Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  Fascinated all my adult life by Haiti, that isolato of nations, I've been returning gratefully to the scene of familiar crimes and joys since 1953. Haiti is a tragedy you can dance to. My first marriage decayed dramatically on a chaotic tropical island among its songs and ceremonies. On a treasure hunt I joined a group of Haitian friends with a pirate map. In the north of Hispaniola, opposite the Île de la Tortue, in the village of Port-de-Paix, I found not Spanish doubloons but malaria. Anopheles bit me one night when a girl whispered from the road and I opened the shutters to joke with her. She said she wanted to know if I was white all over.

  I took other risks during the steady crescendo of Haitian political disasters. Chimères, tontons macoutes, attachés, sometimes even official uniformed thugs, serving the successive dictators, harassed unwelcome visitors. Any individual Haitian is an angel, a friend says, but any group of Haitians is a mob. I was a young student there, I was a nosy journalist, I am a fanatic older guy haunted by memories. My son Ethan says I'm seeing ghosts. Until I stop seeing them, I'm still a would-be writer anticipating imminent festivals. I ask Ethan to allow a father his nostalgia. I can remember the past and, when lonely, populate the present with those ghosts. The supply never diminishes.

  Each time I arrive at the grandiosely named Port-au-Prince International Airport, no longer greeted by merengue bands playing “Haïti Chérie” in the current days of no tourists and bottomless desolation, I somehow become young again despite, despite… I've been infected with the music, the language, the art, and the past. Hans Christoph Buch, a German writer who has also been infected with the malady of Haiti-fascination, tells about an old friend who awoke in her house to hear a thief stealthily moving about. She screamed in Creole, “Who's there?” and he answered, “It's the thief, Madame.” “Get out of here!” “Just a moment, Madame, I haven't quite finished.”

  Now the thieves carry guns and use them. Cuteness has evaporated. Misery is nearly complete. There seems, in fact, to be little hope for Haiti. There is still a heartrending yearning and stoical desperation; there are, for me, old friends, a history, those ghosts.

  Two of my remaining friends from that first long stay, during what Haitians now call “the golden age”—General Magloire's brutality was casual, irregular, drunken, and merely greedy—died in 2001. I wonder who will be next. Three years ago, my son Ari held me up to help me breathe after I had eaten algae-poisoned lambi, a Caribbean shellfish presently to be avoided. Haitian beaches don't post warning signs during the red tide season. They don't post warning signs about much of anything, although risks to life are not unknown.

  I fainted on the lovely gingerbread terrace of the Hotel Oloffson and half woke to find waiters and a friend depositing me in my bed, where I lay for a few days, concentrating on breathing. Ari slept in another bed alongside. One night when I fell into a state of semiparalysis, hiccupping, he held me up, seeming calm, and kept asking me to take a breath. I did so. Finally I said, “Okay, okay, I'm okay,” and lay back against the musty pillow, which had known many heads before mine. It felt so good, I was so happy just to breathe and to think about nothing else in the entire world except gratitude for this first son, watching over me.

  That night could be taken as a hint of things to come. But I miss the sweetness of the flesh of lambi, a shellfish something like abalone, doubly unkosher now. It's another loss to add to my stock of them.

  That poisoned lambi brings continual pleasure into my life. It gives me the memory of Ari calmly watching. I'll never be alone in this world. Like Polonius, I try to pass on to my children some scrappy knowledge I think I've accumulated; the blessing of their existence is a wisdom they pass on to me.

  Youth may be wasted on the young, but agedness is also wasted on the old, who are often too preoccupied lining up their time-release pills to relax and really enjoy their diminishment. Time-release also applies to bodies and souls, even in those who think it doesn't. I'll never sit in an undershirt over a microwaved supper in a lonely kitchen. Even if I did, it wouldn't be illuminated by a bare bulb as I read the newspaper, lips moving, using a nail clipper to cut more pieces of the paper to send to faraway and uncaring children. (I would have misplaced the scissors and put them in the freezer.) I do clip things, of course, but in a Starbucks where the light is better. And my compassionate offspring claim to be amused by my notes in the margins. I know where the scissors are.

