Better than the surfeit of scheduled presentations, the best part of my musical journey was soon provided by a taxista, as scrawny and becapped as he was jolly, running his rounds with a stolid wife very circumspectly by his front seat side, who ended up waiting regularly for me to emerge at the end of every night’s show. His rickety Russian Lada barely seemed to work at all, yet he’d engineered somehow to blast 50’s mambo hits from an antique tape-deck in his dashboard. Somehow, his evident love for these sounds, and nostalgia for a country that no longer existed, overwhelmed me as well – and made for the perfect soundtrack to ferry us joyfully beyond the nightly landscape of ruin.

Soon enough, my irrepressible yearning for more dramatic exposure to so-called “real life” would be unmasked as a familiarly masochistic impulse. Aside from being a long and costly taxi ride from the main Festival grounds, the luxuriant expanse of my assigned casa and the solicitous over-pampering of its staff, was making me feel quarantined from the Cuba I’d come to see. With tourist arrivals down, I figured it would be easy to score some digs smack in the city center, even my own separate AirBnb apartment, most showing smart furnishings clearly set up by “hosts” in exile. But all my first tries at making a booking stalled, flipped back to home pages (before I realized a VPN was required to fool the site into thinking I was in Miami). And when I told my guide Rafa I wanted to relocate near the Old Town, he acted surprisingly put upon and seemed to imply that it wouldn’t be easy. After a couple nights longer than I wished, Rafa informed me he’d come up with the very last remaining room, and a real bargain, on San Isidro, a stretch I’d seen bustling with action (good and not so good). Late that day, my guide had led me through an ornately carved if skinny doorway wedged between tacky Che t-shirt purveyors and leafy open-air terraces for mojito sipping, up an interminable circular staircase (lugging my own baggage, Gandhi-like). Past a second-floor atrium was an inner sanctum that seemed more crowded family home than hostelry, and after paying in cash (dollars only) and seeing my name duly scribbled into a tattered account book, was led by the surly Mom up another flight and to the back of a long hall, opening onto a windowless chamber painted a luridly lime-green to match similar shiny floor tiles, a leopard-patterned throw over a double bed softer than a stock market soft landing. Surely, this was a Hollywood set for some “Night of the Iguana” whorehouse assignation.

I pretended to be pleased, but things got worse when it turned out the proprietor asked for my key back the very next morning. “No problema” -- they had relations who ran a similar place across the street, only this one was way more vertical and minimal, if possible. Or was I being checked in at long last to a sterile white manicomio madhouse? The shower spigot provided gushed strongly enough to burn tender flesh, but I was urged to escape by ordering drinks on a high balcony from which Los Van Van oldies blared. In travel, even more than in other facets of life, you had to be careful what to ask for, since there would always be some callous local ready to provide it. On the road, one could likewise receive immediate and most often unpleasant confirmation of that most tried-and-true homily: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (especially when any protest will be untranslatable). It wasn’t long in my blindingly basic digs before I caught myself wishing to go back to the privileged roost I’d just made such a bother of rejecting. I even began to sympathize with those who’d signed up for the exorbitant tour, where all such choices were taken out of one’s hand – the prime attraction for aging lefties or sheep-like Chinese alike – and all potentially harsh experience was blunted by the rose-tinted windows of that awaiting big bus.

Within a few savagely animated blocks was just about everything I felt obliged to see and everything I didn’t want to witness. So conveniently few steps away now, the street life I’d craved was thoroughly dispiriting, instantly worth avoiding. I had hoped to have contact with more “average” citizens, but I could only hope these street corner malingerers weren’t the least bit average. This populace appeared exclusively made up of black-market moneychangers, craven con artists, touts and souvenir hawkers, pimps and pickpockets in training. At least, there were no mounting pyramids of detritus along this stretch – probably because few people lived here, so many were transient. Now I was right in the thick of it, in search of immediate thinning. There was no obvious prostitution, few skimpily-clad mulatas conspicuous claiming permanent residence on designated corners. No, the action swirled all around. Each time I went out, an easily recognizable and sedately gray-haired mark promising a diminution of bed calisthenics, women of no particular appeal, no different from all the others in their torn, curve-clinging leggings or simply lacking the funds to purchase standard sexed-up wigs or heels, sidled up to whisper the going price for flesh – 30 dollars a pop, American. And that was the starting offer.

By day, all was negotiable, any dangers obvious to avoid. Returning late from the Festival, the area seemed downright terrifying – but seeming to read my mind, my by-now loyal cab driver got out and escorted me right up to my inn’s barely discernible entry. Rafa had pointed out a state telecom office down the block where I could finally pick up a SIM card, which took visa-flashing and an hour’s wait. No wonder alternate providers hovered outside, promising cheaper chips, though no guarantee that the numbers would work. With mine obtained at last, I still couldn’t master the popular, if incredibly slo-mo app for beckoning taxis (not an Uber but an Under) nor a group chat where locals promised immediate pickup, though none replied within 24 hours.

Nevertheless, I had succeeded in getting within an easy, if furtive, stroll of every sight that screamed out “Havana.” Just a block down was Hemingway’s Floridita, where a house band pumped out “Guantanamera” like grinning robots. The elegant bar didn’t look the way I remembered, its pink facade ringed with soot, neon sporadically blinking out. I passed the once gracious Prado promenade, now a kind of outdoor daycare center for unemployed moms, plied by ice cream vendors pushing half-empty carts. And just around the corner, lo and behold, ringed by a whole phalanx of jumbo-sized Fifties’ convertibles in pastel paint jobs like some Chattanooga Chevy dealership’s hallucination, was the nation’s grand, and non-functional, capital building. More than ever, this domed Washingtonian copy looked pasted on to its surroundings, some Greco-Roman cut-out amidst baroque arcades – the Spanish-American war replayed in clashing architecture.

Once the gauntlet of hustlers thinned out, and the setting suddenly seemed to simulate something more respectable, I came to a stately square flanked on all sides by the slender, silvery royal palms (the national bit of nature, said to “symbolize the resilience of the Cuban people” – which they clearly needed). Hogging most of the space below was the veritable Museum of the Revolution, exhibiting within a pavilion jutting out to an all-glass point a replica of the storied Granma, the puny fishing trawler rented in Mexico to bring Fidel and his tiny band of rebels back to the fight, though they all got terribly seasick before the boat ran aground in mangrove swamps, far from waiting comrades. Yes, the Revolution was a cavalcade of mistakes – more proof that the old, U.S.-promulgated order was so ready to be felled that all it needed was one good push. Outside were a few tanks and pieces of military hardware looking outdated enough to suggest World War One. Sentries in green khaki marched up and down but had no reason to guard the place, as few came anymore, not even Russian or Chinese tour groups.

Directly across from all that officialdom, I stumbled on the ultimate in choreographed defiance. Several teams of teen break-dancing troupes gathered regularly here on the ready-made platform of steps for entry to the country’s main “Bellas Artes” showcase. Fueled by boom boxes and led through their synchronized paces by one street Ballanchine in floppy painter’s pants, these were by far the most professional amateurs I’d ever witnessed – their contortions deserving that legal proviso: don’t try this at home. Whether competing to pull off the widest splits or effect jerky, robotic poses, I just couldn’t help gawking at so entertaining a refutation of history’s facing relics (as well as the amusing sight of an all-women’s auxiliary, using the museum’s plate-glass frontings as their make-up mirrors). Days before, when Rafa had casually pointed out the moldering colonial mansion that was a practice facility for the vaunted National Ballet, this turned out to be the one occasion when bureaucracy reared its ugly head, as two tall women, so perfect in posture to undoubtedly have been dancers, refused to let me take a peek without written permit at the last of the Cuban government’s “secret weapons,” cultural weapons at least.

From the look of it, the Bellas Artes also seemed stuck in the Sixties, obsolete as the Museum of the Revolution, with almost no patrons wandering through. But I was so wrong. The two floors of immense, underlit rooms displayed the gamut from colonial to very contemporary: multi-colored phalanxes of sculpted rhinoceros installations, an entire black box hung with dozens of actual bones (cattle, simulating human) etched with superbly detailed drawings. There were a few iconic, pop art portraits of Che and Fidel, but hardly anything else of a propagandistic nature. Led by the striking compositions by Wilfredo Lam, the Cuban granted a sure place in the annals of modern art, a high percentage of the works were challenging abstractions. These far outnumbered the folkloric scenes and tropical landscapes, though even these showed an effortless originality. Topping it all off was a retrospective of an irreverent painter who had died too young, but not before he left an enormous series of Dali-like satires that juxtaposed wide-bodied Buicks with slave rituals, Marti with Ben Franklin and the gas-pumping Texaco man. The Museum was clear proof of the rich legacy born of the island’s central place in Spain’s New World holdings, a testament to the staying power of artistic impulses here, much like the Festival itself.

On the way out in the Bellas Artes gift shop, I soon picked up a crudely printed coffee table book entitled, “What Fidel Saw.” That meant endless photo-illustrated evidence of all the social ills the Revolution had tackled: malnourished kids with swollen bellies, the thatched bohio huts most Cubans called a roof over their head, schools that looked like they doubled as public toilets, verdant tracts of rolling farmlands dominated by absentee owners. Which made me wonder: did younger people like these breakdancers need reminding of all that?

I remember being in Italy on the night cinematic master Federico Fellini died -- and even as the main channel of RAI, the state television, played one of his classic films after another all through the night, reporters sent to interview younger Italian moviegoers in line for some Hollywood blockbuster quickly discovered that none could identify who Fellini was! There is such a thing as collective memory but there is also such a thing as generational memory, and in our times of quick-change novelty, the latter seemed to overpower the former. The most frightening aspect of Cuba was that none of those kids eagerly lusting for the material benefits of American rule had any notion, or lived experience, of just how unfree and unequal that had turned out the last time around. As some of them spoke of leaving for wider horizons or dreaming of Americans coming to the rescue like white knights bearing laptops and Nikes for all, I couldn’t help picturing the lot ending up as bellboys or take-out delivery men, a legion of newly recruited gofers and grunts. I certainly wanted life to be improved for coming Cuban generations, by any means. Yet I couldn’t bear to picture them massing to cheer on the same recurrent conquerors, all waving freely distributed Stars ‘n’ Stripes, giving immediate cover to the lie of their “liberation.”

Seeking those who could speak for today’s Cubans, I pushed Rafa to make introductions to anyone in the art world. His first revelation, apparently a regular stop for culture-hungry Americans, was more of a statement of the past than future. At the back of an ancient townhouse entirely unnoticed on a busy part of el centro, a stolid old dude in shorts, accompanied by a skin-headed and unsmiling son, led me through an enormous loft space whose double-story walls were crammed top to bottom with canvases and prints of varying sizes and periods. With utter calm and frankness, and no ulterior motive whatsoever, the fellow (of needs be, not needing to be identified) told of how his own father, as an illustrious professor at the main art school, had amassed through friendships what had turned into the largest and most valuable private collection in the country. It wasn’t that it needed to be hidden, even if, as he pointed out, a few sketches contained buffoonish caricatures of El Comandante himself, and an entire side wall was taken up with magnificent, Rosseau-like evocations of the Eden this island once may have been (for which its highly-valued creator had been forced out of his university post). Everything here was above board, the names of those represented all well known, occasionally purchased by or loaned to knowing foreign ambassadors, just that the family couldn’t bear to part with their holdings (but toasted them by offering me a thimbleful of rum). Nor had they purchased even a penny of theft insurance. Such a treasure trove had seemingly just fallen through the cracks, and cracks could be surprisingly wide in Cuba.

Through the young inheritor we were introduced to a fledgling gallery owner and promoter of more edgy art. Meeting for coffee in the back garden of a hip café, this fellow with one earring stud, Nehru jacket and Timberland boots was a kind of prototype found in all urban hubs. There was nothing especially Cuban about him, nor especially fearful of authorities –his youthful arrogance pushing him to extremes of opposition. With one sweeping statement, he dismissed Marx, Engels, Freud, Einstein and even Picasso as “con artists.” Apparently, Andy Warhol was still safe. In turn, he set us up with a studio visit – and what a studio, the vast upper floor of a 19^th-century Vedado mansion that any painter on earth would have killed for. The few miniature collages hung on walls barely made a dent, and our host was such a dreamy looking blond that he gave the impression of someone who wasn’t yet quite sure of what he was getting into. He was, however, very openly gay as was his imagery: overlays of bodybuilder hunks pasted on the covers of propagandistic old magazines for “Communist youth.” As for surviving on sales, he made the point that under such a regime, there were so few people like him and that made it relatively easy to become known. He was not the first to repeat, as a shortcut to more serious explanations, “Everything in Cuba is complicated.”

The word I kept hearing from everyone trying to cope with this place and its system still barely in place, the word of the day, of the week, of the month or the decade, had to be “complicado.” No Google translator needed. Getting from point A to point B, even when pointless, was truly complicado, as I’d already found out. Getting one’s monthly rations, getting to bank savings (if there were any), being taken care of properly and having access to appropriate housing, medicines or mentors, of course complicado. I could go on, from morning to night, hardly able to chart most of the examples being a citizen here would manufacture. Above all, being a Cuban artist, intellectual, do-gooder or conflicted tourist guide, trying to show things in both the best and worst light at once, was extraordinarily complicado. Just being Cuban – a creature at minimum part-Spanish, Basque or Gallego, part-Caribbean, part-Yoruban, part-Catholic, part-atheist, part-Jewish, part-Americanized, part anti-Americanized, part trained to be proudly self-sufficient, part endlessly wishing to find something better on which to be dependent, part-collectivist, part-entrepreunerial (the more such urges suppressed, the more insistent), part-nostalgic, part-fearful, part-ingenious or disingenuous. When a collective reason for being gets used up, when a shared history comes to the edge of the cliff, you won’t just find piles of garbage there, but heaps of thwarted desires. Si, es muy complicado.

Apropos of the finish to the World Cup (Argentina, yay! Greedy FIFA, boo!), here’s another excerpt from forthcoming travel book that features my take on the planet’s most rabid football rooters….

Could there be even one demented soul in these parts who didn’t live and die for the neighborhood Boca Juniors football club? Why not Boca Seniors, given their outsized significance? Not only were there numerous sports shops hawking the pale-striped national jerseys, but most were fronted with life-sized figures, the Argentine version of cigar store Indians, of Maradona and Messi, Messi and Maradona – the presence of these twinned secular saints, one a shyly forced celebrity, the other brash salt of the earth, was decidedly Messi-anic, offering salvation on every wall and fence and saloon entry. I even wandered past a wide concrete yard where hopeful Boca boys honed their kicking proclivities with a pantheon of their models a la Marx-Engels in murals peeking from behind the goal netting. This place was a dictadura of the cleated.

All roads led, of course, to one steep side or another of the Boca Stadium. Swathed in Ikea-style yellow and blue team colors, these grandstands rose like the steeply angled sides of some ancient Aztec pyramid, undoubtedly the site of even more ritualized behavior. Of course, I cast about for some posted schedule of upcoming matches. For like many a perversely anti-intellectual intellectual, my lifetime’s favored idea of “joining the crowd” was to be swept along by that irrational fervor born of identification with sporting exertions toward pennant-waving exultations shared through heights of self-delusion. Eschewing some bleeding heart “family of man,” I sought adoption in the more universal family of fan.

I could hardly wait to take my place amidst what was said to be Argentina’s most extreme expression of brotherly aggression, sublimated testosterone in overdose. Yet I was somewhat relieved that the calendar dictated I seek my initiation into football fanaticism at a locale other than this one. The only upcoming occasion had to be the Huracan-San Lorenzo tete a tete set for my first Sunday. The latter, I recalled, had been the favorite squad of ex-Cardinal Bergoglio, that stubbornly plebian Pope Francis. Hopefully, this less than critical contest at season’s opening would reasonably lower my odds of becoming an inadvertent casualty through sitting in the wrong section or wearing the wrong colors.

Looking to purchase a ticket online, I was startled to see they began at tens of thousands of devalued pesos – far more than I figured all those loyal followers could fork out. I was about to give up, when a fellow Argentin-ophile texted with a solution too obvious to have been considered: just head to the stadium, dummy. As I had confirmed many times myself, dealing with scalpers at the Super Bowl in Palo Alto or more surreptiously in the shadow of Beijing’s Bird’s Next, there was no standing-room action that one couldn’t pry one’s way into, given enough focused determination. Still, I felt appropriately foolish joining the flow heading down the many side-streets heading up to the tantalizing hints of stadium curves up ahead – the only naif among thousands who not only wasn’t clutching proof of admission in my paws but didn’t even speak the language properly enough to plead my case. I had also counted on some degree of Third World inefficiency, still unwilling to concede that this town ran to an urgent First World beat. Just as the stolid Huracan home ground came into view, there were solid barriers, checkpoints as unbreachable as Berlin’s Charlie, guarded by burly ticket takers who could have doubled as the world’s most intimidating nightclub bouncers. By the third barricade, and third try at my “dumb tourist” act, I was once more ready to admit defeat. This time, however, my frantic charades miming how to obtain a ticket led to one security man pointing me toward a fellow pacing to the side, busily on his mobile, looking the part of some schoolyard pusher. Summoning up the courage to make my approach, I soon found out he didn’t have any coveted slips of paper, but possessed knowledge on where to get them. Taking up the phone he had just put down, he confirmed with a nod that I could still score – if I trusted his mutterings of a flowery street address I had to scribble down, some unquantified blocks going against the flow toward the match site. I had no choice but to give it a try.

Wandering impossibly far, I was at least provided with a complete picture of how much the impending contest meant to this entire district. Wide circles of male bonding, and beyond that, whole extended families, numerous tykes in tow, were out in their best red-and-white Huracan team jerseys, most standing beyond sidewalks with beers in hand as part of a full day’s warm-up. Eventually, I reached a hectic boulevard where pubs and stands hawking choripan (the more robust local version of the hot dog) were just as packed with fan overflow, wondering if I’d find the right storefront. About to turn back once more, I noticed the stark façade of the team headquarters, identified by one barely glimpsable team logo, and seemingly least patronized of all – its bar and dance hall shuttered before game time. But there was one antechamber to the main lobby served by two girls whose heads barely peeked out over a high counter that could serve only one purpose. Within seconds, I had my admission access in hand, at about one-tenth the Internet price. There were no row or seat numbers shown, and I didn’t dare ask which end of the stands I might be on. Home or away, shade or sun, didn’t matter.

