfully the elevator is well-maintained, he imagines a cable breaking causing it to drop, but the elevator has multiple safety mechanisms. 

Henry's 2-room apartment is furnished creatively with odd furnishings from second-hand outlets, the walls are covered with Cy Twombly ripoffs scribbled by Henry with pencil and felt tip pens, the homemade art emboldens the flat with a modern feeling.   

He makes Cuba Libres in large mugs with chipped ice. Lucia gets to the point, 

Querido, my lover, Sarafina the dancer kicked me out, she found someone else.

I’m looking for work and need a place to stay. It

was a Godsend that I ran into you. 

Henry still loves Lucia saying, 

Wonderful, I make good money selling weed but you might want to do your own thing, work at Macy's or Bloomingdales as a clerk, or dress the mannequins, they make good friends, they're obedient, and don't talk back. Your good looking and have a good figure, so you'll get hired.

I’m a good girl Querido

Yes, you are, blessed to have absconded Cuba, life is tough there. Lucia says, 

I still love you, Henry, we are still married you know, Henry chuckles saying, 

you mean we forgot to get divorced, I love you too.

You never know what’s in the cards, within hours of meeting the lovers are living together, married. Henry says excitedly,

The Night of the Iguana is on cable TV this evening.

They order takeaway, food, from a Thai place called Mi Cow Chi, dim sum, green curry soup, rice, and egg rolls, eating in the living room in front of the TV, 

The Night of the Iguana is a play by Tennessee Williams who did the screenplay for the film as well, living in Puerta Villarta, Mexico, boozing and giving guidance to director John Houston on the set.

The black and white film opens as the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, played by Richard Burton has a nervous breakdown while delivering a sermon in a Virginia Episcopal church, instead of preaching the gospel to the conservative flock he rants about their phony piety, and the churchgoers walk out before the service is over, hence Shannon is defrocked by the bishop. 

Shannon travels to Puerto Vallarta, working as a guide for a run-down tour company, escorting a busload of spinsters, and a teenage nymphet named Charlotte Goodall, who is being chaperoned by the group's leader, the resolute, hyperactive Judith Fellowes. 

Miss Fellowes, a spinster, is jealous because Charlotte is falling for Shannon. She discovers the nymphet in his hotel where the two are talking and calls the tour company to get him fired. 

To thwart the plot Shannon takes control of the bus from the handsome gringo driver, Hank, taking the tour group on a wild ride through the Mexican jungle to the crumbling, secluded hotel of his old friend Maxine Faulk, played by Ava Gardner. 

Maxine is recently widowed, and runs the hotel by herself, with the help of a Chinese cook who likes to smoke weed and two sexy Mexican marimba boys who she swims in the sea with at night.

Maxine and Shannon have known each other for years, they have eyes for each other until he becomes enamored with a new guest. Hannah Wilkes shows broke with her grandfather, a 90-year-old white-haired poet on his last legs, Nanno, she does sketches and Nanno recites his poems to get by as they travel. 

Hannah Wilks is a good woman, she helps Shannon get back his sanity, after he has another nervous breakdown on the hotel balcony she restrains him in a hammock with the help of the marimba boys and Maxine.

While Shannon is in his hammock straight jacket, she brews opium tea, as he sips the tea, she talks him down, fortifying him, bringing him back to his senses, 

Later the same night Nanno dies in his and Hannah's room after completing his swan song. The following day Hannah travels somewhere in the world and Shannon shacks up with Maxine, the couple will run the hotel.

The last scene is symbolic, an Iguana that has been tied in a noose of twine on the balcony throughout the film is freed by one of the marimba boys, denoting the exodus of Shannon's demons. 

Henry and Lucia like the film, neither of their lives resemble any of the characters in The Night of the Iguana. 

Lucia gets a job selling makeup at Macy’s, Henry continues selling weed, and undertakings for the couple are right as rain during the coming years. 