  Also don't wear a senior bus pass on a shoelace around my neck. Keep my driver's license current.

  About Haiti, about my two marriages (one bad, one good, both ended), about my disappeared friends, I think I remember everything, although there's a tendency to selectivity—remember more of the bad about the bad marriage, more of the good about the good one. Anarchy would reign if we remembered everything; it would be a senseless collage. I still have words to try to put the recollections in some kind of order. That wife I loved, she also loved me, she stopped loving me, she went on to another life, she died. So it was.

  Judging by standard insurance statistics, I'm too old to be even a retired policeman. Years ago, I wrote a poem for the wife I loved to mark my fiftieth birthday, telling her, Young Wife, now I'm old enough to be a Responsible Negro Leader, although I didn't carry the Reverend Al Sharptonesque belly or skin color. So why now, more than thirty years later, after that wife I loved stopped loving me, do I feel too young to give up poking into other people's business? I stare at crazies in the street, also at pretty young women; I say, “Thank you for sharing the sordid details of your life” to cell phone blab-bers in cafés and on buses. I would look for a forty-year mortgage if I found a new young wife to join me. I terrify my children with the threat.

  In the morning, in the cafés where I insult the loud cell phone blabbers, I replenish my stock of disasters by reading The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The ever-new, ever-deepening chaos of Haiti is a long-running obituary notice. Even before I check the front page, I turn to the more personal obituary notices, looking for friends and enemies, but so far have been able, usually, to skip the small-type paid announcements. I prefer to appear on the termite-supported wooden terrace of the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, not in the obituaries. Maybe I'll honeymoon there with an as-yet-undiscovered wife whom my children will have to deal with.

  I've given up asking Pamela Fiori, editor of Town & Country, to appoint me chief of their Port-au-Prince bureau. Town & Country magazine can't use a profile of the most distinguished cocaine dealer in Pétionville or a sparkling evocation of the seaside country club for MREs, the Morally Repugnant Elite, and the Bon Ton Macoutes just off the road to Saint-Marc. I try to entertain Pamela with the suggestion, but it seems to make her nervous.

  She buys me a nice lunch in Manhattan anyway. A shell-fish pasta without red tide algae is just the right accompaniment for a proposal by the veteran wordguy to explore “Haiti, Fun in the Sun.” She hesitates, then asks if I want dessert.

  Amid its chaos, I still feel alive and energetic in Haiti. Cockcrow still wakes me at dawn. Even if I'm dreaming of an unrecoverable past—treasure hunt with an improbable treasure map, laughter and dancing, many rum-sodas during the tropical destruction of a marriage—that past is still in my possession. It's secure in the vault of memory. What happened then surely can't happen again, but something else might. Who am I to give up possibility? Something else always does happen.

  Some of the dead have children in Haiti. Sheelagh has a daughter, Jean has a son, Issa has a daughter and a son, Aubelin has many. My old friends are present despite their absence.

  A doctor pal in San Francisco eats very slowly, seeming to stop the world while he lifts his fork, glaring at it. Since we have always shared our stories, we talk about a familiar topic. The fork arrives at his mouth. He continues: “I met this nice person —”

  I watch the fork begin the redescent to his plate. He is still balefully studying it.

  “Do you like her? Is it love?”

  He twirls and twirls. A f
ew strands of pasta cling to the slowly revolving fork. He sighs. “I'm not ready to settle down again. Been there, done that.”

  The fork rises. He stares. I don't ask if he thinks the food might attack him. A tomato-affiliated pasta strand falls onto his shirt. He shrugs. “I wasn't paying attention.”

  I nod at the explanation. He has a right to it. Parkinsonism is not easy to conceal. His thumb and some of his fingers are jumping as he puts his hand in his lap. He will not marry again. He will not rush food to his mouth. He will do his best not to drop his fork. He won't practice surgery, but he will hide the shaking and stiffness as long as he can.