Best of all, my route back skirted another of Buenos Aires’ amply shaded village greens, parks generous enough to testify to the larger scale of pampas grasslands beyond, and passing a corner entry, my eye caught another sort of physical activity in progress. On a vast concrete platform that seemed provided for this very purpose, around twenty couples affected a slow, courtly dance to one live torch singer and amplified guitar strumming. This appeared some inheritance of gaucho culture, only these urban cowboys looked a lot less redneck than the ones I knew. Could they be the only ones in sight who don’t give a damn about football? Most touchingly, the participants were all ages, from blushing teenage to near decrepit veterans, a few dressed for the occasion in crumpled suit jackets and polkadot dresses, but most in high-top sneakers and jeans. Such casual garb further accentuated the utterly anti-modern gentility of sweet partners who coordinated steps but never touched except with their eyes, their slow moves a stylized courtship whose hallmark was the raising and fluttering of long handkerchiefs brandished overhead by both sexes. Later, I searched up that this was probably a national jig known as the Zamba. By whatever label, I was struck dead in my pre-game tracks and just had to watch. Half-inviting and half-coy, half tossed to the winds, through gesturing so feminine in male hands, masculine in female hands, the pastel-tinted kerchiefs didn’t so much wave toward one another as flutter and unfurl in tribute to a past well worth honoring.

It was a hot and sweaty half-hour through more fans than I’ve ever seen in one place before I made it back to the same set of metal obstructions, still not entirely certain if I was holding the proper sort of pass. But lo and behold, my ticket was recognized, and I was pointed to an unmarked, general admissions gate where thousands make a mad dash and took up whatever spot they could find in the gradual rows of concrete at one end of the commodious bowl. To fully appreciate the match, I figured I’d get tips on the team’s top players or history from the knowing rooters standing all around me. But I never got a chance because these bloated believers never sat down or stopped bellowing. As far as I could tell, none of their complex fight songs, closer to psalms than chanting, ever even got repeated twice, though the lyrics sounded so complex to my ear. This progression of the home team’s musical repertoire appeared as pre-determined as any catechism, memorized as if through childhood hypnosis. Between bursts of smoke bombs, firecrackers and mad clappers in unison, these time-honored ballads were blasted out so forcefully in such unison, I couldn’t catch any meanings other than the more general “Props to our side!”

Previous notches in my spectatorial belt included several World Series, unwordly as they were all-American, an Aussie Open and standing room at Wimbledon, three Olympics and two World Cups, where my absorption into the mad masses reached some kind of soulful apotheosis in Seoul, with the South Korean squad unexpectedly making the quarter-finals, where I joined a virtual cheering city of two million before giant street monitors. Yet I had never been exposed to such a degree of urgency enveloping so modest an arena, such rasping exhalations from beer bellies urging the boys on with such conviction, perhaps because most of them were no longer boys themselves – so much so that I had to keep reminding myself this was some obscure derby between two non-contending clubs. I didn’t even get the sense that anyone was actually tracking too closely the long, lazy exchanges of passes or assists, defensemen’s stalling and surveying downfield, on that faded green rectangle where finely-honed athletes so frequently writhed and held shins in mock pain like helpless schoolkids. Even when the home squad burst through with what seemed an entirely accidental, almost apologetic goal, there didn’t seem to be the slightest variation of volume or pitch to the vast chorale singalong, carried forth full-throated and without let-up lest the heavens crash in on all concerned.

After all, such phalanxes of amateur bleaters knew well from experience that most far-off forays ended in frustration, an errant pass or shot soaring way above any known target, all the throwaways and takeaways betraying a kind of cosmic over-eagerness all could partake in. This sport wasn’t just the most territorial in battle lines but the most like intercourse, as front lines forming phallic thrusts attempt over and again to penetrate so invitingly wide, unprotected and entirely passive an opening. As such, it was a sport that perfectly illustrated that infinitude of ways man’s mating approaches could get thwarted, go awry -- while showcasing all the hesitations, feints, coy denials and backhanded stratagems necessary, the performance anxieties, to be channeled in pursuit of those few stolen seconds of glorious, unambiguous breakthrough.

Right in the first half’s midst, an enormous thin blanket, womb-like stretching, is hauled out and covers the entire cheering section up fifty rows until we’re all co-conspirators inside some bizarrely echoing tent, immense teepee. Wasn’t the whole point really just to prove to ourselves we could still unite as one, still get this worked up, in service of some attainable, if abstract, endpoint – daring we call it a goal? Yes, ritual had to be the accurate word for this duly scheduled primal assertion of collectivity that may once have ended in bloodletting, if not slitting throats or taking prisoners, than some berobed priests appeasing unspecificed gods with glinting knives held overhead to sacrifice innocents. I followed my most appreciated form of mob rule out the exits – not daring to test the urinary sub-stations -- and down packed tributaries of what on other days may have been ordinary streets, a veritable hurricane unleashed, hardly caring if Huracan had won.

That last morning in Cuba, I saw my first dead body.

This transpired, oddly enough, as I sipped a cappuccino before a flimsy outdoor table wobbling on cobblestone smack in the most sanitized area of old Havana, a colonial idyll spruced-up and sprayed-painted exclusively for touristic enjoyment. Having briefly noticed some commotion down the block, I had fleetingly spied what I took to be a merrily drunken fellow with incongruous dyed blonde streaks, who appeared to have settled comfortably at ground level, reveling in hogging without permission the very middle of one quaintly unpeopled alley, arms spread wide as though to embrace the universe, or perhaps flapping to take wing toward a threatening tropical sky. Could it be that even death throes were rhythmically choreographed here?

It was only when I’d risen to reach in pants pocket for my few remaining pesos, worthless beyond these parts and nearly so even to a chubby waitress who nonetheless reacted as far too grateful, that I was shocked to discover a black plastic sheet hastily thrown over the man. Instinctively, somewhere beyond logic or words, I knew that one wasn’t supposed to look beneath, that there was, for the living at least, nothing to see. The blunt ends of one immobile arm, and one foot, with cheap sneaker pried off and sock end stretched onto the street, made for immediate confirmation of telltale inanimacy. A mulata mother stared from halfway down the block, telegraphing appropriate concern while shielding the eyes of two toddlers behind. A crowd of older men in cheap suits, emerging from a fancied-up hotel side entrance, now paused at uncomfortably close range, though with little enough reaction -- suggesting the covered clump before them might not be an especially unusual sight. No wonder, by the time I returned to check out of my AirBnb -- actually banned here and only possible to book with a VPN meant to fool the world my laptop was in Miami – I couldn’t help thinking, too callously, that what I’d just been forced to witness would make a pat metaphor for poor Cuba itself.

When I soon informed Rafa, my hired and refreshingly honest, if sourly dissident guide, he summarily rattled off his working explanation that the severe lack of ongoing health care for the elderly or abandoned, scandalous in a society once built on a socialist template, had to be the cause (though this collapsing system’s casualty had appeared far from pensioners’ age). His point was reinforced by the fact that my hired escort had grudgingly agreed to meet at the last moment, not so much for any heartfelt farewell, but to pick up a care package of items he had requested before my arrival These were no longer the innocent pencils and crayons I had distributed to cheery schoolkids on my first visit decades back, but as many non-prescription medications as I could fit into a single draw-string satchel, especially Ibuprofen, painkilling salves, powerful repellents, anti-inflammatories for a nation flaming out.

How to frame an “exclusive” account of something fading before everyone’s eyes, with observational starting points so potentially “overtaken by events,” overshadowed by some imminent if ill-defined ending? Condemned to the topical more than the tropical? To bear news of Cuba’s freefall would hardly be considered a scoop. So to what end this third pilgrimage to the promised land of anti-imperialist impudence? The previous, to my unending shock, had come nearly forty years back. That was when I had joined a “sports tour,” specialized for decidedly unsporting leftists, as part of research for a book on my own, and Latin America’s, favorite imperial holdover, baseball. Coincidentally, our group arrived just after the mass exodus of the Marielista boatlift, a safety valve of the discontent now upstaged by larger crises. Yet my first and longest period of coming to know this place had actually been entirely virtual: nearly two years of imaginary residence amidst every telling detail to conjure up the setting for a novel, meant to artificially sustain my own youthful idealism, made up of a single confessional diatribe by the endlessly speechifying Fidel Castro.

For far too many intervening Januarys, I had thought to return for the Havana Jazz Festival, an equally inspirational project begun during the same period, seeking to bridge that ninety-mile chasm between cultures through yet another shared American “pastime.” It must have been in that same period when I relinquished the last of my youthful rock rebellion and came to belatedly embrace the greatest improvisational art lovingly exposed through my own father’s extensive collection of Django and MJQ albums, late Bix and early Miles, the Duke and Dickie Wells. What amazing apolitical jam sessions I must have missed through my hesitation! How could I have resisted such a joyous distillation of the belief expressed through both my prior books – that Americans, north and south, are more alike than our leaders would have us believe?

*. *. *

With the increasing threat that recent turns in geopolitics might put an end to all such comradely cacophony, I could no longer postpone my auditory participation. A resolve building for so many years even overcame my usual cowardly instincts – defying reports of increasing electrical blackouts, a sudden rise in petty crime and a general lack of sanitation spreading potential lethal, mosquito-borne viruses with scary names like Chikungunya. It was only when I outlined vacations plans to fellow Americans that I got a rise of mystification: Could one really make for that forbidden realm so casually? Somehow poor Cuba, our nearest and dearest neighbor, still remained beyond the pale. Never mind that for years now upstanding Delta and American Airlines provided a packed schedule of daily flights from Miami. Besides, starting out from my expat Portugal home, there was no immediate need to worry about U.S. authorities.

Still, some stops are so loaded with significance that there’s an air of unreality about landing there simply by purchasing a ticket online. Yet I sensed not the slightest saboteurial tremor among fellow Euro passengers on the wide-bodied Iberojet from Madrid -- – when back in the day, the only contraption daring to tackle the quick crossing from Florida had been a chartered DC-3, nearly a World War Two relic, that shook terribly and kept the cabin unpressurized, with exit doors open. No in-flight peanuts or kung fu movies either. Now it fell solely to old-timers, semi-retired radicals like me, to consider how rum and Cokes while tanning on Varadero Beach might contribute to the forging of Che Guevara’s “new man.” Or, in our so accessible world, had every possible destination been consigned to the ordinary?

I was all too familiar with the old Jose Marti Airport, a single brownish wood-trimmed hall divided into gates and looking more like a failed nightclub than transportation hub. On the final day last time, our “Venceremos” tour – as in we shall overcome all obstacles, even touristic! -- was forced to linger somewhere close to eight hours before our one-hour return, as the entire operation became paralyzed by a sudden emergency. But it was worth it, as we were made unwitting witnesses to a hijacking. Remember when those were a frequent occurrence in that long bygone epoch before 9/11 security screenings? As I recalled, rumors somehow swept the airport that an Eastern Airlines hop from somewhere to Atlanta would soon be joining us for an unscheduled stopover. I had no memory of what action was taken against the asylum-seeker responsible. The high point of the entire newsworthy event was that most of our group scampered to the gate and crowded around like a mischievous brood of chimps, getting the reward for our own two weeks of bus riding and cross-cultural travails in being the first behind “enemy” lines to welcome our dazed fellow countrymen! Even this was a bit of an anti-climax, as the passengers, while a trifle stunned as they filed out, made like consumerist zombies and staggered dutifully toward the gift shop to load up on contraband cigars. Jose Marti must have broken a sales record that day.

I found the airport as upgraded these days as any ideals may have got downgraded. Much enlarged, even dominated by shelves of de rigeur duty-free, this might have been bland enough to be anywhere, though when I cast about for an ATM or local telecom booth, I glimpsed no such customary accoutrements. Once outside the arrivals gate, I was hit with the co-equal forces of heat and hustlers. A semi-circle of the standing crowded toward all newcomers, some holding hand-scripted signs welcoming stray hotel guests while older men with premature gray in their wiry curls wandered the periphery, angling to grab a fare – and pounced when they caught me scanning the names, even badly misspelled, to no avail. I had been promised not once, but twice, that a “team” of greeters from the Jazz Festival would be there without fail to transport me into town. I guessed this was a residual of the V.I.P. treatment accorded to musical headliners that I couldn’t help feeling was entirely undeserved – until I eventually came to understand my distinction as one of the only foreign media, perhaps the sole American, covering the event. In any case, I was spared any attendant guilt, and this first hint of Festival disorganization hardly surprised me, since the only official I’d been able to contact for preceding months looked, from her Whatsapp profile, to be a very recent college grad known only by Daniela.

Soon enough, I was being hooked forcefully by the arm toward a waiting Chevy Bel-Air, my knock-off Northface duffel tossed into the cinemascopic trunk. After bolting back towards the terminal for one last look, a Cuban lady in blouse of frangipani pattern offered to make a call on her travel agency mobile. But Daniela’s number yielded no answer – and I soon had it confirmed that the fares into town were state-regulated, the conveyances equally antique. I had vivid memories of my first ride into Havana those many years ago: that particular sickly-sweet smell of the tropics filling even our sealed-up tour bus, the frequent bonfires of palm leaves and field detritus lighting the way down so shockingly narrow a single-lane road. Aside from huge billboards boasting the Revolution’s conquest of “Alfabetismo” (illiteracy), there was scant human presence. And it seemed much the same this time, only sans inspirational signage, but for a detour through one industrial enclave seemingly asleep at just past nine, sliced by train tracks the old Chevy could barely get over. From a backseat voluminous enough for royalty, I could help inquiring if we were really going on the right camino. The driver’s shrugging response implied there was no other.

Reaching suburbs I would come to identify as Miramar, broad avenues lined with extravagantly upper-crust, oh-so-Spanish homes long abandoned -- perhaps by some widely branded during my last visit as “vagrants” and “scum” -- the ride was lengthened further when the driver couldn’t locate my assigned casa particular (as privately-run hostelries were called). The taxis had no GPS guidance here, barely repairs enough to blunt these old junkers’ persistent gas leaks. It took several mobile calls, and a few detours down broad boulevards that appeared to curve in on themselves, before we braked across from a high iron gate to an uphill driveway with columns holding up one wing. By night, it was hard to discern just how far this attached 50’s-style mini-mansion stretched, but two women of indeterminate age pushed open the gate and waved towards me. With hair frowzled, they appeared to have been roused out of bed in their nightgowns. Yet they fought for the honor of snatching my baggage and telegraphed with wide smiles their sincere abracos. As oft-repeated, the natural warmth of the Cuban way of life – a relief after so long in the spooky Cuban night -- was undoubtedly amplified by a special gratitude towards anyone brave or foolish enough to make their way to their blighted island home.

From the ground up, that’s the only way to look at social change. This has become the main mission of Slow Food, the global movement that has generated most of the ideas driving today’s chefs. Attending one of the first of the seminal organization’s “Salone del Gusto,” with food stands and workshops crammed into a reconstructed Fiat factory, I’d found a seat on a bus heading to sample traditional foodways at a farm of organic chestnuts. Seated in the back of a donkey stable, some of the world’s most sophisticated chefs, including Alice Waters, famed pioneer of the farm-to-table California cuisine aimed at taking the stuffing out of the stuffy French, a stooped grandma scooped out helpings of just frothing cornmeal polenta, studded with the aforementioned chestnuts, making one and all coo, “Perfect food! You can’t do anything better than this!”

While the main thrust had originally been mostly about rescuing “endangered” foodstuffs (like lard made in marble tubs that the E.U. had banned for hygienic reasons) and popularizing the notion of applying “biodiversity” to food, as exemplified, in a press conference held by founder Carlo Petrini, in “the Americans, who use to serve just one type of soft bread and had rediscovered dozens of examples of their baking heritage.” But this time I’m lucky to be passing through Northern Italy just in time to eavesdrop on Petrini, an ex-radio jock turned Sixties’ hippie, delivering his annual address to the next class of applicants – and accompanying parents – at the restored castle south of Torino that has become a full-fledged University of Gastronomy, institutionalizing the fundamental Slow Food doctrine. Striding in at the last moment, after flying in from some conference in service to his Tierra Madre, a huge support system for new and more equitable forms of agriculture the world over, Petrini is now less wild-eyed radical than eminence grise. A tall, austere figure, he sports a full-length black overcoat – as undertaker funereal as it is Italian chic. At a lectern, he launches into his customary rap with the fluency honed by three decades of thinking about these issues in a more profound manner than anyone else at the global table.

Petrini quickly warns prospective students that the study of gastronomy is not about “fat men in bowler hats, pots and pans or the ‘food pornography’ of televised cooking competitions.” Tracing his intellectual ancestry back to Brillat-Savarin, he repeats the dictum that “Gastronomy is all that man does to nourish himself.” Beyond mere nutrition, this can involve anthropology, sociology, philosophy, all the sciences plus arts, communal ritual, gender roles, not to mention agronomy, chemistry, health. Anti-authoritarian even when it comes to his own authority, he reminds the fresh-faced crowd that “Someone who makes cheese his whole life knows more than all our professors.” He even warns that applicants will “go out of this university more confused than when they came in,” since he concludes, “Food is the greatest work of nature, forcing man to admit that much of what keeps him alive is still a mystery.”

After all, he posits “When you respect even a piece of ham or salami, then you are respecting yourself – because a few minutes after I consume that ham, it is part of Carlo Petrini.” Where 70 percent of the planet’s culinary diversity has disappeared, he is less interested in influencing governments than growers. “Real power,” for Petrini, “is the power to govern the stomachs of the people.”

Rushing out as purposefully as he rushed in, in a hurry to set up more Kenyan “Peace Kitchens” or publish guidebooks to trattorie that refuse modern shortcuts, I follow the great guru of culinary consciousness, sprinting next to him as he heads to his car. With little time, I blurt out the simplistic question raised wherever I’ve gone, “Can chefs save the world?” His grumbling answer, predictably, is to remind me that “a restaurant is a luxury, not a necessity. Now it’s become very fashionable for chefs to try to become part of the solution – pretty soon even McDonald’s will have its ‘sustainable’ menu -- and they can become more aware of saving local communities, of distribution systems. But it’s the farmers who should be the face of world food. Remember who are the real superstars!”

KISS OF THE CENTURY

There are two kinds of destinations worthy of being destined. Foremost are the ones that reveal themselves through shattering every stubborn stereotype the seeker may have dragged with him. The other sort are those that extravagantly showcase said stubborn stereotypes to the exclusion of all else. And right from the moment I glimpsed that even the trash cans were labeled “B.A.” and I, too, felt all the hipper for sticking to such knowing initials, Buenos Aires seemed to exist solely to satisfy expectations, real or imaginary.

Poking my head into an airport shop for second-rate guidebooks and cheapo SIM cards, I ran smack into my next confirmation. Even by flickering fluorescence, I couldn’t help noticing that the entire back wall was claimed by a black-and-white poster blow-up – capturing that exact moment, already some years back in the world’s ledger of notable happenings, when all-time footballing wizard Lionel Messi claimed the World Cup championship for Argentina by placing his sweaty lips lightly atop the glowing brow of that tacky trophy mounted with a golden if shrunken globe, captioned “EL BESO DEL SIGLO.” The Kiss of the Century! Only a nation so irrationally obsessed with one short-pantsed form of footsie would dare to claim that no event could possibly be of greater import for the rest of the coming war-ravaged, climate-changed hundred years. Making a mental note to not mess with Messi over the coming month, I could only hope that these single-minded folk could be proven right.