 

Henry, Flower & Tulip

 

Henry woke up early after a night of preparing for his appointment with the Social Security Administration in Harlem, a 2-minute walk from the Apollo Theater, where he saw Marvin Gaye and James Brown. The Godfather of Soul was the show stopper, the band playing grinding perfectly arranged soul, Brown doing inventive dance moves.

There weren't many whites in the audience, nobody cared. 

Finally at the Social Security Administration he walks to the 4th floor goes into a large room with connected plastic chairs and takes a number, 403.  

The room is full of people who are after something.

He takes SSI forms from 5 different wire filing baskets to fill out— personal references, proof of identity, whether you are a child molester, level of education, have done time, place of residence, and work history. 

It's a lengthy process as he stands at a long wooden table 

He does the best he can with the forms, then reading Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, a semi-autobiographical focus on Baldwin growing up during his Harlem years, the negative effect the Pentecostal Church had on him, and the positive feeling of living racism-free in Paris in 1948.

Henry's number shows in red lights and he's directed to room 14. The social worker is a fat woman, wearing a wig and a polyester suit. She says, 

I’m Miss Fulsum, I’d like to see your paperwork Mr. Lucowski. 

He hands her the forms, and she examines them stone-faced, Henry hates the process, he feels taken in. 

20 minutes later Miss Fulsum says, 

Mr. Lucowski we will notify you by mail if you have qualified for SSI, he asks,

whataya think my chances are ma’am? The fat woman says, 

a panel will review your paperwork, have a good day Mr. Lucowski. 

He would rather sell dope than put up with the welfare bullshit, selling dope freed you, no bosses.

A variety of potheads visited Henry’s apartment to score, a priest, a Vice cop, dock workers, hookers, other dealers, you never know who gets high, people like bud.

He’d stay in his apartment a lot, ordering Thai and Mexican out, chatting with some customers while most wanted to score and get out.

At times he’d go out for a drink in the afternoon in East Harlem, to the Mess Hall, a cheap bar. 

Sitting in a booth he orders a pitcher of Bud Light. Soul was on the jukebox, nonstop.

It was a mixed-race crowd, blacks, and whites. A thin black girl with model good looks, tall, in her 30s, wearing a short blond wig, and a printed dress with heels sits at Henry's booth, she orders Seagrams and soda. He can't believe his luck saying 

I'm Henry, 

they call me Flower, 

she picks up her drink at the bar, and back at the booth she sees a book on the table saying,

James Baldwin, the white man's choice, my favorites are 

Toni Morrison, Alex Walker, and Malcolm X. He asks,

Do you have kids? 

Yes a girl, Tulip, she's 5. 

How about her father? 

He was shot dead in the street, a teacher who got caught in the crossfire. 

Sorry Flower, the city is dangerous, the country is safer.

Let's do it, cool Flower,

I'd love to, Woodstock is safe, I know some people there, I don't know how many black people live there. Anyway, let's get outta here, take Tulip home go pack, here’s taxi money and my address, say your goodbyes and we'll take the Greyhound to Woodstock in the morning. 

It was summer break so Tulip and Flower spent the night at Henry’s apartment, he would skip out on owed rent and forgo the deposit.

At his apartment, Tulip watches cartoons falling asleep on the sofa. Henry and Flower go to his room and have sex, they sweat and cum through the night.  

In the morning Flower, Tulip and Henry take the subway to the Greyhound station and sit on a wooden bench eating candy and amusing themselves teasing Tulip about a boy she likes, Lester.  

It’s an hour's drive, 4 hours by bus. 

Tulip and Flower sit together and Henry sits across the aisle. As the bus speeds north on Interstate 83 a gay man sitting next in the same seat says, 

I’m Sandra I’m going to Woodstock to visit my brother, I work as an impersonator at Diva’s Cabaret, and restaurant. Your Henry, I overheard your lady friend talking to you. 

Yeah, Sandra, the city's nuts these days, we want to live in a small town. Sandra says, 

there are a number of gay clubs in Woodstock. Henry chuckles saying, 

yeah, gay people span the globe, born to be. Sandra asks,

you got any reefer, you look like the type.

a little, 175 dollars an ounce, she says, 

we can do the deal in Woodstock.