  It's unlikely that an illustrated manual entitled The Joys of Decrepitude would find a grateful audience among folks seeking a gift for Grandparents Day. The comedy of falling apart or self-help hardcovers with accompanying CD, Let's Get Debilitated! complete with a translation for the early-stage Alzheimer'd (that means Old) will not appeal to publishers. The Joy of Sex was illustrated with drawings of isometric riffs and variations. Few would relish photos or sketches of novel constipation-easing postures, nor will the makers of Depends, stool softeners, and denture cleansers rush to advertise in Naptime, The Journal for Sunset Couples.

  Another contemporary, a singer, has decided on a change of careers. “Always kind of wanted to act, so why not? Character parts, probably.”

  “You present yourself well,” I say, and it's the truth. “You always have.”

  He grins appreciatively. He senses sincerity. “Comedy probably, maybe use my singing, too. Combine things, am I right?”

  And then, because we've been friends forever, or at least since we called ourselves “the dynamic duo”—a writer and a singer in college days—I offer him a silent nod.

  “Okay, pal, I'm not leveling with you because you already know, so we can't call it leveling. Can't hack it anymore. Don't have the breath, the volume, the range is gone.”

  I tell him thanks. Tell him I have problems, too. Tell him my problems, some of them anyway, the main one being anticipation. In our different ways, we're working toward the same conclusion, which does not involve singing or writing. We wish to sing or write along the way until we get there. “Eventually, maybe in a year or so, I can be cast as First Dead Man in a show about undertakers,” he says. “I've got a great future in mortuary dramas.”

  “That's so last season.” I suggest he should audition for a part in the next big biblical movie, Armageddon: The Sequel, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, as Arma.

  We're not ready to cry the end of the world, despite a big evangelical market for it. Arma will save us. The public festival of comedy and tragedy makes us want to get out of bed in the morning. Street madness is an essential ingredient (get out of our apartments, too). If I'm not answering the phone, dear daughter Ann, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm lying there helpless with a stroke. I'm someplace in the carnival, wandering down the midway.

  And suddenly my friend and colleague in the survival trade breaks into the first lines of an aria from Boris Godunov: “I am dying. Six years now I have ruled all alone…” In the opera, he only reigns for six years, but in life, we can rule for more. My friend, the singer, and I are trying to learn that even in real life there are limits.

  In old age we treasure life because, by God, we still have it, and suffer suspicion of life because it fails us and we are losing it. We take pride in our history; we see our past dreams and striving as futile. Probably there are as many ways to be old as there are old folks practicing the game. I still remember Miss Collins, my teacher at Taft Elementary School in Lakewood, Ohio, who touched my head indulgently, impatiently, tenderly, as I stood in line at the drinking fountain: “That was nice work. But you misspelled ‘gruesome.’” I had written a “grewsome” story. Her praise thrilled me; her criticism made me want to work harder.

  She stroked my hair! Perhaps, more than seventy years later, I still write to please Miss Collins.

  She looked at the clock in the hall and added, “It's getting late. Time for milk and cookies. Go home.”

  I still write for Miss Collins, my friend Marvin, my brother Sid, and the girl, now an evangelical in her assisted living complex in South Carolina, with whom I played Hospital.

  Life as an Older Young Writer

  “Hi, Herb! Still writing?”

  Writers should get used to the idea that some people are under the well-intended illusion that tellers of stories resemble human beings. Writers can't serve thirty years and then earn release to play golf, wear a baseball cap, entertain themselves by negotiating shopping carts down the aisles of the local supermarket. A writer might rest, brood, stir uneasily, drink too much, chase persons of the same or the opposite sex, but he or she is always on the lookout for the next book. Waits. Doesn't retire. Unless…

  “Hi, how've you been? Still writing?”

  “Do I look as if I have Alzheimer's?” This response helps to explain why I have few living friends and even acquaintances are falling away. Sometimes I try to be agreeable, or at least less snotty, and explain that only normal folks retire. Writers might despair or suffer writer's block, usually loudly, but they don't decide to quit unless they are even more disturbed than they had to be in order to become writers in the first place.

  Still writing? With reluctant compassion, I try to salve the lady's feelings. After all, I want her to have friendly memories when I am finally, inevitably, “in the course of human events,” gone, finished, not invited to receptions or fund-raisers anymore—“passed on.” I explain: “Writers want to do it. They need it. They don't willingly stop. There's no retirement. May I get you a glass of chardonnay?”