Rabid footballistas, tragic tangueros, mate-sipping gauchos meat-saturated parilleros, doughy empanadas in ubiquitous nursery beds, plus enough ostentatious banking edifices and formerly elegant haunts to provoke a longing for lost grandeur – all were unapologetically here. And for a good portion of my prior lifetime, I had become convinced that I held some special affinity for such a type-laden place. Maybe it was from learning that this society boasted not merely an uppermost consumption of the two substances I could least resist (caffeine and beef), but also the most widespread use of Freudian psychiatrists. It also helped that practically every Argentine I’d ever met seem to be so passionately larger-than-life that I didn’t see that shrinkage would do any good.

Where their celebrated authors also seemed given to extremes, the literary gamesmanship of Borges, Cortazar and Puig ever leading back in on itself, Argentine’s earnest cinema consistently presented me with people I felt I knew, or could be -- even when hapless protagonists rowed around a capital city as flooded with ocean waters as official lies, or, in the memorably titled “Love is a Fat Woman,” haunted every hangout in search of the sweetheart who no one will tell him has been thin enough to have been “disappeared.” But what really cemented my belief that this could be my “Place in the World” was an anti-Hollywood blockbuster of the same name, peopled with a committed yet marvelously self-aware group of ex-lefty anti-heroes, fled from military terror to joyously transform an eternally exploited farm town far enough from anywhere to be everywhere. I even tried in vain to contact its director, now in his eighties, to tell him in person what the principled insouciance of his brilliantly drawn characters had done for me – keeping me company from a continent away as only movies can do.

I’d been talking about basking in the solidarity of such cinematic comrades for so long that one mischievous wag of a filmmaker friend, equally inculcated in the Argentine cult, had goaded me into wagering that I’d make it within the next calendar year (knowing full well that obligations to family, a freelancer’s undependable earnings, and my goal’s geographic inconvenience only fattened his odds). I had lost that original bet, but by now, there could be no more postponing a pilgrimage to this last place on earth that I had to see first.

Envisioning myself lurking about ghostly fin-de-siecle cafes in hopes of being swept away by some irresistibly, intensely bohemian crowd, I had instead checked in solo via a lock box wrapped around a sidewalk planting, to an ultra-bourgeois studio apartment, reached by a mirror-lined elevator, that made me feel guilty not to be paying a lot more. Strolling out for my first jet-lagged reconnaissance along a nondescript boulevard, I saw endless vistas of similarly sleek apartment houses, their minimalist balconies lent more grace with the spreading foliage of ample trees left as some humanist courtesy by a genteel past.

Later, I’d read there are over 2000 streets streaking across B.A.’s neighborhoods redolent with romance: Recoleta, Belgrano, Balvanera, La Boca. (Would not a simple listing of mankind’s most trippingly teasing placenames make for the most sumptuous piece of poetry ever written?) Bruising crosstown avenues provided twenty miles or more of non-stop storefronts and later I’d try to cross a park-side thoroughfare renowned for its sixteen lanes of traffic – with nearly as much revolving around the city’s trademark obelisk, prickly point of reference, civic sundial that somehow cast no shadow. “Strikingly modern” did not do Buenos Aires justice, nor did the usual qualifier of this being a European city, implying as it did something stale or misplaced. Even if separated from progenitors by multitudes of icebergs and such, didn’t this town have equal rights to get extravagant and elitist? Like most loyal imitations, B.A. looked to have outdone the original.

Carrying the curse of former wealth impossible to reprieve, a bad rap causing decades of the same denigration most often reserved for disgraced politicians (of which it provided its fair share), the only news about Argentina that ever seemed to get noticed was bad – headlines screaming of currency devaluations, breathtaking scandals and successive failed regimes. Yet at first glance, I sensed no country in crisis, hardly navigating through the slime of corruption. tracking instead contented urbanite archetypes enjoying the seasonal balm in khaki shorts and sockless loafers, walking a who’s who of the trendiest canines. Or families caught in the act of enjoying a land almost as bountiful as it was exclusive theirs. Even the fruit stands were fronted with multi-colored wares in boxes, pears still unwrapped, as aesthetically arranged as Max Ernst pastiches. Could the headlines all be dead wrong? No, dead ought never be applied to a city so fully animated.

The only quibble I could make about the actual town where you ran for speed freak buses rather than chasing down surreal visions was that it didn’t do much for my lusting after the exotic. Aching to be thrilled, I sometimes had to fight feeling let down, even a tad bored that I’d come so far and been set down in what might have passed for my former home turf of Manhattan’s Upper West Side (only with more signage in Spanish). Still, staring up through the blissful bounty of leafy shade lining every block, at a way too blue sky confirming the upside-down magic of a Southern hemisphere summer – I actually caught myself gushing, “What a glorious day to be alive!” How had so recognizable a place instantly made me so unrecognizable to myself? Even more untoward, springing involuntarily from some internal reservoir of hitherto unknown Pollyanna, I eavesdropped on a second shocking declaration, “What a perfect day to be a traveler!”

In a certain trailer park near La Mesa, which for fear of litigation shall not be named, on a frontage road off the old Interstate in an unincorporated subdivision with scant services and scarcely worth remembering, along desert fringes barely separated from strip mall by thinning patch of Joshua, neither pleasant enough to be country nor pleasure-laden enough to be town, one of those bulldozed roosts for the recreational at heart with hook-ups to generators of spark if not spirit, set far enough apart to maintain all sixth, seventh, eighth amendment rights to privately destructive destinies, worn trails plied by alien pickers shutting down lifetimes in hideout, savoring a New World unworldliness disguised as the good life, that particular brand of nowhere no other where can match, safely removed from housing bubbles none here dared live under, yet recognizably at the tail end of that all-talking all-action all-American epoch, there subsisted, resisted, vegetated, hung on, a gentleman (if lengthy record of civil disobedience be gentle), one squirrely squire entirely untithed to estate of mind, diagnosed bipolar yet supremely organized into one-man united front, a deactivated activist, internally agitated outside agitator known to keep a retractable five-and-dime lance in the event of sudden street jousts with authority, even if V.A. hospitals failed to recognize his form of crusade, and with Dons in these parts reduced to N.C.A.A. Second Division mascots, scant campground scuttlebutt had it his given name may have been Ronald McDonald Cohen, on release papers from institutions gone in one end and out the other, though ever since the days when everyone took on dream handles, became chieftains indigenous to their own reservations, he had been known after nativist cartoon howler to co-conspirators and case workers alike as none other than Ron Coyote. . . .

CHAPTER I

In which Our Lady finds the right cause on the wrong day.

Sallying forth in molded space shoes -- the foundation for each day’s resolve into which she eased her misshapen clods with shoehorns as long as Tibetan trumpets -- Donna Quest turned a familiar corner of downtown Barktown, fully expecting to arrive at her chosen indignation of the day. If this was Tuesday, it had to be Niketown -- and a symbolic picket against sweatshop labor. Passing a block that was all Walgreen’s, Army-Navy surplus and smoothie shops, down a sidewalk as sanitized of human suffering as any could get, she listened for the soothing sounds of those customary chants, “Nike Runs On Third World Children! Just Do It!”

Sweatshop labor had become Donna’s penultimate peeve, perhaps in delayed response to her own Ukrainian mother’s tales of indentured childhood servitude to a Cossack seamstress who paid in bits of black bread. But she couldn’t make out any jeers nor cheers beneath the storefront’s multi-story silhouettes of Uncle Tomming slam dunkers; found no orderly line of more-starved-than-thou, plaid-shirted globalists circling the block. A cheery greeter in tracksuit actually mistook Donna for a potential customer (not about to trade the molded Noguchi forms on her feet for cross-trainers pumped with obscene profits). It appeared that the Movement had moved on, the Left left. Had she come to the wrong side of the street, the tracks, to join the right side of history? Donna Quest prided herself on never failing to miss an appointment, whether with the struggle or Dr. Shmuggler, her pet podiatrist. Her rounds were duly noted, alongside death dates of comrades and anniversaries of uprisings past, Paris Commune to Battleship Potemkin, in a jam-packed United Farm Workers desktop diary: foment-at-a-glance.

Was this slip-up the first dread chink of dementia in her organizational armor? A dread loosening of the grip on concrete social relations no Marxist dare lose? She considered checking for an alternative rally outside Banana Republic, several long blocks of retail away, past the college town’s several puny skyscrapers in brown reflective glass that looked to her like giant file cabinets, homages to data storage. But Donna’s feet already throbbed inside her customized clogs -- that she had sprayed bright red to match both her banners and her trademarked incendiary hair.

Once upon a time, Donna had been naturally auburn and wavy á la some Hollywood ingénue, the Veronica Lake of the Workmen’s Circle. By now, her thinning locks, cut unisex short, had been colored to every shade of flaming crimson that came out of a tube. She had the dyeing done at the regional Vidal Sassoon salon, two bus transfers away, on days budding trainees gave fifty percent off. Perhaps that’s why each replenished redness was always slightly varied. Sometimes the effect was luminescent, almost winsome; sometimes flat with hints of humdrum brown. But Donna had been born a redhead, with fair skin and spate of faint nose freckles to match, and she would die that way. Nothing about her could ever be gray.

Never mind that the boyish bob topped a mass of creases, leathered, lizard-like skin much like that of her own mother who for too many later years ran a boarding house for retired trade unionists in Miami Beach; or her lower front teeth turned yellowing and criss-crossed, twitchy fingers moving involuntarily from tip to tip in a strange self-comforting rite, plus a pre-diabetic licking at dry lips. Always the hottest firecracker in the pack, Donna’s chosen look was also pointedly youthful: a bare-midriff blouse of black Mexican lace, exaggerating a full bosom bordering on stocky; baggy black pants of simulated crinkly paper; a gold lamé jacket embossed with the names of imprisoned writers. Most of her outfits were incongruous combinations of thrift-store finds from “Recycled Rags” bargain bins for students who didn’t have any compunction about crawling into other people’s ink-stained jeans. In her determination to outsmart the system, she had left behind Bonwit Teller for the ranks of frugal scroungers. Often, Donna was the only fashionista combing the racks who wasn’t a punker in studs. Or had this former design maven, first on her Manhattan block to model Marimekko prints, yielded to the penny-pinching programmed into old ladies of all ideologies?

The cosmos her mind inhabited consisted of classless utopia, surplus value, the historic role of the proletariat. The world her body moved through: hallways full of stolen shopping carts, lines for bus passes, billboard appeals from injury law-suit shysters. Donna even hoarded her free taxi scrip to show support for the much-disdained public bus system, in defiance of her sons’ warnings, since Barktown’s accordion-linked coaches lurched and swerved, causing Our Lady of Stumps to weave like a drunken sailor. O, storm-tossed NorCal Transit! At least, she took inspiration from driving descendants of Rosie the Riveter who were not just female but black -- and so immense they barely squeezed behind the dash, somehow strong enough to steer solely with foot-long fingernails, fern-curled extensions barely scraping the wheel. But whenever she tried to inform them of their sisterhood with Soviet tractor drivers, Donna found that the wide-bodied ladies’ lacquered scratchers – meant to attract the opposite sex or keep it at bay? -- were also for pointing to signs that enjoined the public from conversation.

Now it would be a disheartening ride home. When Donna ordinarily might have pined for a good police tail, she now hoped no one noticed her backtracking.

Struggling to open the half-emptied corner dispensers for the many free underground weeklies, she tried to find some notice for the demonstration amidst the back page ads for bondage mistresses. Then she recalled the sneaky sneakers’ coalition was sponsored mainly by GAIN (the Global Awareness Intervention Network). Donna staggered further, militantly disdaining a cane, and any newfangled mobile phone, checking one forlorn phone booth after another until finding the one that wasn’t too piss-anointed. Was there a public sector anymore or just a pubic sector? Donna always kept a stash of spare change and miraculously, got both an automated listing and a wavering sort of lefty office ring.

She had no trouble explaining her predicament. “Where’s the protest?” was as second nature to Donna as “Where’s the fire?”

“Yikes! Didn’t you get our newsletter?” Theirs had to be the only one in the universe she didn’t get. “It’s cancelled for the celebration.”

“Celebration?” That wasn’t a word she associated with GAIN.

“International Women’s Day.” What a way to be relieved of incipient memory loss! “But who is this?”

Now Donna could proclaim her identity. “Donna Quest? The beacon of people’s radio with that beautiful basso voice? Brilliant!” Around Barktown, she was indeed a well-preserved living legend, the dramaturge who personally knew her stuff with it came to modernist angst, the vermillion-locked loon who could be counted on to show up for any subset of downtrodden. “I loved your series on Odets -- and that re-enactment of the death of Steve Biko, I mean, you’re one of the pantheon in our office. Take possession of that corner. Look for a Volvo, eco-green!”

Listing with late breezes off the Pacific, Donna dutifully kept a grip on the ravaged Yellow Pages attached to the phone booth ledge. Eventually, a car rolled silently past, which, if Donna paid attention to the automotive, she would have instantly identified as belonging to a fellow refusenik. This Swedish model was older than Max Van Sydow, outfitted with a rooftop bicycle rack crude as a medieval crossbow. A woman waved wildly out the rolled-down window, then double-parked to rush out and help Donna in perfect volunteer trooper mode. But this was no Girl Scout, it was Medusa Feldman.

Talk about participatory democracy! The help who had answered the phone was none other than the head honcho of GAIN herself! Donna had seen her from a distance speaking at untold rallies, also pictured on front pages -- even in the capitalist press -- as the leading disruptor at most every appearance of any visiting dictator or Federal Reserve Chairman. Why, Medusa Feldman could have made the Guinness Book of World Records. She had heckled and hectored more senators and CEOs than any woman alive.

“Donna, you’ve been on my list -- a good list, I mean! We’re going to break bread at the Free Trade Café!”

This woman did not speak; she declared declaratively, deploying her troops -- making Donna feel honored to be commanded with the assured twinkle of someone accustomed to deliberate forms of high-minded mischief. Despite her name, Medusa’s hair wasn’t coiled and snake-like but fine and dirty blonde, blowing in front of her face. Her massive teeth seemed to be locked in a half-grimace. She walked with jaw jutting out, as though striding into the face of a majoritarian wind.

Jumping out to help Donna inside, the driver fairly shouted over a door slam, “You are one brave soul, venturing forth alone beyond the friendly campus confines!” Coming from Medusa, such words were Donna’s best ever Women’s Day salute. Never mind that the entire floor mat where Donna settled her space shoes was filled with assorted yellowed issues of The Nation, The Progressive, Off Our Backs. There were worse things than sloppiness in Donna’s book, though they didn’t occur at the moment.

“Scuse the rubble. Never buy anything first-hand, right?”

So be it, Donna told herself, trying to stifle her bourgeois reflex for bringing order, preferably alphabetized, to chaos. “This used to belong to the sister of Herbert Aptheker, who got it from …” and Medusa went on naming names of famous radicals traced back to Max Eastman, until Donna could no longer keep track of the automotive lineage. Instead, she caught herself enumerating but a few of Medusa’s exploits as publicized on K-RAD. She led charitable 20K road races, even won some of them. She sang the lead in a stirring, Slavic-style women’s chorus. She helped win a group lawsuit against conniving Barktown landlords who had subdivided their Victorians to get around rent control. In her spare time, she probably organized a rebellion among hamsters on their treadmills.

“Here’s our HQ of world domination!” the heavy actually made light, slowing at a three-story corner building cloaked in an umber mural of brown campesinos. Used to living at a sprint, Medusa barely slowed to lead Donna across another uneven sidewalk. She didn’t coddle or betray an ounce of ageism, fairly pushing Donna inside the woodsy nook where GAIN peddled folksy macrame accoutrements people had no need for but gave away at Christmas out of guilt. Medusa ordered two decaf Sandino Blends and pupusa corn cakes.

“Do you know how we’ve tripled wages among the folks on coffee plantations? But I don’t have to tell you!” With that, Medusa did -- being a veritable encyclopedia of liberation movements, articulate to the point of every sentence sounding Politburo-scripted. This was the sort of person who would take you to paradise or a jail cell or both.

“We’re going to be comrades, bosom friends,” Medusa assured, apropos of nothing but the same proclaimed views and Manhattan origins. “But you’re coming with, aren’t you? The Women’s Day event? Just whistle when you want a lift home.”

Before Donna knew it, she was being whisked through traffic to the Barktown Womyn’s Building, a clapboard house from Gold Rush days that had probably once been a brothel, refurbished back in those heady days when there still seemed some intent in spelling it “womyn.” Feeding off Medusa’s confidence, Donna made it to through the ground-floor bookstore -- where the shelves belonged solely to authors with vulvas -- then bested the rickety back stairs up to an attic strewn with red bunting. Where loose window frames, susceptible to ocean winds, clattered in time to amplified rumbas, a dozen or so sisters in floor-length paisley held hands to form a big circle, not so much dancing as swaying their nose rings in unison.

Leaving Donna seated in a corner with a glass of unfiltered Gravenstein apple punch, the leader went to urge on a subversive barbershop quarter, portly in good-time suspenders, come to serenade the meager crowd with their “oldies from the Bolshevik Café.” Donna was cheered to know every lyric. Had the Left produced anything decent since “Which Side Are You On, Boys?” Catchy variations on pro or con were tough.

There seemed but one sex in the room -- until Donna noticed some lanky Latinos stray in. She never would have guessed, or been willing to admit, most were Cubans who’d fled to the North. Circling the periphery in straw hats and flowery shirts, they seemed like predators waiting to pick off the stragglers of the weaker-sex pack -- who might falter and fall, by evening’s end, into the cadence of their smooth salsa moves. So fitting for the two steps forward, three steps back of social progress!

By now, Donna’s decaf had worn off and the caf, too. She worried about Allende, her cat, missing his kibble. But just as she cast about for Medusa’s promised ride, her savior ascended to the mike. The woman solicited donations with the practiced aplomb of some evangelist Billy Sunday. All proceeds would go to defray costs for her newly unveiled initiative: “Sisters Across the Blockade -- A GAIN Delegation Bringing Women’s Health Supplies To Cuba.”

The comandantress then stepped down to hand Donna the very first leaflet, bearing the shapely silhouette of a decidedly female Cuban soldier with rifle slung over her shoulder like a Vuitton bag. “This one has YOUR name on it!” Medusa insisted. Was this the strategic reason for her free lift?

“Another reality tour?” Donna whispered back, flattered yet fearful. She had been on so many such front-line excursions -- guided traipses through places no tourist considered decent -- that she no longer recalled what an actual holiday felt like. She had met enough mothers of the disappeared to want to disappear into her hotel; peeked into favelas where pickpockets in swimsuits wondered why Donna wasn’t around the pool. She had also been through more sugar mills and mezcal factories than she cared to count. See the world, see the food chain. But she had never made a pilgrimage to the island nation that, like her, was a last proud holdout.

“This trip is more than symbolic, and you’re just the sort of mentor we want along,” Medusa hurtled on. “I mean, the Feds would never scare someone like you.”

“An old lady, you mean?” As Donna now noted, the dates of this itinerary coincided with a rather remarkable point in her long journey.