Fine.

Do you have cocaine?

No, I don’t do it.

How bout poppers? 

No thanks, 

she says,

I was a regular at Studio 54, he answers, 

it seemed like a place for big-shot show people. I never went, too young. She says, 

I’m a well-known impersonator, I do Cher, 

Cool, she's still hot.

As Flower corn rows little Tulip's hair the little girl gets motion sickness, her mom gives her 50 mg of Dramamine  

After 3 hours of twisting and winding the Greyhound reaches Woodstock. The threesome grabs their luggage and goes to Ethel’s Diner for dinner. They order meatloaf, mashed sweet potatoes, malts, and pie for desert, Henry asks the waitress, 

can you recommend a low-priced room for the three of us? 

Yeah sure, try the Morris Guesthouse. It’s on an off-street, Oxford, a few blocks away, it's a big old house, 3 stories.  

They walk some locating it, Henry rings the bell of the colonial house and Miss Morris invites them in. Flower says, 

we're looking for a room, and the landlady says sweetly,

I have a dreamy attic for you all, let's take a look.

They walk up 4 flights of stairs to a renovated wood attic, it's huge, with a built-in cooking area, cabinets, a portable electric oven, a double hot plate, air conditioner, stainless steel sink, a double bed, TV, and sofa. 

There's an immense sham oriental carpet on the floor that gives the attic a warm feeling. 

Henry pays Miss Morris in cash.

Flower goes to the 7-11 buying a bottle of Seagrams Seven, Coca-cola, 7 Up, milk, cereal, boxes of cornbread mix, bread, lunch meat, cans of pinto beans, and rice. 

It’s 8PM and they watch Cinderella on TV until Tulip falls asleep, Henry and flower switch the tube to The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, 

Flower wonders, 

Why aren't there black folks in this whitebread film?  They switch channels and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with Sydney Poitier is on, they both laugh and Flower says, 

it's our story baby, thank God we don't have a mess of in-laws. He rolls his eyes, 

Yeah, black-and-white relationships were awkward then, people don't care much now. Why don't you take Tulip to enroll in preschool tomorrow and I will look for a job. 

In the morning Flower cooks cornbread, beans, and rice for breakfast. 

Henry kisses the girls good by and hits the bricks, applying at Ace Hardware and a gas station, deciding he would rather sell weed than be someone's slave.

He contacts Slim in NYC and wires him money for a kilo. Slim wraps the key in 4 layers of aluminum foil and sprinkles powdered carbon throughout the box, sending it Fed X. 

Flower sits in bed reading her Tarot cards to decipher how the couple's luck is, it looks good, the devil, death, 9 0f swords, and the hanged man, don't show.  

Sandra had told Henry about a local Hippy bar, No Name, owned and managed by the bartender.  

Amazingly the herb arrives at the doorstep of Miss Morris's and she signs for it, bringing it upstairs where Flower is reading asking her what it was, Flower says, 

healing herbs, I study Chinese medicine ma'am,

OK, Doll.

 

Henry hits the bricks looking for a hippy bar called, No Name.

Finding it he walks in, sits at the bar, and orders a beer, making small talk with the hippy bartender who says, 

I'm Marley, 

My name is Henry, 

do people smoke weed much in town? 

You beat dude. 

How about you and I go into business selling OZs at the bar I'll give you 25% just to turn a blind eye,

Sure man cool, when do we start? 

Tomorrow. 

Henry becomes a regular at No Name, spending evenings there. 

On the first night he sells 6 OZs, the gig grows and the money flows. 

They enroll Tulip in Woodstock Elementary in the fall and Henry and Flower get married at The Woodstock County Court House. 

The couple and their step-daughter Tulip live normally, lay low, making some special friends, and years later Tulip enrolls in Mohawk Valley Community College to study nursing.  

Life for Henry, Flower, and Tulip was right as rain.