  But then, instead of trotting off nicely, lyingly, for her wine, and probably not returning, I continue the conversation. “You know”—but she doesn't know—“golf, bridge, cruises where you stop in exotic tropical places to buy T-shirts for your grandchildren, are…” Suddenly I recall the words for “compassion” in several languages and don't add the words “boring” or “stupid.” Instead, I say, “Kids hate it when they have to give you a kiss in return for the T-shirt. Was that white or red you wanted?”

  “My grandchildren don't mind,” she says.

  When I was in my twenties, I used as the epigraph for a novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, lines from a poem by Rimbaud: “It should be every man's ambition to be his own doctor.” As time rolled on, it turned out that this ambition was not to be realized by either Rimbaud or me. I have consulted doctors; I receive Medicare. Now I need another poet to write that every person should learn to overcome the melancholy of age. And how should a person do this? Here is a suggested course of action. By not being melancholic, by avoiding sadness, by overcoming grief. And also by wading through and out of the swamp of dulled feelings.

  Not so easy; I've lost my way a few times. The world is very much with us. One rumor—that death is inevitable—happens to be true.

  When she learned that I lacked medical insurance, my eldest daughter protested angrily. “I'm healthy,” I explained. “But you need insurance anyway,” she counterexplained. “Don't nag, I keep a cyanide tablet in my mouth and I'll bite down if there's danger that your inheritance is at risk,” I counter-counterexplained. “Dad!” she cried. This is a daughter's unanswerable weapon, pronounced Daa- aad.

  Fortunately, Medicare checked in. Peace reigns in the family. Death is not imminent. I've let the cyanide Use-By date expire.

  On some days, inclement weather not necessarily the determinant, life seems to be over. The internal thermostat just shuts off. Maybe the liver is slow to do its work or the cloaca or the brain clotted with static. I imagine looks of indulgence from neighbors as the codger trudges up the steps of the hill where I live. A spy at a window may be thinking: He can still climb, but shouldn't he stop to rest? Looks like he should.

  This window on Russian Hill in San Francisco is the one I ran past many years ago and saw a miniskirted beauty doing the Twist with her boyfriend on a late sum
mer afternoon. I vowed to replace him and, briefly, did. I don't recall her name anymore, but she is very possibly a grandmother in El Cerrito. I still live on Russian Hill and have tallied various inhabitants of that house—a Chinese woman who scraped the moss from the steps with a spoon, a couple of dot-com yuppies who moved on to build their dream house in Atherton, an architect who listened to my history of the building with impatient bemusement. I spoke with the neighbors even before I earned the right to their indulgence.

  Once upon a time I was a teenager, being trained by the U.S. Army to speak Russian (Soviet Russian) and preparing to jump out of airplanes to greet our gallant Soviet allies. “I am your friend! I am an American soldier and your friend!” It was important to announce this quickly in order to avoid being shot; I still remember the Russian words. My duty was to explain how to use American equipment. I no longer remember the Russian words for the parts of the Browning automatic rifle, although sometimes they float into my dreams. (When I wake, sometimes I can't even remember the more recent birth names of Snoop Dogg or Eminem; age-related inefficiency.) I can still feel the chill of Camp Ritchie, the military intelligence training center where I graduated in the twenty-second class; I smell the snow (sneg) and the Maryland winter apple orchards (yabloka means “apple ” in Russian); I remember trying to orient myself with a Russian map showing a Baptist church (tserkov). Occasionally I meet another Ritchie graduate, and we report to each other that the base is long demolished but rumored now to lie above a secret underground alternative Pentagon. After the atomic surprise attack, please direct your Medicare inquiries to: Below Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

  On our weekend passes, the Ritchie boys went to Baltimore to buy black bread in the market, drink beer, and chase girls to whom we would hint darkly that we were doing secret work. When a young woman quite reasonably dumped me for an Air Force officer with a tailored uniform, I consoled myself with a complete Shakespeare in Russian, which I had found in a used bookstore. The tailored Air Force officer probably couldn't recite much of “Bit eeli nyeh bit, vot takoi vopros…To be or not to be, that is the question.”