“A vanguard elder!” With that, Medusa led the masses onto the dance floor, expertly executing some hip-thrusting moves, accented by a dark shawl wrapped around her buttocks. Was that dark-shaded fellow Medusa’s partner, or was she going splendidly solo? Donna couldn’t quite make things out. But this radical Renaissance woman was the very opposite of frumpy, showing a voluptuous frame and much cleavage in a tan spandex top and heavy liner around globular “gotcha” eyes. The mass of Indian jewelry up each forearm earmarked Medusa as some high-ranking squaw. Being female was a full-blown sort of thing for her, full-blown as her beliefs. And Medusa did it all with the self-assurance of a real American, or real anti-American. Yes, this young woman -- young being anyone not on Medicaid -- was everything Donna had once hoped to be.

And Donna never held a star sister like this to petty promises! So Donna asked a Lesbian at her table to phone Hamid, a Palestinian cabbie with whom she carried on an oft-interrupted colloquy, a Gaza Strip tease. Waiting for her ride, she rose in one great effort and began shifting her feet in a kind of slow jig from one set of diabetic ulcers to another. Donna often did this at home, swaying to K-RAD’s “Rhythms of the Diaspora.” Now the fists she attempted suggested a pair of maracas.

What were the others gawking at? Why all the clapping to urge her on? After all, she had been a woman longer than anyone in this Womyn’s Building. And life still held surprises, one more foray! If Donna dared, she might even plant her rotten feet upon liberated soil on the day she turned ninety.

Dear subscribers, followers, straying eyes or other subsets:

After a hiatus, brought about by a combination of holiday travels and writer’s block imposed by hopping between three book projects at once, I’m reviving my idiosyncratic bit of the ever-expanding Substack universe. I’m also redefining its central focus on travel, a self-imposed literary ghetto from which I’ve been trying to break free ever since I discovered that my “bad mood” voice was perversely marketable. I will be continuing to contribute entrants in a pet project of mine, encapsulating the world’s most charming locales in a kind of free-form prose poem attempt at a categorizing I call “City-ology,” as well as insider tips on eating in gluttonous Bangkok or spending New Year’s in Salamanca (that sandstone colored gem on Spain’s most remote high plains).

But for now, I’m going to be posting installments of a novel from some years back, polished in preparation for a Kindle publication or more, that charts the last stand and last days of an indefatigable 90-year-plus American Communist — seemingly irrelevant to our current imposition of nativist fascism, but perhaps more relevant than ever in preserving a history of those unsung millions through generations who never went along.

I hope you will find my “Donna Quixote” (dotted with a whimsical counterpoint of a U.S.-style, bipolar “knight errant”) compelling enough to follow along, and would welcome any and all commentary.

THE FIRST BOOK OF DONNA QUIXOTE

“As serious artistic expression is the answer to the meaning of life for a few, so the passion for socialism is the only meaning I can conceive in the lives of those who are not artists; if one cannot create ‘works’ one may dream at least of an era when humans create humans, and the satisfaction of the radical can come from the thought that he tries to keep this idea alive. . . . (while) the increasing anxiety of American life comes from the covert guilt that abundance and equality remain utterly separated, and we have reached the point where socialism is not only morally demanding but unconsciously obvious -- obvious enough to flood with anxiety the psyches of those millions who know and yet do nothing.”

--Norman Mailer, 1954

“Hasta la muerte, todo es vida.”

-- Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

A DEDICATION

The author grovels -- a time-honored tradition.

For thee,

Counts and County Commissioners, State Reps and sales reps, justices of the peace or infighting literary juries, bluebloods of the unpaid royalty, Barnes and Noblemen, not-for-prophets spreading the fellowship of free cash, all ye forever patronizing and taken for grants -- this long-distance dirt-eating curtsy, abject submission in hopes of succumbing to advances, becoming belatedly well-endowed, allowed by your grace and stipend to slip unscathed past army, assembly line, minefields of copywriting, indebted for recognition (with grateful acknowledgment to the highest bidder), but even more to those looking the other way, and just like Miggy C. five centuries back, beseeching sly forgiveness for the irrelevance that is my salvation, knowing full well that the struggle to bring something beautiful into this world serves as proof irrefutable of just how much ugliness has come before.

A PROLOGUE

In which our beginning is pre-programmed and our indefatigable heroine is verified to be among the living.

Each morning at eight, the Eucalyptus Estates Senior Center got its wake-up call from the universe. This free if not entirely welcome service was provided to all hundred-fifty lucky elders granted below-market studios on an expansion of the University of California Barktown campus. Across a no man’s land of beach volleyball pits, undergrads in Spanish-style dorms knew a different sort of curfew. But here at the opposite end of life’s classroom, the telephonic chaperones didn’t keep tabs on nighttime trysts. They checked up on anyone who may have strayed into the dark for good.

“Rise and shine, Unit 39-B! Tele-care calling.” Such was the stage Our Lady had reached: monitored daily to see if she was still kicking. “Is this Mrs. Q. on the line?”

“And who else would it be?” a voice broke the silence in husky, stage-trained tones, patrician as her references were populist. “Mother Bloor? Fannie Lou Hamer? La Pasionara?”

Some awakenings, this would-be icon was tempted to let the phone ring and see how long it took to summon an ambulance. But just like her idols, she had become a tireless foot solider, compelled to the end to declare herself Presente!

“Now there’s the young lady we know and love. Good morning, sugar!”

“So what’s good about it? With a billion children in poverty? Torture on the rise?” In a daily role reversal, this un-retiring resident was the one to sound alarms. “And Republicans in charge of the F.C.C.!”

“Guess I can put another check next to Donna Quest. . . .”

Why not when the name had become so apt? It was back in a New Jersey high school, uncountable upheavals ago, that first beau Leon Noodleman playfully Anglicized her maiden ethnicity of Davya Kvestmann. Later, that youthful alias became a perfect letterhead for the theatrical agency she founded to rehabilitate marquee Reds from the blacklist. Nowadays, as the days dwindled, her widow’s Social Security payments were made out to the same catchy handle that was first made up to mask her membership in the Communist Party, U.S.A.

“Have you signed the wheelchair access referendum? Demands to free Lori Berenson from Peru’s dungeons?” she proselytized through the receiver. “What about Ralph Nader for President?”

“I’m down with that!” replied this a.m.’s interlocutor. “But I’m still a bit iffy on Stalin.”

The condescending chuckle and slight ghetto twang identified this am.’s interlocutor as Delwyn, a chirpy black -- “African-American,” she internally self-corrected – become a gerontological gatekeeper to cover his community college tuition. By now, Donna matched every voice on the line with their limited consciousness. Lolita -- a “Filipini,” she called them, transmogrifying Manila migrants into Milan fashion icons – doggedly funded the studies of six future bedpan-changers back home. Brent, the young Republican -- an oxymoron? -- bewildered her with schemes for technology “start-ups.” How could so many millionaires start at once? Not when Donna could practically quote each Telecarer’s paltry pretax income, knew all there was to know about working conditions in the wake-up industry.

“Today’s the day nurses are picketing the Capitol for fair pay from those greedy HMO’s. And I wouldn’t want to miss the mobilization against police brutality…”

“Things can’t be all that bad,” countered the member of an oppressed group who should have known better. “Just look outside. There’s plenty to feel sunny about.”

Indeed, the screened patch of sky beyond her second-story bedroom window was gallingly blue – as though cued up by some Disney demon. Rousing people out of their misery was tough enough when they weren’t all tanning in this monotonous movie balm. Here, vagrancy and unemployment seemed nothing but extended picnics. How had she ended up in that “golden” state where even the weather, or lack of it, had become a ruling-class tool?

Just beyond the building’s recycling bins, jogging paths lead to research cyclotrons, off-limits labs of mass destruction cloaked in drought-dry groves. Eucalyptus Estates! What were they doing here, making cough drops? At the founding meeting, she made an impassioned plea to name these the Eleanor Roosevelt Apartments. Who had done more for their generation? But a majority of doddering elders went along with the apolitical coaxing of Tamika Williams, their H.U.D.-appointed, big-as-a-house social worker. In her book, there was nothing wrong with being social or a worker -- but for God’s sake, not both!

“But I can’t let you off the hook quite yet, Mrs. Q.” the caller pressed on with his apolitical interrogation. “Can you just describe where you are now?”

This was some sort of test, though Mr. Alzheimer himself could have come up with something snappier.

“I’m in occupied North America,” Donna freely confessed. “Home of the slave and our beloved C.I.A.” And, she wanted to add, in a world that no longer contained a Soviet Union, that vast blank space left on every globe and in every heart! Where now the compass by which to chart East and West, progress and reaction? But history’s dementia never showed up in Tele-care’s telepathic diagnostics.

“Uh, could you get a teensy bit more specific?”

“I’m sitting on a sofa-bed with my tabby cat Allende, about to enjoy a cup of Trader Tim’s Free Trade Sandinista Roast (Decaf), accompanied by an organic rugelach from the Barktown Baguette Collective, in a mini-condo with stain-proof institutional carpeting, constructed by our elitist college regents as a sop to public housing,” Donna enumerated. “Ninety square feet! And crummy lunches of chemical meat loaf from some charitable racket that dares call itself Moveable Feasts! Some reward for a lifetime’s effort!”

But not bad for a lifetime in opposition. For she had transformed her L-shaped allotment into nothing less than a riot of tchotchkes. Mounted on texturized walls by the building’s beleaguered handyman, all her passions were given equal, if slanted, prominence. Busts of Stanislavski and Commedia dell’Arte harlequins mixed with hammer and sickles encased in Venetian glass, Ben Shahn prints of Sacco and Vanzetti. A psychedelic poster of Lenin, orating from place of honor above the couch, surveyed souvenirs from that other America’s “festival of the oppressed”: woodcuts from Brazil’s ever-backward backwoods, mischievous masks worn by Indio rebels, the obligatory Che calendar. Even her oven mitts were Guatemalan. And Donna’s idea of a decorative accent wasn’t some potted plant but a blow-up doll of Munch’s expressionist screamer. Her tiny cubicle fairly screamed out, not just from a full life’s accumulated angst, but in solidarity with the walls, with the air.

So she could hardly accept repressive house rules declaring bulletin boards off-limits to anything but wellness tips, especially “partisan political flyers.” That had led Donna to the first of her successful, and continual, petition drives. Yet she might easily have fled the cramped indignities of managed decrepitude. After all, she had been coaxed to move to the non-unionized Sun Belt to be near her sons. And while Eugene V., called after Debs and true to his breeding, hardly earned a dime from his defiantly obscurantist theatre pieces -- the latest was titled The World Asleep, and boy, was it! – her eldest Norman, similarly named for Socialist Presidential candidate Thomas, had earned a tasteful brown shingle house as Barktown’s king of organic burritos. A good Jewish boy (if part-time Buddhist), he had long offered a backyard cottage as refuge, even storage for his mother’s political baggage. But despite being a champion of mutual aid, Donna had proved stubbornly independent – reveling in having her rampant individualism federally subsidized (the same way she insisted airlines provide wheelchairs, needed or not). Besides, throwing her lot in with the Medicare crowd gave this veteran contrarian as many gripes as her arthritic grip could glom onto.

Reaching with aching mitts toward her bedside raspy clock radio, what really roused her each morning was community-sponsored K-RAD FM, Barktown’s main, if low-wattage, source of outrage. Not only did she contribute original, though predictably didactic programs as often as they would let her near a microphone, but staying at this one spot on the dial kept Donna convinced that the whole planet spun in sync with her views. This morning’s “Sounds of the Struggle” featured Andean mule drivers’ calls followed by insolent Rasta rap (the references to marijuana-induced oblivion going past her). She really came to attention at the abrasive host of “Justice Now,” who didn’t greet the dawn but pummeled it with a piled-up litany of massacres and human rights abuses. Such a daily compendium of horrors would have been enough to send ordinary folk back under the covers. But it was Donna’s perfect tonic. Indignation, righteous or otherwise, increased longevity better than wheatgrass juice or selenium. Too bad the dosage had to be high, guaranteed by constant provocation.

Just as regularly required was her hot bath to banish the arthritic malaise in chronically deformed feet turned to stumps of bone. “More proof,” Donna liked to joke, “that I just can’t stand it.” Her hands, too, had joined the psychosomatic revolt, so knobby at the joints that splayed fingers hung virtually unhinged. Their pointed refusal to grasp made them a poor match for herring jar lids or deadbolt locks – though she pointedly disdained protecting her private property. More dire for Donna was that she could no longer clench a proper fist of protest.

“So tell me, Delwyn -- it is Delwyn, isn’t it? – when are you going to give me some of that physical therapy you are studying?”

“Sports medicine. That’s a tad more lucrative.”

“Rubbing ointments on overpaid gladiators? Why not heal the uninsured masses? Become a barefoot doctor?”

“A bare-ass? Say what?”

“Devoted revolutionaries. They tended to the peasants in China.”

“Come on, Mrs. Q. I could never afford medical school.”

“But you can! In Cuba -- “

“Righto! And who would honor that degree?”

“Only the peoples of the world -- your people, too. Don’t you know they’ve trained thousands of physicians and sent them all over Africa? I can send you a leaflet from the Committee to Save -- “

“Whoa! I’d be locked up for heading over there.”

“Says who? Loads of our countrymen thumb their noses at the State Department!”

“Amazing. So I got to make it down to Castroland to pick up on the American Dream…”

“Young man, countries don’t need a ‘dream,’ impossible or otherwise.” Donna Quest caught herself conflating Martin Luther King with that crass “La Mancha” musical. “Societies, like people, require a rational blueprint. Especially one as irrational as ours.”

“You taking ‘bout one o’ them five-year plans?”

“No, none of my plans extend that long,” she shot back, with slightly stagey quiver of bravery, before trotting out her favorite sign-off. “Just remember, Delwyn. Ever forward to victory! Socialism or death!”

She had no doubt that she would see both, though not necessarily in the right order.

“Whatever, Miz Donna. Until then, you have a great one!”

But Palestinians never have a great one. South African miners never have a great one. Mumia Abu-Jamal framed in a Pennsylvania penitentiary couldn’t be looking forward to a great one. Though her Tele-carer had already signed off, Donna Quest proudly declaimed, “An end to this world -- that can’t come soon enough for me!”

Yet outliving her enemies seemed to be the only strategy left. Not the means of production, but the means of protraction. Old age, viewed correctly, was all overtime: a chance to get in last licks while presumed harmless. There was enormous freedom in knowing the world expected no more from you than breathing, not even that.

The most poignant, and telling, of so many poignant moments in my year of Sundays as one man among a quarter-million maids was when I pointed my Handycam in the direction of a park bench comfortably occupied by two “domestic helpers” – that most Orwellian title for what were simply imported housekeepers, scullions, minimally paid, housed or fed drudges, depending on degrees of didacticism and dramatizing. This pair in the park were invariably of obvious disparate age, and upon pausing for closer inspection, showed a familial resemblance played out in dark locks, characteristic flared nostrils, and above all, similarly resigned ways of smiling that indicated a shared lifetime practice making the best of circumstances that could hardly be worse – in other words, a mother and daughter tag teams of maids. The explications for such an usual formation soon flowed out in a most casual outlining of a usual tale: the older woman come to Hong Kong for a two-year stint that had extended, on the basis of need, to twenty years or more, an entirely lifetime in self-enforced exile, all spent in service of sending home all she could to make sure her precious offspring would have opportunities for a better life she never had – the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly kitchen and toilet toil funding the promising child’s high schooling, tutoring, and then college – of which there seemed to be all too many back in the Philippines, nearly all of them peopled with a largely female, supremely sincere and diligent student body – whose wholesale granting of degrees was as prodigious as it was worthless.

After a life that could not be wound back, refunded or redeemed except through its oh-so-Christ-like sacrifice (a central motif in the life of Filipinos, especially Filipinas) the prized offspring ends up having to take the same path, with no decent employment on offer to befit her education, taking the shortcut to wage-earning through that two-hour leap to Hong Kong and with it, an end to all upward mobility. No raises, no promotions, no change of status no matter how well one performs. No rights of citizenship or legal recourse either. Still in the spring of her life, she too is outfitted with apron, scrubber, and pasted-on servility, just like her saintly mother. The revelation is always made readily, openly, without shame or apology, and with a good deal of giggling, joking puns, that communal conversational habit of making light of the impossibly heavy. The younger one, still pretty in an unaffected way, with the light of hope still sparkling in dark eyes, the purplish cheeks unscarred by time; the mother’s matching visage a textbook of time’s passage, marked by the decades of labor and wasted potential with wrinkles and sagging, but only, in the way of Asian genetics, quite gently – as though one lifetime would not be enough to generate obvious damage.

Sometimes mother and child held hands like an old couple, forever linked. Their familiarity, and by the same token, their incongruous joy, was utterly contagious. The first time I encountered such a pair I figured I’d stumbled on a real exclusive, a highly rarely occurrence worthy of highlighting through my sloppily homemade, willy-nilly documentation. But soon enough, the discovery would be repeated, to the point where I could almost identify it as a distance, before I pressed the “record” button, so that it ended up as no discovery at all. Somehow the most intolerable facts tend to lose force in exact proportion to their repetition.

Without doubt, I was the only reporter for the Asian Wall St. Journal, come to Hong Kong for my lifespan’s first and only real salary, who could be found “slumming” in such crowds every weekend – as I would later put it in my film’s narration, an exploration of why “in a place so devoted to monetary gain, did those who had the least seem, for one day, to have the most.”

My entire project had begun as an offhand dare, proposed to me by an old friend who, like many of my past circle back in the San Francisco Bay Area, was a professor of film history. Without realizing, I had become something of a dedicated cineaste, with attendance at Sundance and other festivals some of my life’s most meaningful, if escapist, activities. Most of my social circle were involved in film in some way – including two rollicking young brothers bent on capturing the intricacies of Tuvan throat-singing. Yet when I had briefly attended N.Y.U. Film School, more to please doting parents who had presented me with a high-end Bolex camera in a frantic attempt to keep me from dropping out of college altogether, I was far more interested in trashing cafeterias in support of striking food workers or occupying the Atomic Energy Commission building in supporting of freeing the “Panther 21” – or was it 22? -- than I was in becoming a fledgling auteur.

The two short 16-millimeter gems I produced, riven with flashes of black line due to the sloppiness of my splices, included an homage to Godard, complete with Brechtian placards, of an attempt to fell capitalism by blowing up the Empire State Building – a premonition of 9/11 perhaps, accomplished with the cut-rate “special effect” of jiggling a post card shot of the monolith up and down. The second, a kind of New York tenement take-off of Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou, had no plot whatever that could be later summarized, but featured one shot of a scrawny exhibitionist pal disembarking entirely naked out of my apartment building’s small, mirrored elevator, his image then vanishing in a quick, if not exactly magical, jump cut. Their premiere, and one and only showing, was met with boos and hisses, a verbal heaving screenward of tomatoes, by my supposedly hippie-ish fellow students – most who had come up with slick boy-meet-girl fare in angling to be discovered by Hollywood. I wanted to be invited in by the Nouvelle Vague, or failing that, Madame Mao’s propaganda unit. Even as writing became my obvious, and only talent, I more than endorsed Lenin’s oft-cited assertion that cinema was the literature of the 20^th-century. Anyway, I was pretty sure, try as I might to force as much montage as possible into my prose, that literature itself sure wasn’t.

