And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William
Butler Yeats
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
My bohemian period in Manhattan was running its course. I
was writing, but less and less every day. I was drinking, but more and more
every night. I stopped traveling uptown to the museums and theaters. I had
visions of being a hermit poet, living undisturbed, unaccompanied and unloved
in a disintegrating New York hotel, a latter-day Rimbaud, burned out before my
21st birthday, a passel of poems scattered over the floor.
Wrong character. Wrong scene. Not me. My childhood friend
Tommy S. came to the city for a visit to celebrate his enlistment in the Army
and I took him to my favorite spot, a bar in a huge, dark basement near Central
Park where a motley crew of acquaintances hung out, reciting poetry, acting out
scenes, singing folk songs, but mostly talking.
Tommy and I talked all night—I remember walking out with him
from the dark cellar and being startled and blinded by the morning sunlight—a
scene that is blatantly symbolic, of course. Within a few days, I had packed my
few belongings and loaded them into his car, and was on my way back to
Bethlehem.
The essence of the conversation was that I was sick, a bad
case of Manhattanitis. The symptoms were lethargy, stupefaction, a feeling of
utter helplessness before the vastness, the wealth and the brilliance of the
city, an illness commonly contracted by the young, unattached, underemployed,
and unrecognized.
The cure was a change of scene and a plan, a goal, an
objective—a decision of what to be and how to be it. I was certain I wanted to
be a writer and I was certain I didn’t want to spend any more of my life than
necessary in minimum wage jobs. I tried bohemia on for size and it didn’t fit.
I needed a profession that would allow me to write in
relative comfort…and the obvious choice was teaching. I knew teachers had
summers off, and I knew that college professors even had sabbaticals—often
every seventh year—when they were free to pursue their studies, research,
writing and other interests.
I would be a professor. This was an odd decision, I suppose,
for a small town Pennsylvania boy, from a family that thought finishing high
school was a major achievement. Even more strangely, I was determined to get my
degree in Puerto Rico.
This had nothing to do with that encounter with the Puerto
Rican coffeeboys in the locker room at Schrafft’s and even less to do with the
rudimentary Spanish I learned from tiny Mrs. Baker at Bethlehem’s Liberty High
School. It had everything to do with a serendipitous trip I once took to the
island.
I ran away from home several times during my troubled
adolescence, always heading south on Highway 1, hoping to make it to Florida.
Twice I made it as far as Washington, D.C., and Arlington, VA, where the cops
arrested me while hitchhiking. My parents were annoyed to have to collect me
and take me home, but I was even more annoyed that I had to go home.
My third try, about the time I was a junior in high school,
was a qualified success. I made it all the way to Miami Beach, but it was on a
dim, dreary, drizzling day. There were no palm trees in sight, and the sky was
as grey as the sea.
I have told this part of my story many times—understandably
since it was my kairotic moment—but I believe it is as close to the truth as
any major memory can be.
The dilapidated art deco hotels with wooden verandas that
lined the beach (this was long before the “youthification” of Miami Beach) were
filled with retired people, rocking on their chairs in slow unison to the
waves.
Instead of paradise—after bumming rides for days—I found
purgatory, porch by porch, and was nearly rocked into depression by
disillusionment and dismay.
As I trudged back toward the mainland, I looked up and saw a
billboard that contained a huge representation of my own private cliché:
sunshine and palm trees, bright white clouds in a deep blue sky, and a headline
that read: “Fly to Puerto Rico, $35.”
I found a pay phone,
called the number—Eastern Airlines—asked if I needed a passport to go to Puerto
Rico and was told, “No, we own it.” I was sure that the airlines didn’t own the
island, so I guessed it was part of the USA. What did I know? I was a kid.
I took a bus to Miami
Airport, bought my ticket, and was soon in a DC6B, crossing the Caribbean Sea,
with $15 in my pocket and visions of palm trees dancing in my head. Six hours
later, we landed in San Juan.
Cut to the interior of
the airplane: zoom in to a sixteen year old vaguely-German looking boy: light
brown hair badly in need of a trim, large ears, big nose, hazel eyes, face
pressed up to the window as the airplane taxies in and the passengers applaud
the safe landing; propellers whirling.
Cut to what the boy is
seeing: beyond the tarmac, (start a slow pan from left to right): a long,
single file of palm trees, behind it a thin stripe of white sand, a deep blue
ribbon of water etched with white waves, and beyond the perfect horizon, a sky
so light and blue that it appears transparent.
Dolly in front of the
boy as he walks in a daze down the aisle of the airplane, not noticing the
jostling and jesting of the happy passengers as they rush to depart.
Cut to the exterior of
the plane, a crane shot; zoom in on the boy as he emerges, stops at the top of
the stairs (no jet bridges yet), his eyes wide, his smile wider. He breathes in
the salt air, clutches the handrail to make sure it is real, and slowly
descends into the postcard of his mind.
Okay, forget the cinematography. It was real. I can still
recover the sensory memories: glorious sunlight hot on my skin, a breeze that
smelled of the sea, sounds of people talking excitedly in Spanish; a distinct
distinctiveness, both foreign and familiar: I dreamed it and it was real. I
knew at that instant that Puerto Rico would be my home.