As for the instigator of my brief moviemaking, he was hardly my closest friend, yet this persistently affable character, six-foot-three with loping, almost apologetic gate and combed to one side sweep of salt-pepper hair, an expert on Hollywood happy endings who never quite managed his own, as the success-phobic son of an L.A. district attorney, seemed to be the only one in my inner circle who periodically broke free from the literal and figurative limitations of that overpowering yet insular American reality. We would also go together to Vietnam – where I had wangled an assignment from the Journal to write about the fierce coffee scene -- and many years later, would be the only representative of old Cal pals at my wedding in Thailand (perhaps driven by his persistent singledom, which had led to some awkward attempts at starting up something with distant cousins of the bride). Attending a local soccer championship to observe the incredible Vietnamese passion for football, he had tripped on the steps in the rickety stands, and gotten inordinately furious at himself for what seemed a random happenstance – but actually prefigured his eventual disability. Anyway, there was nothing wrong with him as we perambulated on a stroll through the Central district to give him one of the first highlights of my quirky tourist tour.

I had recounted for him how fascinated as I was getting over this distinctively local phenomenon: a movable encampment of an animated, jabbering, grooming, dancing, game-playing brood of maids suddenly liberated on their Sunday days off to pack a lifetime of drama and cultural identity into scant hours, a colonized people camping out amidst the remnants of colonial Hong Kong, crowding around yet making irrelevant the mute statuary of British generals and basalt Britannic lions, overwhelming the daily Chinese grind of moneymaking with their unbridled and entirely unjustified optimism.

The city of women easily upstaged everyone else, the longer I interacted with stiff, robotic Hong Kongers, or more frequently, the world’s most brusquely rude food servers. At least those were the rare Cantonese who didn’t entirely shun contact with so-called “white devils,” to the point that most would not even sit next to me, but left the seat open, even on the crowded double-deckers I took to commute to the Journal office each morning. A bare island until the mid-Eighteenth century, Hong Kong was pretty short on history, and despite the exotic overlap of Chinese pictographs, on meaningful quaintness. Called a “cultural desert” by many a local wag (in the period before authorities discovered that international galleries for contemporary art could be as lucrative as mainland toys or textiles), there wasn’t much to compete with the traditions these other sort of South Seas islanders brought. In some ways, aside from the famed view from the Peak, this human welter had unwittingly become Hong Kong’s most iconic must-see – and, in a sense, one of the first visible landmarks of a newly globalized world in which migrants, wanted or unwanted, would outnumber locals in their accidental assertion of a world with borders. I had a vague feeling of wanting to get closer, to find a way to connect to such an overflow of humanity, and perhaps plug into it to recharge my own diminishing reserves after a bad divorce.

So I was inspired to reveal to him the plot of a potential screenplay I was pondering – one of many that I still daydreamed could get me closer to the glamorous sphere of the movies. Inspired by the compelling magnetism of the innumerable women squatting on sidewalks and benches and park lawns or the full-block pass through built into the ground floor of the city’s biggest bank, I had come up with a naïve Western protagonist, just arrived in Asia for the first time to take up some junior executive position in an unidentified export firm, who was shocked on his first Sunday stroll from his luxury hotel by this city of women. The first, and main acts of the script dwelled on his sitting before a sidewalk circle of the Filipinas – a “puesto” as I later learned were called these weekly gathering of friends hailing from the same pocket of their three thousand-plus islands – and getting invited to join them and follow their activities through an entire madcap day, from recording studios where they indulged in ambitions to become singers, a beauty pageant where they joined in the hilarity of amateur contestants’ talent shows (even exposing their breasts during a dance number when halter tops slipped en masse), and slowly fell under the spell of the oldest and prettiest of the bunch. As a denouement, she would confess to him that she was in an abusive relationship with her older employer, who extorted sexual favors through the threat of ending her wages, then sneak him through the back entry into her closet-sized hovel of a room. They would be in the midst of various forms of innocent affection when they heard the man returning to his living room. Through whispers and peeks, our protagonist would discover that the abuser in question was actually his new boss. What to do? Expose him? Try to rescue his new friend as her substitute employer? Or get out of the whole situation as rapidly as he arrived? Stay tuned for a suspenseful ending.

However, the jaded movie master and occasional script doctor wasn’t as sucked in as I had hoped. Whether my friend found my pitch hackneyed, or a pipe dream that might never be realized, he had quickly segued with a sweep of his arm to the raw material all around: the sights and sounds of this enormous surging flood mixing currents of the desperate and the jolly (especially in front of the only HK outpost of Jollibee, a rotgut imitation of a burger chain that reminded these homesick ones of the dubious pleasures back home). I couldn’t recall now if he actually said it, or just implied it with a rapid glances, but he saw documentary gold to all sides – there for the prospecting. Real life, in all its glory and weirdness, beckoned in a way that no artificial construct could. Surely, the twists and turns, plot points and McGuffins, would be far more revelatory and fascinating than any even the more experienced dramatizer (which I wasn’t) could come up with. “If I were you, bud, if I was living here, I’d grab a camera and take advantage.”

He had said it as a challenge of sorts, and though I wasn’t normally the kind to chug a kegger or jump off a high precipice out of some inane peer pressure, this time, I jumped at the chance. Maybe it would relieve the boredom. Maybe it would lead to true love (though I took a principled stance, from the beginning, to never corrupt the entire endeavor by taking my own advantage of so many available women primed to get starstruck but almost any American). Maybe it would give me a sense of social and political purpose, some do-going to offset my many misgivings about lending my talents to a newspaper that advertised itself proudly as the world’s leading “capitalist tool.” Above all, it would fulfill, even if in the most amateur manner, my long-held ambitions to join the hand-held cinematic world.

Besides, no other urban marketplace in the entire planet could have made it more convenient for me to equip myself for the task. There was an electronics shop on every block in this town, nearly as many as currency exchanges, noodle stalls or 7-11’s reeking of herb-saturated eggs. This was the spot where all the world made a pilgrimage to haggle over tax-free gadgetry galore. I heard later from one of the world’s most famed geomancers, a holy adviser on the vagaries of the Chinese belief in feng shui (wind-water), the favorable placement of buildings, homes, shrine to catch nature’s more propitious energies, that his first piece of advice to those in the retail trade was not to move their shop to catch better luck, but rather to immediately open a second one – in other words, to compete with one’s self, keeping prices higher at the original store so that customers would head eagerly to the second. If anything, Hong Kong was the prime illustration of this. Maybe every Leica and Canon and Sony purveyor was part of a single all-seeing, all-knowing, all-monopolizing family.

In any case, I was too embarrassed as always to drive too hard a bargain. Before I knew it, I was removing from its cardboard coffin my very own Sony Handycam, gray and business-like, fitting one hand as it fit my budget, full of switches and features I’d never bother to use. I hadn’t researched anything much in advance, as I wasn’t much of a hardware nerd. All I knew was that I required something small and unobtrusive to keep those I was filming most natural and unposed. Smile, you’re on candid servitude. With this, I could shoot from the hip, or the shoulder. I had a lens to look through that focused itself and a small screen to replay the results. What more was needed? I wasn’t worried about broadcast quality or any quality. This would be cinema verité at its most basic and improvised, with part of the verité being the cameraman’s own unguarded ineptness. The only pros in sight would be these professional wok washers. I would finally invest in a directional mike only after losing too many confessional monologues to the ever-present hubbub of gossip in Tagalog.

It didn’t take long for me to discover that first lesson of a documentarian: that the best interviews happen in the noisiest places and the most haunting faces appear in the dimmest of settings. Was this a veritable law of nature, proof that the random has its own internal logic? One of the first such moments came when I tagged along with two of the older members of the first social circle I had infiltrated as they paused for a hot drink in a blindingly white coffee shop, matching the pristine corridors of a high-end mall set between banking towers, white enough to block out all the unpleasantness that might interfere with the purchase of another handbag or cologne. As almost everywhere else on this day, the shared tables of the place were absolutely full-up with Filipinas. And we’d barely got a seat when the women recognized an old acquaintance of theirs – fellow provincial or perhaps aid provider, it was impossible to tell – and urged her on, nearly at once, to launch into a tale the others already knew all too well from their wholesale nodding. She was a hefty woman, not fat but wide with stevedore shoulders concealed by a flowery throw, a sagging face and sweaty upper lip, a way of licking her lips as she blurted out her confessional that suggested both extreme difficulty in carrying her emotional load and an eagerness to unburden.

Often, it was easy to spot the faded core of some younger belle of the ball, but not her. She seemed to me someone who could pack and unpack a household, a village, a life in minutes. Yet her eyes glinted with a suppressed madness that I soon understood. She had been in Hong Kong some fifteen years now – hardly a surprise given her age, though the women tended to tote things up in terms of contracts. After deciding, like so many others, “to go abroad, especially in Hong Kong, due to our family’s financial situation…my husband’s income not enough to support our family.” She had left a small daughter, a.k.a an angelic innocent in the charge of her husband (who I immediately came to envision as meek beside her mate, though I had no idea why). After barely a stint or two away home, the man had died suddenly – of malaria, diphtheria or one of those thousands of maladies shoved into that back drawer file marked “underdevelopment.” On her two weeks in a year back home, pressed to find a quick solution for future childcare, she had taken up with a former high school boyfriend – a fellow, she implied, of somewhat shifty persuasion, formerly a girlish crush she never considered she would good enough to approach.

Soon enough – the exact details were blurry, the decision undeliberated – this substitute hubby had taken up housekeeping with the daughter just budding into the age of temptation. Or perhaps the temptation was all in the eyes of the beholder, more or less living on a tin-roofed verandah from the monthly proceeds of his new wife’s employment. (The indolence of many of the men of the Philippines , some tricycle drivers, some drug dealers, some professional layabouts, was perhaps the most unacknowledged yet impactful side effect of the whole toxic set-up.) At this point, the women to both sides of me started to clutch my arms, as though prompting me to pay special attention. That second man, that resuscitated sweetheart of hers, began interfering with the daughter. Perhaps that had been his main motivation all along, though this seemed too horrible for her to speculate. And the guilt she carried must have been enormous: while she was so far away, “scrubbing the other’s toilet,” as was the phrase I repeatedly recorded, her precious child was molested and more.

“That man raped my daughter,” the older maid spit toward me. Too late, this had become a fact established in court proceedings, and the culprit was now in prison. I didn’t ask for how long. Nor did I press her on the fate of her daughter – how old she was now, how cared for, how damaged. But given the self-described “martyr complex” of the citizenry whose muddled midst I had now plunged into, thus anticipating a dose of Christian absolution, I wasn’t prepared for what came next. “That man, I want to kill him!” She stared at me hard, or rather into my impassive Carl Zeiss lens. In that moment, I realized that I had never before heard a real life human, rather than a movie villain, expressing such very real sentiments. “If I can see him, I will kill!”

The helpless helper made a stabbing motion in the air, luckily not too close to me, though her obvious wrath went entirely unnoticed amidst the coffee shop gaggle taking their ease through polite tea-sipping and proper butter cakes, though my escorts contributed hushed gasps. “I want to kill that man! Kill him!”

With each Sunday, that day-off for them which called me to duty, it came to feel as if every one of these quarter-million women had some similar narrative in the background, some hidden past marked by youthful disasters and mistakes, more often than not with mean men as the lightning-quick messengers of fate. I just kept filming, feeling for the first of many times like the world’s most sneaky voyeur, not yet qualified to bear witness to all lain so readily before me. Never mind the awe-inspiring site of these sprawling crowds overwhelming any entire city; the storehouse of sad stories, if revealed, would have been far more vast. If one of the great dramatists from the days of the Greeks, those first official plumbers of the tragic, had circulated here, their monotone choruses would have eons of material to wail about.

Directional mike or not, I soon began to trace my own direction, or at least opening gambit. Inspired by Frederick Wiseman, who devoured whole institutions like High School or Racetrack, collecting without filter hundreds of hours for later shaping and never mediating what his camera caught with God-like narration, I would document everything that comprised this freewheeling institution of Mercy on Sundays – and eventually, even found an actual Mercy in the flesh to be my volunteer guide. There were already strident, preachy films enough, produced by pro-migrant organizations, aiming to sensationalize these women as modern-day slaves, simplifying and, it seemed to me, flattening the humanity they hoped to extol by framing them solely as helpless victims. I wanted to show everything about this pathos-packed day-off, the incredible survival skills along with degrees of self-destruction, the solidarity along with the back-stabbing, the will to improve one’s fate beside the will to accept. I wanted to stalk that reality beyond black and white judgments – starting with the first appearance of religious singing circles praising Jesus through a smoggy dawn and ending with the last holdouts, still squatting and squeezing a few last moments of guitar-strumming camaraderie before yielding to their employers’’ curfew, disappearing back into their separate homes and fates, like modern-day Cinderellas forced to leave their platform shoes at the ball.

This brief excerpt from my unpublished novel, Donna Quixote, a tale of an indefatigable 90-year-old American Communist woman and her shadow fantasy of an American “knight errant,” is one of my few stabs at poetry. Though written around 20 years back, it seems especially prescient (with even a stab at “Make America America”) in the riven era of the Trumpsky…

DOS AMERICAS

(Don Quixote at Little League)

Bifurcated from the beginning

as in fore and aft the Mayflower

binary binoculars on two virgin lands to be pacified

twin enterprises split like cells multiplying from same bad egg Vespucci straight lineage from the America of Crispus Attucks John Brown James Brown

and the America of Daniel Boone Dodsworth Ed Meese

to which we Pledge (for all your wood surfaces)

before Little League bleachers where Don Quixote shows up ready to give the signs -- or steal them

urge the tykes ‘round that last wide turn to delusional home

honoring scars and swipes when there should be two flags

unfurling for Americas transient or unmoved

standing up for upstanding versus uppity

one Nation entitled official inside

the second uninvited crasher staring Chaplinesque

at display windows of abundance

one contentedly stable as it profits from chaos

the other discomfited by seeing its name over the door

as the first accepts without question all privileges perks and ancillary appurtenances pertaining hereto and henceforth

in lieu and as proxies of Lions Elks Masons Rotary Club after-lunch speakers

those half wishing to get in, those half relieved they are not

America of perplexing diversity against America of diversionary perplexity

the one that slaps you on the back

the one that boots you out the door

America of Gantry Coughlin Billy Graham versus America of Pat O’Brien Berrigan Boys

America of revelations chased down by Ginsberg

Sherwood Anderson Emerson and Elmore James

versus America of best-selling get-rich-quick how-tos

Bessie Smith in final belt-off against Kate

shifting the stridency to minor key

one naïve, one ruthless

America of Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Susan B. Anthony Johnny B. Good

a savage stream of rebellion agin’ one big muddy of Americanism

America of Trane’s “The Promise” and America of promissory notes

neither bankrupt of new schemes, product lines or manic energy

nor able to quite finish the other off

when everything militates against it (militancy I mean)

living within tissue of non-truths

stratified gooey cake layers of all-American lily white lies

where everything since Columbus is on sale at $19.99 and we only murdered 49,999,999 Indians

auctioned off the souls of 99,999,999 blacks

everything discounted, anything must go

until nothing is rounded-up (except by the posse) and denial becomes the suit America wears

two separate countries bearing their own wounds

each vowing to wow the other

one America incorruptible

while the other admits with a wink that living in sin ain’t all that bad and far less trouble than the alternative

the tolerant America that forgives all

the malevolent U.S. of A. that must be continually forgiven

one America a vision to inhabit

one an actual place to raise your kids (before they crash the car, split town, flame out)

one America all projection of thwarted desires

the other too tangible with sordid ACE hardware affairs

Both shitting out America in their dreams

in agreement on more than the two would ever admit

in arm wrestle thumb wrestle best-of-seven series on seven hundred affiliate channels, winner take all

until Don Quixote is held back from charging the black-cloaked umps

savage in their thumbs-up casting out

thinking these calls are not balls and strikes

but final subdivision of spared and doomed

between the America drugged with victories

the America comfortably accustomed to defeat

the one who speaks in the name of the other

and the other that keeps its quiet counsel in the name of everyone

daring to make America America again

when that’s the last thing America wants

having never stopped being America in the first place

America foul, America fair.

What happens when you realize that nearly all the people you love or admire are dead?

Perhaps it’s because I’m approaching potential obituary territory myself (in my research, I stumbled upon a website that takes bets on the top 50 celebrities most likely to pass on) but I’ve discovered that a major part of the experience of aging is witnessing a gradually emptying out of things that bind you to the living world – call it a merciful societal subtraction – as, just as surely, one’s surroundings fill with crowds of newcomers we find somewhere between incomprehensible and intolerable.

So I feel most acutely the need to stop in my tracks and find some way to honor the disappearance of those who have bolstered and prolonged my existence through their miraculous presence. I feel driven to at least put something in writing, my one and only surefire means of expression, since it seems one result of our modern age is that everything rushes on at such pace that all are accorded the same miniscule slice of passing regard. As the number of billions of humans keep piling up, so in proportion do each of us seem to have less and less of some tiny fraction of significance. Thirty seconds on CNN never seem enough. (I recall, painfully, how I fought for my quite accomplished parents to get New York Times obits, as though their entire existence would be negated if they didn’t.) Given our relative newness, there’s the peculiarly American lack of proper, commonly-held ritual to help process such uncomfortable occasions. Life’s important moments end up as hotel ballroom rentals.

I’m still resisting a cultural landscape bereft of sax prophets Wayne Shorter and Pharoah Sanders, my continual personal touchstones. I don’t know how many share the experience but there are just certain vivid individuals that my consciousness cannot accept as no longer being around. Several are baseball players, summer idols who did their work so much in the public eye, that their images are forever vision-seared: Rickey Henderson getting a quick jump to steal a base, elegant Tom Seaver at rest on the mound of dirt made his private kingdom. But then, too, there are unusual ones like Bernardo Bertolucci, the flamboyant and boyishly handsome cinematic daredevil, with a presence and matching artistic ambition too grand to ever vanish. He is one, among many, who I keep thinking, late at night or in odd moments, must still be plotting his next sweeping production. (Diane Keaton, confirmed as gone as I write this, seems another, all bubbly and winningly gee-gosh.) Most of all, musicians who have put out lifetime streams of sound are the ones I have the most trouble consigning to silence.

So beginning with some words for those dedicated to an artistry beyond words, here’s my attempt at accounting for just a few of the grim reaper’s collection of hides in recent months:

HERMETO PASCOAL – The mad cross-eyed albino wizard of Brazilian music who wrote 10,000 pieces and played an uncountable number of instruments, as well as new ones created on the spot (his own belly, any body of water, a coat rack he broke apart into percussive pieces for my benefit on the day I was privileged to see his band rehearse, seemingly the happiest man alive, in the attic of his ramshackle home in a Rio suburb known as part of the so-called “ring of murder”) a daring exemplar of human potential, beauty sprouting in the least promising of places and absolute unbridled freedom in a world of mechanized metronomes.

EDDIE PALMIERI – Similarly, were this cat doing Mozart or Brahms, he would have been bigger than any coat-tailed Van Cliburn, but that would have been too easy for this roiling, rollicking ivory-banger and band leader, smallish titan of New Yorican syncretism.

ZAKIR HUSSAIN – Technically departed just before the New Year and most shocking of all for he still wore his parted locks at youthful hippie length, lived and tapped his tabla at such an impossible pace (promised an interview for two years, I understood he was just too busy touring, as forger of fusion in the West, and honored guru back home) with ancestral hands placed around drums at birth, there will never be other digits of prestidigitation as prestigious.

SLY STONE – Within the African-American songbook, a quirky outlier whose pointedly interracial troupe blew out quirky forms of brotherhood, saying the obvious about America in the most un-obvious and danceable ways.

IVAN KLIMA – The unheralded maestro of the beleaguered human conscience, filtered through that tongue-and-cheek Czech irony which never quit twisting in the knife, read his “Love and Garbage,” about when the State consigned him to trashman for the crime of free thinking.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA – Noble and Nobel-ed if deeply, snobbily anti-Communist, his prolific torrents of prose dissect movements and passions with an acute dryness, especially his “War at the End of the World,” capturing backwoods Brazil as no other, and “Fish Out of Water,” the inside scoop on his quixotic Presidential bid to purge Peru of deceit and corruption.

SEBASTIAO SALGADO– Every place that puts out images should have stopped the presses or gone dark online to note our era’s singular image-maker, poet laureate of the saintly dispossessed in deep contrast, posed in natural world of the distant volcanic shedding light on the darkest of times.

And on a more plebian note:

CLAUDIA CADINALE – Sustained boyhood crush, a woman born with unfair excessive inheritance of cute, Fellini’s symbol of the elusive angelic and mine, too.

JULES FEIFFER– His droll slouching cartooning characters spoke to me through childhood, squeezing from Manhattan pretensions underlying moments of truth and pain, proof of the human.

TOM LEHRER – I once won a beach scavenger hunt he organized, the kiddie prize being a single hamburger of my choice, but knew him more as the insouciant and erudite voice of subterfuge in groaning rhyme, one of those who secretly kept American common sense rebellion alive through the Fifties for sake of convention-busting Sixties, yet done in full sight, with full throat and laughter.

Ciao, sayonara, hasta luego! Or have I merely added here to other hurried and inadequate sketches, our noticeable inability to offer proper notice?

Looking at studies on the Internet, they surprisingly dwell on other psychological costs, such as isolation or anxiety, even though a broad swath of the ones I’ve known have gone abroad to enjoy privileged lifestyles they could never afford back home. (Even I am ashamed to admit that in Thailand, my family employed a full-time maid/nanny.) Of course, if you look at statistics for countries that generate the most ex-pats, these include India, Bengla Desh, the Philippines and other major suppliers of cheap foreign labor – an entire different kettle of fish.

In my case, I did not join such a group through conscious choice – more through a job offer than helped facilitate a jailbreak long brewing. As painfully revealed in the following piece of writing I stumbled upon (written well before the ascending horrors of the Trump era), such a decision involved far too much agonizing. There’s still a lot more I’d like to articulate about my years in Portugal, Malaysia, Thailand and more, with their varying degrees of challenge or reward, cross-cultural highlights and crushing disappointments. Instead, with a nod to Allen Ginsberg, I present this view of the place left behind and impetus for leaving:

How could I abandon thee, Americaca? With so many itching to trade places, anxious to head the opposite way? How dare I walk out on the country that won’t take no for an answer, give up the ghost on history’s endpoint, turn a deaf ear to your 49.99 Labor Day bait-and-switch sales, boycott your brilliantly numbing diversions, cleverly branded happiness kits, brassy headline lures?

I did give you a fighting chance, more than once, more than a hundred times, more than decades of returning home alone, key in security lock, with no secure amount in my bank account or partner in my bed. I was in truth excessively patient with you, far more tolerant than you were with my efforts to fit in and make good (since you are always in a rush anyway). For such a grumbling critic, I had proved remarkably loyal, an awfully stoic foot solider for a draft dodger dropout, ever hoping for the best like some Julie Andrews goofy-eyed optimist, even as you turned ever more reactionary, piling on the slick, late-night lies, the excuses for failing to deliver on your promises, either by UPS or DHL.

All I required, after all, was a decent shot at recognition and community, a couple more pals and one warm-blooded mate. I didn’t insist on any Rotary Club testimonials, the seals and medals attesting to professional status. My American dream was hardly unreasonable and never included the four-story house with two-car garage. With a little livelier social life and wider selection of late-night movies, I could have easily put up with Reagan, the growing militarism, the Bible Belt thumpers, the random brutality. (My favorite bumper sticker had been, “Support Your Local Police – Beat Yourself Up Today!” If only you’d just come through for me!

I knew in the pit of my Hershey-stuffed guts that I honestly did keep doling out those rent checks and forgiveness chances. But you never filled in those blanks on my social contract. You never made good on my uncompensated acquiescence as part of any fair bargain. I sat and waited through decades celebrated by Skitch Henderson auld lang syne comedy sketches, I watched for glimmers of hope on every cable set-up until the choice of channels got too unwieldy to chart and all weekend through Super Bowls, whence everything was super indeed, big-throated and big-breasted, except my own lost voice and shrinking circle of peers.

Truly I was nothing if not a latent patriot, prime candidate for and unwitting exemplar of umbound extremes in your vaunted individualism. Take a marketing survey, send in the questionnaires and you’ll find, statistically confirmed, that no one loved baseball or jazz or burritos or was so vigilantly attuned to the echoes of latest street talk back talk black slang, the saucy sarcasm of late-night comics, the will to re-invention, the Electoral College or the stage-managed means to matriculate there, podium sloganeering, campfire pioneering, the rib-poking cheap-jokester vaudevillian one-liner soil I was fertilized in.

Especially when it comes to your lonesome country roads where the radio reception frighteningly fades and the slide guitars no longer wail, even your landscapes so befouled by strip malls and Citgo insignias, no one will ever tell him there was ever a better continent than this, more deeply-etched canyons to get stuck down, to which I had been given probate title merely for Ellis Island entry, this coast-to-coast resplendence of painted deserts and Okefenokee swamps, the small towns of New England cloaked in puritan-negating splash of fall colors, so obscenely much forest foliage just begging to become plywood mill fodder, so much plenitude of fresh air and stars on evening strolls to motel ice machines, so many bluffs to bluff on. I still can’t believe that I could turn my slightly stooped back on all that, all those glittering summer lakes and shores and retreats to be oneself when no one is looking, the fifty variants of potato chips and hundred uses for corn syrup, such a beckoning bounteous abundance of the extraneous.

Of course, I would end up dragging a lot of you with me, excess baggage for which I was eternally paying a fine, always peeking back at the latest scandals, shocks and World Series (in fact went through maniacal lengths to find baseball playoffs in Beijing or Tel Aviv before they all became too easily subscribable online. I still made sure to catch the Oscars each year (and check the hidden messages more than the winners), still search up a turkey for Thanksgiving, even if the imported leaden frozen cannonball of a Butterball is sixty dollars a pound in some indigestible currency, still stuff myself on boxed Iroquois stuffing that no one among my new company dares to share. Why, I still tear up when hearing “America the Beautiful,” so long as it’s the Ray Charles or Marvin Gaye version. I get positively weepy to George Gershwin and Billie Holliday in that way only alienated Americanos can weep, naively mourning something that was never quite theirs.

How had I managed to take a transnational powder, give in to flagrant self-expatriation? Even now, I bear traitorous guilt, a need to repent at the nearest C.I.A. black torture center. I am genuinely regretful to have done this to you, turned you down in any way, since I know full well how touchy you are and how badly you deal with rejection, how unsettled it makes you feel, really throws you for a loop-de-loop when anyone brings up the point that there might be alternatives, other nation-states out there that might also have a claim or two on exceptionalism or superior qualities of living. Honestly, though, you gave me no choice, when choice was the one thing you overflowed with on supermarket breakfast cereal V-8 juice shelves. I didn’t want to end up a bargain hunter in one-bedroom flats, a hanger-on haranguing weirdo in some senior center. If my fate was going to be as an outsider, I wanted to embrace it and fill it with purpose. I had to skirt that ignoble everyday kind you mapped out for me to claim an irrelevance of historic, if not heroic, proportions.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to admit that those you shake out of your system happen to be the weaklings who couldn’t take the competitive heat, never read enough how-to books or got fit enough in fitness classes to keep up with your Darwinian aerobics. You’re probably justified to conclude that we’re the runts, the rejects, the ones who weren’t equipped enough with Armour-All to steel ourselves for the fall down the manifest destiny chain. That must be an acceptable explanation for you -- not that we might just be the far-seeing scoundrels who see past you, follow your self-made calling to loftier horizons, glimpse a more lucrative new deal elsewhere. We who just had to stop feeding the meter always running in American life, stop paying the sales tax, the costs of being strapped to non-stop humming machinery we had some very reasonable misgivings about.

Perhaps I was never quite ready to join the crowd, become part of “the people” the way you wanted me to be. Perhaps I was simply the wrong sort of people or maybe I didn’t adore them enough, only at a distance and ambivalently at that. If I’d just kept pushing, kept finagling, I might have finally achieved the stability you offered behind burglar alarms and mown lawns, basked in by everyone on either driveway side. I really did take every crack at it, every swing of the Louisville slugger. But I’ve never been to Louisville, and besides my grip was too tentative.

But while you are closing your gates, you might want to know how many reverse refugees you have spawned, heading elsewhere and going in an opposite direction in yearning to breathe free and less smoggily. When it comes to his fellow escapees, you couldn’t put a count on them, unless you want to try to rescind all our over-stamped passports, dual citizenships you forced us to double-up on.

Please don’t take it personal. Or do. I figure my punches and barbs barely make a dent, especially as I dissents from an indecent distance, in languages I speaks stutteringly and that you couldn’t be bothered to decode unless the N.S.A. deems. I do miss you. Honest-to-goodness, cross-my-heart I do. And I will forever catch myself feeling a pom-pom girl’s cheerleading pride at things I spent so long half-despising; the ex-pat’s dilemma. I offer heartfelt greetings from afar (just a non-stop away but feeling like an irreversible form of flight). I send hugs and my sincere wish for things to have turned out better. But I don’t think I’ll be back anytime soon, not for more than a very quick visit.

Excuse the lengthy interruption in my travel-oriented substack…due, appropriately, to a great deal of travel. What follows the first of several dispatches from the Orient:

Don’t ask me how or why, but I recently found myself treated to some 35 meals in a row – count ‘em, 35 – nearly all of them over-the-top, over-indulgent and endlessly decadent fine dining tasting menus supplemented by obscenely topped-up wine pairings I was tasked to downing for the sake of an exclusive guidebook to Bangkok (a city that takes no prisoners when it comes to culinary excess). At one such stuffing in an oh-so-Gallic boite trying to be trendy with pounding techno piped in and humorous quips scribbled on walls in red neon, as I girded my innards with some apprehension before another night’s surfeit of wagyu and blue lobster, Hokkaido scallops and octopus carpaccio, the obligatory foie gras and sea urchin toast, accompanied by an ostentatiously foot-high pyramid of Normandy butter weighing down my table-for-one, all lovingly presented by some obsequious sous chef in service of a favorable two-hundred word entry, I couldn’t help making a rather curious observation about my fellow diners (among whom, I figured, most had to be willingly forking over 300 dollars or more for my same privilege).

Unlike most of the other candidates for review, packed with excited groups of passionate local foodies or older tourist couples with excessive travel budgets to waste, those gracing at least half the dozen or so white linen tables visible from my corner booth seemed to suggest something sinister. It seemed that there were matching pairs of perfectly groomed aspiring Thai models in most revealing garb, seated with forced smiles yet little conversation, opposite squat and rather menacing males at least twice their age, if not more. Maybe I was generalizing unfairly, but this being Bangkok, I suddenly felt quite certain that I was completing my repast in a room full of high-priced prostitutes. And even as I dutifully raised a well-used utensil up to my eager mouth to judge another entree, just before the unwanted summoning of a passion fruit souffle, the thought arose that at least these girls were serving the survival needs of their families, and had far less choice in the matter than me. By such a spontaneous calculation, I couldn’t help concluding that the biggest whore in the room happened to be me.

After all, I still considered myself, in darker moments, to be a so-called serious writer. Besides, back in high school, when classmates knew me as the resolute, annoyingly relentless anti-capitalist rebel, I surely would have been given the title in our yearbook as “Most likely to end world hunger. ” (Also, were such awards given, the kid with the absolute worst table manners — tending still to scoop things up with my hands before spilling half on my lap). Yet far too large a portion of my professional life, as well as my social life, had been spent on incalculable hours of digestion, if not indigestion, an inexhaustible expression of unnatural appetite that had become all in a day’s work.

It had begun with a travel book concocted to please my new Chinese bride, a search for the world’s best Chinese restaurant that, I soon realized, was only made possible through most of the proprietors laying out our banquets being more than culturally primed to want to gain status through their gratis offerings. When such experience won me the post of main food critic for the Wall St. Journal in Asia, I had gone to help write a popular series of favorite restaurants in 20 cities around the region (at least, ethics rules adapted from covering the stock market forbade me to accept even the tiniest morsel for nothing, causing me to submit eating expenses of 7k and more for one week in Osaka). In service of said series, my proudest moment had been an Olympics of piggery to find the best restaurants of Seoul in all of three days tagged on to the end of an assignment reporting on Korea’s World Cup. Later, freelancing for lesser local publications or erstwhile guides with lower budgets, or invited as a courted if anonymous voter for the World’s 50 Best list, I was back on what felt like an unending gravy train. Sometimes I couldn’t help feeling that I was inhaling the entire animal kingdom, and cornucopia of plant-based side dishes, all in one go.

Over time, I gained a surprisingly small amount of weight, along with proportionately trivial helpings of wisdom. Jokingly, I had come up with the handle to describe myself: the “accidental glutton.” Why, just in the span of two or three nights in Bangkok – devoted to an entirely sort of debauchery than the song implied -- I had devoured a high-end “mac and cheese” supplemented with fresh mussels and dottings of Himalayan morel mushrooms, a Burmese pork brain clay pot, mountains of shaved truffles over tagliatelle, twelve sips of organic sake, quivering slabs of Basque cheesecake. In deference to the Buddhist beliefs of the country where so much of my unbridled eating has taken place (within shouting distance of street vendors in flipflops separated from subsistence by batches of bananas chips refried in half-rancid oil), it seemed that I must have done something right in a prior life to be rewarded with such an unbridled, and unpaid, excess of edible succulence. Perhaps I had earned merit by running a soup kitchen back in Victorian England, or been a busy queen bee oozing out honey to my dependent community.

Or could it have been that this was actually a punishment? An expiation for prior sins, sentenced to spending so much of my precious lifespan overhwhelmed with processing exactly those things I had no real need of, while more compelling wants (for literary fame or loving relationships) seemed to go by the wayside, end up getting chucked out with the kitchen scraps? I, who so yearned to engage with artists, philosophers, political crusaders, was wasting my days in deep dialogue with waiters, hostesses and maitre’d’s, welcomed as another long lost comrade into the easy brotherhood of chefs, those welcoming spirits who nonetheless spent their days mostly pondering how to plate up and garnish some lovely reindeer testicles.

In any case, as an old friend once remarked, an outstanding home cook who happened to be going through a depressive period, “Cordon Bleu or McDonald’s, it all comes out brown the next morning.” And of course, what even more invariably greeted me when I got back to my hotel and reclined in my five-star bed, struggling once more to process and keep down another round of entirely un-called for stuffing, but the latest Al Jazeera images of starving children in Gaza fighting for sacks of flour and other handouts, or the usual emaciated African victims of droughts or warlord rampages – just the most recent reminders of a fact I knew all too well, which was that the sum total of my helpful guidance, which I doubted anyone took seriously, transpired within the context of a world where a billion-plus fellow diners didn’t get enough to fill their tummies.

In such moments, I’m not just made exceedingly nauseous but plagued with enormous guilt – that most useless of emotions. Yet I can also convince myself that, in a rather ass-backwards way, I had come to embody my earlier socialist beliefs. Imagine how it feels, time after time, to rise from a three-hour, twenty-course feed, give a nod of thanks to the server or chef, and simply walk away without having to ask for the bill! The freebie as some ultimate form of safety net. Would all of humanity should get to experience such a feeling of freedom – as in tax-free -- every day of their lives!

What if I tossed in my ill-earned reviewer’s cap and let someone else ease their chair up to the infinite buffet in my stead? Would this act of renunciation actually help any of the hungry, though helping me in the reduction of my midriff bulge? Next time the call came to such odious duties, might I have the Pepto Bismol-soothed guts to refuse?

Legend has it that the Buddha himself died of food poisoning. So I suppose there is hope for me yet.

In the meantime, a miscellany of prior musings on some more of what the act of travel entails:

ANOTHER WAY TO TRAVEL

When he’s on the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, he’s dreaming to drift up the Amazon

When he’s in the rainforest, he’d much rather be in a pub

When he’s snorkeling in Phuket’s blue lagoon, he’d give anything to be watching to a play in the West End

When he’s chomping on egg tarts in Lisbon, he’s missing the dumplings of Hong Kong

When he’s in Paris, he’s wishing he might have arrived in the Paris of the 1920’s

When he’s in Hangzhou, he can’t help wanting to being transported to the one Marco Polo described

When he’s in Rio, he longs for the fogs of San Francisco

When he’s in San Francisco, he boasts of shaking his booty in Rio

When he’s in Phnom Penh, he’d give anything for the clean sidewalks of Frankfurt

When he’s in the Alps, he’d give anything for the teeming spectacle of the Punjab

When he’s circling Lake Tahoe, he envisions Kashmir’s Lake Dal

When he’s drifting on a houseboat in Kerala, he drifts off to reveries of punting on the River Cam toward its treasured bookshops

When he’s with friends at a Starbucks, he wonders what better conversations he could be having with the art deco cafe habitués of Buenos Aires

If he could ever commit to anywhere enough to become a habitué!

When he’s in love in Portland, he calculates how much more intense it would feel to be in love in Sevilla

When he’s boarding another plane, he curses his itchy feet and wonder why he is once again leaving behind his book-lined study, his best pals and his Sunday bagels

When he’s supposedly delving into his own depths, he is scanning sites for the next air fare alert

It’s only when he is plunked on a camel in front of the Pyramids that he realizes he should be sitting in the back row of the bleachers at Fenway

OR BETTER YET…

What about that long-postponed voyage to Grass-Is-Greenerland? Upon arrival in such an imagined locale, customs officials will not stamp the last page of your passport, but kiss your hand. The airport porters will be top models or Olympians. Without even trying, you will know how to read all the signs, charm the inhabitants in their own tongue, colloquialisms included, steer unfailingly to the most delightful, most authentic, insider spots (as there will be no such thing here as “outside”), the finest delicacies to consume (without consideration of gastric upset), as well as the quickest means and most scenic routes to get there, at the lowest fares. You will have perfect weather and encounter nothing which provokes fear or discomfort, everything that evokes wonder and bliss. Your hotel room will replicate the best features of your apartment (excluding the clogged drains and dusty corners), your favorite sounds automatically piped-in. There will be no outside noise, disturbing cries or construction sites. There will be no bellboys or leering concierges, not a procurer or madman to provoke unsettling thoughts. You will not need a fold-out map, ever impossible to fold back up. The delightful Greenerlanders, ever solicitous, will treat you with that perfect balance of abiding respect and servility. You will so naturally touch hands across divides, make so many friends for life that you will have to extend your life by several years at least. None of them will ever feel the need to ask you to purchase any goods or to meet their sister. You will not be shown any brochures, price lists or laminated displays of noodle bowls or nude women. You will have whatever kind of fling you wish, or no flings at all, with no consequences, and no one keeping score. You will not be invited to any convention centers or ever have to sport a name tag. Or a luggage tag as nothing is ever stolen here, not even in your time. As everyone in Grass-Is-Greenerland is as erudite and well-fed as yourself, there will never be any reason for a split-second’s flickering of guilt at partaking of their finest resources. You will freely discuss politics, never skirting any topics, without offending or challenging, and come to a profound understanding of the society in all its timeless manifestations at a single glance. All your first impressions will be consummate. And not just the monuments will prove monumental. Besides, there will be no importuning or ruses, open-air tour busses, inflated exchange rates. You will stay the perfect length of time, during the perfect season, and leave at the exact second when you’ve grown jaded. Your photos will all be prize-winners, encapsulating all you have seen in deep focus, exceptionally framed. Here is the place where you will finally lose yourself and in the same instant, find yourself. Best of all, you will never feel the need to return.

MENTAL LANDSCAPES

What better way, really, to be transported to India than through an infinitely droning evening raga, a Tagore poem, the golden hem of a crumpled sari in one’s clutches? No need then, to ever witness Indian gas stations, Indian toilets, the random Indian malevolence. Ditto almost anywhere you can summon forth with a novel, an art film or a sonata. After all we can conjure, the only fascination is in the shortfall.

Which is why, even as much as I’ve privately railed against the growing trappings of a police state under Herr Trump, I wasn’t at all prepared for the treatment I received weeks back from the infamous TSA going through the security check in the Boston airport on my way back to Portugal. Of my three bags (my cheapo fare did not allow me to check any luggage, just wangle my way into boarding with a carry-on, a small backpack/laptop case and a Trader Joe’s shopping bag full of miscellaneous souvenirs), two trays quickly went down the auxiliary conveyor to be given an extra check. The reason? Never explained. Suddenly all my toiletries, games and wind-up toys for my daughter, a thick biography of George Orwell and the road to Big Brother (fittingly), were being hastily unpacked, to be shoved back in an even more hasty and disordered mannered.

Most of these were wiped with those strips to be inserted into that foreboding machine resembling a radioactive rice cooker next to the overflow of uniformed busybodies, presumably to pick up traces of what exactly – gunpowder, dynamite, hashish or henna? And for some reason, this doomsday box went apeshit over a can of New Orleans coffee, laced with chicory, given to me as a present by my older daughter (duly labeled as coming from a leading tourist market in the Crescent City). Apparently, there was something in this dark grind that could potentially take down a jumbo jet (or alternatively, rot some stomachs).

Before this highly dangerous can of corn could be properly investigated, I was summoned to the other side of the barrier where I was met by a hefty young African- American eagerly strapping on rubber gloves to perform a standard frisking, or so I was told. This turned out to be a fairly serious invasion of my human rights and private bodily parts, basically everything short of an anal probe, as arms, legs, thighs, unbelted waist area and back of neck were treated to a decidedly deep massage. But the clincher came when the fellow, without any warning, reached from behind my skimpy buttocks and under to the front of my crotch, in the manner of a over-eager Bangkok massage girl desperate to stimulate the male organ and psyche into further, more costly encounters. Only this was far from arousing. I actually screamed with the pain from my testicles, also expressing my displeasure at the abuse of my basic all-American individualist personhood.

With this brief, uncensored outcry, I was now clearly deemed a serious problem case and threat to public order. Two or three additional airport cops, regular Boston police with guns at the holster, came on the trot to handle this growing septugenarian savagery. I was suddenly being warned that if I did not calm down immediately, my “flying tonight would be a no go.” Shakily, I did step back to the other side of the barrier, lowered the volume of my protests, but didn’t exactly go meek. I gladly assented to a request, more a demand, for my coffee to be pried open, chuckling irreverently at the absurdity of it all. Meanwhile, I was forcibly led into a private room for a second frisking – this time accomplished by an older and clearly more experienced guard, who even warned me as he went up my thighs and never got anywhere close to the previous danger zone.

Naturally, within five or ten more minutes of grim procedural huffing and puffing – had I not been dropped off extremely early for my midnight departure, I would have missed it – a small sampling of the Francophile coffee had been splayed onto some wax paper, appearing to all the world like some rare earth mineral. Surprise, surprise – not a trace of anything but roasted beans was detected. Trying to put my belongings and my psyche back in some semblance of order, I told the caffeine sniffer he owed me an apology. Like a typical trained robot, he replied in automaton voice that no apologies were ever given where “public security” was concerned. I muttered, as I finally gathered up my things and left the screening area, that I happened to be a member of the public myself, who had just been made to feel unecessarily insecure.

But they still were not done with me. One of the cops accompanied me all the way to my flight, carrying my shopping bag as a means to make amends, but continually warning me that I better not make any more disturbance at the gate. I couldn’t help asking back exactly what sort of trouble I could possibly stir up standing at the back of the boarding line for my aisle seat in Zone 8. Somewhat overstimulated by the experience, I gave this poor deputy, also of African-American descent, quite an earful: that I considered the United States already insanely over-militarized and sure to get worse under Mr. Trump – hardly a friend to people of color, didn’t he know? – which was one of the reasons I had quit my native land for nearly a quarter-century and was currently settled in a country with virtually no firearms in private hands. Oddly enough, this being progressive Boston, my blue-suited escort nodded repeatedly in seeming agreement.

What was more distressing to me in terms of the future of travel was the mood among my fellow passengers – dare I even call them travelers? – as my flight landed in Lisbon. Naturally, at the end of a red-eye, people tended to be disembarking in a groggy, zombie-like state. However, as there appeared to be few Portuguese speakers among the 300 or so on the wide-bodied Airbus, I presumed nearly all around me were holiday-makers at the start of some long-booked journey. However, I glimpsed absolutely not one single glimmer of excitement or anticipation, no clapping or even exhalations of relief at the landing, and not a soul even bothered to look up from their phones and out the portholes at the white hills and orange rooftops of ancient Lisboa, tantalizingly close beneath our flight path. As people struggled to haul down their luggage, it all seemed so humdrum, routine, utterly dull. Where was some old-fashioned joy of travel? Whither a single speck of discovery? Perhaps it was these oh-so-modern voyagers who could have used the wake-up call of a good jolt to the genitals.

I had perfect seat for my first look at the Ganges. It was being revealed in a murky, purple light. The surface was shallow yet unbroken, the granulated water showing no currents at all. Yet a single oarsman at the prow of a crushed slipper of a barge was working his way slowly, slowly against serious resistance. He was far upshore, nearly stilled, as I tracked his progress, mesmerized by the oar he drove through the river like a musician drawing a bow. No, the music equivalent of the Mother Ganga and its navigators was not an instrument of pluck but of drone; the tamboura, harmonic ground of the ages. At the rate he was going, it would take the man all day to move a thousand feet up the riverbank.

Somewhere downstream, near Patna, they were supposed to be building a bridge. In Delhi, I would be treated to a grainy documentary about it. The work had begun with mass enthusiasm: only the second human attempt to span the mighty river! Squadrons of over-draped yet barefoot women built up the pylons with buckets of mud. Slowly, so slowly. Gangs drove the supports into the shallows with well-timed heave-hos. Slowly, so slowly these human pile-drivers labored. And where was the bridge now? I saw only long, low dunes of Himalayan silt. Slowly, slowly, said the Ganges. How dare I be bothered about having lost one brief night’s sleep?

Predictably, a team of conductors, or ship’s mates, came and asked our group to produce claim stubs to the easy chairs we had unthinkingly sunk in. The only occupants of the first-class lounge, none of us had first-class tickets — only white skin and audacity. Pried as from our cozy bunks before, we had to push our way toward the back of the ferry and fight for floor space on the aft deck outside. No armchairs here.

With cascades of shuddering, the old coal burner started up. For an hour or two, we drifted toward Patna. All that time, the tireless Scottish engine dumped its Victorian soot into the breeze and down onto most of the passengers at the stern. The soot fell on the freshly starched kurtas and neatly clutched account books of the spectacled clerks. It fell on the lavender rages of the beggars. It fell on the painted limbs of a family of naked pilgrims, nullifying the daily cleansing they effected through the shuffling of a few brass bowls and cups that were their only possessions. It fell on the Indians’ scowling, staring, searing faces. The faces screamed toward me, “You see! The coal furnace’s discharge can’t get at our souls!”

But the wakening atmosphere seemed less clouded by imported pollutants than it was by desires gone nowhere. The cross-legged commuters on our ferry’s back this day carried with them the delicate dreams, the mythological reference points, that were the oldest expression of man’s elevation from beastliness. Yet they were still forced to live like beasts. The Indians I would meet loved to wax glowingly about their great, wise civilization, but none of that grandiloquent respect for the whole seemed to be accorded to its living constituents. The people bore every indignity for the sake of their culture’s continuing cohesion. What did all the touted spiritual pre-eminence do for the Hindusthan flesh? My own life may have been riddled and ruled by objects of desire, by possessions. These lives were so obviously riddled and ruled by the lack of same. It wasn’t just the scarcity of water that made the Ganges’ clouded flow sacred. It was the pervasive filth of existence. Anything that refreshed momentarily, that tore off the dirt of living near the earth, was worthy of worship. At the very least, non-being was preferable to being because it was clean.

Already, the day was a kiln. Nothing could escape its slow burn — while the glaring pointed at him became black, blacker, blackest. And just as the insistent coal dust had to be continually flicked away, so, too, did the light. The great Indian light blew like glittery grit from one victim to the next. The light: capricious and uncomfortable like the dust. The light: refracted and tortured like the people. The light: cleansing and purgative like the river.

I cast about for my comrade seekers, for those visions of the night more comic than cosmic. We’d been dispersed, gone silent as the river. Even that brawny Swiss Rolf, ever daring Asia to a challenge, had crumpled into a pile of World War I life jackets. Our special status had vanished. No armed guard, or color barrier, shielded us now. Foreign matter no longer, we were dilute in the turgid stream of India.

We breathe, we eat, we die. In that sense, each society purports to its own expertise of breathing, eating, dying. What was I after in coming to see this one? The holy men were so busy painting themselves they almost forgot to be holy. It was their task to be holy. The babus and the office clerks smirked. It was their task to smirk. They did it for the benefit of all, though in order to smirk so effectively, their task included being thoroughly against the benefit of all.

Dawn on the Ganges afforded me a moment of sight uncorrupted. A veritable karmic wallop. Then came the Indian questions: Who knows what you see? Would someone else see it the same? What does it matter in the long run? What, after all, is the good in seeing?

Or can one qualify merely by an occasional supplying of newspaper Sunday supplements or ratings websites with the latest, though not necessarily most objective, advance scouting? Does anybody hand out degrees or diplomas for this specialized field? (Answer: nobody, not a single Ph.D. or even a measly M.T. – Master of Travel).

Besides, each of the separate parts to this profession can quickly get awfully divergent. Writers, I would argue from personal experience, are born – not made. While travelers, as in those who specialize in heading off rather than mere vacationers, seem far more the product of training, habit, early exposure, financial wherewithal, tempered by the amount each of us carries of internal spilkes – the evocative Yiddisher term, bordering like most Yiddisher terms at the edge of an insult, best translated as “ants in the pants,” unstoppable restlessness, the unchecked impulse to keep moving, sometimes aligned with a natural curiosity or an urgent need to escape familiar surroundings.

That I became a persistent traveler is still a source of amazement to me, an unexpected, nearly alien development. That I am a writer was not something I had to “become” at all, but an instinctual aptitude without conscious effort and taken for granted. Like many a school kid, I dreaded speaking up in class (especially getting called when I was half-asleep, one of my recurrent bad dreams a number of decades after matriculation). But I found I could nearly always make up for my reticence as soon as there were written assignments, the more verbiage required the better. I always felt far more comfortable spewing forth the dictations of a private, inner voice than with any outer attempt. As time went on and I became a more rebelliously inattentive student (my parents were actually called in for an emergency conference with the dean of my prep school to be informed that their son “would never go to Harvard” because I spent too much class time staring out the window, daydreaming – the perfect resume entry for a would-be scribbler), I discovered that I could even set down impressive tomes on subjects I knew little or nothing about. (As a goof-off college freshman, I wrote a lengthy paper on a difficult Leroi Jones novel based solely on a back-of-the-jacket description.)

In addition, both my parents were constantly editing book anthologies as I was growing up, accumulating manuscripts before my very eyes through pasting articles and treatises into published volumes on acting and the theatre (Mom) or on love and marriage in all its vagaries (Dad), so much so that it was a running joke among my classmates to be referred to as “son of The Sexual Revolution, Vol. 2”). I can’t say that I ever gleaned any literary tips from witnessing this, only that I absorbed early on that books were not the least bit intimidating, as easy to conjure from the ozone as toy cars or cardboard boxes.

It was my parents who passed down my first lessons in travel as well, though quite inadvertently as neither were especially mobile, my father especially qualifying in his later years as a confirmed “stick in the mud.” The offspring of immigrants become reasonably middle-class professionals, they saved up for a number of years before they could mount the classic Grand Tour of Europe, finally checking in on a lifetime’s artistic and intellectual reference points. Travel, in those years, was far more costly, far slower and more cumbersome to plot and arrange, not yet a right taken for granted by anyone who could afford a backpack and Lomotil tablets. But my parents managed to return every third summer (when I was an impressionable 9, 12 and 15), during which I immediately served as the designated map reader, navigating my elders with considerable pride through the Roman Forum or Fleet Street, while getting properly inculcated in the thrills of tram-riding as well as museum-going. Much of the sophistication I’ve clung to throughout my life (recognizing a Max Ernst at fifty paces, for instance) was stuffed into me during each of those hectic five weeks.

Yet I was still just an All-American kid, who could hand out homemade campaign leaflets for JFK on the interminable Air India flight over, lose my Dodgers cap by sticking my head out the moon roof of our rented Taunus on the Autobahn, scandalously attempt to order Coca-Cola during my first foray into a Lyons Michelin-starred snob factory, skip the exciting plays of the “Angry Young Men” on the London stage to monitor BBC coverage of the Olympics in my hotel, imitate my father’s browsing for bargain Constructivist lithographs by collecting ancient Roman coins rummaged from flea market bins, relish the Soviet Cinerama version of “War and Peace” premiered in Moscow while I was struggling to work my way through the book.

As for my virgin attempt setting out on my own, a college pal and I managed the quintessential initiation into tourism of a week’s starving in Paris, sneered at by shopkeepers who couldn’t be bothered selling half kilos, drooling at patisserie windows while we subsisted on a single honey-soaked Tunisian donut a day. Yet we found our first joy and mischievous mantra by imitating a couple from Iowa seated ahead of us on a city bus, who responded to every passing demi-palace with the hubby declaring “Very old!” and his wife faithfully echoing, “Very beautiful!”

What amount of nerve did it take scant few years later for me to take up the dare of my hippie girlfriend to set out on a year’s journey across Asia, funded solely by three-months Christmas overtime pay loading trucks at the mammoth Oakland Post Office? I don’t recall a moment’s hesitation, being so eager to both extend our tottering romantic relationship and get away from the flag-waving hoopla of America’s Bicentennial celebrations. Besides, there was always the vague motivation not merely to see the Taj Mahal or sample pad thai but to seek paths towards enlightenment or, failing that, put the rest of the globe in some realistic perspective.

If anyone had told me I would end up contracting dengue fever in Bali and a tapeworm in Kabul, getting robbed by a quick-change artist in a Delhi back alley or utterly lost for days on a Himalayan trek, even more perilously dodging an armed coup d’etat coinciding with my first days in Bangkok, I probably would have taken my chances staying in Oakland. Even more shockingly, if any of my comrades from the Sixties had predicted that I’d achieve my first published success from an account of going “around the world in a bad mood,” launch a one-eighty career change leading to my regular appearance in almost every major magazine with “Traveler” on the cover, I might have sat the Bicentennial out on the couch in front of my black-and-white TV.

It was only twenty years later, after my new vocation had been established, if not entirely confirmed, that I unearthed among boxes of old Ektachrome slides a diary I had kept during that very first European jaunt – and discovered with amazement that even as an middle grader I had busily, and on my own initiative, rated each and every attraction, activity or restaurant, in one-to-five stars, crudely traced in smudged crayon.

Which brings me to that frigid yet feathery phenomenon that occasional cascades onto our path, often mistaken for inconvenience when it should be cast as wonder. I certainly can identify my most perfect sight of snowfall, and it happened in a town called Takayama, so-called gateway to the Japanese Alps.

I had brought my daughter there for the express purpose of witnessing the white stuff in all its generous, if unpredictable, spectacle. Raised in Thailand, she had reached age fourteen without experiencing first-hand a white Christmas except inHollywood holiday classics. So, I had devised over December school break her first jaunt to the nearest Asian “snow country” (in Kawabata’s phrase) where nearly all Thais in search of that wintry wonderland make a weather-related pilgrimage. After a day or two getting acclimated, touring Kyoto temples between her first introduction to authentically bracing bowls of ramen (hardly unfamiliar to her, as Japanese food, through both local chains and imported restaurant brands, was the default culinary setting for anything un-Thai), we headed north on a train that snaked along a rushing river as nameless as it was memorable for its exceptionally Oriental hue of pure jade.

My research indicated that Takayama, while hardly some fabled spot of Nippon, was one of the more dependable stopovers to provide the expected celestial phenomenon. However, the first views as the train pulled in at night were anything but promising – a typically sterile mid-sized Japanese town whose large parking lots between warehouses and Lawson convenience marts were thoroughly unrelievedly asphalt black, if slick with leftover moisture from some melt-off we may have just missed.

All the way to the large downtown ryokan I had reserved, my travelers’ heart, and reputation, seemed to be sinking to the pit of my sushi-craving stomach. Had a wasted all my money and planning to come up empty? Could I bear to see my daughter come away from this trip severely disappointed? (In truth, as it is with most parenting, I probably cared more than she did to deliver on the promises of our private tour package.) As I recall, the lobby check-in featured a wall of cubby holes stuffed with a motley miscellany of paired ski boots, a promising sign if hardly what qualified as scenic. At least, we could console ourselves with the snug coziness of a classic tatami room, a multi-course meal borne by spectacularly berobed women and consumed at painfully kneeling level, followed by crawling into the thick futons forming a kind of igloo in cotton enough to get anyone through the worst blizzard whiteouts. All I could do, drifting off to sleep, was pray for ours to be imminent.

The next morning shone radiantly un-stormy if muted through the paper shoji screens slid closed to protect our oh-so Japanesque cocoon. Then, and forever more, I would understand exactly the purpose of these ancient and so ingenuous contraptions, as perfect silent curtains for containing, then unveiling a world less ordered but far more capable of astonishing. It was hardly seven a.m., well past dawn but not yet time for our sustaining breakfast of green tea, rice, miso and battered mackerel filet, just the day’s first fully established burst of light

Then came the unpredictable, unforgettable, indescribable part. Revealed with so silent a sliding of windows was a gentle, if distinctly dispersed universe of floating flakes – each so jumbo-sized in their gravitation fluttering as to seem individualized beings. These were origami versions of flakes, crystalline formations trying to turn themselves into mythic cranes, beautiful splotches that went way beyond confectioners’ sugar in defining the word “powder.” Was it really possible that such a natural occurrence was somehow more humbly minimalist, more perfectly matched to this culture’s design aesthetics? Joined by my daughter at the bank of windows extending our luxurious, mat-laden box, we stood together in an enforced Zen meditation, truly stilled and breathless in our watching.

The rest of our morning’s first wanderings under so soft and perfect a deluge proved equally amazing. Takayama, it turned out, was far more than a convenient seasonal supplier for well-off Southeast Asians. Its central core boasted streets lined with wooden shophouses just as graceful and redolent as anything in Kyoto. And its delicately curved bridges over a coursing mountain river, arched as if eyebrows with railings and all painted-up in a shiny fire-engine red, shone through even more wondrously against the contrasting canvas of ever-accruing white purity.

Again, I had to ask myself, what was Japan doing that the rest of the Northern Hemisphere wasn’t. I nearly wanted to cry out at this surplus of loveliness, and almost wanted my daughter to somehow honor that loveliness by kissing the growing accumulations all around.

This was a meteorological event quite unlike the snowfalls of my New York childhood, when the best result to be hoped for was to find city traffic marvelously if briefly immobilized, so one could clomp down the middle of old Broadway without a care, or snowshoes, until the scene quickly devolved into hideously clogged drainage overflow and melted slush the color of nasty black soot. Of course, this occasioned hundreds of photo snappings: my child eager to pose for folks back home against such a new and magical backdrop. Even better, we dropped randomly into an old-fashioned looking eaterie, entirely without sign or hype, where beds of buckwheat udon were made before our eyes and plopped in kombu broth, perfect antidote to all the world’s frost.

The next day, we caught a bus to the nearby Hida Folk Village, as I had long seen photos of this rare gathering of hulking thatched farmhouses, an archetypal architecture more or less extinct in other parts of Japan. The grouping of huge A-frames and somber interiors evocative of some ancient agricultural past somewhat resembled a theme park. But never mind. The icy paths between the houses were perfect for my daughter to slide and skate on, and while she quickly got bored with the ethnography, the fresh banks of white on all side not only set off the severe symmetry of what we’d come to see, but made a perfect playground for her to fall backwards into, trace angel wings in the drifting powder, glide down on her back even without any sleigh – a thrilling sight for a doting father, even if swarmed over by busloads of Koreans. Nothing could spoil the moment. This trip, at least, had fulfilled its purpose splendidly. Maybe Siberia or Switzerland or the Arctic Circle could have worked just as well, but I didn’t see any way to do snow any better.

1.OVERVIEW OF AN UNDERDOG

As recently as the 1970’s, Portugal remained the poorest and most backward country in Europe, a place where black-shawled widows trudged to Medieval duties on dirt highways and a sleepy urban culture was conformist Catholic, termed by one book “the most boring place on earth,” as ruled by an aged and thoroughly uncharismatic fascist dictator and mired in the brutal overseeing of African colonies.

Thanks to an intervening peaceful revolution (led by radicalized returning from Africa and rural communes, and quickly subverted from its socialist aims by Henry Kissinger et. al.) and vast funding of improvements by the European Union, this quaint carbuncle on the continent’s southernmost chin has now been transformed into the preferred refuge of techies and millionaires, a vacation spot where the costs and culture appeal as “Europe lite,” with core cities still tile-roofed and quaintly unimproved, seafood ever reliably fresh and empty Atlantic beaches that beckon under a welcoming Mediterranean climate.

In the meantime, the Portuguese themselves carry on valiantly, seeking all the diversions of modernity while still struggling with some of the continent’s lowest wages.

Is this really some neo-Nirvana, a mellower Spain without the rough edges or blood lust?

Never mind that prices in the cities have nearly doubled thanks to foreign investors (mostly from France, but also Angola and China), and that climate change seems to be making the winters longer and more windblown where most of the semi-cramped apartments have little insulation and landlords provide zero heat.

Much of the countryside, especially the Southern Alentejo, retains an eternal beauty with black oaks and cork forests (one of the country’s only natural resources) surveyed by old windmills, but much of the civil workings throughout feel more Third World than first. In Lisbon, one or more escalators will invariably be broken at subway stations; plagued by corruption, its public services are starved, especially a public health system that’s often praised in guides, but features decrepit infrastructure and endless waits (a full day to see a doctor, six months for a specialist).

The Portuguese use of “now” is considerably expansive. Waiting in line is a way of life here, with the pace of life leisurely to slo-mo —marked by a decided “manha” mentality, appointments made with Portuguese will never be made for today or tomorrow, but postponed as much as possible, then often not kept – while nearly all store interactions are clogged-up by the preponderance of fussy old ladies seeking interminable conversation. The population, indeed, is markedly aged, with previous generations having migrated for work to northern Europe or Brazil. That makes for quite an ironic, and pitiful sight, as Lisbon’s charmingly hilly terrain is plied with the aid of a stream of canes and walkers, and the characteristic calcadas, sidewalk mosaics laid with black-and-white patterns reminiscent of seafaring motifs, are sadistically slick in the rain for the elderly.

Compared to its Southern counterparts, Portugal seems to retain all the shrugging inefficiency of Latin lands, met with a good deal less humor or human solidarity. While always dangerous to generalize, the Portuguese and their eternal rivals, the Spanish, often appear two sides of the same coin. Most travelers find the Lisboetas or Tripeiros (tripe eaters for Porto) courteous and polite, friendly if not entirely effusive. The descriptives most often used to circle the stereotype of Portuguese are reserved, shy, introverted, circumspect or downright dour (also quite penny-pinching). More curious and warmly embracing encounters with strangers can be had in a week in Spain than a year in Portugal. The Portuguese consider their Iberian partners too aggressive, abrasive and loud. And where Spaniards fill their public plazas with the need for socializing late into the night, Portuguese leave their shared spaces empty and retreat behind the heavy doors of family, hoping never to be disturbed – and if so, quick to call the authorities (landlords, co-ops, police) to register complaints.

Still, many of the attributes that draw people here are in evidence, including a decided tolerance and absence of racial animus -- very liberal attitudes masked in suit-and-tie stuffiness. While Porto feels more industrious, a place of doers and makers more connected to Europe, Lisbon on its airy perch feels floating off toward Africa, the stomping ground of power seekers and poets alike. Pining for past glory still comes before any attempts at improvement, let alone innovation.

Stay away if at all possible from customs or immigration authorities, as the bureaucracy here is fearsome and unbridled, conspiring to bring frustrations and unapologetically interminable delays at every turn (at time several years to obtain appointments or documentation). Expect long lines and heaps of diffident nastiness in every turn.)

The quintessential Lisbon experience remains sitting around the many graceful kiosks in restful pracas (like Amoreiras, not to be confused with the mall, bordered by stanchions of the ancient royal aqueduct), sipping wine or a bracing expresso and lolling in the near-Saharan sun. Just don’t try, as a Portuguese banker friend warned on my arrival, to get much of anything done.

2.KEYS TO THE CULTURE

Nearly all the house keys in Portugal are elongated silver affairs with chiseled wings that look more suited to Medieval dungeons, and rarely if ever work the first time – “jiggling” is a way of life in a “baroque” land where the simplest tasks get overcomplicated. (To get a form letter from a hospital attesting to my daughter’s birth there, took multiple visits and nearly a year.)

There is no good evening in the Portuguese language. “Boa noite,” or good night, is not reserved for tuckings in, but comes into use as soon as the sun sets. No wonder even a busy capital like Lisbon looks like a ghost town after dark except in tourist zones. (Sundays are even emptier, when only a few pharmacies remain open.) However, no polite Portuguese ever fails to wish a “bom fim de semana.” The weekend gets top billing. But even on work days, the Portuguese would not be Portuguese without their heavy, two-hour lunches (kept awake after with continuous coffees — see food section).

In Portugal, perhaps for cost cutting, the traffic signals are all on the side of the street nearest to oncoming traffic. Go an inch or two beyond a proper stop and you’re blind, no lights to guide you on the far side. In much of the countryside, green or red flashing are avoided through endless dizzying roundabouts.

While the first to figure out global navigation five centuries back, the Portuguese still haven’t conquered garbage collection, with trash spilling all over Lisbon due to a dearth of receptacles.

In a pint-sized land beset with compensating for its undeniable inferiority complex, many signs hail many ventures as “O Melhor do Mundo.” The best on earth, or just on that block? And woe to those who would dare disagree!

Aside from foreign imports El Corte Ingles and Auchan, Portugal’s supermarket chains are surprisingly low-quality for Europe and to be avoided. Opening the right or wrong ends of plastic bags provided is a challenge in manual and cultural dexterity taking years to meet.

Those strange high-pitch whistles you may around Lisbon are the ancient calls of itinerant knife-sharpeners, while the eternal tradition of lonesome widowers vigilantly posted peering out their windows to monitor street action or local gossip has become known in modern lingo as “Portuguese CCTV.”

From the Brits, long allies, the Portuguese have inherited a love of dogs, overcooked vegetables and the world’s worst yellow mustard.It’s famed tart, exported wherever Portuguese sailed, and now the basis of a local tourist industry pegged, is called a pastel de nata (cream pastry). Or should that be pastel de nada? As in nothing.

While expansive Brazilians like to hail or farewell one another with a beijao (big kiss), Portuguese’s greetings, and intimacies, commonly extend as far as beijinhos (little ones).

Above all, please be forewarned, this is literally the Lewis Carroll land where puxe means pull.

When I conjure up stops on my travels, it’s curious polyglots that resonate most fondly. First among my discoveries and still foremost is Macau, the world’s longest-running if smallest colony, really a badly misplaced and most modestly run piece of glittering European conceit. Since its 1999 absorption back into China (at which, remarkably, I witnessed Jorge Sampaio, the progressive Prime Minister of Portugal, actually celebrate the fact that his youthful anti-imperalism had been fulfilled) the pastel-toned palaces and over-wordy street signs seem ever more incongruous amidst the time-honored Chinese kitsch of dragons and lanterns. Far more damage to the enclave’s odd identity has been done through its reframing as the world’s most prodigiously earning spot for legalized gambling. (Sorry Las Vegas, you come second.)

Where the old Lusitanian and Macanese haunts and hearty menus are dying out, late-night Macau reverts to the speck of a fishing port it once was, with Cantonese holes-in-the-wall plucking South China Sea bounty from fish tanks. Still, the glimpses of blue-tiled azulejos (in themselves a product of the Moorish imprint left on Portugal) and the scent of dishes steamed in Port wine continue to mark this most densely populated spot in the Orient as uniquely symbolism-crammed.

Having yielded to free speech crackdowns and hard-edged banking towers, Hong Kong itself has lost much of the charm that first won me over forty years back – when the proper British demeanor of hotel receptionists and the bright red English phone booths seemed to fit so snugly into the hurly-burly of equally red ideograms. For similar flavor in a far more unusual and unimproved setting, I’d now favor the Indian state of Kerala’s Kochi, formerly one of the East’s most fabled ports as Cochin. Plied by so-called Chinese junks, its old customs houses, watering holes and well-tended civic greens have moldered through centuries in the tropics into something undefinably strange, yet evocative (while nearby Mattancherry is not just laden with sacks full of all the world’s spices, but a synagogue serving the few surviving Indian Jews).

The other locale that offers this in spades, even with far too much tourism and Malaysia’s triumvirate blending (Hokkien dominant here, but also plenty Malay and Tamil), is the former “Straits Settlement” of Penang – a kind of Singapore without the enlightened greed and pretensions. The island city’s core of Georgetown remains utterly Georgian, even if surrounded by some of the most colorfully Sinofied shophouses anywhere. Not that I’m any great fan of colonialism or forced military occupation. It’s just that the currents of history wash up some fascinating sights once the tides have shifted.

One could certainly create a most charming introduction to Asia by building a specialized itinerary around some or all of the above. Of course, meanderings through the Philippines, ever more marketed Thailand, and even Japan, constantly yield up sharp contrasts between the holy and the franchised, hilariously strange reframings of English (as in Bangkok’s long gone Puberty Restaurant). But I’m not referring here to the current unchecked floods of Americanized commercial penetration. It’s more of an unwitting melange and overlay, a melding of facades and folkways that I’m after, invariably setting off some strange mental tickle.

Besides, searching for some sort of “purity” or unsuilled essence, especially in today’s intermingled world, is a losing proposition. In fact, the whole concept seems somewhat Nazi-like (their foreign group touring, as we know, did not end up well). Could Antartica perhaps qualify as a more-or-less unified experience? But wherever humans traipse in their craven numbers, they carry a multitude of influences and artifacts in their kitbags.

After all, even the motifs of design we recognize as most “Venetian” in Venice had their origins in Constantinople (as Istanbul, still a marvelous crossroads mingler). Likewise in China’s self-contained, inner-looking “Middle Kingdom,” as in middle of the universe, the vaguely less modernized city of Xian not only showcases exceptionally free-flowing Tang Dynasty art and Muslim-based cuisine, but a palpably more relaxed atmosphere – the result, as the locals are quick to admit, of this having been the ancient terminus of the Silk Road, the spot where most dangerously “un-Han” ideas and practices first got absorbed.

Even in remote and perilously reached outposts like Ladakh, the very first thing that has to be confronted is that they must have got their Buddhism from “somewhere else.” Maybe they’re fine in Renaissance art -- but when it comes to geography, there are no immaculate conceptions. Which makes “local,” at least for the casual traveler, a most relative and misleading term.

If all our wanderings are to impart one dominant lesson, it must be to fully appreciate and embrace, even extol the impure, the marvelously muddied, the confused made permanent.

ONE The chance to mark the Millennium with trumpetings by soldiers in mock Ming outfits on the Great Wall, shivering to the bone in a full-length, rented People’s Liberation Army pea coat through a dawning of Asia’s century so cloaked in pollutants that nothing resembling a sun, red or otherwise, ever rose.

TWO The number of hours late for an initial assignation with the unforgettably petal-pale beauty assigned to translate at a PEN Writers’ Conference in Seoul, suggesting to meet for a personal farewell during Friday rush hour in which I set out much too late and got stuck in gargantuan curlicues of traffic merging, as yet unaware of the proper scale of megacities’ mobile humanity, dropped off at last to cast about for my misplaced vision of innocence in flowing white silk he knew had long vanished from sight.

THREE The average number of bloated corpses guaranteed by ship captains on each cruise down the Yangtze, duly spotted floating face-down past muddy riverbanks too many survived and schemed upon, before its gorgeous Gorges got dammed up with daily clog of Styrofoam in matching Bocage of metric tons.

FOUR The total of sibling beauty queens crowned Miss Macau, shown off in posed photos hung all around the restaurant of the same name, on the night Macanese toasted with last supply of Portuguese wine the end of even more centuries as mixed-up middlemen in the East-West muddle.

FIVE The numbers of all-night ragas on sitar and santoor at a so-British Bombay college, representing each of my decades, as I celebrated my most momentous birthday through sleepless transcendence, only to return to grotty guest where a drugged-out MTV producer invited me to hitch rides on Indian army helicopters to film a music video above the Khumb Mela, mankind’s largest mass gathering, just as suddenly called off due to a belligerent visit from a Bollywood dope dealer and the rattlings of a Gujarati earthquake that likewise cancelled his lunch with a fellow reporter soon headed for Taliban beheading.

SIX The old Malay ladies lined up on the living room floor of an illicit “bomo,” so-called pre-Islamic healer, waiting their turn to let minimal chantings turn on instant trances and turn them with alarming swiftness into shuddering, gravel-voiced demons.

SEVEN The week’s worth of bizarre nights in well-equipped love motels expressly provided by the South Korean government as last-minute accommodations during the World Cup, complete with crotch-level shower attachments and bedside assortment of flavored condoms, where I felt a true foreign correspondent a last, filing my dispatches in rhythm to next room, extra-marital gruntings.

EIGHT The amount of years two sisters were ensnared in ongoing Indian courts litigation over one disputed tree overhanging their neighboring yards, before their Kerala village’s return to ancient communal mediation I reported on.

NINE My count of cars tailgating and up-drafting behind the ambulance carrying me for an emergency brain scan, using the occasion of my near-death hemorrhage to forge their illegal shortcuts through Kuala Lumpur freeway jams.

TEN TIMES TOO MANY The approximate number of sycophants on king-sized Harley-Davidsons forming one Hell’s Angel caravan through rainforests and rice paddies trailing the Sultan of Johor on tiger-striped chopper, very model of a modern motorcycled monarch, on his annual “kembara” inspection of loyal subjects from Imams to rubber tappers to indigenous pygmies in orange electric company jumpsuits.

TEN THOUSAND The amount in dollars requested for “big sister tuition” by the charming Vietnamese girl who kindly invited me to dinner, in the years when all former Saigon still starved, when handed over the dessert course her smiling photo scrawled with a plea from her malnourished father, “Please speak with your president! Please adopt my daughter!”

TWO-HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND The number of Filipina “domestic helpers” overwhelming the public spaces of Hong Kong on their single Sunday days-off, reclaiming their humanity through beauty pageants, protest marches and evangelical fervor, as he wandered with his mini-cam, envious of their communal caring, one man among a multitude of maids.

TEN MILLION The price in yen demanded for each photograph of a Noh theatre performance to illustrate my first travel story on Tohoku hot springs, frustrating crazed Vietnam Vet photog driving all night for the shot, unaware that Japanese always avoid a direct “No” – so landing at the spa town’s other entertainment, where half-boiled codgers in bathrobes and clogs lined up politely to inspect one frowning maiden alone on an auditorium stage, spread-eagled to display every bit of anatomy for the curious patrons, clutching flashlights in hand.